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of snow in the parking lot.
    Because they had arrived here almost simultaneously, their vehicles were parked side by side. Darlene paused at the driver’s door of her midnight-blue Audi. She brushed the snow off the shoulders of her coat, and then she opened the door, slid in, and pulled it shut. Bell waved. She said the thing she always said when anyone departed in winter, when snow added yet another treacherous element to mountain roads that were pretty damned perilous to begin with: “Be careful.”
    Darlene’s window was rolled up, so she could not hear the words, but Bell hadn’t really meant them for her. The words were aimed at the universe, at whatever distant, brooding force controlled the destinies of people forced to live in dangerous circumstances. “Be careful” meant: Be careful with the souls in your care. They had suffered enough, most of them.
    Hell. All of them.
    As Bell watched, Darlene backed the Audi out of its spot and then pulled forward, leaving the lot in a wide, slow, wary turn. The snow was thickening so quickly that her tire tracks disappeared almost instantly.
    Bell was consoled by the fact that Darlene knew these roads as well as she did, including the switchback halfway down that had caused more deaths than a serial killer. Yes, Darlene had moved away a long time ago—but some things, you never forgot. Mountain roads in winter definitely made the list.
    She continued to stand by the Explorer. She didn’t want to leave right away. As cold and dark as it was, as furiously as the snow was falling, Bell wanted to wait here for just a few minutes more and contemplate what Darlene had told her. She needed to figure out what—if anything—she should do in response to it. The snow boxed in her thoughts, sealing them off. It temporarily kept distractions at bay. Soon, of course, the snow would be its own distraction; Bell would have to negotiate the switchback, too, and trust the Explorer to get her safely down the mountain.
    But for the next few minutes, she wanted to watch the snow as it faithfully coated every object, obscuring edges and differences, making everything look the same. Simplifying the world. She felt the flakes melting in her hair.
    Darlene was still grieving her father’s death. Bell did not know her well, but she did not need to know her well to understand that. Darlene was stunned, angry, turned inside out with the kind of despair for which there was no antidote. Grief was something you simply had to get through, howsoever you could. Grief was brutal, and it was cruel, and it lasted as long as it lasted. Grief could turn even the calmest, most poised and rational person into an emotional mess. And when grief was mixed with guilt—the guilt that burned and surged and twisted inside you because you so futilely wished you’d done more for your loved one, wished you’d stopped in more often and paid better attention when you did, wished you’d hugged him just once more during that last visit, and told him just one more time that you loved him, although, God help you, you did not know it was going to be your final chance to do that, to do anything—then you were in for trouble.
    Bell had listened to Darlene. She had heard the pain in her voice. She had nodded. But she’d made no promises to her old acquaintance, beyond an agreement to look into the matter. Informally. Discreetly.
    In some ways—and Bell knew she didn’t have to explain this to Darlene—a prosecutor had less power than an average citizen, not more. When a prosecutor made a casual inquiry, it wasn’t casual anymore. It couldn’t be. A clanking, wheezing, cumbersome bureaucracy always came along for the ride. Unless she was prepared to initiate a formal investigation on the basis of what seemed to Bell to be fairly skimpy evidence—or, more accurately, to persuade Muth County Prosecutor Steve Black to do so, being as how Thornapple