Common sense suggested he’d be gone before such extensive forensics could be performed, even if the investigation started right away. But it never hurt to be careful. He didn’t want chicken shit in the tire treads to remind the authorities that there’d been a chicken ranch operating in the area not too long ago and bring them right to his door.

Getting rid of the Explorer without drawing any attention and knowing Edna was in the cooler, where she couldn’t cause him any trouble, should have improved his mood. He’d overcome so many obstacles; he deserved a chance to enjoy his success. But it didn’t look as though he was going to catch a break quite yet. He wasn’t having any luck on the house hunting, which was cause for concern. He didn’t want to stay in Anchorage, where Emmett’s body was and Edna’s soon would be, which cut off Alaska’s biggest housing market. Anchorage was too close to Hilltop and Amarok, anyway. He preferred Juneau, the capital. At about thirty thousand residents, it was still big enough that he wouldn’t stand out. But there weren’t a lot of houses for rent in Juneau, not during the summer when Alaska experienced an influx of seasonal labor, mostly young single people arriving to work on tourist excursions.

Maybe he’d have to go to Fairbanks. Similar in population to Juneau, it was the biggest city in the interior. But it was only 196 miles south of the Arctic Circle. The northern lights, which appeared an average of two hundred nights per year, according to what he’d read online, sounded lovely, but the chinook winds, which could bring rapid temperature changes in the winter, the dense wildfire smoke in summer and the ice fog, did not sound appealing.

“The average mean temperature is ten below, for crying out loud,” he muttered as he frowned at the pictures he’d pulled up. It wasn’t as though Minneapolis, his hometown, was warm during the winter, but it was never quite that cold. Fairbanks experienced one of the biggest temperature inversions on earth.

With a sigh, he searched for homes for rent, just to see what was available, and was pleasantly surprised to find several viable options. Some were in a town called North Pole, though, which came up in the same search. Once he realized that and weeded those out, he found one house, in particular, that looked promising. It was an older three-bedroom, two-bath with a single-car garage for eighteen hundred dollars per month on Nugget Road. A condo would be cheaper, but there weren’t a lot of condos in Fairbanks and he couldn’t risk having close neighbors. That was the beauty of Alaska—the population density was so low he had more privacy than anywhere else and freedom, too.

He supposed that made up for the cold.

Whistling “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” which had been Beth’s favorite song for years, he e-mailed the contact on the listing. But almost as soon as he hit Send, the desire to whistle vanished.