Page 171 of The Woman By the Lake

Fuck.

Harry kept at it.

“Maribeth says Gia eventually started losing it. What she didn’t say out loud in front of Nadia was, the dog was giving a clear warning shit was going down, and it wasn’t going to get better, and Nadia still didn’t let her out. They apparently had words, because Maribeth wanted her to let Gia do her job, but Nadia was dead set against it. In the end, Nadia called my station, but she didn’t let Gia loose.”

“You think Bryce wants payback?” Riggs asked.

“No,” Harry forced out. “Now, I’m gonna tell you, they took out three of your cameras physically. Southside, back, and the one trained this way.”

“God fucking dammit,” Riggs bit out.

“But we checked the feeds, and Maribeth reported timings on what we viewed, and about ten minutes before Gia started barking, the feeds all went to static.”

Riggs chin went into his neck. “Jammed?”

“Yeah,” Harry confirmed. “So we got no visual this time.”

“Grimes saw that video of last time,” Riggs reminded him. “He knows there are cameras. Why don’t you think it’s him?”

“Rus and Karen are here. Wade saw the tracks, and they’ve spent the last half hour following them.”

“Where do they lead?”

Harry locked eyes with him. “To the access road.”

“Fucking shit,” Riggs snarled.

“Brace, brother, and come with me,” Harry said.

Then he moved in the direction of where the stables used to be, and Riggs didn’t like that, but he followed.

He stopped in what Riggs figured was the middle of where those stables were, switched on his Maglite and held it high but aimed to the ground.

Riggs looked that way and felt a chill enter his bloodstream.

Stones were arranged on the ground to make words.

Get Off

Our Land

“Use of an unused access road,” Harry began. “Tracks are the same we saw, male and female. Access to resources, the Wi-Fi jammer. And the word ‘our.’ There are only three people alive who would refer to this land as ‘our,’ and they’re all suspects in three homicides.”

Fuck.

“I’ve never asked, because I thought it was all horseshit, but what kind of crap went down to chase other people off this property?” Riggs queried. “I know about the scratching, anything else?”

“Heard word of whispering outside the windows, as well as scratching on them. What sounded like rocks being smacked together unnaturally. Loud noises of movement in the night in this area, where we are now, that was not the movement of animals. The sound of horses whinnying when there shouldn’t be horses anywhere near. And this isn’t the first message written in stone either.”

Damn.

Harry wasn’t done.

“I know of at least one small, contained fire that was lit in this same area that the people in this cabin didn’t light, but they woke up when the light of it was coming in their windows. Porch furniture moved around during the night. Messages written on windshields in soap, a lot like this one, though ‘our land’ is new. It was more ‘go away,’ ‘leave,’ and ‘you’re not welcome.’ One incident that was reported to Dern we just uncovered in the audit was a shit ton of blood spilled all over the back porch steps. It turned out to be pig’s blood, but it understandably scared the fuck out of the tenants, and they broke their lease the day after they walked out to see that on their porch. And a couple of times that I know of, a woman’s scream, then shotgun blasts.”

Damn.

Thank fuck they hadn’t pulled that kind of shit on Nadia.

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