It did draw attention away from the eyes, though. People overlooked them altogether when describing him as "the cop with one arm." Which was an advantage, as far as Willy was concerned. He appreciated that a lesser but adequately flamboyant deformity covered for a far more telling one. It suited his personality. And his need. As he'd watched those eyes every morning-those windows into the workings of his head-he'd actually become grateful for the arm. It was his own built-in red herring.

He reached up and turned off the light. Time to go to work. Winter had passed by at last, even mud season was nearing an end. A year's worth of weather in Vermont has been called nine months of winter and three more of damned poor sledding, but a quantity of subtleties is lost there. In fact, to those brought up in its midst, Vermont offers as many temperature and mood swings as any moderately complicated marriage, which is also how many natives view their relationship with the state.

Willy Kunkle was not a native. A "flatlander" by birth, transplanted from New York almost twenty years before, he didn't much care about the local fondness for climatology. It was either hot or cold to him, dry or wet. And discussing it wasn't going to change anything. Still, this was a very pleasant morning, and despite himself, he enjoyed the almost uncomfortably cold air drifting in through the open car window on his drive downtown.

Willy lived in Brattleboro, Vermont, a topsy-turvy, nineteenth century, postindustrial town of some twelve thousand residents squeezed into the state's southeast corner, hard by the Connecticut River and straddling three of Interstate 91's first exits out of Massachusetts.

This was a significant geographical detail. It made of Brattleboro the first taste of small-town Vermont to all those high-speed travelers coming out of the south, which is why a multimillion-dollar, high-tech welcome center had just been erected below Exit 1, and helped explain the town's financial survival when other historical mementos, like Springfield, Bellows Falls, and Windsor farther north, complete with similarly picturesque redbrick hearts, had faded to become mere economic ghosts of their former selves.