and circled the man’s body so he could get a look at the drunk’s face.
“C’mon, fella, you can’t sleep it off here. You’ve gotta get—”
The rest of the sentence froze on Carson’s lips.
The man he was trying to wake up was his brother. Bo’s eyes were wide-open and unseeing.
There was a black cummerbund stuffed into his mouth. And he wasn’t breathing.
Detective Carson Gage’s hands were shaking as he urgently turned his brother over onto his back. Any hope of trying to revive Bo disappeared the moment he saw the bullet wound.
His brother had been shot right through the heart.
Irrationally, Carson felt for a pulse anyway. There was none. Swallowing a curse, he sat back on his heels. His brother’s skin was already cold to the touch. This was January in Red Ridge, South Dakota, but death brought a different sort of cold with it and there was no mistaking it for a simple reaction to the weather.
“Damn it, Bo, I told you playing fast and loose with women would be the death of you someday. Why d’you have to prove me right?” Carson demanded angrily.
He curbed his impulse to straighten Bo’s clothing. Bo always took pride in his appearance and death had left him looking disheveled. But the crime scene investigators were going to need to see everything just the way he had found it.
Shaken to the core, Carson got back up to his feet and opened up his cell phone again. He needed to call this in.
It took him a minute to center his thoughts. He was a trained police detective, Carson silently upbraided himself. He couldn’t afford the luxury of coming apart like some hysterical civilian who had just unexpectedly witnessed death up close and personal—even if this was his half brother.
Taking a deep breath and then exhaling, he put in a call to his chief, Finn Colton. As he waited for Finn to pick up, he looked again at the name his brother had written in his own blood.
Demi C.
Demi Colton. Carson shook his head. When this got out, it was going to throw all of Red Ridge into one hell of an uproar, he thought. As if the feud between the Coltons and the Gages needed more fuel.
The next moment, he heard Finn’s deep voice as the chief answered his phone. “Hey, Gage, aren’t you supposed to be at your brother’s bachelor party right now, getting drunk and toasting Bo’s last few hours of freedom? What are you doing calling me?”
Carson enunciated the words carefully, afraid that if he spoke any faster, his voice was going to break. He and Bo weren’t close, but they were still family. “There’s been a murder, Chief.”
“Damn,” Finn cursed. Instantly, the voice on the other end became serious. “Whose?”
Carson paused before answering. “Bo’s.”
“This your idea of a joke, Gage?” Finn demanded impatiently. “’Cause if it is, it’s not funny.”
“I only wish it was, Chief,” Carson answered.
“You’re serious,” Finn responded, stunned. When no contradiction came, Finn asked, “Where and when?”
Carson looked down at his brother’s body. The whole scene seemed utterly surreal to him. “I just found him two minutes ago, lying facedown at the edge of The Pour House’s parking lot.”
“The Pour House,” Finn repeated. “Isn’t that where his bachelor party is supposed to be taking place tonight?”
“One and the same,” Carson answered his superior numbly. He realized he was leaving the most important part out. “And, Chief?”
“Yeah?”
“Looks like Bo wrote a name in his own blood. Maybe his killer’s name.”
Carson heard a noise on the other end as the other man said something unintelligible before going on to ask, “Whose name did he write?”
“Demi C.”
This time there was total silence on the other end for approximately thirty seconds as the information sank in.
The city of thirty-five thousand citizens had more than its share of Coltons. There were three branches in total, as different from one another as the seasons were. The chief liked to say that he belonged to the middle branch, the one that was neither rich nor poor and rough around the edges.
But whatever section he gravitated to, the chief was still a Colton and Carson couldn’t help wondering how Finn Colton would deal with having to bring in one of his own as a suspect for first-degree murder.
Finally, the chief broke the silence and asked, “You think Bo wrote that?”
“It’s in his own blood, Chief,” Carson answered. Then, in case there was any further question as to whether or not Bo was the one who wrote the name, he added, “There’s blood underneath Bo’s fingernail. Looks like he wrote it.”
Finn sighed as if the weight of the world had suddenly been dropped on his shoulders.
“Good enough for me,” he replied. “I’ll have Demi brought in for questioning. Meanwhile, I’ll send some of the team to bring in your brother’s body.” His voice softened, as if he was feeling sympathetic about what Carson was going through. “You can give your statement in the morning if you need some time, Gage.”
Finn was cutting him some slack, Carson thought. He didn’t want any slack, he wanted to get his brother’s killer.
Now.
“I don’t need any time, Chief.” Somewhere in the distance, a coyote howled. Carson would have been hard-pressed to name a lonelier sound. “I’ll stay here with Bo until the detail gets here,” he told his boss. “And then I’m coming down to the station. I want to be there when you interrogate Demi.”
“Gage, you can’t—”
Carson felt the walls going up. He cut Finn off before the chief could officially exclude him. “I need to be there when you question her, Finn. You owe this to me, Chief.”
There was silence again. An annoyed silence if he was any judge, Carson thought. He fully expected the chief to argue with him, but he wasn’t about to back down.
However, Finn surprised him by saying, “All right, you can be there, but I’ll be the one handling the interrogation. I don’t want to hear a word out of you, understood?”
Even though Finn couldn’t see him, Carson nodded his head grimly. “Understood.”
Terminating the call, Carson put his phone into his pocket. Silence enshrouded him although the distant sound of music and raised voices coming from the bar sliced through the air, disrupting the night.
“Sounds like
