She hoped they stayed there for a while. “I’m going onto the front porch. Call if the kitchen light goes off or you see him leave the room.”

“Careful.”

“Right,” she said, readjusting her grip on her gun. She closed the phone and dropped it into her pocket. Leaving the lions, she tiptoed up the front steps and put her hand on the porch door. It was unlocked. She went inside, closing the door carefully. She eyed the statues crowding the floor space. The collection of stone figures reminded her of a New Orleans cemetery, with its aboveground tombs. “Cities of the Dead,” the graveyards were called. The VonHaders had a Porch of the Dead. She paid no mind to the camera, confident the thing was as dead as during her previous visit.

She went over to the windows and peeked inside. There was a fire going in the fireplace. A man in a robe was bending down in front of the blaze; Bernadette couldn’t make out his face. She went back to the door and tried to peer inside through the small window but couldn’t see a thing. She put her gun in her jacket and raised her fist to knock. The porch light flicked on; the security camera had been working after all.

Bernadette felt her phone vibrate again. She quickly took it out, flipped it open, shut it off, and dropped it back in her pocket. Hands folded demurely in front of her, she stood before the door waiting for someone to appear. Behind her, the screen door creaked open. She spun around and saw Garcia. His eyes went to the porch light above her head, then to the security camera mounted on the wall. Taking his cue from her, he pocketed his gun and stood next to her, facing the door.

They heard a deadbolt crack and then the door opened.

Standing shoulder to shoulder were the two brothers, the younger one dressed in a bathrobe. His hair was damp, and he had a glass of whiskey in his hand. His eyes were bloodshot. “We need to talk,” she said to the pair.

“This was a long time coming,” said the older man. He stepped back and opened the door wider for the two agents.

Garcia extended his hand to the doctor, who was dressed in khakis and a sweater but had slippers on his feet. “Assistant Special Agent in Charge Anthony Garcia.”

Luke VonHader gave Garcia a firm handshake and turned around. “Let’s take this into the kitchen.”

While Garcia and the brothers went ahead, Bernadette stalled to scrutinize the foyer and the base of the stairs. The wooden floors were spotless, with no signs of blood. She eyed the staircase leading to the second floor. It was long, wide, and ornate, with carved spindles and a glossy banister. It was similar to what she’d observed with her sight, but the doctor’s staircase seemed to have no landing. She needed to be sure. “May I use the restroom?” she asked as she trailed behind the three men.

Matthew set his glass on a foyer table. “Go on ahead, gentlemen. I’ll show the lady to the facilities.”

Garcia and Luke disappeared into the back of the house. Being separated from her boss gave Bernadette a twinge of discomfort. The doctor was taller than both his drunken sibling and Garcia, and he was stone sober. She reassured herself that Garcia was more muscular than either man and carried a big gun.

Matthew headed for the stairs. “This way, Agent Scully.”

She gave one last glance to the lighted room in back of the house and followed the tipsy smartass up the steps. “If you point me in the right direction, I’m sure I can find it all by my lonesome,” she said to his back.

Without turning around, he responded, “That would leave you free to snoop around, wouldn’t it?”

“Exactly,” she said as she scouted the steps for blood.

He hiccupped a laugh. “At least you’re being honest this time.”

She took notice of the artwork lining the staircase wall. The signature on the rendition of a dusty cowboy ranch looked familiar. “Is that an authentic Remington?”

“Frederic Remington, James Edward Buttersworth, George Henry Durrie,” he said, waving his arm. He could have been ticking off the cereal selection in his kitchen cupboard.

Though Bernadette had snoozed through most of college art history, she recognized those names as important American painters. “Your brother is quite a collector.”

“My parents were the collectors,” he said as they reached the second-floor hallway. “My brother and I are stuck being the curators.”

She remembered that Luke had had a similar complaint. “Most people would kill to inherit such treasures,” she said.

“In a sense, we did,” he said ominously.

Her eyes widened. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

More art hung from the hallway walls, and he ignored her question to point out the pieces. “Here we have a hand-signed print by Marc Chagall. That’s hand-colored lithography by Currier and Ives. Those are all numbered and signed artist proofs by Norman Rockwell. A little too Main Street for my palate, but Mother and Father liked that sort of thing. They were all about the wholesome American family.”

His voice carried a bitterness that alarmed her. “Matt, maybe we could talk. Just the two of us.”

He stopped in front of a door in the middle of the hall and pushed it open. “I’ll leave you to whatever it is you want to do up here. Wash your hands. Powder your nose. Dust for prints. I’ll be downstairs with the menfolk.”

She watched him head down the hall, his shoulders sagging, his gait unsteady. She found him more pathetic than menacing.

Scanning the second floor, she saw it wasn’t anything like what she’d observed through her sight. The entire upstairs was ringed by railing, allowing all the rooms to look down onto the first floor. The corridor traveled by the killer had solid walls on both sides.

She walked into the hallway bathroom. She knew it wouldn’t be the one she’d observed. For starters, the bathroom from which the young woman had fled had emptied into a bedroom, not a hall. Instead of a claw-foot tub, the doctor had a modern Jacuzzi. Instead of white walls, Luke VonHader had ornate wallpaper hung with framed art. She scanned the bottom of the tub, but found nothing more suspicious than a collection of children’s toys: headless Barbie dolls, beach buckets, sand shovels, rubber ducks. The surface of the tub looked bone dry. She went over to a stall with a glass door—the only feature even remotely similar to what she’d conjured through her sight—and popped it open. The floor was wet. Not a surprise. The robed Matthew had probably just used the shower. Was there a chance he’d been washing off blood? She studied the tiles on the floor and the grout between them and found no stains.

Bernadette opened the medicine cabinet and surveyed the contents. Tylenol and sinus tablets and bars of soap and shaving cream and a disposable razor. A few of the wife’s cosmetics and perfumes. She took down the sole prescription bottle: amoxicillin, for the girls’ ear infections. She put the bottle back and closed the cabinet, another fixture that wasn’t in the killer’s bathroom. He’d had only an oval mirror over the sink. Encased in dry cleaner’s plastic, a set of the doctor’s shirts hung from the back of the bathroom door. This was a messy family bathroom, not a murder site.

She quickly made the circuit around the second floor, poking her head inside one bedroom after another. None of them matched the sparsely furnished one Bernadette had seen during her first round with the scarf. The sleeping quarters were filled with dressers and nightstands and blanket chests. Armoires and tallboys and lowboys and vanities. Perched atop the tables and chests and dressers were vases and statues and linens and quilts.

The only things distinguishing the little girls’ room from the other antique parlors were the mermaid spreads on the matching twin beds. Shuddering, she tried to imagine a childhood spent suffocating in this sea of old stuff. It all felt like a heavy weight pressing down on her, and she was only a visitor. She was starting to understand the brothers’ resentment toward their parents.