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Near the Plum River, Maryland

It was a chilly day in late October A stiff hipped the last colorful leaves off the trees The sun was shining down hard and bright on the dilapidated red barn that hadn’t been painted in forty years Streaks of washed-out red were all that was left of the last paint job There was no charm left, at all

FBI Special Agent Dillon Savich eased around the side of the barn, his SIG Sauer in his right hand It had taken discipline and practice, but he’d learned to ents, one of the him, ready to fan out in any direction necessary, all of theents were sloorking their way up the other side of the barn, their orders to wait for a signal froh County and three deputies were stationed in the thick stand of maple trees just thirty feet behind thehts trained on the barn

So far the operation was going sh no one spoke of it He just hoped it would continue the way it had been planned, but chances were things would get screwed up He’d deal with it; there was no choice

The barn was bigger than Savich liked—there was a big hayloft, and too many shadowy corners for this sort of operation Too many nooks and crannies for an ambush, just plain too many places from which to fire a storm of bullets

A perfect place for Tommy and Timmy Tuttle, dubbed “the Warlocks” by the media, to hole up They’d hopscotched across the country, but had dropped out of sight here, in Maryland, with their two latest young teenage boys taken right out of the gy basketball after school, in Stewartville, some forty miles away Savich had believed that Maryland was their destination, no sound reason really, but in his gut he just felt it The profilers hadn’t said much about that, just that Maryland was, after all, on the Atlantic coast, so they really couldn’t go much farther east

Then MAX, Savich’s laptop, had dived into land registry files in Maryland and found that Marilyn Warluski, a first cousin to the Tuttle brothers, and who, MAX had also discovered, had had a baby at the age of seventeen fathered by Tommy Tuttle, just happened to own a narrow strip of land near a good-sized maple forest that wasn’t far from the serpentine Plu ancient barn that had been abandoned for years Savich had nearly clicked his heels together in excitement

And now, four hours later, here they were There’d been no sign of a car, but Savich wasn’t worried The old Honda was probably stashed in the barn He quieted his breathing and listened The birds had gone still The silence was heavy, oppressive, as if even the ani to happen and knew instinctively that it wouldn’t be good

Savich was afraid the Tuttle brothers were long gone All they would find, despite the silence, would be their victie boys—Donny and Rob Arthur—dead, horribly e, black circle

Savich didn’t want to smell any more blood He didn’t want to see any more death Not today Not ever

He looked down at his Mickey Mouse watch It was tio into haret the show on the road

MAX had found a crude interior plan of the barn, drawn some fifty years before, docu been physically saved and filed Kept where? was the question They’d finally turned up the drawing in an old file cabinet in the base was clear enough There was a small, narrow entry, do, here on the west side He found it behind a straggly naked bush It was cracked open, wide enough for hih

He looked back, waved his SIG Sauer at the three agents peering around the corner of the barn, a signal to hold their positions, and went in on his belly He pushed the narrow door open an inch at a time Filth everywhere, soed his way in on his elbows, feeling bones crunch beneath him, his SIG Sauer steady in his hand

There was a strange half-light in the barn Dust h the upper s, only shards of glass sticking up in some of the fra He saw bales of hay so old they looked petrified, stacked haphazardly, rusted hs

Then he noticed it In the far corner was another door not ht of the front double barn doors A tack roo Then he made out the outline of the Honda, tucked in the shadows at the far end of the barn The two brothers were in the tack room, no doubt about it And Donny and Rob Arthur? Please, God, let them still be alive