AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Didn’t I tell you to get into the car?” he demanded, startling her back to the present. “Whoever did this could still be here.”
Remmi couldn’t stand it. She had to know for certain. She turned on her flashlight with her free hand, and the blood-soaked yard was instantly illuminated. Her worst fears were confirmed as she saw, first, Ned’s upturned face, his eyes closed, his body battered and bruised, his clothes soaked with blood.
Nearby, Trudie was lying prone, except her neck had twisted, her pale profile visible against the grass. Her eyes seemed fixed, her face ghostly pale, the blood showing through her blouse, a large, dark, and spreading stain. Noah caught Remmi staring down at the body. He’d been feeling for a pulse, listening for a breath, while still holding the gun in his free hand. He shook his head. “Gone,” he said quietly, and she heard the operator squawking, hadn’t even realized she’d let her hand slide away from her ear.
Disbelief nearly strangled her. She remembered Trudie’s laughter with her mother, Ned telling her to trust a rambunctious colt in a dusty paddock.
“Turn it off!” Noah ordered, hurtling her back to the here and now. “Remmi! Can you hear me? Turn the damned thing off! The killer could be in the barn or anywhere around here. Jesus! Don’t make us an easier target than we already are.”
She clicked off the high beam.
Remmi thought she’d prepared herself, but as she looked down at the still form of Trudie Melborn, she knew she’d been kidding herself. From a distance, it seemed a woman was talking to her.
The 9-1-1 operator was speaking though the phone. Trying to clear her head, she brought the cell back to her ear.
“Still here.”
“An officer has been dispatched. He should be there within three minutes.”
Remmi barely noticed as Noah moved on his knees to the next body. Ned. Lying still. So close to his wife. But no movement.
Please, let him be alive . . . But there was so much blood. Too much. Pooling beneath the bodies, staining their clothing, and trailing off through the grass toward the back of the large building, where now she heard the sounds of horses.
The dog had finally given up barking, was whining as he lay in a fringe of trees near a fence line surrounding the property.
She surveyed the scene. Why was the trail of blood leading behind the stable? Obviously, Ned and Trudie had fallen here, where they lay, where most of the blood had collected. Unless one, or both, of them had been shot farther away, run, then been shot again, and finally dropped to the ground? Or was it someone else’s? She heard the first siren wailing far in the distance, and then, within seconds, a second, lower siren, bleating through the night.
“He’s still with us,” Noah said, a little hope in his voice and once again bringing her back to the present. She looked down and met his gaze. “Just barely. He’s the one who’s been moaning, but . . .”
“He stopped.” Remmi’s heart felt as heavy as if it were made of stone. Ned’s face, like that of his wife, was colorless, not a hint of movement. Remmi felt tears in her eyes and fought them.
Ignoring Noah’s warning about the crime scene, she walked forward and dropped to her knees, grabbed Ned’s hand in her own. “Hang in there,” she whispered. “No matter what happened, you hang in there.” His hand was still warm and smeared with blood.
“Remmi, don’t,” Noah said, but she twined her fingers through Ned’s. This was the man who had once shown her how to load a shotgun and saddle and ride a horse, told corny jokes, and swore that he could make the best chili “north of Texas.” He’d probably been right. And now . . .
“Stay with me, Ned,” she whispered, “You just stay with me.”
The sirens screamed louder. Looking past the house, she saw flashing lights as emergency vehicles raced ever closer, but they were still far away. She silently prayed that they would make it in time to save Ned Crenshaw’s life.
* * *
What a mess!
Settler surveyed the scene at the Crenshaw farm, now illuminated by temporary lamps as well as exterior lights they’d turned on from switches inside the back door of the house. The victims, identified as Ned Crenshaw and his wife, Gertrude or “Trudie,” had been carted off, she to the county morgue, he to the nearest hospital. His life was hanging by a thread, but Settler hoped to high heaven he hung in there, survived, and was able to tell his story. To her. She planned to head to the hospital the second they were finished here, and she’d cut with a razor through whatever red tape might surround the victims.
Settler didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to know that the carnage here was somehow linked to Didi Storm. The two people who found the bodies, Remmi Storm and Noah Effin’ Scott, one of the myriad of people missing from Las Vegas twenty years before, assured her of that. Now, not long out of the army, Scott had apparently become a frickin’ P.I. in Los Angeles.
Just what she didn’t need.
She’d already given them the talk about the attack being police business and warned them to “let the police handle this.” She’d also reminded each of them that they could inadvertently screw up a case, destroy evidence, but judging from their reactions, she figured they’d each heard the spiel before, maybe multiple times, and most likely had ignored it in the past.
They would again.
She’d read it in their gazes.
Great. Just frickin’ great.
Now Storm and Scott were in separate squad cars, being interviewed by different officers who were taking their preliminary statements. Though she’d been fooled before, Settler didn’t think either one had actually fired the missing rifle. No, she believed their story that they’d come here when they’d figured out that Trudie Melborn was not only Mrs. Ned Crenshaw but also the fictitious Maryanne Osgoode. Even so, there was a chance that they knew more than they were telling or were, in some way, even unintentionally, complicit.
