Albert wore no overcoat. He stood near the priest with his head bowed. He held something in his hands. Standing behind him, Spencer couldn't see what it was.

Spencer wondered, looking at Albert's back, if Nathan Sinclair regretted Kristina's dying. He wondered if Albert had maybe loved her, too, and been swept away by her long dark hair and her beautiful eyes, swept away by her heart that sacrificed her whole family for him. Did Albert, too, save match-books from Edinburgh?

Spencer didn't have to wait long to get his answer. Albert came up to the closed coffin, knelt down, brushed the flowers off the top, and tried to lift the cover. The priest and Howard Kim stopped him. What are you doing? they said. Stop, stop. He shook them off, his own shoulders convulsing. Her coat, he said quietly. It's her coat. I want to cover her with it. It was one of her favorite things. Please let me cover her with it. She'll be cold.

They helped him unlatch and lift the coffin cover, and with trembling hands, Nathan Sinclair placed Krishna's maroon coat gently, tenderly into the casket, and then pressed his fingers to his lips in a final kiss.

After the funeral, Spencer checked out of the Hanover Inn and drove to Long Island. He didn't talk to Nathan Sinclair.

Will and Ken Gallagher had approached Spencer to talk him out of going. Gallagher promised him a raise and his own office, while Will appealed to their friendship, but Spencer flatly refused. He was finished with Hanover.

At home, however, there were more urgent matters. His family was together but not intact. A few days earlier, a deranged madman had shot up a Long Island train car full of people coming home from work, killing six and maiming nineteen. Spencer's brother Patrick had been in the train car. He had been wounded in the shoulder and was to spend several weeks at the Stony Brook hospital. He didn't die, and this was the only thing the family talked about during dinner for many weeks. Though Spencer had not seen anybody in his family for five years, he sat down with them at their rectangular wood dinner table that reminded him of Collis Cafe at Dartmouth. Spencer sat down in his old seat, and was served food and was talked to, and was treated as if nothing had ever happened, as if he had never left.

He thought it felt just right.

He lived with his mother for three months while he worked as a security guard in an office building and as a bodyguard for a local Republican politician. Spencer tired of visiting the local bars at midnight, and then he got tired of his jobs, so he applied again to the Suffolk County police force and was reinstated after several months of psychological tests and a number of ringing references from Ken Gallagher, who seemed eager to provide them. Spencer became one of twenty senior detectives. No individual case was ever his own, but Spencer liked being lost in the shuffle.

In the course of the following year, he went back to New Hampshire several times while the New Hampshire v. Constance Tobias case inched toward trial. Fortunately, the courthouse was in Concord, not Hanover.

Whatever troublesome doubts Spencer had about Conni's guilt were relieved before he could take the stand. With the trial due to begin on the anniversary of Kristina's death, Constance Tobias, through her attorneys, pled momentary lapse of reason and was sentenced to five to fifteen years for voluntary manslaughter, which was less than the twenty-five to life for murder two, and much less than the life without parole for murder one. Her lawyers knew it was a good deal, and Conni took it.

With Frankie Absalom a reluctant witness for the prosecution, all the defense team could do was continue to say she hadn't done it, but Conni did not have an alibi. She couldn't even say she was sleeping or in the bathroom or studying. She didn't have an alibi. And she had a motive.

Nathan Sinclair testified to that for the grand jury. Albert Maplethorpe testified to that.

Jim Shaw, a hostile witness for the prosecution, if there ever was one he had gone to the local courts in Delaware to try to quash the grand jury subpoena was forced to say under threat of perjury and jail that he knew of the incident the year before Kristina's death when Conni pushed Kristina off the bridge.

Conni Tobias pled voluntary manslaughter, committed under the influence of drugs, alcohol, or uncontrollable emotional forces.

Spencer was glad he did not have to testify and reveal to the defendant Constance Tobias that the crime she had committed was for a scoundrel and a wasted life, though he was prepared to tell the truth on the stand about Nathan Sinclair.

Spencer's relief at the plea bargain was short-lived. At the sentencing, Spencer saw Nathan outside the courtroom, deftly fielding questions from reporters. He looked well and smug in his smart suit and with his slicked-back hair. Slimed back, thought Spencer, as he walked up behind Nathan, who was in the middle of some long-winded, pseudo-intellectual answer about the dangers of reason on an emotional heart, and whispered fiercely, 'I know all about you, Nathan Sinclair.'

And then Spencer continued walking down the court steps. The best part was turning around and seeing Nathan's face, its usual inscrutable blank stare twisted. Nathan stopped talking. A few moments later, he got rid of the reporters and rushed down the stairs after Spencer.

'What did you call me?' he said.

'You heard me,' said Spencer.

'I don't think I heard you,' he said. 'Now what did you call me?'

Spencer stopped walking and faced Nathan. They were eye to eye. Spencer was a little taller and a little thinner. 'I spoke to your mother. I know who you are.'

'Now I know that's impossible,' said Nathan. 'My mother is dead.'

'No. Katherine Morgan Sinclair is not dead,' said Spencer.

