If I Should Die

loaded.”

“I’m shutting down the resort,” Tim said.

Sean stared at him. “You’d give in to these scare tactics?”

“He could have killed you.”

“This is my battle now.”

Tim clenched his fists, showing a rare anger. “Like hell it is.”

“Dammit, Tim, he went after me. I’m not backing down, not until I find him.”

“I have to postpone the opening. I have a lunatic shooting at my guests.”

“We’re hardly guests.”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s only three weeks until my first real guests arrive, and I couldn’t live with myself if something happened to one of them. If we stop these people before then, great, but I’m still not opening until it’s settled.”

Delaying the opening was exactly what both Henry and Jon Callahan had suggested the night before. Was the shooting to underscore this so-called suggestion? The vandalism had escalated from property damage to arson to attempted murder.

If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead.

“Let’s find the brass first,” Sean said. “Then, I want you to meet with the Callahans. Jon Callahan told us last night that he wanted to talk to you about postponing the opening. Suspicious, don’t you think?”

“You can’t think that the Callahans are behind this-why?”

“I’ll find out. They want to play hardball-I invented the game.”

A chill ran through Sean’s body. How easy it was to fall back into his old life, an existence prone to lawbreaking and violence. His brother Duke had, as a condition of opening RCK East, made Sean promise he’d stay on the right side of the thin line.

“We can straddle the line, Sean, but we can’t cross it.”

His brother had cleaned up Sean’s background, but it wasn’t lost on Sean that Duke was more than willing to tap into Sean’s expertise and old network when necessary. It was only when Sean wanted to do it that Duke balked, fearing his brother would slip back into his old bad habits. Bad habits? That was an understatement.

Looking back toward the trucks, he extrapolated where the shooter had to have been situated, then walked behind the tree he suspected was ground zero. Scanning the ground, he circled outward. The bullet casings could have been ejected quite a distance, depending on the type of gun, the wind, and the angle of the shooter.

He found a casing about ten feet from the base of the tree, on the right side.

Pulling tweezers from one of Lucy’s evidence bags he’d grabbed when they’d returned to the truck, he used them to pick up the brass.

A.270-caliber Winchester round. Very common among hunting rifles, particularly for deer and other large game. Here in the Adirondacks probably every household had a rifle, and half of them fired.270 bullets.

But it wasn’t hunting season.

He dropped the casing into the bag.

Tim said, “I called Duke last night.”

Sean barely controlled his flash of anger. “You called my brother, why?”

“To fill him in on what is going on. I’ve known Duke nearly twenty years; I wanted his advice.”

Of all people-dammit, his brother? For years Sean had been working to get out from under Duke’s thumb, to run the East Coast branch of the California-based RCK without unnecessary interference and unwanted advice.

“And what did he say?” Sean asked, though what he wanted to ask was How did I screw up? Because no matter how much Duke said he trusted him, he had never truly stopped second- guessing his little brother’s decisions.

“He said he’d have done everything exactly as you’ve done. Also, that he’d tap into other contacts for the background checks your partner is running. He told me to have you call him if you needed anything.”

Sean swallowed uneasily. He hadn’t expected that.

“But,” Tim continued, “I’m not so sure about any of this anymore. How did anyone even know you and Lucy were at the mine?”

“That’s why we’re upping the ante,” Sean said, though he didn’t have a firm plan in place. He spotted another casing, three feet from the first. He put it in the bag.

“What’s your plan?” Tim asked.

“We’ll talk at the lodge. I have a few details to work out.”

Meaning he didn’t know what the hell he was doing, but he wasn’t going to sit around and wait for the shooter to come after him.

It was time to go back to the Lock amp; Barrel, look everyone in the eye, and declare war.

FOURTEEN

Lucy paced the short length of Tim Hendrickson’s living room in the small house next to the Spruce Lake lodge. She’d been livid that it’d taken two hours for Deputy Weddle to arrive after the shooting, but nearly exploded when he focused on their excursion into the mine rather than the attack.

“Someone shot at us,” she repeated. How long was he going to ignore the more serious crime of attempted murder?

“We’ll get to that,” he said, “but first I want to know why you went to the mine when it’s a possible crime scene.”

“When you were here yesterday, you gave no indication that the missing body was a priority, and there was no police barrier blocking access to the mine.”

“It’s in the middle of the woods,” Weddle said. “I didn’t think I needed to tell people to keep out. The sign near the mine shaft says the same thing.”

She bit back the urge to explain the difference to him. “We didn’t disturb anything,” she said with forced calm. This cop brought out the worst in her.

Tim leaned forward from his chair at the table across the room. “Deputy, my guests could have been killed. This has all gotten out of control.”

“There’s nothing that tells me there’s a connection between the guy with the rifle and the vandalism you’ve been having,” Weddle said. “For all you know it could have been a hunter and he didn’t even know you were there.”

“That doesn’t explain the note,” Tim said.

Lucy glanced at Sean. He sat on the couch watching the deputy with a deceptively casual expression. He’d been so angry after finding the sniper’s note in their truck, and uncharacteristically silent after Weddle arrived. She forced herself to stop pacing, but she couldn’t sit.

“I’ll take it to the sheriff and see what he thinks,” Weddle said, “but at this point, we have more important issues to discuss, such as interfering with my investigation.”

“What investigation?” she snapped, unable to keep the sarcasm from her tone.

They’d decided not to mention she’d picked up three of the maggots they’d found. She felt uncomfortable keeping the information from a cop, but he hadn’t taken her seriously, and she didn’t trust him. His attitude today told her they’d made the right choice. She’d already packaged up the bugs to ship to a lab once she figured out exactly where to send them for the fastest, most accurate analysis.

“There were strands of hair on the rock,” Lucy continued, “and the maggots I’d seen in the woman’s mouth were in the tunnel opening, right where the cart had been. It’s pretty clear someone used the cart to move the body.”

Weddle looked ill as she spoke, and Lucy was silently pleased. Childish, perhaps, but this cop wasn’t making anything easy. She’d been around law enforcement officers her entire life and expected them to do the job; most did. Weddle was one of the few who seemed both clueless and incompetent.

“I ran you both. You live in Washington, D.C., not Boston,” Weddle said.

Lucy frowned. “Boston? We never said we lived in Boston.”