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It was never news Harry wanted to deliver, but he couldn’t recall dreading it more than today.

Gloria Tanner, wife of the late Angus, was out the front door of her house before he was out of his car. Maybe she’d been

sitting by the window night and day, waiting for the authorities to arrive with news about her missing husband. Or maybe something

Bill Tracy had said at the Lucknow Diner had made it all the way to the Tanner household. Harry hoped it wasn’t the latter.

He didn’t want the bad news to come from somebody else. Gloria Tanner deserved to hear it from him.

She must have known from the expression on his face that he didn’t have anything good to report. As he opened his door wide,

she began to crumple in slow motion, her legs weakening, and then her knees were on the lawn, her calves tucked under them,

her right arm out to keep her from completely going down.

Harry got out of the car fast and was on his knees next to her, a hand around her shoulder, keeping her upright.

“Mrs. Tanner, why don’t we get you inside.”

“You’ve found him, haven’t you?”

“Are your children home?” he asked. The Tanners had two grown kids. A son named Ivan, twenty-five, who worked the counter

at a self-serve Sunoco station, and a daughter, Patrice, thirty-one, who worked for the town’s tax department.

“No,” Gloria whispered. “They both came by this morning.”

“Let’s go inside and call them. Get them back here.”

Harry knew he couldn’t wait for the children to arrive to break the news, but he wanted to know they were on the way. He didn’t

want Gloria Tanner to be alone when he departed.

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” she said as Harry helped her to her feet.

“Yes,” he said. “Let’s go in and put on some coffee. I know I could use a cup.”

He walked her back into the house and guided her to the kitchen. She pointed to the coffee maker. The carafe was already full,

the red light on.

“I must have had some kind of sixth sense,” she said, sitting down. “I just made that ten minutes ago.”

“What’s your daughter’s number?”

She told him and he made the call on his cell. He asked Patrice if she could come to her parents’ house, and if she could

pick up her brother on the way. Patrice didn’t have to ask why. She said, simply, “On my way.”

Harry poured himself a cup, sat down across the table from Gloria. Her hands were flat on the table, trembling. Harry moved

them together and placed his on top.

“We found Angus very early this morning,” he said. “South of town, on Miller’s Road.”

She seemed not to comprehend. “But he didn’t take his car with him.”

“He wasn’t in a car, although we haven’t ruled out that one might have hit him. He was off to the side of the road.” He was

going to say in the ditch but pulled back the words. They sounded too brutal.

“A hit-and-run?” she asked.

“We’re in the early stages of the investigation,” he said. There were things she would have to know eventually, details that would become painfully clear when her husband’s remains were delivered to the funeral parlor. But did she need to know now that many of her husband’s bones had been surgically removed from his body? No, that could wait.

“I know I asked you these kinds of questions when your husband first disappeared, but I need to ask them again. Did Angus

have any enemies? Did he know anyone who might want to cause him harm?”

She shook her head. “He’s a good man. He’s in the Rotary Club, he raises money for the cancer drive. Everyone likes him.”

It might be some time before she could bring herself to speak of him in the past tense, Harry thought.

“Where is he?” she asked. “I have to see him.”

“Not yet,” Harry said. “He’s with the coroner. There has to be a full autopsy. When that’s done, he’ll be released to the

funeral home of your choice.”

“Do I... do I have to identify him?”

“There’s a tattoo that matches the photos you showed us. When a further identification is needed, I’ll let you know and we’ll

find a way to go about that.”

Maybe one of her kids, he thought. But no member of the Tanner family should have to view what was left of Angus.

“Why are you asking about enemies?” Gloria asked. “Did someone deliberately do this to Angus? It wasn’t an accident? Did someone

kill him?”

If only it was just that , Harry thought.

“We are treating this as a suspicious death.”

Suspicious , Harry thought. If that wasn’t the understatement of the year.

Harry stopped in at the Hillmans’, too, figuring once they knew Angus Tanner had been found, Walter might be next. He said they were still looking for Walter, and that there was, so far, nothing to link the two disappearances.

Then he went to the station and asked Mary Walton, who worked the front desk and handled various communications details, to

come into the office so they could hammer out a press release on Angus Tanner. Mary was pushing sixty but could easily pass

for seventy. Thin and wiry, she’d lost, two years apart, one lung and then a breast to cancer and kept on beating the odds,

coming back after both operations and explaining that she was too mean to kill. Tough, without a doubt, but Mary was a sweetheart

under her weathered exterior.

Harry told her what they could and couldn’t say, and Mary went back to her computer and had something printed out for his

approval in fifteen minutes.

