Blood was gushing from Charlie’s knees.
Brenda screamed. The sound of the blast almost knocked her over. Charlie was on his back, writhing in pain. She looked around the room thinking some maniac was in the cabin. There was nothing but a wooden chair knocked over on its side. The chair had a sawed-off shotgun taped to the seat and a wide string running in an intricate path from the chair to the door knob.
“It’s a trap, Brenda. A son-of-a-bitching trap. You gotta help me. I can’t move,” Charlie wailed.
Brenda looked out the door to see if there was anyone around who might have heard the blast. She reached into her purse and pulled out a Glock semi-automatic pistol and placed the barrel of the handgun under Charlie’s chin. Before his brain could register the agony of the situation, Charlie was dead. He slumped forward and then fell to the floor.
Brenda wiped her prints off the gun, pressed it firmly into his right hand, and reached down for the backpack.
“Night, night, Charlie,” she said, and walked out the door.
She reached into the SUV for her purse, pressed in the lighter and lit her cigarette. She blew the smoke out slowly. This is an interesting turn of events, she thought.
A couple of miles down the road, Brenda slipped into the public bathroom of the campground they passed on the way to the cabin. She washed up, reapplied her lipstick, secured her hair with a barrette and walked out into the sunlight. She struck up a conversation with a young couple from Arkansas who had been camping in the mountains and were about to drive back to Santa Fe. Brenda told them her car had broken down a few miles up the road and she needed a ride. They offered to take her as far as the bypass where it intersected with Highway 14. She knew she could catch another ride from the Allsup’s on the corner.
Brenda was confident that if they ever found him, Charlie’s death would be ruled a suicide.
She read somewhere that the Sheriff’s Department detectives regularly botched criminal investigations. So this one would be a slam dunk.
Charlie killed the women and then killed himself.
Period.