Cut and Died by Jeff Shelby

Author:Jeff Shelby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: cozy mystery, amateur sleuth, amateur detective, funny mystery, mystery set in Virginia, farm mystery, private detective
Publisher: Jeff Shelby
Published: 2017-09-19T16:00:00+00:00

TWENTY FIVE

Mack let out a low whistle as soon as he stepped into the camper.

I was instantly curious.

I’d told myself I wasn’t going in. There was no way I was going to be caught trespassing, especially on the off chance that Sheriff Lewis might discover us there. I didn’t know what the normal punishment was for that kind of offense, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the sheriff advocated for the full penalty.

I glanced behind me, back into the clearing and down the gravel road. There was no sign of anyone.

“This guy is insane,” Mack said from inside the camper.

I had all sorts of visions of what he might be seeing that would constitute insane. Had he found more dead bodies? Torture items? Had he been right to suspect that Tim had something to do with the Miranda’s disappearance and death?

The curiosity was killing me. I’d peek inside, quickly, but not go in. My eyes couldn’t trespass, could they?

I climbed to the top step and poked my head inside the open camper.

And gasped.

There were no body parts and no torture devices, thank goodness.

But the camper was filled to the brim with every possible thing someone might need in a time of disaster.

Boxes of freeze-dried meals—some that were MREs straight from the Army—were stacked everywhere, solar-powered flashlights sitting on top of them. Jugs of water lined an entire shelving unit along one side of the room, and another unit held guns and ammunition, bows and arrows, and hunting knives. There was a solar-powered generator in the middle of the camper, half put together, a hand-crank transistor radio next to it. Pots and pans were stacked in an open cupboard, right next to another cupboard filled exclusively with canned goods. A handheld, slight rusty can opener was mounted to the door.

“What is all this stuff?” Mack asked incredulously.

“He’s a doomsday prepper,” I said.

Mack gave me a look. “What? How on earth do you know that?”

“Mikey knows him,” I said. “The cook at the Wicked Wich,” I added, when Mack’s face screwed up with confusion even more.

His expression cleared a little. “A doomsday prepper, huh?” He was walking around the camper, picking things up, inspecting everything.

“Don’t touch anything,” I said.

“How else am I going to find clues?”

I knew he didn’t care that he was breaking the law just by being inside of Tim’s camper, so I tried a different approach. “You’ll leave fingerprints.”

He shrugged. “No one’s gonna know I’ve been in here so why would they dust for prints?”

He seemed remarkably unconcerned with the idea of being caught in someone else’s home uninvited.

He was standing in front of a makeshift desk area riffling through a stack of catalogs and papers: receipts and invoices, from the looks of it.

“Mack.” My uneasiness grew the longer he stayed inside the camper. “You should get out of there.”

It was a warning said too late. Because as soon as the words were out of my mouth, a lone figure walked out of the woods.

A man wearing a hooded jacket, his head angled down, his hands shoved in his pockets.

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