Hot on the Trail. Vicki Tharp

where is his?” she asked.

      “I don’t know. Show me where you found his body.”

      * * * *

      With a flashlight, Quinn and Jenna walked to the front of the property, Dink leading the way. Past the big house, the barn, the trailer parking lot, and the “boneyard” where old tractors and implements went to die in the tall, flowering weeds.

      They stood in front of the hay barn; a single, three-foot strip of metal siding lay off to their left, one corner of it crushed where a vehicle had driven over it.

      “This is where you found him?”

      “Dink found him.” At the sound of his name, Dink glanced up from the gopher hole he was sniffing. “Kurt must have fallen off the top of the round bales. When we found him, he was caught between the hay and the wall. Head down, his hand in the dirt. That’s where they found the syringe.”

      “Did they try to revive him?”

      Jenna shook her head, the brim of her brown Stetson shading her eyes. “Too late.”

      Taking the flashlight from her hand, Quinn popped his head into the void in the building and shined the light up and down the line of round bales stacked three high. No footprints in the dirt as far as the light shone in the eighteen-inch air gap between the hay and the sides of the building.

      No gun, either.

      They walked to the front of the building, leaving Dink to his gopher hunt. Inside the hay barn, row after row of round bales were stacked on the right and stair-stepped stacks of square bales on the left. At the back of the barn, the stacks met.

      Quinn started climbing the square bales.

      “Where are you going?”

      “I want to see where he fell.”

      When he made it to the top, he grabbed on to one of the rafters above his head, leaned back over, and watched Jenna climb. She was nimble and quick, and wasn’t even breathing hard when she made it to the top.

      His own breath came faster than normal from the exertion. Apparently, he needed to up his cardio if he wanted to pass the physical in a month.

      At the top of the round bales, they leaped from one bale to the next and the next until they had made their way to the side where the panel had been removed.

      “What’s this?” Quinn stood on top of the six-foot-diameter round bale and shook the beam of the flashlight in the gap between the bale they were standing on and the next one over.

      The thin layer of green and white plastic netting that held the bale together was torn in the middle, clumps of loose hay gathering in the crevasse between the two bales.

      “Probably damaged when the bales were being moved inside.”

      Quinn grunted, not entirely convinced. He stepped to the edge of the bale, the one Kurt must have sat on before he fell. He shined the light down from there, but everything looked the same as it had from the ground.

      He sat, dangling his legs over the edge of the round bale, looking out through the gap in the siding and at the ranch beyond.

      “What was he doing up here?” Quinn said. “I don’t get it.”

      “Shooting up, from the looks of it.”

      He cast a look at her, but he was starting to believe it himself. “Then where’s his gun?”

      “Despite what you said, maybe he didn’t bring it. Or maybe he needed the cash. My program isn’t free. If he didn’t need the money for his fees, he could have pawned it to pay for the drugs.”

      “Plausible,” Quinn said, the word pregnant with doubt. “But knowing Kurt and how he was about that gun, not probable.”

      He glanced over his shoulder. Jenna stood behind him in deep thought, tugging at her bottom lip with her thumb and forefinger. He stood, the flashlight beam dancing around on the hay.

      “You bleeding again?” Jenna pointed at a spot near Quinn’s right boot.

      He aimed the light on the spot. Looked like blood. He checked his forearm; the bandage was clean. “Not mine.”

      “Don’t move,” she said. “Toss me the light.”

      She caught it with one hand, flipping the barrel to shine the light all around his feet. “I don’t see any more. Jump back one, so I can look closer.”

      He did, and she inspected where he’d been standing, then rechecked the face of the bale that faced the siding.

      “Anything?” he asked.

      “Nothing else.”

      “We should call the sheriff. Could be evidence of foul play.”

      “Most likely Kurt’s blood from shooting up.”

      “I don’t know,” Quinn said. With his hands on his hips, he glanced around the barn and at the narrow gap between bales and the metal sheeting.

      Jenna jumped to the bale where Quinn stood, careful to stay away from the spot of blood. “Now what’s wrong?”

      “How did he end up falling facedown?”

      “How should I know? He shoots up, gets dizzy, his balance is off, and he either falls off this side or the other.”

      “If I stepped off the end, I go down feet first. I stumble or fall between bales, I wind up in a ball in the crease, my hand hanging down or my leg, but in a gap that narrow, if you trip forward, your head’s going to hit the wall, but you aren’t going down headfirst.”

      “Unless you want to.”

      “You playing devil’s advocate, or do you believe that?”

      “Honestly, I don’t know what I believe. Besides the fact that we should listen to St. John and let the sheriff’s office do their job.”

      CHAPTER THREE

      By the time dinner rolled around, the sheriff still hadn’t shown up. Something about some trouble in Murdock that was keeping him.

      Rank from the long hours on the road, Quinn grabbed a shower before joining the others at the big house for dinner. There were three empty chairs at the table, since the ranch’s regular hands, Alby and Santos, had made other plans for dinner on their day off.

      The air was thick with the aroma of brisket and beans and jalapeño corn bread as everybody at the long trestle table served themselves.

      He’d missed Lottie’s home-cooked meals since he’d joined the Marines, and after fueling himself on gas station coffee and fast food on the trip up, his mouth watered and his stomach grumbled.

      Lottie jumped up and gave him a hug. Her husband, Dale, stepped over, clapped him on the back, and gave him a firm handshake.

      “Hey, Mac.” Quinn made his way to the table and leaned down to give her a hug. Of all the people he admired most in the world, she topped the list. And adding icing to the cake, she’d given him her grandfather’s Harley when he’d gone off to boot camp.

      He received a perfunctory handshake from Hank—her husband, and Jenna’s father. In Hank’s eyes, Quinn had never been good enough for Jenna.

      And there had been many times in the past years that Quinn had agreed with him.

      Boomer punched Quinn on the bicep before introducing him to his wife, Sidney. Quinn had met her briefly years before. Before his Permanent Change of Station, PCS, to Okinawa, and before he’d made the mistake of asking Jenna to marry him.

      There wasn’t much about that trip to the ranch that he wished to remember.

      Across from them, beside Jenna, was a young girl around fourteen, give or take.

      “I’m Pepita,” the girl said with