MurderedIin Conard County (Conard County: The Next Generation Book 40)

by Rachel Lee

  * * *

  DOWNSTAIRS, GUS MADE his bed on the sofa, glad he’d decided to stay tonight. He got the feeling that Blaire seriously needed company. He could understand that.

  Being locked inside your own head with your own worries and thoughts could be crazy-making. He’d been there and now tried to avoid it as much as possible.

  Sometimes it was okay. Like her mentioning the winter woods. Like her, he loved that peaceful beauty. Or when he was out taking a lazy ride with Scrappy. But maybe being with Scrappy wasn’t really being alone, he thought wryly.

  He stepped outside to make sure his horse was okay and found that Scrappy had settled onto the ground, having evidently found himself a soft enough spot to curl up in. Scrappy plainly thought the world was safe tonight.

  Back inside he reacquainted himself with the fact that a six-foot couch wasn’t quite long enough for his six-foot-two length, but it wasn’t impossible. Prop his head up a bit on the pillow and he just about made it.

  Judging by the quiet from above, he guessed Blaire had fallen out quickly. Good. He suspected she might not have been sleeping well. Well, why should she? This murder had been bound to reawaken old wounds, even if only to a small degree. He felt some mental twinges himself. But like her, he wondered who could have committed an act like that.

  A very sick man.

  Which didn’t comfort him even a little. It only made the perp more unpredictable.

  Then, with nothing else he could do, he scooched onto his side and sought sleep. As with most soldiers, it wasn’t hard to find.

  Chapter Seven

  Morning brought the dread visit to Jeff. The champagne they’d toasted him with the first night had worn off. Now they wanted to discuss their next move.

  He wanted no part of it, and as they began to talk in the most general terms over coffee and sweet rolls, his mind ran around frantically trying to find a way to step out of this. To get away. To have no further part in their sick game.

  Because he finally had to admit it wasn’t just shocking, it was sick. He hardly recognized his friends anymore. They weren’t the men he’d believed them to be.

  Sociopaths. Psychopaths. Whatever. It didn’t matter. They were strangers to him now, as if they’d been possessed by demons.

  How could he get away from this? He couldn’t commit another murder. He didn’t want to know anything about what they intended to do next. No way.

  But fear held him silent. Maybe too silent because Karl finally said to him, “What the hell is wrong with you, Jeff? You’re as silent as a tomb.”

  That made Will laugh. Maybe in the past a phrase like that would have amused Jeff. Now it only made him feel ill.

  Karl dropped his joking manner. “What’s going on, Jeff?” This time it sounded like an inquisition, barely veiling a threat.

  Jeff’s mind, already skittering around like a cornered rat trying to find an escape, was now joined by a wildly hammering heart. He had to say something, preferably something that would get him out of this mess. He’d done his killing. They knew he couldn’t squeal. He’d implicate himself as a murderer, not as an accomplice.

  But what could he say that wouldn’t make things worse?

  He had to clear his throat to make sound emerge. “You didn’t tell me there was a kid there.”

  “Kid?”

  “Little one. In the tent with his father.”

  “Did he see you?” Will’s immediate concern, Jeff thought bitterly. For his own safety.

  “No. Too dark. Hell, I could barely see him. But I had to listen to his screams all the way up the mountain.”

  The two of them exchanged looks. Jeff was rapidly reaching the point where he didn’t care. If they killed him, at least he’d be out of this.

  “We didn’t know there was a kid,” Karl said.

  “Great planning,” Jeff answered bitterly. “What if I’d hit him, too? You wanna talk about a manhunt?”

  The other two were silent for a minute or so. Then Karl remarked, “They wouldn’t be able to find us anyway. You didn’t leave a trail.”

  Didn’t leave a trail. Well, that was the big problem, wasn’t it? A missing shell casing. And he was rapidly getting to the point where he didn’t care if they knew.

  “I left one thing,” he blurted out.

