The Bennett estate was one of those places people liked to drive by just for a look and a daydream. The three-story manor house and the white-fenced fiercely green pasture where their prize horses ran were something out of a painting of old Kentucky when slaves knew their place and the master walked the grounds with a riding crop in one hand and a long-barreled Navy revolver in the other.

The drive was filled with three police cars, an ambulance, and the yellow Caddy convertible of the county medical examiner, who went by the name of Harry Sykes, if that last name tells you anything.

Kenny’s black Harley was parked next to the gated entrance. I pulled off the gravel road, parked, and walked up to him. It was just now nine thirty and the temperature was eighty-four.

“I see Jamie came through for you again, huh? She forgot to tell you I called.”

“Isn’t her fault. She’s having trouble with Turk.”

“Yeah, I shouldn’t have said that. Jamie’s my buddy.”

“She needs to lose him. Fast.” I nodded to the estate. “What happened?”

“Your friend Molly was here and got the basic details and headed back to write it for the paper. I guess Linda got up this morning and couldn’t find her old man in the house. She said that he walked the grounds at night when he couldn’t sleep, but when she went looking for him she found him out on the far side of the pavilion. Somebody’d stabbed him twice in the neck and once in the back.”

“She say anything about suspects?”

“No. And neither did William Hughes. He was headed into town. He said what Linda did, that the old man liked to walk the grounds at night. He looked shook up. I’ve never seen him like that.”

Bennett had served in two wars, the big one as well as Korea. As a captain during the Inchon landing, one of the most decisive battles of the Korean conflict, he’d saved the wounded William Hughes’s life by dragging him to safety and being shot twice in the chest while doing it.