Abraham Fuller died of a gunshot wound. What was unusual was that the bullet took some twenty years to do its job. A hermit who lived in the green hills outside Brattleboro, Fuller kept his bullet wound to himself. When the old damage finally causes a fatal aneurysm, Joe Gunther decides it's time to find out more about Abraham Fuller - and whoever wanted him dead. Gunther's crew combs Fuller's cabin and garden, making a disturbing discovery. Deep in the rocky Vermont soil is an artificial stainless steel knee joint... and the rest of a very real human skeleton. Worse yet, medical analysis proves that the body is a certified murder victim, slain by a single bullet. What, if anything, does this have to do with Fuller's murder? Gunther isn't sure. Then a sniper's machine gun nearly destroys the hearse bringing the skeleton to the morgue, and Gunther's word is cut out for him: find the manufacturer of the steel knee and then the surgeon who implanted it. For the first time, Gunther's work takes him outside his home state, to Chicago, where the big city cops think their Vermont counterparts do little more than shovel snow...and where too many of the people he meets are desperate to hide their pasts. Who was the man with the phony knee? Who opened fire on the hearse? Gunther follows a trail that leads back in time; only now he is also providing a trail. One that may lead to a fresh new corpse...his own.