In twenty words or less the note said lack of funding equals lack of job. Dave McGuire shook his head—once again the world had thrown him away, yet before he could quite digest the news the phone rang, bringing worse.
Thanks to Vermont’s third-world cell coverage Dave only understood Chris Carter to say that he was in trouble. For a few moments everything was garbled—until he came back, a little stronger with something about a mutual friend having died in a fire—and then more silence. Dave was about to give up when through static he heard Chris say that he knew who set the fire and that the murderer was now after him.
He wasn’t sure Chris was still on the line when he shouted for him to go straight to the police. The only audible response was bad idea.
It’s a solid eight hours from DC to Vermont with good weather and the Jersey Turnpike on its best behavior—but with snow and in a vintage Fiat? By the time Dave and Amy Sinclair reached Brattleboro Chris had disappeared. The only clue they found in his apartment was a quirky reference to a Robert Frost poem. Dave was baffled. Chris was a right-brainer with a practiced aversion to all things literary.
Asking around town he learned that Chris was working for Vanguard-Wolfe a company formed of a merger between a local developer and a major-leaguer from Newark. Their high-profile project in Putney made the news every night. Those who knew Chris worried about a cold darkness that had overcome him since returning from a corporate meeting in Las Vegas. Chris refused to talk about it.
A disinterested police sergeant took Dave’s missing person report. Worse still was the detective assigned to the case that at best would mail in his investigation. After several false leads, he and Amy got a break working with Chris’s only clue. Tucked inside a Robert Frost collection they found a hidden flash drive containing what Chris named the Dead End File—a list of holdout property owners—some who had died, including the mutual friend Chris mentioned. The pending list included a priest in Putney.
Sacred Heart occupied the centerpiece for what would be the Putney Vista project. The town was divided between loyal members who didn’t want their church bulldozed, and others who prized jobs and prosperity over a relic from the town’s past. As a warning to the priest, the church’s old caretaker was killed in his house behind the rectory. Father Jack Benson felt responsible, and fell into the grip of alcohol. Dave and Amy were taken by the beauty and history of the old church and agreed with the priest that the town was on the verge of selling its soul. Dave connected Chris’s disappearance with Jack’s worries and chose to help him.
With the assigned detective out of town Dave pursued what leads he could and was attacked by the man he suspected abducted and possibly killed Chris, a principal in the company Chris left after the Las Vegas meeting.
While sketching a portrait at Brattleboro Rehab Amy uncovered a love tryst between a mental patient and an intern. The lovers’ hideaway provided an accidental view of Chris’s murder on the icebound West River.
Dave can convict the murderer if the shaky priest can convince the reluctant witness to testify—and if he himself isn’t the next victim.