I'm back at the morning I'm named as a suspect on the news.

The sound came before the light—the low, gravel-chewing rumble of four heavy V8 engines crawling up the private lane in second gear.

I stood two paces back from the bay window in my living room, hidden within the deep shadow cast by the unlit hallway. The county sheriff's department didn't use sirens when they came for an ambush. They preferred the quiet, suffocating pressure of numbers: two marked Dodge Chargers flanking an unmarked black Suburban, followed by a mobile crime lab van that bounced awkwardly over the frozen ruts of my driveway.

Red and blue strobes flared to life all at once, painting the naked branches of the winter oaks in violent, alternating pulses of crimson and cobalt.

In the old life, this was where the panic took my legs out. I remembered falling against the wall, my knuckles white on the edge of the radiator, trying to understand how the world had tilted off its axis between two sips of coffee. I had run to the front door with my hands out, stammering apologies for things I hadn't done, looking like a guilty man desperate to negotiate before the cuffs went on.

Not today.

My breathing remained low, pulled deep into the diaphragm, the way my grandfather taught me when we used to hunt whitetail in the high ridges of the Upper Peninsula. When the brush moves, he’d say, you don't run. You freeze, you settle your sights, and you wait for the beast to show its flank.

Through the glass, I watched the driver’s door of the Suburban swing open.

Bradley Vance stepped down into the gravel. He was forty-two, broad-shouldered, carrying himself with that particular, swaggering arrogance common to small-town athletic stars who had traded their varsity jackets for a gold badge. He wore a shearling-lined patrol jacket over his dress uniform, his duty belt cinched tight around his waist, his service Glock resting beneath a thumb-break holster.

Behind him, two uniformed deputies—Miller and Kowalski, men I’d known since little league, men whose driveways I’d cleared with my tractor during the blizzard of ’22—drew their sidearms to the low-ready position.

"Nathan Hayes!" Bradley’s voice boomed through an aluminum bullhorn, vibrating against the double-paned storm windows. "This is the Cook County Sheriff’s Department! We have a search warrant for these premises! Step out onto the front porch with your hands raised and visible! Do it now!"

I didn't move for ten seconds. Let them sweat in the frost. Let the television crew from Channel 4, currently setting up their tripod behind the rear bumper of the news van at the gate, get their lenses focused. I wanted the telephoto glass dialed in; I wanted the wide-aperture sensors capturing every twitch of Bradley’s jaw.

I reached down, touched the small toggle switch of the lapel microphone pinned beneath the collar of my flannel shirt, and felt the micro-transmitter hum once against my collarbone. It was paired to the secondary audio channel of my truck's dashcam, which was currently live-streaming its wide-angle cabin view to a private YouTube server.

I opened the front door.

The cold hit me like a slap of wet leather. The light from six high-intensity spotlights mounted to the brush guards of the cruisers hit me full in the chest, washing out my vision in a blinding, whiteout glare.

"Keep 'em where I can see 'em, Nate!" Kowalski barked, his voice cracking slightly on the cold air. His hands were shaking on the grip of his service weapon. He was twenty-five, terrified, doing what the senior detective told him to do.

"Hands are up, Frank," I said, my voice carrying clear, flat, and steady across the forty feet of frozen lawn. I held them at shoulder height, palms open, fingers splayed. "Front door is unlocked. I’m stepping down off the top riser."

"Stay right there!" Bradley yelled, dropping the bullhorn to hang by its nylon lanyard. He marched up the walkway, his heavy winter boots crunching rhythmically into the frozen crushed limestone. He stopped five paces out, his right hand resting on the butt of his sidearm, his eyes scanning my face for the terror he was paid to find.

He found nothing. Just two eyes as still and gray as a frozen pond.

"You're up early, Nate," Bradley said, his voice dropping into that fake, sorrowful baritone he used for the news cameras. "Guess you saw the morning broadcast."

"I saw it, Bradley," I replied, not breaking eye contact. "I saw a lot of things this morning."

A muscle twitched in the corner of his left eye—barely a millimeter of movement, but to a man who had spent four years in a concrete box analyzing this bastard’s testimony, it was as loud as a gunshot.

"We have a warrant signed by Judge Miller," Bradley said, pulling a folded legal document from his breast pocket with a theatrical snap of his leather glove. "Search and seizure. Real estate fraud, grand larceny, and the suspected unlawful disposal of human remains belonging to Arthur Vance."

"Arthur’s dead?" I asked, keeping my voice level.

"You tell me, Nate," Bradley hissed, stepping onto the first wooden step of my porch. He leaned in, close enough that I could smell the stale wintergreen tobacco on his breath. "Because before this sun clears the tree line, we’re going to find what's left of him on this section. Turn around. Interlace your fingers behind your head."

I turned slowly, deliberately. "The truck is unlocked, Detective. You'll find what you're looking for in the bed. Isn't that where you usually tell your boys to check first?"

Bradley froze behind me. For half a second, his fingers hesitated against the cold steel of his handcuffs.

"Don't get cute with me, Hayes," he muttered into my ear, roughly grabbing my left wrist and snapping the cold carbon-steel jaw of the cuff around the bone. "You're going to Stateville for the rest of your life. And this time, nobody’s coming to bail you out."

Click. Clack.

The metal bit into my skin. It was the exact same sound that had ended my life the first time around.

Only this time, as he shoved me toward the back door of the cruiser, I looked through the glare of the searchlights straight into the telephoto lens of the Channel 4 camera van.

The red tally light on top of their rig was glowing solid.