Together, Harrow and Gibbons crossed the street and moved up close to the first house. When they were safely into the shadows, Harrow looked back to see Laurene and Choi still beside the Tahoe, but with pistols drawn now, and obviously planning on following at a distance. They’d understood he intended them to ignore his instructions.

Gibbons withdrew his pistol and held it barrel down at his side. Harrow plucked the nine millimeter from his waistband, and the gun felt good in his grasp, an extension of his hand. He flipped the safety off and checked to make sure a bullet resided in the chamber.

The pair crept house-to-house like Kevlar-wearing, heavily armed kids playing ding-dong ditch. When they got to the corner of the cross street before Shelton’s block, they hesitated, Gibbons covering Harrow as he sprinted across and then cut through the yard of the corner house, to plaster himself against its wall, chest heaving.

Then Harrow returned the favor, as Gibbons crossed the street and pressed himself to the wall next to him.

Glancing back, Harrow could see Choi and Chase mimicking their moves half a block behind.

Harrow slipped the pistol in his waistband, but at the small of his back, safety off. If need be, he could get to it, easy.

Gibbons whispered, “Sure you want to do this, son?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Well, then—let’s go pay a call on a freakin’ maniac….”

Staying in the shadows close to the abandoned house, Harrow and Gibbons crossed the yard. Now that he was closing in on his target, Harrow could see the house where he’d been invited by the killer of his family.

The old two-story home had a long wooden unenclosed porch of the kind where a swing once had been, and had once been white, but even in the dark Harrow could see neglect had turned it dingy gray.

No lights.

That was no different from the other houses on the block, and Harrow hadn’t expected to see any. No curtains either, but blinds were pulled down over windows on the second floor.

As they drew closer, Gibbons—a few steps in the lead—stopped jerkily short, and Harrow pulled up even with him.

“Sheriff’s just seen me, Mr. Harrow,” said a voice from the porch.

Gibbons’s pistol was pointing at the darkness.

Then the killer stepped from the shadows and into the moonlight, his back to the house as he gripped his human shield with an arm looped round her waist, and held an automatic pistol to her temple.

Carmen Garcia wore boxer-style shorts and a Kansas Jayhawks sweatshirt that looked way too big, like a little girl playing dress-up in the oversized sweatshirt. Her hair was disheveled, but otherwise she appeared unharmed.

Her eyes revealed fear, but—at least with Harrow and Gibbons on the scene—she seemed to be keeping it under control.

Good, Harrow thought, his eyes on her. You’re doing good….

Shelton was in white short-sleeved shirt and black jeans, as best Harrow could tell.

Pressing the pistol’s snout to Carmen’s left temple, his voice oddly matter of fact, Shelton said, “The sheriff disappears, or it’s over right now.”

Gibbons stood firm, his pistol pointed at the killer’s head, only a splinter of which was visible behind Carmen.

“I can take him,” Gibbons said, his voice icy.

“No,” Harrow snapped. “Back off.”

“I can take him, I said.”

A head shot would mean all motor functions turned off like a switch—Harrow knew that damn well. But not much of Shelton’s head was showing.

And plenty of Carmen’s was.

Crouching down behind his hostage even more, Shelton yelled, “Gibbons needs to back off now!”

“You miss and kill my associate, Herm,” Harrow said softly, his tone just as frigid as the sheriff’s, “then you and I are going to have a real problem. You agreed that I could talk to this man—let me do it.”

Slowly, with obvious reluctance, Gibbons lowered his weapon, and his stance relaxed.

Gruffly he said, “Be right next door if you need me.”

As the sheriff backed away, Harrow eased to the left, putting himself between the man on the porch and the retreating lawman, halting the pissing contest between the two armed parties before it came to Carmen—or any, or all of them—getting killed.

Shelton was still trying to keep an eye on Gibbons as he receded into near-darkness.

“Look at me, Mr. Shelton,” Harrow said. “I’m the one you wanted to talk to—here I am. Look at me.”

Slowly, the killer’s attention shifted to Harrow.

“I’m here,” Harrow said. “You don’t need to send any more messages.”

From behind Carmen, who looked only slightly more relaxed by having the sheriff in the next yard, Shelton said, “You…you know I’ve been sending messages?”

“Sending messages, and creating a target. Yes.”

“Lebanon,” Shelton said, his head popping out just momentarily, revealing an extraordinarily awful smile in an ordinary face. His blue eyes didn’t seem to blink much. “The center point. Where it began. Where it ends.”

