He switched off the flashlight and stood in the darkness, listening. He could detect no sound, no breeze, no hint of movement anywhere. He stood there for a long minute, waiting to hear something, waiting to see something. Everything seemed unnaturally still.

Flashlight in one hand and SIG in the other, safety off, he made a 360-degree sweep of the land around him. He saw nothing alarming, nothing out of place. He pointed the beam up at the side of the house, swept it back and forth until he found a severed wire emerging from an electrical fitting by a second-floor window and, about ten feet away, a second wire emerging from a different kind of fitting by another window. He swept the light away from the house toward the road until he located the utility pole and the two loose wires he’d expected to find there, dangling down onto the ground.

He walked closer to the house, below the two severed wire ends. On the clapboards behind each, he could see a small dark hole a few inches from each fitting. He couldn’t judge the diameters with any accuracy from where he stood, but he was fairly sure they couldn’t have been made with a bullet any smaller than a .30 caliber or larger than a .35 caliber.

If it was the same shooter who hit Carl at Willow Rest, it would appear that he was flexible in his choice of weapons—a man who chose the tool most appropriate to the circumstances. A practical man. Or woman.

Esti’s question came back to him. What’s the point of cutting a landline when everybody’s got a cell phone? From a practical perspective, cutting power and communication lines would be the preamble to an attack. But no attack had occurred. So what was the point?

A warning?

Like the nails in Gus’s head?

But why the landline?

Holy Christ!

Could it be?

Power and phone. Power meant lights, which meant seeing. And the phone? What did you do with a phone—especially an old landline phone? You listened and you talked.

No power and no phone.

No seeing, no listening, no talking.

See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

Or was he getting way too imaginative, way to enamored with his “message” theory? He knew damn well that falling in love with one’s own hypothesis could be fatal. Still, if these weren’t messages, what the hell were they?

Having switched off the flashlight, he stood again in the dark, holding the SIG Sauer pistol at his side, straining his eyes and ears. The utter silence gave him a chill. He told himself it was simply because the temperature was dropping and the air was growing damper. But that didn’t make him feel any more comfortable. It was time to get the hell out of there.