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predator-prey response is?”
    “I can guess,” she said. “Critter runs in the woods, a dog chases it. Tries to kill it. It’s in its nature.”
    “There you go,” Sunday said, snapping his fingers at her. “And the way trainers build that predator-prey response is by taking something away from the dog, something that the dog values highly, like a bone or a toy. They let Bowser go for days thinking his favorite bone or toy is gone for good. Then they show it to him attached to a rope. When that dog goes to chase his toy, the trainer jerks it just out of reach—all the time, just out of reach. Isn’t that right, Mitch?”
    Cochran downshifted and slowed, saying, “The dog goes fucking crazy, doing anything in his power to have that toy again. That’s when the trainer steps in and takes total control of the situation, uses the toy as a reward for a job well done.”
    He glanced at Acadia. “And how do I know
that?
We had fucking dogs at Abu Ghraib. Lots of ’em.”
    Cochran took a right turn onto a muddy road a few miles south of Frostburg, in rural northwestern Maryland. They passed a ramshackle farm, and Sunday heard the echoes of pigs squealing in his mind. The road wound up into an oak forest clad in new lime-green leaves.
    A mile into the woods, Sunday started looking at the trees closely, and then he said, “That’s it. Those birches on the right. Park over there.”

CHAPTER
8
     
    COCHRAN PULLED THE DURANGO almost to the drainage ditch next to three birches that grew close together, almost as if they were shoots of the same tree.
    “We’ve got ten minutes still,” Sunday said, and he turned his attention to the laptop again. But Cross was nowhere to be seen around the construction site.
    “You can’t go in early?” Acadia asked, sounding irked. “I told you seventy-two hours is the limit of how far we can push things. That window’s closing fast.”
    Sunday checked his watch. “We’re at sixty-seven hours. We’ll make it.”
    “I gotta go number two,” Cochran said.
    “What are you, in kindergarten?” Acadia snapped.
    “Maybe
that’s
my problem, I’m too fucking childlike.” Cochran laughed, got out of the car, and walked off.
    Sunday looked off through the windshield in silence, and then said, “That farm we passed brought back memories. Mulch grew up in a hellhole like that.”
    “The fabled origins?” Acadia asked.
    “Whence Mulch sprang. And where Mulch died.”
    “Ever been back?”
    “Not even close,” Sunday said, checking his watch. “I think I’m good to go now.”
    “Sure you don’t want one of us along?” Acadia asked.
    Sunday shook his head and said, “It took me a long time to find this guy and gain his trust. I don’t want to spook him in any way, especially not now, when he’s proven so resourceful.”
    “Don’t forget the honey,” Acadia said, and she handed Sunday a small gym bag with a Nike swoosh on it.
    “I’m not back in fifteen, you and Cochran come looking, but slow, right?”
    “Armed?”
    “Definitely.”
    Sunday got out, smelling the rot of spring everywhere around him. It had started to sprinkle. He decided he liked the light rain. Hitting the new leaves on the trees, it would soften all other sound and give him a chance to check out the scene before he fully committed.
    Sunday slid down the bank, then found and followed an overgrown logging trail, mindful to keep the bag raised so the brambles and thorns would not tear it. Soon he smelled wood smoke and slowed to a creep. He approached a ledge that overlooked a clearing and, beyond it, a swollen creek.
    To his right and below, hard by the creek bank, there was a plywood-and-tarpaper shack. Smoke curled from a stovepipe that jutted from the roof. An old blue Chevy pickup with a capper sat between the shack and a barn of sorts.
    Sunday noticed the sheet across the window that faced in his direction was fluttering, and he knew he’d been spotted. So he held up the bag and climbed over the