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accelerating away from the road’s shoulder.
    “Not to worry, Mike,” he said quietly. “We’ll get them.” He pointed with his chin at the TV screen, adding, “And with this, we’ll make it stick.”

        CHAPTER 4        
    “You hear about Matt Mroz?”
    Greg Joseph glanced across the front seat of the unmarked car at his passenger. “Roz? No. What about him?”
    “Somebody capped him last night—single round to the chest.”
    Joseph whistled softly. “I heard about a shooting—didn’t know it was him. Jeez. That’ll shake things up. That was a double, though, wasn’t it?”
    Kevin Delaney nodded. “Yeah. His bodyguard caught it, too. It’ll be in the papers later this morning.”
    “Damn. Who do we have working it?”
    “Stevens.”
    Joseph didn’t react, at least not so Delaney could see. But he was envious of Phil Stevens, with whom he’d graduated from the academy. The Maine State Police’s CID unit handled all homicides outside of Portland, Bangor, or Lewiston—city departments that investigated their own—and Phil had been with them for three years already, while Greg was still stuck in the boonies of Aroostook County, damn near inside Canada.
    He wasn’t underworked—no cop in Maine couldclaim that, the state being so huge and the number of cops so small—but there were definitely some assignments hotter than others.
    This one was a dud, even though Delaney was okay. As Northern Division commander of the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency, Delaney could’ve been a snotty jerk. But he was a regular guy. The MDEA was an elite outfit, which gave them the option of being a bunch of obnoxious hot dogs. And although they did have a cowboy now and then, they generally made an effort to not piss off too many people.
    Greg stared glumly out the window at the drizzly night, resigned to his fate. Maine was New England’s largest state by far, thinly populated with just over a million people, and so vast that cops like him, isolated in the northern reaches, could well be the only law enforcement for an area the size of a large township, depending on the time of day. Older veterans spoke of having had patrol areas of fourteen hundred square miles back in the day, which wasn’t so long ago.
    Delaney reached for the binoculars resting on the dash, fitted them to his eyes, as he had several times already during the two hours they’d been sitting here, and watched the border crossing ahead. It was like a scene from
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
They were stationed in Fort Kent, pulled over by the edge of the U.S. side’s parking lot, waiting to find out if a tip Delaney had received would pay off, although Joseph didn’t actually know that for a fact. He’d been left in the dark, as usual.
    “They know who whacked Mroz?” he asked, returning from his ruminations.
    Delaney spoke while still holding the glasses. “Nope. Not a clue. Nobody heard anything, nobody saw anything, and nobody’s talking—at least not yet.”
    He sat forward slightly, and Joseph held off speaking, trying to interpret the other man’s body language before looking himself to see what was going on, half expecting to see an East German spy sprinting for freedom on a bike amid a hail of bullets. Of course, there was nothing aside from a van with U.S. plates, stopped at the entry gate for a routine interview. Joseph figured all this had something to do with drug smuggling—that much was a no-brainer—but it didn’t explain Delaney’s presence here in the middle of the night. The man was a supervisor—a nine-to-fiver—someone who normally came out for major cases only.
    “Anything?” he finally asked as the van rolled away without mishap, passing by them forty seconds later, carrying a woman with two sleeping kids in the back.
    Delaney replaced the binoculars. “Nah.”
    He didn’t look particularly disappointed—mostly thoughtful.
    “What exactly are we looking for?” Joseph asked. “I was just told