Kim was halfway down the stairs now and peering around the basement like a scared cat. Her gaze stopped at the broken step. “You could have been killed,” she said, wide-eyed, as though the implications of the accident had only then occurred to her. “It broke, just like that, when you stepped on it?”

“Just like that,” he said.

As she examined with a kind of horror the place where he’d fallen, he was touched by something fundamentally naïve in her expression. This young woman who was putting together an ambitious documentary on the horrific impact of murder seemed startled by the notion that life could be perilous.

Following her gaze, he, too, looked down at the break in the wood—and quickly noticed what she had either failed to see or failed to grasp the meaning of. The stair tread, prior to breaking, had been sawed almost completely through on both ends.

When he pointed this out to her, she’d frowned in apparent confusion. “What do you mean? How could that be?”

All he’d said was, “One more mystery to add to the others.”

• • •

Now, as he lay in his bed, gazing up at the ceiling, massaging his arm without much effect, reconstructing the previous night’s chain of events, he thought that answer through in more detail.

The sabotage was likely the work of the whispering intruder, Kim was likely the intended victim, and perhaps he, Gurney, had simply gotten in the way.

Booby-trapping a staircase by partially sawing through one of the treads was a crime-movie cliché. One that would be hard to miss. The easily detectable saw marks would make it clear that the step hadn’t broken by accident—meaning that the saw marks themselves were almost certainly intended to be discovered. In that sense they would be an integral part of the warning.

Perhaps the choice of a low step was part of the warning also—designed to cause a nasty fall but not as bad a fall, say, as one might have from a higher step. Not a fatal fall. Not yet.

The message might be as explicit as, If you ignore my warnings, they’ll get more violent. More painful. More deadly.

But what, precisely, was Kim being warned away from? The obvious answer was her murder documentary, since it was the biggest thing going on in her life. Maybe the message was, Back away, Kim, stop digging into the past, or the consequences will be terrible. There’s a devil buried in the Good Shepherd case, and you’d better not wake him.

Did that mean that the intruder was someone connected with that famous case? Someone with a serious vested interest in things staying as they were?

Or was it, as Kim had been insisting, only rotten little Robby Meese?