Free Smoke by Kaye George Page A

to clear her head. Hortense wondered what was preventing its clarity, but Immy turned and walked out the door. The children were already in bed with the pig curled up on the floor beside Drew’s cot.
    Zack was still staying with them and Tinnie was still at her mother’s in Fort Worth, so no one was at Jerry’s Jerky or the Bucket house. Or the smokehouse. As Immy had suspected, Gretchen’s poor body still lay in the smokehouse with the two bullet holes in her head. Things were happening to the pig that Immy did not want to think about. The dead body wasn’t being preserved by being in the smokehouse. Probably because there wasn’t any smoke left.
    Immy stuck her head out the door and took a gulp of fresh air, then aimed her flashlight at Gretchen’s head, took out the kitchen paring knife she’d brought, and dug the two bullets out. As the knife carved into the soft flesh, she swallowed down some bile, but didn’t throw up. She was proud of that. She folded them into a paper napkin, having read in her Compleat book that plastic bags were not that good at preserving evidence, and stuck that into a paper lunch bag.
    She would see if Ralph or the chief could at least get Gretchen buried.
    After she got home, she wondered what she could compare the bullets to, but didn’t come up with an answer. She would save them in her top dresser drawer and maybe they could be used in the future.
    * * *
    Ralph came over Tuesday night to tell Immy the vet had taken Gretchen’s corpse. That was a relief. Dr. Fox had a small burial plot for pets behind his office.
    He also said the autopsy was done and Rusty had died of smoke inhalation and hyperthermia (which, if Immy had hyper and hypo straight, meant a high temperature, which made sense, him dying in a hot place). But, Ralph said, Rusty also had enough drugs in his system to knock him out.
    “So, he was drugged before he died?” Immy asked.
    They sat on the sagging green plaid couch in the singlewide’s living room, sipping iced tea Hortense had brought them.
    “The killer,” said Hortense, “rendered him unconscious in order to transport his inert form into the smokehouse?”
    “Looks that way,” said Ralph.
    “Should you be disclosing these autopsy conclusions, Ralph?” asked Hortense.
    “This is all gonna be in the paper tomorrow, and probably on the news tonight, so I reckon it’s all right.”
    “He could have ODed. What were the drugs? Did he use a lot of them?” asked Immy.
    “He didn’t take this drug,” said Ralph. “It was animal tranquillizer. The stuff they use on horses.”
    “From a vet’s clinic?”
    Ralph shook his head. “You can’t tell where it came from. But probably the vet clinic.”
    The vet clinic, Ralph said. There was only one in these parts.
    “Are there any findings on Gretchen?” asked Immy.
    “Uh, they don’t do autopsies on pigs, Immy.”
    “But aren’t the cops concerned about her? Are you going to make any effort at all to find her killer?”
    “We’ll be lucky if we can find Rusty’s killer.”
    “No leads?”
    “No one has confessed, if that’s what you mean. Or blamed anyone else. Not even hardly any clues. The scene didn’t give us much.”
    “So maybe someone who frequents the smokehouse?” said Hortense.
    “Way to go, Mother. Good thought. If someone killed him, someone who goes there all the time, you wouldn’t be able to get any useful clues.”
    “Smokehouses aren’t good places to find clues, to begin with,” said Ralph. “The Wymee Falls CSI did collect some prints, but I could tell there weren’t many. They’d be pretty easy to see on those smoky walls. I bet people try to avoid touching those black walls when they’re in there.”
    “How soon before you get the results from CSI?”
    “No telling. They have to collect a bunch of prints from people, you know. The people that work there and stuff.”
    “For elimination, right? Do you know if there were any fingerprints on Gretchen’s