by Rachel Ford
The old guy opened the book to a half-finished puzzle and stared at it for a long moment. Then he clicked his pen, and grunted, and scribbled something in one of the squares.
Owen stirred his coffee and tapped the spoon against the side of the mug. Then he set it down again and took a sip. He thought about the reporter, Nancy Krispen. He really didn’t want to involve reporters.
He’d experienced a media and social media circus during the Nursery Rhyme Killer case. He knew firsthand what it was like to be a member of the victim’s family, and a focal point of that circus. He didn’t want to involve Marsha in anything like that.
On the other hand, what options did he have? Halverson had told him to send the documents. Well, he’d done that, Sunday afternoon. He hadn’t heard a word back. Not even a “thank you very much, get stuffed.”
Just nothing.
Which seemed a pretty good indication that no one had bothered to look at the data. Because if they had, they’d be looking or a serial killer. He had no doubt of that. Data didn’t lie.
“Son of a bitch,” the old guy said beside him.
He glanced up.
“Sorry,” the old guy said. “Just, I worked myself into a corner here. I’m stuck.”
“Oh.”
The old man shook his head and growled at himself. He pressed the pen plunger, and it clicked audibly and loudly in the stillness of the shop. The point retracted. He clicked it again, and the point appeared. And again, and it retracted.
Owen grimaced. Some kind of aggravated or nervous energy release, then. He took another sip of his coffee and tried to focus on the problem.
“Dumbass,” the old man muttered, scribbling something out. “Three, not a seven.”
Owen took another sip of coffee. He wondered if he could make some kind of deal with Krispen, that she’d leave the family alone if he agreed to the interview.
The old guy went back to clicking his pen, the point appearing and disappearing in rapid succession.
Owen took another sip of his coffee. Then he picked up the spoon and stirred it. Three swishes through the dark liquid, then three taps against the side of the mug.
He set the spoon down and found the old guy watching him curiously; and then glancing away quickly, like he hadn’t been watching at all.
He frowned at that and went back to his tablet, and his thoughts. Even if Krispen agreed to leave Marsha alone; even if she had the authority to make that kind of deal on behalf of her paper, that didn’t extend to other papers and news stations.
If the data was as compelling as he thought, other news outlets would want to cover it. And not just by talking to him. All he had was the data. They’d need to bring their own angle to make it newsworthy. And that would involve bothering the victim’s family. Or the families of the victims.
The old guy clicked his pen once, twice, and a third time. Slower now, more of a thoughtful, absent pace than a nervous energy pace.
Owen groaned internally and reached for his coffee. The sound wasn’t much on its own, not really. But it might as well have been a nuclear bomb detonating for his concentration. Every click drew him from his thoughts. Every click sent a shiver of annoyance up his spine, the way someone chewing carrots two inches from his ear might.
Click.
Click.
Click.
He tried to make himself focus. The media is out, he decided.
Click.
It’s Pandora’s Box. Once I open –
Click.
He grimaced. It, there’s no closing it ag–
Click.
He glanced up. The old guy was staring at the puzzle book, oblivious to his irritation. He took another sip of coffee. He didn’t remember where he’d been. Oh yes. Pandora’s box. He’d been deciding that the media was out because it was Pandora’s box.
Click.
He drank more coffee. Then he stirred it. Swish, swish, swish. He tapped the droplets off the spoon.
Clink.
Clink.
Clink.
The old guy was watching him again, something like annoyance on his face. Owen wasn’t sure why. But at least now there was silence in the room.
He flicked through his files. Names, locations, dates and times of death. Ten men and two women, all shot from a distance, all –
Click.
Click.
Owen sighed and glanced around the room. He was going to need to find another seat. There was no way he could concentrate next to this kind of distraction.
The other man looked up around the same time and sighed. He tossed down his pen. “Well, that’s it. I’m screwed.”
Owen said nothing. He didn’t want to encourage conversation.
The old guy shook his head and took a sip of his hot chocolate. The scowl on his face lightened a degree. He glanced over at Owen and nodded. “Damned good hot chocolate, though.”
Chapter Five
Sheriff Halverson pulled over fifty yards down the road from the Wynder place’s main drive. There were technically three drives on the Wynder property. The wide, paved main drive, which led up to the house and then back to a massive garage; friends and the family used that one.
Then there was a smaller, more discreet secondary drive, that led behind the house; that was the driveway the staff used when they came by to mow the lawn, clean the house and prepare dinner five nights a week. It was the drive caterers used during parties, and it was the drive guests used during the annual barbecues. It was longer and so afforded more places to park alongside it; no one wanted to park on the judge’s front lawn. That’d be a good way to ensure you didn’t get invited back the next year. Plus it ran right by the sprawling back lawn where the festivities occurred, and for a stretch, right alongside the great lake behind the house.
