perhaps the farm manager, Pam Gower, who had been away on vacation when Stella died, and who I hadn’t met, but who had been interviewed over the phone by Occam. I’d seen her bio and photograph, and Pam was a bulldog of a woman, midforties with prematurely gray hair. This body was female, but it wasn’t Pam. Instead it was a short, slender, young white woman with cropped blond hair, a girl I had seen on the first day; I had taken her preliminary statement. Ingrid Wayns, a twenty-one-year-old college student, had been ready to graduate, a part-time rider looking to find work in the agribusiness industry. She was stretched out, facedown much like Stella had been, her arms under her as if she fell forward. She was still human looking, still had skin, hair, and her flesh was nearly normal, not oozing green bubbles. Yet.
Ingrid had not been inside the house and there was no reason for anyone in the barn to be dead.
I touched Occam’s elbow to get his attention. Softly, I said, “I need to reread the earth here and around the barn to see if the energies have changed or worsened or spread.”
“I don’t like it, Nell,” he said.
My instant response was less than nice, because it was clear he was talking like a boyfriend and not like my coworker. I held in my reaction and said instead, “I’m not too fond of the idea either, Special Agent Occam, but I wasn’t asking your permission.”
A strange look crossed his face, to be replaced with a dawning comprehension. “Oh.” He stepped back. “It’s hard to let someone I love do things that might hurt ’em.”
“I get that. But that’s the way life is, cat-man. Difficult, dangerous, and disturbing.”
Occam laughed, a single odd, pained note. “You got a point, Ingram. Otherwise you’d be boring. And I reckon I never signed on for boring, not with you, woman. Fine. I’ll accept it. Jist remember. I’m here if you need me.” He flipped me a companionable wave and vanished into the night.
As Occam, the security guys, and T. Laine maneuvered the null room trailer into the barn and scooped up the dead girl, I took a fortifying breath and leaned down to touch the ground with an uninjured pinkie. The death sensation was present but not nearly as strong as the sensation at the house. I stepped into a stall and tested the earth beneath the deep wood shavings. Less strong. I moved into each stall, testing, and most were without the death working. Then I checked the manager’s office. The sensation there was much more powerful, but not on the floor. More as if someone had walked in, touched things, and then left. The coffeemaker was particularly strong, the plastic cracking, and I left a note in the grounds bin that the appliance was contaminated.
Satisfied that the barn was not inherently dangerous in the short term, I sat and opened my laptop, signed on, and started work, but my fingers, still looking frostbitten, ached and my typing was slow. I looked longingly at the coffeemaker and reached slowly back over the chair, stretching my spine.
High in the corner, in the rafters, I spotted a small camera. I managed not to flinch or shout or do anything else, and went back to my business, thinking, wondering why I hadn’t noticed it before. I pulled up the schematics of the house and barn’s security system. There was no camera listed in the manager’s office. Had someone else put a camera here? A spy camera? If so, what was so interesting about this table and the manager’s desk?
I got up, stretched again as if I hadn’t noticed anything, and walked to the spot where I had sat when Occam and I talked to Credence Pacillo. The camera was placed behind a rafter and looked directly down over the desk and the one spot at the table. The angle seemed perfect to watch the laptop that sat there. Someone had been spying on the office. Pacillo? Or maybe Pam Gower? Stella herself?
Out of sight of the camera, I texted the information to HQ and pretty quickly got back a comment from Tandy. Interesting. Overall security feed is not kept in storage but is overwritten every week. Camera is not part of security grid. Will search more on this end. Does camera have memory card?
I texted back, Beats me. 12 ft overhead?
Careful to make sure the camera couldn’t view what I wrote now, but