Page 98 of Weight of Guilt

He handed Nash one of his weapons, just in case.

They pulled the doors open together.

The smell hit him first. Nash knew the scent.

Death.

He turned his head and breathed through his mouth twice. Beside him Luke did the same. Neither of them spoke.

Luke shone his light down the steps—six of them, framed in old timber.

At the bottom, he spotted packed earth and empty shelving along the walls.

Luke took the first step down, and Nash followed him into the space.

At the bottom, Luke trained his flashlight on something in the corner.

It was a boot.

But it wasn’t just a boot.

There was something attached to it.

Luke moved his flashlight another inch. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Nash sucked in a breath.

It was a body.

There was a dead body here.

Nash studied the figure a moment.

Everett Voss had been fifty-one when he did gutter work for the Loveless family. Six foot two, per the file Deb had read him over the phone. Heavy through the shoulders.

The man on that floor was small and thin.

“That’s not Voss,” Nash muttered.

“I know.”

Luke came up the steps, got his radio, and called the dead body in.

When the other deputies and the medical examiner arrived, Nash stepped back from the cellar.

He knew how these things worked. It was better if he stayed out of the way.

Besides, he’d seen enough. His preliminary guess was that the man had been dead for a few days—long enough for decomp to begin. Based on the marks on his arm and throat, he’d been attacked, most likely with a knife.

Nash had no doubt the death was caused by foul play.

He watched as a deputy named Whitt went down into the cellar with a camera.

The space was too small for very many people at a time, and Luke had remained down there. Nash watched from above.

On one of Whitt’s passes, his light swung wide and held.

The beam caught the support timber, low on the wall, close to the packed dirt floor.