Gurney found himself staring at the embers on the woodstove grate, his mind refusing to focus. He rose from his chair, switched on the floor lamp, and went over to the sink island to make himself a cup of coffee. He’d long ago discovered that one way to get to a solution was to step away from the problem and go on to something else. The brain, relieved of the pressure to move in a particular channel, often finds its own way. As one of his born-and-bred Delaware County neighbors had once said, “The beagle can’t catch the rabbit till you let him off the leash.”

So on to something else. Or back to something else.

Back to the discomfort he’d felt when Kyle was insisting that no one had followed him and Kim to the city or back to Walnut Crossing. Gurney had seen no point in sharing his discomfort at the time, but now he needed to resolve the question that had been troubling him. He got the three flashlights out of the sideboard drawer, tried each one, and selected the one whose batteries seemed the least drained. Then he went to the mudroom, put on his paint-spattered barn jacket, turned on the light by the side door, and stepped outside.

It was cold now, not merely chilly. He got down on the frozen grass in front of Kim’s car to check the clearance between the undercarriage and the ground. It wasn’t sufficient for what he had in mind, so he went back into the house for her keys.

He found them in her bag on the coffee table by the fireplace.

Back outside, he went to the tractor shed and got the pair of inclined metal ramps that he normally used for elevating the riding mower when the blades needed changing. He placed the ramps in front of the Miata, then drove it gently forward and upward until the front end was an extra eight inches or so off the ground. Then he set the brake and returned to his position on the frozen grass. Lying on his back, he wriggled under the raised car with his flashlight.

It didn’t take long to find what he’d suspected and feared might be there. It was a black metal box not much larger than a pack of cigarettes, held by a magnet to one of the forward frame components. A wire emerging from the box ran upward in the direction of the car’s battery.

He wriggled out from under the car, backed it down off the ramps, went into the house, and replaced Kim’s keys in her bag.

He had some thinking to do. The discovery of a GPS location transmitter on the Miata was not exactly a game changer, but it certainly added a disturbing new dimension. And it demanded a decision: to leave it there or not.