Shotgun Sheriff

“There were no gloves found at the scene.”

She had an answer for that as well. “He could have discarded them and then hit himself over the head to make it look as if he’d been set up.”

“Then he would have had to change his clothes, too, because there was no GSR on his shirt, jeans, belt, watch, badge, holster or boots.”

“You tested all those items for gunshot residue?”

“Yeah, I did,” he snapped. “This might be a small town, Sergeant Hutton, but we’re not idiots. Shane and I have both taken workshops on crime-scene processing, and we keep GSR test kits in the office.”

It sounded as if Sheriff Hardin had been thorough, but she would reserve judgment on whether he’d learned enough in those workshops.

“But Shane was holding the murder weapon, right?” Livvy clarified.

“Appears to have been, but it wasn’t his gun. He says he has no idea who it belongs to. The bullet taken from Marcie’s body is on the way to the lab for comparison, and we’re still searching the databases to try to figure out the owner of the gun.”

Good. She’d call soon and press for those results and the plaster castings of the footprints. Because the sooner she finished this crime scene, the sooner she could get out of here and head back to Austin. She didn’t mind small towns, had even grown up in one, but this small town—and its sheriff—could soon get to her.

Livvy continued to visually comb the right side of the path, and when they got to the bottom, they started back up while she examined the opposite side. There was no sign of a silver phone.

Mercy.

She didn’t want to explain to her boss how she’d let possible crucial evidence disappear from a crime scene that she was working. She had to find that phone or else pray the cell records could be accessed.

“What about the blood spatter in the cabin?” Reed asked, grabbing her attention again.

“I’m not finished processing the scene yet.” In fact, she’d barely started though she had already spent nearly an hour inside. She had hours more, maybe days, of work ahead of her. Those footprint castings had taken priority because they could have been erased with just a light rain. “But in my cursory check, I didn’t see any spatter, only the blood pool on the floor. Since Marcie was shot at point-blank range, that doesn’t surprise me. Why? Did you find blood spatter?”

“No. But if Shane’s account is true about someone clubbing him over the back of the head, then there might be some. He already had a head injury, and it had been aggravated with what looked like a second blow. But the wood’s dark-colored, and I didn’t want to spray the place with Luminol since I read it can sometimes alter small droplets. Judging from the wound on Shane’s head, we’d be looking for a very small amount because the gash was only about an inch across.”

She glanced at him and hoped she didn’t look too surprised. Most non-CSI-trained authorities would have hosed down the place with Luminol, the chemical to detect the presence of biological fluids, and would have indeed compromised the pattern by causing the blood to run. That in turn, could compromise critical evidence.

“What?” he asked.

Livvy walked ahead of him, up the steps and onto the porch and went inside the cabin. “Nothing.”

“Something,” Reed corrected, following her. He shut the door and turned on the overhead lights. “You’d dismissed me as just a small-town sheriff.”

“No.” She shrugged. “Okay, maybe. Sorry.”

“Don’t be. I dismissed you, too.”

Since her back was to him, she smiled. For a moment. “Still do?”

“Not because of your skill. You seem to know what you’re doing. But I’m concerned you won’t do everything possible to clear Shane’s name.”

“And I’m concerned you’ll do anything to clear it.”

He made a sound of agreement that rumbled deep in his throat. “I can live with a stalemate if I know you’ll be objective.”

The man certainly did know how to make her feel guilty. And defensive. “The evidence is objective, and my interpretation of it will be, too. Don’t worry. I’ll check for that blood spatter in just a minute.”

Riled now about the nerve he’d hit, she grabbed a folder from her equipment bag. “First though, I’d like to know if it wasn’t Woody Sadler, then who might have compromised the crime scene and stolen the phone.” She slapped the folder on the dining table and opened it. Inside were short bios of persons of any possible interest in this case.

Reed’s bio was there on top, and Livvy had already studied it.

He was thirty-two, had never been married and had been the sheriff of Comanche Creek for eight years. Before that, he’d been a deputy. His father, also sheriff, had been killed in the line of duty when Reed was seven. Reed’s mother had fallen apart after her husband’s murder and had spent the rest of her short life in and out of mental institutions before committing suicide. And the man who’d raised Reed after that was none other than the mayor, Woody Sadler.

She could be objective about the evidence, but she seriously doubted that Reed could ever be impartial about the man who’d raised him.

Livvy moved Reed’s bio aside. The mayor’s. And Shane’s. “Who would be bold or stupid enough to walk into this cabin and take a phone with me and your deputy only yards away?”

Reed thumbed through the pages, extracted one and handed it to her. “Jonah Becker. He’s the rancher Marcie was supposed to testify against. He probably wouldn’t have done this himself, but he could have hired someone if he thought that phone would link him in any way to Marcie.”

Yes. Jonah Becker was a possibility. Reed added the bio for Jonah’s son. And Jerry Collier, the man who ran the Comanche Creek Land Office. Then Billy Whitley, a city official. The final bio that Reed included was for Shane’s father, Ben Tolbert. He was another strong possibility since he might want to protect his son.

“I’ll question all of them,” Reed promised.

“And I’ll be there when you do,” Livvy added. She heard the irritation in his under-the-breath grumble, but she ignored him, took the handheld UV lamp from her bag and put on a pair of monochromatic glasses.

“Shane said he was here when he was hit.” Reed pointed to the area in front of the fireplace. It was only about three feet from where Marcie’s body had been discovered.

Livvy walked closer, her heels echoing on the hardwood floor. The sound caused Reed to eye her boots, and again she saw some questions about her choice of footwear.

“They’re more comfortable than they look,” she mumbled.

“They’d have to be,” he mumbled back.

Though comfort wasn’t exactly the reason she was wearing them. She’d just returned from a trip to visit her father, and one of her suitcases—the one that contained her favorite work boots—had been lost. There’d been no time to replace them because she had been home less than an hour when she’d gotten the call to get to Comanche Creek ASAP.

“I do own real boots,” Livvy commented and wondered why she felt the need to defend herself.

With Reed’s attention nailed to her, she lifted the lamp and immediately spotted the spatter on the dark wood. Without the light, it wasn’t even detectable. There wasn’t much, less than a dozen tiny drops, but it was consistent with a high-velocity impact.

“Shane’s about my height,” Reed continued. And he stood in the position that would have been the most likely spot to have produced that pattern.

It lined up.

Well, the droplets did anyway. She still had some doubts about Shane’s story.

Livvy took her camera, slipped on a monochromatic lens and photographed the spatter. “Your deputy could have hit himself in the head. Not hard enough for him to lose consciousness. Just enough to give us the castoff pattern we see here. Then, he could have hidden whatever he used to club himself.”

Reed stared at her. “Or he could be telling the truth. If he is, that means we have a killer walking around scot-free.”

Yes, and Livvy wasn’t immune to the impact of that. It scratched away at old wounds, and even though she’d only been a Ranger for eighteen months, that was more than enough time for her to have learned that her baggage and old wounds couldn’t be part of her job. She couldn’t go back twenty years and right an old wrong.

Though she kept trying.

Livvy met Reed’s gaze. It wasn’t hard to do since he was still staring holes in her. “You really believe your deputy is incapable of killing his ex-lover?”