Past Master

by Richard Stockford

  After making the morning’s assignments, Clipper left the station and drove to Ray Wheeler’s office. He spent fifteen minutes bringing Wheeler up to date on everything that had happened since the past Friday’s briefing, and also told him about Ellen Davis’s theory about the historical shootings in the area.

  Wheeler made some notations on a chart as they talked. “If we are dealing with a serial killer, and it looks like we are, then the frequency of the attacks can be important. Serial killers typically start off slow. You’re got four cases without a suspect in just a week, but they were preceded by two other homicides, Sterns and Day, and the Petersen shooting, which you closed during the prior week. One could make the case that the first two cases somehow triggered the next four. And then there was the shooting at the university last month. I could see that as the first in a series, the normal progression of which then becomes accelerated due to the excitement of your solved cases.” He got up and began to pace. “On the other hand, the lack of a progressive timeline here may indicate that your shooter has done this before, somewhere else.”

  Clipper nodded. “We’re checking nationwide for similar cases,” he said. “So you think it’s just one shooter?”

  “Has the sniper tried to communicate in any way? Letter to the media, something left at the scene?”

  “Only once, something that we haven’t released.” Clipper told Wheeler about the message on Carpenter’s cell phone. “That case feels a little different to me, more personal than the others.”

  Wheeler was silent, staring into space for several minutes, then he nodded slowly. “I’m, going to go out on a limb here,” he said. “I think you’re right, the Carpenter case does have a bit of a different flavor, but I still think there’s only one shooter.

  “I think you’re dealing with a true vigilante—and by that I mean someone who is taking it upon himself to punish people he perceives as criminals, as opposed to a thrill-seeker, revenge-taker, or simple psychopath. This shooter appears to be all business, and the absence of communication suggests that there is minimal subconscious desire to be caught—although I would suspect that he’s driven by a strong compulsion, which may cause him to get careless. The Carpenter text message may be an example of that. I think he made a mistake by showing a personal connection to the victim.” Wheeler returned to his desk. “So what do we know?”

  He began a numbered list on a yellow pad.

  “One, he’s a good shot—possibly military trained. Two, he has some way of determining criminal behavior in his targets. Three, he’s very businesslike, not interested in notoriety. Four, he may have some personal connection with Jack Carpenter. And five, his actions may or may not be related to, or influenced by, a series of similar historical acts.” He looked down at his notes. “One more thing. Have you noticed that all of the shots were made across a body of water?”

  Clipper shook his head. “No, what the hell does that mean?”

  “Who knows? Maybe nothing at all. Or maybe your shooter is unconsciously keeping a barrier between himself and his victims. Or perhaps he’s just afraid of water.”

  Wheeler shrugged and studied his list for a moment longer, then looked up at Clipper.

  “I think you’re looking for a soldier or a cop, or both,” he said. “Or at least someone with those types of backgrounds. Definitely male, someone probably otherwise law-abiding. And old-fashioned enough to take offense to the drug culture and feel protective of the female sex.”

  Andy Bennett closed his folder and pushed back from his table at the Bangor Public Library. He’d missed the puzzle-solving part of his old job—the sifting through odd bits of data and unrelated facts, mulling them over until a theory evolved, and then building on that theory until it was proven—but for the first time in quite a while he was feeling a little of the old enthusiasm.

  Some old contacts had gained him access to State Police cold case files, and he’d followed Ellen Davis’s footsteps in the Bangor Daily morgue and beyond, into the dusty files of long defunct publications such as The Whig and Courier, The Bangor Evening Commercial, The Hampden Observer, and the Penobscot Times. He’d talked to old detectives in nursing homes, and he’d talked to young people who remembered their grandfathers’ stories about when they wore a badge.

  And he had learned one indisputable fact: old Inspector Hayes had been right. There had been a sniper systematically eliminating criminal suspects in the Bangor area between 1940 and 1968, and apparently it was happening again.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  When Clipper got back to the division, he stopped by the conference room for a cup of coffee and found Ellen Davis and Andy Bennett sitting around a pile of photocopied newspaper articles, old police reports, and yellow legal pads.

  “This is amazing, LT.” Davis tapped a paper on the table. “We’ve got eight sniping cases from 1940 to 1968, and every one of them involves some sort of abuse of women on the parts of the victims.”

  “’Course, we can’t prove most of the abuse,” said Bennett, “but it’s pretty obvious. It all started in 1940, when Leland Hooper apparently made some unwanted advances to a woman named Gloria Holland at a dance. She slapped him, and he slugged her. Next day, someone shot him dead.”

  Clipper felt a tingle at the back of his neck. “Holland?”

  Bennett nodded. “Yeah, and what’s really interesting is the next case, in 1950. A nineteen-year-old kid named Justin Kemper was the prime suspect in the attempted rape of a sixteen-year-old girl in Bangor. He was shot from long range, case never solved. The name of the girl he was suspected of assaulting was Rachael Holland.”

  Clipper checked the load in his Kimber and slid it into his outside coat pocket. He wanted it handy during the entry.

