Free Detour to Death by Helen Nielsen Page B

town to call the police at Junction City and Red Rock— Ready, Trace?”
    Virgil climbed back into the jeep again and Trace nodded. He felt sick inside at the thought of what was going out over that party line the instant Viola could get to the phone, and he felt even sicker at Jim Rice’s parting words.
    “Don’t take it so hard, Trace,” he taunted. “You’ll find some other freak to add to your collection.”
    • • •
    As Trace suspected, the news of Danny’s escape reached Cooperton before them. A crowd was already gathering in front of the sheriff’s office, but Virgil was all through offering explanations. “Drive around to the back door,” he directed Arthur. “I haven’t got time to make speeches.” So Arthur swung the jeep around the corner and pulled into a little alleyway that led to the door of Ada’s kitchen. Virgil issued no invitations, but Trace followed him inside.
    At first the place seemed deserted, and then Ada came trotting in from the front of the building. Her face was flushed with excitement and her little eyes bright and anxious. “There’s a lot of men waiting out front to see you,” she panted. “And the phone keeps ringing—”
    “That’s fine!” Virgil snapped. “I’ll probably have to chase every old hen in town off the line!” He started for the corridor to the office and then looked back to see Trace standing just inside the door. “Well, what do you want?” he demanded. “I don’t need you any more.”
    “You don’t need that crowd out front, either,” Trace said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Sending Jim Rice out was all right, he has a deputy with him, but if you let that bunch form a vigilantes committee we may find Danny Ross at the end of a rope.”
    “Right now I don’t care how we find him,” Virgil said. “He took that chance when he broke loose. Remember, he’s out there in the desert somewhere right now. He’s desperate and he has my gun!”
    “The poor boy,” Ada murmured. “Where will he go?”
    Even Virgil had no words for the disgust this comment brought to his eyes. “Talk to them,” Trace urged. “Tell them to leave everything to the law. Tell them there’s nothing in the crazy story Viola Wade’s cooking up. That woman’s just a natural troublemaker.”
    “It’s her condition,” Ada insisted. “She’s going to have a baby-”
    “What would you know about her condition?” Virgil cut in. “As for her crazy story, Trace, I guess you mean the way she keeps hollering about Francy’s death. Well, for your information I can’t tell them there’s nothing in that. I don’t know how Francy Allen died—Do you?”
    The stomp of Virgil’s heavy footsteps could be heard all the way down the hall, and then the kitchen was as quiet as the end of time. Now Trace knew what he’d followed Virgil inside to find out. Somehow he’d known all the time.
    “She died of sin,” Ada murmured. “Everybody dies of sin.”
    Everybody dies of sin
. Trace carried the words with him all the way across town to a flat brick building with colored-glass windows and a faded canopy running out to the street. You wouldn’t think it to look at Cooperton now, but once it had been a thriving community, bigger than Red Rock to the north, grander than Junction City to the south. Then the thread of fortune slowly ran out. The mines, copper and lead and gold, closed down one by one, or settled down to a steady trickle of production; the railroads pulled up their tracks and retreated, and the transcontinental highways had no use for a has-been. But through it all, the first days, the boom days, and the latter days, Fisher’s Mortuary stood like a red-brick monument to the fragility of man.
    Two senior Fishers had already required the services of their own establishment. The current proprietor, representative of the third generation, was a small, graying man with yellowish skin and soft brown eyes. He greeted Trace as if he were a favored connoisseur