Beautiful Villain

I haven’t read the reports, and I haven’t poured over the case like Neil has. I’ve had five years to think about him, but he’s had five years to think about that night.

“He was shot, and the police were on the scene within minutes.”

“You think someone tipped them off.”

“I have no idea.”

“You think Sammy’s dad told them to come out?”

He nods.

“I think he was going to arrest me for something. Maybe he was even going to plants drugs on me. I don’t know. In the end, they didn’t have to plant anything on me. They just had to catch me, which wasn’t hard. I was lurking in the woods when they found me. It wasn’t difficult for them to argue I was hiding after what happened.”

“But there was no gunshot residue on your hands,” I point out the obvious. “Shouldn’t that have mattered?”

“I would have thought that it did,” he shrugs. “In the end, they needed a lot less evide

nce than they should have.”

The entire thing sounds fishy and strange to me, but whatever. We’re here now, and we can hopefully find out what really happened. We walk around in silence. I swing my flashlight back and forth, but I don’t really know what I’m looking for.

Any sort of footprints or fingerprints would be long gone by now. Anything like that would have been taken away by time and animals.

So instead of looking for actual items, I ask myself a different question: where could the killer have hidden?

There’s really nowhere. It’s an open space, and even if the killer hid behind a mine cart, there wouldn’t have been any way for them to escape unnoticed.

And then I think of something else.

“Neil?”

“Yeah.”

“Were any of these mine carts ever outside of the mine?”

“What?” He looks over at me, and I wait a second.

“Outside of the mine. Were any of these ever dragged out for people to take pictures in or to horse around in?”

Neil stares at me and finally, he nods.

“Yeah,” he says. “Me and Sammy, we pulled a couple of them out so we could sit in them and talk. It’s stupid, but it was fun.”

“Where?” I ask.

Then we go back outside. It seems like such a strange thing to think of, but there really isn’t any other explanation. Sammy’s dad didn’t see Neil because Neil wasn’t here. There’s nowhere down here for a killer to hide.

So the only real explanation is that Sammy wasn’t killed in the mines.

I don’t know why Sammy’s father would have lied about that, but that doesn’t matter. What does matter is figuring out what actually happened. If the cops missed the location of the death, then they probably missed something else: maybe even a lot of somethings.

We go back outside and he looks around for a minute. The space is filled with brush and leaves and branches. A tree has fallen over up ahead and it lies on its side. A squirrel is perched on it, watching us, but we both ignore the little creature.

“Where were they?”

“There.”

He points near where the tree has fallen, which is what I was afraid of. Okay, so the area is definitely totally and completely compromised. I don’t want to say anything out loud because I don’t want Neil to completely lose hope that we’ll find out who did this, but the reality is that our chances of finding anything basically dropped completely.