by Mason Cross
“I’ll be watching you every second until you leave this town.” He moved his hand down and took a handful of my shirt collar. “Oh and one other thing.”
“What’s that?”
He lowered his voice to a whisper and leaned in to speak directly into my ear. “Stay the fuck away from Isabella.”
The door opened and Feldman drew back, patting my shirt back into shape where he had grabbed it.
“Deputy Feldman, is there a problem?”
He looked back at McGregor, who was standing in the doorway with his hands braced on his hips.
“I don’t think so, Sheriff. Not anymore.”
McGregor waited for Feldman to leave, and then approached me. He gave me an expectant look, as though waiting for me to say something about my exchange with Feldman. When I didn’t say anything, he nodded.
“After due consideration, I’ve decided you have a point. I don’t know how much help you’re going to be. Directly. But why not? Deputy Green will be keeping you company. You two seem to have gotten to know each other already.”
McGregor stepped aside, leaving a wide-open doorway in front of me. Something told me to forget everything I had just said, walk out of that doorway, get into my car and drive away from Bethany.
But I didn’t do that.
I couldn’t do that.
43
Isabella Green
Isabella could have killed McGregor for that bullshit. Apart from anything else, she knew it would piss Feldman off even more, and that would come back to bite somebody later. Most likely Isabella herself. She was so preoccupied thinking about it that she almost forgot there was anyone else in the car with her until Blake spoke.
“Thank you.”
“For what?” she glanced over at him. He wasn’t looking at her, instead staring ahead at the road.
“For getting me out. I don’t think McGregor was in the mood for letting me go before he had to. Whether he thought I had done it or not.”
She didn’t reply to that. He was dead-on, though. Instead, she asked, “What did Feldman say to you, when we left you two alone?”
“He asked me to stay away from you, as a matter of fact.”
“What?”
“Well, I say ‘asked’. It may have involved the phrase ‘stay the fuck away from’.”
Isabella felt herself color, and was immediately furious at Feldman. She would have to talk to him. The truth was she had had to talk to him for a long time, but had always found excuses to put it off. Seeming to sense her discomfort, Blake changed the subject.
“How did you know I didn’t do it?”
She glanced over at him before answering. “I didn’t, at first.”
Now he was looking at her.
“Don’t give me that innocent look. If you’re asking if I think you’re capable of killing someone, then the answer’s yes.”
“You think I would kill those two idiots?”
“Maybe not. But anyway, I’m a cop. That means I think everyone is guilty until proven innocent, don’t take it personally. Sometimes a killer doesn’t look like a killer.”
“What convinced you?”
“Evidence. It started raining at eleven last night. The ground was dry under the bodies, so you were with me when they were shot. Cell phone data backs it up. They were shot when we were eating dinner.”
“Then I guess you were right,” he said after a pause.
“How do you mean?”
“When you said it was my lucky day, yesterday.”
It took them twenty minutes to drive back out to Slateford Pass. The coroner’s van was long gone, the deep impressions of its tires in the mud at the side of the road. Isabella parked up and the two of them got out. The rain had collected in the channels made by the wheels. She remembered the shiny black shoes Blake had been wearing along with his suit when he visited the station and glanced down at his feet. He had changed to brown leather walking boots, quickly re-laced after the laces had been returned to him on checkout from the Bethany SD Motel.
Blake saw her regarding his footwear and waited for the verdict. “Better?”
“Good call,” she said, making sure to sound as bored as possible. When she had first met Blake, he looked so at home in a suit that it was hard to picture him in more casual clothes, but he looked good in jeans and boots and a work shirt. The fresh stubble helped with that. Isabella guessed the sheriff hadn’t felt like waiting around for him to shave before he arrested him. By the evening, she would be able to take him to Jimmy’s Bar and he wouldn’t stick out at all among the locals.
She turned her attention to the scene. If you knew where to look, you could see where the long grass had been flattened where the bodies had fallen, but otherwise there was nothing to see but evidence flags planted to indicate the positions of the bodies and the other items. She would be making a return trip when the rain stopped to see if anything had been missed, but she doubted it. She thought about Haycox and how he would kick himself for missing this: what would be his first homicide, quite apart from the potential link to a case he was fascinated with. And then she felt another pang of worry. With each hour that passed, the feeling only got more intense.
Blake was surveying the scene. Isabella thought about listing their findings so far, but held off, waiting to see what he thought. His first question wasn’t one she expected.
“What were their names?”
It took her a second to recall them. “Jeffrey Friedrickson and Thomas Leonard. IDs say they were both from Jersey. Tourists.”
“I thought they were hunters.”
“So did they. Doesn’t mean they weren’t tourists.”
“Did they have their guns with them?”
She indicated the flag in the middle of the clearing. “Brownings. A .223 and a .270. Placed right over there.”
“Placed?”
