Thankfully, much of that night had now become a blur. I still had nightmares about it and probably always would, but they were finally starting to fade into two-dimensional representatives of what they had once been. Dulled and flattened, they were much easier to take than the full-blown, Technicolor reenactments. Still, I was looking forward to a future when they would be visited upon me with less frequency.

I knew that day wouldn’t come as long as Porter was free.

Of the things I recalled clearly from that night, I knew that in my bid to escape I had shot him. I definitely remembered pulling the trigger, and there was even a blood spatter at the scene that provided physical evidence that I’d hit him. Nevertheless, when the police arrived, there was no body to be found.

No lifeless remains.

No hard and fast proof of his demise.

I had blacked out at almost the same instant the handgun had discharged, so I was no help in the eyewitness department. At the time, Ben had been convinced that Porter had fallen from the bridge to a certain death in the icy river below. The other members of the Major Case Squad on the scene concurred.

For them, it was all over but the paperwork-one of my friend’s favorite cliches and one that I’d heard him quip several times before.

But for me… Well, I was the proverbial odd man out. I held the one dissenting opinion in their clutch of optimism. Something in the back of my head told me that Porter was still alive, that the wound I’d inflicted was not so grievous as to take his life, and that he had disappeared into the fog-not the water. That inkling had eventually become an issue of extreme contention between Ben and me-to the point where I finally just kept my nagging intuition to myself.

Well, for the most part anyway.