  He and Ellen Davis were in an unmarked cruiser idling at the side of the road a hundred yards south of Doug Holland’s house, and John Peters had just reported that Holland’s truck was parked in the driveway, as he drove past with Caleb Cross and Randy Bissonette to take up their positions covering the left side and rear of the house.

  Peters’s voice was low and tense over the tactical channel. “Ready.”

  “I’ll knock on the door,” Clipper said, clicking the mic twice in response and dropping the car into gear. “You cover me from the car, but keep your gun out of sight. He’s got no reason to think we’re on to him, so maybe we can do this without any shooting. If he opens the door, I’ll take him.”

  Clipper parked behind the pickup in the driveway and walked up the short path to the front door of the farmhouse, clad in a cumbersome vest under his heavy coat. He could feel his pulse hammering in his throat as he raked a casual glance across the windows in the front wall. Nothing moved behind the half-pulled shades, and only the crunch of his steps on the frosty ground broke the heavy silence.

  With a quick look back at Davis, he stepped up onto the low porch and knocked on the door with his left hand, instinctively sliding a little to the left, his right hand hanging near the pocketed Kimber.

  The flat sound of the knock was swallowed by the dead air, and the house remained ominously silent. Clipper knocked again, then leaned in to try the knob when there was again no answer.

  “Doug?” he called as the door opened easily. “Doug, it’s Tom Clipper. You in here?”

  When there was no response, he drew the Kimber and gently pushed the door open, risking a quick glance inside. There was no one in the front room, and Clipper immediately sensed that the house was empty. Some subliminal vibration of human presence was missing—the silence too deep, the air too still.

  He leaned back out the door and beckoned Davis forward, and they spread out to clear the house.

  Clipper found him sitting at the kitchen table. Doug Holland was slumped forward, head on the table in a pool of blood, arms hanging at his sides. A small chrome revolver lay on the floor under his right hand.

  “It had to be a military guy, when you stop and think about it,” Caleb Cross said.

  It was s
even a.m. Thursday morning, and after working through the night at Holland’s house, they were debriefing in the conference room over coffee and a huge box of Cleo’s doughnuts. “Most all the shootings were done with military ammo, there was obviously some military training involved, and the spacing of the earlier cases looks like a guy maybe coming home on leave once a year.”

  Clipper nodded. “Holland would have been a little young for the first one, ten or eleven, but I’m thinking that was probably his father defending his mother, and he either knew about it or figured it out and did what came natural when his sister was attacked.”

  When they had finally left the Holland house, the sun was rising in the east and they were laden with nine rifles, two shotguns, four handguns—including the .32 caliber suicide pistol—and large amounts of .223, 7.65 mm and .357 ammunition. One of the rifles was a Remington model 700 chambered in Winchester .300 magnum, topped by a Unertl 6 to12 power scope.

  There was no suicide note, but tucked in a small metal box on a bedroom closet shelf they had found a collection of yellowed newspaper clippings, an archive of the cold cases they would close, along with a short, handwritten letter on an equally yellowed piece of note paper.

  August, 1970

  To whom it may concern:

  It was never my intent to sit in judgment and I understand that is not the place of any man to exact vengeance, but all my life I’ve fought to protect people who were weaker than those who attacked them. As a child, that is what I was taught; as a soldier, that is what I swore to do and as a soldier, a brother and a human being, that is what I had to do.

  The responsibility for these acts of protection is mine alone and I pray that they will not be seen as the acts of a madman. I could not stand by and do nothing.

  I believe that the world is a better place without Jason Kemper, Nathanial Obie, Robert Breland, Armand St. Pierre, Harvey Pelletier, Mark Simms and Kenneth Eldridge, animals and enemy combatants all, and I make no apologies for their elimination.

  Douglas Holland

  Doc Church had viewed the body and offered a preliminary conclusion that death had occurred sometime between midnight and three a.m., most probably the result of a contact gunshot wound to the right temple that seemed consistent with suicide. Dave Adams was on his way to the Crime Lab in Augusta with the body, firearms, and ammo, and the house was sealed while Clipper and his division stood down for some badly needed rest.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “I don’t believe it. Not that nice old man.”

  Janice had been at work when Clipper got home. He’d slept until one o’clock, then showered and dragged himself back to the office to spend a couple of hours debriefing the chief and catching up on the past twenty-four hours.

  She was fixing supper when he finally got home again; he slumped into a kitchen chair and told her what had happened.

  “He couldn’t have.”

  Clipper got up and put his arms around Janice. “I don’t want to believe it either,” he said, “but he was a sniper, remember? That’s what he did.” He sighed. “Well anyway, we’ll have the handwriting checked by an expert, but he left a written confession to seven murders between 1950 and 1968. The lab will tell us whether his guns were used in any of the recent cases, but it looks like he was it.”

  Janice shook her head stubbornly. “I don’t know about 1950 or 1968, but we’ve talked to him. We’ve been to his house and he’s been here. We’d know if he was killing people.”

  Clipper grimaced. “I wish it was that easy,” he said, but in the back of his mind, he wondered.

  By the following Monday morning, the picture had begun to clear.

  The State Medical Examiner confirmed that Douglas Holland had died from a single gunshot to the head and, given his fingerprints on the gun and the gunshot residue on his right hand, had ruled the death a suicide.

