Immediately afterward there were footsteps again, thumping across the ground toward the barn.

All at once the big door slid back open. Sam started to raise his binoculars, along with Dani, but then she gasped and dropped them back to her lap.

Sam saw the reason.

“Oh Christ…” he whispered.

The two men slipped into the barn, but by then neither Sam nor Dani were looking at them.

They stared instead at the place where the two men had been standing out in the dark—and working. It was obvious now what the sound had been: the hiss of metal against soil. Fifty feet away from the barn door, centered in the light that spilled from it, was a waist-high pile of dirt with two shovels stuck into it. And next to the pile was a long rectangular hole in the ground.

The two men had just finished digging a grave.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Dani’s reaction was overwhelming. She fell backward from where she sat, just managing to catch herself with her arms behind her.

“No,” she whispered. “No … no…” She kept repeating it, shaking her head. Her voice shuddered. “No…”

Sam felt the acid rise in his stomach. Was this what Mr. Coleman had wanted them to do? Simply witness Lauren’s burial so they could report it to someone? So she wouldn’t spend eternity in an unmarked grave? Was that all the man had been able to ask for, in the end?

“No…” Dani whispered. The word came out through clenched teeth. She was losing it.

Sam turned to her. There was nothing he could possibly say. Instead he just put his arms around her and pulled her against himself tightly. She responded, hugging him back and burying her face in his shoulder. He felt her tears through his shirt. He had his head just above hers, facing the barn. He had to keep watching. He had to know.

Ten seconds later the two men came out again. They were carrying a body between them; without the binoculars it was hard to see it clearly.

And then it moved. It jerked and twisted in their arms.

“Dani,” Sam whispered. “Look.”

She let go of him, wiped at her eyes and turned them on the barn.

The body kept fighting, but by its movements it was obvious that its wrists and ankles were bound.

“Oh my God,” Dani said.

Her hands were still shaking, but she managed to get hold of her binoculars again. Sam raised his own, and got them centered on the two men and their victim; he tracked them until they stopped beside the grave, at which point they dropped the body on the ground.

It landed diagonally, relative to Sam and Dani’s position. By chance, that angle made it easy to see the victim’s features—there was just enough light from the big door shining onto the face.

It wasn’t Lauren.