Page 39 of Tracking Down the Lawman's Son

In fact, the conversations Sandra had overheard could have been Shannon talking with Tara. Tara might be the mastermind behind the kidnapping and the attacks. Why though, Bree still wasn’t sure.

She went back to Luca to let him know that the dead woman didn’t have a tat and found him in the middle of another Manny tirade. Manny was now demanding that Luca tell him what was going on, and the man was peppering the demand with plenty of profanity.

Bree mouthed the info about the tat. Luca nodded and interrupted Manny’s rant. “A woman’s been murdered, and it might be Shannon,” he said.

That stopped Manny mid-sentence. “Murdered?” he questioned. “And you think I did it?”

“Did you?” Luca asked.

“Of course not.” He paused again. “This is why you want to talk to Tara,” Manny concluded with a sigh. “Do you think she killed her sister?”

Luca frowned. “Why would you think that? Is Tara capable of killing Shannon?”

Manny did more cursing. “To hell if I know. A week ago, I would have said no, but I think Tara’s had some kind of breakdown. There’s no telling what she might do in this state of mind.”

There it was again, the feeling that what he was saying just didn’t ring true. Basically, Manny was throwing Tara under the bus. Maybe because he believed she was indeed capable of murder, but it felt to Bree as if Manny was trying to cover his own tracks by making them believe Tara was guilty.

“I really need to speak to Tara,” Luca went on. “But she’s not answering her phone. Any idea where she might be?”

“None whatsoever,” he was quick to say, “but when you do talk to her, remember what I said. Don’t believe anything she tells you about me. Or anything else for that matter,” Manny added a split second before he ended the call.

Luca stared at his phone for a moment as if he might hit Redial, but something Duncan said must have caught his attention because he headed in that direction. Duncan was still talking to someone on the phone, but he finished his conversation just as they approached him.

“They ran the dead woman’s fingerprints and got an immediate hit,” Duncan explained. “It’s Shannon.”

Bree wasn’t sure what to feel about that. With her death, she would no longer be a threat. But the threat was still out there, and if Shannon were alive, she might at least have been willing to spill the name of her accomplice. If she had an accomplice, that is. For now, all they could do was speculate as to what her part had been in Sandra’s kidnapping and the attacks.

They knew from the witnesses’ sketches that Shannon, or Tara, had been at the cabin and had driven the silver truck. So, one of them had held Sandra. It was too bad that Sandra had never seen her kidnapper’s face or she might have been able to verify which one.

But the proximity of Shannon’s body to the cabin pointed to it being her.

Shannon had that “trouble magnet” past, and she would have had an easier time getting to and from the cabin than Tara who, according to her work schedule, was putting in fifty-plus hours a week. That didn’t totally exclude Tara, but at the moment the circumstantial evidence was skewed more to Shannon. She was almost certainly the one who had brought in groceries to Sandra.

“Deputy Morales will get the body to the ME and send the gun to the lab for analysis,” Duncan explained. “Her address is listed as an apartment in Austin, so Austin PD will send someone out to take a look at the place.”

Duncan was scowling. So were Luca and Slater. Probably because this had turned into a three-prong investigation with three different law enforcement agencies involved. That meant red tape and possible delays.

“I checked and Shannon Adler doesn’t have a gun registered to her,” Slater said a moment later. “Of course, that doesn’t mean she didn’t buy one illegally, but we still might be able to trace the gun to someone.”

True. “How about our other suspects?” Bree asked. “Do they own guns?”

“Not Tara. Again, not legally anyway,” Slater answered. “Manny has a permit to carry concealed, and he owns both a Glock and a SIG Sauer.”

Those were normally cops’ weapons, but plenty of civilians carried them as well. Manny could probably justify ownership of that kind of firepower though by saying he’d wanted protection for the bar. Added to that, if Manny was responsible for the attacks, he almost certainly wouldn’t have used one of his own weapons. However, the concealed permit was an indicator thathe knew how to shoot since he would have needed classes to get that.

“Did Morales say if the shot to Shannon’s head was point-blank?” Luca asked.

“It was,” Duncan verified. “There was stippling around the point of entry.”

Bree knew that stippling was unburned gunpowder striking the skin, and it was an indicator that the shot had been fired less than two feet away. So, if this wasn’t a suicide, it likely meant Shannon’s killer had been someone she knew. Or at least someone who could get that close to her anyway.

“Morales thinks Shannon was actually killed in the spot where she was found,” Duncan went on. “There were no drag marks, and there was an ample amount of blood to make him believe that’s where she died.”

“How far from the road?” Luca wanted to know.

“About fifty yards,” Duncan answered. “It was a heavily treed area in between the cabin and the river. Morales said it was the very definition ofoff the beaten path.”

“So, Shannon was meeting someone or was lured there,” Luca concluded.

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