Crazytown (The Darren Lockhart Mysteries) Read Free Page B

in drive and his foot on the gas.
    “See you there,” the police chief said as he jerked away.
    The agent actually had no idea how to react to what just happened, so he walked back toward the law enforcement office. He quickly saw that the chief had circled around the block and parked outside his office.
    Lockhart took a deep breath. He wasn’t used to working on his own, and local police typically hated having federal agents around, so any cooperation they did offer on their own freewill tended to thin with time. Lockhart figured Donaldson’s apparent distain for all things FBI probably started at the crime scene, with the agents from Bemidji, and it would only get worse if he didn’t take charge and remedy the situation. He needed to keep his relations in the best shape he could. He was all alone out there in the Northland woods. Even with offices in nearby Bemidji and Duluth, those agents would not have his level of familiarity with violent crimes, and while they could be there to assist if it became necessary, he was still working from a town that was beneath the radar—or at least beneath Google Maps.
    Joy greeted him again as he entered the office, and Lockhart found himself smiling in response. He moved past her toward Donaldson’s desk.
    The police chief had already taken off his shoes and was rubbing his feet. “Gout,” he explained, with a sigh of relief as he focused on his bare foot. “Feel like a cripple half the time. Gotta drive everywhere when it flares up.”
    Lockhart smiled in the way he would have grinned at his grandfather and then took a look around the office. He was sure it must have been a living room at one point. The desks were crowded together against several adjoining file cabinets. The walls were covered with pictures of townspeople at local fund raisers and carnivals. His eyes stopped on the wall-mounted gun case, noticeably unlocked; in fact, there wasn’t even a lock on the thing. Inside it were three scoped rifles and two shotguns, there for the taking.
    The chief looked up and smiled. “Don’t worry, junior. We keep the shells locked up.”
    He was none too fond of casual nicknames like “junior,” “buddy” or “sport,“ but he thought it best not to bother mentioning it—at least not yet. “You’re not concerned with the potential theft of departmental firearms?”
    Chief Donaldson laughed. His smile made him look even older, forming deep creases and valleys all across his face. He looked weathered, a byproduct of vicious northern Minnesota winters. “Son, most of the farmers around here have bigger armaments than I got here. Those are more for show than anything.”
    “So there are a lot of guns around? Mainly rifles or are there handguns as well?” Lockhart prodded, his own heavy-handed way of getting to the investigation.
    The chief’s face smoothed and tightened as he grew more serious. “Some smaller-caliber stuff for getting rid of squirrels or scaring crows, maybe stuff to put down a wounded buck, but that’s about it.”
    “Has anyone reported any guns missing in the last few weeks?”
    “Nope.”
    “What caliber was used in the presumed homicide?”
    “Nothing presumed or assumed about it. That boy had no quarrel with anyone and it wasn’t an accident.” The chief put particular inflection on the final word.
    Lockhart would have preferred that the town and its police remain unbiased until the evidence proved otherwise, but it was a small town, and a boy had died, seemingly for no reason. He knew at that moment he would have to do his best to keep emotions at a minimum.
    “That boy was smart as they come,” Donaldson continued. “It’s a darn shame. Anyway, we haven’t got the results back from your FBI coroner, but it looked like a 9mm at close range, single tap to the back of the head, execution-style by the looks of it,” the man spoke with his first indications of experience and professionalism.
    The chief looked Lockhart square in the