I had visions of my dog imprisoned in Jeremy’s version of the pit where Crayline had kept the hapless Jessie Stone.

I crouched low and ran to his yard, stepping from dense forest into manicured grass and neat beds of bright flowers. The doors and windows were locked tight, the door locks too complex for my simple abilities at picking. I stepped back and scanned his second floor. A back window to his office appeared lifted a few inches. I went to his tool shed and retrieved a twelve-foot ladder most likely used to clean leaves from his gutters, angled it against the roof. I listened for sounds and heard only the breeze in the leaves and the far call of a whip-poor-will.

Within a minute I was inside his office. I ran downstairs, opening doors, looking for a basement or even a large root cellar. Nothing. It hit me that the land here was a foot of topsoil over sandstone or limestone, not conducive to excavation. A fool’s errand, I realized; desperation and fear. I scrambled upstairs to escape.

The computers hummed as the screensaver etched its endless line across the screen. A question came to mind: Jeremy had alluded to making his money playing the market, but had also said he’d only learned about making money after his arrival here. My brother lied so often even he forgot when his falsehoods crossed paths.

I pulled close the chair and played my fingers over the keys. I had a few stocks of my own, a portfolio worth about enough to buy an entry-level car, but it provided a sense of control over my money. And it had given me an insight into reviewing charts and graphs and other financial records.

I discovered Jeremy’s online trading accounts were password-protected, and my brother would never have used the birthdays and names common to most mnemonic passwords. He would simply have assigned each account a meaningless term and remembered it, his mind thriving on minutiae.

I studied the desktops in turn until seeing a file named TXREC. I opened it and found tax records: gains and losses and estimated quarterly taxes he needed to file. I stared for several seconds at the amounts of the gains. My brother was indeed a canny reader of the market.

I continued my fast scan until hearing an engine sound. I scrambled to the front window.

Jeremy!

His vehicle was canting down the road and approaching quickly, downshifting to turn the bend at his drive. I exited his file, pushed the chair into place. Heard the crunch of gravel beneath his wheels stop as he pulled to the gate. By the time my feet were feeling their way to the ladder rungs, I heard the clatter of the gate chain as he undid the lock.

When my feet hit the ground, I heard him pull through the gate. Then stop to relock it. I started to slide the ladder closed, forgot the spring-driven stop mechanism. It slapped over a rung like bell. I winced, dropped the ladder to the ground and began feeding it into itself with one hand while the other held the mechanism from the rungs.

Jeremy pulled to the porch, less than forty feet away, on the other side of the house. His door was opening as I grunted the ladder to the shed. Ducking inside, I replaced the ladder on its wall mount, the sweat of fear pouring into my eyes.

His back door opened. I edged to the wall and found a slender crack between boards. My brother stepped outside and studied a thermometer mounted on a porch post. He nodded as if pleased by what the day was doing for him and went back inside. I slipped from the door, backed carefully away with the shed as my shield. In seconds I was back in the covering safety of the woods.

My scan of my brother’s records confirmed what I’d suspected - none of the stock records pre-dated his arrival. He may have fostered his particular insights into the market before arriving, but had only profited once here.

Which sparked a curious question: Where had my brother gotten the money to buy his property?

45

McCoy was at my door the next morning at seven thirty, the normally composed master of the woods looking pale and distraught.

“What is it?” I asked, hobbling out to the porch while pulling on the second shoe.

He produced a small black laptop and tapped the keys. “The geocache website. I checked it out of habit a half-hour back.”

He spun the screen to me. I leaned close and saw map coordinates, above them the dreaded symbol.

=(8)=

My heart sank. Crayline was dead. This couldn’t be happening.

“Where is it?” I asked.

“Over by Star Gap. Donna’s heading there now. She wanted me to show you this, then meet her there.”

“It has to be some kind of joke,” I said, stumbling into the vehicle, wondering if I was having a full-blown nightmare.

We returned to the Forest Service SUV and McCoy pulled up and out of the hollow. We were closing on the site fifteen minutes later, Cherry waiting and pacing, her face tight with tension. We followed McCoy, walking left, then right, guided by the arrow on the GPS screen. He angled around a house-sized boulder, arriving at a muddy clearing in the forest floor, the mud lightened by dissolving shale, gray, rarer in the area than the dark soil or sand that generally prevailed.

I heard McCoy gasp. Cherry ran up. Her lips moved but no sound came out. Caudill arrived and stopped dead in his tracks. He turned away and began hyperventilating.

I stepped into the clearing. Beale’s naked body was on the ground. It took my mind several reality-bending moments to fathom the scene. What had been done to Beale was almost indescribable, requiring a sharp knife and hideous surgery.

“Is it him?” Cherry asked, only able to look at the body in glances. “We can’t see his face without, uh …”

“Those are his tattoos,” Caudill whispered. “It’s the sheriff.”

Cherry called the state forensics and medical people and asked for their most experienced team to unravel the nightmare of Sheriff Roy Beale.

“Why Sheriff Beale?” Caudill asked, shaken to his bootstraps. “What did he do?”

“An authority figure, maybe,” I ventured. “Or a threat.”

“There was nothing to Beale, threat-wise,” McCoy said. “If the killer had only Beale to deal with, he could kill half the folks in the county before Beale Junior even noticed.”

“Beale Junior?” I said.

“I thought you knew his daddy was sheriff, Carson,” McCoy said.

“I do, I just never had to make connections to it before, see it on the timeline.” I turned to Cherry. “Could old Sheriff Beale have known anything about the camp?”

Cherry said, “I heard a few bad tales about Beale’s daddy, but every county sheriff makes enemies who—”

“I knew old Beale,” McCoy interrupted. “If there was anything illegal going on, I expect he got paid for not noticing.”

“He was that bad?” Cherry asked. “You never told me that.”

“Old Beale was dead and gone. No sense spitting on his memory.”

Something stirred in my mind. “Mooney Coggins recalled Powers talking about ‘being put under a star’,” I ventured. “Could that have meant a protective alliance with old Beale … the sheriff paid to overlook the camp?”

McCoy did the money-whisk. “If there was enough of this in the picture, I expect Beale senior would have pretended that part of the county didn’t exist.”

I re-thought the situation with the new input. I walked from behind the boulder and studied the savaged corpse for a few seconds.

“What’s another term for not seeing what’s in front of you?” I asked.

Cherry shot a glance at the wreckage of Roy Beale. Her eyes closed and her shoulders slumped.

“Having one’s head up one’s….” She couldn’t finish.

“I rest my case,” I said.

46

If Krenkler and her crew had been in mop-it-up-and-hop-it-up to DC mode, they pivoted on that dime. We were summoned to the cabin by the park, told to the minute when we should arrive, which had Cherry mumbling under her breath as she took her seat at the conference table, awaiting an appearance by the woman she’d taken to calling The Peroxide Queen. Krenkler stood outside the cabin talking into two cellphones at once, her lacquered hair the only item not in frenzied motion. Three agents swirled around her bringing notes, coffee, chewing gum.