Free Spilled Blood by Brian Freeman

been in St. Croix.”
    “Why would she be there?”
    “That’s the way it’s been for the past year. Raids and sneak attacks between the towns.”
    “Was Ashlynn part of that?”
    “I don’t know. She was from Barron. They’ll do anything to hurt us.”
    Chris still wasn’t convinced that his daughter was giving him the whole story. “What did you do after you dropped the gun and left Ashlynn in the park?”
    “I went home and went to bed.”
    “Did you talk to your mother?”
    “She was already sleeping. She sleeps pretty heavy because of the chemo.”
    “So she didn’t hear you leave or come back?”
    “I guess not.”
    “Did you tell anyone about Ashlynn? Did you send someone to help her?”
    “No.”
    “Why not? You said she was stranded out there.”
    Olivia shrugged. Whenever she talked about Ashlynn, her face went cold. “I wasn’t going to help her,” she said.
    “What time did you leave Ashlynn in the ghost town, and what time did you get home?”
    “It was around twelve thirty when I left, and I got home ten or fifteen minutes later. It’s not far.”
    Chris put the facts together in his head. Olivia left Ashlynn Steele stranded at half past midnight. She was alive, with a gun at her feet in a deserted park, miles from either Barron or St. Croix. Five hours later, before dawn, Tanya Swenson finally confessed to her father what had happened overnight, and Rollie Swenson called 9-1-1. The sheriff’s department found Ashlynn in the park, dead from a single gunshot to the forehead. The revolver was missing. The girl’s Mustang was parked in the main street of the ghost town, with a flat tire, exactly as she’d left it.
    The initial estimate placed the time of death several hours before the body was discovered. In other words, she’d been killed shortly after Olivia left Ashlynn there.
    Or before , he thought to himself.
    Olivia could see it in his eyes. “You don’t believe me, do you? You think I killed her.”
    “No, I don’t think that, but a trial is about good facts and bad facts. Right now, we have a lot of bad facts. You were there. You had a gun. You threatened Ashlynn. Ashlynn is dead. What we need are facts to support your version of what happened. That you didn’t pull the trigger. That someone else did.”
    “I don’t know what to tell you, Dad. It could have been anyone.”
    “Tell me about Tanya,” Chris said.
    “What about her? It’s not like she went back to the park and blew Ashlynn away.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Tanya? No way.”
    “If you weren’t there, you don’t know that. Our job is to establish reasonable doubt that you killed Ashlynn. Tanya knew about the gun. She knew Ashlynn was stranded. She didn’t tell her father or call the police for five hours.”
    “Yeah, but Tanya would never—”
    “She’s a suspect, Olivia.”
    His daughter frowned. “Whatever.”
    Chris opened his mouth to chastise her, but he held his tongue. He reminded himself that she was young. Sixteen-year-olds could do adult things; they could smoke, drink, have sex, and even kill. It didn’t matter. She was still a kid who didn’t realize that the rules of the game had changed, who didn’t grasp that her whole life was hanging in the balance.
    “It’s time for the hearing,” he told her. “Let’s get you out of here.”
    After a hearing lasting no more than three minutes, the judge ruled that Olivia would not be kept in secure detention, and he released her without conditions, pending the next stages in the criminal proceedings. Chris wasn’t surprised, because the presumption in any juvenile case, even murder, was to release the child. It was an easy victory, but going forward, the battle got much harder.
    Outside the courtroom, while Olivia was in the bathroom, Michael Altman corralled Chris. The county attorney’s face was concerned. “I heard about the incidents at your motel and at your ex-wife’s house. The sheriff wants to talk to you about what