  Two heads swiveled to look at him, and neither looked very friendly. “What?” Karl demanded.

  “A shell casing.”

  Will swore. “We warned you.”

  “Warn all you want. I forgot it. Do you know how many people were in that campground?” He was winding up now and didn’t care where it took him. “Lots, and as soon as I fired my pistol, the kid started shrieking and the whole place woke up. I didn’t have time to pull out my penlight and look for a casing. I had to get the hell out.”

  Although the truth of it was, he hadn’t even remembered the casing. He might well have been able to find it and remove it. The chance the police hadn’t found it was slim, but he was going to have to go back and look for it anyway, because he couldn’t take the chance that he’d left evidence that could identify him and that it was still lying out there waiting to be found.

  Bad enough he’d had to commit the murder. He sure as hell didn’t want to pay for it.

  “It’s probably no big deal,” Karl said a few minutes later. “The heat of the exploding powder probably would have burned it clean.”

  “And if it didn’t?” Will demanded.

  Karl shrugged. “Say it’s got a fingerprint or two. Partials at best. And Jeff’s never been fingerprinted, have you?”

  Jeff couldn’t force the lie past his throat. It was as if a vise clamped it and wouldn’t let him speak.

  “Jeff?” Will’s voice had tightened and lowered until it almost sounded like a growled threat. “Fingerprints?”

  Jeff wished he were already dead. He’d like to be out of body, watching this all from the ceiling. He wasn’t going to get out of this, though. His silence was already an answer.

  “When I enlisted in the Army. They took everyone’s prints.”

  Karl swore and jumped up from his chair.

  Will looked at him. “You said there’d be nothing left,” Jeff said.

  “There shouldn’t be. That doesn’t mean there won’t be.”

  Jeff cringed instinctively as Will raised his hand. He expected to be struck, and having experienced that once before years ago, he knew it would be painful. The man was religious about staying in shape, and part of that was bodybuilding.

  But Will didn’t strike him. He lowered his hand and said, “We ought to bury you out back right now.”

  Jeff felt a flare of anger, a welcome relief from the terror he’d been living with. These men were supposed to be his friends? What alternate universe had he been living in?

  He leaped up and glared at both of them. “I never wanted to do this, and you know it. I only killed that guy because you threatened to kill me if I didn’t. I’m not happy about it. And if I made a freaking mistake, I’m the only one who’ll go down for it, and you know it!”

  “How are we supposed to know that?” Will asked.

  “Simple, you jackass. No matter what I might tell the cops, you could tell them I’m nuts. There’s nothing to implicate you. Why would I even bother? I told you months ago I’m not a rat.”

  “And we warned you about leaving behind any evidence,” Karl growled. “Damn it, Jeff, are you missing some screws?”

  “No.” Jeff was getting fed up beyond containment. “You’re clear. What do you care if I get picked up?”

  “You need to go back and find it,” Karl said. “Because the crime scene people might not have. You need to look for the shell casing, Jeff.”

  “How could they have missed it?”

  “They’re not big-city cops. A bunch of rubes. They’d miss their
own noses if they didn’t have mirrors.”

  “I can’t go back there,” Jeff said finally, and sagged into his chair.

  “Why not?”

  “Because the time we went on recon, I saw the ranger.”

  Will waved a hand. “Wait a minute. Why were you walking up the road? We told you to avoid that!”

  “Remember, you took me on the recon. And the night of the killing. I came in from the back just like you said.”

  “Then why...” Karl trailed off as if he couldn’t find words.

  “It’s simple,” Jeff admitted. “I knew the ranger when we were in the Army. Just briefly. If she saw me when we drove up there, she never recognized me. As far as she was concerned, I was a total stranger.”

  Karl and Will exchanged long looks, then Karl said, “You’re a jerk, Jeff. A total jerk. What if she remembered you afterward? What if she wonders what the hell you were doing there? You should have told us. We’d have found another place.”

