“Detective Devereaux is out on medical leave.” The deputy eyed me. I tried to look tall and confident. This was a hard thing to do when faced with a high counter that reached almost to my chin, but I could, and did, meet the deputy’s gaze with a calm assurance.
“Is it serious?” I asked. The detective and I weren’t what you might call friends, but we had a relationship that was working, more or less, and I hoped whatever was wrong was fixable.
“He won’t be back until after Thanksgiving,” the deputy said.
“Then how about Detective Inwood? Is he around?”
“Let me check.” He asked for my name, reached for his phone, and dialed. Though he spun away from me to talk, he glanced at me once over his shoulder.
I smiled brightly, and he turned away. My interior self, which was not nearly as polite as my exterior self, snorted. I could just imagine that conversation. The detectives and I had a history, some of it positive, much of it not. They saw me as impatient and interfering. I saw them as slow and stolid, especially when it came to law-enforcement issues involving people whom I knew were law-abiding citizens of the sort who would never be late returning a book to the library, let alone anything as violent as—
“Ms. Hamilton? He says you can go back.” The deputy pushed a button, the door to the inner sanctum unlocked, and I went on through.
Inside, Detective Inwood was waiting. “We thought we’d be seeing you.”
I squinted up at him. It was a fair ways up. The first few times I’d met the two detectives, they’d always been together. You’d think that I’d have been able to keep their names straight, considering that one was tall and thin while the other was shortish and round, but it hadn’t been until a sympathetic deputy had told me that Detective Inwood, the tall and thin one, looked like a letter I and that Detective Devereaux looked like a letter D that their names got stuck properly in my head.
“We?” I asked. “I heard Detective Devereaux is out on medical leave.”
Detective Inwood nodded and ushered me toward another door. “Knee replacement.”
I winced. My primary cold-weather activity was downhill skiing, and I’d heard enough tales from former mogul jumpers to make me want to avoid the surgery at all costs. “He’s doing okay?” I asked.
“Says he’s getting bored watching so much TV.”
I made a mental note to put together a selection of suitable reading materials, and entered the small meeting room that held a table, four chairs, and nothing else. It pained me on a deep level to see a room without a single book, but I kept my thoughts to myself and pulled out a chair.
“When I said ‘we,’” the detective said, “I meant myself and Deputy Wolverson. You might recall that he’s training to be a detective.”
As if on cue, the man himself walked into the room. “Sorry,” he said. “I got caught with a phone call.” He slid into the seat diagonally across from me and smiled. “Hi, Minnie. Sounds as if you had a rough time on Saturday.”
I glanced at Detective Inwood, who was settling into the chair opposite me. I wanted to tell him that his much-younger coworker here had the right attitude, that a little kindness could go a long way, but once again I kept my thoughts inside. Which probably wasn’t an entirely good thing, because someday they might come hurtling out of me in a manner I wouldn’t be able to control. But why color today with the pending doom of tomorrow?
“It was a lot worse for Roger Slade,” I said. “Do you have any idea who shot him?”
Deputy Wolverson glanced at his senior officer, so I knew what was coming. “I know, I know,” I said. “This is only the beginning of the investigation, all avenues will be explored, and you won’t rest until you get the right guy.”
A small grin formed on the deputy’s face. Detective Inwood, however, simply nodded.
“Exactly right, Ms. Hamilton. I’m glad you understand our position. All possibilities will indeed be considered.”
Something in the phrase sounded off to me. “What do you mean, ‘all possibilities’?”
He steepled his fingers and stared at them intently. “The obvious is, of course, the most likely answer: a tragic hunting accident. We are interviewing property owners in the area about hunting permissions and we’re talking to other parties who might have knowledge of poachers. However, there is another possibility.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, frowning.
Detective Inwood’s eyebrows rose. “Surely, Ms. Hamilton, with your recent experiences, you’ve thought about the one other thing that could have caused Mr. Slade’s death.”
I shook my head slowly, ever so slowly. I didn’t want to hear this. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.
“It could have been murder.”
* * *
The possibility that Roger’s death could have been something other than an accident hadn’t entered my head until Detective Inwood shoved it there.
“Thanks a lot,” I muttered as I squelched my way back to the library. An accident was horrible enough, but murder? Roger was the nicest possible guy. He worked for a construction company that had a fantastic reputation. He’d helped his kids build tree forts and volunteered his time with Habitat for Humanity. How could anyone want to kill a guy like that?
With my thoughts not on what was in front of me, I stepped straight into a puddle deep enough that I felt wetness across my instep. Sighing, I trudged onward.
An accident seemed much more likely than murder. We’d been out in the middle of your basic nowhere, and it had probably been a bullet from a deer hunter with very bad aim that had struck poor Roger. Then again, maybe there’d been some wacko up in those hills who’d felt like using a human for target practice. Things like that made you think there was no safety anywhere.
My breath sucked out of me, and I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. I turned in a small, damp circle, suddenly seeing threats where seconds before I’d seen only a quiet downtown.
What was behind that fence?
Was someone lurking around the corner of that building?
Had I heard someone following me?
“Of course not,” I said loudly, but my voice came out much thinner and weaker than I would have liked. I cleared my throat and almost said it again, but decided that would sound like I was talking to myself.
Not that there was anyone to hear.
Was there?
I stood for a moment longer, willing myself to not be a scaredy-cat, then squared my shoulders and walked briskly back to the library.
Once inside, I shut myself in my office. “Think, Minnie,” I told myself. If I was ever going to get to sleep that night, I needed to reassure myself that Roger’s death was an accident. Only . . . how?
Everything I knew about guns came from an in-depth series of self-defense classes I’d taken last summer, and most of what I’d learned had been about handguns. Up here, deer hunters used rifles, and my extremely limited experience with those—an hour on the range with a .22—wasn’t going to help much. What I needed was to talk to a hunter.
I picked up the phone and dialed. “It’s Minnie. Do you have a minute?”
Rafe Niswander clucked at me. “You say a minute, but is that what you really mean?”
“No.”
“That’s women for you,” he said. “Never saying exactly what they want, always leaving us poor men to guess at what’s going on up in their heads. No wonder there’s such a communication gap.”
I put my feet up on my desk. “You’re making assumptions about my entire gender based on a single colloquialism?”
“Oooh, big college word.”
“The right word,” I said firmly. “And you have as many degrees as I do.”
“Don’t remind me.” He sighed. “It’s embarrassing sometimes.”
I snorted. For whatever reason, Rafe liked to pretend he was a country bumpkin, fresh off the farm and clueless about almost everything. It was an act that his middle-school students ate up.