The sergeant uttered his warning with a placid expression. May as well have said, Watch out for poison ivy if you wander off the trail. Don’t feed the ducks. He wished me good fortune and sent me packing nowhere closer to knowing anything one way or the other.

■■■

Wednesday afternoon, I bought lunch at a deli—a Monte Cristo and a large black coffee. The paper cup was blazoned with the shop’s horsehead logo. The horse’s eyes were X’d out, 1950s cartoon fashion. I ate my sandwich and drank my coffee at a table in a raised garden where everything was dead except for the pigeons who circled and sortied for crumbs. A larger predatory bird wheeled and wheeled, obscured by the moving scrim of clouds. It was a few degrees above freezing. Passersby wore hats, mufflers, and long coats.

My phone buzzed. Dr. Alex Pruitt pleasantly surprised me with a text naming a place and time to meet; nearby and at once. He stressed the latter portion. We’d rendezvous within the hour or not at all.

Hard to say whether this reversal was good news or one of those ill omens that cropped up with alarming frequency. I wanted to cover the bases with speed and efficiency, write my report, collect the balance due, and mosey on to the next case before the Redlick Group, Zircon Corp, or whoever decided to put the clamps on my activities. Despite a nagging suspicion that the official story didn’t hold water, I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of a surprise revelation opening another avenue of inquiry. Sometimes a mystery is wisely left alone, but I’m not one to heed that warning.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Vulture Bluff was the catchy name of my destination. Where there were heaps of dead horses, hungry vultures flocked.

I drove to a gravel lot at the base of an evergreen butte five minutes outside of town. The lot was veiled by thick brush; cracks split across the farthest third of the cratered asphalt. Two other cars were parked—a midsize sedan, brown; and a blue softshell Volkswagen Beetle. A crimson and bronze 1950s Mercury Monterey turned partway into the lot, then reversed and kept going along the road.

I climbed slippery wooden stairs through a tunnel of hemlock and mulberry and emerged into a broad clearing amid more hemlock, pine, and bur oak. An eight-foot-tall fence of warped planks encircled much of the field. From a high-altitude plane, the field might’ve appeared as a spearhead. Shaggy grass and unraked leaves contributed to the impression of dereliction.

Nearer to me were painted stripes of a soccer infield bleaching into the pale grass. Toward the far side of the grounds, rotting wooden bleachers canted precipitously. A backstop twined with creeper vines sank into the sod, off-kilter and somehow post-apocalyptic. Scholars cheerfully posit the end of the world will entail clouds of ash, rusted empty towns, and radioactive deserts. I envision a black, endless forest and pregnant silence that elongates into centuries. Mankind’s bones lie scattered in mossy graves; home for the meek, scuttling inheritors of the earth.