He didn’t slam the door, and he’d long ago disabled his car’s dome light. He’d also parked slightly down the road, to avoid being noticed. These were habits born more years ago than he could recall, when he’d been a night patrol officer and had valued being inconspicuous. It was also eerily quiet where he was right now, unlike in the urban streets he normally frequented. He was in the countryside, between Burlington and Middlebury, in the midst of Addison County’s farm country, surrounded by the night’s vast emptiness. All around was where Brian Sleuter had once aggressively patrolled, looking for a ramp up to the big time. Willy was at the address of Sleuter’s ex-mother-in-law, a woman named Shirley Sherman, whose daughter Brian had divorced years before. Sherman was therefore a peripheral member of Sleuter’s family tree, certainly in terms of Mike Bradley’s check into Brian’s past, and as such she hadn’t yet been interviewed. But Willy was intrigued by what he’d interpreted from Shirley’s raw data in the state’s computer files.
