Page 17 of Mile High Mystery

Shelby was prepared for Camille to balk at answering questions she had already been asked over and over in the two and a half years since the night Judge Hennessey was murdered. She knew how to tease out information from reticent witnesses and how to use emotion—anger, sadness, regret—to elicit information they might not have revealed before. She was very good at her job.

But interviewing Camille required none of that. The young woman was open, happy to talk about that night and everything that had followed, as if she hadn’t told the same story over and over. What she said matched what was already in her file. She didn’t embellish the way so many witnesses did over time, perhaps in an attempt to make their story, or themselves, more interesting. Camille knew she was interesting, the way some people accept that they are beautiful or powerful.

After the first hour, Shelby felt as if she was talking with a girlfriend. Camille had brought out flavored seltzer and popcorn, and they snacked and chatted as if they had known each other for years. Camille really came alive when she talked about her family—her parents, her deceased sister, Laney, and especially her brother, Zach.

“I wish you could meet Zach,” she said. “I think you would really like him.”

“Is he a lot like you?” Shelby asked.

“He’s not like me.” Camille tossed a kernel of popcorn into her mouth and tilted her head, considering. “Zach is quieter. More thoughtful. I mean, he really thinks about things before he says anything or makes up his mind. When we were kids, people sometimes thought he was slow, but he’s actually really smart. He just takes his time making decisions. Me, I think on my feet. I size things up very quickly. Sometimes, he accused me of being rash, but it was never like that. I just made up my mind fast and stuck to my decision. That night at the restaurant, I knew what I had to do right away.”

“Does Zach look like you?” Shelby asked.

Camille ate more popcorn. “We have the same dark hair and eyes, but Zach is taller and just, well, bigger.” She held her hands out to her sides. “Not fat, just tall and broad-shouldered and muscular. But to go along with all that brawn, he is almost pretty. Those big, dark eyes and long lashes. I would kill for lashes like that, you know. And he has this mole right at the side of his mouth.” She touched her own face to indicate the position. “A perfect beauty mark. When he was little, kids sometimes teased him about it, but then he outgrew most of them and the teasing stopped.” She shrugged. “He was always my little brother, no matter how big he got. And I always tried to look out for him.”

“You didn’t think he could take care of himself?” Shelby asked, fascinated by this picture of the beautiful giant who needed protecting by a woman who was all of five feet six inches tall and weighed maybe 125 pounds.

“Yes and no. Zach was so quiet and easygoing. Too easygoing. I don’t think he ever understood how dangerous people could be. How dangerous the Chalk brothers could be.” Her expression grew troubled. “When I told him I needed police protection, I think he saw it as me being dramatic.” She grinned, showing white, perfect teeth. “Not that I don’t occasionally channel my inner drama queen. When it suits me.”

Shelby returned to that night at the restaurant, trying to ferret out any detail they might have missed before, but coming up with nothing new. “I know the Chalk brothers can’t be tried again for the judge’s murder,” Camille said. “So what else do you hope to accomplish?”

“I’m reviewing everything in their files, trying to find some detail we’ve missed that might link them to other crimes,” Shelby said.

“I wish I could help you,” Camille said. “But I really have told you everything I know.”

Shelby gathered her belongings and prepared to leave. “If you think of anything, no matter how trivial, call me,” she said and handed Camille her card.

Shelby studied the card, then slipped it into the pocket of her jeans. “Could I call you just to talk? Or go shopping or to lunch or something?”

Shelby blinked. “Uh, sure.”

“It’s just that I really enjoyed hanging out with you,” Camille said. “I think the two of us could be friends. It would be nice to have someone I didn’t have to pretend with, you know?”

Shelby nodded. She didn’t know, but she could imagine. No matter who else Camille grew close to from now on, there would always be her other, secret life between them. “Call me anytime,” she said. “Just to talk or hang out. A person can’t have too many friends.”

Camille surprised her again at the door by giving her a hug. She felt the other woman’s loneliness in that gesture, and a longing that mirrored her own. Being an FBI agent, especially one of the few women in her office, was lonely, too. She and Camille had more in common than Shelby had imagined.

TWODAYSAFTERarriving in Eagle Mountain, Shelby stood on the doorstep of Zach’s townhouse once more, frowning at the smooth black paint of the front door. He hadn’t answered her ring, or the knocking that followed. He might not be home—or he might be inside, refusing to talk to her. She had tried his workplace earlier, and a woman there had informed her Zach was out on bereavement leave. She might take her inability to contact him as bad timing, except that he refused to answer her texts or call her back. She understood he was probably still angry about the role the FBI had played in deceiving his family into believing Camille was dead. Frankly, that whole scenario made her uncomfortable, too.

But she hadn’t been part of that deception. She hadn’t even been with the Bureau back then. All she wanted now was for the two of them to work together to try to figure out who had killed his sister and her friend. She wasn’t his enemy.

She walked back to her car, trying to decide what to do next. Before joining the Bureau, she had worked as a sheriff’s deputy. The east Texas town she had worked for had been a little larger than Eagle Mountain and not as scenic, but she had investigated her share of crimes. It was one of those crimes—a kidnapping and multiple murder—that had brought her to the attention of the Bureau.

She needed to put herself back into the role of an investigator. Local law enforcement was being as cooperative as any of them ever were when the Bureau swooped in to take over a case on their turf. They had promised to share any information they uncovered about the crime, but that wasn’t enough. This was Shelby’s case, so she needed to investigate it herself.

She consulted the report she had received from Sheriff Walker, then pulled up a map of the area on her phone, plugged some coordinates into her GPS and began to drive.

Twenty minutes later, she eased her rental car down a rutted, rocky road toward the Piñon Creek campground. The car’s springs groaned in protest as she sank into a pothole, and she winced at the screech of metal on rock as she climbed up out of the hole. Mud spattered the sides of the vehicle and spotted the windshield when she splashed through water running over the road—the last remnants of the flood three days ago.

At last, she spotted the sign marking the entrance to the campground and turned in. A kiosk had a list of the rules and a map showing the layout of all the campsites. The sheriff’s report said Camille’s body had been found in site number 47, near the back of the campground.

She drove slowly along the dirt road. Only half a dozen sites were occupied, and she saw no people at any of them. Were they away for the day, hiking and Jeeping and fishing and whatever else people came here for? Or were they hiding inside their campers and vans, suspicious of the stranger who was clearly not a camper, moving into their midst?

Even if she hadn’t noted the number of the site where Camille had been found, she would have known which one it was by the yellow crime-scene tape that still fluttered from the stunted piñon trees. She parked in site 46, across from 47, and walked over.

Tracks in the mud showed where a wrecker had towed the rental van away. The trunk and branches of a mostly dead tree lay next to the tracks, its stump like a broken molar jutting from the red-brown dirt. The other campers, seeing Camille’s body on the ground beneath the tree, had assumed it had fallen on her. But Shelby doubted the impact from this half-rotted trunk could have killed her. And, of course, it hadn’t. Had her killer pushed the tree over or managed to arrange for it to fall in order to hide his handiwork a little longer and allow him time to escape?

She searched for other tracks in the mud—shoe impressions or tire or bicycle tracks—but the prints of first responders and other campers, and the flood itself, had wiped out anything that was likely to lead to Camille’s killer. She paused to study the deep treads of a man’s hiking boots, overlaying the van’s tracks where it had been pulled from the campsite. Of course, the crime-scene tape would draw other campers to look. Who didn’t love a good mystery?

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