Gloria, my ex-wife, took the photo fifteen years ago. She had it blown up and framed, and she gave it to me for Christmas. The boys were sitting side-by-side on the bow seat of a leaky old rowboat on a lake in Maine where we’d rented a cottage for a week in August. They were both holding fishing rods. They looked sunburned and mosquito-bitten and scruffy. One of those happy times in what was, for a while, a happy family’s life. Even then you could see the devil in Billy’s eyes and the intensity in Joey’s. I wondered what a photo of Gloria and me, taken back then, would have revealed in our eyes. The safe’s six-number combination was the boys’ two birthdays. I opened it and put the Meriwether Lewis letters inside next to the Smith & Wesson .38 revolver I kept there. Ben Frye had been right. Whether or not the letters turned out to be evidence, they were considerably more secure in my safe than they’d be on a shelf in the Boston PD evidence lockup. Henry, I noticed, was sitting meaningfully beside the door.
