Page 65 of A Future To Remember

“He couldn’t have.”

“Why not?”

“Because Dad had just come from placing cones and setting up a detour due to a downed tree at the far end of town. There’d been some forty-mile-an-hour wind gusts earlier in the day, and a big elm had toppled over about two hours earlier. Dad had just finished setting up cones to reroute traffic back north to County Road 62, over to Highway 69, then back down and around the southern end of town for folks who needed to get to their homes on the other side of the tree.”

“Huh,” I said, tapping my finger on my arm. “So, you think the killer was on foot.”

“I do.”

“That means they lived in town, Cash.”

“It does.”

“How many people live in town?”

“About eighteen hundred.”

I frowned. That was more than I would’ve guessed. “Then your suspect pool is eighteen-hundred people.”

“Nope. It’s a little over twelve-hundred. There were six hundred kids under the age of twelve living here at the time. And before you ask why Norris didn’t include twelve-year-olds, I’ll repeat what he told me and that is that a twelve-year-old might be able to pull a trigger and murder a small-town sheriff, but it takes a more mature evil to shoot that sheriff twice in rapid succession, then go in for a kill shot to the head.”

I shuddered. This whole conversation was starting to unnerve me. I agreed with Cash, though. I didn’t think the killer had been a child. And for that matter, I didn’t think the killer had even been a young adult. No, Cash was right. It took a special kind of evil to shoot Sheriff Cash Penton Sr., and I’d bet my lunch that the person who did it had killed before.

In my mind’s eye, I suddenly saw a vision of a faceless figure, dressed in fatigues, saluting.

“Sheriff, do you have any statistics on how many veterans live here in town?”

“Veterans?”

I nodded. “My brain’s creating the image of a guy in uniform, and so I’m thinking that maybe the murderer had prior experience with killing, like from Vietnam or the Gulf War. Maybe this guy was in the armed forces, saw some combat, and it messed him up. And maybe he took that out on your dad.”

Cash nodded, his gaze faraway. “We got quite a few veterans living in town. It’s a prideful community. But Norris’s investigation didn’t mention any vets under suspicion.” He then focused on me again, offering a slight smile. “That’s a good tip, Maddy. I’ll see if I can’t get some info on that.”

“Cool. I’ll look through the binder tonight after work and try to come up with another clue or two.”

Later, after we’d closed up the diner, Levi and I sat huddled over the murder binder, spreading out some of the pages on the floor to look at them from a wider angle.

“I don’t know what you’re gonna find here,” Levi said, his eyes pinched as he set aside a close-up of Sheriff Penton’s pale face and sightless eyes, staring up toward the heavens where he’d so recently been dispatched. “Sheriff Cash has been working on this case since he became a deputy, and he hasn’t even come up with a single suspect.”

I skimmed Doug Maydole’s witness statement, hunting for a clue. He was the only witness, and, in the end, he’d really witnessed nothing. He’d seen and waved to the sheriff, continued on with his dog, Comanche, turned around when he’d heard the sound of a gun firing three times, and found Penton dead at the curb only a few minutes later.

“Levi?” I asked. “How long would it take to walk from here to here and back again?” I pushed the back page of the witness statement toward Levi. The page had a handwritten map, crudely showing an X where the sheriff had been killed, as well as a line with an arrow showing Maydole’s path as he walked down Elm and turned right at Dogwood Lane all the way to the end at the cul-de-sac.

“Not long. Maybe three minutes.”

I pressed my lips together. I had a feeling it’d taken a man with Parkinson’s considerably longer.

“Come on,” I told him, getting to my feet and grabbing the keys to the back door. “We need to walk it and time it.”

“You want to go outside? Now?” Levi asked me.

I was struck by his tone. He looked almost scared. Granted, it was nighttime, but it was only a little after nine o’clock and the temps outside were in the forties.

“Yeah, now. Why? What’s up?”

Levi frowned, then he sighed heavily and stood up, shuffling his feet into his sneakers. “Nothing. It’s fine.”

“I can go alone,” I offered. Something was bothering him, and I didn’t know what that could be. Did he think I was tricking him into leaving the loft and getting him outside to lock him out?