  “I’m telling you...”

  “You don’t get to tell me anything. There’s only one solution for this. You go back and kill her.”

  * * *

  GUS AND BLAIRE decided to make a small social occasion out of the morning. Gus took Scrappy back to his corral just as the first morning light was dusting the eastern sky with pink. A half hour later, as the rim of the sun just started to lift above the mountains, he picked up Blaire in his green Forest Service truck. Some of the large tools rattled in the back but that was par.

  She climbed in beside him, a smile on her face. For now they were out to banish the ugly things and reach for the good ones. One of the best was breakfast at Maude’s diner. For a little while she could allow her concern about what had happened to that man, Jasper, and by extension his little boy, move into the background.

  She used to be better at putting things aside. She’d quickly learned when she was overseas that you just couldn’t let things weigh on you constantly or you’d wear yourself out, or worse, become useless. Compartmentalizing, she thought it was called. Well, for the duration of breakfast she was going to compartmentalize the murder.

  Maybe in a way what made it so hard for her was the protectiveness she felt for all the people camping in the park. As if she were their caretaker or something, which was ridiculous. Still, she handed out bandages, topical antiseptics, advice on a whole bunch of things, like starting a fire in a firepit, and even, at times, how to assemble a tent.

  Mothering adults. Did she have an overinflated sense of her own importance? Or did inexperienced people just decide to go camping?

  Only some of Maude’s morning regulars had arrived at the café, so they had no trouble finding a seat. Blaire had loved Maude’s—or the City Diner as it was properly named—since the first time she had visited it. It was vintage in every respect, right down to the matching tape covering cracks in the upholstery of chairs and booths. The tabletops, some kind of plastic laminate, had been wiped so many times that they showed white spots. And the aromas...ah, the aromas. At this hour, they were mostly of coffee and frying bacon or ham, and enough to create an appetite even on a full stomach.

  Her stomach was far from full.

  They both ordered omelets filled with cheese and ham. Blaire chose rye toast on the side, but Gus asked for a double helping of home fries with his meal. And, of course, coffee, but this time Blaire ordered one of the lattes Maude had started making a few years ago, from what she understood. One concession to modernity.

  It would have been nice to get through the meal without a reminder, but an older man rose from a nearby table and came over to speak to them with little preamble.

  “So what’s with that murder? You got any leads yet?”

  Blaire weighed a response. This would be a bad time to shoot from the hip. Gus was looking at her, probably deciding that since the murder had happened in her park, she should answer. “The police are looking into it. Right now, you probably know as much as I do.”

  The man nodded, rubbing his chin. Calloused skin rasped on beard stubble. “Folks are talking about some other murders, too. Been five of them in the mountains.”

  “I wouldn’t know about them.”

  He shook his head. “I think people are inclined to make up stories because it’s more interesting, if you know what I mean. Well, I thought maybe you could give me some ammo to stop some of that talk.”

  “Sorry, I know as much as you do.”

  He glanced at her name tag. “Thanks, Ranger Afton.” Then he returned to his table.

  “So much for forgetting for half an hour,” she mumbled as she lifted the latte to her lips.

  “I guess once you poked your nose out, someone was going to ask about it.”

  “He could have been a bigger nuisance,” she admitted and pulled a smile from somewhere. “So much for our little social hour.”

  “We can try it again around a campfire tonight.”

  Her smile broadened. “I like the sound of that.” And she did. It had been a while since she’d done that, and never with Gus. Sometimes she held campfires with storytelling for guests at the camp, especially when there were quite a few children of appropriate age.

  She enjoyed those times, times when all the bad stuff at the back of her mind went into dark corners and stayed there.

  After breakfast, they walked over to the sheriff’s office. Blaire didn’t spend a whole lot of time with the police, but she knew a few of the officers and greeted them. Gus seemed to know everyone there who was getting ready to go out on patrol or settling into a desk. He was, after all, law enforcement himself.

