Read Online A Wee Christmas Homicide by Kaitlyn Dunnett - Free Book Online Page A

to turn them off. Then again, she didn’t suppose Thorne himself was a target.
    As she took the porch steps in one bound, she got a good look at the damage to the display window. The glass hadn’t shattered. There was just a neat, round hole surrounded by a spiderweb of cracks to show where the bullet had gone through. Thorne would still have to replace the glass, but at least there wasn’t a huge mess for him to clean up.
    Inside she found the remains of the victim. Tufts of stuffing clung to every nearby surface. Sherri couldn’t believe there had been so much cotton—or whatever it was—inside such a small bear.
    “Thorne?”
    She located him behind the high sales counter, slumped in his expensive office chair, his head in his hands and a hand gun dangling from his fingers. Sherri did a double take at the sight of the weapon.
    “Whoa! Is that thing loaded?”
    Thorne looked up, a dazed and stricken expression on his paste-colored face. It took him a moment to process her question. Then he nodded. “I thought the villain might still be in the store, but I was too late.”
    “Why don’t you put that away, then, and tell me what happened?” She wanted to yell at him for being an idiot, but instead kept her voice as low and soothing as she could. It was the same tone she used to calm her son Adam when he was out of sorts.
    His movements erratic, Thorne complied. Once the gun was out of sight in a drawer, Sherri breathed easier. Civilians and firearms were a bad mix, especially when the civilians didn’t show proper respect for a deadly weapon.
    “I take it you didn’t shoot out your own window?”
    “Don’t be absurd!”
    That was better. Nothing like a little righteous indignation to snap someone out of a pity party. Now maybe she could get some straight answers. “Any idea who did?”
    “No. An intruder, I thought. But I didn’t see any sign of one.” He shook himself like a dog shedding water and managed a glum smile. “Lucky for him, whoever he was.”
    “Sit tight,” Sherri advised. “Let me take a quick look around. Then we’ll talk.”
    It didn’t take long to confirm that no one else was in the shop. The back door was still secure. The lock on the front door didn’t look as if it had been tampered with. “Was this open?” she called to Thorne.
    “No. I unlocked it right after I called you.”
    A closer inspection of the bullet hole in the window convinced Sherri that the shot had been fired from outside. Whoever had been responsible for the damage was long gone, and since no one had come out of any of the nearby houses or called her to report anything out of the ordinary, it was a good bet there had been no witnesses.
    She paused to study what was left of the Tiny Teddy, then eyed the window again. The bullet had passed right through the toy. After a short search, she found what she was looking for embedded in the back wall of the shop. Very carefully, she pried the bullet loose and popped it directly into a small ziplock bag. Only then did she take a closer look at it.
    The police academy didn’t spend a lot of time on forensics, so Sherri wasn’t an expert on firearms. For major crimes, officers called in the state police. Sherri could see that the bullet had been only slightly squashed by its impact with the wall. It was a small caliber, but she couldn’t be certain if it had been fired by a handgun or a rifle.
    Frowning, Sherri tucked the bag into the inner pocket of her uniform coat and focused her full attention on Gavin Thorne. He was not a pretty sight—bed hair, no shirt, sagging sweatpants that undoubtedly revealed a butt crack when seen from the back, and bare feet. He had a painful-looking bunion on one of them.
    “I take it you were upstairs asleep when this happened?”
    He nodded. “Something woke me. I didn’t realize it was a shot until I came down here and saw the bear.”
    “What made you think you should check on things?”
    “I don’t know. Just an uneasy