Page 31 of The Evening Wolves

They moved more carefully through the trailer this time. In their haste to clear it, with adrenaline hammering at his nerves, John-Henry’s first impression had been of space and color: rooms with dingy gray walls and soiled carpet. Now, moving through the space like a detective, he saw what he’d missed on his first pass: the hole in the bathroom where the toilet should have been, dropping into the darkness below the trailer; the water stains spreading across one bedroom wall, greenish brown and shaped like angel wings; the beach towels stuffed around ill-fitting windows. They were decorated with cartoon characters—one of them was Woody Woodpecker. Stained twin mattresses lay on the floor in one room. In another, a camp stove, a jumble of dirty pots, and several cardboard boxes of canned and dehydrated food suggested how the meth cooks had lived while they were out here. Jugs of water filled the tub in the bathroom, although it didn’t look like either man had spent a lot of time on personal hygiene. In what must have been considered the living room, an old Dynex TV was duct-taped to a stand, the screen canting at a slight angle. A stack of DVDs next to the TV suggested how they’d passed the time.

“They really liked Asian women,” John-Henry said, eyebrows raised at the pictures on the covers. “Do you think they knew what ladyboys are?”

“The name pretty much tells you, John. It’s not rocket science. Where the fuck is he?”

John shook his head.

“I’m going to check the trucks we saw near the barn. Then the perimeter.”

“Wait, you think he did walk out of here?”

“He’d have to be off his ass, but I don’t know what the other option is. He didn’t lock himself inside that shipping container.”

“Maybe someone else locked him in there.”

“And left how? North and Shaw were watching the only road.”

“I don’t know, Ree. I’m suggesting possibilities.”

Emery opened his mouth to say something, and then one of those tiny, Emery Hazard smiles cut across his face.

“Oh my God,” John-Henry said with a grin.

“Does this feel familiar?”

“I’m having flashbacks. Go ahead and check the trucks. Let me know when you want to check the shipping container; we should do that one together.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Something felt weird about those bodies. I’m going to take another look.”

“Something felt weird.”

“I’m definitely having flashbacks. Go check the trucks.”

Emery left, and John-Henry moved back to the trailer’s kitchen. The smell seemed worse now, and he pulled his sweatshirt up to cover his nose and mouth. The two men lay near the center of the kitchen. The woman was farther back, near the door that led out of the trailer. John-Henry tried to play out the sequence of events. The most obvious scenario seemed to be that Vermilya had arrived, parked at the gate, and proceeded on foot. Most likely, John-Henry thought, to avoid being heard. He’d entered the trailer, found the men and woman in the kitchen, and shot them. He must have known this place, been familiar with it. If John-Henry were going out on a ledge, he’d guess that Vermilya had been trusted by these people.

He studied the bodies, and then the blood, looking for clues that might supplement or contradict the narrative he was constructing. The two men had been shot in the head. The spray of blood and brain covered the wall and door behind them. The woman, in contrast, had been shot twice in the chest. Unlike the men, she looked like she’d taken care of herself, her blond hair—what he could see of it under the trucker hat—clean, the hat and coverall immaculate except, of course, for where she’d been shot—

That thought brought him up short. Because it didn’t make sense for the hat and coverall to be free of spatter, not if she’d been standing behind these men when they’d been shot. Some of the spatter would have shown—on her clothes, her skin, or her hair. Most likely, on all three. On the other hand, her appearance made perfect sense if she’d heard the shots and come running, rushed through the back door, and arrived after the fact.

John-Henry turned in place, examining the walls of the kitchen and the trailer’s narrow hallways beyond it. Blood spatter covered these walls too. No void. He shook his head and loosed a few choice swears inside his head. Then he retraced his steps to the front of the trailer, inspecting the carpet and the walls more carefully. He didn’t see any blood, so he retraced his steps.

The fact that there wasn’t a void was significant. John-Henry didn’t consider himself an expert by any means, but he knew enough to know that a void in blood spatter suggested something had blocked the spray of droplets. Voids could indicate that something had been removed from the scene after the incident. Or, in the same vein, where the shooter had been standing. This blood spatter was behind where the shooter would have been standing. In theory, if the blood had come from the victims, then there should have been a void.

But there wasn’t.

Which means, John-Henry thought with a surge of the old excitement, someone else got shot.

He crossed the kitchen again and let himself out onto the crowded deck. Unlike Emery, he didn’t lug an entire forensic laboratory with him everywhere he went, so he used the flashlight on his phone to inspect the deck. It didn’t take him long to find the drops of blood: on the plastic dinosaurs, on the bag of fertilizer, on the sun-faded boards of the deck itself. A bloody transfer pattern suggested where someone had grabbed the rail.

And then the trail ended.

“John?” Emery called from across the compound.

“I think I’ve got something. Had something. I don’t know.”

Emery came jogging back. John-Henry showed him the spatter and then the blood on the deck.

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