A thermal sweep was next. Dane pulled the handheld from his jacket. It was a black unit the size of a paperback, with a small screen on the back rendering the world in a wash of blue and purple where it was cold and yellow and white where it wasn’t. A body behind the toolshed would read as a hot smear against the dark. A car engine that had been running in the last twenty minutes would still glow where the hood met the grille.
Dane ran it slowly across the wall, the gate, and the line of bare hedge at the edge of the yard. The screen remained cool.
I took it and ran it across the toolshed and the empty stretch of grass falling away toward the trees, watching the screen remain calm all the way to the tree line.
Nothing read warm that shouldn’t have.
We were halfway through a check of the gate sensor when the camera at the mouth of the drive pulsed an alert. Dane pulled his phone, thumbed the feed, and held it up between us.
A car was easing past the entrance to the drive, not stopping, but slow. Twenty-five where thirty-five was the rhythm of the road. It was the speed of a driver who wanted to look at the gate without slowing down enough to make it obvious.
Dane was already moving, drawing out his sidearm. He jogged down the drive, but by the time the car would have been visible, it was gone.
He exhaled and pushed his sidearm back into the holster. I did the same.
The adrenaline hit clean and hard. We returned to the house, and Dane’s shoulder brushed mine on the way to the door.
I followed him into the mudroom. He closed and locked the back door behind us, throwing the deadbolt.
Reed met us at the inner door. “Anything?”
“Slow car at the gate. Plate run on it now.”
Reed went back to the front. We hung our jackets. Dane peeled out of his and shook the rain off the shoulders. His hair wasdamp at the ends where the hood hadn’t covered it. A single drop traced the line of his throat and disappeared into the collar of the henley underneath.
I had to look away.
He’d caught me looking. His hand paused on the hook for a half-second after he hung his jacket. He turned to the sink, washed his hands, and dried them on the towel hanging over the oven door handle.
“You think Cabot’s wrong?”
I leaned against the opposite counter. “I think lonely men are easy to weaponize.”
“Do you think Henry’s lonely and vulnerable, or do you think he’s the weapon?”
“I think both can be true.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s all I’ve got.”
Dane was three feet from me. The light caught the side of his throat, still damp from the misty weather outside.
I placed my hand on the side of his cheek and leaned in for a kiss. I tasted rain and coffee on his lips.
“You’re off in twenty minutes, Farrow. Go get some sleep.”
“I will,” I said.
“I mean it.”
Chapter fifteen
Dane
My watch shift was almost over, and I joined Cabot in the kitchen. He had three pages of Harcourt names in columns, and a fourth of event timelines spread on the dining table. He had a coffee mug to his right with a thin, pale film set across the surface.
I set a fresh mug beside the cold one and sat at the head of the table. “Drink that one,” I said.