As he listened to it, a chill crept up his back, raising the hairs on his neck.

A falsetto voice, shrill and metallic, a voice not quite human, was singing the most bizarre and least-understood of all children’s nursery rhymes—an inanely lilting allusion to the roseate skin sores, the flowers used to stifle the stench of rotting flesh, and the ashes of burnt corpses during one of Europe’s deadliest plagues.

Ring around the rosies,

Pocket full of posies.

Ashes, ashes,

All fall down.

Chapter 56

A Fatal Rage

“Dad?”

Kyle and his father were standing uneasily near the fireplace end of the living room—the end farthest from the kitchen area, and well away from the doors. The blinds were lowered at all the windows. The only light came from a small table lamp.

“Yes?”

“Before the phone rang, you were starting to say that we should assume that the Peter Pan guy might be out there somewhere?” Kyle shot a nervous glance at the glass doors.

Gurney took a long moment to answer. His mind kept going back to the creepy, singsong nursery-rhyme message—and how its words reflected not only its grotesque bubonic plague origins but also the Flowers by Florence and arson elements, Panikos’s own MO.

“He might be out there, yes.”

“You have any idea where out there?”

“If I’m right about the flat tire, he’d be on the west side of us, and Barrow Hill would be his likely choice.”

“You think maybe he’ll sneak down here by the house?”

“I doubt it. If I’m right about the tire, he has a sniper rifle with him. In that game, distance gives him a major advantage. My best guess is that he’ll stay—”

There was a startling flash of light, a sharp explosion, and something came smashing through one of the kitchen windows, flinging shards of glass everywhere.

Kyle cried out, “What the fuck …?”

Gurney grabbed him and pulled him to the floor, then drew the Beretta from his ankle holster, extinguished the lamp by yanking the cord out of the wall socket, and scrambled across the floor to the nearest window. He waited a moment, listening, then parted the bottom two slats of the blinds and peered out. It took him several seconds to comprehend what he was looking at. Scattered over a broad area out beyond the patio were the remains of the henhouse materials, many of the pieces burning.

Kyle’s voice behind him was a rasping whisper. “What the hell …?”

“The lumber pile … it’s … blown up.”

“Blown … what … how?”

“Some kind of … I don’t know … incendiary device?”

“Incendiary? What the hell …?”

Gurney was absorbed in scanning the area as best he could in the near-darkness.

“Dad?”