They stayed in the shadow of the trees as they made a wide arc around the house; Nick could see the lights still burning in Braden’s office. He wasn’t surprised; by introducing that scrapbook he had undoubtedly kicked off a discussion that would last well into the night. He wondered how Braden was taking the news that his made-in-heaven wife was a little more down-to-earth than he thought; he wondered how the senator’s spinmeisters would reveal to the public that the future First Lady’s mom was a serial killer responsible for multiple murders, including the murder of a federal agent. And these weren’t genteel and ladylike murders either—not just a sprinkle of arsenic on the pot roast or a few sleeping pills dissolved in the tea. No—these were bat-bashing, skull-cracking, corpse-dragging murders—the kind that stick in people’s minds for a long, long time.

The Braden campaign seemed doomed—it seemed impossible to Nick that anyone could recover from that kind of negative publicity— but if anyone could manage it, the beautiful Bradens could. There was a lot of money on the line in a presidential race and a lot of powerful people were involved. The Bradens had probably already made a few calls, and somewhere in Washington right now an army of strategists was already calculating the best way to distance the Bradens from these unfortunate events. Politicians are survivors, Nick thought. In his experience they were harder to kill than a cockroach, probably because they share a common characteristic: When the lights go on, they disappear.

It took fifteen minutes to circle around behind the house and come up behind the first of the outbuildings—a rustic old grain silo that had apparently been preserved to keep Bradenton looking like the working farm it hadn’t been in years. If the silo was empty it would be an excellent place to hide a body—but Trygg circled it once and simply looked up at Nick.

Next they came to a large tack shed. Nick pulled up a handful of grass and tossed it into the air to test the direction of the wind; they approached from downwind to allow Trygg to pick up any scent that might be drifting in the breeze, but the dog made no alert. Nick found the door unlocked and they entered; they searched the interior carefully but found nothing there.