All Night Long

manners. Never got into trouble.”

    “Not like Pamela, is that what you’re trying to say?”
    “Don’t get me wrong. I liked Pamela. Felt sorry for her. After she hit her teens, though, she went wild. She lost her mother when she was only five, and her dad was always too involved in his next campaig o pay any attention to her. Pamela had problems, no doubt about it. I never understood why the Stensons let Irene run around with her that summer. Talk about one hell of a bad influence.”
    “You got a point, Sam?”
    “I’m getting there. What I’m saying is, Irene wasn’t a tough kid. She was a sweet teen who spent mos f her spare time in the library. She was absolutely shattered the night her father went crazy and di hat he did. Doubt if anyone can ever really recover completely from something like that. But it must have been even harder on a nice, innocent, sheltered girl like Irene.”
    “You’re trying to tell me that she’s probably got issues.”
    “Anyone who went through what she did at the age of fifteen would have issues. I was the firs esponder that night.” Sam looked away toward the water. “When I went into the kitchen she was standing there in the middle of the room, staring at me with those big, terrified eyes. Poor kid had been trying to do CPR on her folks. There wasn’t any point. They both must have died instantly.”
    “Where was Elizabeth Stenson shot?”
    “In the head and chest.” Sam’s jaw flexed a couple of times. “Like she’d been executed, you know?”
    “What about Hugh Stenson?”
    “After he did her, he put the gun to his own head.”
    “The side of his head?”
    “That’s how it looked to me, yeah.”
    Luke thought about that. “Stenson didn’t eat his gun?”
    Sam turned his head to look at him. “What?”
    “Most men who know something about firearms and who decide to use one to commit suicide put the barrel of the gun into their mouths. Less chance of botching the job and ending up a vegetable that way.”
    Sam took his hand off the side of the SUV and straightened. “You want to know the damned truth? I can’t recall all of the details very clearly. I was shaken up bad. I was twenty-three years old. It was the first time I’d seen anything like that. After Bob Thornhill got there and we put Irene into his car, I went out into the trees and puked my guts out.”
    “Who wrote up the report for the department’s files?”
    A great stillness came over Sam. “Bob Thornhill. He was next in line in the department. Took over the chief’s job for a while.”
    “What happened to him?”
    “He died about six months later, right after his wife. Heart attack. He went off the road into the lake.”
    “And suddenly you were the new chief of police in Dunsley.”
    “I was the only one left on the force.”
    “I’d like to read the file on the Stenson case.”
    Sam’s mouth tightened. “Not possible.”
    “You want me to go to the trouble of filing a Freedom of Information Act request?”
    Sam exhaled deeply. “It’s not possible to get you a copy because there is no file.”
    “What happened to it?”
    Sam’s face reddened. “The damned file, along with a lot of others, was accidentally destroyed by a temporary secretary who worked for the department for a while.”
    “Bullshit.”
    “It’s the truth, damnit. When Thornhill took over the chief’s job, the first thing he did was hire some short-term help to clear out the old files. The woman screwed up, okay? It happens.”
    Luke whistled softly. “No wonder Irene’s cooked up a conspiracy theory to explain the killings. She’ ad plenty of ammunition to work with, hasn’t she? No file on the case. The chief who took over after her father dies rather conveniently six months later—”
    “Don’t drag Bob Thornhill into this. He was a good man who got nothing but a lifetime of bad luck. He spent a year taking care of his wife while she died of cancer, and then the poor guy gets hit with a heart attack, goes off the road and drowns.”
    “What are the odds, huh?”
    “Now look here, Danner,” Sam said softly “you won’t be doing Irene any favors by encouraging her in her loony conspiracy theories. Rumor has it she’s been diagnosed with that trauma thing that soldiers sometimes get after they’ve been in combat.”
    “Where’d you hear that?”
    “Not like it’s any big secret around here,” Sam said. “Look, all I’m saying is that you aren’t helping he y feeding her