“Can I trust you to sniff around for him?”

Butch yapped twice, but I swear it was sarcastic.

I laughed. “Okay, sorry. I shouldn’t have even asked. Let me know if you find anything.”

He trotted off without deigning to reply.

It would help if we knew what we were looking for. As it was, we strolled through the run-down clapboard houses, admiring the patchy lawns, filthy gutters, and interesting piles of junk. Though I wasn’t inclined to agree with Sandra Cheney on principle, I could almost sympathize with her desire to keep Shannon from hanging around here. The whole neighborhood stank of despair and decay.

“So we had the fire,” Chance said, thinking aloud. “The burnt trees and grass. We found the ‘earthquake’ site. What are we missing?”

“Blood,” I murmured immediately.

“There was blood when I got shot,” Jesse muttered.

Shannon added, “Hail.”

Jesse thought for a moment, and we paused to give him a chance. “Miss Minnie said she saw the four horsemen coming and going.”

“People don’t ride horses through town,” Shannon objected. “Even in Kilmer, it can’t have been dudes on horse-back.”

“So what did she see?” I asked.

Unfortunately, nobody could come up with an answer. We continued in a meandering path around the two streets that made up this country ghetto. I kicked at a clump of pig-weed straggling up at the edge of the road.

“When does the next train come by?” Chance asked Shannon.

“Tuesday and Saturday, just before six a.m.”

I suspected she’d know that only if she’d spent the night with her scruffy “friend” at some point, but that wasn’t our business. Time had gotten away from me, so I mentally tabulated how long we’d been there.

“It’s Thursday?” I asked aloud, none too sure of my calculations.

Jesse agreed with a nod. “So no trains today.”

As we completed the loop and wound up back by the Forester, Chance gave us something else to think about. “We should be looking near the tracks. Right here, in fact.”

I agreed with that. Unless we were totally off target, one of these ramshackle tract houses held something we needed to know. Talk about an exercise in frustration. Only Miss Minnie’s rambling had guided us here, and maybe we were crazy for putting any stock in it at all. It was unlikely that Curtis Farrell had lived anywhere near here.

We paced up and down the street four times before Shannon said, “That one has a red front door. I mean, it’s painted—badly, too.”

I saw what she meant. It looked as though someone had slung a paint can to cover up some ugly graffiti. From some angles, it also looked like splattered blood.

Chance saw it too. “Red as blood,” he noted as we approached the broken cement driveway.

Butch came around the corner of the house, wagging his tail fiercely. He yapped at me to tell me he’d found the house. I stared in astonishment.

“Here? The gas station guy’s been here?”

The dog barked in confirmation, and I gave him a rub. He leaped into my arms, and I stowed him away safely in my bag.

We proceeded with caution. After all, it was early; we were strangers, and most people around here had never heard of gun control. Nothing stirred behind the curtains. While the others made their way toward the house, I paused at the mailbox, hoping to find out who lived here.

Jackpot. I found a couple of utility bills for Curtis Farrell. I hadn’t dared hope we would be this lucky. It would have been simpler to locate him in the directory, assuming he was listed, but this confluence of events suggested Miss Minnie knew something, layered beneath bits of old Bible verse. I wished we could talk to her again, but I was afraid of what more questions would do to her. I didn’t want to hurt anyone while I was here. Well, nobody who was innocent , anyway.

But how brilliant. We needed to search his house, and here we were.

When I caught up to the others, I found them studying the front door. Jesse was asking, “Can you make out what it says underneath the paint?”

Chance leaned in for a better look. “Mar . . . and some numbers. Eight-three-six, I think.”

“March?” I offered. “Is it a date, you think? Or a time?”

The others shrugged.

Shannon stepped to the side and peered through the window between the gap in the ragged sheers. “I don’t think anyone’s here. Are we going in?”

Since the guy was dead, it didn’t seem likely anybody was home, unless Curtis had a roommate.

I cleared my throat. “I’m taking Jesse around back. Chance, if the door happens to pop open while we’re gone, give us a holler.” I thought that was better than making Jesse watch him pick the lock. Even if he was suspended and well outside his jurisdiction, I figured he probably didn’t want to see active lawbreaking.

Rummaging in his pockets, Chance didn’t acknowledge me as Jesse and I rounded the house. Shannon stayed with him to watch him work.

“So your ex is a house-breaker too,” Jesse said, sounding amused. “As I’ve said before, you have the most interesting friends, Corine.”

I thought about Chuch, the ex-arms dealer, married to Eva, the forger, and grinned. “Yeah. They sure come in handy, don’t they?”

He smiled back, bitter chocolate eyes roving my face in an appreciative manner. “I don’t think I should comment.”

“That’s probably wise.”

