Page 79 of A Forgotten Mistake

“I hear ya.” I turn my light off as I quietly start heading toward the bales.

But the second we begin moving, the gun goes off again. There’s a succession of three shots as I realize they’re shooting down into the floorboards above us, probably to force us to draw back. Given no other choice, I swiftly jerk Gabriel back as the animals inside the barn start to panic. The noise makes it hard to tell where the person above us is going until I hear a thud on the other side of the solid wall in front of us. I don’t see an opening to the far side of the barn, so I quickly rush up the haybales, into the loft above.

“Please be careful,” Gabriel says from where he’s right behind me.

“I am,” I assure him as I see right where they’d jumped down.

“There, I just saw them slip out there,” Gabriel says as he jumps down. I quickly follow him out to where the person just fled.

“Police, drop your weapon and get on the ground,” Gabriel orders a moment before I hear a gunshot, thankfully out of Gabriel’s gun this time.

The person falls through the wide strands of the fence and rushes into the herd of cattle that had been curious but are now a bit panicked, disrupting our view. Gabriel grabs the fence before jerking back. “Fuck, it’s electric,” he hisses as he hastens to slip through it again even after getting shocked. But the issue is when he’d jerked back, it drew my attention to him, so I didn’t notice the dark figure moving toward us.

I turn fast just as Cameron swings hard, but the shovel seems to be too heavy for him in his weakened state. I grab it fromhim, tearing it from his hands before yanking his arm down and slamming him against the ground.

“Where is Liz Marsh?” I demand.

He stops moving, so I flip him onto his side as he makes gasping noises.

“Is he trying to die?” Gabriel asks.

“Sure is,” I respond as I hear sirens. “The medical team is needed here immediately. We need to follow the assailant.”

“I did hit them; it should have slowed them down,” Gabriel says.

“Good job,” I praise him.

“Now I have to get shocked again, dammit. Yes, you’re cute, can I get through?” He waves at the curious cow standing in his way. “Fuckity fuck fuck,” he whines as he gets shocked a bit on the way back.

“Is this a kink I don’t know about yet? Because I’m willing to know about it,” I say as he raises an eyebrow.

“Only if I get to shock you,” he retorts as he quickly makes a call before taking over with Cameron. He’s definitely better at the keeping someone alive part than I am. While he balls something up to compress the wound, I scan our surroundings, looking for anything moving, but the area is so vast and dark it’s impossible to see much of anything.

Thankfully, backup arrives, and I send some of them out in their patrol cars to scan the roads surrounding the property. A group of officers also move out on foot as the medical team tries to revive Cameron to no avail. The gunshot we’d heard must have been the reason he was slowly bleeding out. I wonder if him coming at me exerted something to the point where it finally killed him.

“I’m quite surprised you’re not racing across the woods like a madman,” Gabriel comments.

“Because the rest of the team has a huge head start on us and something else has my attention,” I say, Gabriel following as I hurry back to the two-story farmhouse. “There are already enough officers out in those fields to find the killer.” I rush up to the front door and let myself in. It looks like there was a brawl in the kitchen where the table has been shoved back and there’s blood on the tiles. The dinner that they appear to have been enjoying is half on the floor.

The other officers spread out to check the first floor as my attention goes upward. Holding my gun steady, I head up the stairs to the room where the light went off. I turn the hallway light on and see that the door is partly closed.

“You hear that?” Gabriel asks. “Sounds like water running. I wonder if his wife Jessica was attacked. This is the police, is there anyone in there?”

He pushes against the door, but it refuses to open with something in front of it. I shine my flashlight through the crack in the door and see that the light switch is covered in blood. And beyond it, there’s blood smeared across the wall in a kind of arc.

“My guess is that what’s in front of the door is a body,” I say. “See the way the blood is smeared against the wall? The lights weren’t turned off on purpose… someone fell against the wall, hitting the switch.”

I turn my phone’s camera on and slip my hand in enough to see that my theory is right when the lens of my camera picks up the body in front of the door. Since we can’t tell whether it’s an alive or dead body, our duty is to reach it quickly to see if there’s something that can be done. I push against the door until it gives enough for Gabriel to slip into the room.

“She’s dead,” he says, but he calls for the medical team to verify. I look down at Jessica and kneel to get a closer look at her chest where she’d been stabbed multiple times. The bloodcoating the floor and walls tells me that she didn’t go down quickly.

“The tub is running,” Gabriel states, but why would she be taking a bath when she’s fully clothed and they were clearly in the middle of dinner?

“What was she trying to get rid of?” I ask as I get up.

“Exactly what I was wondering. If she and her husband were the victims… there’s no way he’d want to attack us unless there’s something he doesn’t want us to see.”

I follow him into the attached bathroom where a laptop sits submerged in the tub full of water.

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