'She is not my mother,' Nathan replied.

Spencer swallowed. 'No, Clairton, Pennsylvania, huh? What, did you stick a pin on a map to come up with that one?'

When Nathan didn't answer, Spencer said, 'You keep in touch with your mother?'

'I told you she was not my mother.'

'Who was she, exactly?'

'Kristina's mother.'

'You keep in touch with Kristina's mother?'

'Now and then,' he said evasively, his hands in his suit pockets. 'What do you need from me, detective?'

'Nothing, Nathan. Nothing. But Constance Tobias could use something from you the truth. Don't you think?'

'No,' he said firmly.

'No?'

'No. Hasn't she suffered enough?'

'I don't know,' said Spencer bitingly. 'Has she?'

'Yes,' replied Nathan, not flinching. 'She has.'

'I'm going to go back up to the reporters, Nathan, and I am going to tell the world about you.'

'Fine,' said Nathan. 'You're going to destroy Conni, you're going to destroy Jim, and you're going to destroy what little is left of the Sinclair name and family. I am going to be just the same.'

'But maybe you'll talk to reporters a bit less.'

'No, actually, I'll talk to them a lot more. I'll be a lot more interesting.'

'You're not interesting, you're pathetic,' said Spencer.

'Am I the one trying to hurt a girl going to prison for five years? Who's the sad one, detective?'

Spencer was surprised at the intensity of his own feelings. He wanted to kill Nathan. He was usually dispassionate, but this time he took it personally, and the feeling didn't pass. He clenched his fists and gritted his teeth, remaining barely in control.

Nathan smiled.

'I'm not worth it, detective,' he said, looking at Spencer's fists. 'I'm not worth losing a job over, am I?'

'You're not worth losing a night's sleep over,' replied Spencer.

Conni Tobias was taken to a medium-security New England prison, and Spencer went back to Long Island, where life was quiet and comfortable. Spencer was glad to have left Hanover behind. It was good to be around family again, except on those occasions when one of his eighteen nieces and nephews would say, 'Uncle Spencie, how come you don't have any kids?'

Spencer went on with his life as best he could, as if he had never left Long Island, never lived in a little town called Hanover, and never stumbled upon a pleasant black-haired girl named Kristina Kim putting on her black boots in the middle of Main Street. In the beginning, it was almost easy. His days were busy, his nights too two million people in Suffolk County as opposed to ten thousand in Hanover meant little idle time behind a desk. Local bars took care of his rare free time. Occasionally he went to the movies with his brothers.

But Spencer's mind wasn't quiet, his soul wasn't at peace. In the year after Conni's sentencing Spencer spent his free time going over the minutia of Kristina's case. He went over every crumb like a hungry dog looking for food on the kitchen floor.

During the second year, his memory began to dim. He forgot how long Kristina had lain on the ground unclaimed. He forgot about the knee marks on her chest. He forgot how long Conni had been gone from her room. He started to forget the sound of Conni's squeaky voice, and the look of Jim Shaw.

But Spencer could not forget Nathan Sinclair.

Sometimes Spencer would flash back to a face across from him on the steps of the Concord Courthouse, in the middle of the afternoon, saying, 'I'm not worth it, detective. I'm not worth losing a job over, am I?' And the feeling of rage, raw and untamed, would spring back at him.

Spencer had missed something, and he kept going over it in his head, until it became a tic with him that followed him throughout the day and made him sleep badly at night.

Nathan Sinclair. Nathan Sinclair. Spencer wanted to tell him how much Kristina had loved him. How she had loved him more than anything in the entire world, how she had given him everything and risked losing everything to have Nathan near her.

He couldn't breathe when he thought of Kristina and Nathan Sinclair.

Spencer began dating a fellow policewoman. She was young, very attractive too attractive for him, Spencer thought. She was ready, and wanting. She was his age, and he agreed with her that it was about time to get back into the human race.

He didn't like living with himself.

Dreams of Hanover wouldn't go away. He dreamed of the pine trees looking down at Kristina, in death as they looked at her in the last moments of her life, and he dreamed of running through the dark path behind the Feldberg Library, hearing the noises from below.

Every night Spencer would wake up in a sweat, asking himself the same question over and over.

Could Nathan Sinclair have killed Kristina?

He would then turn on the light, open the top drawer of his nightstand, and take out a torn and many-times-folded sheet of paper to reread the inscrutable words: She makes you will your own destruction.

Then he would throw it back in the drawer and turn off the light.

Kristina's safety-deposit box screamed her love for Nathan, but oddly, she hadn't left him her full inheritance, hadn't even told him she was coming into an astounding sum of money, the kind of money that would mean freedom from grandmothers and Howards, freedom from Conni and Jim, freedom from work. They could have taken that money and flown to St Bart's, never to be seen again. Why hadn't she told him?

Not only had she not told him, but the day after her near-fatal crash, Kristina had gone to the bank and specifically made sure he wouldn't get all of her money. Why?

Had she died intestate, everything would have gone to Nathan, her nearest living relative. Nathan would have had to come out of Albert Maplethorpe's skin, but to get nine million dollars, he'd have come out and pledged into a sorority.

