Chapter 8 - The Neighbor Who Refused to Disappear
Mr. Harlan Pierce had lived beside the farmhouse for forty-three years.
He remembered Grandpa's old tractor, the peach harvest that failed after a late frost, and the year I left for the Navy.
When I warned him about the recording, he answered with the stubbornness that had made him an excellent witness.
“I told the truth once, Evelyn. I can do it again.”
Price arranged for an officer to take another statement and advised Pierce to report any contact immediately.
Pierce met us at the county offices rather than his home.
He brought photographs he had taken during my father's visit with the developers.
One showed Dad beside a survey marker near the east field.
Another showed Conrad Vale measuring the boundary with a handheld device.
A third showed an unfamiliar man carrying a rectangular equipment case toward the barn.
Pierce had assumed they were prospective contractors.
Mara enlarged the photograph and noticed a distinctive patch on the man's jacket.
The patch belonged to a private security contractor retained by the development company.
Kessler verified the contractor had been hired for site assessments but insisted no one had authorized entry onto my land.
A field supervisor named Owen Briggs had submitted expense reports for work that day.
His reports included a fee for “site access coordination.”
The payee was Carter Consulting.
A business registry search showed the entity had been dissolved years earlier, but its name survived on invoices.
Price would have to determine whether the payments were genuine, misdirected, or fabricated.
I found myself increasingly frustrated by the distance between what looked obvious and what investigators could prove.
On the drive home, Pierce called me.
“Evelyn, I forgot one thing,” he said.
“The fellow carrying the case came back alone after dark.”
“Did you see what he did?”
“He went into the old smokehouse, not the barn.”
My grandfather had converted the smokehouse into a locked storage shed before I left home.
After Grandpa died, I changed the farmhouse locks but never replaced its rusted padlock.
When Ortiz inspected it, the lock had fresh scratches.
Inside, behind stacked fence posts, was a hidden electrical outlet wired to a small transmitter.
The transmitter had no current power supply.
A technician photographed the setup and removed it for examination.
I stood at the doorway, chilled by the thought that someone might have monitored the property while pretending I had abandoned it.
The next afternoon, Price called.
The device contained a memory card.
Its oldest saved video was dated eighteen months earlier, the same week as the forged trust deed.
The camera angle showed the farmhouse kitchen.
May you like
And in the first recording, someone who looked exactly like me walked through the back door.
