Page 103 of Midnight Creed

“Good ole Carl bought all this land. To develop. You bulldozed bunches of trees. Piled on dirt. Built houses. That’s quite a nice pool back there.”

“Somewhere on this land that you own, all this property that you control—whether developed or still a part of the woods—somewhere close by, you buried my father.”

Her eyes lit up with as much surprise as anger.

Then suddenly, all three of them startled at a knock on the front door.

“Get rid of them,” Gregory told her. He came up close behind Carl and raised the knife. It took every ounce of restraint to not slit the man’s throat right here, right now.

Instead, he shoved Carl’s chair until the man’s belly wedged up against the table, incapacitating him even more. No one would see his zip-tied hands down below if his mother was stupid enough to invite them inside. They would think Carl was simply sitting at the table.

Except for the bump on the head.

She understood. He saw her put on her “we have guests” face before she disappeared around the corner to the entrance.

“Mrs. Ramsey,” said a woman’s voice. “I’m with the task force to find your grandson. I have a few questions I need to ask you.”

“This isn’t a good time. My husband and son just got home. We’re all exhausted. Can it wait a few minutes? Maybe twenty or thirty?

Gregory smiled in spite of himself. His clever mother was giving him a deadline. Not the person on the other side of the door.

How much of who he was—of what he had become—had he learned from her? In the past, she could destroy him in much less time than half an hour. He doubted she had any idea of what he was capable of doing.

69

“This sod looks freshly laid,” Norwich said, examining the spot Grace had alerted to earlier.

“Give me a few minutes, Sheriff,” Creed told her. “I need to check something.”

The clouds lit up around them. A roll of thunder moved closer.

Creed took Grace aside, then asked her to “find Will.” He winced when her immediate response was to take off across the golf course. She wanted to continue to the woods on the other side. Those were thicker than the stretch they’d come through. He reined her in.

Now he knew he’d made another mistake. His mistake. Not Grace’s.

Will had crossed this field of grass. Maybe someone was chasing him. Grace insisted he had run to the woods. To escape?

Creed glanced back at the place where the Jack Russell had alerted. He couldn’t shrug it off as fertilizer. Just because it didn’t make sense to him, or because he hadn’t given her the correct command, didn’t mean she was wrong. Grace was rarely wrong. Sometimes she found things. Other scents she’d been trained to find. And she did it without Creed asking.

He hated to stop her now, but he needed to check her previous alert.

“Let’s take a break,” he told her.

She recognized the phrase and relaxed. It didn’t matter that they had already been standing down and waiting. That was different. They were tending to Hank. She understood that. She was quiet and at his side, knowing the dog had been hurt.

As they walked back, Grace dragged her nose through the dew-slick blades of grass. Instinctively, she was keeping her nose wet. A wet nose helped to collect and navigate scent. She knew she wasn’t finished.

When they got back to Norwich, she asked, “Does that mean this is a false alert?”

“I’m not sure. It was a solid alert. I think we need to check.”

“You mentioned she alerted to the bags of fertilizer earlier. Didn’t you say it was Mr. Monroe’s landscaping truck?”

Creed nodded.

“Sod, fertilizer,” Norwich said, her face tense but her voice hopeful. “It could just be more fertilizer, right?”

“It could.” But he no longer believed it was.