Page 16 of Code Violation

EIGHT

Nero – Thursday

Nero didn’t end up trying to speak to Amy Blass, not after finding the mail carrier’s body. By the time the CSPD finished interviewing him, he wasn’t prepared to talk to a stranger about the loss of their child. Instead, he retreated to the relative safety of Cabin Five. He’d also forgotten to mention the break-in, which seemed small compared to finding a dead man.

“Make sure you’re available,” Chief Dear had said before letting Nero go home—well, commanded. “We may have more questions for you. Don’t talk to reporters.”

He’d stifled a laugh at that, figuring that Dear maybe wasn’t aware of his past career. Still, Nero had no intention of writing publicly about what had happened. The postal officer deserved justice, not Nero’s rambling account of discovering a murder victim.

And where would he go anyway? His mother’s house? Not that Chief Dear or anyone else in town knew that Nero was one four-hundred-square-foot cabin away from being homeless.

The officer who’d responded to his call had told him the victim’s name was Ned Barker. Probably he wasn’t supposed to share that kind of information but he, the cop, was new to the job, Nero figured, and obviously a bit queasy about the dead man.

Nero figured he wasn’t considered a suspect—he’d never met the man before finding him dead. But he had discovered the body—so maybe he was? Dear had seemed more harried than suspicious though. And it was obvious the shorthanded police force was still struggling to regain its footing after the weird stuff that went down in January. Nero for sure wasn’t a cop, but he was a damn good investigator. Why not put his skills to use and see if he could help out CSPD?

“Because every cop in the world loves it so much when amateurs interfere with active investigations,” Nero muttered as he attempted to pace from one side of the cabin to the other. His voice sounded loud in the too quiet space.

He was antsy and needed something to distract himself. Dead bodies weren’t new to him; Nero had seen them before. But this time he’d been the first person on the scene. He’d been the one to call 9-1-1—and thank god he’d gotten a signal at that moment. He’d been the one to place his index and middle fingers against the man’s throat to see if there was a chance he had a pulse.

The turtleneck Nero had pushed aside had still been warm, and so had the carrier’s skin. But there’d been no pulse, and Nero hadn’t really expected one. Not with the victim’s head at that angle.

The traitorous raven had flown off almost immediately, leaving Nero alone with the body. He—Nero, not the dead man—thought he heard something in the woods. But after peering into the dense brush and the trees grown too close together with no results, Nero had convinced himself it was nothing more than the clumsy bird and his own overactive imagination—although his imagination had never been quite this overactive before.

Still, while waiting for the police to arrive, Nero hadn’t been able to rid himself of the feeling of being watched. Spied on. Even now, several hours later, he felt oddly exposed and twitchy, like a very large target had been painted on his back. He’d found himself staring into the woods at odd times over the course of the day. They’d simply stared back, offering him nothing.

The officer who’d responded to his call had looked around the scene, but he hadn’t found anything and, not wanting to disturb possible evidence, he hadn’t gone very far. Once other officers had shown up, focus had been on the scene at hand, not the looming trees around them.

On the short trip back to the cabin, Nero had driven past the Steam Donkey. The parking lot seemed suspiciously full, and Nero hadn’t stopped. The last thing he wanted was to be interrogated by the citizens of Cooper Springs. It would happen eventually, but it didn’t have to happen right now.

When he’d caught himself looking for Forrest Cooper’s purple vintage farm truck in the lot, Nero stepped on the gas pedal. He was far too intrigued by the lanky, bad-humored man as it was. Notably, Cooper still had not returned his call, and Nero suspected the message had been deleted—which was fine. He had no idea why Forrest Cooper had taken such an instant dislike to him that the man wouldn’t even return a simple phone call.

Now, Nero’s not-quite-pacing picked up a bit.

“Too intrigued, Nero. Note to self: you are the unemployed drifter. He is the descendant of the founding Coopers and obviously emotionally unavailable if his snarky comments are anything to go by,” Nero said to himself as he turned at his double bed and tried not to think about how much the situation sounded like a Hallmark movie.

“It’s for the best,” he told himself about his decision to end the relationship that hadn’t even started. “I’m not staying in town. I don’t need to add to my own baggage.” He paused at the small window with quirky curtains. “And I probably need to stop talking to myself out loud too.”

* * *

Nero finally sat down at the cabin’s miniscule table and opened his precious laptop, intending first to work on the podcast about his search for Donny. But instead, his fingers typed in “Ned Barker” + “Cooper Springs” + “Murder” and hit Enter.

He knew what he was doing was a coping mechanism. He couldn’t bring the mail carrier back to life, but he could learn as much as possible about him. The same way that, after twenty-four years, he still wanted to solve the disappearance of his cousin. Did he know the likelihood of solving either mystery was small? Yes, but he wasn’t giving up.

The first result was a Facebook page that apparently substituted as the main news source for the town. The sting of being laid off flared. This wasn’t news and these weren’t facts.

“Chief Dear must just love this,” he muttered as he scrolled further down the page. There were tons of posts and comments about Barker’s death. After only a few hours, there was already speculation about what might have happened. Was it a cover-up? Was Bigfoot involved? Barker’s ex-brother-in-law and also head of the Cooper Springs postal service, one Oliver Cox, had apparently been VP of the local Bigfoot Society. A commenter brought up this fact as a possible-conspiracy angle. Nero frowned. Did they think Bigfoot committed the murder? Someone else chimed in that maybe aliens were responsible.

“Okaaay,” Nero said to the screen. “Moving right along.”

“Anonymous” claimed to have seen “someone weird” creeping around a few days earlier and speculated that was the killer. A moderator then piped up—one Robert Butler, Nero noted—asking that people please be respectful as someone important to the town had died.

Nero continued scrolling in the hope that he’d find worthwhile information. Mostly, folks were expressing their sadness that Barker had been murdered and wondering what was happening in their town. Some blamed it on newcomers. Nero winced at that; he definitely fell into the new-to-town category.

Then, buried deep in the comments, another anonymous commenter said, Maybe someone should look into other deaths. Didn’t Ernst Cooper die the same way?

Heart pounding and fingers fumbling over the keys, Nero typed in “Ernst Cooper” + “Death” and hit Enter once again.

The Daily World—the Aberdeen online newspaper—began to load. Slowly. Nero was about to give up when it finally finished. He clicked on the old headline, Death in Local Pioneer Family.

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