The crowd of gawkers was gone. The funeral business that’d failed in Persimmon Ridge years ago was a growing concern now in Nowhere County. Willy Cochran and Abby Clayton on J-Day. Now Martha Whittiker. All in just two weeks.
The old lady had no family here. Somebody would have to take it upon themselves to provide a funeral and burial. Liam didn’t know who that would be, given that her only relative in the county was her grandson, who was the prime suspect in her murder.
Except he didn’t do it.
Liam certainly was no great detective, but you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to see the scene in Dylan Shaw’s apartment had been staged.
Head wounds bled a lot. Liam knew that from his emergency medical technician training. They always looked more serious than they were. Well, unless you could see bone and gray matter, which you couldn’t with Martha Whittiker. The wound had bled, though, had to have bled. And there was almost no blood where the body had been found.
She had been killed somewhere else and her body dumped in Dylan’s apartment.
And who would do a thing like that? Liam didn’t have any idea but the only safe bet was that it wasn’t her grandson. Even a wacked-out druggie wouldn’t have killed his grandmother and then hauled her body to his own apartment and dumped it on the floor.
So if Martha Whittiker hadn’t been killed in her apartment, where had she been killed? All the evidence in the yard and flower beds had been trampled by the gawkers so there was no way to determine if she had been dragged across the yard and gardens. From a car maybe, or from the house.
Liam went to the house and searched it, looking for blood, but found none. What he did find, however, was a kitchen floor so clean you could have performed open-heart surgery on it. And the smell of bleach was almost overwhelming. Unless Martha Whittiker, in her last moments on earth had been cleaning her kitchen floor with bleach, then got up and put the cleaning supplies away—
Put them away. Liam went into the laundry room and quickly found what he was looking for — an empty bottle of bleach stuffed into the trash can. There was a red-brown smudge on the bottle, which he would bet was blood.
It might even be that a fingerprint could be lifted from the smudge. Except Liam didn’t have access to fingerprinting equipment. A forensics team might have been able to lift prints off the blood on the outside of Dylan Shaw’s apartment door, too. But there was no forensics team.
Liam walked slowly from the laundry room back into the kitchen, the likely scene of a murder, and wondered, as he had wondered countless other times in the past two weeks, what he was supposed to do with this information. Was it his job to try to track down the killer? How on earth would he go about doing that? And if he found the killer …
He shook his head, trying to order his thoughts. His mind seemed to be on a continuous loop going nowhere.
Police training had described that as a phenomenon some law enforcement officers experienced after a trauma on the job. The police officer who keeps his gun trained on the bank robber he just shot, continuing to yell at him to drop his weapon.
Liam’s mind wasn’t in that kind of loop. It was in a conundrum loop, the one he’d been in since he’d awakened in the bus shelter two weeks ago with a needle inside his skull.
As the lone law enforcement officer in the county, what was he supposed to do … about crime and criminals? He didn’t know, hoped tonight’s meeting would provide some guidance. But throughout the day, a feeling of dread had been growing in his belly, a sense that something wasn’t right, that the meeting was likely to ping off in an entirely unexpected direction that would leave him in worse shape than he had been in before.
One thing he could do, though. He could clear Dylan Shaw of suspicion. And he knew where to start looking for the young man. Surely, he had run away from what he’d obviously discovered on his living room floor. If he had, he had become acquainted with the Jabberwock, in which case he had spent time in some state of incapacitation in the Dollar Store parking lot.
Liam would go there and have a talk with Sam or Charlie or Malachi — whoever happened to be at the clinic. Tell them what he’d found in Martha Whittiker’s kitchen. Ask them if Dylan had shown up in the Middle of Nowhere and did they know where he went afterward. He’d also ask what they thought Liam should do about the murder. They didn’t likely have any more answers than he did, but they’d at least provide moral support. Maybe even help him puzzle it out.
Dylan Shaw hadn’t killed his grandmother.
But somebody sure as Jackson had. And who might that be?