She squeezed her eyes shut for just a moment, then said quietly to Gus, “The father’s been shot in the head. Dead. The kid is clinging to him and terrified out of his mind. I need the boy’s name.”
Gus slipped away, and soon she heard him murmuring to the gathered campers.
Not knowing if she would ever get the boy’s name, she said quietly, “Wanna come outside? I’m sort of like police, you know. You probably saw me working when you were on your way up here.”
No response.
Then Gus’s voice in her ear. “Jimmy. He’s Jimmy.”
“Okay.” She lowered the zipper more. When Gus squatted, she let him continue pulling it down so she didn’t have to take eyes off the frightened and confused little boy. “Jimmy? Would you like to go home to Mommy? We can get Mommy to come for you.”
His eyes flickered a bit. He’d heard her.
“My friend Gus here has a horse, too. You want to ride a horse? His name is Scrappy and he’s neat. All different colors.”
She had his attention now and stepped carefully through the flap, totally avoiding the father. She wondered how much evidence she was destroying but didn’t much care. The priority was getting that child out of there.
The floor of the tent was small and not easy to cross. A small sleeping bag lay bunched up, a trap for the unwary foot. Toys were scattered about, too, plastic horses, some metal and plastic cars and a huge metal tractor. She bet Jimmy had had fun making roads in the pine needles and duff outside.
As soon as she got near, she squatted. His gaze was focusing on her more and more, coming out of the shock and into the moment. “I think we need to go find your mommy, don’t you?”
“Daddy?”
“We’ll take care of Daddy for you, okay? Mommy is going to need you, Jimmy. She probably misses you so bad right now. Let’s go and I’ll put you on my ATV. You like ATVs?”
“Zoom.” The smallest of smiles cracked his frozen face.
“Well, this is a big one, and it definitely zooms. It’s also a little like riding a roller coaster. Come on, let’s go check it out.”
At last Jimmy uncoiled and stood. But there was no way Blaire was going to let him see any more of his father. She scooped him up in her arms and turned so that he’d have to look through her.
“Gus?”
“Yo.”
“Could you hold the flap open, please?”
Who knew a skinny four-year-old could feel at once so heavy and light? The flashlight she carried wasn’t helping, either. She wished she had a third arm.
“Are you cold, Jimmy?” she asked as she moved toward the opening and bent a little to ease them through.
“A little bit,” he admitted.
“Well, I’ve got a nice warm blanket on my ATV. You can curl up with it while I call your mommy, okay?” Lying. How was she going to call this kid’s mother? Not immediately, for sure. She couldn’t touch the corpse or look for ID until after the crime techs were done.
“Gus? The sheriff?”
“I radioed. There’s a lot more than two cars on the way. Crime scene people, too.”
“We’ve got to get this cordoned off.”
“I’ll ask Mr. Curious to help me. He’ll love it. The kid?”
“Jimmy is going to get my favorite blanket and a place to curl up in the back of the ATV, right, Jimmy?”
Jimmy gave a small nod. His fingers dug into her, crumpling cloth and maybe even bruising a bit. She didn’t care.
Walking carefully and slowly with the boy, almost unconsciously she began to hum a tune from her early childhood, “All Through the Night.”
To her surprise, Jimmy knew the words and began to sing them with her. His voice was thin, frail from the shock, but he was clinging desperately to something familiar. After a moment, she began to sing softly with him. Before she reached the ATV, Jimmy’s head was resting against her shoulder.
When the song ended, he said, “Mommy sings that.” Then he started to sing it again.
And Blaire blinked hard, fighting back the first tears she’d felt in years.
* * *
GUS WATCHED BLAIRE carry the small child to the ATV. He’d already recovered the crime scene tape and there were plenty of trees to wind it around, but he hesitated for a moment, watching woman and child. He could imagine how hard this was for her, dealing with a freshly fatherless child. War did that too often. Now here, in a peaceful forest. Or one that should have been peaceful.
His radio crackled, and he answered it. “Maddox.”
“We’re about a mile out from the parking area,” came the familiar voice of the sheriff, Gage Dalton. “Anything else we need to know?”
“I’m about to rope the scene right now. The vic has a small child. We’re going to need some help with that and with finding a way to get in touch with family as soon as possible.”
“We’ll do what we can as fast as we can. The witnesses?”
“Some are trying to pack up. I’m going to stop that.”
He was as good as his word, too. When he clicked off the radio, he turned toward the people who had dispersed from the remaining knot and started to fold up tents.
“You all can stop right there. The sheriff will be here soon and you might be material witnesses. None of you can leave the scene until he tells you.”
Some grumbles answered him, but poles and other items clattered to the ground. One woman, with her arms wrapped around herself, said, “I feel like a sitting duck.”
“If you were,” Gus said, “you’d already know it.” That at least took some of the tension out of the small crowd. Then he signaled to the guy who’d tried to follow them to the tent and said, “You get to help me rope off the area.”
The guy nodded. “I can do that. Sorry I got too close. Instinct.”
“Instinct?”
“Yeah. Iraq. Know all the parameters of the situation.”
Gus was familiar with that. He decided the guy wasn’t a ghoul after all. He also proved to be very useful. In less than ten minutes, they had a large area around the victim’s tent cordoned off. Part of him was disturbed that a gunshot had been heard but no one had approached the tent of the one person who hadn’t joined them, not even the veteran. The tent in which a child had apparently been crying.
But it was the middle of the night, people had probably been wakened from a sound sleep and were experiencing some difficulty in putting the pieces together in any useful way. Camping was supposed to be a peaceful experience unless you ran into a bear. And, of course, the sound of the child crying might have persuaded them everything was okay in that tent. After all, it looked untouched from the outside.
Scared as some of these people were that there might be additional gunfire, they all might reasonably have assumed that Jasper and his son were staying cautiously out of sight.
Once he and Wes, the veteran, had roped off the area, there wasn’t another thing they could do before the cops arrived. Preserve the scene, then stand back. And keep witnesses from leaving before they were dismissed by proper authority. He could understand, though, why some of them just wanted to get the hell out of here.
The fact remained, any one of that group of twelve to fourteen people could be the shooter. He wondered if any one of them had even considered that possibility.
Blaire settled Jimmy in the back of the