No Coming Back (14 page)

“Wait and watch. I promise it gets more interesting, real fast.” Krauss pinch-zooms the top corner of the image so that the bait shop fills the screen. The picture is fuzzier but not enough to blur details too much.

The bait shop door opens inward and a well-built guy in a heavy winter coat backs out onto the sidewalk. He looks like trouble. It’s the first time I’ve seen myself on camera and I realize I fit the
stereotypical
ex-con image to a tee: the shuffling body
language
, the slightly hunched frame, the overall shifty
appearance
.
Consciously
, I straighten my spine and puff out my chest. On screen, I see my stubbly face glance up and down the street, suspiciously, before shaking myself down and heading for the diner.

“Looks like you just made my case for me,” Meeks comments as my image disappears from view. “It corroborates with our eyewitness testimony. If that doesn’t prove Olson’s guilt, I don’t know what will.”

Krauss sighs. “We’re not done here yet. Will you please be patient and watch?”

Telling Meeks to have patience is like asking a rabid
Doberman
to please drop the family bunny and roll over. He’s not happy with Krauss’s intervention. He’d rather whisk me away unseen, get me as far from Harper as he can before anyone notices I’m gone. I can feel his restless tension. He’s about to dismiss Krauss’s defense
altogether
when something flashes on the screen. It’s too fast to make out properly and is gone in the blink of an eye.

“There! Did you see it?”

Meeks releases an irritated breath. “No.”

“So pay attention this time.” Krauss rewinds the video by a few seconds, then taps the screen again.

The neon sign glows brightly in the bait store window. Behind it, the store is darker, cave-like. No movement. Exasperation
rumbles
in Meeks’s throat. Then one half of the image whitens slightly, softly, pixelated, for a split second, as though a ghostly apparition has strayed across the image and disappeared in a heartbeat.

“It’s muzzle flash,” Krauss explains.

“I know what it looks like,” Meeks growls. “But it could also be a passing vehicle reflected in the window. What it doesn’t show is somebody else actually shooting Ben. And it doesn’t change the fact Olson is our prime suspect.”

Krauss’s mouth opens but no words come out. She came to the table with a full house, believing it was good for a win, but Meeks’s straight flush has beaten her hands down.

“Looks like muzzle flash to me,” I add.

“No one’s talking to you, Olson.”

Krauss rewinds the video again and pauses it on the flash itself. To the untrained eye it looks like a reflection in the glass.

“Firearms are my specialty, remember? I know my stuff.
This is definitely muzzle flash, and that’s definitely Ben’s shotgun
discharging
.”

Meeks has a mocking expression inching up his face. “Since when can you identify individual shotguns just by their
muzzle flash?”

“You’re not making this easy.”

“I’m the chief; it’s my job to get the facts right.”

“Either way, Ben’s Ruger was found with his body. I could smell cordite on the muzzle, which meant it had been discharged recently.” She taps a nail against the screen. “And here’s the proof. Okay, so it might not show us who actually pulled the trigger, but it does prove the gun was discharged after Jake left the building.”

Meeks doesn’t look happy. Bullies never take too kindly to being proven wrong. His smirk is slowly fading away.

“Shane, all I’m asking is you take a step back and think about it. Don’t rush in and make the same mistake twice. We both know the original evidence against Jake was circumstantial, and we both know the evidence you did have was cooked up to make it
easier
to swallow. Jake didn’t kill Jenna, and he didn’t kill Ben; I just showed you reasonable doubt. So instead of turning him over to the
marshals
, do the right thing, here, for once, for me. I’m betting you’ve taken GSR swabs. If the results come back proving Jake fired Ben’s shotgun then I’ll bring him in myself. You have my word. But you no longer have sufficient cause to hold him, and that’s a fact.”

Just like her police SUV, Krauss’s Prius smells of mango and leather. I roll down the passenger window just enough to allow the freezing night air to circulate.

Through the side mirror I can see a simmering Chief Meeks still standing on the sidewalk under a streetlight, watching us depart at speed.

“So I went over the bait store crime scene,” Krauss says, pulling my attention back inside. “It looks like whoever killed Ben wanted us to think he committed suicide.”

“Suicide?” The thought doesn’t seem to fit. “Meeks was
adamant
it was a homicide.”

“Only because he jumped to conclusions the moment he heard you were the last person out of the bait store. Had you not been in town today—and especially not visiting Ben minutes before he was found dead—I think his death might have been viewed as self-inflicted, at least until we had all the evidence and knew otherwise.”

I thought it over. “That’s all well and good, Kim, but anyone who knows Ben knows he’s too vain to take his own life. He’s the kind of guy who can’t pass his own reflection without blowing it a kiss.”

Krauss titters. “Maybe the old Ben—or should I say the younger Ben?—but word is he’s been suffering from depression recently. He was even talking about selling up so that he could spend more time with his grandchildren.”

Now I feel even worse for Ben.

With one hand on the wheel, she hands me her phone. “I took pictures of the crime scene. I thought you might like to see what you were wrongly accused of.”

Out of morbid curiosity, I swipe through the snapshots. The flash-frozen images show various angles taken inside the bait shop. Everything appears to be in place—apart from Ben Varney’s head, which is fragmented and splattered all over the gun racks behind the counter. Blood and bits of brain matter dribbling down gun barrels and dripping off the ceiling. Pellets peppering the wall. The man himself is sprawled on the floor behind the glass cabinet, in a pool of bright blood, with most of his head missing.

It’s a grisly scene and not easy on the senses. Nothing like you see on TV. Dealing with violent death calls for a cast-iron
constitution
.

