“A hard day,” said Gurney softly.
Mason stared at him. “What is it? What happened?”
The fear in the man’s voice told Gurney that he might be guessing at the truth.
“We found the body of a woman on your property.”
Mason blinked, his mouth opening slowly. “A woman?”
“Yes.”
Mason’s lips moved for a few seconds before he spoke and his voice contracted to little more than a whisper. “Do you mean my wife?”
“Can you describe her to me?”
Mason looked lost.
“Her age?”
“Fifty . . . fifty-one. Yes. Fifty-one.”
“Her hair?”
He sounded as if his mouth had gone dry. “Brown. Mostly brown. A little gray. Here and there.”
“Long or short?”
“Long. She . . . likes it long.”
“Did she ever braid it?”
“Sometimes. A single braid. Down the back.” He began breathing heavily. “Oh, God. What happened to her?”
“We’re trying to find out.”
“Where is she?”
“In the barn.”
“She never went into the barn.”
Gurney hesitated. “She may have been placed there.”
“Placed there?”
“That’s the way it looks.”
“Are you saying she was killed?”
“I’m sorry, sir, but it appears that way.”
“She was killed? You mean murdered?”
“It appears that way.”
“How? Why?”
“Those are the questions we hope to find answers to.”
“You’re positive that the . . . the body you found . . . is Linda?”
“We’ll be asking you to confirm the identification, when you feel able.”
A silence fell between them, broken finally by Mason.
“Do you know things . . . things that you’re not telling me?”
“I’m afraid, sir, that right now we don’t know very much at all.”
Mason nodded in a way that appeared more like a mindless rocking motion than a cogent response. “Can I see her?”
“Soon. The medical examiner is . . . here now.”
“Where?”
“In the barn.”
“Where in the barn?”
Gurney wanted to be reasonably truthful, without being too specific. “By your tractor. I assume it’s your tractor?”
“That’s where you found her?”
“Yes.”
Mason let out a sharp little sound, halfway between a stifled whimper and a laugh.
“She hated that tractor.” He closed his eyes. When he opened them, they were full of tears. He lowered his head and slowly bent forward, his hands clasped between his knees.
Gurney was tempted to reach out and put a consoling hand on the man’s shoulder but instead maintained, as he normally did in situations of crime-scene grief, a professional distance. It wasn’t a difficult decision, since he found emotional detachment in general to be a comfortable state of mind.
Mason straightened himself in the seat, gazing blankly for a while in the direction of the barn, then turning to Gurney with a look of perplexity.
“Why were you asking about Billy Tate?”
When Gurney didn’t answer, Mason’s eyes widened. “Tate is dead . . . isn’t he?”
Again Gurney said nothing.
“My God! He’s not alive, is he? How could he be alive?”
“Good question.”
“Do you . . . are you saying . . . my God, is he involved in this?”
“It’s a possibility.”
“I don’t understand. He was struck by lightning. It was in the news.”
“Some new evidence has come to light. It’s possible that Tate survived.”
“What? How could that—”
“Mr. Mason?” Mike Morgan had come to the side of the car. “Mr. Mason, I’m sorry, I know how difficult this is, but would you feel able at this point to look at the victim’s face and tell us whether or not the victim is your wife?”
Gurney was beginning to wonder if Mason had understood the question when he finally responded, distractedly. “Yes, I . . . I’ll do that.”
“The medical examiner will be bringing the victim’s body over this way in just a moment.”
A rolling stretcher emerged from the barn, guided by Fallow and pushed by his assistant.
Gurney and Mason exited the Prius. A cool breeze had come up, the sun was gone, and small dark clouds were scudding across the sky. The green of the lawn had lost some of its vibrancy.
“Dave?” Kyra Barstow was calling to him from the front porch of the house, her hand raised to get his attention. “There’s something here you need to see.”
He glanced at the approaching stretcher, which he now saw was bearing a dark plastic body bag. He hoped that Fallow would have the delicacy to open the zipper just far enough to show the woman’s face without revealing the god-awful wound to her throat, and he knew that Morgan was quite capable of handling the formality of the identification process.
He made his way around the official vehicles and followed Barstow into the house. The front door, the newel post and banister of the staircase leading to the second floor, and several spots along the hallway had already been dusted for prints. In the living room, one of her Tyvek-suited assistants was going over the rug with a noisy trace-evidence collection vac.
“Up there,” she said, indicating the staircase.
He’d only climbed a few steps when he saw it.
On the wall of the landing at the top, illuminated only by weak window light reaching it from the adjacent bedrooms, there was a message painted in large dripping letters.
I AM
THE DARK ANGEL
WHO ROSE
FROM THE DEAD
Whether it was the meaning of the message, or the likelihood that it had been written in the blood of the dead woman in the barn, or the suggestion it conveyed that the dreadful work of this “angel” might not be over, the sight of it on that dim-lit wall gave Gurney gooseflesh.
He went back down the stairs and out onto the porch. Barstow followed him out.
“We need to know more about Tate. I can’t tell whether he’s psychotic—or trying to create that impression—or whether something else is going on.”
“Something else . . . like what?”
“I wish I knew. Most homicide cases, your first hypothesis is often pretty close to the truth. But this Tate thing is a whole other animal.”
She seemed fascinated by this. “The guys who leave messages at murder sites, they do tend to be the crazy ones, right?”
“They’re the ones with a hunger for recognition, justification, admiration. The messages are directed at an imagined audience. The wording sometimes reveals mental deficits, delusions, emotional disorders. But once in a while, all that craziness is being faked. I’ve had cases with perps who came across as total maniacs, when in fact—”
A sound not far away stopped him—a small, wavering moan—barely audible, yet as full of pain as a scream.
Greg Mason was standing in front of his car, between Fallow and Morgan, looking down at the face in the open end of the body bag. His own face was contorted with misery.
“Poor man,” said Barstow softly.
Gurney watched as Morgan helped Mason back into the passenger seat of the Prius. He remained there, bent over, speaking to him, while Fallow zipped up the body bag and, with the help of his assistant, rolled the stretcher over to their cadaver-transport van.
Gurney followed them.
“Dr. Fallow?”
Fallow turned and regarded Gurney with an unblinking lack of expression.
“Doctor, if there’s anything you can share with me at this point, even if it’s just a guess, it could be extremely helpful. The time factor in this case—”