“Let’s grab some coffee,” he said. “I’ve got something I want to show you.”
I followed Colm to The Bakery. Enid was working behind the counter. She and I talked for a couple of minutes. Having been eager to find out the lab results, I hadn’t eaten that morning, so I ordered breakfast. “You want anything, Colm?” I asked.
“No. Just coffee.”
Colm and I sat at a table in the back corner. He was holding a manila file folder in front of him.
“What is it?”
“Got the results back on the gun.” He handed me the folder.
I looked over the report. It detailed levels of lead, antimony, and barium found in the barrel.
“So the gun was fired. That’s not a surprise,” I said.
Enid brought Colm and me a cup of coffee. He drank his black. I drank mine with cream.
“Keep reading,” Colm said.
The second page began a long analysis with images of prints found on the gun. All but one on the grip had been smudged and couldn’t be lifted. The other was a partial print of a little finger. The technician couldn’t tell whether the whorls were from the left or right hand. Several prints had been lifted from the cylinder.
“None of them match Latour’s,” Colm said. I knew Colm had obtained Amy Raye’s prints from items in the camp.
“What are you saying?”
“What if Kenny was the last one to fire the gun?”
“Do the prints match his?”
“I don’t know yet. But I’m going to find out.” Colm picked up his coffee, blew on it a couple of times, and then took a loud swallow.
“Was the revolver completely loaded when he gave it to her?”
“He said it was.”
“Which would explain his prints on the cylinder. Colm, Kenny said he was at the camp. Amy Raye had the truck. Both he and Aaron passed lie detectors.”
“Lie detectors aren’t foolproof.”
“And there’s no way to know when the gun had been fired?”
But I already knew the answer to that. It was practically impossible to determine how long gunfire residue had been left in any gun.
Enid carried a plate of biscuits and gravy to the table. I handed the folder back to Colm.
“You’re forgetting something,” I told him. “If she fired the gun, she was most likely wearing gloves. That would explain the smudging of the prints on the grip.”
“Maybe. But we found her gloves back at the truck.”
“But we didn’t find any liners. And we don’t know if she had another set of gloves in her pack. Come on, Colm, it was thirty-six degrees that day. She wouldn’t have gone out there without gloves.”
Maybe we should be considering these things about Kenny, but I wasn’t so sure. If Kenny had fired the gun, we could be talking murder, and an accusation like that could destroy someone’s life. If only we’d found the body.
I shoved a forkful of biscuits and gravy into my mouth. Then another.
“Somebody’s got an appetite,” Colm said.
I stopped eating. “We need to be sure. Be careful, Colm.”
Then I thought of something. “She was left-handed,” I said. I remembered the bow. It was a left-handed compound Hoyt. “What side of the grip was the print lifted from?”
“The left.”
I finished my biscuits, hoping the delay would emphasize my point. “That’s what I thought,” I said. “No prints were found on the right grip panel. No prints were found on the hammer. And the prints found on the left side were smudged.”
Colm knew what I was saying. If Amy Raye fired the gun, she would have held it in her left hand, and if she had been wearing gloves, she would have smudged any of Kenny’s prints from when he’d given it to her with his right hand. Because Kenny’s hand would be larger than Amy Raye’s, a print of his little finger showing up toward the bottom of the left grip panel would make sense.
But Colm wasn’t convinced. “We’ve gotten our search warrants for the computer and the phone records. Dean’s driving over to Evergreen today to pick up the computer. We should have the phone records by the end of the day tomorrow.”
“You’re still thinking foul play.”
“Foul play. Suicide. I’m not sure what I think, but like I said, from that bloody tear on her hat, either she was running from something, or she fell down, and if she fell, she would have fallen backward. She could have been shot. She could have been pushed. I’m speculating, of course.”
“Or she was walking through the woods and hit her head. I do it all the time.”
—
That night, Joseph and I were sitting on the sofa with our legs stretched out over a wicker trunk that we used for a coffee table. We had a bowl of popcorn between us and were watching the Steelers play the Broncos.