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  The girl on the other end answers fast, with a breathy, “Kami?” We’ve talked several times.

  “It’s done. Police are arresting him now.”

  There’s a scream. No, it’s more cry than scream. Then she says, “Thank you. Thank you.”

  Although she lived two hours away, she’d heard about our team. Sam’s blog post about our confidential informant case had gone viral in Iowa. Emma had contacted us via our high school’s website link, wanting our help.

  Emma’s older, but underage, sister, Margot, died a month prior in an alcohol-related car accident. There was physical evidence that she’d been abused and beaten before it happened. No one knew who did it or how Margot got the alcohol, but the high school rumors pegged this Sip N Go guy. There was DNA evidence but no criminal database matches. Authorities had been frustrated with no true leads.

  I say, “Under the new state law, now that he’s sold alcohol to underage customers, he’ll be arrested. His DNA and fingerprints will go into the system. If he’s the guy, we’ll have him.”

  Over the phone, the sobs continue as Sandy pulls up behind the flashing cop cars.

  I say, “I hope it helps.”

  “It does. It does. Thank you!”

  In the long term, I doubt it will. Grief is grief.

  Gavin, then Sam and Daniel, come to stand by the Green Machine. Sandy and I get out and join them. Highway traffic sounds are an unending drone, and the ground rumbles beneath my feet. The tire taste bites my tongue, and the smell twists my nose in disgust.

  The sun has set; no moon has risen. Overhead in proper Nighthawks style, the giant retro orange and green neon Sip N Go sign burns down on us, mixing with the red-and-blue police lights.

  But I’m not Edward Hopper. Whether it’s good or not, I must have answers. Chaos points lead somewhere, and I must follow.

  ***

  Two weeks after the arrest

  It’s snowing, again. It’s been a long winter and spring isn’t knocking very hard. My laptop is open to my final update on the Margot case. Although we wait for the DNA analysis report, Sip N Go guy’s fingerprints matched those on several empty beer cans found in her totaled vehicle.

  Better yet, after the arrest became public, those high school rumors turned into witness testimonies. Two young women came forward. They had bought alcohol and been abused by the same man.

  I close the e-file and poise my finger over the inbox messages from Sam the Case Feeder. What bashing chaos points will emerge? Where will the threads lead my team?

  Two Bits, Four Bits, Six Bits…

  Frederick Ramsay

  About a dozen years ago I was in a critique group and trying, with little success, to pitch a book I’d written (Judas) to agents. One of the members of the group knew Robert Rosenwald, publisher at Poisoned Pen Press, and said the Press did not require an agent but specialized in mysteries only. I happened to have an old mystery I’d written years before. I rewrote it and sent it off. It was nearly a year before anything happened, but then, one Sunday afternoon, Editor-in-Chief Barbara Peters called and said they liked the story, and so the first Ike Schwartz mystery, Artscape, moved off the hard-drive into print.

  —F.R.

  ***

  Charlie had no right to say the gun was his. Just because he’d been the one who saw it first and picked it up, didn’t make it his. Hadn’t they both found it in the weeds next to the creek? Charlie said if he wanted it, he’d have to pay him four dollars. Jake didn’t have four dollars. He had a pocket full of change that added up to, like, two dollars and a quarter. He hoped if he threw in his Matt Wieters rookie card, Charlie would let him have it.

  “It’s probably some crook’s gun,” Charlie had said.

  “We should turn it in to the sheriff’s office, Charlie.”

  Charlie shook his head. “No, that won’t do any good. Murderers always wipe their fingerprints off their weapons and anyhow this is probably from someplace a million miles away. I think I’m going to keep it.”

  “We both found that gun.”

  That’s when the argument started about possession being nine-tenths of the law and what it would take to buy him out. Charlie’s dad was a lawyer, so he would naturally know all about that.

