Solomon rode with the herd until they hit the river then dropped down into the gully and crossed back to the fire-scorched bank. He slipped to the ground and let his horse drink while he took handfuls of black ash and mixed it into a paste with dirt and water then smeared it on the horse’s flanks and back. They would be looking for him in earnest now. He had fled the scene of a murder. He couldn’t ride into town the way he had come out: too close to the airfield, too visible. But he couldn’t ride across the fire-blackened desert either, not on a pure white horse. He continued to camouflage the horse using methods the native tribes had employed for millennia then did the same to himself, darkening his white skin and hair with grey ash from the ground.
Discovering Old Man Tucker’s body had changed everything. His death didn’t fit the narrative he had been constructing in his head, with Holly and James Coronado on one side of the coin and the town elders on the other. But Holly couldn’t possibly have killed him. The body had been fresh when he found it and she was in custody. Also a woman was unlikely to have been strong enough to have delivered the death blow through the sternum. He pictured the body in his mind again, the neat slit above the heart. There was something not right about it: the flayed skin, the way he had been … displayed. That’s what it was like, a display – it spoke of violence and of someone using pain to extract information, but the stab to the heart suggested a degree of humanity as well as skill and control. He thought of the man with the silenced weapon standing calmly in James Coronado’s study. A man used to dealing in death. A man who had already been in Holly’s house. He wondered if maybe he was looking for the same thing Tucker had been after, the same thing he was now sure that James Coronado had died for. And what had Tucker told him, he wondered, before the killer had delivered the coup de grâce? Judging by the abruptly abandoned mess in Holly’s house, Tucker hadn’t found anything. Which meant the killer would probably circle back there. Wait for the lady of the house to return. Maybe sharpen the knife he’d used on the old man while he waited for Holly. So he could ask her questions.
Solomon stepped on a boulder and remounted the horse, the smeared mud already almost dry in the warm air.
He thought of her, tied up with strips of skin removed from her back like Tucker, and kicked the horse forward. They rose up the bank and set off at a gallop across the charred earth, the stallion’s hooves kicking up puffs of drying black ash as they thundered along. Maybe he couldn’t save her husband, but he could save her. He needed to warn her, tell her what had happened. He remembered her slipping her phone into her pocket before she left the house. He needed to get that number. But he also needed to get a phone.
He could see the town drawing nearer now and activity around the crash site – more uniforms to avoid. He was far enough away that they wouldn’t see him, but he didn’t want to take any chances. He steered the horse in a wide arc around them and drew closer to the town. There were still a few people clustered round a fire truck, some of them still in their funeral clothes, which set a thought running.
When he had told him that James Coronado was dead, Morgan had looked up; an unconscious gesture that Solomon had picked up on. He followed the remembered line of Morgan’s gaze now to where the evening sun was throwing long shadows across the red face of the mountains. He saw it about a third of the way up the lower slopes – a cross, made of plain board and painted white so the sun would catch it. The cemetery where James Coronado was buried.
Solomon dug his heels into the horse’s flank to urge it forward. They kept records of burial plots at cemeteries – who was buried, special maintenance requirements – and contact details of living relatives.