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"I will be."

Walter started in the direction of the highway. I picked up my shovel and followed him, counting the steps from Orson’s grave to the edge of the forest. When we emerged from the trees, the highway was silent, and a cold fog was descended from the high country. I could only see a hundred yards down the road now — beyond, an impenetrable black mist.

I left my shovel leaning against the largest pine tree I could find. We would need some marker to find this place at night. As we climbed back into the car and the interior lights came on and the seat belt warning beeped, something sank inside of me. Walter was wrong. Perhaps the foggy dusk intensified it, but I was afraid. Driving back toward the inn, my hands trembled as they gripped the steering wheel. I wondered in the back of my mind if I could do it. In spite of everything he’d done, Orson was my brother. My twin. There was a bond.

Walter and I didn’t speak. I imagined our silence might be analogous to that which develops between soldiers who have a bloody task ahead of them. No place for superficial chatter. Only an intense focus on the coming hours, and mental preparation to do a horrible thing.

24

FRIDAY, early afternoon, as the sun reached its apogee and crossed into the western sky, my bed resembled a small arsenal: my subcompact .40 Glock; Walter’s full-size .45; two boxes of Remington .40-caliber 180-grain semijacketed hollow-points; two boxes of Remington .45-caliber 185-grain semijacketed hollow-points; two extra magazines for each handgun; a pair of Amherst RS446 walkie-talkies; eighteen vials of benzodiazepines; one vial of antidote; three hypodermic needles; latex gloves; leather gloves; a penlight; handcuffs; and two mechanic’s suits I’d purchased from an Army-Navy surplus store in Davidson.

The benzodiazepines had been tricky to come by. Walter’s mother-in-law suffered from a panic disorder, and among the sundry medications she stockpiled was a medium-acting sedative called Ativan. He’d helped himself to thirteen 1-mL vials. According to our on-line research, this would be sufficient to keep Orson sedated for a couple of days if need be. The downside, however, was that the onset of Ativan took upward of twenty minutes, and I needed something that could knock Orson down in less than two.

So I’d done a very bad thing.

Horror writers get away with murder in the pursuit of realism, and over the years, I’d befriended attorneys, detectives, and professionals in various fields, all of whom had graciously consulted with me on the accuracy of my novels. The investigative and courtroom procedures in my stories are religiously unerring. I always get the gun right. A coroner friend of mine even let me sit in on an autopsy, just so I could nail the olfactory experience in the opening chapter of my latest book.

There’s a vignette in Blue Murder where the protagonist steals drugs from a hospital. So in the course of my research for the book, I’d asked my doctor, "If you wanted to steal narcotics from a hospital, how would you do it?" Writers can ask these questions, and no one suspects their motives because "it’s for the book," and they show up in the acknowledgments.

He told me exactly what to do, and goddamn if he wasn’t right. His advice: "Raid the recovery room. It doesn’t matter if the narcotics are locked up, as long as the keys are left in drawers that aren’t. Pray for incompetent nurses. Know where the cameras are. Acquire a janitor’s uniform, and stay busy long enough to see where the keys to the narcotics cabinet are kept."

Thanks to careless, unobservant nurses in the recovery room, two days before we left for Woodside, I walked out of Mercy Hospital in Charlotte, North Carolina, with five 1-mL vials of the short-acting benzodiazepine, Versed. Used for sedation in surgical procedures, when administered intravenously, it can render someone unconscious inside of ninety seconds. Unfortunately, it also has the potential to induce