  Jake patted his pocket with the money and kept walking. Charlie’s house had a long walkway which led to the big porch that stretched all the way across the front and wrapped around the side. Jake liked that porch. He’d asked his dad why they didn’t have a porch. His dad only grunted, “You sound like your Ma. Hand me that nine-sixteenth open end,” and kept on working on the car he kept in the garage which he said would sell for “big bucks.” It was a “classic,” he said. It looked like a pile of junk to Jake.

  “Besides, them Livingstons never sit out on that porch from one day to the next. You could park a damn Volkswagen on it and them people wouldn’t notice it for a month of Sundays.”

  Charlie would notice. Good weather or bad, he always sat on the porch around the side of the house. He said it was his office. Jake veered off the path and headed toward Charlie’s office. When he heard the first gunshot, he stopped dead in his tracks. The next two sent him hot-footing across the lawn and into the woods.

  ***

  Billy Sutherlin had the crime scene tape in place and the crime scene techs going when Ike arrived.

  “We all set here, Billy?”

  “Pretty much. Miz Livingston is in the front room. She’s all shook up, like. We don’t know where the boy is, but we’re looking.”

  “Where’s the husband?”

  “According to her, he’s in Roanoke for the day. She expects he’ll be home for supper.”

  “Anybody tried to reach him?”

  “She don’t know where he’s at exactly, so, no.”

  “Call his office and see if they know. Okay, what have we got?”

  “Samuel Purvis, thirty-five, white male, shot three times here in the hallway. The shooter got him once in the chest, twice in the back. Blood spatter suggests that whoever shot Purvis nailed him the first time and twice more when he tried to run away.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Not too sure yet, friend of the family, the wife said.”

  “No witnesses?”

  “Wife says she was upstairs, heard footsteps, guessed Purvis came on in, and then the shots. She says her son, Charlie, might or might not have seen something. Kids run pretty wild out here in the summer, so no telling where he might have been at the time.”

  “Okay, show me what you have so far.”

  ***

  Jake hightailed it to the woods and crouched down behind a clump of sassafras. When he dared to take a look back at the house, he saw Charlie careen around the back of the house and disappear in the woods twenty yards away. Jake worked his way over to him.

  “Charlie, what happened? Who got themselves shot?”

  For a ten-year-old, gunshots emanating from a big house could only mean one thing: somebody had been murdered. Charlie sat in the brush, his arms locked around his knees. He didn’t look too good, glassy-eyed, sort of.

  “Charlie, are you okay? What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, my God. He’s dead, Jake. My Uncle Sam is shot dead. I was on the porch like I always am. Oh, God. I…the shots. Bam, and then bam, bam. I run in the house and there he is in the front hall. He’s dead, Jake, and our gun is what killed him.”

  “Holy cow! Wait. When did it get to be our gun?”

  “Your gun, then.”

  “Mine? Charlie. You been telling me it was finders-keepers, and nine-tenths of the…whatever, and now all of a sudden it’s mine? How’d that happen?”

  “Well, I agreed to sell it to you and so that makes it yours, see?”

  Jake frowned and studied Charlie close up. He always deferred to Charlie because he was older by a year and g
enerally believed to be smarter. At least that’s what his teachers said, so it must be true. At this exact moment, however, Jake wasn’t so sure. Charlie was looking less like a fox and more like a weasel.

  “You know what that makes us, Jake?”

  “What?”

  “Accessories to the commission of felony murder.”

  Charlie learned all that talk from his dad. Jake wasn’t sure he knew what he was talking about most times, but this sounded serious.

  “We are accessories to murder? How are we? What’s felony? I ain’t aware we done anything. Oh, you mean because we didn’t turn the pistol over to the sheriff. I told you we should have and—”

  “It’s not that, stupid. My Uncle Sam is lying in the house shot dead with…okay, with our gun.”

  “I got that. You didn’t shoot him, did you? If you did, that don’t include me. I don’t even know your Uncle Sam. Heck, I didn’t even know you had an uncle. How can the murderer have killed your Uncle Sam with our gun?”

