Greg Sampson said he was at Perry's waterfront bar the night Special Agent McGrath had beaten all comers at darts. Greg had no reason to check out this McGrath character's story but thought it was legit. He reminded Zoe that a person, an FBI agent or no FBI agent, didn't make friends in Goose Harbor by beating all comers at darts.

Deep into her second month of unemployment, Zoe was determined to resist the idea that J. B. McGrath was her problem. He was on vacation. FBI agents deserved to take vacations. Goose Harbor was a great place for a vacation, with its strips of sand beaches, its picturesque harbor, its historic houses and quaint shops and inns. That he'd arrived almost to the day of the one-year anniversary of the chief of police's unsolved murder didn't necessarily mean a thing.

Even in her self-imposed exile in Connecticut, Zoe would have known if the Maine State Police's Criminal Investigations Division had asked for FBI assistance in her father's murder investigation. The truth was, there were no new leads. They had his body, they had the two bullets that had struck him and they had very little else. No footprints in the sand, no DNA evidence left behind, no witnesses. For all anyone knew, Patrick West, Goose Harbor 's beloved chief of police, could have stumbled onto out-of-town drug dealers who shot him and made off for parts unknown.

In the weeks after his death, although she was no longer a state police detective herself and was supposed to be on her way to Quantico, Zoe had done everything she could to find her father's killer. She'd stepped on toes of people who got in her way and toes of people who didn't-she didn't care. She just wanted answers. Why had a good man died that early October morning? Why had she been the one to find him?