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“Can I have a minute, Zeke?” Gene asked quietly.
He was dressed in the black- and-gray uniform, his hat clenched in his fingers as he faced Zeke across the room.
“A minute. ” Zeke nodded.
Gene cleared his throat. “I’m still on schedule. I thought maybe we could talk about the other day. I was out of line. ”
A frown clenched Gene’s weathered forehead as he raked back his dark hair and grimaced heavily. Zeke remained silent.
“I don’t have a problem with you, Zeke,” he finally said. “I got family issues goin’ on, and I guess I was blowing off steam with the Walkers. I’d like to make up for it. ”
Zeke hadn’t filed the report against him, he hadn’t initiated a suspension, simply because he hadn’t had time. He and Gene had once been friends. Zeke had fought for the position as sheriff, and Gene had come on board as deputy for the same reasons Zeke had. Or so Zeke had once believed. To clean up the county, to find a way to eliminate Dayle Mackay’s stranglehold here, and make up for the wrongs their fathers had committed.
He and Gene had promised themselves they would make up for those darker years.
Gene was a good deputy, and once, Zeke had known him as a good friend. But Zeke suspected now that Gene’s loyalty might not run as deep as he’d once believed it had.
“Everyone deserves justice, Gene. ” He finally sighed as he watched the other man closely. “Walkers are no different from anyone else. Hell, they weren’t involved in that mess last year when some of our leading citizens were. I’d say they were a damned sight better than some around here. ”
“I agree, Zeke. ” He nodded. “I went off when I shouldn’t have. It won’t happen again. ”
Something had changed in Gene over the years, Zeke thought. He wasn’t as compassionate, he wasn’t as patient as he had once been. But hell, had he really ever been as diligent as Zeke knew he had wanted Gene to be? He hadn’t been, and it was a fault Zeke had acknowledged a while back.
It wasn’t as much Gene’s fault as it was his own. He should have known better than to put Gene against his own father and the past he had shared with Zeke’s father. Gene didn’t have the demons Zeke had; he hadn’t faced hell and turned his back on it.
“We’ll let this one go, Gene,” he finally said. “We’ll both see if we can’t fix things in the future. ”
“Thanks, Zeke. ” Gene inhaled in relief as he moved to grip the doorknob. “I’ll head out on patrol then. ”
“Gene. ” He stopped the other man before he left the office.
Gene turned back, his brown gaze curious.
“You said the Walker boys were fighting over a girl at the bar last week. Any gossip as to who they were fighting over?” It was the one piece of information Zeke hadn’t been able to uncover.
Gene lifted his hand and scratched thoughtfully at the side of his nose before shaking his head. “There was no name mentioned, now that I think about it. Just that Rogue had to throw them out because they were fighting, and the fight was over some girl both of them wanted. ” He frowned slowly. “I didn’t hear who the girl was. ”
Zeke nodded. No one else had heard, either. Just that it was over a girl.
“I’ll head out then. ” Gene opened the door, slid from the room, and closed it behind him, leaving Zeke alone to stare at the coroner’s initial report that was lying on the desk.
Joe pumped up on heroin didn’t make sense. Joe and Jaime fighting over a girl didn’t make sense. Nothing about their deaths added up or pointed him in the right direction to look for evidence. All Zeke had was the fact that it was identical to a method the exterminator used. He knew it was, because his father had told him about it repeatedly when he’d been a teenager. When he, too, had been a part of the Freedom League.
He rubbed at his jaw, sat back in his chair, and visualized the murder scene again. The TV remote and the half a bottle of beer. But the television had been turned off.
There had been no drugs in the house, though Joe and Jaime weren’t strangers to a little marijuana. There should have been some.
Jaime hadn’t fought, he hadn’t even tried to come out of his chair.
Joe had put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger within moments of killing his brother.
There were no signs of tears on his face or in his eyes. There were no defensive wounds to indicate he had been murdered. The gun was in his hand, his prints alone marking it.
He closed his eyes and let the scene form in his head. There was something off there.
Something more than the lack of evidence for anything illegal, something more than that damned television being turned off, the remote in the exact position it would have been if it had fallen from Jaime’s hand.
There had been traces of marijuana in Jaime’s system, but heroin in Joe’s. The coroner’s report showed a single track mark in the arm. Nothing more. He’d shot up only once and killed his brother while under the drug’s influence.
