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was all.
    “What kind of glasses? Can you describe them?”
    “Big, with dark rims.”
    Morgan had closed her notebook, fished a card from her pocket, and left it with the boy with instructions to call if he remembered something else. She’d been excited at first, but the information had led nowhere. Everything she’d learned led nowhere.
    Morgan shook off the memory of the interview and leaned toward the coffee table, and her straight, dark, collar-length hair fell forward. Brushing it back with her fingers, she hooked it behind her ears, then placed the beer bottle on a coaster and opened the folder. She spread several papers across the table—the notes on all the people she’d interviewed and photos of the crime scene.
    “Come on, kid,” she said to the silent, flickering television and the empty room. “Come on. You can do this. You’re a smart girl.”

Chapter Three

    The Ingram hit made the newspaper and the local TV news. Before that excitement died down, Sophie and Lois had their next job—a referral from Jessica. A friend from college, Ashley Schneider, was having trouble with her ex-husband, Josh. He was stalking her and had threatened her life as well as the lives of their three children. He broke into her house several times and, on the advice of her domestic-violence counselor, Ashley relocated.
    She hadn’t even unpacked all the boxes before he found her. He simply waited at her work (a job she couldn’t afford to leave) and followed her home. He lay beneath the bushes in her side yard and watched her through the French doors in the family room. Ashley called the police several times, and each time they took him in and talked to him. He’d leave and then come back, if not the same evening, the next. Ashley had an order of protection and a stack of arrest reports, yet things continued to escalate.
    One evening when a man Ashley was dating spent the night, the two woke to the sound of sirens. They got up and went downstairs. The living room was dark, but flickering shadows danced on the walls. Ashley then heard her boyfriend swearing. She rushed to the front door and saw his SUV, which had been parked in the street out front, engulfed in flames.
    The Schneider job was across the state line in Indiana. To learn his routine, Sophie and Lois had to board the cats, Buffy and Blade, and spend several days in a motel, so they added those expenses to the total cost. The majority of the money from this job would pay Sophie’s ticket for driving uninsured.
    In the end, they learned Schneider went only two places regularly: to work and to Ashley’s home. More than once, he hadn’t even gone home before he checked in at his job at the House of Health, an isolated warehouse that housed a vitamin- and dietary-supplement business, where he was one of twelve employees who handled phone sales and shipments.

    *

    A week following their return home, Lois drove back to Indiana alone. Shortly after sunup, she parked on a two-lane road that ran past the rear of the warehouse and led out into the country. Behind her a cornfield, with rows of green stalks less than a foot high, stretched toward the horizon. Though the days had been growing much warmer, the temperatures had been in the low forties the night before, and Lois pulled her faded denim jacket closed. As she waited, she remembered her first kill, the deer with the brown eye.
    Late in November of the first year Lois lived with her grandmother, her Uncle Harry decided to teach her how to hunt. Although Grandma objected, Uncle Harry won her over. The youngest brother of Lois’s mother had seemed quite grown up. When she looked back on it, she realized that he’d been around seventeen. Late in the afternoon, he grabbed a rifle and walked with her across the backyard, past the outhouse and the pheasant pens, to the stubble field. To her right was the long rutted lane she went down to catch the school bus. On her left stood an old outbuilding that housed a