But Not For Lust by BJ Bourg (comprehension books .txt) 📕

  CHAPTER 38

Susan got on her cell phone and called Melvin to tell him she had fired a warning shot at the buzzards.

“I didn’t want you to come running over here thinking we’d gotten into a gunfight,” she explained. “Where are you?”

I couldn’t hear his part of the conversation, but he must’ve asked what we’d found, because Susan began explaining all of it. She left out nothing. I was just finishing the documentation of the scene by the time she ended the call.

“What did he say?” I asked when I had straightened and brushed off my jeans. “I can’t imagine he’s too impressed with what they did to Ty.”

“He’s as pissed as you are,” she acknowledged, “which is why I can’t have you two going off alone to find these killers.”

“Whatever you say, Mom.”

“He’s almost here,” she continued. “He said he could hear us talking. He should be here within a few minutes.”

I packed up my crime scene gear and glanced toward the sky. It was time to load Ty in a body bag, but I decided I’d wait until Melvin joined us. We needed someone watching our backs, because it was looking more and more like these birds meant business.

“Hello the camp!” Melvin hollered a few minutes later, sounding like a character out of a Louis L’Amour novel. “Don’t shoot! I’m un—what the hell?”

He stopped talking when he saw the giant flock of vultures above us. “I have never seen so many buzzards in one place in my life! I could hear them, but I couldn’t see them from the trees. This is amazing!”

I nodded. “We need to move this body before we have to declare war.”

Melvin nodded and hurried to help me unfold the body bag. Susan stood nearby with my shotgun poised, ready to fire a warning shot or one in self-defense. Like our suspects, the action she would take would depend entirely on what the birds did.

Fortunately for us—and them—they soared overhead and watched as Melvin and I loaded Ty’s body into the bag. They made no move on us and they continued watching as we began humping the body bag out of the field. The going was slow because of the soft mud we had to traverse, but we finally made it to the pumping station and were able to secure him in the covered bed of my truck. At that point, we began waiting for the coroner’s investigator, whom Susan had called on the long walk back to my truck.

“So, what’d you find?” I asked Melvin while we waited. “Were you able to locate their tracks?”

“It was difficult, because it’s been so dry lately, but I definitely found marks in the hard-packed earth where they dragged Ty,” he said. “I didn’t find any weapons along the way and there were no blood drops on the trail, so I guess they waited until they got to the field to start beating him.”

“What about cameras?” I asked. “In the neighborhood.”

He frowned. “The spot where they dragged him into the trees is between two houses, and neither of them had surveillance cameras that I could see. So, I knocked on both doors and asked the owners, but they both said no. I checked the houses to each side of them, but they don’t have any cameras either.”

“Shit!” I turned my back to my truck and leaned against the bumper. “We’ve been looking high and low for Ty and we finally find him, but we’re no closer to solving this case than we were yesterday at this time.”

“At least you’ll be able to get his fingerprints now,” Susan said. “That way, you’ll know if the print on his door was his or belonged to someone else.”

“I looked at the skin on his fingers,” I said with a scowl. “I don’t know how good they’ll come out. I might have to wear them to roll them.”

Susan grimaced, but didn’t say anything. She was familiar with the process of removing slipped skin from the palm or fingers of a decedent’s hand and placing it over the detective’s hand in order to record the fingerprints.

I would have to do whatever it took to recover Ty’s fingerprints. I needed them to compare against the prints on the pipe and doorknob to his camper. One of them had to belong to Ty, but what about the other? So far, fingerprints had helped me tell a tiny piece of the story, but nothing more. If one of the remaining two prints belonged to the killer—or someone who might be able to tell me who the killer was—I might be able to get somewhere, but the problem was identifying the owners of those prints. Once I did, we might very well be on our way to solving the case.

An accomplice who was willing to testify against the killer would be golden right about now, but I was always careful when dealing with criminals who rolled over on their crime buddies. It was too easy for the actual killer to pin the crime on someone who was less culpable. Since the killer was present, he would be able to provide intimate details about the case, and it would be easy for him to convince a jury that his buddy committed the murder. It would be a simple matter of switching rolls and he could tell a convincing story.

Right now, I only had two possible suspects, but something occurred to me right about then. What if my suspects had joined forces? They came from two different walks of life, but it wasn’t impossible to think their paths might have crossed. What if Neal had been going through the neighborhood looking for Ty and he ran into Logan? It would only take a few seconds of talking to realize they shared a