It was stupid of him to have come back, of course. This was not his case to worry about. Ira Parminter had made that clear enough. As a federal peace officer, Deputy Marshal Custis Long had no jurisdiction here. None.
Hell, he didn’t know why he’d come back to the cabin.
All right, so he did know why. Damn it.
It was that tear frozen on the dead girl’s cheek. That and her age. She’d been a kid still. Practically. Never mind what she’d been doing for a living lately. Fact was, she was just a kid. And now she was dead. And there was something about that sight of that tear frozen on her pale, no-longer-soft, and unblemished cheek that reached inside Longarm and churned his gut.
Whoever did such a thing to the girl shouldn’t be allowed to walk away from it unscathed.
Never mind that Longarm had no jurisdiction. The hell with that. He would find some handle to grab hold of when the time came to sort that out. He was sure he could. He would think of something.
In the meantime, well, he wanted to take another look. That was all. Just a look. It wouldn’t violate any questions of jurisdiction for him to look around. Why, the town’s own mayor had invited him to look, hadn’t he? Damn right, he had.
Long saw the dark bulk of the Travis cabin ghostly and dim through the screen of blowing snow and turned toward it.
He was nearly to the door before he realized that something seemed wrong.
For a second or two he couldn’t figure out what. The place looked very much like it had the first time he arrived here, earlier in the company of the mayor.
The scene was very much the same, the door with its broken lock standing wide open and a glow of lamplight dimly visible indoors.
Except Longarm thought that Parminter had blown the lamp out before they’d left. He couldn’t swear to that, but he thought it was so.
More to the point, though, was that door standing open to the storm.
Sure, the door was open this morning when Longarm and the mayor first arrived.
But it was shut when they left. Longarm knew that for a fact, for he had been the one to close it.
Had the killer come back to make sure there were no clues to his identity left behind?
Longarm tugged the glove off his left hand and reached inside his coat, drawing the big Colt from its cross-draw holster as he eased up alongside the doorway.
There was too much wind noise for him to hear anything inside. The good side to that was that no one indoors was likely to hear him over the howl of that wind either.
Longarm held his revolver poised shoulder-high and aimed in the general direction of the sky. He took a breath, braced himself in readiness, and sprang through the doorway in a rush.
Two men. No, three. Bulky. Gathered close beside the bed. They were looking down at the body, and at first remained unaware of Longarm’s presence. Then one of them looked in his direction and let out a shriek of terror. He was peering straight down the sights—the wrong way—of Longarm’s .44.
He screamed. His two friends turned. They screamed too.
Longarm was so startled himself that he jerked his hand sharply upward lest by some tragic error he loose off a round by accident and kill somebody.
Kids. They were a bunch of damn kids. Not much older than the boys who’d found the body to begin with. These boys were thirteen, fourteen, somewhere around there.
Enough older, anyway, to have a fascination with the sight of a naked female, never mind that she was dead and frozen.
For that was damn sure what they’d been doing. Obviously they’d heard about the naked girl from the younger kids and decided to enjoy the sight for themselves. When Longarm walked in on them, they’d been standing there holding the lamp over her and staring at the girl’s body. The blanket Longarm had so carefully drawn up to cover her was pulled aside now so that these pimple-faced little pud-whackers could get an eyeful. Of a girl who couldn’t possibly object to their examination. “You little sons of bitches!” Longarm barked.
That was a mistake. He knew it almost before the sounds passed his lips.
The little bastards broke out of their rigid poses and headed for the door, taking flight as suddenly as a covey of quail breaking cover and scrambling to get by Longarm.
He wanted to talk to them. At least take down their names so as to scare the shit out of them as a lesson in manners.
He didn’t have a chance. The Colt was in his right hand and they were rushing by on that side. He made a swipe at one with his left, but the kid ducked and slithered past slick as snake snot.
Even then, Longarm probably could have caught at least one of them—all right, might’ve had a chance to grab one of them—except for a rising blossom of yellow flame that he glimpsed out of the corner of his eye.
The idiot kid who’d been holding the lantern hadn’t tried to take it with him when he ran. He’d just dropped the thing where he stood.
And the lantern, its globe already broken, had promptly ignited the corner of the blanket that the boys had pulled off the girl’s body.
If Longarm took time to run down the boys, dammit, the cabin, body, evidence, and everything else would be a bonfire long before he could hope to get back.
With that in mind, he really didn’t have much to choose from. He turned his back on the boys and hustled over to grab the burning blanket.
