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Chip flushed. But he returned the shot swiftly. “Yeah, I do know. Last time I looked, she wasn’t hanging out with wife killers, either, though. So we’re sort of even.”

“Never mind that,” Jake said impatiently. “The coordinates where Randy said to float the money … I want them. Now.”

Chip handed Roger a pen, Bob supplied a scrap of paper, and Roger scribbled hastily. When he was finished, she snatched the paper from him. “This had better be—”

“Tell me about the alibi now,” Bob interrupted. “The one you told this young fellow here that your brother could break if you didn’t do what he said.”

Roger looked sly all at once. “You didn’t read me my rights, you know. I’ve got rights. None of this stuff can be used against me. You know that, don’t you? That nothing can—”

Suddenly, Chip was standing beside Roger. He’d taken a small black electronic device from his pocket.

He’s still working on the book
, Jake realized.
Even with all that has happened …
He waved the tiny machine in Roger’s face. “If you don’t answer the nice policeman’s questions right now,” he said, “I’ll shove this thing so far down your throat, you’ll hear your own voice every time you swallow.”

Gulping, Roger looked at Bob. “Are you going to let him threaten me?”

But Bob only smiled. Maybe this kid had possibilities after all, his look seemed to say.

“All right.” Roger gave in resentfully. “The house Anne and I lived in, the old Lang House.”

On Washington Street, he meant, a block uphill from the bar. It had been the Lang girls’ family home before they married, and Roger had lived in it for a little while after Anne’s murder.

But then he’d moved out. He couldn’t stand it anymore, he’d said, and people had understood: Poor Roger.

My foot
, Jake thought as he went on: “After Randy married Cordelia, Randy liked coming over so he could go down to the cellar and see if he could find any things to sell. Antiques or whatever.” Roger sighed heavily. “And you know the girls’ great-great-grandfather, in the old days he had the factory on their property attached to the house?”

Jake knew. Everyone did. “Get to it,” she said.

“Well, they needed a way to get the raw materials, the sheet tin and soldering stuff and so on, from the wharf to the factory, and then the finished cans down to the cannery by the water,” said Roger.

He relaxed a little. “Even in bad weather, which back then was even worse than it is now,” he went on easily, beginning to sound conversational, “they needed to—”

“Roger?” inquired Chip. “Do you think you’ll like eating this recorder? Or is there some other reason you’re stalling?”

Roger blinked nervously, seeming to remember why he was here. “All right, all right.” He sat straighter. “There’s a tunnel down there, okay? In the cellar, for the can factory. It goes down the hill a block and a half or so, to where the wharf was way back then, right underneath my bar.”

He looked down at his hands. “It comes out in a room under my cellar. Randy found the tunnel, pried a bunch of boards off the entrance, and opened it up when he was hunting for valuables.”

“So, you could’ve gone back and forth between the house and your bar without anyone ever seeing …” Bob Arnold began.

Outside, the clouds parted, sending a stray shaft of light onto Chip’s face.

“I think what Roger’s saying is that for his wife’s murder—and his sister-in-law’s—he has no alibi whatsoever.” He put the recorder into his pocket. “And Randy threatened to remind everyone of it if Roger didn’t play ball, didn’t he?”

Roger nodded silently as Chip’s voice turned confidential. “So, where’s he going, Roger? Your dead brother, who drowned off his own boat and was never seen again—where’s he headed now?”

Roger shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Chip was on him suddenly, one hand on Roger’s throat and his fist cocked in Roger’s face. “You tell me, you—”

“I don’t know!” Roger cried, shrinking back in alarm. “Don’t you think I would tell you if I did?” He looked around desperately. “I’m afraid of him now, don’t you get it? He’s different, and not just his face. He’s changed.”

“What do you mean?” Chip demanded grimly. But he took his hand away.

“I’m not sure,” Roger muttered, fingering his throat. “But the things he was saying last night before you two came in … all crazy, violent things.”

A tear slipped down his face. “He killed Anne and Cordelia, I know that now. But while he was away, I think he got a taste for it. Maybe it started out being for the money, but”—his voice dropped to a whisper—“I think he got to like it.”

