AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She looked at Marcus. Blue sweatshirt, jeans, socks and boots. But no jacket. The teens were hanging out in an old hunter’s cabin at night. The temperature must have been minus five at least. No jacket. So where was it?
Nicholls walked back in.
“Did you find his jacket?” she asked.
“What?”
“Marcus’s jacket. He’s not wearing it in these photos.”
Nicholls set his coffee down. “No. We didn’t find a jacket.”
“Oh.”
“Oh?”
She looked up at him. “Well, he must have been wearing a jacket. Did you ask his parents, friends?”
Nicholls looked irritated. “Of course. And yes, he was wearing a jacket. North Face. Gray. Brand new, in fact.”
“So where is it?” Barbara prodded.
“I presumed the perpetrator must have taken it. Maybe as a souvenir?”
Barbara frowned. It didn’t fit. If this was a Colony killing, then it was born out of rage, desire, hunger. They didn’t take souvenirs. They’d got all they needed.
“Tell me about the other boys,” she asked.
Nicholls’s jaw tightened. “They didn’t do this.”
The rebuttal was too fast. Barbara smiled pleasantly and reached for her coffee.
“I never said they did, sir. I’d just like to know a little more about them.”
He regarded her dubiously and sighed, again: “Stephen is a typical teen. He’s bright but easily bored. His parents run an outdoor-adventure business. His mom, Jess, grew up here. Dan, his dad, moved from Canada. He takes tourists trekking through the national park. Sometimes, Stephen goes with him.”
“So Stephen knows the area well?”
“Guess so. He’s been in minor trouble, but then what teen hasn’t? The usual—drinking too much; he got into a fight with another kid once. But he’s not a killer.”
I’ll be the judge of that, Barbara thought. In her experience, for every misdemeanor you caught a kid for there were half a dozen you didn’t know about. Conversely, in any group of kids there was a fall guy. The kid who threw the last punch as the cops arrived or couldn’t hold their liquor. She would need to talk to Stephen to see which one he was.
“And the other friend, Jacob Bell?” she asked.
Nicholls cleared his throat. “He moved to town with his dad about nine months ago.”
“No mom?”
“Divorced, apparently.”
“Why here?”
“His dad, Nathan Bell, grew up around here.”
Bell. Barbara had thought the surname was familiar.
“Wasn’t he one of Todd Danes’s friends?”
“Yes. But I wouldn’t read too much into it. It’s a small town. And Todd’s killer confessed. There’s no doubt what happened to Todd.”
