Page 69 of Long Gone

“No. Brett Colter.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Who told you that?”

“A friend of a friend told me that Colter was waiting for Burton to default so he could snatch up the land and build apartments. He was already preparing a proposal to put before the county planning commission before Hugo disappeared. The same commission he was a member of.”

“Isn’t that a conflict of interest?” I asked.

He shrugged. “It’s Lone County. Who the fuck around here cares about conflict of interest. There are worse things that have been pushed through county governments.”

“You sound like you speak from personal experience.”

His eyes turned cold. “Let’s just say the hands of justice aren’t always actually seeking it. Some people use that power to fulfill their own personal vendettas.”

“Someone have it out for you in Fenton County?”

“Just about everyone in the damn county had it out for me,” he grumbled. “But it doesn’t have a godforsaken thing to do with Hugo Burton, now does it?”

He was right, but I was still curious about his past. Honestly, I was impressed he’d shared that much.

“Okay, back to Hugo. If Colter wanted the land, then I think that rules him out as the murderer. He only had to wait for Hugo to go belly up.”

“Which leaves the potential investor,” Malcolm said.

“The mysterious investor…” I mused. “Okay, what about this? What if the investor was going to give Hugo money and Colter found out, so he killed Hugo because he was pissed?” I shook my head, already dismissing it. “Only he didn’t get the land after all. Larkspur did.”

“Maybe he thought it would be too messy to own land where the man he’d killed was buried.”

“I would think it would be smart to control the area where you buried someone. Which is likely why Larkspur bought it and did nothing with it,” I said. “But who owns Larkspur?” I put a hand on my hip. “You really don’t know?”

An amused grin lifted his lips. “Try as he might, Carter’s never been able to find out. It’s a thorn in his side. He hates when he’s thwarted.”

From what little I knew of Carter Hale, that didn’t surprise me. “Let’s keep searching,” I said. “We can cover this field in less than thirty minutes.”

Turned out it only took us fifteen.

My metal pole hit something solid that sounded like rock or concrete, and Malcolm came over and tapped it a few feet away from my location, confirming it wasn’t an errant rock. He went back to the Jeep and came back with two shovels and a crowbar.

“Wait,” I said, my heart racing. “What are you doing?”

He gave me an impatient look. “You came out here looking for Burton’s body, and we’re looking for Burton’s body.”

“We can’t just dig up his body, Malcolm! We should call this in to Detective Jones.”

He set the tip of one of shovels on the ground and leaned his weight on the pole. “Are you serious? You want to call up the detective who blew off this case five years ago with the suspicion that he might be buried here?”

He had a point. “He’s going to take it seriously. We found several items that could have belonged to him.”

“Could have belonged to him. We don’t know that they actually did,” he said. “There were countless kids out here who could have left those items. Sure, one of them has an H on it, but that doesn’t prove it was Burton’s.”

“If he’s even a halfway decent detective he’ll take it seriously,” I countered, my heart racing.

Why was I so anxious? Finding Hugo’s body would be a good thing. So why wasn’t I hiking over to the county road and calling Detective Jones already?

“This case is five years old,” Malcolm said, “and their preferred version of this story is that he ran away. Do you really think they’re going to waste the money or manpower to dig up this clearing looking for him?”

I presumed they would, but then again, Jones had skimped out of several things that would have cost too much money during the original investigation, including a forensic accountant and a proper manhunt of this property. If I alerted them to the possibility of Hugo being buried here and they didn’t dig, I’d be hamstrung.

“Besides,” Malcolm drawled, as though he realized I was turning to his side but needed one last push. “You have no idea if we actually found a body. For all we know, we found a giant rock. What’s Jones gonna think of you then? He’ll think you’re a joke.”

---