Spencerville

They moved another twenty yards and stopped again. To their right, about a hundred yards away, sitting in the large clearing that ran to the lake's edge and silhouetted against the lake, was an A-frame house of dark wood.

They both stared at the house a moment, then Keith raised his binoculars. The house had sort of an alpine look and was built on cement-block columns, he saw, also that it was elevated a full story above the ground. A raised, cantilevered deck ran completely around the house, giving Baxter a full 360-degree view from a raised vantage point. A stone chimney rose from the center of the roof, and smoke drifted toward them, so they were upwind from any dogs. Parked in the open garage beneath the A-frame structure was a dark Ford Bronco.

The house was set at an angle to the lakeshore, so that Keith could see the front of the house as well as the long north side. Light came from the dormered windows set into the sloping roofline and also from the sliding glass doors that led onto the deck, and, as he watched, a fleeting figure — he couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman — passed in front of the glass doors.

Keith lowered the binoculars. "This is it."

From the direction of the house, a dog barked.

Chapter Thirty-eight

Cliff Baxter strapped on his holster and put on his bulletproof vest. He went to his gun rack and took down his Sako, model TRG-21, which was his night rifle, with an Army-surplus infrared scope mounted on it. The rifle, made in Finland, had cost the taxpayers of Spencerville four thousand dollars, and the scope another thousand, and in his opinion, the rifle and scope together made about the most accurate and deadly night-sniper system in the world.

He shut off the lights in the living room so he wouldn't be backlighted and slid open the glass door that led from the living room to the elevated deck.

Baxter dropped to one knee behind the deck railing and raised the rifle, sighting through the scope and adjusting the infrared image with the focus knob. His right eye was still fuzzy from where Landry had jabbed him, but the magnification helped.

He looked out into the woods that started about a hundred yards across the open space around the house, and scanned along the edge of the pine trees, but didn't see anything.

Baxter wasn't certain which dog barked, or why, so he walked in a low crouch around the continuous deck, looking through the variable-power scope at the woods that surrounded the house on three sides, then scanned the shoreline of the lake, which, like the woods, was about a hundred yards away across open terrain. He focused on the waters of the lake itself but didn't see any boats.

One of the dogs, the Labrador retriever, was tethered to a dog run parallel to the lake side of the house. The second dog, a golden retriever, was on its dog run, which ran from the lake, across the front of the house, out toward the woods where the dirt road came into the clearing. The third dog, a German shepherd, was out toward the rear of the house. The shepherd wasn't on a wire run, but was on a fifty-yard-long leash, attached to a pole, that allowed it to roam at will as far as the woods and as close as the house. He was satisfied that the placement of these dogs covered the perimeter of the clearing around his house.

They were good dogs, Baxter thought, but they barked at nearly everything. Still, when they barked, he checked it out. He went back to the front deck and, again in a kneeling stance, he raised the rifle and pointed it toward the dirt road. It sounded like the golden retriever who'd barked, and in fact the retriever was at the end of its run near the wood line. But Baxter noticed that the wind was coming off the lake now, so the dog probably couldn't smell anything upwind. But it must have heard or seen something. Baxter adjusted the focus knob again and concentrated on the infrared images as he slowly scanned from left to right.

He focused on the golden retriever again and saw that the dog was facing toward the woods about thirty yards left of where the dirt road began. Baxter dropped into a prone firing position, rested the rifle on the deck below the bottom slat, and sighted to where the retriever was pointing. He aimed low at the base of the pine trees and squeezed off a single round.

The shot echoed through the trees and over the lake behind him, breaking into the silence of the night. All three dogs began barking. Baxter sighted again and fired another round, then another.

The echo died away, and the dogs quieted down. Baxter lay motionless, peering through the scope, waiting for a sound or movement in the pine, and waiting, too, for return fire. After two full minutes, he decided there was nothing out there, or if there was, it was gone or dead. "Maybe a deer." They liked to feed after dark during the hunting season, but as soon as the dogs barked, they ran. So why was the dog still looking into the woods? "Maybe a rabbit or squirrel. Yeah..."