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brEE AND SAMPSON THREW up their hands.

“Who are you and what the hell are you doing here?” he demanded.

“I’m a homicide detective,” Sampson said. “Washington, DC, Metro.”

“And I’m a private investigator and former chief of homicide at DC Metro,” Bree said. “We’re looking into the death of Ryan Malcomb. We heard he was interested in buying this ranch.”

“And you figured you could ignore the signs telling you not to trespass because of that?”

“I admit it was a moron move,” Sampson said. “We just wanted to see why Malcomb was interested in owning a place like this.”

“Sheer beauty, maybe?” the man said.

“We saw that,” Bree said. “Can you lower the gun, sir? We are unarmed.”

He hesitated, then lowered the shotgun. He pivoted away from them and racked the shell out of the chamber. He turned back and said somewhat sarcastically, “What’s there to investigate? It was officially an accident. Read the report myself.”

“Your name?” Sampson said, holding out his hand.

“Eldon,” he said. He removed his mitten and shook Sampson’s hand. “Eldon Boyt.”

Bree said, “You the caretaker, Mr. Boyt?”

He nodded. “I look in on the place for the owners.”

“Brazilians.”

“Correct.”

Sampson said, “You’ve met them? The Brazilians?”

“Never had the pleasure,” Boyt said. “Absentee owners.”

“Did you meet Ryan Malcomb when he flew in here to see the ranch?”

He shook his head. “I was over in Denver. My mom’s been sick.”

Bree said, “Why do I get the sense that you’re skeptical of the accident ruling?”

He squinted at her. “You work for an insurance company these days?”

“Something like that.”

After a moment of hesitation, he said, “Follow me.”

Boyt limped back down the snowed-over two-track road and put in a code to open the gate. He got in an old red Ford F-250 parked by their Jeep, led them back down the mountain, and parked just shy of where Malcomb’s van had gone over the guardrail.

The caretaker got out and retrieved an aluminum snow shovel from the back of the pickup. He shoveled and carefully scraped up several inches of snow, from the impact point at the rail back into the road, revealing thick skid marks arcing from the right lane to the left.

Boyt said, “I used to drive a tow truck out of Elko. We had all the interstate chaos. You see enough pileups, you know that for someone to lay down rubber this thick, he’s gotta be driving like a bat out of hell before he hits the brakes to avoid whatever he was trying to avoid.”

“What was Malcomb trying to avoid?” Sampson asked. “An animal?”

“The only animals that can move up and down something this sheer are mountain goats and wild sheep, and neither live in this range.”

“A rock broke free of the cliff and landed here?” Bree asked.

“If there was one, it wasn’t mentioned in the report. It just says he must have been traveling at an excessive speed, lost control somehow, and hit the rail. But look at the skids. To me, it says he was avoiding something big that was sitting right here, blocking the lanes.”

“Like a vehicle?” she asked, trying to see it in her head.

“Now you’re thinking,” Boyt said. “Like a vehicle parked sideways.”