WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 8
Sheriff Jackson Archer studied what appeared to be the scene of a suicide, holding on to professional detachment as best he could. He was a good cop and a popular sheriff. And though he had spent a few years with the Charlotte police in order to acquire the sort of experience a small, ordinarily peaceful mountain town rarely offered and even more rarely needed, the truth was that Prosperity had been exceptionally peaceful since he’d taken office, and he suspected he’d gotten used to that.
So professional detachment was difficult.
Not that any cop could with complete detachment view a scene in which a man had blown most of his head off.
“Why a shotgun?” his chief deputy Katie Cole asked, her own detachment having long since departed; her voice shook more than a little, and her face was paper-white. That shock looked odd on her, unfamiliar, at least to Archer, because he’d really never seen her anything but calm, professional, and both courteous and pleasant enough to hide the steel inside her from all but those who knew her well.
He had taken some flak for hiring an “outsider” to be his chief deputy rather than promoting from within, but Katie had a background in law enforcement, and both her friendly, easy manner and her solid training—sharpshooter proficiency on the shooting range and skilled physical workouts in the gym that had pushed other, larger deputies to their limits—had mostly quieted the early rumblings in his department. Plus, experience in working with her day to day had convinced even the most jealous of her hiring and rank that she was indeed the best qualified for the job of chief deputy.
Though those same people might have been forgiven for revising their impressions now.
Because right now, her pale face caused her dark blond hair, worn in a casual ponytail that made her look far younger than thirty-two, appear even darker, and her normally sharp hazel eyes were dark and disturbed. She looked a little shocked, a little frightened, and more than a little unsure of what to do next.
He didn’t blame her for that. Any of that.
“Why a shotgun?” she repeated when the silence had lengthened.
“Beats the hell out of me,” Archer responded grimly.
From her position several feet farther from the body than the sheriff’s, Katie said with a stab at professionalism if not detachment, “I can see with those long arms of his he could easily reach the trigger even with the end of the barrel up under his chin like that, and it’s obvious he did from his position, but why use a shotgun when he owns several other guns?”
“Guess he wanted to make sure he got the job done.”
Katie eyed her superior, in part because it was a far less stomach-churning view than that of the victim. He was thirty-eight, tall, rugged in a way that made him look more like the sheriff of an Old West town than a twenty-first-century small mountain town. (She had caught herself more than once expecting to hear the metallic jingling of spurs.) He had dark brown hair with a bit of silver mixed in, level gray eyes, and an almost-always calm voice that could turn persuasive—or hard as nails—depending on what the situation called for. He had one broken marriage behind him, a not uncommon curse of law enforcement work, but he didn’t talk about that and Katie hadn’t asked.
He was a good cop, a good boss, and a man the people of Prosperity and the sprinkling of other, smaller towns in Foxx County respected a great deal. The sort of man people would turn to in a crisis.
Katie just hoped that would be the case now. That the citizens of Prosperity would see in him a steadying hand even when things got bad, very bad, as she knew they would during what she could feel was coming. What had already started. And she very much hoped Jackson Archer could at least accept the existence of something he would quite probably never understand.
Otherwise, what was going to destroy so much would destroy him as well.
Dragging her thoughts back to the here and now, she said, “He chose to blow most of his head off on an otherwise normal Wednesday morning with his wife upstairs fixing breakfast and the kids still getting ready for school?” She shook her head. “I know he keeps all his guns down here in that gun safe, but would a father of three blow his brains out in the basement with his kids in the house?”
Archer drew a breath and let it out in a rough sigh, not impatient with his deputy, but clearly baffled himself. “It seems clear he did; since he kept his other arm across the gun it barely moved when he let go with both barrels. His finger’s still stuck in the trigger guard, and it’s the right finger on the right hand—that is to say the correct hand, his left. He is—was—a southpaw.”
The victim of what appeared to be suicide, Sam Bowers, thirty-three, was seated on an old couch in the basement that was the only real piece of furniture in a space filled with plastic storage bins on homemade wooden shelving and one fairly large obviously homemade table beside the washer and dryer, presumably used for folding clothing when it came out of the dryer. The couch had been pushed up against one of the cinder-block walls, and the area behind what had been Bowers’s head was now splashed with blood and bits of skull and brain matter.
A lot of blood and a lot of brain matter.
It was a gruesome sight. It was the sight Stacey Bowers had found when she had come halfway down the basement steps to see what she’d expected to be a repentant husband one of whose guns had unaccountably gone off at seven in the morning.
One of those people who handled emergencies with calm and then fell apart afterward, she had managed not to scream, hurried back up the stairs and closed and locked the basement door, called a neighbor to take the kids so they’d be out of the house, and then after hustling them on their way, called 911. She had still been calm enough when the sheriff and his deputies arrived to tell them where the body of her husband was and why he’d gone downstairs. Or, at least, why she’d believed he’d gone downstairs. White as a sheet and with a steady voice that had finally begun to break by the time she finished telling them what she had to.
After that she had fallen apart, literally dropping to the floor with an agonized moan, and was now upstairs in the living room still sobbing, her shock and grief deep and genuine, with a sympathetic but otherwise helpless female deputy with her and the family doctor on his way.
Her thoughts clearly running along the same lines, Katie said, “Stacey won’t be able to tell us anything, assuming she even can, for a while. I’m betting her family doctor will want to sedate her.”
“Yeah, probably. Did you call her sister?”
Katie nodded. “Should be here in about half an hour. She was already at work, so coming from downtown out here. She said she’d take Stacey and the kids to her house, that they’d stay with her as long as they needed to.”
“How did she react to Sam’s death?” Archer knew Heather Davidson, who worked at the courthouse, and he knew she was neither easily shaken nor a fool. And the sisters were close.
“Shocked. Genuinely shocked. Said there was no way it was suicide and sounded absolutely positive about it.”
Archer’s frown deepened. “No note. Not down here, not in their bedroom, not in his briefcase. He’s dressed for work at the bank as usual. According to his wife, he just came down here while she was busy with breakfast to get a few things out of that chest freezer over there and carry them upstairs for tonight’s supper. Just . . . a routine morning, a common chore.”
Until it had turned into something horrible.
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