On Harrow Hill

When he reached the door, he switched on his flashlight. The painted letters were a deep red; their distinctive tackiness told him the blood had been applied very recently.

There were two doors to the barn—this large one that permitted him to move his tractor in and out, and a normal entry door. He went to that second one now, quietly turned the knob, then kicked it open, sweeping the flashlight beam across the interior, holding his Beretta in firing position.

Satisfied that the barn wasn’t harboring Tate or anyone else, he stepped out, closed the door, hurried back up to the house, and made a call to police headquarters in Larchfield for the evidence team to go over the site ASAP. It was out of their jurisdiction, but involving the local police in an incident clearly tied to the Larchfield case would make no sense.

34

The morning sun, now well above the ridge in a cloudless blue sky, was illuminating the blossoms on the old apple tree by the chicken coop and turning droplets of dew on the grass into dazzling pinpoints of light.

He and Madeleine were sitting at the round pine breakfast table, each with a mug of coffee. He had opened the French doors to let in the morning air, and Madeleine had closed them. They had hardly spoken since he’d insisted that she leave the house and stay with a friend, at least for the next couple of days, or until the evident threat had been neutralized.

It was not the first time a lunatic had invaded their lives. Everything that could be said about it had been said on the previous occasion. All that remained now on Madeleine’s part was a grim resignation. On Gurney’s part, a sense of guilt that he’d allowed this to happen again alternated with what he considered a realistic acceptance of the nature of his career. It is what it is—in the words of a popular saying that struck him as both profound and inane.

His focus now was on logistics and the minimization of risk. His plan was to drive Madeleine with a suitcase of clothes and other essentials to Geraldine Mirkle’s house on the other side of Walnut Crossing. She and Gerry shared the same schedule at the mental health clinic and usually drove there together. And Gerry was an extrovert who always welcomed company, especially Madeleine’s—a fact confirmed by her immediate affirmative reply when Madeleine had called to ask for the favor.

Madeleine went to take a shower and pack her things, and Gurney went down to the barn to touch base with Kyra Barstow, who’d been working there for the past hour with one of her techs.

“I took a scraping for DNA,” she said, pointing to the message. “And we found a couple of shoe prints in the damp ground in front of the door—I’m thinking from the same sneakers that left prints at the mortuary. No indication that he was inside the barn.”

He nodded. “Are you checking for vehicle tread marks?”

“Already done.” She pulled out her phone and swiped back and forth between two shots of tread marks in soft earth. “The first is from the road in front of the Kane cottage, the second is from right over there.” She pointed to an area next to the barn where there was more dirt than grass. The tread marks appeared to be identical.

“Best of all,” she added, “there’s a double impression here, one from each side of the vehicle—which gives us the exact axle width, which with any luck may give us the make and model of the car, or at least narrow the possibilities considerably.”

“Interesting,” said Gurney. “He’s not shy about leaving his little calling cards.”

“Or his big ones.” She gestured toward the bloody message on the door. “Did you hear or see anything suspicious last night?”

“Just before dawn this morning, we heard a god-awful howling—shriller, louder, more intense than any coyote or wolf. Like something out of a horror movie. Now I’m pretty sure it was him, wanting to make an impression.”

“He didn’t think a bloody message about rising from the dead was enough?”

Gurney smiled. “We’ll ask him when we catch him.”

After taking another look around the barn and finding nothing out of place, Gurney returned to the house. While he was waiting for Madeleine to finish packing, he checked the locks on all the windows, upstairs and downstairs, and the French doors.

When they finally set out, he mentioned to Madeleine that he needed to make a quick stop at Miro’s Motors, their local auto repair shop, to have something looked at. It was a sign of her preoccupation that this generated no response.

Gurney wanted to make sure that whoever had left the message on the barn hadn’t also affixed a GPS tracker to the Outback. The best way to examine the undercarriage was to have it raised on a lift so that all the nooks and crannies would be visible.