Strange, but she wasn’t sure why. Maybe the way the birds flew hard and fast straight east. But it wasn’t uncommon for birds to fly in a straight line, was it? But three of them spaced out like that?

And pigeons? She’d seen some roosting in the barn at the RHR, but she couldn’t remember seeing one out in the wild. Where did pigeons roost out here? But it stood to reason that they did.

Dismissing it, she hung on and waited for her chance.

Twenty-Eight

Falcon slipped through the woods to the back of the house, Sheriff Corly close behind. Just as he came around from the west, McCall came from the east.

Their eyes met, and John’s narrowed, but he didn’t say a thing. The need to be silent won the day.

The back of the ramshackle cabin was close enough to the woods that there wouldn’t be a long line of footprints. Falcon figured he could smooth them out without much trouble.

Falcon found a few bare spots blown clear of snow. Lightly, he covered the distance to the back of the house and heard fluttering and cooing from inside.

John came up behind him. Falcon glanced back and saw that John had stepped in the same spots as Falcon, less of a trail to cover. The sheriff came last and was covering their tracks with decent skill.

“We found more pigeons.” Falcon smiled at John, who nodded.

They went into a small back entry, just a little wider than the door. A small slit in the east wall let the pigeons in. There were neatly built coops here, a smaller set of only four coops, but otherwise they were like the coops at Hawkins’s house. There were two pigeons inside. And two more coops with their doors open.

Falcon led the way into the main cabin, and it was the work of two seconds in the single room to see it was empty.

“He’s been here.” The sheriff pointed to a few unwashed dishes sitting on the table. A skillet on a small potbellied stove. The sheriff went to the stove. “The fire has burned down, but there’s still some heat. He must’ve slept here last night.”

There were three cots in the room, one on each wall except for the side with the fireplace. The entry door was pushed far to one side of the building so a cot would fit.

“All three of them must’ve met here.” Falcon looked around, but there wasn’t much else to see. “Wyatt said Hawkins was known to go off for a few days now and again. I’ll bet he and his brothers met here, talked over who all they’d robbed and killed lately. They probably did it when Clovis was still alive, then the two of them kept at it after he died.”