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Cuthbert might have been a challenge to talk to, but he was nothing if not efficient. He had the list of contacts ready by the time Faith and Michael were checked into a room at the Danbury Marriott less than a half hour after leaving the park.

“Damn,” Michael said appreciatively. “He must drive as fast as he talks.”

“Or he wrote the email out on his phone,” Faith suggested.

“Still impressive,” Michael said. “I’ll get started on the list.”

He stepped into the other room of their suite. Turk trotted in between the two beds in this room, lay down and almost immediately fell asleep.

Faith started looking into Kevin. Step one was to call Maria back and get names for the half-staffs. Maria only knew first names, which wasn’t very helpful, but if Mike, Bill, and Gary showed up anywhere else in her research, she’d know to prioritize them.

She had a little more luck with his employment. Kevin was a four-year employee at Daring Auto Repair in Danbury. When she called the number and told the manager why she was calling, he cried out, “What? Kevin’s dead?”

“I’m afraid so,” she replied.

“What? How?”

“He was found near a walking trail in Collis P. Huntington Park,” she said. “I’m sorry to say that foul play is confirmed.”

“He was murdered ? That’s crazy!”

“Yes,” Faith agreed. “It most definitely is.”

“Oh man,” he said. “The boys are going to be broken up about this.”

“The boys are?”

“The others at the shop. Kevin was popular here. We called him soldier boy.”

“I see. Who am I speaking with, by the way?”

“I’m the manager.”

Faith rolled her eyes. “I know, but can I get your name for the record?”

“Oh. Sure. I’m Matt Kennedy. I’ve been running the shop here for nine years now. I hired Kevin right out of the Army. That’s why we called him soldier boy, obviously.”

“Figured that,” Faith said. “Can you tell me a little bit about Kevin? You said he was popular.”

“Yeah, he was cool. He always had the biggest smile and the most energy of anyone. Even when his wife left him, he was always happy.”

That fits with the profile of their victims. These were the people who saw his happy side. “When was the last time you saw Kevin?”

“Yesterday at work. He was in until six o’clock.

He was our suspension guy. A lot of guys don’t like doing suspension on modern cars because unibodies are tough to work on.

Shocks and struts are pretty much the same thing, but in a unibody, you have to remove body panels to get to them, and sometimes you end up hitting brake lines by accident or other things that just shouldn’t be in the way.

In a body-on-frame vehicle, the suspension is separate from the body, so you can just pop things in and out.

Point is, people don’t like doing suspension on unibodies, so Kevin was the guy for us.

He was fast, too. He could replace all four corners in two hours on a good day. ”

Faith took Matt at his word that was fast. “Did you spend a lot of time with him outside of work?”

“Not a lot of time, but we’d all go out for drinks every Saturday after work. We were going to go out today, but… shit. I guess we’ll drink here and pour one out to him. Oh shit. His poor family.”

Matt seemed to just be internalizing the fact that his employee was actually dead. His voice was calmer and more subdued as he continued. “We didn’t think to call or anything because he’d already asked for the day off.”

Faith’s ears perked up at that. “He did?”

“Yeah, he said he had something going on with his ex over custody. Nothing serious, just a squabble over payment.”

“And everyone knew about this?”

“I mean, yeah. We were all talking about it at work. That’s why he didn’t head out with us to the bar.”

“Where did he go?”

“Home, I assume. The rest of us didn’t think anything of it. We just went out and had a good time. We usually only go out once a week. This trip was spur of the moment. We figured maybe he had other plans.”

“Which bar was this?”

“Tin Can. It’s on Garrity and Underwood.”

“How long were you there?”

“Until the bar closed. Two o’clock.”

“All of you were there until two o’clock?”

“Yeah. Hey, you don’t think one of us did this, do you?”

Faith would check with the bar to be sure, but it was a long shot that an employee at an auto repair shop in Danbury, Connecticut would drive all the way to Hancock, New York to kill Paul Martinez, so she felt comfortable replying, “No, but I have to cover my bases.”

“Who do you think did this?”

“We’re looking at different leads right now,” she answered. Which was the official way to say they didn’t have a damned clue. “When Kevin left the shop, did he drive or walk?”

“He drove. He had an old Toyota pickup, a T100. Kept it in good shape. Not that you need to do much to Toyotas. They run on a song and a prayer if that’s all you have to give ‘em.”

“What color was it?”

“Red.”

Faith wrote down Red T100 pickup and asked, “Do you have an address for him?”

“Sure. One second.”

He gave her the address a moment later. Faith thanked him and let him go, then looked the address up with the Motor Vehicle Department to get the truck’s license plate. Once she had that, she looked through impound records to see if the truck had been picked up at some point during the night.

Bingo. At ten p.m., someone called in an abandoned Toyota pickup near the junction of Highways 53 and 107 in Redding, a small town near the state park. Faith called the Redding police department and was directed to Blue Star Towing.

The manager of Blue Star, Pedro Alcantara, knew what Faith was talking about immediately. “Yeah, the T100. Beautiful truck. Couldn’t believe someone left it sitting there. Probably a title issue, right?”