  On Tuesday, the State Lab had also confirmed that the handwriting on the letter found with the newspaper clippings matched known samples of Holland’s handwriting, and that paper and ink analysis put the age of letter at no fewer than twenty-five years.

  Wednesday afternoon, the firearms lab reported that bullets test-fired from a .308 Winchester Model 70 taken from Holland’s house matched the bullets recovered from the Jason Cord and Jack Carpenter shootings, and the next day they matched the bullet that killed Beaudreau with his Remington 700.

  Red and black fibers from a pair of old woolen hunting pants from Holland’s closet matched fibers found in the nest the sniper had shot from in the Beaudreau assignation.

  Day after day, report after report, the evidence piled up. Still, in a small part of his mind, Clipper wondered.

  By the beginning of the following week, things were finally getting back to normal in the division.

  The shooting of Turk Nason was found to be justified by the Attorney General’s office and, against the wishes of his doctor, Allen Oaks returned to work on light duty, helping John Peters and Evan Paul as they began a third round of interviews in the Kristen Pollack case. The number of interviews had grown with Galen Woodman’s list of visitors to the hunting camp.

  Ed Angelo also returned and, bored and embarrassed by his enforced time off, grabbed more than his share of the case assignment load.

  The patrol ranks were swelled by three new recruits, and Clipper had finally convinced Chief Norris that making Caleb Cross’s assignment to the division permanent was the best way to cut down on overtime.

  Doug Holland’s body was released, cremated, and buried in a private service at the Veteran’s Cemetery in Augusta. Clipper and Janice had driven down with Holland’s son Phil and Galen Woodman, and they both blinked away tears as the plain stone urn was placed in the ground.

  Clipper and Janice spent Thanksgiving day with Clipper’s sister and her husband in Orono, and he took Friday off as well, his first long weekend of the year. He spent most of it in his shop, thinking of Doug Holland as he finished the rifle rack he had started when Holland helped Janice pick out her rifle.

  Clipper rested the forearm of his rifle on the low windowsill and settled into a comfortable sitting position with his back braced against the side of a sagging three-legged couch. He had spent the better part of an hour making his stealthy approach to the abandoned house and now held a commanding view of the river and roads below. The bolt-action rifle was topped with a powerful scope that brought hundreds of yards of the riverbanks into sharp relief. Time passed unnoticed as Clipper sat unmoving, all of his senses focused on the scene before him, awaiting the drama he knew was about to unfold.

  A sudden flicker of movement caught his eye, and he watched Janice step into view on the far side of the river; an instant later, he spotted the sniper, prone behind his rifle, no more than fifty feet away, directly in front of the window. Part of his brain was gaping at the impossible suddenness of the sniper’s appearance, even as struggled to find the almost point-blank target in the powerful scope. He tried to move the rifle in small arcs, but it was no use; the view through the lens showed only a confusing, obscenely magnified landscape of blades of grass as large as trees and pebbles the size of boulders.

  Stifling the impulse to scream a warning to Janice, feeling her time ticking away, Clipper dropped the rifle and clawed frantically for his pistol.

  Time shuddered to a stop as Clipper’s fingers brushed the empty holster at his side, and he froze in stunned acceptance that there was nothing he could do. He had lost the race.

  The voice behind him was low and calm. “Well, at least she wasn’t molested, Clip. Here, use this. I never really trusted the lighter calibers.”

  As Clipper whirled to see a smiling Doug Holland extending a familiar-looking Smith and Wesson model 19 combat magnum, the thunderous crack of the sniper’s rifle filled the universe.

  Clipper awoke, sweat-soaked and wide-eyed, to the echo of his own hoarse yell and the fading rumbles of a rare fall thunderstorm.

  Knowing he would not sleep again, Clipper got out o
f bed and stood under the shower until the water began to cool. He left the house in the five a.m. darkness and drove to Cleo’s for breakfast. He spotted Ray Wheeler alone at a corner table and slid in beside him.

  “Too cold for worms, Doc. What brings you out of the nest so early?”

  “Got a conference down in Augusta.” Wheeler eyed Clipper. “That’s my excuse. What’s yours?”

  “Ah, just couldn’t sleep, so I thought I’d get a jump on the day.”

  Wheeler’s gaze sharpened. “I’ve got to hit the road, but I’m free tomorrow morning,” he said. “Why don’t you drop by for a chat?”

  Clipper nodded. “Maybe I will. I’ve been wanting to talk to you about Doug Holland.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  “I guess there’s no doubt that he killed Gerard Beaudreau, and we’ve got his confession to all those other killings back in the sixties, but somehow he just doesn’t feel right for the others.”

  It was the following morning, and Clipper was sitting in Ray Wheeler’s office.

  “The guy that attacked his sister, Beaudreau, people that abused women—I can almost understand those. Like he was protecting them or something. But just randomly shooting drug dealers and motorcycle gangs doesn’t fit for me.”

  Wheeler shrugged. “Well, he was a sniper, and snipers are generally motivated by the responsibility of protecting their comrades. Over the years, who’s to say how all-encompassing that responsibility may have become in his mind.”