Chapter 36
THIRTY-SIX
Jackson County Sheriff’s Department
Main Office
Static from the department radio crackled through the briefing room. Outside the square, grimy windows, the last of the morning fog had burned away, leaving a hard June sun shimmering off the courthouse parking lot.
Sheriff Burke Scott stood at the front of the room, a crime-scene photo pinned to the dry-erase board behind him.
Luke Hale, Scout Wilson, and Sara Parker sat around the scarred laminate table, notebooks open.
“It wasn’t a burglary,” Burke said, looking from one deputy to the next.
Silence settled over the room.
“Bennett filled in a few blanks this morning. Mabel wasn’t obsessive about locking the house. Sometimes she did. Sometimes she didn’t. People came and went around that property all day long. Employees. Vendors. Neighbors. She trusted the people around her.”
He tapped the photograph with the end of his marker.
“She figured she had all the security she needed.”
Scout frowned.
“Moose.”
Burke nodded.
“Exactly.”
A few heads turned as Ruger, stretched out beside Baker’s chair in the corner of the room, lifted his head before settling back onto his paws.
Burke glanced down at the German Shepherd.
"People hear 'guard dog' and assume every dog reacts the same."
He shook his head.
"They don't."
He scratched behind Ruger’s ear absentmindedly.
“Ruger here is a trained police K-9. If I tell him someone is a threat, he’ll put himself between me and danger without hesitation.”
His gaze shifted back to the room.
“Moose wasn’t trained like that. He protected Mabel because he loved her.”
The room grew quiet.
“If somebody wanted Mabel Blackwood dead, the first thing they had to do was separate her from the one thing in that house willing to die protecting her.”
Luke leaned forward.
“You think they locked him outside?”
“Maybe.”
Burke shrugged.
“Maybe they called him outside. Maybe they shut the door behind him. Maybe they distracted him long enough to get upstairs.”
He paused.
“I don’t know.”
His eyes hardened.
“But I do know this.”
He looked at each deputy in turn.
“Moose wasn’t in that bedroom when Mabel was attacked.”
Sara frowned.
“When we got there, he’d nearly torn the back door off trying to get inside.”
“Exactly,” Burke said. “At the time, we all assumed he knew something was wrong with Mabel and couldn’t reach her.”
He let that settle.
“Now we have to ask a different question.”
The room waited.
“What happened before that?”
Nobody answered.
Burke turned back toward the board.
“The chemical analysis from Dr. Cade came in this morning. The fibers recovered from Mabel’s airway match the cream-and-blue velvet throw pillow from her bedroom.”
The room fell silent again.
“The killer didn’t bring a weapon,” Burke said. “They used what was already in the room, staged the scene, and left.”
Sara shook her head.
“She fought.”
“She did.”
Burke nodded once.
“And somebody still held that pillow there until it was over.”
Luke glanced toward the board.
“So we’re looking for somebody who knew the property.”
“And somebody Mabel wouldn’t think twice about letting into her house.”
Luke frowned. “Sheriff... what if we’re looking at this backward?”
Burke looked up.
“What if nobody came in after Mabel got home?”
The room went still.
Luke shrugged.
“She spends all day at the winery. Bennett says people came and went around that property all the time. If somebody knew her routine...”
Sara finished the thought.
“...they could’ve already been inside.”
Burke didn’t answer immediately.
He looked back at the crime scene photographs.
Mabel had been attacked upstairs.
No signs of forced entry.
No valuables taken.
The bed staged.
“Possible,” he finally said.
Scout frowned.
“Then what about Moose?”
Burke folded his arms.
“Same problem. Whether the killer came in before she got home or after she went upstairs, they still had to account for that dog.”
Burke’s eyes drifted across the names pinned to the board.
Red Stephens.
Walter Grady.
Zack Fowler.
Vanessa Mercer.
Burke looked around the room.
Mabel Blackwood was sixty-nine. By every account she was generous. Respected. She employed half the valley and quietly gave to the other half.
He let the silence settle.
“So why would somebody kill her?”
Nobody answered.
Burke folded his arms.
“The reasons never change.”
His eyes moved across the room.
“Love.”
“Money.”
“Greed.”
“Power.”
“Revenge.”
He nodded once.
“The motive’s probably older than any of us. Our job is figuring out whose it was.”
The heavy glass door to the sheriff’s office rattled against its frame.
Every head turned.
Through the briefing-room window, a small woman in a floral headscarf marched across the bullpen with determined purpose.
Scout glanced toward the door.
“That’s June Wheeler.”
Burke capped his marker.
“Hold the rest of this.”
He nodded toward the bullpen.
“Scout, see what she needs.”
