Preacher’s house sat dark among the trees and fog as Test pulled the Explorer into the yard.
The Subaru was gone, but the old Ford pickup truck sat in the yard.
“No way to squirm out of this, not with him having that truck here,” Test said as she and Rath crossed the wet yard and took the steps to take Preacher into custody. Pieces of the broken porch still lay scattered in the muck, though the snow and ice had melted.
Test knocked on the door.
Rath sensed Preacher inside, lying in wait.
Test knocked again.
Rath stepped off the porch and knelt at a low basement window and cupped his hands to see inside.
It was too dark in the basement to see anything.
“We’re going in,” Test said.
Rath drew his sidearm as Test drew hers and took hold of the doorknob. The door was unlocked.
It opened with a creak.
Rath smelled the odor from out on the steps.
“What the hell?” he said as he and Test stepped inside, his handgun trained up the stairs, Test’s trained on the basement stairs.
The odor bloomed, potent.
The house stood silent.
The place was gloomy with shadows.
Rath hit the light switch beside him, and the chintzy fixture above him lit the stairway.
The top three stairs were darker than the rest. Nearly black.
Rath looked at Test and climbed a few steps.
Blood had spread over the lip of the stairs from the floor and run down the risers to pool on the top three treads.
Rath stepped over the blood-blackened stairs and followed the blood through the swinging doors of the kitchen, at the center of which Ned Preacher sat in a cheap folding chair, his body slumped forward onto the table.
The chair and table were caked with black blood, as were Preacher’s clothes and body. A lake of the blood had spread from beneath the chair to the stairs.
Test stepped up behind Rath.
“Let’s check that it’s clear,” she whispered.
She and Rath combed the residence, upstairs and down, finding no one.
Back upstairs, the two stepped carefully around the dried blood to stand in front of Preacher.
He’d been dead for some time.
His body had been slashed and torn and gored so many times there seemed to be no flesh untouched by the knife.
So much blood.
“I’ll radio the state police and ME,” Test said. She did not care if she were first on-site, first to investigate. She was tired of this shit.
Rath and Test backed out of the house, mindful of surfaces and the blood.
Outside, Rath watched Test walk to the Explorer. When she was out of sight behind the screen of hemlocks, Rath stepped off the porch to the trees.
The birdhouse was still there.
Rath put on a surgical, crime scene glove and lifted the birdhouse lid.
The trail camera sat inside.
Rath needed the SD card. Images of the killer had to be on the card. But there were images of him on it, too, pictures from fishing and hunting. He’d meant for whatever images the camera took here to be for his private use at the start. Now, he needed to erase the pics of himself. It could not be known that he’d put the camera up. It would complicate matters of evidence, even though he’d put the camera up as a citizen. He’d erase any images incriminating himself and send the SD card in the mail. Anonymously.
He was about to lift the camera out and snatch the SD card when the Explorer’s door slammed shut. He’d run out of time.
He closed the birdhouse lid and hurried to the porch without the SD card.
Test had a camera slung over her shoulder and held a box containing crime scene coveralls, hoods, booties, and rubber gloves. She looked at the gloves on Rath’s hands. “Raring to go, huh?”
They put on the garb and went inside.
Rath searched the kitchen as Test scoured the living room. There was no evidence of a struggle, nothing obviously out of place. Rath opened drawers, the refrigerator, cupboards, and a pantry, all of them nearly bare. He flipped through a pile of junk mail and bills on the table, checked the trash can under the sink and found nothing but a glop of pasta. Something nagged him. Something was missing; he could not think of what it was. The more he forced himself, the more it eluded him.
It would come; he needed to trust his subconscious.
He returned to the living room. Test looked up from where she was standing in the far corner of the spare room.
“Anything?” Rath said.
“How does someone stab Preacher in a chair without a struggle? It has to have been someone he knew. Trusted.”
“Clay Sheldon.”
“Sheldon visits, maybe under the pretense to share what he’s done with Dana Clark. Or maybe to do just this. Kill the one person who knows what he’s done. After we visited him at the North Star, he knew we were circling and that Preacher was a loose thread.”
“Maybe.” Rath’s mind was working. “Who else could come to Preacher’s home and lull him?”
Rath stared at Preacher’s corpse. It strained against the ropes that bound it, as if Preacher were trying to get free. This was it then. The end of him.
“I need to call Rachel as soon as I’m back in cell service,” Rath said.
“About her,” Test said, her tone grave yet conciliatory. “She called me. The first night she stayed at your house. After Preacher was watching her. She wanted copies of the police report for her parents’ murders.”
“I hope the hell you didn’t provide them.”
“She has legal rights to the files.”
“You didn’t have to be the one to give them to her. You kept that from me? If you’d made her come in and make copies, she may have balked. Who knows what seeing all that shit might—”
“Trigger.” Test looked at Preacher’s body.
“I won’t honor that with a response,” Rath said, but he felt chilled, knowing what Rachel had read and seen about her parents. He knew the anger it spawned, the compulsion to do something.
He needed to get that SD card more than ever.
“We’ll see if forensics can find anything we can’t,” Test said.
“They usually do.”