The house itself was not a normal shape. It was like a square in the process of melting, with soft corners and walls that curved outward near the ground. It had a rough surface, like stucco, but Leah had a nasty suspicion. There were two piles of unused rebar in back of the house, and two pretty large cement mixers. The walls might be concrete. She saw two rings of stone about three feet high on both sides of the house, and guessed they could be firing positions.

She had found nothing that looked like an outhouse or a porta-potty in her aerial search. But in an infrared image of the front yard of the house she could see a faint area of lighter yellow running along the ground, which could be the sewer line to a septic tank. The water was cool coming into the house from the tank above the back of the house, warmer leaving the house from the front, and then formed a rectangle of warmer ground a few yards away. There were chemical processes that might be the reason for the warmth above what she thought was the septic tank.

She could see two white tanks in the area near the side of the house. They looked like forty-pound propane tanks for use with barbecue stoves. Maybe that was how they cooked, and maybe even heated the house in cold weather.

A steel tank that held about three thousand gallons was on a rise in back of the house. Running from it was a white PVC pipe with a turn in it leading into the ground in front of it. She couldn’t see any power lines running up from the highway to the house, or strung from anywhere. There was also no sign of the kind of service mast that was usually on the front corner of the roof of a house with commercial power. There was a metal shed about thirty feet from the house that might hold a gasoline generator.

She thought about the implications. There didn’t seem to be a way to provide power to an alarm system or a set of floodlights, unless they were on a battery system that was charged by running the generator regularly. The infrared camera had picked up no heat at the metal shed.