Hunting the VA Slayer

by C. M. Wendelboe

  “Then the victim could have been killed because he was mistaken for a Vietnam vet?” Arn asked.

  “Very well could have.” Kane snapped the clasp on his briefcase. “Still, at this point I have no proof that this was a homicide. We’ll have to wait for the lab results and the autopsy.” He snapped his fingers. “If you’re staying in the Hills for the night you could come up and catch the autopsy in Rapid City,” he winked at Ana Maria. “It’d be cheap entertainment for you and sweet cheeks there,” he told Arn. “I’ll bet secretaries don’t get a chance to leave the office very often. I’ll buy popcorn.”

  “We’ll pass,” Arn said. “We’re staying over here in Hot Springs for the night to catch the hot springs in the morning. It’s just late enough I hate to drive back at night with all the deer on the road. Besides, I wanted to visit with Ethan Ames if he happens to be here. Wanted to get his insight into the killer with this fresh victim.”

  Kane slung his briefcase over his shoulder “I wanted to talk with him myself, but he left for Cheyenne earlier. I’ll catch up with him day after tomorrow as his secretary says he’s in Rapid that day.” He started for the door and called over his shoulder, “I’ll let you know what we find in the autopsy and the lab results when we get them.”

  “What about the surveillance cameras?” Ana Maria called after Kane just before he left the room.

  “What about them?” he asked without turning around.

  “Did you look at them?”

  Kane turned slowly. “Even us rubes get our jobs right now and then.” He laid his briefcase on the table and talked slowly. “There was no one—except veterans and employees—roaming the halls.”

  “There must have been someone besides them. Someone wanting to kill Boding.”

  “Anderson, I’m still struggling with your notion that all those deaths are connected. And until I took a closer look at Boding, there just is nothing to prove homicide.”

  Arn nodded to Ana Maria. “She had a good point—did you see anything unusual at all on the cameras?”

  “We talked before about those RSL fools,” Kane said. “Two of them came into the facility and tried recruiting but they were tossed out on their keisters before they got a chance to spread their hatred.”

  “And they couldn’t have slipped back in and killed Boding?”

  “You mean sneaking by Earl?”

  “That old man guarding the front door?” Arn said. “You could drive a dump truck past him and he wouldn’t wake up.”

  22

  HOW THE HELL COULD I have screwed up that bad? If I had a gun, I’d cap myself right now. Right here as veterans walk past me in the courtyard paying me no mind.

  How? The man—I learned was a Charles Boding living right outside Rapid City—looked way too young to have served in Vietnam. Yet I was so careless thinking he just wore his age well. Good Genes, as Dr. Oz would say.

  I got careless.

  That’s the one thing I said I would never do after I almost botched Captain Sims’ killing. But I screwed this up simply because I assumed a man wearing an officer’s Vietnam hat was a Vietnam vet.

  On a positive note, luck was on my side today. As big a man as Boding was, he didn’t go down like the others, but merely staggered. If I hadn’t had the vial of Xylazine to… sedate him, he might have fought like Sims did. But unlike Sims, I had cocaine ready in the other syringe. I might just keep a syringe of Xlazine with me from now on. For such occasions. Except this time, I’ll hang on to it and not drop it in the trash, though I doubt the inept cops will even think to look in the garbage.

  The courtyard will help me think about what to do next. What I did was not right—Boding didn’t need to die like the others. Not like the retired officers who probably trumped up charges against any number of enlisted men for things they did not do.

  Even though killing Boding was a blunder of mammoth proportions, I owe it to myself to think straight. As I look around, I feel people staring a hole in the back of my head. But I know I’m just imagining it. I know no one suspects the man in the courtyard catching a few rays as the one the police will be looking for. If they ever figure it out.