I pause on a photo of his lower torso. It shows the double-barreled shotgun resting loosely in his hands, a thumb still hooked in the trigger guard, the muzzle directed toward his missing face. It’s the same shotgun he pointed menacingly at me a couple of hours earlier. At a glance it certainly looks like he took his own life.

“Do you see it, Jake—the mistake that proves it’s a homicide? It’s the shotgun. The positioning’s all wrong. Had Ben pulled the trigger, the gun would’ve kicked out of his hands. Landed away from the body. Shotguns are heavy, powerful. You try holding one at arm’s length sometime, and the wrong way round. They’re
cumbersome
and difficult to shoot like that. No matter which way you try and hold onto it, the recoil throws it in the opposite
direction
.”

“Every action comes with an equal and opposite reaction.”

“See, you were only pretending to be asleep in science class.”

I zoom in on the picture so that his hands fill the screen. “Ben
was a fitness freak. I remember he had a bone-crushing
handshake
. When we were kids he’d show off by doing finger push-ups, for what
seemed like hours at a time. If anyone could hold onto that gun, Ben’s your man.”

“Maybe once, but not lately. I heard he had autoimmune issues, hence the depression. Besides, even accounting for blowback, there’s little chance of blasting away your entire head by putting the muzzle in your mouth. What you see there is the kind of effect you’d expect if the gun was discharged at close range, from say two or three feet away. Ben wasn’t known for his long reach. But there it is, in his grasp. You’d need six-foot-long arms to pull that off. I’m thinking the killer wanted us to believe he committed suicide so that we wouldn’t go snooping any further.”

It sounded no less feasible than all the other theories we were coming up with. “Okay. So what about the security camera, behind the counter?”

“A dummy. That’s why I scanned through the footage from Merrill’s webcam. Before your visit, everyone who went in the bait shop came out again.”

“The killer entered through the back and left the same way.”

“Stands to reason.”

I look at her. “Which means the person in the back office, the one he was talking with when I went in there—”

“Was probably the killer.”

“And Ben knew him.”

We cut down a side street and enter a quiet residential area in the western part of Harper, moving through alternating pools of light and dark.

I hand back her phone. “Did you have any luck finding out who the two remaining members are?”

“No. I spoke with Ruby—or at least tried to—but she was out of it and high as a kite. Pretty useless really.”

“What about your dad?”

“I tried calling him, but his phone is either off or out of range. Cell reception is intermittent up there at best. That’s why I insisted on us both having a multi-use radio.”

We pull onto a driveway. Headlights reveal a large two-story house with an icicle-fringed basketball hoop above a double-garag
e door.

Krauss kills the engine and we climb out.

“We can call him from here,” she says.

“This your place, Kim?”

She smiles lopsidedly. “Home sweet home.”

We leave our boots to mildew on the porch and go inside. Krauss pops on the lights. It’s a pleasant place, tastefully decorated in warm tones and dark wood.

“Nice.”

“Thanks.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“Since the engagement.”

We drape our coats over ornate hooks and peel off gloves.

“You moved in together? I thought the wedding was called off?”

“It was, and it’s a long story I’d rather not get into right now. Beer?”

I nod. “Sure.”

Krauss heads down the hallway, waving a hand behind her as she goes. “Don’t just stand there. Go through and make yourself comfortable; I won’t be a minute.”

The living room is awash with autumnal colors and heavy
fabrics
, pleasing on the eye. Matching couches face each other over a mahogany coffee table. An alabaster chess set sits on the surface, the pieces abandoned in mid-battle. I wander over to a wooden bookcase crammed with monthlies and paperbacks. The magazines are mostly
Guns & Ammo
, going back decades, some outdoorsy stuff. The books are all horror, with broken spines and chafed skins. I run fingertips over bloodcurdling titles until I come to Stephen King’s
Misery
, gently work it free from its resting place. It’s the only book out of a hundred that isn’t bruised and battered. In fact, it’
s perfect.

“I must have read it at least a dozen times,” Krauss says as she comes up alongside me, silently. She leans against my arm, taking a peek at the immaculate cover. “You wouldn’t think so by looking at it, would you?”

“I can’t believe you still have it.”

She looks up at me. “Why wouldn’t I? It’s the one and only thing you ever bought me, Jake Olson. So lay off with those big clumsy thumbs of yours.”

Obediently, I slide the book back in its cavity.

She hands me a beer, then raises her own bottle in salutation. “To new beginnings.”

I tap my beer against hers.

But we don’t get to guzzle it. Unexpectedly, Krauss raises herself up and plants her lips against mine. For a second it’s just the kind of kiss that friends give one another—we’ve done this a thousand times before, harmlessly, a simple congenial peck, with no agenda and no expectations—but a second later there’s a difference, because our lips haven’t parted. A second after that and something stirs deep within, something urgent and with a life of its own, and suddenly we’re kissing like long-lost lovers, deep and forceful, with no thought to either consequence or conclusion.

Krauss curls a hand behind my neck and holds on tight. I slip a hand behind her waist and draw her close, feel her contours melt into mine. We have embraced before, but not like this, not with such primal desire. I let the kiss take its own natural course,
weaving
in and out, venturing into previously unchartered territory,
realizing
I have never properly kissed before or been kissed.

“I’m going upstairs,” Krauss whispers as our lips part. “You coming with?”

All at once I want to, desperately. My thundering heart and speeding hormones tell me I need to. But my head—my cold institutionalized head—warns me I am about to cross a line that cannot be uncrossed.

“Kim,” I begin softly, “you’re in a relationship. What about your fiancé?”

Krauss takes my hand in hers and freezes me with her gaze. “Trust me, Jake. This is okay. The wedding plans were shelved a long time ago and there hasn’t been any intimacy in years. Living under the same roof is just a means to an end and actually a whole lot smoother since we decided to quit. So it’s just you and me. And it’s okay.”