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Gerald scratched his head. “Medford, maybe. Might’ve been Metzger.”
When Lucien began to drag the rusted bike back toward the woods, Gerald asked, “Where are you going with that?”
“I’m taking it with me. Us,” he corrected, glancing at Brogan. “We’ll haul it back to Pelican Pointe just in case it has anything to do with Trey’s disappearance.”
Brogan made a face, looking down at her muddy shoes, ruined now from poking through the icky junkyard. “You’re putting that rusty, old thing in the back of my SUV, aren’t you?”
“I offered to bring my truck, but you insisted on driving.”
“Yeah. You did. When will I learn not to overdress for a field trip? I should know better. A day of sleuthing always turns messy. In my defense, when I changed clothes, I thought we were headed to the county clerk’s office, not a scrap heap. Since we’re here, are we checking out that old barn over there?”
Lucien grinned. “You read my mind. We could be on a roll, uncover something else from that timeframe.” He leaned the shell of the Huffy bicycle up against the old oak tree and angled toward Gerald. “You game?”
Gerald slapped him on the back. “You bet. I’m not turning back now. I’ll say one thing for you guys. You’re more willing to think outside the box than anyone else who’s come knocking. Susan and I haven’t been out here in fifteen years.”
Brogan and Susan followed the men down another trail toward a rickety bridge. “I can see where teenage boys would spend a lot of time out here, exploring, especially in the summer months.”
“Trey loved this place,” Susan noted, pointing to a tent and a makeshift campsite about thirty yards ahead. “Could someone be roughing it out here?”
Once they crossed the bridge, Lucien decided to put their minds at ease. He cautiously approached the campsite and stuck his head inside the tent. He was relieved to find it abandoned. “No one’s been using this campsite for at least a couple of months.”
Brogan noticed Susan relax a bit. “Seems we’re alone out here after all.”
“Thank goodness for that.”
But the closer they got to the barn, the hairs on the back of Brogan’s neck stood up in an eerie warning. The place had a ghostly feel about it. Her mind went back to the early settlements. She could picture the indigenous peoplesworking in the fields, picking the fruits from the orchards, laboring over their trade and crafts—tanning, milling, spinning, cooking, weaving, and forging the metal—working from sunup to sundown.
“This was a thriving community,” Brogan murmured as she watched Lucien and Gerald disappear around the corner into the barn.
“What do you suppose is in there?” Susan prompted. “I don’t think I’m brave enough to check it out.”
“Same here,” Brogan stated in a low voice. “If Trey got this far with Elliott, what happened after that?”
“I was thinking the same thing. They wouldn’t have had any food with them. They would’ve been scared to death, especially if the killer had chased them to this spot. Is this where my boy ended up?”
Brogan squeezed Susan’s hand. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We don’t even know if the boys made it this far.”
She’d no sooner uttered those words than Lucien reappeared, bending at the waist, hands on his knees, holding back the urge to upchuck his lunch.
“What is it? What did you find?”
Lucien swallowed hard, pushing down the bile in his throat, and shook his head.
It was Gerald who came up behind him. “I’d say our camper from that campsite near the bridge found a corner of the barn where he could take his own life. There’s a pistol clutched in his bony fingers and a hole in the side of his skull. The rest of him is leaning up against the wall in there. Skeletal remains are all that’s left.”
After getting his emotions under control along with his stomach, Lucien sucked in a breath of fresh air. He dabbed the sweat off his brow with his forearm and took a few steps away from the barn. “There’s a massive amount of dried blood on the wall, brownish stains near his head. We’ll need to call the authorities.”
Brogan looped her arm through his. “We will. For now, try to walk off what you saw.”
“Not yet. I need to go back in there and take a photo of the bullet holes in the adobe.”
“What bullet holes? Why on earth would you do that?”
“Not the bullet hole from the camper. There’s only one gunshot to the head. No, I’m talking about the ones that are older, way older. If there’s the slightest chance that those older bullet holes could be from 2001 when Trey and Elliott disappeared, then we need to preserve what the wall looked like before this place gets swarmed by cops.”
“How many bullet holes are we talking about?”
Gerald cleared his throat but kept his voice low to avoid upsetting Susan. “A dozen by my count.”
