Garrett glanced at her then relaxed his grip somewhat—though his gentler touch proved to be a lot more troubling; he took to stroking her wrist with his middle finger, which reminded her of a fat blood tick looking for a spot to burrow into her skin.

… chapter four

The Rollx van passed a cemetery, Tanner’s Corner Memorial Gardens. A funeral was in progress and Rhyme, Sachs and Thom glanced at the somber procession.

“Look at the casket,” Sachs said.

It was small, a child’s. The mourners, all adults, were few. Twenty or so people. Rhyme wondered why attendance was so sparse. His eyes rose above the ceremony and examined the graveyard’s rolling hills and, beyond, the miles of hazy forest and marshland that vanished in the blue distance. He said, “That’s not a bad cemetery. Wouldn’t mind being buried in a place like that.”

Sachs, who’d been gazing at the funeral with a troubled expression, shifted cool eyes toward him—apparently because with surgery on the agenda she didn’t like any talk about mortality.

Then Thom eased the van around a sharp curve and, following Jim Bell’s Paquenoke County Sheriff’s Department cruiser, accelerated down a straightaway; the cemetery disappeared behind them.

As Bell had promised, Tanner’s Corner was twenty miles from the medical center at Avery. The WELCOME TO sign assured visitors that the town was the home of 3,018 souls, which may have been true but only a tiny percentage of them were evident along Main Street on this hot August morning. The dusty place seemed to be a ghost town. One elderly couple sat on a bench, looking out over the empty street. Rhyme spotted two men who must’ve been the resident drunks—sickly looking and skinny. One sat on the curb, his scabby head in his hands, probably working off a hangover. The other sat against a tree, staring at the glossy van with sunken eyes that even from the distance seemed jaundiced. A scrawny woman lazily washed the drugstore window. Rhyme saw no one else.

“Peaceful,” Thom observed.

“That’s one way to put it,” said Sachs, who obviously shared Rhyme’s sense of unease at the emptiness.

Main Street was a tired stretch of old buildings and two small strip malls. Rhyme noticed one supermarket, two drugstores, two bars, one diner, a women’s clothing boutique, an insurance company and a combination video shop/candy store/nail salon. The A-OK Car Dealership was sandwiched between a bank and a marine supplies operation. Everybody sold bait. One billboard was for McDonald’s, seven miles away along Route 17. Another showed a sun-bleached painting of the Monitor and Merrimack Civil War ships. “Visit the Ironclad Museum.” You had to drive twenty-two miles to see that attraction.