Bloody Kin by Margaret Maron

appreciate it if you’d give me a call at the sheriff’s office.”
    Lacy took the dangling cigarette from the corner of his mouth and said, “She seen him before? He one of her New York friends?”
    He made New York sound like an epithet.
    “Not a friend,” Kate said sharply. “There was something about that black mole on his cheek—”
    “Black mole?”
    Lacy’s pale blue eyes goggled at them and Dwight said, “That’s right—I forgot you weren’t down at the packhouse when we brought him out. You only saw him lying with the side of his face against the ground. When we turned him over, Mr. Lacy, there was a pea-size black mole on the right cheek, just below his eye.”
    “And she thought he looked familiar?” Lacy spluttered. “I reckon he did. I guaran-damn-tee you he looked familiar. You wait right here!”
    He hurried up the porch steps and into the house. The sound of table drawers scraping open reached them through the door and Dwight looked questioningly at Kate.
    She shrugged. “I have no idea.”
    In a moment, Lacy returned, hugging a large scrapbook-type picture album to his bony chest. He sat down on a wicker rocker near Kate’s swing and rested the album on his knees.
    “Now just you looky here,” he told Dwight, turning the brittle black pages.
    The snapshots were tipped in with black triangular corners, many of which had lost their holding power. Several pictures had come loose entirely and Lacy tucked them between the pages as he searched. Kate remembered leafing through the album with Jake several times after they were just married when she was eager to know everything about his life before they met.
    His mother had begun it in the forties by gathering up all the stray family photographs and arranging them in chronological order. The oldest was a badly corroded tintype of an elderly man in full whiskers. There were stiffly posed studio groupings of children in petticoats and high-button shoes. Halfway through the album, brown-toned wedding pictures gave way to shiny Kodak snapshots of Jake as a baby balanced on an enormous mule by a grinning Lacy; Jake as a toddler on Andrew’s lap laughing through the steering wheel of a new tractor; Jake in a series of grammar school pictures that ended with a solemn yearbook likeness of a capped and gowned senior clutching his high school diploma.
    Jake’s mother had identified the earliest sections in tiny white-ink captions. After her death, Andrew had written the dates directly onto the snapshot borders in firm ballpoint script. Later still, Lacy’s uneven printing had labeled the pictures: “J. in basic training,” “J. in army uniform,” “J’s last leave before Vietnam,” “J. and buddies in V.”
    The printing remained, but that particular page was empty. Only the black corners showed that several spaces had been painstakingly filled at one time.
    Lacy fumbled through the loose snapshots and finally went back into the house to turn out the table drawer. The photographs he sought remained missing. “They was pictures of Jake and James Tyrrell and a Bernie-somebody.”
    “Yes!” exclaimed Kate, now that her memory had been nudged.
    “He had a black mole in the same place you say that dead man has,” said Lacy.
    “Didn’t he have a beard though?” asked Kate.
    For the past half hour, Lacy had talked around Kate, ignored her presence, and tried to pretend she didn’t exist. Even now, in his excitement, he responded to Dwight rather than answer her directly.
    “That’s right. He had a big black beard just like my granddaddy Avera had, only his was white.”
    “Can you remember his last name?” asked Dwight.
    “Bernie’s all I ever heared Jake call him.”
    “Kate?” If Dwight felt awkward using her name this first time, he didn’t show it.
    “It began with a C,” said Kate, “and I think it was rather long—like Chesterton or Columbia. Something like that.”
    “Vietnam,” mused Dwight. “That was where Jake first