“Look, I’ve got to get off the phone now,” Eli told Dan. “Keep looking. I want to know as much about this girl as I can.”
“Wait. You said you found Freddie Lansing dead? That’s the kid who threatened your niece and nephew, am I right?”
“That’s him. Keep it to yourself, Dan. His folks have to be told before this is made public.”
“Ten-four, good buddy,” Dan replied. “I’ll get the details later.”
“Much later,” Eli answered, with a sigh.
The call ended.
J.P. approached, handed Melba a woman’s ski jacket, red like her dress, and she took it gratefully, wriggling out of Eli’s coat and handing it back.
“Belongs to my sister,” J.P. clarified, though no one had asked about the provenance of the red jacket. “One of them, anyway.”
“Thanks,” Melba said, donning the jacket and zipping it to her chin.
Alec and Sam were climbing out of the van, equipment bags in hand.
“Not again,” Alec said.
“Sorry, but yeah,” Eli replied. “It’s Freddie Lansing. Looks as though he hanged himself, but you never know.”
Sam, thinking his own thoughts, as usual, said nothing.
Eli led them toward the barn. The doors had been partially off their hinges for years, so the entrance was clear.
If Freddie—and maybe Tiffany Ulbridge—had used this place for a refuge of some kind, they must have damn near frozen.
The two deputies—Jake Riverton and Amos Edwards—came up behind Alec and Sam. Jake had a camera in one hand.
Melba filled the lawmen in while Eli and J.P. walked around, looking for any evidence they might find on the ground.
They circled the barn, slowly, Trooper sniffing along behind them, but found nothing other than old bottles, scraps of wood and rusty nails. Back in the day, they’d partied here fairly often with all their friends until J.P.’s dad had landed in the middle of one of their shindigs like a fox in a henhouse and sent everybody scurrying for the hills.
Everybody except J.P., Cord and Eli himself, that is.
He’d herded the three of them back to the ranch house, read them the riot act, then called Cord’s grandparents and Eli’s mom and dad.
All that had happened when they were fifteen—before Reba had all but tanked their friendship—and Eli remembered it fondly, even though he’d caught hell from his folks, not just at home, but all the way there.
He’d missed baseball practice for two solid weeks, nearly losing his place on the team, and that, to his mind, had represented a personal apocalypse.
The end of the known world.
He sighed, shook his head.
Went back into the barn.
Sam, evidently nimble as well as brilliant, was perched astraddle of the rafter, examining the knot that had secured the rope.
“Is that necessary?” Eli asked Alec, in an undertone.
“Sam likes to get an overview,” Alec replied. “Let the kid do his thing. He’s smarter than you and I put together.”
“I don’t doubt that,” Eli admitted, turning his attention to the coroner, who was crouching beside Freddie’s body, wielding a pair of tweezers and dropping fibers, some of them minute, into an evidence bag.
“Too early for a conclusion?” Eli prompted, but carefully.
“I’m 99 percent sure it’s suicide,” Alex responded. “Sam checked his pockets. No note.”
Eli crouched opposite Alec, thrust out another heavy sigh. “You’re sure? Because I’ve got to pay a visit to Freddie’s folks pretty soon, and they’ll want to know exactly what happened.”
“Can’t blame them for that,” Alec sighed as well.
Sam shinnied down a support beam, agile and quick. He landed on the barn floor with a slap of his sneakered feet and hurried over to the cot. Threw back the old sleeping bag atop it.
“Sheriff,” he said, excited. “Guess what I just found?”
Eli, mildly annoyed, stood up and made his way over, along with J.P.
A snub-nosed .45 lay, cold and black, on the lining of the sleeping bag.
Eli silently berated himself for not checking out the cot right away. He’d seen that in Freddie’s pictures, as well as the backpack.
“Don’t touch it,” Sam said.
Eli gave him a look.
To his credit, Sam backed off slightly. “I’ll get more gloves and another evidence bag,” he said.
“You do that,” Eli practically growled.
Sam moved to one of the equipment bags, took out a pair of steel tongs and the promised bag. Brought them to Eli without meeting his gaze.
“Thanks,” Eli half barked, snapping on the gloves and lifting the gun carefully from its resting place.
The chamber was empty.
He sniffed the barrel. The weapon hadn’t been fired, not recently anyway.
He dropped the pistol into the evidence bag and handed the works over to Sam.
Then he shook out the sleeping bag, but there was nothing inside.
He wondered if Freddie had slept here often. If he’d owned the piece or stolen it.
Melba materialized beside Eli. “You think that’s the gun that killed the Ulbridge girl?” she asked, very quietly.
“Yep.” There would have to be ballistics tests, a check for fingerprints, etc., but Eil would have bet his best chance at reelection that they’d just found and bagged the murder weapon.
There was a degree of satisfaction in that, though the fundamentals obviously hadn’t changed. Tiffany Ulbridge was still dead.
She would be nineteen forever.
“So we can be reasonably certain that Freddie Lansing killed her,” Melba speculated.
“That would be my guess, but we can’t afford to jump to conclusions, Deputy. The gun could have been planted, or used to force Freddie into hanging himself. Or it could have nothing to do with either scenario.”
Melba huddled inside her borrowed coat, frowning. “Sometimes this job drives me crazy.”
“Tell me about it,” Eli replied.
At Alec’s request, the deputies, Amos and Jake, who had been standing around up to that point, fetched a body bag and stretcher from the van.
Freddie’s body was heavy, and it took both deputies, Eli and Sam to lay him in the bag.
The zipper made a tearing sound as Sam yanked it closed.