A chill sense of foreboding invaded Jake, as if Sam’s being missing wasn’t the worst thing about this mess, suddenly.

As if maybe the worst thing about it was who Sam was missing with.

Bob got up. “All right, I think that’s it for now,” he said. “Roger, you’ll say all this again for the record, right?”

Which made Jake wonder again, as the unhappy barkeeper nodded in reply: Roger was upset. But he wasn’t stupid. So—

“Why, Roger? Why tell us all this now, and …”

He understood. “Incriminate myself? Not that it will.” He turned
sneeringly to Chip, then faced her again. “Please, that’s the least of my problems.”

A bitter chuckle escaped him. “I know Randy’s alive, and what he’s done. I’m the only one who has known, until now. So if anyone chases after him,
he’ll
know who talked, won’t he?”

His shoulders sagged. “So put me in jail, please. Maybe in there I’ll be safe. Knowing Randy, though, knowing what I know about him now,” he added bleakly, “I’m betting not.” He put his face in his hands.

Chip gazed impassively at him. “Okay, Roger,” he said. “Okay, thanks.”

Chip walked out.

JAKE CAUGHT UP WITH HIM OUTSIDE. “YOU’D BETTER COME
on up to the house with me. There’s no sense your sitting around alone in a motel.”

No sense telling him the real reason behind her invitation, either. Because maybe he was a nice guy, as he had been when he’d befriended Sam, years ago. But maybe not, and his performance just now had convinced her she’d better keep an eye on him.

Chip looked balky, but he followed her to the car and got in. “What next?” he asked.

“Call my husband.” She gripped the wheel; no question about it, she needed Wade’s calm confidence.

“It might take me a while to reach him where he is, though. Meanwhile, I’ll have to”—
What?
She had no idea—“figure out what else to do, and do it,” she finished.

She backed the car out. “What difference does it make how big the money package was?”

Chip glanced sideways at her. “Because Roger Dodd’s a liar. That sob story he’s giving us is an act. On top of which, if you’d ever handled a million bucks—”

She had, actually. Back in the city her duties had included some interesting tasks for people who believed cash should travel incognito. But she’d never measured it with a ruler.

“Not that I’ve ever seen that much in one place,” Chip went on, “but Carolyn was writing about a ransom demand once, so I actually had to find out how high a million dollars in hundred-dollar bills is. Roger’s measurements were right.”

She did the math in her head, another holdover from her old money-manager days. Chip must have a bit of a head for numbers, too, she realized, to recall such a thing. “Yup,” she confirmed. “And that’s not the kind of trivia he’d be likely to have just hanging around in his memory, is it? So he could be telling the truth about the money part.”

“Maybe. How did he get his hands on so much cash, though?” Chip wondered aloud. “Because I don’t care how rich you are, you can’t just walk into your local bank branch and …”

This part she knew for sure. “He didn’t. An estate like the Langs’ has someone handling it, a personal banker. So a wealthy client doesn’t have to stand in line with the riffraff.”

It was cold in the car. She turned the heat on even though they weren’t going far.

“All Roger had to do was make a call, say what he wanted and how he wanted it, and go pick it up or have it messengered. The banker might’ve had thoughts about how wise it was, and counseled Roger about it.”

And good luck getting anywhere with that, she thought,
rich
and
brilliant
not being exactly synonymous, in her experience. “Also, there are reporting rules about withdrawing so much cash.”

“To thwart drug dealers and terrorists, right?” Chip asked interestedly.

In the old days, he’d been interested in everything, too: surgical tools Sam’s father had brought home, medical-text cross-sections of the human brain, baseball statistics.

Especially New York baseball statistics. She felt a burst of reminiscent affection for Chip.

“Uh-huh,” she replied. “Bottom line, though, it’s Roger’s money. If the Lang trust’s provision was that it be dissolved when the last family member died, and the proceeds delivered to a beneficiary, that’s what happened.”

It wasn’t rare for a large family trust to provide for its own end. There were a few paperwork hoops, not particularly onerous if no one involved was fighting about anything, and once they’d been jumped through, it would all be fairly routine.

Roger would have had no real problem getting the cash, if he was insistent enough.

