Chapter 7
Callie knew it was the same before she even saw the body.
McKenzie drove. Neither of them spoke much on the way out.
The roads were quiet at that hour, the mountains still dark against a sky that was just beginning to separate from the night.
Frost had settled on the windshield before they left Lewis, the first time this year.
The seasons were turning. The heat was thinning and the mornings carried something sharper now, a coolness that smelled like wet leaves and woodsmoke.
Callie watched the tree line pass in the headlights and thought about the Coleman case.
It had been ten days since the murder. The Pike warrant already felt like old ground.
The rifles had come back from ballistics two days ago.
No match. None of the weapons seized from his property had fired the round that killed Maggie.
Savannah hadn't pulled Pike from the board entirely, but the lead was dying. The investigation was stalling.
And now a second call.
She didn't say it out loud yet. She didn't need to. McKenzie was thinking the same thing.
They turned onto Hays Brook Road and followed it for two miles through a corridor of birch and hemlock. The first patrol car appeared around a bend, parked at an angle with its lights flashing. A second cruiser was behind it, blocking the road. A deputy waved them through.
The property sat back from the road at the end of a gravel drive.
A white clapboard farmhouse, two stories, with a detached garage and a workshop behind it.
Three acres of flat ground edged by forest on three sides.
A pickup truck was parked near the garage with the driver's door still open.
The dome light had burned out sometime in the night.
Callie got out of the Tahoe and pulled on gloves.
Dew clung to the gravel and the grass was silver where the first light touched it.
The property had the kind of quiet that came from isolation, no neighbors within earshot, no traffic on the road, nothing but trees and sky and the faint sound of a creek somewhere behind the workshop.
She saw the dog first.
A yellow lab, old, with a gray muzzle and cloudy eyes.
He was sitting on the gravel between the garage and the door of the house, about ten feet from the body.
Not barking. Just sitting with his front paws together and his head slightly lowered, watching the people who had come to stand where his owner was lying.
Callie crouched at a distance and looked at the dog for a moment. He looked back. His tail didn't move.
"He's been there since the neighbor found him," the deputy said from behind her. "Won't leave. We tried to move him. He just comes back."
She stood and turned to the body.
Dr. Halvorsen was face down on the gravel driveway between the garage and the door.
He was wearing a flannel shirt, work pants, and boots.
His right arm was extended toward the house.
His left was tucked beneath him. A large bag of dog food had burst open beside him, kibble scattered across the gravel in a wide arc, mixed with blood that had soaked into the stones and dried to a dark crust overnight.
He had been carrying the bag from his truck to the house. He’d made it about fifteen feet.
Callie moved around the body without touching it.
The entry wound was in the upper back, left of the spine, just below the shoulder blade.
The round had gone through him. A small exit wound was visible on the left side of his chest where the flannel was torn and stiff with dried blood.
The ground beneath his chest was saturated.
Callie had worked homicides before. Stabbings.
Domestics. Bar fights that ended on the floor.
Those scenes were messy. This was different.
This was clinical. A man killed from a distance while carrying dog food to his door.
There was no anger in it. No heat. Just a single round and a life stopped mid-step.
McKenzie came up beside her. He stood with his hands on his hips and looked at Burt and the kibble and the dog and the open truck door and said nothing for a long time.
"Where did it come from?" Callie asked.
They both turned and looked behind the property.
The land rose gently from the driveway toward a wooded ridge to the northeast. The trees were thick, a mix of spruce and hardwood, and the ridge was higher than the one behind Maggie Coleman's house.
The shot would have traveled downhill, through open air, across the flat ground of the property, and into Burt's back as he walked from his truck.
“I’d say that is farther than the first one," McKenzie said. "Four hundred yards. Maybe a touch more."
“Straight through a moving target this time. Not a woman sitting at a desk."
"Aye. This one's harder." He turned a cigarette between his teeth. "And he still only needed one round."
They walked the property. The gravel was hard-packed from years of truck traffic and held no useful prints.
The grass at the edge of the drive showed no disturbance.
The path to the ridge was a gentle slope covered in pine needles and deadfall, the kind of terrain that absorbed footsteps and left nothing behind.
McKenzie took two deputies and hiked up to the ridge while Callie worked the scene below.
She photographed the body from every angle.
The dog food bag. The spill pattern. The dried blood in the gravel.
The truck with its open door and the remaining groceries on the passenger seat, a bag from the hardware store, a case of bottled water, a receipt timestamped 4:47 PM the previous day.
Burt had gone shopping yesterday afternoon and never finished unloading.
She photographed the door of the house, which was unlocked.
