She put her finger back on the wall switch, and the target began to move farther away. It stopped at the range’s fifty-foot end point. She took hearing protectors and safety glasses off a hook by the switch and put them on, glancing back at Gurney and Kim. “Sorry I don’t have extras. I don’t usually have an audience.” She unholstered her SIG, checked the magazine, flipped off the safety, and for a moment stood perfectly still, her head bowed like an Olympic diver’s before the crucial moment. Then she did something that Gurney knew would be with him for the rest of his life.

She screamed—an enraged, bestial sound that made the word that initiated it more like lightning tearing through the room than like anything verbal. What she screamed was “FUCK!”—and as she screamed it, she raised the pistol in a sudden movement and, without any visible act of aiming, fired off every round in the fifteen-round magazine in what Gurney guessed was less than four seconds.

Then she lowered the gun slowly and laid it on the table, removed her safety glasses and hearing protectors and hung them neatly on the wall. She raised her hand to the switch, and the target glided from the end of the range up to the table. She detached it carefully and turned around, smiling placidly, seemingly in full possession of herself.

She held the target up for Gurney’s inspection. The normal aiming area—the center of the body mass—was untouched. In fact, there were no bullet holes anywhere in the human-shaped outline, except in one place.

The center of the forehead had been obliterated.

Chapter 11

The Strange Aftermath

Kim and Gurney were in the Miata, passing through the almost nonexistent village of Peacock, heading for the county road that would eventually bring them, through a succession of hills and dales, to Walnut Crossing. It was just past five, the overcast was thinning, and the mist had finally ended.

“I was a hell of a lot more startled by that business than you were,” said Gurney.

Kim shot him an appraising glance. “Making you conclude I’d seen it before? You’re right.”

“Which is why you suggested that she show me the shooting range? So I could see her little performance for myself?”

“Yep.”

“Well, it made an impression.”

“I want you to see everything. Or at least as much as you have time to see.”

They both fell silent. It seemed to Gurney that he’d already seen a lot. It was hard to believe that he’d gotten the call from Connie Clarke only the previous morning. He closed his eyes and tried to arrange the flood of observations, conversations. It was dizzying. The project was bizarre. His involvement in it was bizarre.

He awoke as Kim was turning onto the narrow lane that wound its way up the mountain to his home. “Jesus. Didn’t mean to fall asleep.”