Page 8 of Go Alone

Millbrook was an unincorporated community clustered around the intersection of two single-lane roads about two miles southwest of the county seat of Wooster. On the south end of the north-south road there was an auto repair garage. On the east end of the east-west road sat an old mill, closed, and a single farm. The rest of the buildings were single family homes planted haphazardly sometime during the seventies and left undisturbed while the world grew elsewhere.

Odum lived on Grand Street, a small L-shaped road that formed the bottom half of a rectangle with the main streets forming the top half. The rectangle was the closest thing to a subdivision the community had, and as Marcus had intimated, every house was visible from another house on all sides. That wasn’t a guarantee that anyone had seen the killer at the time of the murder, but it was likely someone had seen something suspicious.

If there was anything suspicious to be seen. Murders in small places like this were usually committed by people familiar with their victims. No one would bat an eye if a neighbor came to check on another neighbor, and unless it was known that bad blood existed between them, it would cross no one’s mind to suspect that.

“Go talk to the neighbors,” Kate told Marcus. “See if you’re right and someone noticed something. I’ll check out the scene.”

“Will do.”

Marcus pulled the car to a stop behind an aging Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor and jumped out. He gave the driver of that interceptor a wave, then motioned to the house across the way from Odum’s.

Kate approached the sheriff’s deputy with a wry smile. The deputy, a sturdy woman on the shorter end of medium height with curly russet hair and soft blue eyes that wore a sardonic, weathered expression Kate had seen on the faces of many experienced law enforcement officers.

“My smell carry that far?” the deputy asked.

“Sorry,” Kate said. “I asked him to talk to the neighbors. He could have said hello first.”

“New York boy?”

Kate lifted an eyebrow. “Yeah. How could you tell?”

“That counts as saying hello to a New York boy,” the deputy opined. She sounded amused rather than offended. “Probably thought he was being extra sweet.” She stuck her hand out. “Detective Anita Purcell.”

Kate took the hand. “Special Agent Kate Valentine. It’s nice to meet you.”

Anita shrugged. “I hope you don’t think me too rude if I say I’d rather not have met you. We see the odd murder from time to time in Wayne County, but we sort of hoped this Lawgiver thing would stay in the big city.”

“I don’t blame you,” Kate agreed.

She lifted her eyes to the one-and-a-half-story ranch in front of her. The house had seen a fresh coat of whitewash recently, but the shingles on the roof were faded gray and starting to curl at the edges. “This is Odum’s?”

"Yep," Anita confirmed. She gestured to a larger one-and-a-half-story to the right of Odum's. "That's Greer's. Checked the place out. Couldn't find anything out of place. No prints either, 'cept for Howard's and Odum's, but Odum's are at least a week old."

“That fits. He’s out of town.”

“Yep,” Anita replied with a nod. She gestured with her head toward Odum’s house. “Probably good that your partner’s talking to Trout. I was just about to talk to him myself. He was in town when I showed up. That’s Wooster to folks from Wayne County.” She started toward the house. “I’ll show you the place. Not much to see, but I guess what there is oughta give you a good start.”

Anita walked with the deceptively fast, long-legged stride of a lifetime Midwesterner, and though Kate had about three inches on her, she had to trot to keep up. She spied a set of boot prints in the snow to her left and looked questioningly at Anita.

“Trout Jensen,” she explained. “Neighbor your boy’s talking to right now.”

Kate turned to see Marcus on the front porch of a long and wide single-story across the street. A heavyset gentleman in a wifebeater and a wide-brimmed cowboy hat leaned one arm on the doorjamb as he talked to Marcus, revealing a tuft of armpit hair the same color as the muddy snow.

“He heard Patrice Mullen screaming and came over to see what got her upset,” Anita explained. “He sure found it, all right.”

They stepped through the door, and Kate was immediately struck by the smell. Potting soil had an odd, artificial taint to its odor, as floor cleaner spilled into clay. The body was gone, but the odor lingered, hanging in the air like dust in a cellar long closed to the outside world.

The furniture in the home was like the outside. Clean and appearing fresh but with wear at the seams and corners that betrayed its age. Thin black lines outlined the couch cushions, and the wood on the top of the kitchen table and the seats of the four chairs around it sported wide circles of fade in their medium-brown stain.

“Nothing stolen,” Anita informed her. “Nothing damaged either. Except for the casserole dish, but Patrice Mullen brought that back to return to Leonard and dropped it when she saw the body. Blood’s hers too.”

Kate looked at the elliptical spray of glass spreading from a spot just behind the right side of the table. Sure enough, a small pool of blood stood in the center of that spray, and a trail of droplets ran from the pool underneath Kate’s feet and out the door.

She turned around and got her first good look at the cipher. She was mildly surprised to see the English alphabet, though scrambled and arranged without spacing or punctuation. As with many of the previous ciphers, one line of clear text appeared at the very top, outlining the commandment being enforced.

THOU SHALT NOT COVET THY NEIGHBOR’S HOUSE.

“The report you provided my field office stated that Odum and Greer got along well,” Kate said.