Page 45 of Hero's Prize

Callum took a moment to look through the copies of the letters on the tablet. Then he turned his attention back to the note.

“First of all, just because the letters are about love and they are drenched in perfume does not mean this is a woman. It could be a man covering his tracks.”

Colton nodded. “That makes sense.”

“But it could be a woman, right?” Tony asked.

“Yes, and honestly, it probably is. But I just wanted to make sure we noted that that might be an error. But for now, we’ll refer to the perp as a she.”

Colton looked over at Tony, who shrugged and nodded.

“Okay,” Colton said. “She, unless proven otherwise.”

Callum crouched down to a small bag near his feet, pulled out a camera, and began taking pictures of the note and the knife.

“Shouldn’t you have a crime scene team or something?” Tony asked.

“This is a small town. I am the crime scene team. We have one for TetonCounty, but I don’t know that this merits a call out to them.”

Callum finished taking his pictures, then put on a pair of gloves and pulled the knife out of the wood of the door.

“It wasn’t in very deeply, so that’s another sign that it may be a woman.” Callum marked the hole the knife had made with a Sharpie marker. “But a tall one.”

“How can you tell?” Colton asked.

“Think about where you would put a message up. Knife or not, you would put it up in what would be your direct line of sight. This letter is a little high, so we can pretty much eliminate shorter women as suspects.”

“How do you know she didn’t just reach up and stab the paper?” Tony asked.

“Because of the angle of the knife—pointing down. If she were reaching, it would’ve been pointing up.”

“That’s pretty damned impressive detective work,” Tony said.

Callum kept working. “I wasn’t always a small-town cop. So, I do know a thing or two.”

“The fact that you knew how to handle Rick is impressive enough for me.” Colton looked out and saw that the younger man was walking slowly and methodically, looking for clues.

Callum chuckled.

“That knife looks pretty small, right? Like something a woman would use,” Tony said, studying the knife Callum was holding in his gloved hands. “As much as a knife could be masculine or feminine.”

“I agree,” Colton said. “It’s definitely not something that screams manly.”

Callum nodded. Then he placed the knife in an evidence bag. “We’ll check it for prints, of course. Although, if the stalker is dumb enough to leave their prints on something like this, then you probably don’t have anything to worry about to begin with. Can you show me those other letters again?”

Tony got out his tablet and showed Callum the rest of the notes that had been found over the past two months. The sheriff studied them carefully, asking questions about where each one was found and the circumstances surrounding them. When he reached the last one, he leaned back against the porch railing and scrubbed a hand down his face.

“I’m afraid your excitable friend is right. This is an escalation.”

“Because of the knife being stabbed through a picture of me?” It definitely had gotten Colton’s attention. The letters had been a sort of flattering annoyance up to this point.

“Yeah, a knife is never good, but honestly, there’s something about this picture that is suggesting the escalation more than just the knife.”

“What about it?” Tony asked. “She sent a couple of other pictures with the letters. You saw those, right?”

“Yeah.” Callum held up the photo from today from inside a clear evidence bag. “But those other pictures were different.”

“How so?” Colton thought of all three images. “They’re all of me. All relatively recent.”

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