“Why does she keep circling?” Tully asked in almost a whisper, as if afraid to interrupt the process.

“She’s in the scent cone. Barriers can create secondary scent pools, even secondary scent cones. Like I told you before, there’re a number of reasons she might not be able to zero in on the primary scent yet.”

“Barriers?” Maggie said and just then noticed that despite Grace’s erratic circling, she was headed for the opened doorway of the barn.

“If there are other bones scattered or even …” Creed hesitated. “Is there any possibility of pieces buried in several spots?”

Maggie shot a look at Tully. Creed noticed.

“The body in the garbage bag was decapitated,” Tully told him. “The head was in a separate bag, but close by. Practically on top of the other bag.”

Maggie realized it was ridiculous for them to keep information from Creed. It would only impede the search. This wasn’t like holding back details to see if Grace was the real deal, like some initiation rite for her to prove something to them.

“We do have information that there could be a body buried in the barn.”

Grace was already at the doorway but she paused and looked back at Creed, waiting for his permission to enter.

“What’s the floor like in there?” he asked as he pulled a rod out of his backpack and started unfolding it until it became a spear with sharp prongs at one end.

“Hard dirt,” Maggie answered, and Tully raised an eyebrow, surprised that she knew. “I checked,” she said to Tully. “It looks like there’s old straw scattered and matted on top.”

“Any chance the place is booby trapped?”

“Holy crap,” Tully muttered. “We didn’t really think about that.”

Neither of them had considered it when they recklessly unlatched and swung open the doors earlier.

“If it’s any consolation,” Maggie said, “The house wasn’t.”

The three of them stood silently as Grace wagged and whined, excited and ready to enter.

Finally Creed said, “You two stay right here. I’ll make Grace sit outside until I’m sure it’s safe.”

“We’ll check it out with you,” Maggie said, looking at Tully. They had taken over this crime scene. It was theirs to protect.

“Maggie’s right. This site, including the barn, is our responsibility.” And Tully started leading the way.

“Actually it’ll be easier if I go in alone,” Creed said, walking along with the two of them.

They kept a slow steady pace and Maggie suddenly felt conscious of every step, of what could be underfoot.

“We train bomb dogs, too,” Creed continued, “for law enforcement, the military. Even Homeland Security. I have an idea of what to look for.”

“An idea doesn’t sound convincing,” Tully said.

Ten feet away from the open barn doors Creed stepped ahead, turned, and stood in front of them as if to make his case.

“It’s not going do much good if all three of us get blown up. Seriously, I’m not questioning your authority or jurisdiction. I’m just saying I have a better idea of what to look for if the place is rigged.”

Creed’s eyes went from Tully to Maggie, back to Tully. If he were being cocky this would be easier, but he was sincere. He made it sound like this was just another part of his job. But Maggie didn’t like it. She was more comfortable taking a risk than letting someone else do it. Most of all, she hated that she and Tully hadn’t thought about this killer ambushing them. After all, he’d left them a map. They had gone by the premise that he simply wanted to show off his talent and his dumping ground. But they knew plenty of killers who enjoyed setting up his pursuers, of besting them just to make them squirm, or worse—to watch them die.

She found herself looking around the property again, glancing back at the house, studying the windows and watching for movement. Beyond the grove of trees she couldn’t even see the deputies Sheriff Uniss had stationed. It would be easy for someone to hole up in one of the other buildings and keep an eye on them without ever being detected.

“Maybe we should call in experts to check all the buildings,” she said to Tully.

“That construction crew was ripping down and digging up stuff all last week,” Tully said, but now he was looking around, too. “Chances are pretty slim that he’d rig one structure and none of the others.”

“It’s probably fine,” Creed said. “I’m always overly cautious. But I need to protect my dogs from as many unforeseen hazards as possible. Sometimes farmers put down rat traps. So let me just do a check.”

Maggie could feel Tully’s eyes on her. She knew he’d made his decision to let Creed go ahead but he wouldn’t say so unless they were in agreement. Maggie was watching Creed, waiting for him to meet her eyes. When he did, he didn’t blink. There was an intensity, a maturity beyond his young age, but there was something else—a reckless disregard for his own safety. That realization jolted her. Usually in risky situations she was used to seeing the kick of adrenaline, sometimes a healthy dose of fear or passion. But in Ryder Creed’s eyes Maggie saw a hint of resolve, that if he happened to get blown up in the next few minutes, so be it.

She hated that the two men had put her in this position. She wanted to believe that Tully was right. If the killer had wanted to blow them up he’d already had a half dozen chances. Then she thought about him planting the orange socks. He wanted his handiwork to be found, not destroyed, not blown up.

Without taking her eyes away from him, she said to Creed, “If you see anything at all that doesn’t look right you back out immediately and we get the experts.”

“Absolutely,” he agreed.

He started to turn but stopped as if he’d forgotten something. He dug in his jeans pocket and handed his Jeep keys to Tully.

“Just in case,” he said with that subtle smile that hitched up the corner of his mouth and painfully reminded Maggie how right she was about what she had seen in his eyes. And it also surprised her how much she didn’t want something bad to happen to this man.

They watched him instruct a wiggling, excited Grace to sit outside the open doorway. Then he went inside holding the collapsible rod-turned-into-spear.

“We’ve got nothing that says this killer would set up booby traps, do we?” Tully asked, still needing reassurance.

“He strung up Zach Lester’s intestines in a tree. He left us a map.” Maggie was thinking her way through it. “But the orange socks,” she told him, “he put them on a victim who was already dead just for our benefit. If there’s another body inside, I’m hoping he wants us to find it and not join it.”

She stared at the barn’s doorway and only then did she realize that she had unsnapped her holster and her right hand was now inside her jacket, gripping her revolver.

CHAPTER 31

Noah’s mother had brought him a clean set of clothes. The detectives had confiscated his overnight bag with Ethan’s car and everything else that was inside. It had been towed in to their crime lab. He was told that they were going through it right now, examining every single thing for clues. Detective Lopez told Noah this in a tone that sounded like a threat. But Noah knew they wouldn’t find anything that would tell them what had happened. No one would believe what had happened. In the light of day, Noah wasn’t even sure he believed what had happened.

When he told them that Ethan was dead, his mother had gasped but Detective Lopez and his father looked at him like he was either lying or delirious. Now they talked around him like he wasn’t there. People came and went, in and out of the hospital room.

The doctor was the only one who had spoken to Noah without looking at him as though he were crazy. When he came to examine Noah he had been kind and gentle with him, and Noah wanted to tell him about the voices in his head. Did the doctor have anything he could give him? Any medication that would help. Maybe Noah should have complained. Maybe then the doctor wouldn’t have dismissed him from the hospital.