  I need to move. To think deeper, and the presence of people surrounding me somehow focuses my attention and I move to the waiting room. Like a familiar part of the forest that is a cougar’s territory, I have come to think of waiting rooms as my safe space. Where no one knows me. No one pays me the slightest bit of attention to me, like the mailman or the paperboy on their routes that no one notices—plain. Unobtrusive.

  It surprised me that the police—I don’t mean that old duffer snoozing by the front entrance—but the regular police, and now the state investigators, have been called. All the other times, they would take it for what it appeared—an old veteran who had just worn himself out and died as he was taking his last dump. Except Boding wasn’t old. He wasn’t helpless.

  I think back to Aristotle when he said it is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light. Focus. Think. I know the police will find nothing. The commotion will soon die down and I’ll simply slip out one of the side exits.

  And I make a solemn promise to myself not to make the same mistake twice—never will I confront an innocent veteran again.

  What kind of man would I be—after all—if I didn’t recognize my mistakes and learn from them?

  23

  ARN AND ANA MARIA HAD left Hot Springs early after an early morning soak in the mineral pools. By the time they arrived in Cheyenne, Ana Maria was nagging him to grab a bite somewhere when Sam left a voice mail offering to buy him lunch.

  “Might as well drop me off at home,” Ana Maria said.

  “Thought you wanted to get something to eat?”

  She tapped Arn’s phone. “With an invitation from the Ice Lady, you better go. And go alone if you ever expect to make anything of this relationship.”

  He had hesitated to accept her lunch invite. Their last dinner date had gone remarkably well, with Sam hanging on Arn’s every word, complimenting subtly more times than she should have. In fact, it had gone so well, red flags waved in front of Arn’s face as he tried analyzing her. A woman many years Arn’s junior who could have her pick of suitors. Even with the single professional men who drooled around her office, she had come on to him. At first, Arn had been flattered as he felt his old mojo returning. Until he remembered he didn’t recall ever having mojo enough to attract a beauty like Samantha Holder.

  He had sat and thought about her last night as he soaked in the hot springs, without Danny or Ana Maria telling him just to enjoy her company and see where it goes. Which is just what Sam said when she called him this morning. “It’ll just be at the cafeteria here at the VA,” she told him. “Nothing fancy. Just to get together and visit. See where this is going.”

  Was she after something more than a relationship, like information about his investigation? Get a damn handle on your paranoia. Meet with the lady but keep an open door to your gut feelings.

  “I can bring you something from the cafeteria.”

  Ana Maria smiled. “Not to worry. Drop me off at home and Danny will throw something fabulous together for lunch.”

  —

  When he passed the Police Office, the door stood open and he stepped inside. “Returning the file,” Arn called out.

  “Back room,” Wagner answered.

  When Arn stepped into the small, back office with Sims’ military file tucked under his arm, Wagner sat at his desk, one sockless foot propped up on the desktop while her cleaned his toenails with his Buck knife. “Did you find anything in there?”

  “Nothing that’ll lead me to his killer.”

  “I told you there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot in that file,” Wagner said, “except Sims must have been some kind of investigator the way he went after those black marketers. I was hoping there’d be
more in the after-action report I received from the Army archives this morning. If you think there was anything substantial in that, don’t hold your breath.”

  Which is just what Arn did, holding his breath as he moved upwind from Wagner’s stinky feet. “Care to let me look at the after action report?”

  “Can’t,” Wagner answered, admiring his toes like a model admiring her figure in a full-length mirror prior to runway time. “But I can give you the quick and dirty of what I found.”

  “I see the quick and dirty,” Arn pointed to Wagner’s feet, “but tell me what you found out.” He took out his notebook and a pen. “Shoot.”

  Wagner started slipping his sock back on when his big toe stuck through a hole in the fabric. “Funny you should use that term,” Wagner said as he extricated hos toe from the hole in the fabric, “because that just what Bo Randall threatened to do to Sims at his court martial—that he was going to drill Captain Sims center-chest as soon as he got released from Leavenworth.”

