Isolation Read Free Page B

tried—Dad tried—to save her. The paramedics say she’s been dead for hours. They’ve already taken her body away. Dad’s talking to the sheriff now.”
    Faye dropped to a crouch and put her palm on the ground to steady herself. “Liz? Oh, God. Liz? Who would have shot Liz? There’s something wrong with a world where things like this happen.”
    Joe said something that was probably “Yeah,” but she heard him choke on the word.
    She tried to think of something else to say, but she couldn’t. She just murmured “Okay,” when he said, “Michael’s fine. I had some snacks for him and the new sheriff is letting him play with his badge. I think we’ll be home by lunch.”
    Faye tried to say good-bye, but she choked on that, too, so they both hung up.
    ***
    Joe could tell that the new sheriff wasn’t quite sure what to make of his father. Sly was weeping as if he’d lost a wife, while answering the sheriff’s questions by confirming that he’d only known Liz two weeks. Liz had been nothing to Sly but a nice lady who’d cooked eggs for him about fourteen times, so Sheriff Rainey must have been confused by Sly’s tears. Joe elected not to try to explain his father to Rainey, who had held office for a couple of years now, but whom Joe still considered “new” because he wasn’t Sheriff Mike.
    Sly was getting louder by the minute. “So young. She was too young to die. It’s not right. It’s just not right!”
    â€œI know it’s hard,” the new sheriff was saying, “but I need you to answer my questions. It’s the only way I’m going to find out why your friend is dead.”
    As the law officer spoke, he was making eye contact with Joe, communicating one silent word: Help?
    Joe wasn’t surprised by his father’s behavior. The man had never had a governor on his emotions, and he’d been as quick to rage when Joe was a boy as he was to grief now. The rage hadn’t shown itself since he and his father became reacquainted. Yet. Joe’s memories made him wary.
    Looking at Sly was like staring into a distorted mirror. His father’s shoulders and biceps, so like his own, were impressive for a man pushing sixty. Like Joe, he had the black mane of a Creek warrior. His hair was still as thick as Joe’s, though he kept it cut to jaw length and it was streaked with white. Age had thickened his waist, but there was no paunch to his belly. His tears were streaking down skin coarsened by age but not yet wrinkled.
    Joe could have given the sheriff a very good idea of why his father was overreacting to Liz’s death, if he had trusted himself to speak. His dead mother had worn her red hair long.
    ***
    Sheriff Ken Rainey studied the weeping man for a good long minute. He would give Sly Mantooth credit for honesty. He had been upfront about his time in an Oklahoma prison. Rainey had asked a desk-bound deputy to run Sly’s history while he interviewed him.
    As it turned out, the elder Mantooth’s criminal record wasn’t a long one, but his one offense had taken him straight to the pen. Truck drivers who decide to sell their transportation services to the highest not-legal bidder tend to be quick casualties in the War on Drugs.
    Sheriff Rainey had no love for the people who sold and transported the mind-twisting substances that had ruined and then ended his brother’s life, but he was fair. Men like Sly, who had lived several decades without a single instance of violence blotting their criminal records, rarely hauled off and killed somebody late in life. He wouldn’t say it never happened, but murdering thugs were not usually born at the tender age of fifty-eight.
    He nodded at the other witness to Liz’s murder scene, the taller and younger man who was silently helping his little son throw rocks in the water. Joe Wolf Mantooth gave every indication of having known