The notion of a Tate-Aspern alliance seemed a stretch but not impossible. It certainly merited further exploration. That was his last conscious thought before he drifted off to sleep.
When he was awakened suddenly by Madeleine gripping his arm, it was near dawn, but the moon had moved behind a cloud bank and the room was darker.
“What was that?” There was an edge of fear in her voice.
Her tone had him fully awake.
For a long moment he heard nothing but the susurrus of the breeze in the thicket. Then he was stopped cold by a high-pitched howl. He was familiar with the howls and yips of coyotes, but this was more piercing, fading at the end into something like a demented laugh. This was no mere coyote, and the nearest wolves, even if one could produce such a sound, were over a hundred miles away in the northern Adirondacks.
He rolled out of bed and picked up the powerful LED flashlight he kept on his nightstand.
Madeleine sat up on her side of the bed. “I think it came from the low pasture.”
Gurney’s hearing was normal, but hers was extraordinary, and he’d learned to trust it. He went to the side of the house that looked down over the pasture, the barn, and the pond. There was enough moonlight filtering through the clouds for him to get a sense of the open parts of the landscape. He saw nothing moving. He was tempted to use his flashlight to scan the border of the woods, but decided not to. Before he announced his presence, he wanted to know what he was dealing with.
After peering out of the windows on all sides of the house, he returned to the bedroom, where he found Madeleine locking the windows. He put on a pair of jeans, sneakers, and a sweatshirt, took his 9mm Beretta from the top drawer of his nightstand, and slipped it into his sweatshirt pocket.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Taking a quick look around.”
“Be careful!”
He left the house as quietly as he could, closing the side door gently behind him. Instead of taking the path through the pasture, he entered the narrow copse that separated the high pasture from the low one and followed it down toward the pond and barn. The moon was slowly emerging from the edge of the cloud cover. Bathed now in a silver light, the hillside seemed preternaturally quiet, focusing Gurney on the sound of each step he took.
When he reached the pond, there was a silver gleam on the black surface. The frogs, usually croaking at all hours of the night, were silent. He stood for a minute or two in the relative darkness under the drooping branches of a giant hemlock, letting his gaze move around the perimeter of the pond, then over to the end of the town road, then across to the barn.
On the wide door of the barn something caught his eye.
He removed the Beretta from his pocket and flicked off the safety. He moved cautiously from under the hemlock and approached the barn.
He was still a good fifty feet from the barn door when, in the brightening moonlight, he saw what he’d been hoping he’d never see again.
I AM
THE DARK ANGEL
WHO ROSE
FROM THE DEAD
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.