Hot on the Trail Mix

by P. D. Workman

  “He had a family?” Erin’s heart sank. Those poor people. No home, and now they had lost the head of the family. How were they going to fend for themselves?

  “A wife and young children,” Terry confirmed, the corners of his mouth turning down. “We are trying to find them.”

  “You don’t know where they are?”

  “That’s one of the problems with homelessness. It isn’t always easy to find people when you are looking for them.”

  “So where do you go? How do you find out?”

  Terry sighed. “Just keep asking questions. Find everybody you can who knows them. Ask if they’ve heard anything. Ask who else might know. Hopefully, people cooperate enough that you’re able to narrow it down over time.”

  “But people don’t exactly trust the police.”

  “That would seem to be the case,” he agreed dryly.

  Erin felt herself flush. She knew that she didn’t tell him everything. And he knew that too. There were parts of her life that she didn’t feel comfortable sharing, even with all that they were to each other.

  Their meals arrived, and Erin did her best to forget about poor Darryl Ryder and his young family and to focus on her time with Terry.

  Chapter 12

  Erin worked on her tai chi before bed, enjoying the warm weather outside and the feeling of the grass between her toes. She watched carefully to make sure there were no surprises in the grass. K9 was good about using the dog run, but Nilla wasn’t very disciplined in his habits. Even though they tried to monitor him carefully when he was in the yard, he did manage to sneak past them every so often.

  Vic was sitting on the steps watching Erin go through her forms. Nilla was calm for once, sitting while Vic slowly fed him kibble one tiny piece at a time.

  “So they don’t even know where Darryl lived?” Vic asked.

  “No. Doesn’t sound like it. Terry is asking around, trying to nail it down. They have to inform his wife and talk to her about when she last saw him. If there was anyone he’d had a disagreement with. Stuff like that. They have to sort out all of those things before they can figure out who—how he was killed.”

  “Yeah. But if he was a drifter, then it wasn’t likely anyone in town, right? Maybe he had a business partner who came to see him. Or an estranged family member. Some enemy that followed him here.”

  Erin let her mind assess these possibilities. She could see that it was possible. Ryder’s death might not have anything to do with anyone in Bald Eagle Falls. And that would be good. She’d be happy if that were what the police determined. She didn’t want to think about anyone in her Bald Eagle Falls family being involved with Ryder, even peripherally.

  “Maybe. I guess I can’t figure out why anyone would want to kill a drifter or homeless person. I mean, it doesn’t make sense that it would be for some kind of gain, because he wouldn’t have anything. And as far as jealousy, he has a wife and kids. Married men can fool around, but if they weren’t from around here, who would he be involved with? Wouldn’t he be too busy trying to find a job and get his family settled?”

  “Some men are never too busy.”

  Erin nodded at the truth of this.

  “Or maybe he just got in someone’s way,” Vic suggested. “Started a fight or got in an argument over something stupid.”

  “In a cave?” Erin paused in her movements to look over her shoulder at Vic.

  “Well… maybe.”

  Erin shook her head. “I still think it must have been an accident. Sometimes an accident scene can look like homicide.”

  Vic gave her a long look, then went back to feeding Nilla the bits of kibble.

  Vic and Erin were working together again the next afternoon. Bella had been scheduled to take the afternoon shift, but something had come up and she called in to cancel with profuse apologies. Vic shrugged and said that she could stay on, so they were covered. Everything was fine until Vic got the call from Willie.

  “Hi hon’,” Vic greeted, tapping her Bluetooth headphone to answer it. She wouldn’t have if she had been out in the customer area, but she and Erin were both in the kitchen while things were quiet, prepping some fresh muffins for the after-school rush.

  “I’m heading over to the police department.” Erin could hear Willie clearly over the headphone, his voice raised in irritation.

  “To the police department. For what?”

  “More questions about the Ryder case. I was really hoping this was all out of the way!”

  “What else do they want to ask about that? We already told them everything we know. It isn’t like we were trying to cover anything up.”

  “I guess since they identified Ryder, they want to ask me about him.”

  “You don’t know anything about him, do you? Just tell them you never heard of him before and don’t have anything to say.”

  There was no immediate answer from Willie. Maybe he was getting his truck started or was focused on something else.

  “Willie? You still there?”

  “Sure. I’m here.”

  “Just tell them you don’t know anything about Ryder.”

  The suggestion was again met with silence. Vic looked at Erin. She probably knew that Erin could hear the whole conversation. And even if she couldn’t hear Willie’s part of the conversation, she couldn’t help but hear Vic’s end, which was interesting enough.

  “Willie… you don’t know Darryl Ryder, do you?”

  “Yes. I do. Or did.”

  “Oh.” Vic processed this. She picked up a pan of muffins and started loosening them from the tin. “Well… I guess they figured that out, then. Someone must have told them that you knew him.”

  “Yeah. I don’t think they’re just fishing.”

  “Okay. So you knew him. But that doesn’t mean you know anything about what happened to him. Or that you had anything to do with his death. Good grief. You couldn’t have.”

  “I didn’t,” Willie agreed.