  “I hid it in that big flowerpot out front like always, and he musta found it, walked in, and shot Uncle Sam.”

  “How did that happen if it was hid?”

  “I don’t know. The only important thing is, it was took and we are accessories to murder. What are we going to do?”

  “I don’t get it. Someone shot your uncle with the gun we found and that makes us accessories?”

  “Cheese and rice, Jake, are you that dumb? Our fingerprints are all over that gun. When the police find it, we’re sunk.”

  “Charlie, if someone took our gun to shoot your uncle, don’t it stand to reason that they’d keep it or, if they didn’t, you said yourself, they wipe their fingerprints off before they throw it away?”

  “Not if they were wearing gloves. Then they wouldn’t wipe it in case there might be somebody else’s on it. That would lead the police away from them.”

  “And straight to us. Cripes, Charlie, I told you we shoulda turned that gun in to Sheriff Ike. Now lookit what we got to deal with.”

  “Shut up, Jake. We need to find that gun.”

  “Charlie, how the heck we going to do that? We don’t know if he threw it away or, if he did, where he threw it at.”

  ***

  Ike Schwartz thought of himself as the “Reluctant Sheriff.” He’d run for office the first time to rid the town of a truly corrupt sheriff, the second time to foil the return of the same. Now it had become a “‘hard to break” habit. His dilemma was: If he wasn’t the sheriff, what else would he do? His wife, Ruth, had a career. They had no children. What would an old CIA hand, out-of-work sheriff do?

  Billy Sutherlin leaned around the door. “We might have something, Ike. There’s a rumor going around that Miz Livingston was having an affair with the dead guy.”

  “And?”

  “Well, Lawyer Livingston is supposed to be in Roanoke, but he coulda drove back, caught Purvis, and shot him. Then all he needed to do is scoot back to Roanoke and make hisself seen around town and come home for dinner and be all shocked and surprised his old buddy is bumped off in his front hall. He has motive and opportunity.”

  “And assuming he has a gun, the means. Okay, it’s a possibility. Put out a BOLO on him and bring him in.”

  “Already done. You want to talk to the lady again?”

  “Yeah, only let’s talk to her here. Any luck locating the boy?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Okay, send a couple of deputies back out to the house and search the area. Kids and woods and summertime, he’ll be in there somewhere. While they’re at it, tell them to keep an eye out for the weapon. It’s not likely the shooter tossed it, but we might get lucky.”

  “Right. Anything else?”

  “Samuel Purvis, our vic. What do we know about him besides what you told me earlier? Is he married? Kids? What?”

  “He’s married and has a real estate office in Lexington. Don’t know about family. His wife has been notified and is on her way here.”

  “That sort of suggests another possibility, doesn’t it? If she suspected the affair, she could drive down here from Lexington, which you know is a whole lot easier to do than driving up from Roanoke. She catches him in flagrante, plugs her husband, and pops back up the road before anybody even knows she’s gone.”

  “You think she knew about the affair?”

  “Billy, we don’t even know if there was an affair. If there was, we don’t know if either of the spouses being cheated on knew about it. That said, if there was, and one or the other of them did know, we have at least two possible suspects with a motive, but zero evidence any of this happened.”

  “So, where’s that leave us?”

  “Right now, we are six bits short of a dollar.”

  “Six bits short of a…what?”

  “A dollar. In the twenties, my granddad had a haberdashery. He always bought an ad in the local high school yearbook. I was looking through them a while back and noticed a football cheer they printed in the book.

  “Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar.

  “If you’re for the Tigers,

  “Stand up and holler.”

  “Right. What’s bits?”

  “Come on, two bits is a quarter, right? So, four bits would be two quarters or fifty cents, like that.”

  “So, you’re saying we’re a far piece from closing this one out.”

  “You got it.”

  ***

  “How in the heck are we going to find a gun which we don’t even know he threw away, Charlie?”

  “I might have seen him do it.”

  “Scout’s honor, Charlie, you didn’t see no man run out here, did you?”

