A Reasonable Doubt by Susan Sloan (free novels .txt) 📕

something hard.  He began pulling it out.  It was a small silver rectangle, framing a faded photograph of a woman sitting on a porch.  He was removing it from the bed when it suddenly snagged on something.  He tugged softly and the frame came free, but curiosity got the better of him, and so he went back and ran his flashlight slowly over the bed.  What he saw literally made the seasoned ex-policeman’s eyes pop.

A small hole, perhaps three-eighths of an inch in diameter, with what looked like burn marks in the fabric, went clean through the fleece.  The hole, Joe knew instantly, was exactly the size that a forty-caliber bullet would make.  He backed out of the box and stood up.

“What is that?” Billy asked.

“Good question,” Joe replied.  “I’m going out to my car,” he told the barkeeper.  “Will you stay right here, and try not to touch anything.  It’s very important.”

“I just turned to stone,” Billy said.

Joe practically ran all the way to the Jeep, diving into the front seat and extracting his camera.  Then he made a beeline back to the basement.  True to his word, the barkeeper hadn’t moved.  The private investigator began to photograph the hole in the bed, just as he had found it.  Then he carefully lifted the bed out of the box and shined his light over the piece of carpet.  Sure enough, there was a corresponding hole in the carpet.  He photographed that, too.  He turned to Billy.

“Do you have a screwdriver or a hammer or something I can use to pull up this carpet?”

“Sure thing,” Billy said, disappearing and returning a moment later with a box of tools.

Together, the two men pried the tacks out of the carpet, and right where Joe expected to find it was a small hole in the bottom of the box.

The private investigator photographed everything.

“Help me turn it,” he said.  “And let’s hope when Jason built this thing, he built it right.”

Together, they managed to tilt the box over on its side, and just as Joe had hoped, the bottom was reinforced with a heavy metal plate.  There was a dent in the plate, but no exit hole.  Joe took more photographs.

“Okay, let’s get it right side up again,” he said.

“What is it?” Billy asked, as they returned the box to its upright position.  “What did you find?”

“Something that has no business being here,” Joe told him.

He pulled out his pocketknife and began digging carefully around the hole, stopping at every step for more camera clicks.  When enough of the wood had been scraped away, he took a pair of long-nosed pliers from Billy’s toolbox and, reaching into the hole, extracted what he was sure was going to be a forty-caliber Smith and Wesson bullet.

The private investigator took a final photograph.

“Now what in the world was that doin’ in there?” Billy asked, peering at the object over Joe’s shoulder.

“Good question,” Joe replied.  “Very good question.”  He took one of the small plastic bags he habitually carried with him from his pocket and dropped the bullet into it.

“What are you going to do with that?” Billy asked.

“I’m going to give it to an expert,” Joe told him.

“Will it help Jason?”

“It just might.”  Joe was ready to leave.  Almost as an afterthought, he turned to the barkeeper.  “By any chance did you ever see anybody else come looking for this box?”

“Matter of fact, that very night, after all the excitement was over and everybody was gone, a guy did come nosin’ around,” Billy told him.  “Said he was investigatin’ the crime scene.  I told him the box was gone, and I didn’t know anythin’ about it.”

“Which wasn’t true.”

Billy shrugged.  “Nope.  Told the guy a lie.”

“This guy,” Joe asked, “did you happen to know him?”

“Yeah,” Billy said.  “He’s a cop.”

. . .

“A second bullet?” Lily asked, when Joe finally caught up with her, just as she and her father were sitting down to dinner.  “What do you mean there was a second bullet?  Where did it come from?”

Knowing that Lily would be at home all evening, Dancer had begged off on dinner, wanting to make the rounds, wanting to hear whatever was being said about how she had done on day one of her case.

Joe dangled the plastic bag containing the bullet under her nose.  “It came from your client’s bed.”

“His bed?  You mean, in his box?”

“Yep.”

“But how did it get there?”

“If you’re asking me, I’d say it got there from Dale Scott’s gun.  Of course, that would just be a guess on my part.  We’d have to have ballistics confirm.”

“But it doesn’t make any sense,” Lily said.  “How could there have been two shots fired when only one bullet was missing from the gun?”

“Exactly what I was wondering.”

“Could it have been there for a while?  I mean, is there any way to know when it was fired?”

“Not really,” Joe told her.  “Gunshot residue doesn’t last very long, only a matter of hours usually, maybe days under the right conditions, but certainly not weeks or months or years.  But we can at least find out if this little baby came from Dale’s gun.”

“Do it,” Lily said.  “I don’t care if I have to pay for the test out of my own pocket, do it!”

. . .

“A second bullet?” Carson Burns contemplated after Joe was gone.  “Well now, that could put a rather big crimp in somebody‘s case, couldn’t it?  The question is -- whose?”

“That’s just it,” Lily said.  “I don’t know.  We don’t even know yet if the bullet came from Dale’s gun.  And even if it did, we would have no way of knowing when it was fired.”

“True,” Carson conceded.

“But, just for the sake of argument,” she wondered aloud, “let’s say it did come from Dale’s gun, and let’s even say it was fired that same night -- what could it mean?”

“Well, it could mean the Indian shot Dale, and then, as he stumbled into his box, he accidentally discharged another round.”

“But is that really something