little bit,” he admitted.
“Well, I’ve got a nice warm blanket on my ATV. You can curl up with it while I call your mommy, okay?” Lying. How was she going to call this kid’s mother? Not immediately, for sure. She couldn’t touch the corpse or look for ID until after the crime techs were done.
“Gus? The sheriff?”
“I radioed. There’s a lot more than two cars on the way. Crime scene people, too.”
“We’ve got to get this cordoned off.”
“I’ll ask Mr. Curious to help me. He’ll love it. The kid?”
“Jimmy is going to get my favorite blanket and a place to curl up in the back of the ATV, right, Jimmy?”
Jimmy gave a small nod. His fingers dug into her, crumpling cloth and maybe even bruising a bit. She didn’t care.
Walking carefully and slowly with the boy, almost unconsciously she began to hum a tune from her early childhood, “All Through the Night.”
To her surprise, Jimmy knew the words and began to sing them with her. His voice was thin, frail from the shock, but he was clinging desperately to something familiar. After a moment, she began to sing softly with him. Before she reached the ATV, Jimmy’s head was resting against her shoulder.
When the song ended, he said, “Mommy sings that.” Then he started to sing it again.
And Blaire blinked hard, fighting back the first tears she’d felt in years.
* * *
GUS WATCHED BLAIRE carry the small child to the ATV. He’d already recovered the crime scene tape and there were plenty of trees to wind it around, but he hesitated for a moment, watching woman and child. He could imagine how hard this was for her, dealing with a freshly fatherless child. War did that too often. Now here, in a peaceful forest. Or one that should have been peaceful.
His radio crackled, and he answered it. “Maddox.”
“We’re about a mile out from the parking area,” came the familiar voice of the sheriff, Gage Dalton. “Anything else we need to know?”
“I’m about to rope the scene right now. The vic has a small child. We’re going to need some help with that and with finding a way to get in touch with family as soon as possible.”
“We’ll do what we can as fast as we can. The witnesses?”
“Some are trying to pack up. I’m going to stop that.”
He was as good as his word, too. When he clicked off the radio, he turned toward the people who had dispersed from the remaining knot and started to fold up tents.
“You all can stop right there. The sheriff will be here soon and you might be material witnesses. None of you can leave the scene until he tells you.”
Some grumbles answered him, but poles and other items clattered to the ground. One woman, with her arms wrapped around herself, said, “I feel like a sitting duck.”
“If you were,” Gus said, “you’d already know it.” That at least took some of the tension out of the small crowd. Then he signaled to the guy who’d tried to follow them to the tent and said, “You get to help me rope off the area.”
The guy nodded. “I can do that. Sorry I got too close. Instinct.”
“Instinct?”
“Yeah. Iraq. Know all the parameters of the situation.”
Gus was familiar with that. He decided the guy wasn’t a ghoul after all. He also proved to be very useful. In less than ten minutes, they had a large area around the victim’s tent cordoned off. Part of him was disturbed that a gunshot had been heard but no one had approached the tent of the one person who hadn’t joined them, not even the veteran. The tent in which a child had apparently been crying.
But it was the middle of the night, people had probably been wakened from a sound sleep and were experiencing some difficulty in putting the pieces together in any useful way. Camping was supposed to be a peaceful experience unless you ran into a bear. And, of course, the sound of the child crying might have persuaded them everything was okay in that tent. After all, it looked untouched from the outside.
Scared as some of these people were that there might be additional gunfire, they all might reasonably have assumed that Jasper and his son were staying cautiously out of sight.
Once he and Wes, the veteran, had roped off the area, there wasn’t another thing they could do before the cops arrived. Preserve the scene, then stand back. And keep witnesses from leaving before they were dismissed by proper authority. He could understand, though, why some of them just wanted to get the hell out of here.
The fact remained, any one of that group of twelve to fourteen people could be the shooter. He wondered if any one of them had even considered that possibility.
Blaire settled Jimmy in the back of the ATV after moving a few items to the side. She had a thick wool blanket she carried in case she got stranded outside overnight without warning, and she did her best to turn it into a nest.
Then she pulled out a shiny survival blanket and Jimmy’s world seemed to settle once again. “Space blanket!” The excitement was clear in his voice.
“You bet,” she said, summoning a smile. “Now just stay here while we try to get your mommy. If you do that for me, you can keep the space blanket.”
That seemed to make him utterly happy. He snuggled into the gray wool blanket and hugged the silvery Mylar to his chin. “I’ll sleep,” he announced.
“Great idea,” she said. She couldn’t resist brushing his hair gently back from his forehead. “Pleasant dreams, Jimmy.”
He was already falling asleep, though. Exhausted from his fear and his crying, the tyke was nodding off. “Mommy says that, too,” he murmured. And then his thumb found its way into his mouth and his eyes stayed closed.
Blaire waited for a minute, hoping the child could sleep for a while but imagining the sheriff’s arrival with all the people and the work they needed to do would probably wake him. She could hope not.
* * *
HE HADN’T KNOWN the kid was there. God in heaven, he hadn’t known. Jeff scrambled as quietly as he could over rough ground, putting as much distance between him and the vic as he could.
He’d been shocked by the sight of the kid. He almost couldn’t bring himself to do it. If he hadn’t, though, he’d be the next one The Hunt Club would take out. They’d warned him.
His damn fault for getting too curious. Now he was on the hook with them for a murder he didn’t want to commit, and he was never going to forget that little boy. Those eyes, those cries, would haunt him forever.
Cussing viciously under his breath, he grabbed rocks and slipped on scree. He couldn’t even turn on his flashlight yet, he was still too close. But the moon had nose-dived behind the mountain and he didn’t even have its thin, watery light to help him in his escape.
His
