Dispatch had received the call at 5:22 AM. A neighbor driving past Dr. Burt Halvorsen's property on Hays Brook Road outside Saranac Lake had noticed the garage light on, the front door open, and a dog sitting in the driveway that wouldn't move. He pulled in to check.
McKenzie drove. Neither of them spoke much on the way out. The roads were quiet at that hour, the mountains still dark against a sky that was just beginning to separate from the night. Frost had settled on the windshield before they left Lewis, the first time this year. The seasons were turning. The heat was thinning and the mornings carried something sharper now, a coolness that smelled like wet leaves and woodsmoke.
Callie watched the tree line pass in the headlights and thought about the Coleman case. It had been ten days since the murder. The Pike warrant already felt like old ground. The rifles had come back from ballistics two days ago. No match. None of the weapons seized from his property had fired the round that killed Maggie. Savannah hadn't pulled Pike from the board entirely, but the lead was dying. The investigation was stalling.
And now a second call.
She didn't say it out loud yet. She didn't need to. McKenzie was thinking the same thing.
They turned onto Hays Brook Road and followed it for two miles through a corridor of birch and hemlock. The first patrol car appeared around a bend, parked at an angle with its lights flashing. A second cruiser was behind it, blocking the road. A deputy waved them through.
The property sat back from the road at the end of a gravel drive. A white clapboard farmhouse, two stories, with a detached garage and a workshop behind it. Three acres of flat ground edged by forest on three sides. A pickup truck was parked near the garage with the driver's door still open. The dome light had burned out sometime in the night.
Callie got out of the Tahoe and pulled on gloves. Dew clung to the gravel and the grass was silver where the first light touched it. The property had the kind of quiet that came from isolation, no neighbors within earshot, no traffic on the road, nothing but trees and sky and the faint sound of a creek somewhere behind the workshop.
She saw the dog first.
A yellow lab, old, with a gray muzzle and cloudy eyes. He was sitting on the gravel between the garage and the door of the house, about ten feet from the body. Not barking. Just sitting with his front paws together and his head slightly lowered, watching the people who had come to stand where his owner was lying.
Callie crouched at a distance and looked at the dog for a moment. He looked back. His tail didn't move.
"He's been there since the neighbor found him," the deputy said from behind her. "Won't leave. We tried to move him. He just comes back."
She stood and turned to the body.
Dr. Halvorsen was face down on the gravel driveway between the garage and the door. He was wearing a flannel shirt, work pants, and boots. His right arm was extended toward the house. His left was tucked beneath him. A large bag of dog food had burst open beside him, kibble scattered across the gravel in a wide arc, mixed with blood that had soaked into the stones and dried to a dark crust overnight.
He had been carrying the bag from his truck to the house. He’d made it about fifteen feet.
Callie moved around the body without touching it. The entry wound was in the upper back, left of the spine, just below the shoulder blade. The round had gone through him. A small exit wound was visible on the left side of his chest where the flannel was torn and stiff with dried blood. The ground beneath his chest was saturated.
Callie had worked homicides before. Stabbings. Domestics. Bar fights that ended on the floor. Those scenes were messy. This was different. This was clinical. A man killed from a distance while carrying dog food to his door. There was no anger in it. No heat. Just a single round and a life stopped mid-step.
McKenzie came up beside her. He stood with his hands on his hips and looked at Burt and the kibble and the dog and the open truck door and said nothing for a long time.
"Where did it come from?" Callie asked.
They both turned and looked behind the property. The land rose gently from the driveway toward a wooded ridge to the northeast. The trees were thick, a mix of spruce and hardwood, and the ridge was higher than the one behind Maggie Coleman's house. The shot would have traveled downhill, through open air, across the flat ground of the property, and into Burt's back as he walked from his truck.
“I’d say that is farther than the first one," McKenzie said. "Four hundred yards. Maybe a touch more."
“Straight through a moving target this time. Not a woman sitting at a desk."
"Aye. This one's harder." He turned a cigarette between his teeth. "And he still only needed one round."
They walked the property. The gravel was hard-packed from years of truck traffic and held no useful prints. The grass at the edge of the drive showed no disturbance. The path to the ridge was a gentle slope covered in pine needles and deadfall, the kind of terrain that absorbed footsteps and left nothing behind.
McKenzie took two deputies and hiked up to the ridge while Callie worked the scene below. She photographed the body from every angle. The dog food bag. The spill pattern. The dried blood in the gravel. The truck with its open door and the remaining groceries on the passenger seat, a bag from the hardware store, a case of bottled water, a receipt timestamped 4:47 PM the previous day. Burt had gone shopping yesterday afternoon and never finished unloading.
She photographed the door of the house, which was unlocked. Inside, the kitchen was clean. A single plate and fork in the drying rack. A calendar on the wall with a dentist appointment circled for next Tuesday. In the living room, a recliner facing a television, a stack of woodworking magazines on the end table, and a half-finished chess game against himself on a board by the window. He had lived alone and organized his solitude into something like contentment. His wallet was on the kitchen counter beside his keys. Nothing appeared to have been taken. Nothing had been disturbed. Whoever did this hadn't come inside.
She went back outside. The forensics team had arrived and was setting up around the body. One tech was placing trajectory markers while another prepared to extract the round from the ground beneath the exit wound.
McKenzie came back down from the ridge twenty minutes later. His face confirmed what Callie already knew.
"Rock shelf," he said. "About two-thirds up. Flat ground, good sightline, tree cover behind. Same setup as Maggie's property."
"Shell casing?"
