“Well,” Rollins said. He slipped a pair of aviator sunglasses from his breast pocket and put them on, and then he shrugged off his windbreaker and folded it and dropped it at his feet. He turned his head to the right and stared down the runway for a moment, and then he looked at the tarp. “Let’s have a look,” he said. He bent at his knees and lifted a corner of the tarp and peered beneath it. Winston looked away. He’d seen all he’d needed to see of Rodney the night before. “What can you tell me?” Rollins asked.
“He’s a local man named Rodney Bellamy,” Winston said. “Black, mid-twenties. His wife said he went out for diapers last night. They got a new baby boy.”
“That’s a shame,” Rollins said.
“Yeah, it is.”
From the corner of his eye, Winston saw Rollins let go of the tarp and pick up his windbreaker. He stood. “How’d he end up out here in the middle of the night? You think he was up to something?” Rollins nodded toward the airplane. “Maybe he was helping unload this aircraft, and then something went sideways?”
“I don’t think so,” Winston said. His gaze had turned back to the tarp, and he recalled seeing Rodney’s face last night in the flashlight’s beam, and then he recalled the faces of Rodney’s father, his widow, and his baby boy that he’d seen just that morning. Winston wanted to tell Rollins that Rodney Bellamy wasn’t just one more Black man taken out with a bullet, but what did that even mean? And why did he feel the need to say it, to even think of saying something like that? “I think he went out for diapers, and I think he saw a plane come in low in the middle of the night. He must’ve come out here to check it out.”
“Any arrests or convictions?”
“No,” Winston said. “He’s clean. Always has been as far as I know. My daughter went to school with him, and I know his daddy. He teaches over at the high school. He’s a good man.”
“A lot of good daddies have bad kids, Winston.”
“Not this one.”
Winston felt the presence of someone behind him, and he turned and found Rountree standing just a few feet away. Rountree still held his open pad, but he clicked his pen closed and slipped it into his breast pocket.
Rountree looked at Rollins. “We’ll send this out on the teletype back at the office,” he said. “This aircraft needs to be processed in a covered hangar, and there’s not one big enough here. Best bet’s Wilmington.”
“You going to fly it?” Winston asked. He’d meant for it to be a joke, but the words came out tinged with the anger he still felt after Rountree’s dig at him over the fingerprints.
“No,” Rountree said. His face portrayed neither humor nor amusement. “But we’ll find somebody who can.” He nodded toward Rodney’s body. “And we’ll find out what happened to him.”
Winston followed Rountree’s eyes down to the tarp at Rollins’s feet. And that was when he saw it, when they all saw it. Perhaps the angle of the sunlight was perfect, or perhaps no one’s eyes had come to rest on that exact spot just yet. Whatever the reason, all three men spotted the shell casing at the same moment. It rested in the grass only a few feet off the runway, but Rountree was the first to move toward it. He pulled the pen from his pocket and bent toward the ground and slipped the tip of the pen into the empty casing. He stood and held it up as if he were pinching a tick between a pair of tweezers. No one said a word until Rountree’s gaze moved from the casing on the tip of his pen to Winston’s face.
“I thought your office processed this scene, Sheriff,” Rountree said.
“I thought we did too,” Winston said.
Rollins stepped forward, lifted his sunglasses from his eyes. “Looks like a nine-millimeter,” he said.
“It is,” Rountree said. He took a baggie from his pocket, snapped it open, and dropped the casing down inside. “Maybe I can actually get us a fingerprint after all.”
Winston and Rollins were quiet as they watched Rountree seal the bag and slip his pen back into his breast pocket. Winston looked at the two agents, and he understood that if he was going to have a role in this investigation then he was going to have to take it.
“I’d like to run point with the media on this,” Winston said. “And I’d like to keep a deputy out here twenty-four hours a day until the plane’s gone.” Winston’s office was already stretched thin, and keeping somebody out here on the runway around the clock to guard an airplane that wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon was only going to stretch them thinner. But he’d already suggested it, and it was too late to take it back.
“I’m fine with that,” Rollins said. “It’s better you than me when it comes to reporters. And I appreciate the offer to keep eyes on the aircraft.”
“It’d better not be the same officers who were supposed to be looking for shell casings,” Rountree said.
Rollins sighed as if he wished that Rountree hadn’t said what he’d just said. He looked at Winston. “That’s fine with me,” Rollins said. “It would help us out until we can get this thing moved. I’ll give you a shout as soon as we know something about how that’s going to happen.”
Winston nodded at Rollins. “Let me speak to these reporters so they’ll leave,” he said.
He left the agents on the runway and headed back toward the parking lot. Winston stopped where Kepler stood and asked him to follow.
“Just stand beside me and look smart when I start talking,” Winston said.
Kepler shrugged. “I’ll do my best.”
As the two men walked, an ambulance from Dosher Memorial drove through the parking lot. The gathered members of the press parted for a moment, and the ambulance passed through the open gate and rolled onto the runway. It slowed when the driver spotted Winston and Kepler in their uniforms, but Winston gestured for it to continue on and pointed toward the spot where the agents still stood by Bellamy’s body at the end of the runway. He watched the ambulance for a moment, neither he nor Kepler saying a word, and then he turned back toward the parking lot, where the reporters—microphones, tape recorders, and cameras at the ready—were waiting for him.
He felt something familiar, something he had felt more often over the past couple of years; it was the knowledge that he could walk away from this job right now and go on about his life. After the shock of the decision, no one would begrudge him leaving the job, retiring, especially with Marie trying to recover and everything that had happened to Colleen. Winston knew it would be easy—perhaps practical—to give in to that urge. He felt like he was holding his breath instead of breathing, and he wondered why he was doing something he didn’t want to do. But what would happen if he walked away? If he literally walked away from the reporters and the investigation and Kepler and simply climbed into Marie’s car and drove home? They wouldn’t have insurance, for one. They wouldn’t have a steady paycheck. It would quickly become clear that Winston’s big decision to walk away from the stress of his job would introduce untold stress into the remaining parts of his life. Best to keep things how they were, at least until the election was over and any choice Winston could make in this moment would have been made for him.