Winterkill - C. J. Box [136]
He did not want to see Melinda Strickland again. Had she called the sheriff on him? Had something happened between her and Marybeth after he’d left?
Joe approached the building and eased the door open far enough to stick his head inside. The bourbon had made him bold—or foolhardy, he thought. Probably both. Inside, it was just as he had left it, except that Deputy Reed stood in the reception area, his radio raised to his mouth. The Saddlestring policeman sat on the vinyl couch, still bundled in his winter coat, with a vacant, drained look on his face, like he had seen something awful.
“Sheriff Barnum?” Reed said into the radio, “How fast can you get over to the Forest Service building? We just got a call about the fact that the door was left open and the lights were on at seven at night, so I checked it out and . . . well, we’ve got a situation.”
Joe looked quizzically at Reed, and Reed nodded toward the hallway where Melinda Strickland’s office was. Her door, like the front, was ajar.
He stepped inside and walked across the reception area. The Saddlestring cop was upset. Something he had seen down the hall made him lurch to one side and throw up in a small garbage can. Joe was grateful that both Reed and the cop were too preoccupied to ask him why he was there.
Joe rounded the reception desk and looked into Melinda Strickland’s office. What he saw seared the alcohol out of his system.
Strickland was still in her chair, but was slumped facedown over her desk in a dark red pool of blood. The wall with the framed cover of Rumour and photo of Bette was spattered with blood, brains, and stringy swatches of copper-colored hair. Strickland’s stainless-steel nine-millimeter Ruger semiautomatic pistol was clutched in her hand on top of the desk. A single shell casing on the carpet reflected the overhead light. The room smelled of hot blood.
Joe gagged, then swallowed. The bourbon tasted so bitter this time that he nearly choked on it.
He knew it wasn’t suicide. Just a couple of hours before, he had stared into that woman’s soul and there was nothing there to see. Strickland had not succumbed to some sudden pang of guilt. No, Joe thought, someone had made it look like a suicide.
He started to push the door open farther but it stiffened. It wouldn’t open enough for him to get through. He looked down and saw that he had shoved the bottom of the door over something that had jammed it.
In a fog, he bent down to clear the door. He pulled the obstruction free, and looked at it.
It seemed as if something had sucked all the air out of his lungs and out of the room itself. He wasn’t entirely sure the groan he heard was his own.
The item jamming the door was a single Canadian-made Watson riding glove. It was one-half of Joe’s Christmas present to Marybeth.
Thirty-seven
Joe checked both ways as he left the Forest Service office in the heavy snowfall. There was no traffic on the street. He heard a siren fire up several blocks away. That would be either Barnum or the police chief. The glove was jammed in Joe’s pocket.
He was soon out of town and rolling on Bighorn Road toward his home before he allowed himself to think. He was ashamed of what he was thinking. It was unfathomable.
Marybeth’s van was parked in front of the garage and the porch light was on, but the windows were dark. When he entered, he noticed immediately that the house was cool and that the thermostat had not been turned up since they had left in the morning.
Sheridan and Lucy, who should have been watching television or doing homework, were nowhere to be seen.
“Marybeth?”
“Up here.” Her voice was faint. She was upstairs.
He bounded up the stairs and found his family in the bedroom. Lucy was sleeping on the top of the covers at the foot of the bed, and Sheridan and Marybeth were sitting on the side of the bed cuddling.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“We were just talking about April,