“Was there no easier way, Mr. Shelton? Did my family have to die to make up for the loss of yours? Did so many families have to die?”

Shelton was quiet for a long moment—night sounds, insects, birds, rustling trees, provided an eerie orchestration.

Finally, the man holding Carmen managed, “Sacrifices had to be made. Innocent blood is always part of a sacrifice. I’m sorry about your family, Mr. Harrow. I’m sorry about all of them. But they did not die in vain. You are here. And my message will be heard.”

“What is your message, Mr. Shelton?” His voice seemed calm, but within him, Harrow was waging a battle with his emotions, fighting the instinct to rush this sick bastard and blow his demented brains all over that porch, and if Carmen weren’t in harm’s way right now, that’s exactly what he’d do.

From behind the wide-eyed Carmen, Shelton blurted words like pus exploding from a squeezed boil: “They killed my wife and son!”

“Easy,” Harrow said, and patted the air, trying to calm both Shelton and his hostage. And himself.

“That is my message,” Shelton said, his composure back. “Those selfish, evil bastards murdered my family, and left me in a world of pain.”

“Who murdered your family, Mr. Shelton?”

“Brown, Gibbons, their deputies—the whole wretched lot of them…They’re in it together.”

Carmen’s expression begged Harrow to be careful.

“Mr. Shelton—you need to put the gun down, and talk to me. I promise you will have time in front of my cameras to deliver your complete message to the public.”

“You’ll edit it to—”

“No! You are too important now. You have sent messages that have been heard all over this land, but not understood. This is your chance to correct that. To explain.”

Shelton seemed to be thinking this option over. Harrow couldn’t see much of the man, with Carmen a helpless puppet in front of him; but perhaps Harrow’s words were getting through….

“You know, Mr. Shelton, some say you killed your family.”

“Don’t ever say that!” The one eye visible flared. “I’ll kill her! I’ll kill her right now and—”

Carmen was holding her breath, frozen in fear.

“I am not saying that, Mr. Shelton! I am saying that the messages you’ve sent seem to say you’d be capable of such a thing. I know all too well that you have killed other men’s families…why not your own?”

Carmen’s eyes narrowed, questioning Harrow’s tack.

“Stop saying that! Stop saying that. You’re wrong; you’re misinterpreting everything I’ve meant to say.”

“That, Mr. Shelton, is why you need to put the gun down, and go in front of our cameras and explain yourself to the world. Explain that you would never have harmed your family.”

Almost entirely hidden behind his hostage now, Shelton spoke in a clear but oddly small voice in the quiet night: “How did you feel, Harrow, when they accused you of killing your family?”

“…I felt terrible. It made an unbearable sorrow more unbearable.”

“Well…I’m sorry for that. But you did get the message, didn’t you?”

“I…I did.”

“And now you know that I didn’t kill my family. Because I know you didn’t kill yours.”

This logic was nothing Harrow wished to spend time exploring. All he wanted right now was to talk this pathetic but so very dangerous creature into giving up and letting Carmen go.

A vein twitching in Harrow’s forehead was the only hint that under his calm exterior he was fighting the urge to jump the rail of the porch and shove the nine millimeter in the man’s mouth or maybe just strangle him; the desire to destroy the monster that killed Ellen and David coursed in him like lava, burning through his every capillary, vein, and artery.

“You can take my word,” Shelton said, “as the man who killed your family, I did not kill my own.”

Carmen’s eyes were wide with fear, but managed to convey to Harrow that she didn’t understand this insane reasoning any more than he did.

Only Harrow did understand. It reflected how twisted his own path had been that he knew damn well Shelton confessing the murders of Ellen and David, freely, was a gesture of sorts, a blood-stained olive branch.

They had a bond. And only the lunatic on that porch, and the man below who’d been driven half-mad by the lunatic’s actions, could understand that bond.

“I believe you, Mr. Shelton. Why don’t I come up there, and we’ll discuss this further?”

“I like you where you are.”

“No, you need to meet me halfway. You let me take Carmen’s place, and we can work the rest of it out. It’ll be a show of good faith.”

A bit more of Shelton’s head became visible over Carmen’s shoulder as the killer got a better look at Harrow.

“All right,” Shelton said. “You take a step at a time and wait for me to say take another.”

“Fine.”

“And I want your hands up!”

“Fine.”