Inside, the kitchen was clean. A single plate and fork in the drying rack.
A calendar on the wall with a dentist appointment circled for next Tuesday.
In the living room, a recliner facing a television, a stack of woodworking magazines on the end table, and a half-finished chess game against himself on a board by the window.
He had lived alone and organized his solitude into something like contentment.
His wallet was on the kitchen counter beside his keys.
Nothing appeared to have been taken. Nothing had been disturbed. Whoever did this hadn't come inside.
She went back outside. The forensics team had arrived and was setting up around the body. One tech was placing trajectory markers while another prepared to extract the round from the ground beneath the exit wound.
McKenzie came back down from the ridge twenty minutes later. His face confirmed what Callie already knew.
"Rock shelf," he said. "About two-thirds up. Flat ground, good sightline, tree cover behind. Same setup as Maggie's property."
"Shell casing?"
"Nothing. Soil's soft up there from the moisture but there's no clear boot print. If he left anything, we haven't found it." He pulled off his cap and wiped his forehead. "But I'll tell you something. From that position up there, this was a harder shot."
Callie looked at the ridge. “So he's getting better."
"He was already good. Now he's confident." McKenzie put the cap back on. "First kill he picks a stationary target in a fixed position. Second kill he takes someone moving, at greater range, in the open. That's not just skill. That's someone testing himself."
"Or proving something."
"Aye. Either way, he might not be done."
Callie thought about the approach. From the road, the shooter would have had to cross the property boundary on foot, hike through forest and uphill terrain, set up on the ridge, and wait for Burt to come outside.
That meant he knew Burt's routine. Knew when he came and went.
Knew the layout of the property. Knew the dog wouldn't be a problem because the dog was old and trusting and wouldn't bark at a figure in the trees.
He had scouted this place. Just like Maggie's.
The forensic tech held up a clear evidence bag. The recovered round was deformed but largely intact. "Same profile as the Coleman round," she said. "Thirty-caliber, high velocity. I'd bet my mortgage it's the same rifle."
McKenzie looked at Callie. She looked back.
"Same rifle," he said. "Same shooter." He paused. "We've got a serial sniper."
The words landed hard. Callie felt the investigation shift beneath her feet the way ground shifts before a slide. This was no longer a single murder.
By noon the property was crawling with personnel.
State Police. BCI. Sheriff's Office. A forensics van from Troop B.
Two television news crews had set up on Hays Brook Road, their satellite dishes visible through the tree line.
The story that had been local was about to go regional. By evening it would be national.
The town felt it before the press conference.
Callie drove through High Peaks on her way back to Lewis and saw it in the faces on Main Street.
Clusters of people standing outside the coffee shop, talking in low voices.
A mother walking her kids to school with her hand on the older one's shoulder, holding tighter than usual.
The hardware store had a handwritten sign in the window: CLOSE AND LOCK YOUR DOORS.
A town that had prided itself on never locking anything was suddenly remembering that the mountains didn't just keep people out. They kept them in.
Ray held the press conference at three o'clock on the steps of the High Peaks Police Department.
He stood behind a cluster of microphones in his dress uniform, flanked by Acting Sheriff Rivera and two State Police officials.
He read from a prepared statement. A task force was in place.
Resources were being deployed. The community should remain vigilant.
Anyone with information should contact the tip line.
He took no questions. He walked back inside and the doors closed behind him.
At the same time, Savannah spoke to the media separately, outside the State Police building in Ray Brook.
"Both victims were prominent members of the community," she said.
"A journalist and a medical examiner. We are investigating this as a potential domestic terrorism event targeting community institutions.
We take this extremely seriously and we are devoting every available resource to identifying and apprehending the individual responsible. "
Noah watched the press conference on a monitor at his desk.
He leaned back in his chair and stared at the screen as Savannah fielded questions with the same composed certainty she brought to every briefing.
Domestic terrorism. Community institutions.
The language was clean and the framework was institutional.
It made sense on paper. But everything about this was telling him it wasn't random. It just looked that way from a distance. He stared at the photos and waited for the connection to surface. It was right there, sitting on the edge of his mind, close enough to feel but not close enough to name.
He turned back to the monitor and watched Savannah finish the press conference. .
The briefing that evening at High Peaks PD ran long. It was the same questions. Same dead ends.
Callie worked through the files anyway.
Near the bottom of one stack, she paused.
"The Hale autopsy," she said.
Noah glanced up. "Yeah. Burt handled that."
"And Maggie covered it."
She paused.
"There was a surviving son, right?"
"Yeah. Liam."
She made a note. Then kept going.
It was one name in a room full of names. And no one treated it like anything more.