  “I take it he’s no longer in prison?”

  “You got it. He got another year tacked on for that little courtroom outburst, but he served his time and was released in 1972. His trail goes cold from there.”

  “Did the Army keep track of him?”

  Wagner tossed his holey sock in the trash can and put his boot on without one. “Bo served his time. Wasn’t any reason for the Army to keep him on their radar. My guess is he went back to Custer.”

  “I have another favor to ask—.”

  “Not today,” Wagner said. “And not the day after. Or the day after that. I have enough of my own work to do around here as it is.”

  “You wouldn’t want to help solve these crimes?”

  “Anderson, there are no regional crimes, at least as far as old vets go. It’s just some old farts keeling over from heart issues.”

  “Suit yourself,” Arn said as he closed his notebook. “I’ll get hold of the South Dakota VA officers and ask them for help.”

  Wagner laughed. “And just why should they help a pain-in-the-behind civilian with his bogus theory?”

  Arn shrugged. “Because when I put it all together—with their help—they’ll be heroes.”

  “It’ll take more than that.”

  “And they’ll probably get nice promotion. Maybe even a transfer to someplace with more… opportunity for advancement for someone who takes a little initiative in their work.” He started out of the office when Wagner stopped him. “How much work you talking about?”

  “Not much,” Arn lied. “But the reward could be well worth it. That is, unless you want to sit around bored out of your mind waiting to kick an occasional drunk out of the facility.”

  “All right. All right. What the hell you need me to do?”

  After Arn explained that he needed Wagner to research each victim’s record to see what doctors they were seeing at their respective VA centers, Arn needed to know if any of the victims served with Bo Randall in Vietnam. “That’s all!” Wagner said. “Do you know how much time it’ll take for me to do that?”

  “What else do you have to do all day but sit around picking your toenails?”

  —

  Arn patted dry wall dust off his bib overalls before taking them off. “Where do you want them?”

  “Just drop them by the washer,” Danny said as he swiped at a spot of wet dry wall mud that had dropped onto his shirt front from his dry wall knife. He put one hand on his thin hip. “I swear you make more work for me than a dozen people trying to hang drywall. And you better run a brush through what little hair you have—there’s enough drywall dust and mud there to hang another sheet.”

  “I just feel guilty about leaving you with the rest of the room to finish—.”

  “Believe me, you’ll be doing me a favor,” Danny said. “If you’re not helping, I’ll go twice as fast with half the mistakes. Now clean up and give that DCI feller a call back.”

  Before Arn walked out of the mudroom, he stuck his head under the faucet. He dropped his shirt and bibs on the floor before parading through the house and upstairs to his room. He put on clean jeans and t-shirt before stopping in the kitchen long enough to make a cup of green tea. He hated to admit it, but it was helping his regularity. His blood work came back yesterday and—except for itching where the nurse had wrapped the Kerlix bandage too tight, he felt fine.

  He took the cup of tea and a plate of cookies into the sewing room and opened his phone.

  “I see you left me a voice mail,” Arn told Agent Kane.

  “I did. Figured you’d want to know… the autopsy on that feller in Hot Springs, Charles Boding, is finished, and the lab results are back. I believe he was murdered. Boding died from a cocaine overdose, but he was no user. I talked with his father and he is convinced me his son never used any drugs.”

  Arn thought of what Oblanski said before. A lot of cocaine addicts lived a normal life—unlike meth heads—and often the last to know were the person’s family. “Why you figure he was murdered?”

  “That syringe we found in the trash,” Kane said. “I fast-tracked the lab tests and the techs found traces of Xlazine. Faint traces.”

  Arn let out a breath. Although it gave him no peace to be right about the veterans’ deaths, at least he felt some vindication. And a place to start looking for the killer. “Did you find the injection site?”