She makes you will your own destruction.

Kristina had typed the will, gone to the bank, had the will notarized, and put it into her safety-deposit box. It was probably then that she had scribbled the seemingly meaningless words to Nathan.

He was getting three million dollars. What was she warning him about?

Why would Nathan give the money away? All that money must have seemed like a fortune to a pauper orphan from Texas. Yet he had given his share away as if it were an extra shovel in the sandbox. Had he been angry with her for not leaving him everything? But surely his pointless gesture would mean nothing to Kristina when she was dead.

If he had not killed her for the money, why would he kill her? And if he had killed her for the money, why would he give the money away?

One night, Spencer thought, he could have killed her. He could have slipped out unnoticed with the pillow under his coat and waited for her in the bushes near the bridge. Maybe that's why he went to Frankie's the afternoon before Kristina died. Not to see his friend but to walk through the woods, to plan his attack, to time himself getting back, throwing out the pillow, maybe even the coat. He could have slipped out that night, waited for her, killed her, quickly walked back through the woods, thrown the pillow and his gloves into the trash compactor, maybe even brought a garbage bag with him, put his coat, gloves, and the pillow in the garbage bag, and then tossed the bag in the compactor. This way he wouldn't have to return the coat and gloves to his room. He would just go back into the lounge where the kid was sleeping and pretend he was there all along, watching TV.

Spencer laughed out loud. His tortured mind was overacting. All he wanted to do was ease his pain. Even drinking heavily before bed was only good while he was actually drinking.

And still he returned to Nathan Sinclair.

Nathan waited in the woods for her, and then called her, and she came, because she didn't fear him and she didn't fear the night with him, nor the dark woods, nor the snow. She came to him in the snow. Did she kiss him? Did she smile? Did her eyes, looking at him, know it was the last minute of her life? Did she get scared and run?

Did she scream?

Spencer got stuck on her scream night in and night out. What if she screamed and no one heard? To quiet her, he shoved her helpless body to the ground and knelt on top of her and put a pillow to her face. And she tried to roll away from his hands but couldn't move with her bad ribs, bad shoulder. Spencer didn't know, but he may have cried in the night, thinking about Kristina fighting against death.

She makes you will your own destruction.

It made no sense. Why would Nathan kill the only person who took care of him, who loved and nurtured him, who took him out of the tattooed gutter of juvenile courts and paid to change his name and move him to live close to herself?

He couldn't have wanted her money, for he gave away his share as if it were a quarter to a homeless bum.

Why would he kill her? Spencer understood why Conni would. The irrational emotion was blazing in Conni's eyes. She had been lied to so often and so long, she could no longer tell reason from insanity. Everything was jumbled up. She was out of control the first time she went to the bridge. The second time she decided to be more thorough. She brought props. Spencer could understand that.

But why would Nathan kill Kristina?

Then he remembered his own words to Kristina Kim the Sunday afternoon they had coffee together. 'Power and intimidation,' Spencer had said to Kristina. Suffocation was an act of power. During their final years together, Kristina had all the money, therefore all the power. Albert didn't want to have the money doled out to him anymore by a girl who may have been fed up, who may have wanted out. Who knows, maybe Kristina stopped loving Albert, maybe that's why she didn't leave him all her money in the will. Albert wanted the last interaction between them to be one of him wielding his power over her.

Conni's words, 'I didn't do it,' started to ring in Spencer's head like church bells, unexpectedly breaking into a high-pitched song and bruising Spencer's insides.

His work was suffering.

Finally, after an acute episode that lasted most of a rainy Sunday in March, Spencer sent Conni a short note, saying he hoped to come and see her soon. A few weeks later, having given her ample time to receive his letter, Spencer set out for New Hampshire.

It had been two years since he had seen her, and she had changed considerably. Gone was the young girl. Her face was drawn now and full of bitter disappointment. Gone was the happy smile, gone the long blond hair. She was thinner, paler, tougher-looking. Conni was twenty-three; in another two and a half years she'd be eligible for parole. She smoked heavily now, as she had once nervously pulled out her eyebrows.

'How've you been, Conni?' said Spencer, sitting down across from her. They were separated by a glass partition, but they could see and hear each other without phones.

'Fine, as you see. You look different.'

Spencer ran his hand through his hair. 'My hair it's not a crew cut anymore.'

'Yeah, that's it. You don't look as tough.'

'Very deceiving,' said Spencer.

Conni smiled. 'You look good. Really.'

Spencer hadn't come three hundred miles to talk about himself.

'Get a lot of visitors?' he asked.

'Sure, my parents come all the time. My brother comes, like, five times a year, which is pretty good for him, since he lives in LA and all.' She paused. 'That's not what you meant, is it?'

Spencer shook his head.

'My lawyer comes, too. Not too often. If I'd been convicted, we would have appealed and then I would see him a lot more often. Now there's nothing to appeal, and I'm out one visitor.' She paused again. 'It's nice of you to come.'

He waved her off. 'It wasn't nice of me to not come for so long.'