She reached into her pocket for her phone. The crime scene photographer would have gotten better shots, but Isabella always took a few for her own reference. She cycled back to the first in the series and handed the phone to Blake. He took his time swiping through, looking up and frequently changing his position to align with the shot he was looking at. When he was finished, he handed the phone back.
“What do you think?” she asked him.
“They were caught off guard, that’s for sure. Either of them get a shot off before the guns were taken from them?”
Isabella could tell he was thinking about the way the guns had been neatly placed on the ground, between the positions of the bodies. She shook her head.
“Somebody got the drop on them,” he continued. “That takes confidence. Two men with guns. Two men we know were not averse to a little confrontation. That means they believed their killer had the upper hand, which could mean there was more than one of them. The killer, or killers, made them kneel. Executed the big one, then the other one as he tried to run. Whoever it is is a decent shot. Point blank is one thing, hitting a moving target with a head shot takes skill.”
“Not bad,” Isabella said, taking care not to sound impressed.
“You have the caliber yet?”
Her eyes were on the flag where Leonard’s body had lain. She looked up at him before she answered. “You mean do I think it was a .38?”
He looked back at her, waiting for her to go on.
“This isn’t that, Blake. I told you …”
“You told me the Devil Mountain Killer is dead. How sure are you about that?”
“Sure.”
“And this is just a coincidence?” He shook his head. “I think whoever did this is sending you a message.”
An involuntary chill swept through Isabella. “What do you mean?” She heard a catch in her voice and wondered if Blake would notice it.
“Not you personally. ‘You’ as in the department. This i
s about what happened back then.”
She sighed. “Do you know why I really let you come out here?”
He considered the question. “Because David Connor is my client.”
“You’re right. I don’t want you to say a damn thing to anyone else about this, and that includes McGregor, but if those slugs come back as .38 caliber, then I don’t think this is a coincidence. I don’t think it’s the killer risen from the grave, mind you, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence.”
Blake held her gaze for a while and then looked back down at the ground where the two hunters had fallen.
“Okay,” he said after a minute. “Let’s go talk to David Connor.”
44
Carter Blake
Connor was expecting us. By the time Green’s patrol car reached the top of the steep, winding drive up to his house, he was waiting at the doorway, his arms folded. He was wearing knee-length khaki shorts and a white T-shirt, with no logo this time. His eyes were locked on the driver at first, but when he looked at who was in the passenger side, he looked taken aback.
“What are you doing with her?” he said as I got out. Before I could answer, he looked at Green. “The sheriff forget to ask me something? Like where I was when Abe Lincoln was shot?”
I exchanged a glance with Green. So McGregor had beaten us to the punch. Strange that he had kept Green out of the loop, or maybe not so strange, since he had assigned her to babysitting me.
Green stepped forward and stopped at the bottom of the steps, her hand on the guard rail. “Can we come in, David?”
Connor looked at me again, the wariness changing to resignation. “Let’s get it over with.”
He led us inside, directing us into a kitchen at the back of the ground floor this time. There was a big rough wood square table, six feet on a side. No tablecloth. I got the impression he didn’t host many dinner parties. There were four wood-backed chairs around the table. He sat down at the far end, not saying anything, just staring at me.
I got the idea we would be waiting a long time for him to ask us to take a seat, so I pulled the nearest chair to me out and sat down on Connor’s right. Green followed suit, on the opposite side from me. She took out her notebook and a pen and laid them side-by-side on the tabletop.
“I assume you know what I’m going to ask you about,” she said.
Connor didn’t take his eyes off me. “McGregor and his right-hand-man left ten minutes ago. They wanted to know where I was last night.”
Since he was still here in his kitchen, I guessed that whatever answer he had given had been satisfactory. Or at any rate, it hadn’t given them reason to take him in.
“What did you tell them?”
He switched his gaze to Green for a moment, then looked back at me.
“Why are you here?”
I considered carefully. “Because they asked me the same questions before they got to you, David. Sounds like they were a little more polite with you.”
He didn’t look surprised at that piece of information. “I told them where I was. Where I always am: here.”
“Okay,” Green said. “Anybody with you at the time?”
“No.”
Which meant they hadn’t been able to rule him in or out. But I guessed McGregor had decided one hasty arrest was enough for one day. “How much do you know about what happened?” I asked.
“Two out-of-towners were shot, that’s all McGregor told me. I said I hadn’t come across them. Funny thing was, after they asked where I was, all they wanted to talk about was you, and what you were doing for me.”
Green’s eyes met mine. So McGregor was thinking along the same lines. That it might not be a coincidence; the murders coming right after Connor started hiring people to dig up the past.
“Because you’re Blake’s client, right?” Green asked. She had put her notebook away.
He snorted. “Not anymore. Mr. Blake here thinks I’m nuts, don’t you?” He smiled at me, with all the warmth of a deep freeze.
