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“Were either of them?”
“Less than average for Penny. For her, it was three months to immerse herself in one project, with spare time to catch up on her technical reading, and even do some fiction reading.”
“Like a sabbatical.”
“A very well-paying sabbatical. We shared that in common—with no kids or partners waiting for us at home, this was a chance to unplug and focus.”
“And Bruno?”
“It was tougher for him. Not the isolation but being away from his family.” She pauses. “My sessions aren’t covered bypatient privacy—and that was made clear in the waivers—but I don’t want to seem as if I’m blabbing away about people who confided in me professionally.” She shifts position. “I know I can seem like the type who’d do that.”
“As the person relying on your insights to find two missing people, I appreciate anything you can tell me.”
“Bruno is separated from his wife, with the separation beginning with this project and—he hopes—ending with it.”
“Ah. Things were rough at home, and he thinks if he gives her three months of uninterrupted personal time, she’ll welcome him back.”
“Yep. Also, for the sake of full disclosure, the issue was an affair. He had a fling. She wanted him gone. He left… hoping to return.”
“Which may explain his reluctance to socialize with the women here. Either avoiding temptation or avoiding any sense of impropriety. The fact he had an affair might make him more likely to have one with Penny. Or it might make himlesslikely, if he really did regret it.”
“Yep.”
“As for Penny, did you get any sense that she’d be interested?” I ask. “In an affair or a one-nighter? Yolanda couldn’t confirm her sexual preference, which is obviously Penny’s own business, but it is a factor here.”
“No sense pursuing the fling theory if she wasn’t into guys. On a professional level, it never came up. On a personal level? I may have tested the waters in that direction myself. I like Penny. We have a lot in common, and I couldn’t get a read on how she gravitates, but my overtures went undetected. She wasn’t ignoring my pitch—she never saw the ball.”
“Suggesting she’s straight.”
“In my experience, yes.”
I ask Kendra a few more questions, before Yolanda strides in looking for a postmortem-exam update. I thank Kendra, who promises to get me those names she mentioned.
I give Yolanda her update, which only takes a few minutes—yes, it was murder and yes, the knife wound was the cause of death. She wants to know what I got from Kendra. I’m vague there. In the waivers, it stated that the results of the therapy sessions would not be private, but the waivers were ten pages long, and we know from our Rockton experience that no one reads them thoroughly, which is often to our advantage. I’m still not telling Yolanda anything she doesn’t need to know.
Once that’s done, I interview the people Kendra suggested, but get nothing new, so Dalton and I head into the forest looking for Bruno and Penny. Dalton found what he believes is Bruno’s entry point. We expected that to be mostly just a box ticked off the list, something that would have bugged Dalton until he found it.
It turns out to be more. Possibly a lot more.
What we discover is a trail that someone—that someone seeming to be Bruno—has been using routinely, enough that it’s a clear path into the woods. From his residence, he’d been cutting between two buildings on the perimeter and going into the forest. How do we know it’s him? Well, Storm says yes, based on his scent marker, but there are also the boot marks.
This being a jobsite, steel-toed boots are mandatory. Yolanda had chosen the ones we issued. They’re high-end, designed for cooler weather and comfort, and the crew had been pleased. All except Bruno, who needed special boots with arch support, so he’d been allowed to bring his own. That means thateveryone’s boot treads are the same except Bruno’s. And the treads we find on that path are not the standard issue. Multiple iterations of that tread, sometimes atop one another, mean he’s used this path many times.
We continue along the path. After maybe two hundred feet, it joins up with the main one.
“Well, that’s less helpful than I hoped,” Dalton says. “Gotta give him a little credit for the ingenuity, though.”
What he means is that the two paths don’texactlyjoin up. Bruno’s path ends on a rocky patch, which he then used to cross onto the main one without leaving any sign of a branch.
I show Storm the end of the trail. She follows Bruno’s scent over the rock to the main trail. Then she whines, ears plastered to her head.
“Something wrong?” I ask. “Or are you apologizing for not picking it out earlier?”
She can’t answer that, but her look says guilt rather than concern. I pat her head. She’s not a professional tracker, and there are enough scents on the main trail that I don’t blame her for not realizing her second target had joined it. She’d been focused on Penny.
We follow the main trail to the point where it ends and Penny kept going. I ask Storm to check for Bruno’s scent on the path Penny cut. Her reaction says it’s not there.
“So Bruno came out through his secret spot, and joined this trail, but doesn’t seem to have taken the same off-ramp as Penny. I can see their initial paths being separate if they were secretly meeting. Not sure why they’d separate here.”
