he said in response to her hesitation.
She tipped her head forward, the brim of her cap momentarily hiding her luminous, green eyes.
“I know who it is, too, don’t I?” Chuck asked.
She nodded again, a quick dip of her dimpled chin. Her gaze moved past him to the house, where another officer exited the back door. The officer was even younger than Officer Anand. Peach fuzz covered his upper lip and acne pocked his cheeks. A shock of auburn hair showed beneath the visor of his ball cap.
The boyish officer descended the three wooden steps from the rear of the house, the screen door swinging shut behind him. He hustled across the backyard and through the rear gate.
Sandra said to Chuck, “It appears everything started in your house.”
“In my . . . in our . . . ?”
“In your study, to be exact. It’s a mess in there.” She fixed him with unblinking eyes. “Did you have anything in there someone might have wanted?”
He glanced past her in the direction of the body in the alley beyond the fence. “I’m an archaeologist. What could I possibly have that would be cause for that?”
“You’ve made some big discoveries over the years, headline-
making stuff. Everybody in town knows it.”
“I never keep anything of value in my house, ever.”
“It would seem someone thought otherwise.”
“Can I see?”
She pursed her lips, frowning. “You can’t go inside, but I guess you could peek in the window. Maybe you’ll spot something.”
Chuck climbed the steps to the back door. Gripping the doorframe, he leaned sideways and peered through the window into the small room at the back of the house that served as his office. Inside the room, his scarred oak desk was swept clean. Spiral notebooks, photographs, a desk lamp, notecards, and pens and pencils that normally sat on the desktop or filled the desk drawers were scattered across the hardwood floor, along with his laptop and monitor.
Opposite the desk, the drawers to his two file cabinets were pulled open, their contents strewn on the floor with his desk items. A framed picture of Janelle and the girls had been lifted from the wall and lay on the floor as well.
Chuck cursed. He pushed himself upright from the window. “You’re right,” he said with a shake of his head as he returned to Sandra in the yard. “It’s a mess in there.”
“Somebody was looking for something.”
“Obviously.”
“And . . . ?”
“I have no idea. My laptop is still there. You’d think they’d at least have taken that.”
“Think harder. It would appear somebody thought something in your study was worth killing over.”
He pivoted at the cry of “Chuck!” from Janelle.
She rounded the rear corner of the house and rushed to him.
“Thank God, you’re okay,” Chuck said to her as they embraced.
She stepped back. She wore her Durango Fire and Rescue
uniform—navy shirt and black cargo pants with large side pockets. Her smooth, olive face was lightly made up. Her black hair, long and straight like Carmelita’s, was corralled in a bun at the back of her neck. Her cheeks were drawn and sallow. A sheen of perspiration shone on her forehead.
“Carm and Rosie are out front,” she said. “The officer wouldn’t let them come back here with me.”
Chuck’s eyes strayed to the rear fence. “For good reason.”
She followed his look. “I heard he’s in the alley.”
“He?”
Sandra ticked a forefinger back and forth in warning, but Janelle continued nonetheless.
“It’s all over the police radios,” she said to Chuck. “That’s why Mark—” her shift supervisor, Mark Chapman “—sent me home.”
“I’m glad he did.”
With the girls growing older and increasingly independent, Janelle had been accepting every offer of fill-in shifts that came her way, seeking to impress Mark and the other Durango Fire and Rescue supervisors enough to win the next full-time position that opened up with the department.
She took one of Chuck’s hands in hers. Her voice shook. “It’s Barney, Chuck. They’re saying it’s Barney.”
“Barney? That’s insane. Are you sure?”
Barney Keller was a senior archaeologist for Southwest
Archaeology Enterprises, one of several firms in town that, like Chuck’s one-man company, performed site surveys as well as full-on digs throughout the archaeologically rich Four Corners region surrounding Durango, where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah met.
Chuck had worked with Barney on a number of combined-
firm contracts over the years. But Barney was more than just an occasional work partner to Chuck. He was one of Chuck’s few close friends, a harmless teddy bear of a guy, jovial and kindhearted. In the years since Chuck had become husband to Janelle and stepdad to Carmelita and Rosie, he credited Barney’s wise counsel with helping him tamp down the hot-headedness he’d displayed all too often during his many years as a bachelor. Barney and his wife, Audrey, had raised a son, Jason, in
Durango. Jason was in his mid-twenties now, living in Denver.
“Barney doesn’t have an enemy in the world,” Chuck said.
“He couldn’t,” Janelle agreed. “Plus . . .” Her voice trailed off. She let go of Chuck’s hand and shot a sidelong glance at Sandra before looking away.
Chuck knew what Janelle was thinking. “Plus, Clarence,” he finished for her. He turned to Sandra. “Assuming that really is Barney Keller out there, I want you to know two things. First, to repeat: no one would ever want to hurt Barney. Everybody loves him, me included.”
He paused.
“Second?” Sandra urged.
“Second is that Clarence Ortega, Janelle’s brother, has been doing a lot of work with Barney over the last few weeks.”
Chuck whirled to Janelle. Clarence’s rotund frame matched that of the corpse beneath the sheet in the back alley. “Have you talked to him? Is he okay?”
Janelle tapped her phone, stowed in the side pocket of her pants. “I called him. He’s at his apartment. He’s fine.”
Chuck pivoted to Sandra. “Barney’s company, Southwest Archaeology Enterprises, has won just about every contract in the area the last few months. They’ve taken on
