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shoot-out.
    "Any ideas, Sheriff?" Jesse asked. He flashed the gap-tooth grin that Gail never quite knew how to interpret.
    "I've got a couple," she said.
    "Let's start with why one of them is in his skivvies." Jesse had been an early competitor in the race for sheriff last November, but had taken a dive at the request of the Indiana Democratic Party, which was in a lather to install a female sheriff in this rural community. Gail Bonneville had an FBI pedigree and a doctorate in criminal justice to go along with her law degree. The party didn't want to run the risk of someone like Jesse walking away with the election simply because his was the more familiar face. Gail had always felt guilty about her engineered victory, and had never fully trusted Jesse as a result of it. He had plenty of motivation to torpedo her career.
    Paranoia aside, however, she had no concrete reason to suspect him of anything but total loyalty. "I have no idea," she said, addressing the fact that one of the boys had clearly been stripped of his clothes. It was the way his underpants were skewed, and his socks were half-pulled from his feet. "But I think we've got ourselves a couple of dead kidnappers."
    Jesse's eyebrows scaled his forehead. "Whoa, that's quite a leap out of the gate. How did you get there?"
    Gail shrugged. It really wasn't all that much of a stretch, when you thought about it. She knelt closer to the floor. "Look at the duct tape," she said, pointing with her pen at the gray and white shreds on the concrete. "Doesn't that look like it was wrapped around somebody's wrists? And that one around the ankles?"
    Jesse nodded. The tape was wrapped repeatedly around itself, yet cut cleanly through all layers. Looking carefully, she could see short, curly hairs still attached to the sticky side of the remnants. "Somebody rescued him. With all that hair, the victim certainly wasn't a girl."
    "That's what I'm thinking."
    Jesse made a sweeping gesture toward the corpses on the floor. "So one of these is the good guy and one is the bad guy? They shot it out between them, and neither made it out alive?"
    Gail shook her head. "I don't think so. The angles are wrong. Look here." She shifted and pointed to the bodies. "They've both got weapons, but all the bullet strikes are over there." She pointed to the star-shaped divots in the stone near the shattered door. "I don't think they were shooting at each other. I think they were defending themselves from somebody else."
    "Somebody else ?"
    She waited for him to connect the dots.
    Jesse's eyes grew wide. "You think it was a third party?"
    Gail smiled and nodded. "You, she supposed, but it had been her experience that killers--like everyone else in life--followed the simplest path, not the most difficult one. "But I don't think so. I think this is the work of someone hired to do a job, and maybe the job went the wrong way and got messy. By leaving the tape and the bodies and the casings, I think maybe he's trying to show us that at least he killed for the right reasons."
    "Hoping that we'll back off, maybe."
    "Or at least not press as hard."
    Jesse regarded Gail. "He bet wrong, didn't he?"
    She smiled. "Oh, yeah. This isn't the Old West. You want justice done, you call the police. Or, if you pull something like this, with these results, then you still call the police and own up to it. Let a jury decide who's the good guy and who's the bad."

Chapter Eight
    Jonathan dropped the Explorer off at a self-storage place on the outskirts of Muncie and locked the door. Within a few hours, the owner of a body shop that specialized in under-the-table repairs would enter the storage bay and examine the vehicle for any bullet holes or other damage that might need repairing. Finding none, he would return it to the rental car lot at the Indianapolis Airport. No one would know anything of the events in which the vehicle had participated.
    Leaving the storage yard, Jonathan walked down the street to a no-tell motel and took