The kid leaned on his hands, cutting off Sharp’s air.
Sharp crossed his arms over his chest, using his elbows to bend his assailant’s arms and ease some of the pressure, just enough to suck in one breath.
As suddenly as the weight had landed on his chest, it disappeared. Sharp gulped oxygen, his lungs burning, as a shadow fell over him. Lance had the kid by the neck of his hoodie, the kid’s toes barely on the ground.
“What’s going on?” Lance asked. He wasn’t even out of breath.
Sharp looked up, wheezing and feeling old.
Lance shook the kid like a kitten. “Why were you running from Crystal’s house?”
The guy was young, maybe eighteen or nineteen. His wide-open, panicked eyes made him look younger.
“I didn’t do anything.” His arms flailed.
Lance eased the kid’s feet to the ground and released him. Sharp sat up and waited for the kid to spill his guts, but he clamped his mouth firmly shut. Sharp bet this was not the kid’s first B and E.
“If you try to run”—Sharp jerked a thumb toward Lance, whose bowling-ball-size biceps served as useful threats—“I’ll sic him on you again.”
The kid’s gaze darted back and forth between Sharp and Lance, then he nodded.
Sharp checked the kid’s pockets for weapons and found a wallet. He read the driver’s license. “Ricky Jackson. OK, Ricky, let’s go see what you were so anxious to run away from.” Sharp pushed him back toward Crystal’s house. He pocketed the wallet, just in case the kid managed to beat feet.
There were no houses in sight. The dilapidated farmhouse a quarter mile away was the closest neighbor. Ricky dragged his feet, but he was smart—or experienced—enough not to give anything away.
“Are you cops?” he protested.
“No,” Sharp said, keeping one hand on the kid’s arm.
The kid tried to twist away. “Then get your hands off me.”
“Walk.” Lance pointed toward Crystal’s place.
As they approached, Sharp studied the open window. Sharp caught a vibe—and a smell—that indicated bad shit had gone down. “I’m sure they’d love to know why you were climbing out Ms. Fox’s window.”
The kid went quiet.
They hauled him around front.
“What happened?” Morgan asked.
“Caught him climbing out a window.” Sharp handed the kid off to Lance, then went to his car for a set of zip ties. Returning, he pulled Ricky’s hands behind his back and fastened his wrists together.
“Hey, you can’t do that.” The kid wriggled.
“Shut up.” Sharp dragged Ricky to a lamppost and used a second zip tie to hook him to the post. He patted him on the shoulder. “You stay here.”
“You suck, man. I’m gonna sue your ass.” The kid spat onto the ground.
“I caught you breaking into a woman’s home. This is a citizen’s arrest, my young friend.” Sharp glanced at Morgan. Her face was set in a disapproving frown. He ignored her. His instincts told him they were not going to like what they found inside the house, and that the kid had been up to no good.
Besides, Grey’s Hollow was Sheriff King’s domain. The sheriff might not love PIs, but he would enthusiastically approve of heavy handedness when it came to punk-ass kids breaking into houses.
“Keep an eye on him,” he said to Morgan, then motioned Lance forward. They approached the front door. Sharp pulled gloves from his pocket and tugged them on. Lance did the same. Sharp tried the knob, but the door was locked. He and Lance walked the perimeter of the house, looking in windows. They tried the side entrance and a sliding glass door around back before stopping in front of the open window.
The sill was chest high. Sharp peered into a spare bedroom. He scanned past the boxes and piles of clothing to focus on the doorway. Across the hall and through another doorway, a pair of feet dangled just off the floor. “Shit, I see dangling feet.”
Lance laced his fingers as a step. Sharp took the leg up and scrambled inside. He maneuvered his way through the piles of junk. Lance came through the window behind him.
“Let me go first.” Lance shouldered ahead, his gun in his hand. “I’m armed.”
But Sharp could already see there was no reason to hurry. The woman was beyond help. He stopped in the doorway, the breath whooshing out of him as he viewed the body. The smell of death brought back his years on the police force. The body had not yet begun to decompose, but the bowels and bladder had released.
She dangled from a rope attached to the ceiling fan, her toes not quite brushing the carpet. Her eyes bulged, and her swollen tongue protruded from her mouth. A chair rested on its back beside her.
“I’ll clear the house,” Lance said.
Sharp heard him moving through the rooms.
Crystal Fox had been the single best new clue in Vic’s disappearance.
And she was dead.
“You really need to carry your gun.” Lance stopped next to him.
“I generally don’t need one, and I want people to feel comfortable talking to me,” Sharp said. “Besides, you’re the muscle, and I’m the brains in this operation.”
Lance holstered his weapon and pulled out his phone. “I’ll call the sheriff.”
“No rush. She isn’t going to be more dead five minutes from now.” Sharp took a camera from his pocket and began snapping pictures. “Once King gets here, the scene will be off-limits. And the ME won’t talk to us about an active investigation either. The sheriff will button down all his hatches, as usual.”
“But the kid knows we’re here,” Lance argued, sliding his phone out of his pocket.
“True.”
“And I always get the feeling the sheriff would like nothing better than to toss us both in jail.”
“Also true. King likes jailing people in general, but he has Ricky to lock up tonight. That should make the sheriff happy.”
While Lance made the phone call, Sharp snapped more pictures, zooming in on the rope, the knot, the woman’s face. “It’s a simple slipknot. No special skill required.”
“Do you think this isn’t suicide?” Lance asked, lowering his phone. “The sheriff recently informed her that her daughter was murdered. Seems like a reasonable motivation.”
“Maybe.” Sharp photographed the body in sections. “But her daughter has been missing for twenty-three years. Don’t you think the possibility that Mary had been killed would have occurred to her by now?”
“But the reality is very different from the possibility,” Lance said quietly.
Damn. What a shitty thing to say to someone whose father had also been missing all that time.
Sharp lowered the camera. “I’m sorry. You would know better than I would.”
“You could be right.” Lance rolled a shoulder. “Even my mom, with all her problems, was almost relieved when she thought my father’s body had been found. She’s more upset now, knowing that it wasn’t him.”
“We’ll get to the bottom of this.” Sharp pointed to purplish red dots on the dead woman’s swollen face. “Facial congestion and petechial hemorrhages are consistent with death by asphyxia caused by hanging, manual strangulation, or smothering.” He used one gloved finger to lift the hem of her pant leg and expose her foot and calf. “No sign of lividity yet.” The blood hadn’t had time to settle in the lowest part of the body. “She hasn’t been hanging here very long.”
Sharp finished with the body and moved on to the room. His gaze landed on the dresser. The drawers were open and had been rifled through. A jewelry box lay on its side, its contents spilled onto the top of the dresser. “That little rat was robbing her.”
“What’s going on in there?” Morgan called from the open window.
“Don’t let her in here.” Lance frowned at the body. “She doesn’t need to see this.”
“She’s tough,” Sharp said. “She can handle it.”
“But she doesn’t have to,” Lance said in a low voice, then he turned and called back to her. “Wait out front. Crystal is dead. I called the sheriff. He’s going to be mad enough that we contaminated his scene.”