“I’m going out to investigate. You stay in here. I’ll lock the door behind me.”
Her face had gone pale, but she nodded.
Max was thinking it was too bad Farmer Winters hadn’t taken the next step and built a safe room they could use in an emergency. Of course, those had been simpler times. How many farmers would have thought of a safe room?
He walked around the first floor switching off lights, then turned to Olivia. “You have your cell phone?”
“It’s upstairs.”
“Go get it. And stay up there. If you hear anything, call the police.”
“Anything like what?”
“A gunshot.”
She winced, but she was already moving toward the stairs.
“And let’s make sure you don’t shoot me when I come back in. If it’s me, I’ll call out ‘Jack Brandt,’” he said, naming one of his partners instead of himself.
“Okay.”
“And if everything’s okay in there, answer with ‘Runway,’” he said.
She made a face but didn’t voice an objection.
When she was halfway up the stairs, he headed for the back door, turning off more lights as he went and peered out the window into the darkness. He could switch on floodlights, but that would only make him a target for whoever was out there watching. Of course, it might not be a person at all. There were plenty of animals in the area. Raccoons, opossums, foxes. But only a deer would have been big enough to trip the sensors that he, Jack, and Shane had put around the property.
However, he wasn’t going to take a chance on the intruder being a four-legged animal.
Although he and his partners had set up sensors as an early-warning system, they extended only about seventy yards from the house. Any farther out and someone would still have freedom of movement.
Max silently cursed the hasty arrangements to protect the Winters property. But the quick job was out of necessity, he told himself. They’d only had so much time before the meeting tonight. And in any case, they couldn’t cover the whole damn farm with motion sensors.
Plus they’d only gone with the sensors—no electric fences or explosive charges like they employed around the safe houses that Rockfort Security sometimes used. Those defenses would have been a dead giveaway that more was going on besides Olivia Winters and her new fiancé coming back to spend some time at the old homestead.
Max stepped outside into the darkness. After locking the door behind him, he listened intently, hearing nothing. His gaze swung to the barn, and he saw that the door was closed. And it looked like it was still secured by the padlock that Olivia’s father had installed years ago.
Of course, someone could have cut it and made it look like it was intact, but judging from when the sensor had gone off, he didn’t think anyone would have had that much time.
He tested the boards of the back porch, wincing when they squeaked a little. At the bottom of the steps, he walked a few paces from the house, then looked back the way he’d come. When he swung his gaze up, he saw that all the lights on the top floor were off—which was a good move on Olivia’s part. But was she standing at the window, staring out? He would have warned her not to, but he was pretty sure she would have done it anyway. He would have. Staying inside without a clue about what was going on outside would have been difficult for anyone except a timid person who hid from danger. And he already knew that didn’t describe Olivia. She could have stayed in New York and continued modeling. Instead she’d cleared her calendar, come down here, and looked for a detective to help her investigate her friend’s murder. Of course, she apparently hadn’t cleared it with her agent as well. What did that mean exactly?
He switched his focus to his surroundings as he moved silently across the property into the darkness, aware of every sound around him, from the wind rustling the leaves of the trees to the buzz of insects. When he reached a patch of woods about fifty yards from the house, he stopped and listened. The alarm had been silent out here, but it had told him the threat—if there was a threat—was coming from the northwest corner of the property, a wood lot that had grown unkempt in the absence of an on-site resident.
Anyone could be hiding in the deeper shadow under the trees or in the underbrush. And going in there could be dangerous. But it might flush out whoever was stalking the house. There were a lot of possibilities for who it might be—from the fairly innocent to the frankly malevolent. Someone from the meeting they’d left a few hours ago could be curious about the newly married couple and could have come around to check out their story. It could be a neighbor who passed the property often and had noticed that someone was living here after years of the place being vacant. Maybe they thought that whoever was in the house didn’t belong here—and they wanted to check that out. Or it could be the killer, coming for Olivia.