The Homeplace: A Mystery Read Online Free PDF Page A

and lit another. “What do you need me to do now?”
    “We can take you to see your son’s body.” Paco cleared his throat.
    “No. I can drive myself.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Yeah.” A lungful of smoke filled the air around his face. “Jimmy”—it was the first time he had said his son’s name—“drove a Ford pickup. Any idea where it is?”
    Paco almost recited the next words. “Sir, your son’s body is on the way to the morgue at Comanche Crossing. You can view the body there. It will be up to the district attorney as to when it will be released.” It made Jimmy sound like a thing, not a person. “You can talk to them about your son’s truck.”
    Riley was on his sixth cigarette and still on the couch when the deputies left him. He had never asked anything more about how his son had died. Had it been guessing when he asked who shot Jimmy? Marty shook his head.
    The deputies didn’t say a word until they were in the car. Paco took a folded paper from his shirt pocket and scribbled down notes for himself.
    Marty copied the older man and wrote down things he wanted to remember, but the silence battered his ears. “I saw Chase Ford this mornin’.” He needed words to fill the terrible quiet and silence the things that brewed in his mind. “He’s stayin’ out at the ranch. Gonna try to get a deer.”
    Paco nodded. “I said hello to him at the game last night.”
    “Big Paul didn’t come to Chase’s games, either.”
    Paco shook his head. The old deputy had ten acres on a creek bottom between Brandon and Comanche Crossing. He and his wife had two little girls. They raised Shetland ponies for extra money, went to church every Sunday, and he coached soccer and softball. Paco never missed his girls’ games.
    Paco started the car. “The woman Victor Benavidez married has a daughter named Dolly.”
    “I know.” Marty didn’t want to hear what he knew would come next.
    “Before she married Victor, Isabel kept house for Big Paul and Chase.” Paco stared straight ahead. “She came to work for them after Chase’s mother was in that accident.”
    “I remember all the stories people were sayin’ back then.”
    “That Big Paul was plowin’ two fields?”
    “Yeah. And that the baby girl was Chase’s half-sister.”
    Paco shifted the car into gear. “Most Saturdays, Dolly Benavidez works the breakfast shift over at Saylor’s. Let’s go see what she can tell us about Jimmy Riley.”
    Marty wasn’t sure he wanted to hear what she might say.

 
    CHAPTER THREE
    Birdie stepped over the yellow crime scene tape. She waved for the truck driver to stop and used the keys that Andy Puckett had given her to open the pasture gate. She swung the gate open and tied it off with a piece of baling wire she found in her pickup. No need to shut it. Everything in the field was dead. Including Jimmy Riley.
    Sheriff Kendall and the state police had taken her statement and told her she could leave. An ambulance waited to drive Jimmy’s body to the morgue in Comanche Crossing. The techs from the state said it would take them the rest of the day to gather what they needed.
    Andy Puckett never settled down; he went on a rant again. Finally, Sheriff Kendall let him send for a truck and front-end loader to haul his buffalo to the processing plant so he could save what meat he could.
    All the while Birdie couldn’t get one thought out of her head. She knew she was right about the shooter. He’d dropped the buffalo one at a time as they came in for the alfalfa hay he’d spread out along the fence. She reached down and picked up a handful. From the feel, it was fresh cut. Couldn’t have been in the bale for more than a week. The bale in the back of the boy’s truck was a regular sixty pound, square bale. Nothing special about it.
    She tried to recall which farmer was cutting and baling, which field had been worked recently, and who sold to whom.
    All this farm country could look the same.
    Then she remembered.
    Birdie