Pierce shook his head. “I’m sure Anthony wasn’t.”

“I don’t believe so,” Walker answered. “But I’ll ask. Are you saying that’s where these other discs came from?”

“It’s possible. But we won’t know until we find out who these men are. And why their names are connected with three murders here.”

“I’d rather believe it was one of them than one of ours,” Walker said.

Pierce took a deep breath. “I don’t care who it is. I want it stopped. I want this murderer brought to justice.”

“Then why did you refuse to let the Hastings police step in?” Rutledge asked.

“Ah, that. I’ve had words with Inspector Norman in the past. Oh, not over anything of this nature, not murder. But my younger son, Danny, was troublesome in his day, and Inspector Norman wanted him clapped up in prison until he’d learned the errors of his ways. I refused to let Norman bully me or my son. And in the end, Danny won a medal for bravery, presented by the King himself, at Buckingham Palace. The same arrogance, as Norman called it when Danny was fourteen, saved the lives of dozens of men. Danny charged a machine gun nest single-handedly, and held the German detail at gunpoint until he could be relieved. They were taken prisoner. If he hadn’t stopped them from firing, God knows how many of our men would have been killed.”

“Where is Daniel now?” Rutledge asked.

Pierce flushed. “I don’t know. He came back from the war, spent two weeks with us here in Eastfield, and then disappeared one night. We haven’t heard from him since. I blame Inspector Norman there. Not two days after Danny came home, Norman was on my doorstep wanting to know if Danny had been part of a group of men who had robbed the owners of a small hotel and their dinner guests. He claimed that the description of one of them could have fit Danny quite easily.”

“Did your son have an alibi?”

The flush deepened. “He didn’t need one. His word was good enough.”

But once a troublemaker, always a troublemaker, in the eyes of the police.

Walker stirred uneasily, as if he’d been caught in the crossfire between Pierce and the Hastings police.

Dropping the subject of Daniel Pierce, at least for the moment, Rutledge asked who had found the bodies of the other two victims.

Walker said, “It was the housekeeper at the Roper farm. She thought Jimmy might still be sitting with Dandelion. Instead she found his body just outside the stall. And young Mr. Pierce was discovered by the foreman, coming in to work the next morning. He thought the killer might still be in the brew house, and sent his men to search, armed with whatever weapons they could lay hands to, while he stayed with the body and one of the other men came for me.”

“But there was no sign of an intruder.”

“No, sir. Whoever he was, he hadn’t broken in.”