Page 78 of Night Hawk
“Thanks bunches.” She smiled.
He grumbled something but stepped out wearing a glowing headlamp. She noted the gun at his hip and prayed he wouldn’t draw it. If he did, Brendan—a former sniper who’d taken a stance in a nearby tree—might be forced to shoot, and that would cause all kinds of problems for him. And someone would be dead, because if Brendan fired, it would be a deadly bullet.
“Follow me.” Sharkey set off with quick and powerful steps for a man his age.
She heard Clay moving behind her, but only because she was listening for him. She doubted Sharkey heard a thing. She fell back to signal her intention to move up next to Sharkey to distract him, allowing Clay to get the drop on him.
She caught back up to Sharkey and pretended to look around. “Do you sell U-cut trees here?”
“Nope. We ship everything we grow out of state.”
“Too bad. It would be fun to cut them.”
“Don’t want people all up in my property. Besides, there’re plenty of places to do that.”
Clay reached Sharkey and jabbed him in the back with his handgun. “Don’t move.”
Sharkey went for his gun, but Clay was faster and removed it with his free hand. “On the ground now. Face down. Nice and slow.”
Sharkey gave Toni a sharp glare as he lowered himself down.
“Hands behind your back,” Clay demanded.
Sharkey complied with Clay’s request. “Who are you?”
Clay gave the guy a snide grin. “We’re the people who are going to prove that you murdered Fritz Rader.”
Clay and Toni searched the living areas and kitchen finding nothing. Now they were going through the bedrooms, where people often hid valuables and things they didn’t want found, and Clay hoped to score a lead.
But Sharkey’s sparse bedroom had few hiding places. It held a double bed with a worn wood headboard, a matching nightstand, and a four-drawer dresser.
“I’ll take the dresser,” he said to Toni.
“I got the nightstand and closet.” She went to the nightstand and pulled out the single drawer.
He opened the top drawer to find underwear and socks rolled into tight little bundles. He took his time in all the drawers, careful to look for anything small like a flash drive. He heard Toni move to the walk-in closet. In the bottom drawer, he plowed through sweaters and found a large manila envelope with Hibbard’s name written on the front.
Clay carefully opened the envelope and withdrew several photos. The top one was of Toni’s dad lying in a pool of blood in the parking lot where he was murdered. Whoever took the shot must’ve used a telephoto lens, but then the bullet that killed Toni’s dad had been fired at a long distance too. Clay hated to show the photo to her, but she had a right to know this guy not only likely killed Rader, but maybe her father too.
“Toni,” he called out. “You need to see this.”
She came into the room, and he displayed the photo.
She gasped and looked up at Clay. “He could’ve killed Dad.”
“Seems very possible, and based on these other pictures, he could’ve killed these other people too.” Clay flipped to a photo of Rader lying on the floor in his home. The next one of a teenage girl and then two of other men.
She tapped the last picture. “Olin Kraus. Hibbard’s second in command.”
“Yeah,” Clay said. “Maybe Sharkey was the one who murdered Kraus. Then he took over as number two.”
“But why would he have these pictures in his house much less label the envelope with Hibbard’s name? The pictures don’t prove Sharkey or Hibbard killed these people, but it does make Sharkey look suspicious. Why keep them?”
“Blackmail, maybe.”
“You think he was using them to blackmail Hibbard. That Hibbard is the killer, and he shot my dad.”
“Could be. We just don’t have enough to know for sure. But Hibbard always kept his hands clean, so if I had to guess, I’d say Sharkey did the killing.”
