He growled and jutted his head toward the gate.

Looking angry.

Wrong guess? Something near the pond bothering him?

The growls grew louder. I looked over the fence and saw it.

One of my koi—a red and white kohaku, the largest and prettiest of the surviving babies—was lying on the moss near the water's edge.

A jumper. Damn.

Sometimes it happened. Or maybe a cat or coyote had gotten in. And that's what he'd heard . . .

But the body didn't look torn up.

I opened the gate and went in. The bulldog stepped up to the gatepost and waited as I kneeled to inspect the fish.

It had been torn. But no four-legged predator had done it.

Something was sticking out of its mouth—a twig, thin, stiff, a single shriveled red leaf still attached.

A branch from the dwarf maple I'd planted last winter.

I glanced over at the tree, saw where the bough had been cut off, the wound oxidized almost black.

Clean cut. Hours old. A knife.

I forced my eyes back to the carp.

The branch had been jammed down its gullet and forced down through its body, like a spit. It exited near the anus, through a ragged hole, ripping through beautiful skin and letting loose a rush of entrails and blood that stained the moss cream-gray and rusty brown.

I filled with anger and disgust. Other details began to leap out at me, painful as spattering grease.

A spray of scales littering the moss.

Indentations that might have been footprints.

I took a closer look at them. To my untrained eye, they remained characterless gouges.

Leaves beneath the maple, where the branch had been sheared.

The fish's dead eyes stared up at me.

The dog was growling.

I joined in and we did a duet.

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER

7

I dug a grave for the fish. The sky was Alpine clear, and the beauty of the morning was a mockery of my task.

I thought of another beautiful sky—Katarina de Bosch's slide show. Azure heavens draping her father's wheelchaired form.

Good love/bad love.

Definitely more than just a sick joke now.

Flies were divebombing the koi's torn corpse. I nudged the body into the hole and shoveled dirt over it as the bulldog watched.

“Should have taken you more seriously last night.”

He cocked his head and blinked, brown eyes gentle.

The dirt over the grave was a small umber disc that I tamped with my foot. After taking one last look, I dragged myself up to the house. Feeling like a dependent child, I called Milo. He wasn't in and I sat at my desk, baffled and angry.

Someone had trespassed on my property. Someone had watched me.

The blue brochure was on my desk, my name and photo—the perfect logic of trumped-up evidence.

Reading this, someone could believe you were esteemed colleagues.