Harrow approached the stairs—six of them—and took the first one. Shelton moved back, closer to the front door, but the angle of the moon put him in more light. Carmen’s eyes weren’t so wide now; she seemed almost relaxed, or as relaxed as a person could be with a gun snout to her forehead.

“All right, another step.”

Harrow took it.

“Another.”

Harrow did so.

Then Shelton’s eyes darted right, and Harrow realized the killer had seen something he didn’t like.

“You stay put, Herm!” Shelton yelled. The arm around Carmen’s waist tightened and she made a sound, like a child picked up too roughly. “You stay the hell put!”

Harrow glanced over and saw Gibbons at the edge of the shadows of the house next door—he was motionless, but for the weapon in his hand, dropping by degrees.

“Back off, Sheriff,” Harrow said, loud, firm. “Mr. Shelton is complying with everything I’m asking. Let me do this.”

Gibbons dissolved into the darkness.

After several long seconds, Shelton said, “Okay, Mr. Harrow. Take another step.”

He stepped, and in the earpiece whose occasional cop chatter he’d been ignoring, Harrow finally heard something worth registering: “Suspect in better light. Still no shot.”

The voice of the deputy, Colby Wilson.

The sniper was probably deep in the shadows of the houses across the street or possibly on a rooftop. Harrow risked a glimpse right, and caught sight of a boom mike peeking out at the back corner of a porch—either Hughes or Ingram had moved in pretty close. Harrow had gotten away with the glance because the killer’s attention was still on Gibbons, or anyway the darkness where the sheriff lurked.

So Harrow risked a quick look in the other direction, and thought he saw a part in the curtains on the first floor of the nearest abandoned house. The sniper? Or the unblinking eye of a camera?

“Mr. Harrow! What are you looking at?”

Harrow’s eyes snapped back to the killer. “I’m just nervous.”

“Don’t con me. You try conning me, and she’s dead and you’re dead. And I’m dead, but I don’t care because I died a long time ago, so don’t you con me.”

Harrow gestured easily with the upraised hands. “I was checking to see if my camera crew was in position and getting this.”

The slice of his face visible behind Carmen’s included an eye that widened. “Are they? That would be good.”

“Yes, it would. It would get your message out in a much better way.”

“Are they out there?”

“I don’t know. You said, don’t con you. I think so. But I just don’t know.”

Shelton allowed Harrow up the final few steps, and then Harrow was facing Carmen and her captor—perhaps four feet separating them. Ivory washed over Carmen, and she looked fragile and lovely and, of course, terrified.

In Harrow’s ear, the deputy said, “If Harrow’d move a step to his left, I could cap this sumbitch.”

But Harrow moved not an inch, his eyes on the slender wall of flesh that was Carmen, behind which her captor hid, only barely visible there.

What had happened to Jenny Blake? Where was her intel?

Harrow felt the situation slipping like sand through his fingers. Maybe he should dive left and let Gibbons’s man take the shot….

“Okay, Mr. Shelton. Here I am. Let her go, and I’ll be your hostage.”

“I let her go, and a sniper takes me out. Probably that shit Wilson. He’s in on it too, you know!”

“We had a deal….”

“I want a TV camera. You said I could talk to a camera.”

In his left ear, Harrow finally heard Jenny: “Shelton’s wife was named Cathy and his son Mark.”

Harrow said, “How do you think Cathy and Mark would feel about what you’re doing? About what you’ve been doing for the past ten years?”

The eye on view flinched, but the killer’s comeback was quick: “How would your wife feel about you tracking me down, all over hell and TV and gone?”

“She’d hate it,” Harrow said.

“Like mine would what I’ve done.”

“And yet you kept on.”

“I did. And you’re here, aren’t you? What our gentle wives would have done is beside the point. You and me, Mr. Harrow, we’re men. Screwed-up men. We do what we can. We do what we have to do. Anyway, the dead don’t get to have opinions. And your opinion is, you’d like to kill me.”

Carmen’s eyes pleaded with Harrow. He wasn’t sure what she was begging him to do. He wasn’t sure she even knew.

“Maybe,” Harrow said. “Maybe not. We both know this much—nothing brings them back. Not revenge, not justice, nothing. I’d guess you know that better than anybody, Mr. Shelton.”

“Sheriff Gibbons was lead investigator,” Jenny whispered in his ear. “Shelton was his only suspect.”

Wondering why the sheriff had omitted being the lead investigator, Harrow said, “Why does Gibbons think you killed Cathy and Mark?”

