Everyone Dies Read Online Free

was ready to go, walked quickly to his pickup truck, sat looking straight ahead, and said nothing as he wheeled out of the driveway. Feeling guilty about the squabble, Kerney matched Sara’s silence with his own.
    Halfway through the drive, Sara looked at her hands, twisted her wedding ring with her thumb, and asked about the homicide.
    Kerney gave her a brief summary. “It could be a tough one to solve,” he said in conclusion.
    “You were so long getting back, I thought you had abandoned our plans for the morning,” Sara said.
    “I wouldn’t do that,” Kerney replied. “I stopped by to talk to Fletcher. He had some interesting information about Jack Potter that might prove helpful.”
    “You could’ve sent a detective to meet with Fletcher,” she said flatly, her eyes still fixed on the road ahead.
    “Yes, but I wanted to cool down a bit,” Kerney said. “Besides, seeing Fletcher got us a dinner invitation at his house for Friday night.”
    “If we’re talking to each other by then, I suppose we should go.”
    “Aren’t we talking now?”
    Sara squinted against the sunlight and lowered the visor. “Not really.”
    They left the highway and drove the ranch road to the cutoff that took them through a pasture on their new property and up toward a long ridgeline. Kerney had spent several weekends improving the road with a borrowed grader, spreading and packing vast amounts of gravel to make it usable year-round. No longer rutted, narrow, and rocky, it climbed gently to a large sheltered bowl below the crest, where several low courses of new adobe walls stood on the recently poured concrete pad.
    Sara made no comment about the road, nor about the red prefabricated galvanized steel horse barn that had been erected a good half a mile from the house. She was out of the truck and moving toward their contractor, Bobby Trujillo, before Kerney set the parking brake and killed the engine.
    Trujillo met Sara halfway across the open field. Together they walked around the outside perimeter of the partially raised adobe walls, inspecting the work in progress. Kerney decided to let them go on without him and took a hike in the direction of the horse barn to check on Soldier, the mustang he’d trained as a cutting horse.
    Soldier had been pastured at Dale Jennings’s ranch down on the Tularosa for the past several years. Two weekends ago, after the barn and corral were completed, Dale, his boyhood chum and lifelong friend, had brought Soldier up by trailer along with his own mount. The two men camped out on the property overnight and covered all of Kerney’s two sections-twelve hundred and eighty acres-by horseback the following day.
    It had been Kerney’s best weekend away from the job in several months. Dale had left shaking his head in wonder and amusement at the beauty of the land and its magnificent views of the distant mountains, the size of the house Kerney was building, and the fact that his old buddy had put up a six-stall barn that for now would serve one lonely animal.
    The corral gate was closed and the stall door was open, but Soldier wasn’t inside the arena or under the covered shelter that ran the length of the barn. Inside the corral, Kerney inspected the water trough and freestanding hay rack he’d filled yesterday before leaving to pick up Sara at the airport. Both looked untouched. He glanced into the empty stall, which he’d purposely left open to give Soldier access to the corral. The interior gate to the center aisle was closed and latched.
    Kerney stood in the corral and did a three-sixty looking for his horse. He was nowhere in sight. Kerney doubted Soldier could have gotten out without assistance. He’d carefully padlocked all the other exterior doors to keep rodents and other small animals from gaining access.
    He walked around the barn. Except for Soldier’s stall it was secure. He unlocked the barn doors, pushed one back, and saw Soldier lying on the concrete pad that ran the length of