With a few slashes of his hunting blade, a relic of his time in the armed forces, J.P. cut the body down.
Clad in a long, filthy coat, worn sneakers, jeans and a plaid flannel shirt, the dead man landed just this side of the trunk, toppling forward to land facedown on the hard dirt floor.
“Freddie Lansing?” Melba asked, even as Eli crouched, turned the corpse over onto its back and reached for the pillowcase.
“Yes,” Eli said. He would have been a liar if he’d said he wasn’t relieved, but he also knew that this situation was the start of a major crap-show.
He pulled the pillowcase away, revealing Freddie’s purple, bloated face. His tongue protruded, a classic response to strangulation, and his eyes bulged.
Melba was on her way to the SUV to call for backup and the coroner.
She returned after a few minutes.
“Alec and Sam are on their way,” she said. “I told Alec it looks like a suicide, and he asked if he ought to roust one of the state’s CSI teams.”
Eli, standing beside J.P., was looking around the chilly space, chinked with blue sky and sunlight, comparing it to the images Dan had opened up on the dark web, back at Sara’s place.
“What did you tell him?”
Melba looked extremely out of place, in her bright red holiday dress, and she was shivering. Realizing for the first time that she must have forgotten her coat in the rush to get to this place, Eli took off his uniform jacket and laid it over her shoulders.
“I said he was probably the best person to make that particular call,” she replied. “If Freddie Lansing didn’t take his own life—and I don’t see any reason to believe otherwise—then Alec will be able to tell us.”
Eli nodded, mildly distracted. He squinted, found the cot he’d seen online and then the backpack. Went for it.
“What can I do to help?” J.P. asked quietly. He was standing with his booted feet apart and his arms folded. Like Melba, he’d forgotten his coat, but he didn’t look cold.
“Go back to the gate,” Eli suggested, carrying the backpack outside, into the sunshine. J.P. and Melba followed. “Point Alec and the others in the right direction.”
“Got it,” J.P. said, and headed for his truck. On his way, he turned, tossed Melba a grin and remarked, “I like your uniform, Deputy Summers.”
Eli gave a grim chuckle, and Melba pretended she hadn’t heard what J.P. said.
The wind was brisk now, and without his coat, it bit into Eli’s hide like row on row of shark’s teeth.
He set the bag on the hood of the SUV, examined the outside for any kind of identification, but there was nothing beyond a partial orange price tag bearing part of the word “clearance.”
Melba drew nearer, as intrigued as Eli was. Had been since they’d spotted the backpack in Freddie’s website photos.
He’d been in a hurry to get out here, to this isolated, lonely place, not because he’d expected to find another body—he hadn’t—but because of this canvas bag, with its shiny new zipper. He’d known it had a story to tell, an important one.
And he hadn’t been wrong.
Inside were a pair of wrinkled jeans, a crumpled blue hoodie, some dingy underwear and—bingo—a cheap wallet, pink, with rhinestones glued to the flap. Many had already fallen away.
Eli fumbled a little, trying to open the wallet, and Melba took it from him, opened it, drew in an audible breath.
“Here’s our girl,” she said, handing Eli a driver’s license.
The DMV photo was a few years old, and the young woman’s hair was short, instead of long, brown instead of blond, but this was definitely the person Russ Schafer had found on his back lot, shot to death, only the day before.
Her name was—had been—Tiffany Ulbridge, age nineteen, and she hailed from Lubbock, Texas.
Eli got out his phone and speed-dialed Dan Summers.
“Yo,” Dan greeted him. “Find anything?”
“Sure did. Freddie Lansing, for starters, hanging from one of the barn rafters.”
Dan let out a long, low whistle of exclamation. “What else?”
“ID for yesterday’s dead body. Mind running it for me? Since you’re sitting all warm and toasty and full of my sister’s good cooking and we’re out here freezing our asses off, waiting for the coroner?”
“You got a name, Sheriff Andy, or do I have to wait for a Howler?”
Despite the events of the last twenty minutes, Eli chuckled. It was a dry sound, and it hurt his throat a little. “Tiffany Ulbridge.”
“Spelled like it sounds?”
“Yeah,” Eli replied, following up with the address in Lubbock.
He could hear the rapid clicking of Dan’s surprisingly deft fingers on the keyboard. “Let me guess. The info was in the backpack we saw in the pictures.”
“Affirmative. Got anything?”
“Give me a minute, will you? I shifted mental gears after you and Melba shot out of here like clowns out of a cannon—the ball game’s on.”
Eli huffed out a sigh.
Melba pulled Eli’s uniform jacket around her, a little more tightly now, as the wind picked up.
“This has been one hell of a New Year’s,” Dan remarked, still busy. “Makes a man dread Valentine’s Day. Gotta get myself back to the war zone, where it’s safe.”
Eli said nothing; he just waited. He figured if Melba picked up on the gist of this conversation, she’d crawl right into his phone, shimmy through some wormhole in the time/space continuum and rip Dan Summers a new one.
“Okay—yeah—” Dan mused aloud. “Tiffany’s been on the run from home for three years. Looks like the local PD and the home folks searched for her for a while, then gave up. I imagine our brothers and sisters in blue are as overworked and underfunded in Lubbock as they are everywhere else.”
“Anything on social media?”
“Yeah,” Dan said thoughtfully, “but they’re not our Tiffany.”
“Ulbridge can’t be that common a name,” Eli prodded.
He heard vehicles in the distance, bumping over hard ranch roads.
“I’m looking, I’m looking,” Dan chided. “Chill.”
“Oh, I’m chill all right. It’s a wonder my teeth aren’t chattering.”
Melba began to shrug off his coat, and Eli signaled her to keep it on, which she reluctantly did.
J.P.’s old truck arrived first, flanked by two deputies and Alec’s van.