The Viper

It took him a moment to recognize the woman slumped in an easy chair in front of the television as Charlene Vesco. Rivulets of blood extended from her wide-open eyes down her cheeks . . . and from her ears down her neck . . . and from the lower corner of her mouth onto her chest, soaking the front of a pale blue sweater. In the light from a lamp next to the chair, her skin was a sickly white. Her eyes had the dullness that sets in a few hours after death. He started taking out his phone but was stopped by the sight of a second body. A dark gray body on the floor at Charlene’s feet. Her pit bull, in a pool of blood.

He went to his car, blocked his phone ID, and placed a call to 911. He gave the dispatcher the address, the location of the body in the house, and its visual condition. He added that it was an apparent homicide and ended the call.

He went back to the window for another look at the room, in case he might have missed something. He noted on a coffee table not far from the bodies a bottle of what appeared to be whiskey and two glasses. That should get the attention of the homicide team.

He returned to his car. In the event that Stryker might be pinging his phone, he drove for several minutes in the direction of Albany before turning the phone off, reversing course, and heading back by a roundabout route to Walnut Crossing.

AS HE BROUGHT the car to a stop in its hiding place in the woods, he was wondering what had been done to Charlene Vesco to produce those unsettling symptoms, and whether the whiskey bottle and the two glasses had anything to do with it.

The blood he’d observed suggested the possibility of a massive dose of an anticoagulant. He considered the idea that it might have been secretly administered in a shot of whiskey but realized that the taste of an amount sufficient to produce such severe effects would have been noticed instantly. It seemed more likely that the chemical had been administered by injection, probably after the woman had been rendered unconscious or at least unresisting—perhaps by a few drops in her whiskey of something less likely to be noticed. That sequence of events, along with the two glasses and her position in the easy chair, suggested that she knew her killer—possibly the occupant of that out-of-place Range Rover.

But why had she been killed? And why in such a bizarre way?

Gurney shivered. The gloom of Garville’s weather had followed him home, and his car was getting cold. There was a hint of snow in the air, and before it became more than a hint there were things he wanted to get from the house and bring up to his campsite.

The trek up and down the hill and back across the field to a bedroom window was becoming routine, a routine he found both absurd and necessary. The first thing he did in the house was go to the kitchen sink and let warm water run over his hands to get the chill out of them. While the coffee machine heated up, he got two tote bags from the mudroom and began filling them. In one bag he loaded a loaf of bread, a package of cheddar cheese, a bag of almonds, two bananas, a jar of olives, a large thermos of water, and a container of orange juice. In the other he placed an extra sweater, woolen socks, a scarf, ski mittens, a flashlight, and his laptop with a charging adaptor for the car’s USB port. When he finally sat down by the French doors with his coffee, the time on the Regulator clock was exactly 4:00 p.m.

Madeleine had the early shift at the clinic that day and should already be home. As he was frowning at that thought, the security app on his phone produced the distinctive series of beeps that indicated the activation of the camera down on the barn. He moved away from the French doors, went to the kitchen window, and saw with some relief Madeleine’s rented red Crosstrek coming up through the low pasture.

She didn’t come inside right away. He watched her walking from the car over to the coop. She was carrying the shotgun—rather casually, he thought, as though it had become a natural part of her life. She walked around the coop, stopping to gaze down at the pasture below it, before coming into the house.

“What was that all about?” he asked when she appeared in the kitchen.

She laid the shotgun on the sideboard. “I was getting a sense of where the fence will go.”

“Fence?”

“For the alpacas. I asked Jim Smithers to come up and see if it’s something he can handle.”

“Who the hell is Jim Smithers?”

“The farmer on the road to the village. Did the concussion erase your memory?”

“You mean the old guy with the tilting silo and the ancient tractor?”

Her eyes narrowed, but she said nothing.

“What do you mean—if it’s something he can handle?”

“The Winklers want to bring the twin alpacas here within the next week or so. The fence will have to be up by then. Obviously, you’re not going to do it. I’m hoping he can.”

“All this has to happen right now? With everything that’s going on?”