Page 14 of Head Room (Caught Dead in Wyoming #15)

“I’m ready.”

“What?” That useless delay-tactic question came out before I could stop it.

Dale answered, despite its uselessness. “I’m ready to start taking pictures of each page of the manuscript for Jennifer.”

I fell back on “Great.”

No, I didn’t mention I’d started taking photos myself, because I’d only done the first two pages before I let that slide while I read.

With the manuscript no longer in my possession, I looked up Camp Douglas, which I had never heard of, despite being an Illinois native.

Yup, there it was, essentially in the present-day Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side.

A training camp and one of the Union’s largest prisoner-of-war camps.

It was overcrowded and understaffed. At times, civilians organized aid drives for the prisoners.

Many turnovers in command surely didn’t help.

I felt the rabbit hole of its history luring me, but resisted.

The other element I allowed myself to look up was the Nebraska Territory, confirming what I thought I remembered from Mrs. Parens, a former teacher and principal who was a resource for all things Cottonwood County and, more widely, Wyoming.

Yup. In 1865, what became Wyoming — as a territory in 1868, as a state in 1890 — was part of the sprawling Nebraska Territory.

So that road ranch might have been in present-day Nebraska. Fort Laramie was certainly in Wyoming now.

With admirable self-restraint, I closed the screen and left my desk.

I found Nola Choi in the break room.

Not because I was looking for her there, but because I was in search of a backup stash of Pepperidge Farm Double Dark Chocolate Milano cookies I kept here. So, maybe it hadn’t been all self-restraint leaving the historical research behind.

My stash was not in the fridge, where my coworkers who would never consider poaching a story would gobble them without hesitation. At the moment, Nola was rooting inside it in a way that would have revealed anything hidden.

No, I kept this stash of cookies inside an innocuous box and tucked behind a dozen similar boxes of napkins.

Wasn’t giving that hiding spot away by digging them out in front of a witness.

“Nola, okay with you if I look at all your footage from the cabin fire scene?”

She straightened enough to look at me over the open refrigerator door.

“Sure. I’ll set it up in the editing bay.”

I could easily do that myself. “No reason for you to—”

She closed the fridge and started out, then stopped at the doorway. “You coming?”

Yes, darn it. Without the cookies.

Didn’t take long for her to set it up. Rather than leaving the editing bay when she finished, she sat next to me, not asking permission, but assuming I’d let her stay. I admired that.

Didn’t stop me from side-eyeing her.

She answered my unspoken invitation to leave with, “No way.”

I rolled the video.

After a minute or two, she added, “What are you looking for?”

“Don’t know. Just looking. Your framing’s good. Especially with the standup with Ned Irvin.”

Distract with a compliment? Me?

“Thanks. Diana gave me a trick to keep the head room even.”

After a while, she switched to the second day. We watched several more minutes of burnt ruins, with drifts of smoke, some still rising, but also shifting sideways.

I leaned forward. “There. Is that when they found the body?”

“Yeah.” She stopped the replay with bulky bodies leaving only glimpses between them as they clustered around something.

“I couldn’t see much. Before the firefighters reacted, I had no idea.

Then they blocked the view. There’s a better angle later on.

Audrey said not to use it on air, even though you have to mostly use your imagination to make out that it’s a body. ”

She restarted the video, which showed more legs shifting around. After another three minutes, she stopped it again.

“There. That’s the clearest frame.”

“Not very clear.”

“No. Camera didn’t do much better, either. I tried that, too, along with the video. Still, I was pretty sure I saw something and one firefighter confirmed it, though he insisted on off-the-record.” She grimaced. “Couldn’t have used it at that point with just him and my maybe-I-saw-it, but—”

“What was it?”

“The dead man had been shot in the head.”

“Well, we knew that from the sheriff’s department’s statements later.”

“Uh-huh. How I knew it was I could see the hole in what was mostly a skull.”

That spiked my eyebrows. “The head was a skull . . .? But the boots survived?”

“Yes and yes. Well, sort of on it being a skull. The body was burned badly down to below the knees. Not like a skeleton like in science class, clean and white. It was . . . charred.”

Her hesitation was a timely reminder of how new she was to this business and that she hadn’t seen things like that before.

Cover a few wars — or conflict areas as they are euphemistically called — even only now and then, as I had, and you saw a lot.

Certainly too much to take in completely at the moment of seeing it. Maybe haunting dreams and unexpected memories were a way for the brain to process smaller pieces over time.

After this inquiry, after the wedding, after the honeymoon, I’d sit down with her and talk about the processing and not to expect it to be fast.

She pushed past her hesitation. “It wasn’t until there was a break in the smoke and you really looked that you could spot the hole. At the same time, the boots were mostly still there. Not pristine, but certainly recognizable.”

“Interesting.” That roughly matched my initial impression of the pattern of what — to my admittedly inexpert eye — appeared to be accelerant. Specifically, being stronger in the center of the main room and around the edges, but not near the fireplace.

That pattern was not apparent in this footage. That provided one answer — I hadn’t missed it from careless viewing when it aired.

Bless Diana and her filter.

“Did you see a gun that could have been used for suicide?”

“No. But I heard guys talking about seeing one, then they clustered around something three or four feet farther into the rubble. Never could get a clear shot of it. There was lots of opportunity for them or their equipment to have moved it around accidentally.”

“What’s the fire department telling you?”

She pushed out a disgusted breath, then started in a singsong tone, “It’s under investigation. Still subject to AAR — after action review. Nothing to share with the public at this point.”

She jerked up. I hadn’t stopped watching the screen, but in the cramped editing bay, I felt her movement.

“What do you know, Elizabeth? Why are you interested?”

She didn’t waste time asking if I knew anything, but went right for the what. I really liked this young woman, even when she made me feel ancient and out of date with her tech skills.

“About the scene? Nothing more than you do. Although . . . did you know there was someone at the scene who seems interested in you.”

Deflect, deflect, deflect.

She gave me a side-eye. “Oh? What did he look like?”

“Dark hair. Clean-shaven. Mid-thirties.”

“Oh.” Disappointment packed into a syllable.

Good. His winkyness and the jealous woman in his orbit made him a less than promising candidate.

Plus, if she was interested in Miles Stevens, I would have been kicking myself for protecting her unnecessarily and forgoing that advantage when I talked to him.

“Doesn’t mean another firefighter wasn’t interested in you, too. Which one—?”

She humphed a snort that said with entirely unnecessary emphasis that she wasn’t telling.

“I wouldn’t try to fix you up or anything—”

Another snort.

I knew a snort ordering me to step-back-behind-the-line when I heard one.

Especially one that suited my purposes. While she protected her privacy, I left . . . without explaining my interest.