There was that at least.
“What about downstairs in the basement?” Hector asked as he walked back into the room. “Did they make it down there?”
The sheriff frowned for a moment before spinning and heading down the hallway. Hector and Will hurried after him. The door was still closed. Will hoped that boded well for what they would find, or not find. Maybe whoever did this hadn’t had a chance to make it that far, or like Hector, didn’t know where the basement was located.
“Could they have been looking for the basement?”
Hector turned sharply and looked at him.
Will swallowed tightly. “It was just an idea. You had a hard time finding it, so I thought…” Will shrugged. “Maybe that was what they were looking for.”
“It was a good idea, tesoro.”
Will beamed.
Chapter Fourteen
Hector wanted to rant and rave at what had been done to his house. He wanted to shout and bang someone’s head against the wall until he made just as many holes as were already there.
He didn’t.
He didn’t want to scare Will any more than he already was. This was supposed to be his safe zone. It clearly wasn’t. How could he prove to Will that he would be safe here when he clearly wasn’t?
Hector didn’t know what made him madder. The fact that someone had destroyed his home and all the hard work he’d put into it or that they had taken away Will’s feeling of safety.
Maybe both.
“Do we have any way of knowing if this was Doug and Gill?”
“My forensic team fingerprinted the place,” the sheriff replied. “They also fingerprinted a sledgehammer we found in the hallway. I suspect the fingerprints will match Doug and Gill.”
“What about the shooting?” Hector asked. “Can you prove if that was Doug or Gill?”
“We won’t know until we get the slugs out of those two agents. We found a gun next to Gill’s body, so that should be easy enough to match up, but I’d bet just about anything Doug took his gun with him.”
Hector raised his eyebrows. “Do you actually think you’ll get your hands on those bullets once the federal suits get here?”
Sheriff Riley grinned. “The coroner had already taken the bodies away before I called the feds. He should be done with his autopsy by the time they get here.”
Hector chuckled. Sheriff John Riley was no one’s fool. “I’ll be honest here. I don’t care who shot who. I just want these guys caught.”
“You and me both,” the sheriff said.
Hector pulled Will closer to his side as he opened the basement door and reached inside to turn the light on. He shuddered then started down the narrow staircase. There was a hint of stale air that made the hairs in his nostrils flare and his stomach clench. He glanced back over his shoulder. “You said Happy lived down here?”
The sheriff nodded. “For years.”
His grandparents must have been monsters.
Hector wasn’t any more impressed when he reached bottom of the staircase. The room was pretty damn small, maybe five feet by five feet. How a man of Happy’s size lived down here Hector would never know. He felt claustrophobic just standing at the bottom of the stairs.
It was hard to tell if anything had been disturbed as he had never been down here. There were a few wooden crates stacked in the corner next to a chair and several cardboard boxes. There was even a twin-size mattress leaning on the wall.
He turned to look at Will. “Does anything look out of place?”
Will glanced around for a moment before shaking his head. “No, everything looks just like it did when I was down here before.”
That was a revolting thought.
