“I figured Myles was out hunting. One reason was that I didn’t see his bow and arrows in the barn,” the guy explained. “But they’re not on the horse either.”
Stef chewed on that a minute and then said, “They’re probably somewhere in the woods. Wherever he was when he got off the horse?”
“I wonder where that was.” I looked at the horse and wished there was a way to tell. “We need to look through those saddle pockets,” I said to Mueller. “Here, not wait for the lab.”
“We’d have better control in the lab,” Mueller pointed out. “We don’t want to mess up any latent prints.”
“You can be careful, but we can’t wait,” I said. “We need to know if there’s anything in there that can help us find him.”
Mueller sighed but did as I asked. The saddle glowed in the light emanating from the barn’s interior as he used a small tool to pop the pockets open and a hook to search inside. Out came a stash of energy bars and a wallet. We found Myles’s driver’s license with the same photo we’d been showing on TV, those inquisitive blue eyes I remembered, dark hair and a pilgrim beard to match that covered his neck. Mueller closed the wallet and slipped it, as he had the energy bars, into evidence bags to go in for fingerprinting.
Meanwhile, the rest of us waited while one of the techs continued searching the saddle. At first, nothing, but then she found something in a small inner pocket—an envelope. On the front, someone had typed: LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT
Inside she found a single sheet of folded paper dated the previous day, Monday, the day of the killings. The tech laid it out on the table and we gathered around. There were three short paragraphs and a typed signature at the bottom. I picked it up in my gloved hands, Max shined his flashlight on it, and I read aloud to the others:
To whom it may concern:
Point One: Being of sound mind, I, Myles Thompkins, want my cabin and all I possess liquidated. All funds are to be put into a trust for Jeremy Johansson, the son of Laurel and Jacob Johansson.
I paused. Before I went on, something immediately bothered me. I looked at the faces of the others. “Does this seem real to you?” I asked them. “Isn’t it odd that it’s typed?”
“I’d feel better if it were handwritten,” Max said. “Why would Myles type this when he hand-printed all the letters to Laurel?”
At that, Mueller spoke up. “Also, we didn’t come across this document when our tech guys examined the computer we found in his cabin. If Myles didn’t write this on his computer, where did he write it? All we found on his desktop were old tax returns, financial records, and emails to buyers about the dogs he was selling.”
“That does seem strange,” I agreed.
“Is it possible that Myles had a second computer? A laptop?” Max asked.
“We didn’t find any,” Mueller pointed out. “And no evidence of one, no cords sitting around, laptop cases, anything like that.”
“Well, let’s send Myles’s printer in for analysis, see if the characters in this document match the printer,” I suggested. “At least we might be able to figure out if this letter was printed on his equipment.”
“Good idea,” Mueller said. He looked up, called out to one of his techs and said, “Get the printer boxed and logged in.” The guy nodded and ran off toward the cabin.
That done, I returned my attention to the paper in my hands. “Okay, well, let’s keep going,” I said, and I started reading the second paragraph to those of us gathered:
Point Two: I, Myles Thompkins, confess that I murdered Jacob, Laurel, Anna, Benjamin and Sybille Johansson. I did this out of jealousy. I went to the bison ranch to take Laurel away with me, but she refused me. I didn’t mean to kill anyone, but my anger took over. I killed them all. All except Jeremy.
I paused. I felt stunned. Reading his letters, I’d come to think I knew Myles, that I could see inside his heart. Despite the evidence of the boot’s sole matching the print on the scene, part of me didn’t believe—or didn’t want to believe—that he could have been the murderer. Yet, here it was, typed out for all to see, his confession.
I mentally clicked through Doc’s timeline that indicated Laurel died six or seven hours before the others. It didn’t