I’ll fry up some eggs for us. If you want anything to drink besides water or malt liquor, you’ll have to bring it yourself.

She turned and made her way back out to the front porch. Some instinct told her that wherever Jesse was, he wasn’t in the house. What was this—a drug shakedown? Maybe he owed someone money, and they’d come for it. It looked like there had been a furious tussle, followed by a violent and thorough search. Maybe he’d escaped out the back and taken off into the gathering dark—or, God forbid, been kidnapped.

She thought of the truck that had passed her on the road.

Stepping down off the porch, she let her light range over the property. The henhouse looked untouched, but even from this distance, she could see that the padlock had been cut from the toolshed door.

Now she pulled her gun from its holster. Except for the beam of her light, and her own footfalls on the dusty ground, silence and darkness were absolute. Corrie got a good fix on the location of the shed, then turned off her light and stood motionless, allowing her night vision to return. Once she could see its outline, she began creeping forward again—slowly, slowly—until she reached the broken lock.

Her heart was beating like a hammer. Still silence. She readied herself, and then—moving fast—kicked open the door, dropped to a defensive stance, and covered the room with her Glock, bringing up the flashlight to support her right hand with the “ice pick” Harries grip she’d been trained to use.

“FBI, nobody move!” she barked.

There was nothing but the echo of her voice and the faint squeaking of the door.

Slowly, Corrie straightened up. As she did so, her elbow brushed against a light switch—the old-fashioned kind you toggled on and off by pushing. If she hadn’t provoked a reaction yet, she wasn’t likely to now.

Lowering the flashlight but keeping the gun ready, she pushed the button.

A naked bulb in the ceiling came on. It revealed a space full of the same furious carnage as the main cabin. Jesse Gower sat in a chair near the back wall. He was hog-tied, ankles and wrists bound together behind the frame of the seat. His head was flung back at an unnatural angle, but nevertheless she could see his face was a mask of blood. His shirt and ragged shorts were sodden with blood; more spatter encircled the ground in front of the chair, along with a couple of teeth. It was obvious he had endured a methodical, savage beating.

“Jesse?” she called out quietly. Then she approached the chair.

But she already knew what she’d find. Gower’s eyes were open and filmy, and he wasn’t breathing. She touched his neck and found no pulse, the flesh cool.

She stepped back, feeling slightly sick, and glanced around the shed. Half of it had been lined with rude wooden shelving. The other part held piles of old tools, auto parts, rusting tin cans, highway signs, and other detritus, apparently once covered by oily tarps. This was merely a mental reconstruction, however, because the interior of the shed was now such a storm of debris that it was impossible to be sure of anything. Except for the obvious: this was the result of a fierce search.

And one other thing: given the level of destruction, if they hadn’t found whatever they were searching for, then she wouldn’t, either.

42

AN HOUR LATER, at ten o’clock, the Gower Ranch had become a crowded and bustling crime scene. Portable floodlights bathed the house and toolshed in pitiless illumination, and Evidence Response Team workers in uniforms and gowns went to and fro with cameras, evidence bags, and forensic equipment of various sorts.

Corrie Swanson stood back from the fray, leaning against the side of the ERT van. To one side of her was Morwood, and to the other was Sheriff Watts, who had arrived a few minutes earlier while Morwood had been questioning Corrie about what she had seen.

Watts took off his hat, brushed a speck of invisible dust from it, and fitted it back on. “And what, exactly, was he going to show you?”

“He called it his great-grandfather’s ‘other precious possession.’ He said nobody else knew why he treasured it so much, but over time it became a kind of family heirloom.”

“Was he bullshitting you?”

“Didn’t sound like it to me.”

“Okay.” Morwood called over the medical examiner, his gowned figure glowing unearthly in the bright light. “What have you got?” he asked.

The man nodded. “Prelim. The victim probably died of a traumatic cervical fracture, caused by radical hyperextension.”

“A broken neck?” Morwood said. “He seems to have been worked over pretty goddamned well.”

“We’ll know more after the postmortem,” the medical technician said. “It’s possible another injury might have been the fatal one, but I would put my money on the cervical fracture as the proximate cause of death.”

“Very well. Thank you.”

Morwood turned to Corrie. “I want to commend you, Agent Swanson,” he said. “You handled an unexpected and difficult crime scene with care and precision.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Tomorrow, I’d like a full report on this matter. I’m particularly interested in the conversations you had with Jesse Gower and what brought you back out here this evening.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I wonder if the killers were looking for the same thing,” Watts said, “and they tried to beat its location out of him.”