Scout pushed back from the table and slipped out of the room.
Jackson County Sheriff’s Department
Front Lobby
June’s knuckles were white around the strap of her oversized canvas purse, her face pale beneath the scarf. She didn’t pause at the low wooden gate separating the lobby from the bullpen; she marched straight up to the front counter.
Scout Wilson looked up from a stack of traffic citations, straightening. “Morning, June. Can I help you with something?”
“I need Burke,” June said, her voice thin but absolute. She didn’t glance at the waiting chairs. “Right now, Scout.”
“The Sheriff is in a closed briefing with the team,” Scout said gently, reaching for a clean intake pad. “If you’ve got a statement to make regarding the Blackwood property, I can take it right here. We’ll get it filed clean.”
June snapped her chin up, eyes flashing. “Nope. Nope, no one except the Sheriff. I’m not whispering a word of this to a deputy, Scout Wilson. Go get Burke, or I’m sitting on your front steps until he walks out.”
Scout recognized that look—the small-town stubbornness that wouldn’t budge for a badge. He set his pen down, stood, and walked back toward the glass conference room.
A moment later, Burke Scott emerged, his uniform shirt crisp, his eyes carrying the exhaustion of the timeline. He offered June a calm nod as he pushed the swinging gate open. “June. Come on back to my office.”
June didn’t speak until the heavy oak door of Burke’s office clicked shut behind them. She refused the chair he offered, choosing instead to stand by the window, fingers twisting the canvas strap of her bag.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost, June,” Burke said, settling behind his desk. “What’s going on?”
“It’s about Red Stephens,” June whispered, turning sharply to face him. “I haven’t slept a full hour since folks found out Mabel didn’t die naturally, Burke. I keep replaying it in my head, and I can’t keep it inside anymore.”
Burke leaned forward, pen poised over a yellow legal pad. “Replaying what?”
“Three days before she died,” June said, her breath coming a little too fast. “I was over at the Victorian. Mabel had invited me for lunch—a light chicken salad and some hot tea in the dining room. We were sitting there, talking about the weather, when the front door didn’t just open…
it slammed. So hard the china in the hutch rattled. ”
Burke didn’t interrupt. His eyes stayed on her face.
“Red Stephens came storming right into the dining room,” June went on, her chest lifting and falling. “He didn’t even take off his mud boots. He was furious, Burke. Absolutely beside himself. “He said, ‘I heard down at Talley Feed and Tack that Mabel was fixin’ to sell the cattle farm.’”
“Sell the cattle farm?” Burke asked, his mind jumping to Luke’s interview notes.
“That’s what folks down at the feed store were saying.
” June nodded quickly. “Red said everyone was talking about it. And it pissed him off like nothing I’ve ever seen.
He marched up to the end of the table, leaned down in Mabel’s face, and told her what was what.
He shouted she wasn’t going to sell that land out from under him—not after all his years of service, not after everything he’d sacrificed to keep those fences standing. ”
June swallowed, her voice trembling. “Mabel tried to tell him to calm down, but Red wouldn’t hear it. He pointed his finger right at her nose and said that if she thought otherwise... she’d find out the hard way.”
Burke’s jaw locked, his pen making a heavy mark on the pad. “‘Find out the hard way.’ Those were his exact words, June?”
“His exact words,” June whispered, eyes wide. “It was shocking, Burke. I was sitting right there, terrified he was going to lay a hand on her. He stormed back out the front door, slamming it so hard the glass in the transom buzzed.”
She took a slow breath, fingers loosening around her purse.
“Mabel tried to brush it off,” June said softly.
“She forced a laugh, said Red was just an old bull who didn’t like a new gate.
She tried to go right back to eating. But Burke...
when she picked up the silver pot to pour the tea?
Her hands were trembling so bad she spilled it all over the lace cloth. She couldn’t stop shaking.”
Silence settled into the small office. Outside, Main Street hummed on, but inside, Mabel Blackwood’s final days turned darker in Burke’s mind.
Burke's thoughts flashed back to the autopsy. Mabel had suffered a massive heart attack during the assault—but it hadn't finished the job.
Burke set the pen aside, the weight of June’s confession tightening his chest.
“June, you stay right here with Scout and write this down exactly how you told me. Every syllable.”
He stood, reaching for his utility belt and his Stetson. When he opened the office door, his face was a hard, unyielding mask.
Out in the bullpen, Luke looked up from the briefing table, sensing the shift before Burke spoke.
“Scout,” Burke said, voice steady but edged, “grab your keys. We’re going to pay Red Stephens a visit out at Blackwood.”
Blackwood Black Angus Cattle
The drive out to the lower pasture was dead silent.