When he got back to the station, Ben found Doyle playing a video game. Ben dropped a file on his desk. “Anytime when you’re finished.”

“I’m about to lose a troll.” Doyle pushed away from the chair, defeated. “I just got killed.”

“Do you really think you should be playing this in front of me, Doyle?”

“Dunno.” He shrugged. “What else do we have to do?”

“Funny you should mention it.” Ben pointed to the file he’d just placed on the desk.

Doyle picked it up and started leafing through it. “Holy shit. How old is this thing?”

“Nineteen forty-four. It’s on a man named Desmond Bennett. Nineteen years of age. He disappeared on October ninth, 1944. They found his car on Duvall Road the next day.”

“That’s fucking weird.”

“Even weirder is that, according to Esther Hurston, Duvall Road was the former name of—” Ben let the sentence hang to see if Doyle was paying attention.

“I’ll take a guess and say Wickelow Bend?” Doyle smiled.

“You got it.”

“So we’ve got three men, missing on the same day, in the same manner, at the same location, every thirty years?”

“Yeah, I’m starting to think it’s a ritual killing of some sort. Do we have any known witch communities?” One thing that Ben had been relieved about was that the appearance of another killing thirty years earlier seemed to rule out Jason Barnes as a potential suspect.

“I don’t think so.” Doyle looked at his computer.

“Can you find out more about Desmond Bennett? Maybe ask over at the paper?”

“You can’t make a call to Kim Landau yourself?” Doyle chuckled.

“I’d prefer not to.”

“I see.” Doyle winked.

“No, you don’t see, Doyle. You see nothing.”

“Uh-huh.” Doyle shrugged, noncommittal. “You had a call by the way, some real estate agent.”

“Shit,” said Ben aloud as he looked down at the note on his desk. Abigail Atwater had called him back and she was on her way to the house.

Five Victorian houses separated his house from the one where he’d grown up, each sporting some oversize American flag for the July Fourth holiday. Ben ran past them all, spying the magnetic sign for ATWATER ASSOCIATES on a black Cadillac SUV. He was too far away to see if Abigail Atwater was in the car or not.

All the houses on Washington Street looked as though a child had gone through a Crayola box to paint them. Next to Ben’s house stood Victor Benson’s stately old two-story lemon-yellow Victorian with periwinkle-blue accents and a wraparound porch. On the weekends, Vic and his wife would sit on their porch swing and drink wine. Ben’s was a natural brick home, but Marla had painted it two years ago so that both the brick and grout were now a vibrant fire-engine-red color.