The farmhouse door opened before anyone reached it. Tabitha Smith stood on the porch in the same long dress she'd worn at the deli, her headscarf slightly askew, her face tight with an anger that she was working hard to hold below the surface.
Behind the convoy, the rear door of a cruiser opened and Derek Hollis stepped out. They'd picked him up from the deli on the way, gave him no option but to ride along and provide access to the property. He was tall, mid-forties, with a trimmed beard. He wore dark work clothes and had his hands raised slightly, palms out. Water ran down his face. He didn't meet Tabitha's eyes. “Tabitha, I tried to call.” He raised his hands. “They gave me no choice.”
"You have no right to be here." Tabitha addressed Callie, who was climbing the porch steps.
Callie held up the warrant. "That we do."
Tabitha took the document and unfolded it, reading it in the light from the house while rain dripped off the roof overhang around her. The man beside her put a hand on her shoulder and leaned in to read along. Other figures were appearing now, coming from the smaller house, from one of the barns, drawn by the lights and the sirens. Men and women in plain, practical clothing. Some carrying lanterns. Some with children clinging to their legs. All of them watching.
"Now," Noah said, stepping up beside Callie. "You want to tell us if Fiona Spence is here?"
Tabitha looked up from the warrant. "Who?"
The same answer she'd given about Brooke Danvers at the deli. The same denial, delivered with the same calm certainty.Noah held her gaze and said nothing. He didn't need to. The warrant said everything.
Officers fanned out across the compound. Two teams to the houses. One to the outbuildings. McKenzie took a pair of deputies toward the metal-sided barn. The property was large and the rain was picking up, flashlight beams cutting through the drizzle in long white streaks that swept back and forth like searchlights.
Callie tapped Noah's arm. "Noah, look." She pointed past the farmhouse toward the red barn. The windmill rose behind it, its vanes barely visible in the dark, but the angle was right. The barn's upper level had a wide opening, a hay door, that faced the windmill. From inside that loft, the windmill would be visible exactly as it appeared in the photograph.
They made a beeline for the red barn. Behind them, Tabitha came off the porch.
"You can't just go through our property. This is a house of worship. These buildings are sacred."
A deputy stepped in front of her. "Ma'am, I need you to stay here."
"This is persecution. You are persecuting a religious community."
"Ma'am."
The bearded man moved to intervene, stepping toward the deputy with his hands raised. Two more community members approached from the smaller house, a man and a woman, both in their twenties, both with the same resistance in their faces. They weren't threatening. They didn't have to be. They were a wall of bodies and conviction, a passive obstruction that was hard to counter without creating a scene.
"Stand down." The deputy's voice cut through the noise. "All of you. Back on the porch. Now."
They didn't move. Tabitha was still talking, her voice rising, citing rights, citing religious freedom, citing the constitution. The rain was falling harder now and the red and blue lights from the cruisers turned the scene into something that pulsed and shifted, faces appearing and disappearing in the strobe.
McKenzie appeared from the side of the gray barn and read the situation in a second. He walked straight into the cluster of community members with his badge held high and his voice low enough that only the people directly in front of him could hear what he said. Whatever it was, it worked. The group parted. The bearded man stepped back. Tabitha went quiet, though her face said the conversation was far from over.
Noah and Callie reached the red barn. The main door was a sliding panel on a rusted track. Noah pulled it open and the smell hit them first: hay, animal sweat, old wood, and something else underneath it. Something stale and human.
The ground floor was a working space. Stalls along both sides, some with horses, some empty. Tack hung on the walls. Bales of hay were stacked in a row near the entrance. A single bulb on a cord hung from the center beam, casting a yellow circle that didn't reach the corners.
"Up there." Callie nodded toward a wooden ladder that led to the loft.
Noah went first. The ladder creaked under his weight and the rungs were worn smooth from years of hands and boots. He pulled himself up over the edge and into the loft and stopped.
The space was not what belonged in a loft. Hay bales were scattered around the perimeter but the center had been cleared and furnished. Two couches, their fabric stained and sagging, faced each other across a low wooden table covered in bottles. Wine, whiskey, cheaper stuff. Glasses. An ashtray. Against the far wall, a mattress lay on the floor with rumpled sheets. A standing lamp with a red shade was plugged into an extensioncord that snaked across the floor and down through a gap in the boards. And from the open hay door at the far end, the windmill was framed perfectly against the sky.
"Jackpot," Noah said, holding up the photograph. The angle matched. The loft, the window, the windmill in the background. This was the room.
Callie climbed up beside him and surveyed the space. She pulled on a pair of gloves and began photographing.
"Hey, you might want to come take a look at this," McKenzie called from below.
They came down the ladder and found him standing at the entrance to one of the horse stalls. He pointed inside. A large steel trough sat against the back wall, the kind used for watering livestock. It was full. But not with water.
The liquid inside was dark. Thick. The surface had a dull sheen under the single bulb. The smell coming off it was unmistakable, the copper tang that anyone who had ever been around a trauma scene would recognize and never forget. Blood. The trough was full of it.
Callie stared at it. McKenzie stared at it. Noah felt something cold settle in the center of his chest and stay there.
