He wondered if Freddie had slept here often. If he’d owned the piece or stolen it.

Melba materialized beside Eli. “You think that’s the gun that killed the Ulbridge girl?” she asked, very quietly.

“Yep.” There would have to be ballistics tests, a check for fingerprints, etc., but Eil would have bet his best chance at reelection that they’d just found and bagged the murder weapon.

There was a degree of satisfaction in that, though the fundamentals obviously hadn’t changed. Tiffany Ulbridge was still dead.

She would be nineteen forever.

“So we can be reasonably certain that Freddie Lansing killed her,” Melba speculated.

“That would be my guess, but we can’t afford to jump to conclusions, Deputy. The gun could have been planted, or used to force Freddie into hanging himself. Or it could have nothing to do with either scenario.”

Melba huddled inside her borrowed coat, frowning. “Sometimes this job drives me crazy.”

“Tell me about it,” Eli replied.

At Alec’s request, the deputies, Amos and Jake, who had been standing around up to that point, fetched a body bag and stretcher from the van.

Freddie’s body was heavy, and it took both deputies, Eli and Sam to lay him in the bag.

The zipper made a tearing sound as Sam yanked it closed.

It was a sad finale to a young man’s life, however misspent.

AFTER HELPING SARA with the cleanup and thanking her for the invitation to dinner, Brynne climbed into her roadster and started for home.

Halfway there, she flipped a U-turn and, with no clear objective in mind, headed for the sheriff’s office instead. While she was certainly curious—Eli and Melba had left the Worth place in such a hurry, and Dan wasn’t answering any questions related to whatever the three of them had found on Sara’s computer—Brynne was compelled by something deeper, something far more personal.

She needed to see Eli, allow her eyes and her heart and her intuition to tell her, in some small measure, how he was holding up under the pressure of this new incident, whatever it was.

Never mind that Eli Garrett’s well-being was essentially none of her business; she simply had to see him, if only from a distance.

Did that make her obsessive? A stalker-in-training?

The thought made her nervous.

Then it made her laugh.

Maybe she needed therapy.

When she pulled into the parking lot, Eli was there, just getting out of his SUV. Either Melba had already gone inside, or he had dropped her off along the way.

Brynne shifted into neutral and rolled down her driver’s side window.

Eli approached, bent to rest his forearms on the base of said window and smiled. He looked so weary, so beleaguered, that Brynne’s heart squeezed.

“I’m not here to ask questions,” she said.

He arched one eyebrow. “Good,” he replied gruffly, “because I’m not here to answer any.”