Last Ragged Breath Read Online Free PDF Page B

parts, and she figured that the faster she moved, the swifter and more forthright her decision making, the sooner her constituents would realize that a young woman could do this job every bit as well as a middle-aged man—maybe better—and that they’d been right to elect her. Nick Fogelsong’s endorsement had made her a lock the first time around; next time, she wouldn’t need him.
    â€œYou’re smart,” she said. “Wily enough to do just that—to kill a man and then leave the body right out in the open, in a creek on your very own land, assuming it would throw off suspicion.” Harrison hooked her hands on the front table edge and leaned forward. He leaned back, his eyes on her hands, not her face. “Trouble is, Dillard, nobody on God’s green earth wanted Edward Hackel dead more than you did.”
    â€œNot true.” He stuck out his chin. “There’s a line of folks a mile long who hated that bastard. Just like me. I ain’t the only one who’d be rootin’ for the buzzards.”
    â€œYou’re not helping yourself with that observation. You ought to know that.”
    The sheriff had read him his rights, and knew that Deputy Mathers had done so, too. But Dillard said he wanted to talk. He rejected—repeatedly—the offer of a court-supplied attorney. She halfway wished he’d told her to go to hell and then clammed up, refusing to talk, daring her to charge him with the murder. She wished, fleetingly, that he’d had a tight-knit, pugnacious family to protect him, to speak up for him, a complicated network of angry uncles and prickly aunts and outraged cousins who would’ve shown up at the courthouse when word got round that he’d been brought in for questioning, a bristling picket line of blood relations who would’ve demanded that she show her evidence or let him go. But Royce Dillard didn’t have any family. Not that such a thing was unusual anymore: By the time they reached forty, fifty years old, a lot of people around here didn’t have much family left. Sometimes it was on account of the slow regular way of the world—heart attack, stroke, diabetes, the cancer—but sometimes it happened another way. A quick way, with violence involved. That was how it had happened for Dillard.
    Once again, though, that didn’t mark him out as special. So many people in this region had violence living in their history, like a snake waiting under a pile of rocks: You knew it was there, but you tried to forget about it, and if you had an errand that took you past those rocks, you walked a wide circle around them.
    The only people who seemed to give a damn about Royce Dillard were the old couple from the farm next to his, Andy and Brenda Stegner. It was Andy who’d found the body in the first place; he’d used his cell to call 911, and then had the judgment and good grace to move away a few yards, so that his puked-up breakfast of biscuits and gravy wouldn’t contaminate the crime scene. Shortly thereafter, the state police forensic unit had arrived and started its work. When it came to the science component of an investigation, counties as small as Raythune didn’t have the resources to run their own show.
    â€œLast chance, Dillard,” the sheriff declared. Maybe she couldn’t do the chemical analysis part, but she sure as hell could handle the psychology part. She’d watched Fogelsong do this for years, with dozens of suspects in dozens of cases. She was ready. And she knew a guilty man when she saw one.
    â€œLast chance to tell the truth here,” she went on, swapping out her hard-ass tone for an affable, bargaining one. “You help me—and I help you. Okay? So maybe Hackel shows up at your cabin. Starts pushing you around again. Trying to get you to sell your land. Won’t let up. Hasn’t let up for weeks. This time, maybe he threatens you. Maybe you fear for your life.