“No, the title is fine,” Faith replied. “The owner, unfortunately, was murdered last night.”

A brief pause, then, “Holy shit. Fuck, that’s why he didn’t call back when we told him we recovered his truck.”

“Hard to call back when you’re dead,” Faith agreed. “What time did you receive the call?”

“Three in the morning. Dead even,” Pedro said.

“You guys are always open overnight?”

“Yeah, we’re contracted with AAA to provide twenty-four-hour roadside assistance. We rotate who has to work night shifts, and last night was me and Julio. He was the driver, and I was the dispatcher.”

“Do you remember anything about the person who called?”

“Some trucker. He was on his route and called 911 to say there was a truck abandoned. PD called us, and we came and got it.”

Faith made a note to follow up with PD on the trucker. “Okay, so you get to the truck by what time?”

“Three-thirty-three. I remember because Julio and I were laughing about it.”

“Did you notice anything unusual?” Faith asked.

“Not really. I mean, not noticing anything unusual was unusual.”

Faith straightened in her chair and folded her hands. “Can you explain?”

“I mean, people don’t just abandon cars unless something’s going on, right? Either they’re doing drugs or the car’s stolen, or they got hurt or something. But the truck was fine. Looks like the guy just parked and got out.”

Faith frowned. “And the truck was just on the side of the road?”

“Yeah. Just pulled up to the dirt right before the dirt turned into a concrete divider.”

Faith wondered what would have caused Kevin to get out of his truck in the middle of the night in the middle of almost nowhere.

Had he known the killer and agreed to meet him there, or had some other seemingly innocuous event prompted him to pull over to the side of the highway?

Perhaps he saw another vehicle in need and stopped to help the broken-down motorist, only to discover too late that it was a ruse.

“How long do you believe the truck had been sitting there?” Faith asked.

“Had to have been a couple of hours, at least,” Pedro said. “The engine was cool when we picked it up.”

“Was it drivable?”

“Oh yeah. It still is. You’re welcome to come take a look at it if you want.

We didn’t drive it for liability reasons because we didn’t have the owner’s permission.

It’s going to stay on our lot for thirty days or until the MVD releases the title.

We’ve touched it all over the place to get it onto the truck, and we did need to get inside to load it onto the truck, so there will be a lot of fingerprints, but I’ll talk to Julio.

I’m sure he won’t mind if we give you fingerprint samples so you can figure out which is ours and which might be the bad guy’s. ”

That was a tempting offer, but Faith was pretty sure the bad guy hadn’t touched Kevin’s truck. It was Kevin he was interested in, not the truck.

“I’ll let you know,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Yeah, for sure. That’s crazy. I’ve picked up a lot of vehicles, but I think this is the first murder I’ve seen.”

“Here’s hoping it will be the last one,” Faith said.

“Your mouth to God’s ears.”

She hung up and called the police department.

They gave her a name of Charity Lancaster for the trucker.

Faith got Charity’s commercial DL number and tracked her to a company called Spee-D Shipping out of Baltimore.

Their trucks were equipped with GPS tracking devices, and looking through the data on Charity’s device showed that she didn’t stop anywhere in Connecticut.

She called in the truck while driving and kept on driving all the way to Boston.

So she wasn’t the killer.

She sighed and folded her arms across her chest. She had a timeline now, but like Paul Martinez’s timeline, it ended in a black hole.

Kevin Barnes had last been seen by his coworkers.

He had then driven to Redding for reasons unknown and stopped on the side of the highway, also for reasons unknown.

He had been killed sometime between nightfall and say one a.m., then taken to an archaeological dig in Collis P.

Huntington State Park and buried as they had found him earlier.

She called the Tin Can and got the bar’s security footage sent to her laptop.

She saw the group from Daring Auto arrive.

As Matt had said, they had all stayed there until the bar closed.

It was possible that someone else had left before they arrived at the bar, but that would mean Matt either didn’t notice, or he was complicit in Kevin’s death.

If it was only Kevin they had to worry about, she might have pulled that thread, but the chances that one of them also had an interest in Paul Martinez were very slim.

The trucker angle intrigued her, though. The killer probably wasn't a commercial driver, but maybe he was someone who traveled a lot. Maybe he drove in a circuit throughout the region, or maybe he drifted along the road like Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole.

Except those two had chosen their victims at random. Not entirely at random, but they weren’t nearly so picky as this killer was.

And Faith was certain he was picky. He wanted depressed veterans so he could give them some sort of honorable death. Whether he wanted vengeance and was showing respect to a fallen enemy or he wanted to dispense mercy to people he thought were struggling, Faith didn’t yet know.

But he chose his victims specifically. He chose them .

It all came down to the burial sites. That was the link. That would tell her where to look. Once she knew that, it would be easy to find the person who shouldn’t be there, the person who was either too perfectly in place or just out of place enough to grab her attention.

And she had to hurry. Something told her that their killer would strike again and soon.

He had a taste for it now, and one thing that all serial killers shared was the inability to walk away once they were in the game.

He’d strike again, and unless Faith wanted to look at another body in another shallow grave, she had to find him soon.