Page 13 of Forbidden Protector

"I'd move faster if the sheriff hadn't already decided it was weather."

Thirty feet back and to my right, nothing creaks. I know where he is standing anyway, and I lose the end of my own sentence somewhere between the gate and the gravel.

Maren watches me do it.

"You sat where you could see both sides," she says.

"You didn't sit on either one."

One corner of her mouth goes up and comes straight back down.

"Huh," Maren Sullivan says, and goes back to Knox with his hand on Wyatt Mercer's back.

Kathleen Sullivan catches me at the gate.

She takes my gloved hand in both of hers with a warmth that would fool anybody who hasn't spent three years watching people lie about money.

"Agent Tatum. Bitter day."

"Mrs. Sullivan."

"Kathleen. You'll want a heavier coat. That one's cut for a city, and you're going to be outside a good deal more than you planned on." One pat. "Josephine's boy has been arranging himself around you since the second hymn. Two years he's been home, and I've never seen him stand that close to a living soul. Have a hot meal tonight, dear. It's a long winter."

She's gone before my face is in order.

They put Jacob Mercer in the ground at eleven-forty.

The Hutterite women sing something in German that nobody asked them for, four rows of dark headscarves and no accompaniment. It goes up off this hill in a wind that should take it apart and doesn't. Half the county has its hat over its heart. The grandmother with the oxygen line has her chin up and her eyes shut.

I am three rows into the faces when the light changes on my left.

Holt stops a half step ahead of me, angled, shoulder open to the northeast. He isn't looking at the grave. He looks up over the tree line one time, fast, checking something he already has the answer to.

I follow it.

Drone. Small and high, small enough that if you weren't hunting it you'd take it for a bird, and I did.

It holds over the northeast corner, slides west a measured distance, holds, slides again. Even spacing, straight lanes, turning at the end and coming back one lane over like a man mowing a field he's being paid to mow.

Nobody flies that for fun.

My phone is already out and coming up when he moves.

No grab, no word. He steps across in front of me and stops with his back to the northeast, putting I’d guess about two hundred and twenty pounds of himself between me and whatever is up there. Then a hand comes up behind me and hovers at the small of my back, and presses nothing, and waits.

It's a question. Move left.

An inch of air, and I can feel every bit of it through wool and lining and a coat cut for a city. My whole spine comes up, and the small of my back forgets there is a case.

His hand doesn't land.

He didn't even touch me. I don't move.

"Tell me what that is."

"No."

"That's no hobbyist."