Indelible

"Son?" Hoss said. He was still by the window. Jeffrey noticed he was standing on one of Jessie's bloody footprints. A few of her little white pills had been crushed under his heel.

"Sir?" Jeffrey said, thinking Hoss must have been as distraught as he was. Everybody showed it in different ways.

"I said it looks pretty straightforward to me," Hoss said. He nudged the dead man's foot with the toe of his boot, and Jeffrey felt like he had been kicked in the gut seeing the casual way Hoss was dealing with this man's death. That was how it had always been for Hoss, though. There were good guys and bad guys, and to protect one, you did what you had to do to the other. He had always been hard on Robert and Jeffrey, but he was the only man in town allowed to say anything bad about them.

Hoss squatted down, looking at the corpse. Greasy blond shoulder-length hair covered most of the face. Still, Hoss asked, "Recognize him?"

"No, sir," Jeffrey said, kneeling down for a better look. He was still in the doorway, and down close to the carpet, he could see backsplatter fa

"Luke Swan." Hoss stood, looping his thumb in his belt.

The name was familiar to Jeffrey if not the face. "We went to school with him."

"He dropped out before y'all graduated," Hoss said. "Remember?"

Jeffrey nodded, though he didn't. His high school life had been spent in an insulated clique of football players and cheerleaders. Luke Swan was hardly the athletic type. He looked like he weighed ninety pounds wet.

"Been in and out of trouble ever since," Hoss said, a sad note to his voice. "Drugs, alcohol. He's slept off more than a couple of good times at the station."

"Did Robert ever arrest him?"

Hoss shrugged off the question. "Hell, Slick, we only got eight deputies on the street any given shift. All of us have seen the boy one time or another."

"He ever do anything like this before?" Jeffrey asked. When Hoss shook his head, he added, "Armed B amp;E is a big step up from just getting in and out of trouble."

He crossed his arms. "You saying something? Should I be concerned?"

Jeffrey looked at the body. He still could not see all of the man's face, but the thin blue lips and small build gave him a youthful quality. "No, sir."

Hoss came toward him, not bothering to look where he was walking. He told Jeffrey, "That lady of yours seemed like she had something to say."

"She's a coroner in our town."

He gave a low whistle, impressed, but not for the obvious reason. "Y'all can afford a full-time coroner?"

"She's part-time," Jeffrey told him.

"She charge much?"

Jeffrey shook his head, though he had no idea what Sara made. Judging by her house and her car, she made a hell of a lot more money than he did. Of course, it was a lot easier to make money when you came from it. Jeffrey had seen the truth of that his entire life.

Hoss tilted his head toward the body. "Think she'd do this one for us?"

Jeffrey felt his chest tighten again. "I'll ask her."

"Good." He turned back around, looking at the room. He said, "I want to get this mess cleared up and Robert back on the street as soon as possible."

Then, as if to put an end to any further discussion, he reached over and turned off the light.

Chapter Nine

Sara woke in a sweat, her head spi

Sara pulled her legs up, resting her chin on the top of her knees. She had not dreamed about Atlanta in a long time, but seconds ago, she had been back there – back in that bathroom at Grady Hospital where she had been raped. Her attacker had handcuffed her arms behind her and defiled Sara in ways she could still feel if she let her mind stay there long enough. Then he had stabbed her in the side and left her to bleed to death.

At the memory, her throat constricted again, and Sara closed her eyes, trying to breathe through her emotions.

"You okay?" Nell asked. She stood in the doorway with a cup of coffee in her hand.

Sara nodded, trying to find her voice.

"Possum's gone to open the store. Jeffrey went to check on Jessie. He's a fool if he thinks she'll be out of bed before noon." She paused when Sara did not respond. "He said to tell you to be ready to go at eight-thirty."

Sara looked at the clock on the mantel. It was half past seven.

Nell said, "Coffee's ready when you are," and left Sara alone in the room.

Sara sat up, hitting her toe on her suitcase. Jeffrey had put it there a few hours ago while she pretended to sleep. He had sneaked in like a thief, and she had watched him go, wondering exactly what she had gotten herself into. Jeffrey Tolliver was not the man she thought he was. Even Cathy Linton would have been surprised by his behavior last night. Sara had felt threatened, and at one point she had been frightened enough to think that he would actually hit her. She could not let herself get involved with someone like that. There was no denying that she had feelings for Jeffrey, maybe she was even in love with him, but that did not mean she had to put herself in a situation where she was afraid of what might happen next.

Sara pressed her lips together, looking at the framed magazine cover of Jeffrey on the wall. Maybe being back home had altered him in some way. The man Sara had seen last night was nothing like the Jeffrey Tolliver she had grown to know over the last few months.

She found herself trying to reason out his behavior. Prior to this, there had been nothing in his personality that would have pointed to last night's outburst. He was frustrated. He had punched the wall, not her. Maybe she was overreacting. Maybe the circumstances had brought him to the edge, and she had done nothing but help push him over. He had grabbed her arm, but he had also let it go. He had warned her not to talk, but when the sheriff came, he had done nothing to stop her. In the light of day, Sara could understand his anger and frustration. Jeffrey was right about one thing: Alabama was a death-penalty state, and not just a death-penalty state, but almost as gung-ho about it as Texas and Florida. If Robert was found guilty, he could be looking at the electric chair.

Though she was punch-drunk from lack of sleep, Sara tried to go over in her mind again what she had seen in Robert's bedroom last night. She was no longer certain about what she had heard in the street, nor was she sure about the sear pattern she had seen when Robert had removed his hand. He had been fast about it, and had done a very good job of smearing blood around the wound. What it came down to was that Sara had to ask herself why he had gone to such great lengths to cover the entrance wound if there was nothing to hide.

If she was correct, the muzzle of the gun that shot Robert had been placed at an upward angle against the skin. The hot metal had seared a V-shaped impression of the muzzle into the flesh. Either the person who shot him had been in an inferior position, squatting or kneeling, or Robert had held the gun to his own side and pulled the trigger. The second theory would explain why so little damage was done. The abdomen contained seven major organs and around thirty feet of intestines. The bullet had managed to miss them all.

Sara would have voiced her suspicions to the sheriff last night, but after taking one look at the man, she knew that, like Jeffrey, he was going to do everything he could to give Robert the benefit of the doubt. Clayton "Hoss" Hollister screamed good ol' boy, from his nickname to his cowboy boots. Sara knew exactly how his kind operated. Her father certainly wasn't part of Grant's network of powerful old men – he hated doing favors because he had to – but Eddie Linton played cards with most of them. Sara had learned how they worked her first week as coroner, when the mayor explained to her that the county had an exclusive contract to order all their medical supplies through his brother-in-law's company, no matter how much he charged.