Henry thanked her, then waited for Irma to fulfill her promise. As soon as she pulled the bathroom door shut, he looked down at the phone and carefully dialed his mother’s number.

CHAPTER 82

“COON’S RIGHT THERE,” says an FBI agent, pointing to a dark hump in the grass beneath the shattered window of Henry’s hospital room.

John Kaiser takes a small but powerful flashlight from his pocket and shines its beam on the gray animal, which appears to have been shot more than once. Then he pushes through the bushes beneath the window. I look right, then left, surprised to see how many volunteer trees and shrubs have obscured the windows that line the hospital wall.

“Hold my light, Penn?” Kaiser says, handing me the black metal tube. “Shine it on this tree trunk.”

I do.

With a penknife, Kaiser digs into a small hole in the bark of a sapling by Henry’s window.

“You got another slug in there?” asks Sheriff Dennis.

“Yep.” Kaiser turns and nudges me out of the bushes. When he steps into the open, his hand held in front of him, I shine the light beam into it. Lying in his palm is a small, deformed slug.

“Twenty-two Magnum?” Sheriff Dennis asks.

“Just like the ones inside.”

A deputy behind me whistles. “I’ll be damned.”

“Is that a sniper rifle?” Caitlin asks.

Kaiser shakes his head. “It’s a varmint gun, basically. People like them because they’re not as loud as a .308, but they have more killing power than a .22 long rifle. You can kill a coyote at seventy yards with a head shot.”

“You can also shoot coons and armadillos without waking up the neighbors,” Sheriff Dennis observes.

Everybody falls silent. Speculation about the bullet’s caliber temporarily blinded everyone to what is right before us. We have a dead raccoon and a dead woman within a few yards of each other.

“You see any other holes in that tree?” Sheriff Dennis asks Kaiser. “Maybe the wall?”

I shine the light at the window, and Kaiser points to the right of it. “Looks like one embedded in the wall there.”

“Shit,” says Dennis. “You think some kid could have been popping off rounds at that coon and accidentally shot through the window?”

“No way in hell,” says Kaiser.

Walker doesn’t look so sure. “Every kid in this parish owns a .22. They get BB guns for Christmas when they’re four years old. If you stand outside around here on any given night, you’re gonna hear shots. What if some kid was chasin’ that coon and run him up that tree you dug the slug out of? That’s just what a coon does. One miss would put a bullet right through Henry’s window.”

“Why would a kid fire with a lighted window right there?” Kaiser asks. “And why multiple shots? No. You’re reaching, Sheriff.”