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THOMAS WOLFE WAS WRONG.
 
You can always find your way back home—so long as you know how much garlic to put in the marinara. That is the secret. Garlic. And, of course, the olive oil— Filippo Berio extra virgin. But even when you get the recipe right, people want to give you directions. They want to barge into your home and take over your kitchen. Miscreants. Philistines.
 
If Thomas Wolfe had studied marinara, if he had labored over a hot stove more than he did over a typewriter, he would have changed the title of his book— and probably his life. For one thing, he would have gotten drunk more often. Oh, yes, one cup of ale for the pot, and one for the maw. You seldom have trouble finding your way home because you hardly ever leave.
 
I was getting buzzed. A morning on the lake in the warm sun trying to outwit an elusive bass, followed by a stint in the kitchen starting the sauce (it has to simmer all afternoon), and I was ready for the shower. Life is grand.
 
I was expecting company—a rare visit from my daughter, Lane, a detective with the New York City Police Department. She had sent a fax four days earlier. Lane was concerned that she hadn’t heard from me, and sounded as if she were having a crisis of conscience. Her note said, in part:
 
We wrapped up the Wolf case nearly a year ago, but I’m still not able to put it behind me. I need to talk to you about that day in Vermont. I’ve told the sanitized version of the story a dozen times, but you and I have never sorted out what really happened. Sometimes I think it was murder. Other times I’m sure that it was justice. I just need to know why you did what you did.
 
I answered the fax, assured my daughter that I was fine, and told her that I would love to see her.
 
Intuition had been nudging Lane with the truth— that I had murdered the killer, John Wolf. It didn’t seem that long ago, but my daughter was right. It was nearly a year ago. Lane had been the lead investigator in her partner’s ex-wife’s murder. What began as a straightforward homicide case became a hunt for a serial killer. I had provided armchair advice to Lane and her lieutenant until it was clear that Wolf’s next intended victim was my daughter. So I went after the bastard, tracked him to his lair in Vermont, and used his own bomb to blow him to pieces. Enormously rewarding justice, that.
 
The six-week bout with demons in the night that erupted when I returned home had nothing to do with my having dispatched a predator to the netherworld. The problem had been that even though he was dead, Wolf continued to live inside my head. In order to track him, to anticipate his moves, I had to invite him into my mind, to learn to see the world as he saw it, to think as he thought. When it was over, the task of evicting Wolf from my dreams took more time than bringing down the beast.
 
Killing him had caused me no confusion. I had not hesitated, and I had not lost a wink of sleep over it. But it was different for my daughter.
 
When she was young, Lane was always sticking bars of flowery-smelling soap in the shower. She would dump my Ivory in the wastebasket, and I would have to haul ass out of the shower, dripping wet, to retrieve it.
 
Soap is not the only thing that she and I see differently. I used to lure her into the kitchen when she was a child, determined to turn her into a cook. “That’s men’s work,” she would say—and she was right, at least in our house. When it was my turn to cook, my wife, Savvy, seldom passed through the kitchen; I was not a kind cook.
 
As Lane grew older, she became more specific in her distaste for cooking. “Think of the time we consume driving to the grocery, picking out the food, preparing it, eating it, clearing the table, washing the dishes, drying them, putting them away. You could solve half a dozen murders in that time.”
 
I wanted her to appreciate cooking the way I did, to appreciate cooking the way it deserved to be appreciated, but it was hopeless. She was too caught up in that other part of my life—my work as a practicing psychiatrist, profiling and tracking human predators. Although she always ate whatever I set before her, she remained steadfast in her indifference to the process.
 
“It’s just food, Pop.”
 
A heartbreaking sacrilege.
 
When she was transferred from her street beat to Homicide, Lane wanted to fill my head with her cases. She expected me to offer some profound insight, some new angle on a murder that was fracturing the best minds in law enforcement. “When I quit,” I always told her, “I really quit.”
 
She insisted that she had special rights—a “biological exception” to my rule. True. I have never mastered the art of saying no to my daughter.
 
My daughter or my cat. I guess they are the only two creatures on earth who have me exactly where they want me.
 
I looked at my massive Maine coon cat and said, “Max, do you think you’ll ever retire?”
 
I was sure that he would do a better job of it than I had.
 
Max flipped his tail. He was sound asleep on his kitchen chair, deep in a dream state—with his paws curled back and his lower jaw in a cataclysm of murder. Max is the perfect predator. The field mice, chipmunks, and squirrels that populate my ten acres have learned the hard way. When he comes inside, Max purrs, rubs against my leg, curls into my lap, sniffs my beard to determine what I have eaten in his absence. When he sleeps, he is back in the field—the cold, calculating killer that nature designed him to be.
 
I ran my hand down his back, from his neck to the base of his tail. “Pity your jungle friends, Max. They’re capable of many things, but they can’t purr. Has to do with the arrangement of cartilage in the throat. Of course, they can roar, and you can’t. Maybe it all evens out.”
 
He opened one eye, yawned, then went back to sleep.
 
Because I had been somewhat out of touch, Lane assumed that I had shut myself away, struggling with a bout of depression akin to what had nailed me just before I sold my practice and headed for the Michigan woods several years ago. She was just being a dear, over-protective worrywart, although I must admit to a twinge of guilt—this time I had not been struggling with anything but road maps. Janet, my friend from across the lake, and I had sneaked away to Vancouver, British Columbia, where Blues Traveler was playing in concert. Actually, I should amend that. We did not sneak, we simply did not tell anyone, including my daughter, what we were doing.
 
In truth, I had not lingered on the Wolf matter. After my six weeks of emotional recuperation, I pronounced myself sane, then promptly continued with the important things in life: fishing, good music, a new book by Harry Crews.
 
Most detectives go through an entire career without encountering a serial murderer. Lane had already dealt with one—John Wolf, who had killed dozens in a career spanning two decades—and more than a hundred had haunted me. I certainly could listen to my daughter, but I did not know how much help I could offer her.
 
I walked toward my bedroom at the back of the house. Lane was usually prompt, so I had perhaps an hour to get out of my fishy jeans, grab a quick shower and some clean jeans, and just generally make myself more presentable. I nipped a final time at the ale, then hit the switch on the perimeter security system. Chuck Logan was due to deliver two cords of firewood, and I didn’t want him or Lane to pull up the drive and be greeted by screaming sirens.
 
I had installed the alarm system as soon as I moved to the lake. Back then, I was still feeling vulnerable to the outside world, surrounded by the ghosts and other incarnations of the monsters that I had wrestled over the years. I wanted, needed, an absolutely secure retreat.
 
I had also stocked the log house with a small arsenal of rifles, revolvers, and semiautomatic pistols. But security had never been a problem. I doubted that I needed any of the hardware anymore.
 
Everything seemed to be under control when I hit the shower. A bit blurry perhaps, but under control, with the promise of a pleasant visit ahead.
 
As the water splashed onto my face, my head began to clear. Muscle aches that I had been nursing since the day before responded to the warm spray. I had begun splitting my winter’s firewood—a task that tests my ability to tolerate ambivalence. I always have to force myself to go out to the stump in the wood lot, but once I start wielding the twelve-pound splitting hammer, I hit a rhythm, develop a momentum, feel as if I’m thirty again. It’s when I have to break out the Ben-Gay the next day that I know I am not.