  “Finally,” Kane answered. “In the event the victim was a user, we looked at the usual places where people shoot themselves up—the veins in the arms and the back of the hands. We even looked between the toes. Nada. But,” rustling of paper on the other end, “the ME saw a tiny red mark under the tongue. Bingo! That was where he was injected with the coke.”

  “Just to be absolutely certain,” Arn said, “You are positive he did not inject himself?”

  “I am,” Kane said. “I have never run into a user who injects himself under the tongue.”

  “And the horse tranquilizer?” Arn asked. “Was that injected under the tongue as well?”

  Arn waited so long he thought Kane had hung up.

  “It’s the oddest damn thing I ever ran into. At autopsy, there was a pinpoint discoloration on the victim’s thigh—another injection site.”

  “He was hit with cocaine twice.”

  “He wasn’t,” Kane said. “Testing at the site and blood work showed Boding was injected with Xlazine high on his thigh. We’ll know more after I run the samples to the state lab.”

  Arn closed his eyes, processing what Kane told him, and combining it in his mind with the crime scene photographs of Boding’s death, reconstructing the crime in his mind’s eye. The killer would have hit Boding with the horse tranquilizer to get him sedated before the needle was injected under the victim’s tongue. That might work very efficiently with the older veterans who had died.

  But Boding wasn’t an old vet. He was a younger, stout man that the killer had to inject with the Xylazine to subdue before injecting with the cocaine

  But how did the killer get the upper hand on a young man like Charles Boding?

  24

  ARN ENJOYED THE RIDE SOUTH on 85 as much as he had enjoyed it when he was a youngster growing up in Cheyenne. He and his friends now and again would sneak on down to Pierce, Colorado and east on an oiled road to climb the rolling hills of the grasslands. They would climb to the top of Pawnee Buttes with their warm beer in a backpack and watch the antelope chase one another through the buffalo and grama grass. And when the boys had a snootful, they would slide down, stopped only by the limber pine and chokecherry bushes and hang out until they were sober enough to drive back home.

  As Arn headed east on the secondary road he passed a pump jack moving slowly up and down, like a giant pecking bird, pumping oil into one of five large holding tanks on the well site. Black White-Faced cows grazed beside the oil site, and a coyote scurried
across the road in front of the Oldsmobile as Arn turned onto a drive. He started along the hard mud-rutted road for a quarter mile, the 442 bottoming out every so often, and Arn cursed himself for not getting his old International truck roadworthy.

  When he reached the top of a slight rise in the road, it dropped off sharply and ended a hundred yards farther, passing a sign that read righteous sword of the lord: trespassers will be shot.

  He pulled up slowly to a small guard shack positioned on one side of a gate made from well pipe heavy enough to stop a truck, and repositioned his revolver beside his leg. Just in case the two guards emerging from the building considered him a trespasser needing to be shot.

  The two men—dressed in black uniforms punctuated by silver-colored embroidered RSL patches on each shoulder—kept their rifles slung as they walked toward the car. Before they reached the Olds, one man peeled off and headed to one side of the car. Arn’s blind side. Military.

  “You lost, bud?” the man approaching him asked while he discreetly switched the safety off his AR-15.

  Arn stepped out of the car and stretched, keeping the man to his side in his peripheral vision. “No. I know just where I am.”

  “Then you know you don’t belong here. Hop in that old beater of yours—.”

  “I’m here to see Jonah Barb.”

  “Got an appointment?”

  “Didn’t know I needed one,” Arn said.

  “You do,” the man said, and Arn detected an imperceptible nod to the other guard.

  “Even if I want to… join your merry band of men?”

  “Scat!” the man said. “Colonel Barb is busy.”

  Arn motioned to the phone hanging on the side of the guard shack. “Maybe I’ll just call him. Tell him a convert is here to enlist,” and started for the phone when the man off to Arn side rushed in. He grabbed Arn by the arm, but years of custody control classes—and wrestling matches in high school—kicked in. He slipped from the man’s grip right before he kneed him in the thigh.