  “I…okay, I just guessed he must have. I mean you were out front. Did you see anybody go that way?”

  “No.”

  “So, there you are. He had to come through here, right?”

  “So, let’s say he did. Where’d he throw the gun?”

  “If he’s left-handed, over there.” Charlie pointed into the trees to their left and then those to the right. “If he’s a righty, over there.”

  The area to the right was mostly grass and finding a pistol would have been easy. No gun. They worked their way left toward an oak, poking the shrubbery aside with sticks. Jake almost missed it.

  “I got it,” he hollered. Over here.”

  The pistol was almost hidden by leaves. Jake leaned forward to pick it up.

  “Don’t touch it, Jake,”

  “Don’t touch it? How are we going to get rid of our fingerprints if I don’t? Unless you have some gloves or something in your back pocket, one of us is going to have to.”

  “I don’t but, wait. I saw on TV how the detective sticks a pencil in the barrel and kinda lifts it up.”

  Neither of them had a pencil. Jake had to try three twigs before he found one that didn’t snap under the weight of the gun. He held it up and Charlie wiped the pistol, barrel, cylinder, and grip, with his shirttail. Jake didn’t think he’d ever stop and the pistol seemed to get heavier every second.

  “That’s got to be enough,” he said. “Now what do we do?”

  “I guess we put it back where we found it.”

  “Where we found it first, or where we found it just now?”

  The twig snapped and the gun dropped to the ground. Before Jake could fit another twig into the barrel and lift it up again, a deputy crashed through the underbrush.

  “Hey, you kids. What are you doing here? Don’t you know this is a crime scene?”

  “Yes, sir,” they both said. Charlie added, “I live here, so it’s okay, right?”

  “What do you mean you live here? Is your name Charlie Livingston?”

  “Yes, sir, it is and my Pa is a lawyer, so you’d better be careful.”

  “Ha! That’s a good one,
kid. We been looking all over for you. You come with me. The sheriff wants to talk to you,”

  “We found the gun,” Jake blurted.

  “Shut up, Jake.”

  “You found the…sure you have.”

  But Jake couldn’t stop. His fingerprints were no longer on the gun. He could not fairly be accused of being a felony accessory, and he needed the thing over with. He pointed at his feet “Right the Sam Hill here.”

  The deputy stepped over and whistled. He turned and spoke into his shoulder radio. Within a minute two other deputies joined him. The gun disappeared into an evidence bag and the two boys were hustled into a police cruiser and whisked to the sheriff’s office.

  ***

  Ike spent a half hour with the two boys. Charlie Livingston did most of the talking. The other boy, Jake Baker, listened, his eyes fixed on Charlie. Occasionally he’d frown, but he did not interrupt. Their story in a nutshell was that Charlie and Jake were exploring the woods and heard the gunshot. They didn’t think too much of it. No, he didn’t hear anyone calling him. When they came near the house they veered off the path and found the gun. When asked why they left the path, Charlie paused. Jake started to say something and Charlie jumped back in.

  “We had to pee.”

  Both of you?”

  “Yes, sir, and that old oak tree is our peeing tree.”

  “Your what?”

  “It’s good luck to pee on that tree so, we do whenever we can. Ain’t that true, Jake?”

  Jake didn’t seem too sure, but nodded his head. Ike sent them home with a caution not to talk to anyone about what they’d seen or done.

  ***

  At five-thirty, Billy stepped into the office. “Ike, we got a ‘hurry up’ done on the ballistics and prints from the gun. I reckon we have good news and bad news and one odd thing. There was a piece of a twig jammed in the barrel. It must have got there when he tossed it. Hard to figure, though.”

  “The bad news?”

  “It was mostly wiped clean, but the killer forgot to wipe the shells in the chamber. There were prints on them.”

  “What’s bad about that?”

  “The prints don’t belong to anybody even remotely related to the crime. They belong to a Chako Hernandez who is in the cooler over in Lynchburg for murder in a stick-up last week.”