I looked up. The woman was at the corner of the porch and thumbing her cellphone. She studied the screen and rolled her eyes. I took it there was no signal to be found.

In the light the woman was in her early thirties, an inch or two above medium height, slender. She wore a blocky black pantsuit that looked straight from the rack at Wal-Mart, black cross-trainers, with a gold badge slung around her neck on what appeared to be a length of clothesline. Her hair was an unruly shag à la early Rod Stewart, red, probably the real thing given her creamy complexion and dusting of freckles.

She looked my way. Stared, like making a decision. She walked over, her eyes a mixture of curiosity and contempt, her voice pure country.

“We caught you standing over the body, fella. Anything you wanna talk about?”

She was hoping for an on-scene confession. Instead, I nodded toward the book in the passenger seat. “Interesting-looking book up there, Detective. Serial Killers by Their Captors. Is it yours?”

She glanced at the stack of books, then back to me, figuring I was working some kind of angle. Or playing with her. I noted her sea-green eyes looked in slightly different directions, a mild strabismus. Though the declination was subtle, it was unsettling, like one eye was looking at me, the other at something on my shoulder.

“The book’s mine,” she said. “Why? You figuring to add to it?”

“Did you read the case history of Marsden Hexcamp and his followers? The cult from coastal Alabama?”

She stared at me for a five-count. “I read that chapter.”

“I wrote it,” I said, leaning forward to jiggle my cuffs. “Can a brother get a little love here?”

8

We were in a bilious yellow meeting room in the Woslee County Police Department. It smelled of boiled coffee, tobacco smoke, and drugstore aftershave. Donna Cherry, head of Eastern Kentucky Combined Law Enforcement, Region 5, sighed and dropped the phone into the cradle after checking my background with the Mobile police. She leaned cross-armed against the wall and stared at me with the offset eyes. The call hadn’t made them any friendlier.

“Let’s start again, Ryder.”

“Come on, I’m not really a suspect, am I?” I argued. “You just verified that I—”

“I verified you’re a cop. What I didn’t verify was how you happened to be on the scene of a murder before the locals arrived.”

“You called me, dammit. My cellphone rang and you gave me coordinates. Asked for help.”

“That’s a bald-faced lie, Ryder. I never called you.”

“You have a distinctive voice,” I said, mentally adding nails on a blackboard.

She glared at me, angry I wasn’t breaking down and confessing to God-knows-what, then stood with the eyes still hammering hard. I felt the silent pounding as she paced behind my back. She sat across the table, her question bag re-filled.

“You said the call confused you, Ryder. If so, why didn’t you call back to ask for more information?”

I was getting irritated. I’d received a cryptic call for help, ran to offer assistance, was being grilled for the effort.

“You blocked your number. But you know all this, don’t you, Detective Cherry? You’re gaming me for some reason.”

“I AM NOT GA—” She caught herself and took a couple seconds to compose, tapping clear-polished nails on the desk. I saw anger in one eye, bewilderment in the other, averaged it out into exasperation. “How could I call you without knowing your number, wise guy?” she asked.

“I’ve told several locals I’m a Mobile detective, gave them my cell number. The people at Compass Point Outfitters. A lady at the service station in Pine Ridge. Dottie Fugate at the cabin-rental company.”

“So what?”

“I know how the country grapevine works. One of them called you, said ‘Guess what, there’s a homicide dick vacationing in the area.’”

She gave me incredulous. “You’re saying when faced with a homicide my first thought was to call the big-city detective?”

I gave her my most sardonic smile. “You called me, lady. I didn’t call you.”

She put her elbows on the table and leaned forward. “If I called you, why didn’t anyone expect you on the scene, Einstein? You figure that one out?”

Actually that one bothered me a bit. But I was working on theories. “The cell connection was lousy. You didn’t realize your message got through. When you found me with the body, my face under a bandana, you figured me for the perp.”

“And not the hotshot hard-on from Mobile.”

“Your words, not mine,” I said. “But let’s get back to my question: Why are you gaming me?”

“I am not running a game here, Ryder,” she said slowly, as though explaining something to a child. “I did not call you anonymously because you’re a big-time detective who writes books and all. What I am trying to do is reconcile your story with your actions.”

Cherry seemed truly convinced she hadn’t called me. I wondered if the woman had two personalities, each with its own line of sight. I decided to bag my confrontational attitude and appeal to her rational side, if there was one. I pulled out my cellphone, thumbed to Call History.

“Let’s try a timeline,” I said, holding my phone screen so Cherry could see the info. “There’s my call, at 6.57 a.m. It says Caller Unknown. My only call today, the call from, uh, the woman with the distinctive accent. When did you get the message about the body, Detective Cherry?”

She scrabbled through the papers in front of her, plucked up a sheet. I saw her eyes juggling information. “We received information at six forty.”

My rational side lost out to my hand slamming the table. “But you people didn’t arrive until almost seven thirty!” I barked. “Ten minutes after I did, even though you were notified before my call. Did you stop for breakfast along the way?”

Her jaw clenched and she looked away. “Our notification wasn’t by, uh, traditional means. It took some time to, uh, deal with.”

“The message came by carrier pigeon?” I asked.

“Not your business.”

“The hell it isn’t. Someone called me with your voice and sent me to a crime scene and now I’m halfway to being accused of the murder.”

“No one’s accusing you of anything, Ryder,” she said, adding: “Not yet.”

“Then I can escape the Donna Cherry Memorial Madhouse, right?”

The eyes blazed, the jaw clenched. She stood stiffly and nodded toward the door.

“You’re free to go.”

I stood, started to walk away, paused in the doorframe. I turned round and lit my eyes with false bonhomie.

“The next time you know I’m in the neighborhood and want a consultation with the hotshot hard-on from Mobile, Detective Cherry, just call and use your real name. It won’t be hard …” I made the thumb-pinkie phone sign, wiggling it beside my cheek. “You’ve got the number, right?”

I winked and walked out the door.

The next morning I awoke to birdsong and the cackling of crows, the sound so full and rich it pushed aside the weirdness of the preceding day’s events. The air through my open window smelled of pine and rising dew. The clock showed 6.23. Mix-up scampered out for the performance of his morning duties.

After showering and dressing and gulping down my coffee, I met Gary for a two-hour lesson on the cliffs. I returned feeling pumped and happy at half past ten, noting a man sitting in one of the rockers on the porch, patting my dog’s head.

It was the ranger who had been with Sheriff Beale the day before I’d been summoned to the murder scene. He smiled and stood as I pulled up. I stepped to the porch and shook hands with Lee McCoy, senior ranger for the Red River Gorge area of the Daniel Boone Forest.

“I heard about what happened yesterday,” McCoy said, producing a zip-locked bag with a two-inch stack of pink ovals inside. “I figured it’d be good to give you a more proper mountain welcome.”