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horses and brought them back to the front of the tent. Bird took a moment to retrieve the whiskey bottle from her saddlebag. She had briefly entertained the idea of helping herself to some of the whiskey from one of the jugs inside the tent, but those smells were too much even for her. She would use her own supply, for now.
    Bird tied the horses outside the tent, then went back in where she found Tower standing, his rifle leaned up against the table in the corner. He was turned toward the dead man.
    Bird went and stood next to him.
    “Mr. Verhooven, I’m assuming,” Tower said.
    The dead man wore filthy coveralls and a stained shirt. His neck was stretched, the head tilted at an unnatural angle. His eyes bulged and his tongue protruded from his mouth.
    Bird studied the dead man’s face. She saw blood dripping from the corner of the man’s eyes.
    “He hasn’t been dead long,” Bird said.
    “Just a minute or two,” Tower said. “That ended up being the difference between murder and suicide.”
    “What are you talking about?” Bird said.
    “I think we really did hear someone riding away. If we hadn’t, we probably would have jumped to the wrong conclusion.”
    Tower lifted his leg and used the toe of his boot to push the dead man. The effort caused the body to slowly twist, and reveal what had been pinned to the corpse’s shirt.
    It was a yellowed sheet of paper with thick black words scrawled across the front.
    I killed the preacher.
    Bird turned to Tower and said, “Why would—”
    But before she could finish, they both heard a voice that seemed to come from a distance, yet at the same time closely surrounded them both. The effect was unsettling, and Bird felt a cold breeze along her neck.
    The voice was faint, and the words weren’t clear. But it was a woman’s voice.
    The same one they’d heard.
    At Killer’s Draw.

EPISODE TWO
Fifteen
    For once, the blood was her own.
    Bird stared at the back of her hand. She had just finished
coughing, not an uncommon activity these days, she had to admit. But when she
expected to maybe see a bit of spittle, instead, she saw blood. Not a lot. But
even a little was more than she liked to see.
    The bright-red splatter ran across her hand and dripped a
little onto her wrist.
    Bird grabbed the whiskey bottle from her saddlebag and
helped herself, swishing the amber liquid around her mouth to rinse out the
metallic taste. She wiped the blood from her hand on her horse’s neck.
    She straightened in the saddle and looked out over the
valley in front of her. She was behind Verhooven’s mine, studying the trail of
the mystery rider she was sure had been involved with the miner’s murder. Or
suicide, as someone had probably been hoping to make it appear.
    Tower waited until the morning to load the body onto the
back of Verhooven’s horse and head back to Big River, so Bird waited with him
and then set off to find out if there really had been someone else at the mine—and
to see if that someone was responsible for killing Stanley Verhooven.
    A hazy sun hung overhead, the deep recesses of the valley
below still shrouded in early morning fog. On the ridge to her east, Bird saw a
mule deer across an open meadow, startled by something or someone. It raced
across the open space and in seconds was back in the tree line, deeper into
safety.
    Bird nudged the Appaloosa and they moved forward. The trail
had already taken them at least a mile from Verhooven’s camp, but the tracks
were becoming more and more difficult to find.
    Of one thing Bird was sure: there was only one rider. He
apparently wanted to get away from the scene as quickly as possible, but once
he had, he took greater care in covering his tracks. Bird already noted how the
rider had swung wide and skirted open patches of dirt on the trail, opting for
sections that were covered in long grass or pine needles. Someone riding
normally wouldn’t do that, unless the trail was treacherous. The rain had been
prodigious, but