Turn to Stone by Brian Freeman Page A

nothing left,” she said.
    Stride saw the discomfort in her face and didn’t like what it meant. He headed down the hallway, which was lined with family photographs, and he paused to study them. Percy and Kelli were an odd couple in the pictures, not really looking like they belonged together. Percy didn’t smile. Kelli smiled, but it looked like the nervous smile of someone whistling in a graveyard. He saw their master bedroom on the left, which had an unmade king bed. He passed a narrow bathroom with a frosted window leading outside. Opposite the bathroom was a small bedroom crowded with an oak desk and lacquer bookshelves.
    The desk was empty. Swept clean.
    He took a step into the office. Kelli was behind him.
    “I unlocked the room today and found it like this,” she said. “There’s fresh ash in the fire pit outside. I think he burned all of his notes before he killed himself.”
    Stride turned around and stared at her. “Or did you burn them?”
    “I didn’t.”
    “Weik will think you did.”
    “I swear I didn’t. This is the way I found his office. I hunted through the desk, and it’s empty. The only thing I found was a piece of paper that had fallen behind one of the drawers.”
    “What was it?” Stride asked.
    “It was a page copied from a credit card statement. Percy had highlighted a couple entries.”
    “Was it Greg Hamlin’s?”
    “I didn’t look that carefully.”
    “Do you still have it?”
    She nodded. She left the room and went into their bedroom, and she returned a moment later with a folded piece of paper in her hand. He studied the page and saw that it was an excerpt from an American Express bill. The accountholder was Greg Hamlin. Two entries from the previous month had been marked in yellow: a charge from a locksmith in Appleton and from a Green Bay restaurant named Kroll’s.
    Percy had also scrawled an acronym in the margin: FOB .
    “Do either of these charges mean anything to you?” he asked.
    “No.”
    “What about FOB?”
    “I have no idea what that means.”
    “Hope Hamlin told me that one of her customers saw Greg with a woman in Green Bay. Was it you?”
    “It wasn’t. I told you, I didn’t know him.”
    Stride was frustrated. “Kelli, can you think of any reason at all why Percy would have killed Greg Hamlin?”
    “No, because I don’t believe he did. That’s not the man he was. Whatever happened to him, you’ll never convince me that Percy was a killer.”
    Stride studied the rest of the office. Percy had been thorough in cleaning up. He’d left nothing in the desk, nothing in the wastebasket. Only the bookshelves had been left behind. He saw an unsorted collection of hardcovers and paperbacks. Mysteries. Law books on criminal procedure. Religious fiction. On one shelf, he also spotted several books with titles in German. The German volumes were a mixture of textbooks and Thomas Mann novels, as well as a collection of Grimm’s fairy tales. Stride pulled the book off the shelf and noted the contents. The collection included a story that Neal Gandy had mentioned: Der Teufel mit den drei goldenen Haaren.
    “Did Percy speak German?” Stride asked.
    “No, he didn’t.”
    “Then why the books?”
    “They’re mine. I learned German for my degree. Many of the best psychologists were German, so I wanted to be able to read their theories in the original language, not in translation.”
    “So you speak German?”
    “Yes.”
    Stride closed his eyes. She sensed his anxiety.
    “I don’t understand,” she went on. “What difference does that make?”
    When he opened his eyes again, she’d already backed away from him. She was in the doorway of the bathroom across the hall, and her face was white. Somehow, he thought she knew what he was about to say, and that was a bad thing. A very, very bad thing.
    “Hamlin’s body,” he said.
    She swallowed hard. She touched the tattoo on her neck, as if the snakes were alive. “Yes?”
    “His killer carved a word