I remembered Jane Graham’s dark hair and brown eyes, how she was an almost perfect match for Adeline Connor. And I had seen her from up close.
“I don’t think you’re nuts at all. The person you saw in Atlanta looked—”
“It was her.”
“Your sister is dead, David,” Green said gently. “I’m really sorry. But Blake’s right.”
Was I? I wasn’t sure about anything in this case, anymore.
Connor just shook his head and looked down at the table.
Green continued. “We think all this could be related in some way, though. There are certain similarities between the murders last night and the …” she caught herself and took a second to think about her wording. “And the MO used fifteen years ago.”
“Just say his name.”
Connor was looking down at the table. His hands had formed into fists.
“I don’t—” Green began.
Connor’s head jerked up. “Say his fucking name! The Devil Mountain Killer. That’s who you think it is. You think he’s come back. You think I woke him up.”
Green didn’t flinch at the outburst. She waited for Connor to finish, and then straightened in her chair. “I don’t think that, and I don’t think McGregor does either,” she said. “Yes, there are similarities. So much of what happened fifteen years ago is in the public record. Everybody who knows how to google knows pretty much everything we know from 2003. Could this be a coincidence? Sure. But if it isn’t, it’s a copycat, not a ghost.”
Connor stared at her as she spoke.
“And you think I’m the copycat?”
She met his gaze. “I don’t know what to think, David. If you didn’t do anything last night, I guess you don’t have to worry about anything.”
Green stopped the car as soon as we got out of Connor’s driveway and called McGregor.
“I just spoke to David Connor,” she said. I heard a pause on the other end and McGregor’s voice replying.
“I guess great minds think alike. Any word from Haycox?”
Her eyes closed as McGregor answered in the negative.
“We have to find him, Sheriff.” She paused and listened to him. “If that were true, we’d have heard from him by now. I think we need to get some volunteers and start beating the bushes.” Another pause. “But Sheriff … Understood.”
She hung up and looked out of the windshield at the house. “It’s not like him. Haycox I mean.”
“You’ve tried everything, right?”
She nodded. “I mean I was worried last night, but ever since we found those hunters …”
I had exchanged only a few words with Haycox, but I was starting to become almost as concerned about his whereabouts as Green was, though perhaps for different reasons. An intense interest in the DMK case. Access to files nobody else could see. Someone who held the authority to get people to do what he wanted. Somebody trained in firearms, probably able to hit a moving target with a headshot.
“You’re right,” I said. “We need to find him.”
45
Carter Blake
On the way to Dwight Haycox’s place, Green told me that McGregor had vetoed her request to organize teams of volunteers from the town to help with the search. I understood why: there was a killer out there. The last thing McGregor wanted to do was to send teams of civilians wandering around in the woods. Instead, he had authorized Green to go looking, and promised to put Dentz on it as well. With a double murder on his hands, that was all of the manpower he could spare.
I knew what Green was thinking. She had been worried before. Ever since the discovery of the bodies, I could tell she was fighting the inbuilt law enforcement pessimism about what we were looking for. I wondered if she had considered that there was more than one negative outcome possible on this search. We had two dead bodies and one miss
ing person. Sometimes that’s a closed loop.
From our brief interaction, it was jarring to imagine Haycox cold-bloodedly executing two strangers. But then you never really know. A killer doesn’t always look like a killer, as Green had said a short while ago.
Haycox’s apartment was the upper half of a two-story building. Green knocked hard on the door. She told me she had come by in the morning, and Feldman had tried last night. For a third time, the knock went unanswered. I started sizing up the door, wondering how easy it would be to break down, when Green produced a key.
“The spare, from his desk at work,” she explained.
She inserted it into the lock and the door swung open. There was a short entrance hall with four doors leading off: living room, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom. Just the basics. There was a small alcove to the immediate left of the door, with room for a pair of black boots and an upright vacuum cleaner. We opened each door in turn and examined the four rooms. It didn’t take us long to search the place. Haycox kept the apartment almost as neat as his desk. It wasn’t perfectly tidy, though, which told us something. There was unopened mail on the kitchen table, the trash in the kitchen was half-full, and there was fruit and milk and half of a chicken casserole in a Tupperware container in the refrigerator. It told us Haycox hadn’t planned on going anywhere for an extended period. The bed was made and there was a pair of sneakers neatly positioned underneath it.
“His uniform isn’t here,” Green said, seeming to read the thought I was having at that moment. I looked up to see her standing by the bedroom closet, running a hand through the hanging shirts.
“He wouldn’t leave it at the station?” I asked.
“No, we wear the uniform to and from work. Tight budget, remember? It’s not like we have shower and gym facilities down there.”
“Okay, so wherever he is, he has his uniform. That means either he didn’t go home after his shift, or he put his uniform on when he wasn’t on duty.”
“More likely the former,” she said. “Damn it.”