“Press is gonna want a quote from you, so I made up a couple,” she said.

Harry had a read of them. “Sounds like something I’d say. Let ’er rip.”

“And this won’t be enough. TV types are gonna want you in person, looking all chief-like.”

Harry didn’t enjoy going before the cameras but knew it was likely inevitable. “You can set it up for later today.” He told

Mary to fax the release to the usual list of media suspects while he headed off to the Lucknow Public Library.

He was relieved to have been able to put off, at least for now, telling Tanner’s widow about the deboning of her husband’s

body, but he couldn’t get the word out of his head. Was deboning the most accurate, the most clinical , way to describe what had been done to the man? Was there no more dignified description than what one would do to a brook

trout or a chicken breast?

Maybe he’d find the answer at the library.

He was pretty much a stranger to the building, not being much of a reader himself, but Janice and their son, Dylan, were regulars. On an almost weekly basis, they were here to borrow reading materials or attend special programs. Dylan, unlike his father, went through books the way Harry went through bad coffee, primarily paperback novels based on characters from the Star Wars universe. Chewbacca was his favorite.

The librarian helped Harry find several medical reference books, and when she showed some curiosity about what he might be

researching, he simply smiled and thanked her for her help.

He thought if he knew what , exactly, had been done to Angus Tanner, he might have a lead on who could have done it. Was there a murderous surgeon out there? A homicidal butcher?

He learned of a procedure called an osteotomy, but that involved cutting bone just enough to realign joints. It could be performed

on jaws or knees or shoulders or spines or any number of other places on the human body. This struck Harry as more of a trimming , not a deboning. And then there was a carpectomy, the removal of carpal bone, designed to keep small, delicate bones in the

wrist from rubbing up against one another and causing pain. Again, this did not involve slicing open a limb and removing a

length of bone that ran from the ankle to the knee or the elbow to the shoulder.

As best as Harry could tell, the medical community wasn’t spending a lot of time relieving individuals of their skeletal structure.

It struck Harry that he’d have to come up with his own term to describe what had been done to Angus Tanner:

Sick.

What kind of sick, twisted bastard did that to another human being? And for what possible reason? This was new territory to Harry. Oh, he’d dealt with a handful of homicides in Lucknow over the years, but they were never what you’d called whodunits. No need to bring in Columbo. One drunk dickhead stabs another drunk dickhead at a tailgate party in front of twenty witnesses. There was that time a kid in a Chevy pickup cut off a guy in a souped-up 1970 Dodge Challenger. The guy in the Challenger then rammed the tail end of the pickup, running it into the ditch. Then he grabbed a gun from the glove box, got out, and shot the kid in the neck, killing him. When he got back to the Dodge, intending to flee, it wouldn’t start, so he called Triple A for a jump.

You couldn’t make this shit up.

But this Tanner case, this was different.

Harry made some discreet calls, to the state police, to the FBI, asking if they’d seen anything like this before. There was

one agent at the bureau, Melissa Cairns, who said something about it rang a bell, a case out in Des Moines, maybe another

down in Florida somewhere, and she’d love to help out, she really would, but ever since the eleventh of September, the bureau’s

focus had been on terrorism, and anyone with something less outlandish than a jet flying into a skyscraper would have to take

number. But if she had a chance, she would look into it for him.

So, at least for now, Harry was pretty much on his own.

“Whatcha lookin’ at?”

Harry had been sitting at one of the library’s long tables, closing the last of the medical texts he’d been poring over, when

he sensed someone standing behind him.

He knew that voice. Even before turning around in his chair, he said, “What can I do for you, Rachel?”

“Those are medical reference books,” said Rachel Bosma.

“I’m thinking of switching fields,” Harry said, turning around and getting to his feet. He bundled up the books under his

arm. “Gonna lose the badge and start carrying around a six-pack of tongue depressors.”

“You’re funny,” she said. “You should be writing for Seinfeld .”

“What can I do for you, Rachel?”

Rachel was the top reporter for the Lucknow Leader , although, given the size of the town and the paper’s circulation, that also meant she was the only reporter for the Lucknow Leader . They had a couple of other staffers who put together the births and deaths and wedding announcements and Little League scores,

but when it came to writing about actual news, Rachel had that job pretty much to herself. Lucknow wasn’t even large enough

to have a daily paper. The Leader came out Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Anyone who wanted a decent weekend read with plenty of sections went to the local

smoke shop or convenience store and picked up a Boston Globe or New York Times or the Burlington Free Press . Where Rachel had it over them was, none of those papers cared what happened in Lucknow.

