Fatal Mercy by Dan Padavona (freenovel24 .TXT) 📗

killer kept striking and they couldn’t narrow the suspect list. But Gray made the case unbearable with his vendetta against Fowler. At what point did Thomas call the sheriff out for shoddy investigative work?

“I’ll dust the truck for prints,” Aguilar said.

Thomas slid gloves over his hands, clicked the flashlight, and lit the blacktop, pulling out the cracks and disrepair that would turn the road into a minefield by winter. Skid marks trailed from the center line to the guardrail, ending beneath Tillery’s flattened tires. Did the killer stab Tillery, then slash the man’s tires in case he survived and tried to drive away?

“Aguilar,” he called over his shoulder.

“Yeah?”

“Are Tillery’s tires slashed?”

She moved from one wheel to the next, crouching to examine the flattened tires.

“They’re torn up, like he hit something in the road. It almost looks like Tillery drove over a spike strip.”

Thomas swept the light down the road. Something flickered along the far shoulder. Crossing to the other side, he bent to examine the object.

“I found a tire spike,” he said, slipping the spike into an evidence bag.

Aguilar jogged to Thomas.

“One spike wouldn’t take out four tires.”

“The killer must have collected the spikes before he fled the scene.”

“Except he forgot one.” Aguilar lifted the bag to eye level. “I doubt I’ll pull a print off the spike.”

“Keep looking.”

For the next five minutes, Thomas and Aguilar walked up and down the curving road.

“That’s the only one I found,” he said, handing the evidence bag to Aguilar. “What else do we have?”

She cocked her head toward the truck.

“I found two sets of footprints leading from Tillery’s truck to his body.”

Thomas and Aguilar followed the trail, one weaving while the other arrowed straight down the bank. When they reached Garrick Tillery’s body, Thomas compared the tread on the dead man’s boots with the footprints.

“Those prints belong to Tillery,” Thomas said, pointing at the twisting indentations. “Given the erratic gait and weaving, I’d say he was drunk.”

“The other guy wasn’t.”

No, the killer wasn’t drunk, judging by the straight path he took from Tillery’s truck to the shoulder.

“The killer’s prints end on the pavement. He didn’t follow Tillery into the ditch.”

“So he stabs Tillery, then Tillery stumbles off the shoulder and lands in the ditch.”

“That’s the way it appears.”

The splash of blood on the shoulder suggested the killer gutted the drunk man along the road. Had someone driven past and witnessed the murder?

“Deputy.” A tall state trooper left his post at the barricade and approached Aguilar. “My partner interviewed a server at the bar down the road.”

“Hatties?” Aguilar asked.

“That’s the one. The server remembers the deceased stopping in this evening. She says Tillery drank too much and left the bar around nine.”

“Was he with anyone?”

“Negative, but he got into an altercation with a man named Carl Middleton.”

Aguilar’s eyes shot to Thomas.

“What happened?” asked Thomas.

“No punches thrown. The argument ended when Middleton shoved a table into Tillery and drove off.”

“We need to find Carl Middleton,” Thomas said.

Aguilar agreed.

“I’ll follow up with Harbaugh and meet you at Middleton’s place.” Aguilar glanced at her watch. “Give me half an hour.”

“Gotcha.”

“Don’t knock on Middleton’s door before I get there. We don’t know how dangerous he is.”

Thomas climbed into his truck as Virgil’s team arrived to take Tillery’s body to the county morgue. Gray knocked on Thomas’s window.

“I’ll notify Suzanne Tillery,” Gray said. “Better to do this in person. It’s gonna be a long night.”

A third person dead, and nobody could find Raven Hopkins.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Saturday, July 18th

10:25 p.m.

 

The woman stumbling through the cemetery gates might have been a ghost from the way the moonlight bathed her in ethereal light. She barely stayed on her feet, the mental exhaustion crippling her as she searched the graveyard through a haze of tears.

Kay Ramsey tripped and caught herself on a tree. The gravestones glowed like hundreds of broken teeth sticking out of the earth. Above her, an oak tree extended a long bough. Under the light of day, the tree would have appeared protective. In the dark, it seemed grotesque and misshapen, the tentacle of a monstrous beast.

Confused, she spun one way, then the next. Lincoln’s gravestone should be just up the incline. But she didn’t see it.

Her husband’s funeral felt surreal Saturday morning. It seemed half the village attended, everyone with a kind word to say about the man she loved. Memories from school and work. All those memories were pages torn from a book, left to the wind to scatter. She’d nodded and shared tears and hugs, and when it was over, Ambrose drove her home and sat with her inside the empty, gaping house.

Yet it never hit Kay that Lincoln was dead, that Virgil Harbough wouldn’t call her in the middle of the night to announce Lincoln miraculously sat up. They’d made a mistake, and he was going to be fine. Not until she climbed the stairs to the guest bedroom, still unwilling to sleep in the bed she shared with Lincoln, did the reality crash down on her. After staring at the ceiling for an hour, she’d risen from bed, climbed into her clothes, and donned a dark jacket. She couldn’t sleep without speaking to Lincoln one last time. She’d staggered to her vehicle and driven across the village to the cemetery without a single memory of the trip.

“Where are you?”

She swung her eyes across the gravestones, reading the names, searching for her lost husband. Is this what heaven was like—an endless exploration for the people you lost?

Now she stood in the dark, alone and afraid, as the night made sounds around her. Some sounds she expected—cricket songs and the hoot of an owl somewhere in the trees. Others, like the whispers of footsteps through the grass, she did not.

She wasn’t alone in the night. Someone was in the graveyard. A caretaker? Another soul grieving a lost love?

Kay stumbled against a headstone and recoiled when her hand came away with a crushed slug. She shook her hand and slung the dead thing into the grass, a