  “You couldn’t have. You wouldn’t have taken me there if you knew his body was there. How stupid would that be? If you’d had something to do with it, you wouldn’t have ever gone back there. Let someone else find the body, and they wouldn’t ever be able to draw a connection back to you. Do they think you’re an idiot?”

  “I don’t know what they are thinking. I guess I’ll find that out. Maybe they think that I did it and then regretted it later. Wanted to find a way to get him off my conscience.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  But was it? Erin could see the police’s way of thinking. Willie didn’t want Ryder rotting away in that pool, his family thinking that he had abandoned them or forever wondering what had happened to him. So if he could find a way to ‘stumble across’ the body in a natural way… the police would never suspect that he was involved.

  Except that they did.

  Chapter 13

  “Okay, well maybe,” Vic conceded. “I think that’s a pretty far stretch, though. And why would you kill him in the first place? You’d have to have a reason.”

  “Yeah,” Willie agreed. “You’re right about that.”

  “How did you know him? Just because you saw him around town? Or was he involved in mining too?”

  He’d been found in a cave; it wasn’t hard to believe that he’d had a reason to be there. Something that connected him to Willie.

  “I’m just pulling up now,” Willie said. “I guess… I’ll talk to you later. Let you know how it went tonight.”

  “You don’t have to go in if you don’t want to talk to them,” Vic pointed out. “You’re not required to unless they arrest you, and they haven’t done that.”

  “Not yet. I’m hoping to avoid that.”

  “They’re not going to arrest you. If they want to keep you half the night, just tell them you’re going home. I want to see you.”

  “I’ll get there when I can.”

  He apparently disconnected, because Vic didn’t have to. She worked on getting the muffins out of the tin a
nd onto the cooling rack, her brows drawn down. Eventually, she looked over at Erin.

  “How much of that did you get?”

  “Well… pretty much everything. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. Then I don’t have to explain anything, right?” Vic shook her head. “I can’t believe that they are treating him like a suspect. They say they’re not biased. But they are. They think that Willie is a criminal. He’s the most likely suspect because he doesn’t have a regular job like they think he should. They think he’s lazy and dirty. He was involved with the Dixon clan years ago, so they think that any time he’s faced with a decision, he’s going to pick the illegal route. But he’s not like that. He isn’t a criminal.”

  Erin remembered what Terry had said and that he had refused to confirm that Willie had never served time. But it didn’t seem like a good time to bring it up. Asking Vic whether Willie was a convicted criminal after that tirade was not a good idea.

  So she just nodded sympathetically. She wouldn’t like it if someone were accusing Terry or Vic of having something to do with Ryder’s death either. She liked Willie, and she didn’t like the idea of their thinking that he had anything to do with it. Vic was closer to Willie, of course, but he was Erin’s friend too, and she didn’t like the direction the investigation was going.

  “They’ll figure it out,” she assured Vic. “They’ll talk to him this afternoon, and he’ll answer whatever questions they have, and then it will all be okay. They’ll go on to the next person on the list.”

  “I don’t know.” Vic shook her head dubiously. “I doubt that he’s going to answer all of their questions. And they’ll think that means he’s guilty of something. So then they’ll have more questions and suspicions. They’re not going to go on to the next person or theory unless they feel like he’s cleared himself. And I don’t think that’s going to happen today.”

  “But if he didn’t have anything to do with it, then he shouldn’t have any problem answering their questions.”

  Vic glared at Erin. “And is that how you felt whenever the police wanted to question you about something? That if you just spilled everything to them and told them the truth, they wouldn’t suspect you anymore? You wouldn’t end up in prison, because they would believe everything you said?”

  Erin had to laugh at that. “Well… no. Definitely not. I guess that even after everything that has happened, I still have an idealized view of the police. Blame it on Terry.”

  “I don’t think Terry’s given you reason to think that.”

  “He hasn’t arrested anyone without good evidence.”

  Vic nodded, but didn’t look convinced.

  Vic was probably right. Erin and Terry rarely saw eye-to-eye on investigations. Erin jumped to conclusions. She jumped into things with both feet without looking first, sometimes getting herself into some pretty dicey situations. How many times had Terry told her to stay out of things and she hadn’t listened to him?

  If she trusted that the police would eventually arrest the right person, then why was she always putting herself into the middle of police investigations?

  When Erin and Vic got home, both Terry and Willie were still at the police department. Probably on opposite sides of the table. Usually, Erin would invite Vic to join her at the house for supper, but Vic was worried about Nilla having already been left alone too long, and wanted to keep him company.

  “Why don’t you come over to the loft? You never spend any time over there, and you should be as comfortable there as I am in your kitchen.”

  “Are you sure? I would think you would want your privacy…”

  “Some days, yeah. But not all the time. And it isn’t like I have a bunch of contraband or questionable literature lying around the place. No secrets.”

  No secrets?

  Beaver had said that Vic had secrets.

  Of course, she had said that Erin had secrets too.

  Which was true.

  Nothing terribly shocking, no dead bodies buried in her wake, but still things that she didn’t feel like revealing to her friends and loved ones. Old associations, embarrassing stories, guilty feelings still lingering after years.

