Free Far Gone by Laura Griffin

licensed dealer?”
    “Only thing he’s licensed to do is drive a car,” he said. “We see it a lot with these antigovernment types. They don’t like their names in databases. Don’t like the idea of background checks. It’s probably why he asked your brother to be a straw buyer for his friend.”
    “What does he do at these shows?”
    “Sells hunting gear—binoculars, ammo, camouflage jackets. Passes out leaflets railing against the government.”
    She raised an eyebrow.
    “He’s convinced the federal government is to blame for the failure of his parents’ farm. Cutbacks in subsidies, that sort of thing.”
    “Not to mention they seized the land,” she said.
    “That, too.”
    “I can kind of see where he’s coming from. I grew up in an ag town. A lot of people I know have been devastated, especially with the drought.”
    “Do they murder their public officials?”
    “No, but plenty of them are mad. It’s not easy watching your crops dry up because of water rationing when fifty miles away, they’re watering golf courses.”
    Jon gave her a measured look. Maybe that sounded provincial to his ears, but it was how she felt.
    “You were telling me about your evidence,” she said. “The ME ruled it a suicide, but you think he got it wrong. Why?”
    “Couple of things. One, Kimball had just bought a half-million-dollar life insurance policy three months before his death. One of the clauses stipulated that in the event of suicide within the first six months, the policy would be void.”
    She tipped her head to the side. “Any chance Kimball missed the clause?”
    “He had a law degree.”
    “Okay, so maybe he didn’t care,” she said. “Wanted to end it all anyway.”
    “Also, his favorite shotgun was a Winchester, custom-engraved. Belonged to his dad. He didn’t use that weapon, though. He used a cheap twenty-gauge he’d picked up at Walmart a few years before.”
    “So?”
    “So most suicides tend to be ritualistic. His wife insisted that if he’d intended to kill himself, he would have used his favorite gun.”
    “Guns are heirlooms to some people,” Andrea said. “Maybe he wanted to leave it to his kids. Didn’t want them having a negative association with it.”
    “They didn’t have kids.”
    “This is weak, North, and you know it.” She leaned forward on her elbows. “What’s the real evidence?”
    He looked at her for a long moment. Then he sipped his beer and plunked it on the table. “A fingerprint.”
    Her eyebrows tipped up.
    “We have Shay Hardin’s print on one of the shotgun shells.”

chapter six
     
    “HARDIN LOADED THE MURDER weapon without gloves?” Andrea couldn’t keep the skepticism out of her voice.
    “Not the shell used in the killing,” Jon said. “We got the judge’s prints on that. A shell. From the box in Kimball’s car. He drove it out to a part of his ranch where he liked to dove hunt, parked, and walked out into a field with his shotgun. Never came back.”
    She watched him. “What’s Hardin’s story?”
    “Has an alibi for the time of the crime.”
    “Of course he does.”
    “Four people put him at a bar in Killeen, two hundred miles away.”
    She cringed. “That hurts. What does he say about the shell? I assume someone interrogated him?”
    “An agent interviewed him a week after it happened. Hardin claims the judge was at some of the same gun shows. Must have bought a box of ammo from him there.” He paused. “Unfortunately, that story pans out. They were, in fact, at a couple of the same events. And Hardin sold ammo, so it’s possible. But I’m not seeing it. The judge wouldn’t stop at a booth to buy something from a man who’d publicly insulted him and sent scathing letters about him to the local paper.”
    “You’re right, it’s a stretch.”
    Jon leaned back in the chair. He rubbed the back of his neck, and she could see the stress of the case was weighing on him.
    Still, she felt as if she was missing something. Such an