Mitch hurried off, talking into his shoulder radio as he ran, and the rest of them moved forward slowly. Maybe it wasn’t a massacre, Brad conceded. He saw no blood. But the bodies definitely looked dead. He thought he should make sure and called out, “Gila County Sheriff’s Department!”

No response. No sign of movement.

Kneeling next to the first body, that of a man, Brad placed a finger on the neck. The skin was cold and there was no pulse. He looked back at Hank and Bill F. and shook his head.

The man and the woman next to him he recognized as Mike Gamell and Juana Rodriguez, two former tellers from Bank of America. Standing up to look at the other bodies, he was pretty sure they had worked at the bank as well.

Brad knew who the fat man in the ditch was now: Bank of America’s former manager. Glen something. Teagan? Teague? Taylor? It definitely started with a T.

“Glen Taggart,” Bill F. said, as though reading his thoughts.

“And that’s Cissy Platter,” Hank said, pointing. “She signed my car loan.”

If he had felt overwhelmed at the sight of the manager’s body, Brad now felt completely out of his depth. Ignoring the crackle of his shoulder radio, though he heard Issac addressing him by name, he walked slowly past the prone corpses, seeing no wounds, no sign of injury, though there’d been blood on the trail here. Why had this happened? How had it happened? Was it some sort of suicide pact, a murder-suicide or just plain murder? The manager’s killing could have conceivably happened on the day the Bank of America closed, since it was obvious that he’d been dead for a few days. But it was odd that no one had reported him missing. Was he married? Did he have family? Brad would have to have someone look that up.

It was the other deaths that really concerned him, however. They had obviously died more recently. No one had yet reported any of them missing—it was quite likely that their loved ones still did not know—and yet for some reason all of them, every employee of the bank, three days after the bank’s closing, had either committed suicide or had been executed out here on the way to the transfer station.

Executed.

That was the word he’d been looking for. There were still no signs of violence readily apparent, but the manner in which the bank employees had been laid out on the ground reminded him of nothing so much as an execution.

“Sheriff!”

Issac was practically shouting through the com device now, and Brad pressed the talk button at his shoulder. “Neth here.”

“You found more bodies and Mitch says they’re all B of A employees?”

“As far as we can tell.”

“Jesus. I thought maybe he got it screwed up and…” There was a lengthy crackle of static.

“I found two more over here!” Hank called out, pointing into the brush near the spot where he was standing.