  One of Vic’s secrets had been Theresa. Not because they had been seeing each other behind Willie’s back—which would have delighted Theresa—but because Vic was embarrassed about some of her old associations too, and didn’t want to have to explain Theresa and their shared past. It was over and done, something best left alone. Until it had flared to life and they had found themselves in a situation that had nearly gotten them killed. Terry and Detective Jack Ward could easily have both died that night if the others hadn’t managed to overcome Theresa and to find them when they did.

  Odds were Vic still had secrets. But who didn’t?

  “Okay. I’m just going to feed the animals and shower off, and then I’ll be over.”

  “Perfect. I’ll see you soon.”

  It was funny that after spending almost all of their time together, the two of them were still perfectly willing to spend the evening together too. But they were. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Like Erin had always thought that having a sister would be. She and Vic were as close as sisters. Closer than Erin had ever been with any of her foster sisters. And certainly closer than Erin ever expected to be with Charley, who really was her sister.

  Nilla appeared to be the perfect gentleman when Erin let herself into Vic’s loft apartment. There was no sign that he had torn around the apartment trying to destroy everything he could sink his teeth into. Everything looked remarkably tidy and untouched. She could still see a few areas that he had attacked in earlier days, leaving teeth marks or scratches on various furniture, the wall, and the doors.

  Instead, he sat on a dog bed on the couch, regal as a king. Erin sat down on the other end of the couch. Not too close to Nilla, worried that he might get overly excited and either attack her or run away.

  Vic came out of the bathroom. “I thought I heard you. Long time, no see!”

  “Yes, such a long time,” Erin agreed with a smile. She nodded at Nilla. “Isn’t he behaving himself well.”

  Vic gave Nilla a long look, seeing if he would stay still like he was supposed to. Then she stepped closer to him and petted him on the head. “Good boy. You want some treats? Haven’t you been good!”

  He panted at her happily, waiting for his reward. Vic got out a few pieces of food and fed them to him slowly by hand.

  “I think he’s finally starting to settle down. I don’t know whether he was just really anxious after Beryl died because everything changed, or…”

  “I think she just didn’t know how to train him. Or hadn’t bothered to. It looks like you’re doing a really good job with him now.”

  “I hope so! As long as he doesn’t turn into demon dog the minute I start to relax…”

  The white, fluffy dog just sat there panting and smiling at her, waiting expectantly for the next piece of food. Like he’d never been anything but an angel. Erin would have believed it if she hadn’t seen some of the chaos he had caused.

  “What can I help you with? What were you planning for supper?”

  “I don’t know. Just warm up whatever is around or open a can of something. You sit for a few minutes while I figure out what it’s going to be. It won’t be anything fancy.”

  “I don’t need fancy. A lot of what Terry and I are doing lately is soup and salad. Better than too many rolls with honey or jam at the end of the day!”

  “Well, more nutritious. Maybe not better tasting…”

  Erin conceded this point. She wasn’t a salad eater. She really didn’t appreciate a wide variety of vegetables. She was forcing herself to eat better to stay in shape, but most nights all she could say about her supper was that it was satisfying. Not that she had really enjoyed it.

  “Seems like there aren’t a lot of things that are both delicious and low calorie,” she sighed.

  “We’ll have to figure a few out. Heaven kno
ws, I don’t want to end up all plump and rolls of fat either.”

  Vic at least had extra height on Erin. She could weigh more without looking heavy.

  Vic stuck her head in the fridge to look through the various leftovers and ingredients she had on hand, glanced in the freezer, and opened up a cupboard full of canned goods. “How about tacos?”

  “Sure, tacos sound good.”

  “All right. We’ll do them super simple. You can open a can of beans and I’ll get some vegetables chopped. We’ve got salsa, avocado, taco shells, and cheese. That should be all we need.”

  They got to work. They were only halfway finished eating—and Erin was enjoying the tacos much more than soup and salad—when they heard Willie’s truck roar into the parking space beside the garage.

  Erin looked down at her plate. She should really go and give Vic and Willie a little privacy, but she couldn’t exactly walk out gracefully with her plate still half full of food.

  “It’s fine,” Vic assured her. “We’ve got all night.”

  “I’ll try not to be too long…”

  Willie’s heavy boots were clomping up the steps outside the garage and, in a moment, he was opening the door.

  “I swear, there are days that I would like to just pick everything up and move—” He saw Erin at the table. “Oh. Hello, Erin.”

  “Sorry, I’m just finishing up. I’ll leave the two of you alone in just a minute…”

  “No rush. You’ll give yourself indigestion. I’ll just save the more choice parts of my conversation until later when I won’t burn your ears with my colorful language.”

  “You can say what you like. I won’t be offended. It isn’t like I haven’t heard bad language before.” Erin laughed. “I did grow up in foster care, you know. The language that some of those kids used…”

  He chuckled. “I can imagine.”

  “No… I don’t think you could.”

  Willie sat down on the couch and bent over to unlace and remove his boots. Nilla yipped at him and growled deep in his throat. Willie looked over and stared him down. “You don’t growl at me, you little rat.”