It was the last thing Aaron Hart needed, another body on his hands. For all of the spiel the sheriff had spun to his favorite deputy about crime in Makah County being more or less simple, he couldn’t quite convince himself the Charlene Todd murder wrapped up as nicely as it should have.
The call had come in about an hour previous, closer to nine in the evening than eight, breaking up the meeting of the minds with Sergeant Shipps and the state patrol. Ernie Saint Louis at the Cobalt had a murder to report, and he was saying it was the man who’d killed Bad Boyd who’d done it.
Ernie was in his cups, and deep, by the time Hart had trekked across the street to the Cobalt Hotel, a forensics team on its way from Port Angeles to meet him. No elevator in the Cobalt, of course, and Hart was near out of breath by the time he’d reached the third floor, found Ernie in his room with an open bottle and a couple more of them empty, asked him to explain the whole thing over again.
Ernie swore it was Mason Burke who’d met him in the hall, had come out of Charlene Todd’s room and told Ernie there’d been a murder. And Charlene Todd was dead and murdered; there was no doubt about that. Her throat had been cut, and she’d died in her bed, not even forty-eight hours since she’d walked into the detachment and pointed Hart to the murder weapon at the bottom of the Deception Cove boat basin.
From any logical point of view, Mason Burke was the prime and only suspect. And Hart figured that was probably the way it would all shake out in the end. But in the meantime, there was plenty that niggled at him. The first thing was how Burke had figured out so quick it was Charlene Todd who’d snitched on him. The second was, why’d he go and tell old Ernie to call the law and there’d been a murder, when he could have said nothing and bought himself time to keep running? But the most troubling thing about this whole development, from Hart’s eyes, was why Burke would bother to kill Charlene Todd at all.
Hart didn’t know Mason Burke very well. He knew the man’s history, and they’d shaken hands once or twice. But he knew Jess Winslow, better than a little bit. He figured he knew her well enough to trust she was an all-right judge of character.
Hart could believe that Mason Burke had killed Brock Boyd. The men didn’t like each other, and from the sound of it, both of them had had something to prove. Burke had a killer’s pedigree to start with, and he’d likely seen Boyd as pretty close to fair game, Boyd being a criminal himself, and a dogfighter at that.
The way Hart saw it, if Burke had killed Boyd, he probably slept just fine at night afterward. Just as he’d likely not lost any sleep after what had happened with Jess and Kirby Harwood on Dixie Island. But Jess swore the first murder—the one down in Michigan that had sent Burke down this path—had been a long-ago mistake, something that had changed Burke almost as much as it had changed the unlucky bastard on the other side of the equation.
As Hart surveyed Charlene Todd’s little room, and Charlene lying dead in the middle of it, he didn’t see fair game, and he didn’t see how Burke could have either. Charlene was destitute, and she was by and large harmless. She’d done nothing wrong but tell the law what she’d seen.
Why would Mason Burke risk capture just to punish her? It was a hell of a chance to take when Charlene had already told her story. And Burke, to Hart’s mind, seemed smarter than to do it—or at least the sheriff hoped his favorite deputy wasn’t shacking up with a guy that dumb.
But if Burke hadn’t come to kill Charlene Todd, then why had he come here? And if not Burke, then who had killed her?
Hart knew he was playing the same game Jess Winslow had been playing, letting his mind spool out with conspiracy theories and hunches, not seeing the facts laid out before him. Charlene Todd was dead, and Mason Burke had been in the room with her. Smart money said Burke had killed her, and Hart might never know exactly why.
All the same, the questions bothered him. And when Doc Trimble showed up from the coroner’s office, and the forensics technicians arrived on loan from Clallam County, Hart decided he’d put them to work.
“I need it all, Shay,” he told Trimble as they stood in the doorway and looked in at Charlene’s body. “Full workup on the deceased. Everything you can tell me.”
Trimble nodded, but she looked skeptical. “You’re the boss, Sheriff,” she said, “but I can tell you right now, it looks like she died from a knife.”
The doc was wearing more makeup than usual, a nice crimson dress underneath her lab coat. Hart surmised he’d interrupted some kind of evening.
“Yeah, I get that,” he told her. “Time of death, though—that’s what I’m after. As close to the minute as you can peg it.”
Mason Burke had been in with Charlene around quarter past eight, Hart figured. If the coroner could pin down a time of death within a reasonable proximity, the sheriff knew it would go a long way toward erasing the nagging doubts in his head.
But in the meantime…
“Dust the room; all of it,” he told the forensics team, Bobby Yee and Ray Franklin, with whom he’d worked more than a few cases in Clallam County. “You might probably get the phone book, but I want every fingerprint accounted for. Anything unusual in this room, document it.”
He stepped back and watched the team get to business. Figured to work this case harder than any open-and-shut case had ever been worked in Makah County, get ahead of this homicide spree before it claimed any more victims. Probably it was Mason Burke who’d killed Charlene Todd. Undoubtedly he’d killed Brock Boyd.
But just in case it wasn’t Burke who was doing this, Aaron Hart figured he’d need every scrap of a clue he could get his hands on.