Conspiracy

132

By the time Lia made the connections with the courier at the county airport and shipped Chief Ball’s hair off, it was already after six. Lia tracked down the properties the chief’s wife had mentioned, and though it was dark she checked them as best she could, driving as much as she could through them and then walking around with her flashlight and even checking on an old building at the Burdick farm. Lia kept calling Amanda’s name, though she had long ago concluded she wasn’t going to find her alive.

Lia had no evidence, but she did have a theory: Amanda Rauci had found something in Forester’s car, maybe one of his notebooks or something else the state police had missed.

That led her to investigate the chief and then confront him.

He’d killed her and then run away.

Or maybe not. Cold and tired, Lia went back to the hotel, had a quick meal, and fell asleep facedown on her bed without bothering to change. When she woke, it was two hours or so before dawn. Lia got up and went straight to the Castro property, not even stopping for coffee.

The place looked even more forbidding during the day.

Dominated by an old gravel mine, it consisted of roughly a thousand acres. Large clumps of rocks and deep gouges in the earth made the landscape look like the back side of the moon. A stream ran through the middle of the property, bisecting a spider’s web of dirt trails before disappearing in the woods.

Lia drove her rental car to the edge of the widest trail, looking for signs that someone else had been through recently. She got out and walked up the narrower paths. But she saw nothing suspicious.

The old Burdick farm was several times the size of the Castro property, with even more places to dispose of a body.

Besides the standing farm house that she had checked the night before, six or seven other buildings stood at the far end of the property, obscured by rows of bushes and young trees.

They were all in various stages of disrepair, moldy, their thin walls bereft of siding and pockmarked with bullet holes.

Lia checked them all, without finding a body. It was a long, hot day, and even though she’d spent it entirely outdoors, Lia didn’t feel particularly close to nature when she gave up looking for Amanda late in the afternoon.