Of course, that didn’t really prove anything—they could have inserted an industrial tracker behind my dashboard or stuck a tiny button out of reach. I supposed I could do a serious Wolinsky and wrap my whole car in foil, but what’s life without some risk?

In case they were relying on my devices to tell them my route, I put them all back in my Faraday pack. It would have to be protection enough.

I drove east once more, this time taking a side road, where it would be easier to spot a tail. Fifteenth Street went past the school where Cady Perec taught twelve-year-olds to be thoughtful citizens, then ran between two big cemeteries. Thank goodness I hadn’t wasted months hunting Sonia Kiel’s dead lover in an actual graveyard.

I crested a couple of hills, bumped across a set of train tracks, and was instantly in farmland again, my car bouncing along a pockmarked gravel road. I went by a place with boarded-up windows, possibly a meth house, something for Sheriff Gisborne to take care of once he’d finished looking after Sea-2-Sea’s problems.

When I reached Doris McKinnon’s farmhouse, I parked next to the barn, where Gisborne said they’d found the Prius’s and McKinnon’s pickup’s tire tracks. I put on my hiking boots and went inside.

A flex lamp hanging near the door held a powerful bulb; even inside the barn on a gray afternoon, I got a pretty good idea of the interior. I skirted the perimeter, not wanting to disturb the scene, if it was a crime scene, and not wanting to leave traces of my own presence.

Dust of all kinds—hay, dirt, seeds—billowed around as the wind gusted through the high open doors. I was sneezing heavily, so someone from NCIS, or Baggetto’s entourage, definitely could pick up my DNA if they cared to swab the building. The dust made it easy to see the oil drippings and tire marks left by the pickup and the Prius; they’d been parked close to the wide door that opened onto the yard.

Two cats snarled and slunk away when I moved the light into the interior. Besides the dust, the barn was packed with old equipment. A rusty tractor, stacks of things with jagged teeth, giant rake heads. Rustling in the corners came from whatever the cats were hunting—I hoped mice, but probably rats.

I didn’t see anything that looked like the canister in the photo Baggetto had shown me or the bags of dirt Doris had been digging up and tagging. Several sets of recent footprints showed where Gisborne and his team had been looking, so if Doris had left anything important, the sheriff’s team would already have taken it.