Rachel was in her mid-thirties, with two kids in elementary school and a husband who taught high school chemistry, and if

she’d ever entertained thoughts of making it to the big leagues, she had abandoned them long ago. Harry didn’t want to talk

to her right now, but he liked her. She was tireless in her efforts to keep the good citizens of Lucknow up to speed on what

was going on, and whatever the editor was paying her, it wasn’t enough as far as Harry was concerned.

“I got the fax on Angus Tanner,” she said. “Anything you’d like to add?”

“Nope.”

“It was a little light on detail.”

The phrase bare bones popped into Harry’s head and he suppressed a grimace. “When we know more, you’ll be the first person I call.”

“Come on. Guy’s been missing for weeks, and you put out some thing that’s a basic hit-and-run story. What was he doing? Wandering Miller’s Road all this time? Where’s he been? What’s he been up to? And was he hit by a car or dumped there or what? Is it officially a homicide? And I’m hearing stuff I can’t go with until you confirm it, like his body was like rubber or something and that he was naked as the day he was born.”

Harry had kept back the details for good reason. He didn’t want to start a panic in Lucknow. If word got out that there was

some nut on the loose who had a thing for removing bones, no one would answer their door without a gun in their hands. Vigilante

groups would form. Nutcases who shouldn’t be allowed anything deadlier than a peashooter would be carrying in public, guns

slung over their shoulders and hanging from their belts, lining up for coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts. Also, when they did bring

someone in for questioning—and Harry prayed that would be sooner rather than later—they didn’t want to poison the well. Fake

confessions could be pretty convincing if the whole story was out there.

“What were you looking up, anyway?” she asked as Harry walked over to the counter, returned the books, and gave the librarian

a nod of thanks.

“Maybe I’ve got hemorrhoids,” he said. “I’m dealing with a real pain in the ass right now.”

“Cut the bullshit, Harry. The fuck is going on? And what about Hillman? You still haven’t found him.”

“For all I know, Walter Hillman left town. There’s no evidence of foul play.”

Rachel had been whispering up to now, but her voice was growing in volume. “Except that he walked away from his Business Depot

job without telling a soul, there’s been no action on his credit cards, and his car’s still parked at his place. Just like

with Tanner.”

The woman behind the counter shot her a look.

“Let’s do this outside,” Harry said, taking her by the arm and getting a nasty look in return.

Once they were clear of the building, and Rachel had shaken off Harry’s grip, she said, “Do you even have a possible make

and model on the car that hit Tanner? If a car even hit Tanner, because you’ve never said one way or another. You know I’ve talked to everyone who lives along there, probably the

same people you did, and none of them heard anything like a car hitting somebody. No screeching brakes, nothing like that.

The one who called it in was driving the pickup?” She dug a notepad from her pocket and flipped through the pages. “Tracy.

Yeah. I know about him. He told me what he saw.”

She paused to catch her breath. Harry said slowly, “You done?”

“No.”

“Are you done for a second or two?”

“Okay.”

“What I like about you is that you’re a professional. You don’t print rumors, you don’t print stuff you can’t substantiate,

you don’t go with sources unless they’re reliable, and I am here to tell you, you can’t put any stock in what Tracy told you.

It was the middle of the night, he was tired, working two jobs, probably never seen a body in that state before, and is not

what I’d call an experienced observer.”

“I bet he’s smart enough to know when someone’s naked.”

“Would you like to go ahead and print that? That you have new information, that Angus Tanner, fifty-two, married and a father

of two, was naked. Just that. Would that answer a burning question, or prompt another dozen that you don’t have the answer

to? What will you do when Mrs. Tanner calls and asks what that’s supposed to mean? Because she will. If you were her, wouldn’t

you call?”

“Christ, I’m not going to write a story that says nothing more than that the deceased had no clothes on. Give me some credit. And even if I did, and she called, I’d tell her to talk to you , and ask you what it was supposed to mean, and to give me a call back when she got a straightforward answer.”

“Let me be as straightforward with you now as I can,” Harry said, then added, “Off the record?”

Rachel considered the request. “Okay.”

“There are... aspects to this investigation that make it slightly more complicated. I can’t get into what those are yet.

Releasing snippets of information’s going to raise more questions I can’t answer. So—”

Rachel was rolling her eyes. “Come on, Chief, give me a break here. At least you can tell me whether—”

The Nokia in Harry’s jacket began to ring. Harry grimaced, brought out the phone, and put it to his ear.

“Yeah.”

“It’s Mary.”

Harry turned his back to a scowling Rachel and walked three steps away. “What’s up?”

“Dell Peterson found his goat. Thinks you’re gonna want to have a look.”