We circled the house and found a bunch of disgusting garbage cans that should have been set out weeks ago. If I were truly devoted, I would have suggested going through them for clues, but you couldn’t have paid me enough to touch one.

Instead of calling to us, Chance opened the back door and waved us in. “The front was open,” he said mildly.

Jesse raised a brow. “Fancy that.”

“Small town,” I said. “People just don’t see the need to lock up.”

I climbed two steps and crossed the sagging porch, stepping into Farrell’s house. We’d gotten there before the police, assuming the sheriff would even bother. The place looked like a cyclone had hit it, though; clothes everywhere and dirty dishes piled in the sink. Added to the trash in the back, it seemed as if Curtis hadn’t been home in a while—at least, I couldn’t imagine a human being living like that.

“Have a look around.” Jesse took charge as if this were his crime scene. “I’ll take the kitchen. Corine, you search the bathroom. Chance, take the bedroom, and Shannon, check out the living room, please. I guarantee we don’t have to worry about leaving DNA on the scene, but don’t touch anything with your bare hands. They probably have a fingerprint kit even out here in Hooterville.”

Shannon snickered, but she took his advice and pulled the sleeves of her hoodie down past her hands as she headed for the living room. Once in the bathroom, I did the same with my sweater. Ew. I really had to search in there? It smelled like something had died, and green fuzzy stuff grew in the grout between the tiles. Man, I thought Jesse liked me better than that.

From within my handbag, Butch whined. The smell was getting to him too. “There’s no help for it,” I told the dog. “We have to be brave.”

I heard a thunk from the bedroom and peered out. Using a broom handle, Chance poked gingerly at the piles of clothing spread across the floor. He flashed me a wry smile. “I think Shannon got the best deal in this division of labor.”

“Well, she’s young. He didn’t want to traumatize her—oh dear God.” I caught my breath at the sight of a dead rat in the cupboard beneath the sink.

It was going to be a long day.

Unearthed Secrets

In the end, Shannon found what we were looking for.

“Mark 8:36,” she called, excitement thrumming in her voice. When we gathered in the living room, she read from the book in her hands. “ ‘For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’ This passage is highlighted.” She showed us the Bible, where someone, probably Curtis Farrell, had marked the verse scrawled on his door.

“Sounds like a threat,” Chance said quietly.

“Somebody knew something,” Jesse agreed. “But were they blackmailing Farrell or trying to get him to stop?”

An excellent question. Farrell hadn’t displayed the confidence of a career criminal. He’d seemed hesitant, like he didn’t know what to do when confronted with resistance. His job had been spelled out for him—and I still wasn’t sure what he’d intended to do to Miss Minnie—and once things went wrong, he didn’t know how to respond.

“Is this a religious thing?” I asked. “Or someone just using the Bible for a convenient code?”

“Impossible to say.” Jesse took the Bible from Shannon and flipped through it. As he gave the book a last shake, a scrap of paper tumbled toward the floor.

With his preternatural reflexes, Chance snatched it before it touched. He scanned it and then looked at me with a half frown. “Robert Frost? It’s that ‘Two roads diverged in a wood’ poem.”

“ ‘The Road Not Taken’?” I took the torn yellow sheet from Chance; it looked as if it had been pulled from a legal pad. “Wish we had a sample of Farrell’s handwriting. Then we’d know whether he wrote this down himself or someone else gave it to him.”

“Can I?” At Shannon’s question, I passed it along. Her eyes widened. “This is John McGee’s writing. I’d recognize the crabby little letters anywhere.”

“So Farrell had been talking to McGee,” Jesse mused. “And they both ended up dead.”

I wondered aloud, “Could that have been the point? Someone may have sent Farrell to Miss Minnie’s house right then, knowing we were there.”

A thundercloud frown knit Chance’s brow. “Knowing we wouldn’t react well to a robber threatening an old lady.”

“If that’s the case,” Shannon said, “then the guy on the roof wasn’t working with Farrell. He was there to keep us pinned down until we noticed something was wrong inside.”

Jesse gave her an approving nod. “Good thinking, Shannon.”

She flushed with pleasure. “Just makes sense, right? He didn’t try too hard to hit us. He might’ve been trying to drive us back inside the house, and then Butch heard the intruder.”

It would’ve taken a dog’s hearing to notice someone jimmying the back door with the varmint rifle pinging away. But then, everyone in town knew I took Butch everywhere. As theories went, this one seemed to make sense.

That put a scowl on Saldana’s face. “If that’s true, it makes it even more embarrassing that he got me.”

I didn’t look at him. He’d been shot trying to protect me. I couldn’t make light of that, even if it hadn’t been strictly necessary, but there was no evidence to support any of our hypotheses, anyway.

“We sound like crazed conspiracy theorists,” I said in disgust. “It was this; it was that; it was—”