But that didn’t matter. He had to get Emmett’s body into the henhouse. Just because someone hadn’t discovered it yet didn’t mean they wouldn’t. Once rigor disappeared, the amount of decomposition would make for a much nastier, messier job, anyway.

He looked around the ranch until he found a pallet and a hand truck that had probably been used to move cases of eggs. After fitting the pallet onto the end of the hand truck to create a wide base, he rolled Emmett’s body onto it.

It took more effort than he’d thought it would. A dead man was so heavy. Lyman had to stop time and again to rest, at which point more blood and other bodily fluids would leak out of the body.

Apparently, it’d been warm enough to speed decomposition. But he finally managed to move the corpse around back.

When he heard the dogs barking as he approached that particular henhouse, he changed his mind about putting Emmett in there. While he liked the idea of the dogs eating the corpse so he wouldn’t have to worry about someone discovering it, he’d been bitten before, as a child, and he was afraid he’d get bitten again if he threw open those doors and went in with a bloody body.

So he put Emmett in another henhouse and covered him with manure. Only once he could move cautiously and wasn’t weighed down with a hand truck and 240 pounds of deadweight did he approach the dogs. He fed them from the sack of food Emmett had left sitting outside and, while they were busy gulping down their dinner, filled their water bowls before making sure they couldn’t get out and hobbled back to the plant.

He was dying to rest, but he had yet to clean up the blood on the sidewalk outside the store. He also had to decide what to do about the van. He couldn’t afford to keep the car he’d rented, but it was dangerous to drive a stolen vehicle. He could easily attract the kind of interest he most needed to avoid.

Still, he decided he’d keep it, for now. He wouldn’t take it out of its vine-covered hiding place unless he absolutely had to, and he’d trade the license plates with those of another vehicle—one of equal age so the number sequence wouldn’t be a red flag to law enforcement—while he had the rental car and could easily move from place to place without fear of being pulled over. Maybe he’d paint the van, too. It wasn’t as if he had to do a good job. Someone had already blacked out the name of the company. He just had to make sure the rest of the carpet-cleaning logo wasn’t visible, and he could do that with a can of black spray paint.

Heck, why not spray the whole thing? No one would think twice about such a poor paint job, not on a clunker like that.

The van issue settled in his mind, he summoned a little more energy to clean the blood from the entryway of the store so that the owner of the property, if she happened to stop by, wouldn’t see anything suspicious. Once that mess was gone and he’d settled in, he’d call the owner and tell her that Emmett Virtanen had quit and he was taking over with the temporary dog shelter. Then he should be safe—for a while. As much as he wished he could stay indefinitely, he’d have to find somewhere else eventually. He needed to move to a place that wasn’t up for sale.