He walked down the driveway to the garage and looked in the windows. He could see a newer Mustang 5.0 parked next to a Bob-Cat.

He said, “Huh,” scratched his head, and glanced back at the house. He was getting a bad feeling about this. He called Wardell Holland. Holland answered on the second ring, and Virgil asked, “Do you know Glen Andorra?”

“Sort of. I nod at him,” Holland said. “He doesn’t live in town.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m out at his place. Do you know anyone who would know him well enough to have his phone number?”

“Yeah. Try Doug Cooper. Let me get Doug’s cell number for you . . . He farms out there.”

Virgil called Cooper, who didn’t have Andorra’s phone number. “Why are you looking for him?”

Virgil explained, and Cooper said, “Tell you what, I thought about checking on him. I drive by his place every day—I’m about two miles down the road—and there’s been this rug hanging on his clothesline for a couple of weeks now. That’s not like Glen. He’s a fussy guy, and we’ve had some rain coming through, but the rug never moved, so . . . I thought about checking on him.”

“I’ll check, I guess,” Virgil said. “There’s a Mustang in his garage . . .”

“Well, that’s his only car. Since you’re the law, I’d go look inside, if I were you.”

—

Virgil walked all the way around the house and wound up climbing the six steps of the front porch and peering through the hand-sized cut-glass windows in the door and the big window on the porch itself.

The only thing he saw that might be useful was a double-hung window on the far side of the house that appeared to be cracked open at the bottom. He walked around to check it, but the window was up eight feet. He went to the garage, found the door unlocked, borrowed a stepladder, walked it around to the side of the house, set it under the window, climbed up, looked inside.

The window was open, but only two or three inches. Virgil stared into what was once a dining room but was now being used as a place to watch television. The wide-screen was tuned to a game show, the cheery quizmaster joking with a group of D-list Hollywood celebrities. A man whom he assumed was Glen Andorra was lying back in an easy chair, and he had the withered, rotted look of a genuine zombie.

And Virgil could smell him in the air that wafted out through the window.

“Ah, jeez,” he said aloud. He got on the phone to the sheriff’s office, and Zimmer said he’d send a bunch of cars. “Does it look natural?”

“Hard to tell . . . He might have been sitting there for two weeks,” Virgil said. “There’s warm air coming out—I think the furnace is turned on.”