“He doesn’t—he was in on it. He’s part of the conspiracy.”

“I need to hear about this conspiracy. America needs to hear. It’s time to let Carmen go, Mr. Shelton, and get those cameras up here and—”

But Shelton was somewhere else: “They wanted the land, all the land,” he was saying. “The ones that wouldn’t sell, they drove out.”

“But you did sell,” Harrow said.

His face flashed from behind Carmen’s and his brow was clenched and his mouth twisted. “Only after they killed my family! That money they gave me, their blood money, that’s what’s financed my deliveries. Oh, I bought that little crummy shack on the other side of town, but the rest, the insurance money for Cathy and Mark, every dollar and cent’s been used to deliver my message to the world. To let everyone know the kind of greedy goddamn grubbing that’s been going on in the center of America.”

“And what is going on, Mr. Shelton?”

“I told you! They want all the land.”

Jenny whispered, “Shelton sold out to Castano Developments.”

“So Castano Developments wants all the land in this neighborhood?”

“Not just here! Everywhere.”

“The whole town?”

“Everywhere, all of it!”

“They want all the land.”

“Now you’re getting it.”

“And they kill people to get it.”

“Yes, yes, yes—and they’re using the deputies and cops, and maybe even the state police as their hatchet men.”

“The state police?”

“Yes, them too. I went to them after Cathy and Mark were killed. They came back and said they couldn’t find anything either. That meant they had to be in on it too. Maybe even the FBI—they listened nice and polite when I drove up to Kansas City, to tell them all about it. But they didn’t do a goddamn thing. Didn’t even pretend to do something, like the state police did. No one has…not till you, Mr. Harrow. Not till you.”

Carmen’s eyes begged him: Stop him…end this….

“When did you talk to all these people?”

“In the weeks and months after the murders, but they didn’t do a damn thing. That’s why I started delivering the messages myself. I knew sooner or later someone would come to my rescue.”

Harrow knew these were the ramblings of a lunatic mind. Shelton thought the evil developers were after his land, and everyone’s land everywhere, and that all of law enforcement had conspired to kill his family.

At this point, the only remaining question was how to get Carmen away from this crazy, before the man decided to deliver one last message….

“Mr. Shelton, how long have you been after these people? Ten years?”

“Ten years.”

“Well, I’ve been investigating this for only a few months. I did look into my family’s deaths, but it took me all these years, and some corn from this county, to bring me to this porch. So if you want us to stop them, you’ve got to share the information you’ve found. That’s going to take time, and we can’t do it here, not like this. We’ll get you in front of a camera, and you will tell your story, and you will tell it in detail.”

Shelton said nothing. The hand with the gun seemed to be shaking, just a little. Was that good, or bad?

“You can’t stay on this porch with a gun to my friend’s head forever,” Harrow said. “Let her go. I’ll stay with you as your hostage, until the cameras can come in.”

Shelton swallowed. “We could go inside and talk. Where this started. Where they killed them. That would be…dramatic, right? Good for TV?”

The gun dropped from Carmen’s temple, but Shelton’s arm was still looped around her waist as the man shifted, about to ease out from behind the woman, if Harrow was any judge.

And in his right ear Harrow heard: “I’ve got a shot, do I have a go order?”

From the darkness, where he was shouting into his radio, Gibbons’s voice registered for all to hear: “Go!”

“Bastards!” Shelton said, and ducked behind Carmen again as the sound split the night and the shot thunked splinteringly into the front door between Harrow and the captor with his hostage.

Shelton’s sudden movement caused Carmen to stumble and the two went down in a heap, Carmen screaming, Shelton making animal sounds as they hit the old wooden slats of the porch. Then Shelton was on his knees, pulling Carmen’s hair as he tried to bring her up as a shield again, his gun-in-hand rising to take its place at her temple.

Looking down at them, Harrow didn’t hesitate—his hand whipped around his back and came back with the nine millimeter, which he aimed and fired in one smooth motion, the bullet punching through Shelton’s forehead, the crack of his skull audible, the gunshot itself a thundercrack that seemed to shake the old house.

The gun clunked from the killer’s hand to the porch as limp fingers released Carmen’s hair, and the self-styled messenger slumped to weathered wooden slats, dead as his family, dead as Harrow’s family, oozing brains that had been damaged long prior to the bullet.

Then Carmen was in Harrow’s arms, sobbing, holding him tight, as they sat on the bottom porch step. For his part, he just stroked her hair and let her cry.