I take a pad of paper and pencil from my bag. “Since the scene no longer exists, I need to draw it from your memory. I’ll put the campfire here, and this arrow points north. Now, tell me where the tent was.”
“Uh…”
Cherise snatches the pad and pencil and a few minutes later passes the pad back with a complete drawing of the crime scene.
“She’s good, ain’t she?” Owen says with pride. “Could be a real artist.”
Cherise huffs and shakes her head, but I can tell she’s pleased even as she says “It’s a sketch, not a work of art.”
True, but it’s hardly an X for a tent and stick figures for bodies, which is pretty much what I’d have done. In a few deft strokes, she’s depicted the scene as well as any crime-scene artist. Basic figures, all clearly identifiable.
While I examine it, she fingers the pencil. It’s only as I look up that she seems to realize she’s still holding it and thrusts it back at me. I reach out, but Owen lifts a hand, blocking her from returning it. Then he pulls a twenty from his pocket.
“We need the pencil,” he says. “And the book after you’ve taken the page. I’ll give you this for it.”
Cherise opens her mouth in protest, but he cuts her off with a firm “We need it.”
They don’t “need” it. He noticed her reluctance to part with that pencil, and he’s buying it for her, along with paper to draw on.
I don’t understand their relationship. I’m not sure I want to. But with this, I realize I should not mistake it for a purely functional partnership. There is genuine affection here.
Giving Owen money to buy a knife wasn’t a sop to shut him up about the gun. It was, in its way, an apology. I cannot let you have that thing you want, so I will give you a different thing instead.
I think of the kind of life Cherise has led, where paper and pencils are luxuries she cannot afford. No, she can afford them—the family is wealthy, in settler terms—but she cannot justify the expense, however small, for something as frivolous as a hobby.
“It’s a cheap pad of paper and a pencil,” I say. “Five bucks, tops. I’ll take it out of what I owe you.”
He shakes his head. “Take the twenty and bring more. She’ll need a sharpener, too.”
This time, when Cherise starts to protest, I accept the money and hold out the sketch, saying, “Is this to scale?” I pause. “Are the distances—”
“I know what ‘to scale’ means. I can read a map. It’s not perfect, but it’s proportionally correct.” She looks at me. “Would you like me to define ‘proportionally’?”
“No, thanks.” I look at Owen. “Did you move anything before Cherise arrived?”
“Hell, no. There were three hacked-up people on the ground. You think I wanted her walking over to see my hands covered in blood?”
“So they were lying just like this?” I show him the sketch. “Around the fire?”
“Yep. Like I said, looked as if they’d been attacked during their dinner. Coals were still hot.”
He’s wrong. Not lying, just not playing through the scenario enough to understand that his conclusion is inaccurate. Dalton glances at the sketch and grunts, telling me he sees the problem. Not so much a problem, really, as confirmation of our original theory.
Owen says they were attacked over dinner. Technically correct, but he means someone set on them with a knife while they ate. If that happened, at least one would have had time to rise and fight, moving the action—and their corpses—away from the fire.
The placement of the bodies means all three were shot quickly, not giving the victims time to do more than rise from their seat on seeing their loved one fall.
“Tell me about the blood,” I say.
Cherise’s brows shoot up, but Owen nods.
“You mean the blood patterns.” He looks at Cherise. “Cops can tell how people were killed by the way the blood falls.” He looks back at me. “There was a lot of blood, but they must not have fought very hard, because it was all under them, soaked into the ground. It wasn’t, like, dripping from the trees or anything.”
“Did you notice any blood spatter?”
“‘Spatter,’ that’s the word. No, their stuff was clean. It must have happened fast.”
Again, Owen’s mistaken here. Blood doesn’t spatter because people fight. It can, but most of it would be arterial spray. The family fell from the gunshots and were stabbed where they lay.