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privilege on the ground that you weren’t yet licensed when you might have heard some privileged information.”
    Lacouture was elevating my opinion of him. “You’re satisfied with the prosecutor’s word on that.”
    Another grin. “This is Maine, John. A lawyer’s word is still his bond.”
    I took out a pad. “Go ahead.”
    Lacouture rifled through the file, more like he was looking for something than that he needed to refresh his memory. “My client Steven Shea and his wife, Sandra—for business purposes, she kept her maiden name of Newberg when they married—drove up to their summer place on Marseilles Pond a week ago Friday.”
    Lacouture pronounced it “Marcel’s,” as Nancy had. “Hale and Vivian Vandemeer, friends of theirs from down by you, drove up separately in their car. The Foursome—I’m guessing you’ve already heard the media people use that—spent a lot of time together, including some weekends on Marseilles. Well, it seems that Steve did a piss-poor job of checking the larder before driving home each time, so there was always something he had to run to the country store in Marseilles to buy. That night, it was some wine and bread and other little stuff. My client drives his camp road to—”
    “Camp road?”
    “The dirt road going from his camp—his house on Marseilles, hell of a house, actually—to the lake road to the village. Anyway, Steve gets in his four-wheel-drive and heads to the country store. He buys the stuff he needs, comes back, and discovers a fucking massacre.”
    Lacouture’s voice broke a little, and his hands were quivering as he took out some eight-by-ten glossy photos.
    I reached across the desk to take them. The photos were in color, but you would have preferred them not to be. Three showed one body each, two women and a man, an arrow lodged pretty squarely in each chest. One of the women had her hand and what looked like a napkin or paper towel nailed to her breastbone by the shaft in her body. The fourth photo showed a crossbow, gunmetal gray with fingerprints enhanced by the dull brown of dried blood.
    Lacouture was watching me as I returned the photos to him. He said, “They don’t get to you?”
    I thought back to Saigon and my time doing death cases with Empire Insurance and other situations since. “They get to me, Gil. After a while, you just learn not to show it.”
    “Good.” Lacouture made a ritual of putting the photos back in the file, as if once they were secured he was safe from them again. “I’d hate to think anybody could look at those things without feeling something.”
    “What did your client feel?”
    The lawyer kept his face passive. “When Steve came back from the store, he walked up the path with a grocery bag in his arms and stumbled over the crossbow. He bent down to pick it up, couldn’t figure why it would be out behind the house instead of hanging in the garage where they kept it. Then he saw what happened in the house, bent over the bodies, tried to hold his … wife.”
    I gave him a minute. “So, Shea’s prints were on the crossbow, and her blood was all over him.”
    “Right.”
    “Any prints on the arrows?”
    Lacouture half grinned, then got himself back into lawyer pose and broadened it. “Nancy’s judgment about you seems confirmed. Steve’s prints on the one that killed his wife, no prints on the rest. And by the way, they’re called ‘bolts,’ not arrows.”
    “Any other physical evidence?”
    “Two shoes with blood on them.”
    “You’d expect that, wouldn’t you?”
    “I don’t mean the shoes Steve was wearing. These were up in his bedroom closet.”
    “They belonged to him?”
    “Yes. And those shoes made footprints starting at Hale Vandemeer’s body and going across the great room, up the stairs, and to Shea’s closet.”
    I thought about it. “Like Shea killed them, then realized he stepped in some blood and went upstairs to change into clean ones?”
    “Yes, but it doesn’t make sense,