  She still found it hard to get to know people. Brief conversations with campers, or informative campfires, were different somehow. Odd, but she hadn’t always been that way. Something had happened to her in her time in the Army. It was almost as if she were afraid to commit any real emotion, as if she feared the person would just leave. As so many of her friends had during that year in the ’Stan.

  She gave herself an internal shake, telling herself not to go there. It was over except inside her own head. Ghosts. Just ghosts.

  Velma, the eternal dispatcher, waved them back to Gage’s office with a cigarette in her hand. Over her head on the wall a huge no-smoking sign hung.

  Blaire stifled a giggle.

  “Skip the coffee,” Gus whispered as they entered the back hallway. “Some of the deputies say it tastes like embalming fluid.”

  Another reason to laugh. Was she ready for that? She guessed she was. But everything changed the instant they stepped into Gage Dalton’s office.

  The sheriff, one side of his face scarred by an old burn, motioned them to sit in the chairs facing his desk. If she sat just right, Blaire could see around the tippy stacks of paper and the old-fashioned cathode-ray tube monitor on the computer. That thing needed to be put out to pasture, she thought.

  “Need a bigger desk?” she heard herself ask.

  Gage chuckled. “I need not to have to keep every report on paper as well as on the computer. Don’t ask me why. I keep thinking I should make an executive decision to put a halt to the duplication, but then a clerk over at the courthouse reminds me we’ll always need a paper trail. What if the computers go down or get hacked? I still need an answer for that one. So, what’s up?”

  Gus looked at Blaire, so she spoke first. “We want to do a perimeter check, but we don’t want to get in your way. And if there’s anything you’ve discovered about the murder that you can share, it’d be really helpful.”

  Gage looked at both of them. “Don’t you have your own park to watch?” he asked Gus.

  “Right now I want to help catch this guy so Blaire isn’t out there all alone at night wondering if he’s still in the woods.”

  Gage nodded. “I hadn’t thought of that. We’ve been presuming he’s long gone. No reason to hang around. And as near as w
e can tell so far, he picked Jasper at random. He worked as an accountant for an oil company. No reason to have any enemies. God-fearing, churchgoing and nobody so far has a harsh word to say. Although that could change.”

  She couldn’t help herself. “How is Jimmy? The little boy?”

  “His mom says he doesn’t seem to be aware of what happened, but she’s taking him to therapy anyway. He’s going to need help, at the very least, with dealing with his dad being gone for good.”

  “I should say so.” She shook her head, remembering that sobbing little boy in her arms on a cold, cold night.

  “His mom says she can’t separate him from the rescue blanket, so you made a hit with that one.”

  “Space blanket,” she said. “That’s what I told him. Maybe he’ll dream of being an astronaut.” She sighed. “But back to the big questions. I’m hearing from one of my team members that people are talking about this murder being related to others.”

  “I’m hearing that, too. I have some investigators looking into it and consulting with other police departments. We’ll see if we can find any links. God knows we need something more than a spent shell casing.”

  Gus leaned forward. “He left a shell casing behind? That’s amateurish.”

  “Yeah, it is,” Gage agreed. “Very. So the likelihood that he’s responsible for other murders that left no evidence behind is pretty slim.”

  “Blaire had an idea,” Gus said. He looked at her.

  “It’s probably silly,” she said, ready to dismiss it.

  “Nothing’s silly,” Gus replied, “and certainly not from you with where you’ve been. Spit it out.”

  She shrugged one shoulder. “It seems random. But when you add in the other murders people have mentioned, maybe... Maybe it’s not one guy acting alone. Especially since I’m hearing that they’re all different, but you say they left no evidence behind.”

  Gage nodded thoughtfully. “I’m not ready to agree, but it’s an interesting notion. Let me see what I get back from other agencies. Then there’s the question of what you mean by a perimeter search.”