“What made Carolyn Rathbone believe Randy Dodd might not be dead in the first place?” she asked.

She turned onto Key Street, past the old red-brick Peavey Library with the arched leaded-glass windows and the antique cannon mounted out front, then continued uphill between rows of small white clapboard houses built close to the sidewalk, their hydrangeas and trellised clematis vines brown and dormant for the winter. Identical gray wisps curled from their chimneys, scenting the cold air with wood smoke.

“Before he ever started sending you any e-mails, I mean,” she said. “And even afterwards …”

“Why believe it was really him?” Chip nodded agreement with this question. “You’re right, it could’ve been a crank. Online, anyone can say they’re anyone, can’t they? I mean, it’s the whole principle of the chat room.”

They passed the old Smith mansion, a three-story, mansard-roofed monstrosity with rotting trim, a sagging roofline, and more holes than stones in its foundation.

No smoke there—the chimney had collapsed into the yard long ago. Last year’s shriveled Christmas wreath hung from a doornail.

“But the idea was originally Carolyn’s,” Chip explained. “She said
until proven otherwise, a lot of money and a missing body meant murder, no matter how much it might look like something else on the surface.”

“I see.” Someone had slapped sheets of cheap white vinyl siding onto the rot-raddled expanse of the Smith mansion’s façade, apparently in an effort to make the whole place look less like a tearerdowner.

The attempt hadn’t worked. “But how’d she even know—”

“—that much?” Chip turned from the window. “She subscribed to an electronic clipping service. She got news stories about all kinds of crimes from all over the world, and I screened them for her.”

Which explained how a writer of true-crime bestsellers had cottoned on to events in a place so remote that it might as well have been on the moon, especially now in early winter. Overhead the clouds thickened again; a spatter of rain hit the windshield and froze there in shining globs.

“Once her last book was finally done, she started reading the clippings I’d picked out for her,” he went on. “She chose the Dodd story, and I started doing research about it.”

“But—” she began. Surely the pair of them hadn’t come all the way to Eastport just on a hunch?

“And what I found,” he continued, “was one tiny detail that didn’t make sense: a motor vehicle department record of a moving violation in South Carolina, issued to a driver by the name of Randy Dodd.”

She glanced at him. “A speeding ticket? You can do that? I didn’t know that you could just look up somebody’s …”

Driving record
. “You can’t. But I can.” He sighed heavily. “See, I’ve been a computer research geek for a long time.”

Back in the city, pretty much the only other thing the then teenaged Chip Hahn had done besides hang out with Sam was spend time on the early online bulletin boards. Still …

“Trust me, if you know who to ask and they think you might be able to help them in return sometime, you can get just about anything from the people who run databases,” said Chip.

She thought about this. “It could have been some other—”

“Somebody else with the same name?” He seized the objection happily. Then—“But not with the same driver’s license number”—he demolished it.

“But that means—” She was still trying to wrap her mind around the idea that Chip could get this stuff at all.

“Yup. I think Randy had his act together,” Chip said. “He must have done a lot of planning. But then he made a mistake.”

She looked questioningly at him.

“The ticket was dated just a day after he vanished,” he explained. “I think maybe he had new papers stashed somewhere for a new identity. And he was going to pick them up, but on the way …”

“He was nabbed for speeding.” She put it together. “While he still had only his real driver’s license in his possession.”

Chip nodded once more. “Which wouldn’t have mattered. No one was looking for him then. But I was, later. I was trying to be really thorough before Carolyn and I put a whole lot of work into anything more. Otherwise, she would be unhappy about it.
Very,”
he emphasized, “unhappy.”

Jake slowed for a black cat dashing across the street.

“My heart nearly stopped when I actually found that ticket, though,” Chip admitted as they crossed the intersection at the top of the hill.

Her own big old white house loomed ahead: white clapboards, green shutters, red chimneys, all wanting maintenance. And a pressing need for more insulation before the real winter arrived, she remembered again sinkingly.

“And then later hearing from someone who kept hinting at actually being him,” Chip added, “that just topped it off. I was intrigued, and Carolyn was even more so.”

“And that’s why you came to Eastport. To meet this person, see if it really was him.”