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guess some sort of flare could have been set off, but for what reason?” He sniffed the air again, but smelled only that same rich, loamy scent. No one had burned anything recently, or the smell of smoke would have lingered in the air.
    “An animal could have done this,” Jesse said, indicating the disturbed vegetation. “Two bucks mighta locked horns, or a fox could have caught a rabbit. Don’t see no blood, though. And I don’t see no point to this, other than wasting time.”
    Knox checked his watch: thirteen minutes, a new world rec-ord for Jesse Bingham. “You’re right,” he said, turning around and reversing his path downhill. “I was just curious about those flashes.”
    “I told you, it was heat lightning.”
    “Not if you didn’t hear any thunder, it wasn’t. This was right on top of you.” Any type of lightning caused thunder. Moreover, the flash that had blinded the security cameras in town hadn’t been produced by lightning.
    “Then maybe there was thunder and I just don’t remember it.”
    “That isn’t what you said. You said you couldn’t hear any thunder.”
    “I’m getting old. I don’t hear so good anymore.”
    His patience shredded, Knox turned around and jabbed a finger into Jesse’s chest. “Stop messing with me. Now.”
    Jesse glared at him, but before he could decide whether or not to risk pushing just a little further, the radio on Knox’s belt crackled to life.
    “Code 27,”
said the dispatcher’s voice.
“Code 27; 2490 West Brockton; 10-76.”
    Knox was already heading downhill at a run.
Code 27
meant “homicide/deceased person,” and
10-76
meant an investigator was needed. He fished the radio off his belt and keyed it to give the dispatcher his 10-4 and ETA.
    “Hey!” Jesse yelled behind him, but Knox didn’t slow or in any way acknowledge him.
    He was intimately familiar with all the roads in Peke County, even the back trails. West Brockton began life in Pekesville as simply “Brockton,” but once it crossed over the main highway it became West Brockton. The road was almost exclusively residential, upper-middle-class, though the farther you traveled from town the farther apart houses were. To the best of his recollection, 2490 was about a mile outside the city limits.
    He got back to his car much faster than he’d gone up the hill. Grabbing the blue light from the seat, he slapped it on top of the car and turned it on, then jammed his foot down on the accelerator and left rubber as he rocketed onto the road.
    He recognized the house as soon as he saw it, and not just because of the tangle of county cars and emergency vehicles parked on the far shoulder of the road. He knew the people who lived here—or at least he
had.
Right now he had no idea how many bodies he’d find inside.
    No one had parked in the driveway or yard, at least not yet. He’d taught them well: let an investigator and Boyd Ray, their forensic guy, have a shot at finding some evidence before it was driven over, trampled, or otherwise obliterated—not that they had a big forensic department with all the newest equipment, but, hell, at least give Boyd a chance.
    As Knox got out of his car one of the deputies, Carly Holcomb, came toward him. The expression on her freckled face was as serious as he’d ever seen it.
    “This is Taylor Allen’s house,” Knox said. Taylor was a lawyer, and Knox thought, judging from his dealings with him, a pretty decent one, as lawyers went. He was fiftyish, divorced a couple of years back, and had quickly acquired himself a twenty-nine-year-old trophy wife.
    Carly nodded. “He’s inside,” she said, falling into step beside Knox as he strode toward the house. “When he didn’t show up at his office, his secretary called but didn’t get an answer. She tried his cell phone, and when she didn’t get an answer on it, either, she called Mrs. Allen, who, incidentally, is in Louisville visiting friends. Mrs. Allen reported that she’d talked to Mr. Allen