The third drive was more of a track than a drive: just a rough, cleared path through the trees into the back acreage. The Wynders owned some four or five hundred acres, all adjacent to the house. Their nearest neighbor was Ted Walters. Even he had sold some of his own property to them after the divorce.
The sheriff got out of his car and glanced down the road. From this vantage, the second drive was invisible. It was hundreds of yards away, the mouth surrounded by trees on either side. A discreet drive made in the mold of all servant’s entrances and backdoors in great houses since time immemorial. Functional, accessible, but out of sight.
Not out of range, though. No, he was pretty sure of that. There would be spots on that back drive that would afford someone a view of the house. A view of the gardens. A view of the path where Rick had been shot.
Of course, the roadside afforded that same vantage.
The house was set back from the county road about a quarter mile, on the crest of a huge, slightly sloped lawn. Even from his current vantage, it looked massive. It looked imperious, like some kind of old world, lordly manor.
Which probably explained the open aspect. There were a few privacy shrubs around the sides and back, to obscure the rest of the yard. But the front lawn was wide open, giving Rick and Marsha a full view of their surroundings. Like lords of old.
And giving the locals a view of the great house. Like old world peasants.
The wind blew down from the trees. A cold wind, a wind that promised more snow, and soon. Halverson hiked up the collar of his jacket and walked for twenty paces. He could see around the corner of the house. He couldn’t see the garden path. The angle wasn’t right for that.
But he would have been able to see a person standing on it.
He walked on, keeping his focus on the path. He passed the driveway. He walked the length of the lawn. The path remained visible until he reached the far end. A mix of newer pines and older hardwoods started up near the edge of the yard, and a few paces later the gardens and garden path were completely invisible.
Halverson turned back and faced his vehicle. A long stretch of county road lay between him and it. A lot of space for a killer to set up and wait for the judge. And in
front of public land, too.
The Wynder place faced a long stretch of county owned woodlands, all open to hunting during the season. So the killer would have had a good reason to be carrying a rifle in those woods.
No one would think twice if they spotted him heading out that way, or if they passed him hurrying away afterward. He’d be one of hundreds out on opening weekend. Just another guy.
Hell, hunters parked along the shoulder along the public lands as they saw fit. And there was no law against leaving your vehicle by the judge’s house. So the killer might have parked nearby. He might have had his getaway vehicle waiting just down the road.
People could have driven by it all day without taking a second glance. Just another hunter, on opening weekend.
Halverson turned again, back toward the almost invisible opening for the second drive.
Or the killer might have used the back driveway, he thought. More likely to raise the judge’s suspicions if he got caught. But less visible from the road. More discreet.
Like an assassin slipping in through the servant’s entrance, to kill the lord of the manor.
Halvorson walked back to his car, thinking about angles and trajectories. Thinking about his crime scene and how little information he’d been able to gather from it. He didn’t know exactly how the body had fallen.
Ted had been the first to disrupt it. After some initial denials, he’d admitted to moving the body. He couldn’t remember exactly how it had lain when he first got there. He’d tried CPR, until he noticed the back of Rick’s skull. Or the absence of it.
But the dog hadn’t helped. Neither had the widow. Moses had gone all through the blood and picked up pieces of Judge Wynder’s cranium into the bargain. He’d made tracks and eaten evidence. Halvorson didn’t like to think on that, too long.
Marsha had shifted the body again and disrupted the blood all over again. She’d got it on herself and tracked it all over the scene.
There were drops and drips and lines of blood. Maybe it had been spray from the impact. Maybe it had trailed off Moses’s fur, or Ted’s coat, or Marsha’s clothes.
He couldn’t even tell anything from the arrangement of skull fragments. They’d been walked on and brushed aside by the humans and licked and chewed and carried off by the dog.
At some point after Moses’s disruption of the scene and before Halvorson’s arrival, Ted had realized what his dog was doing. He’d collected the pieces he could find and stacked them in a pile with some idea of preserving his friend’s dignity.
So Halverson didn’t know where the shot had come from. The best he could do was eliminate those areas where it couldn’t have come from: anywhere that the bullet would have kept on going straight into the side of the house.
They’d searched all over, and they were clear on that. The bullet may have come from behind the house. It may have come from across the road. But it didn’t wind up in the house.
Halverson got into his car, and pulled a U-turn. He headed for the secondary drive, and pulled in. He drove slowly, still thinking about angles.
For about a hundred yards, he was pretty sure a careful shooter could have made the shot. The bullet would have come close to the house, but it would have passed by.
After that, the angles would be wrong. The bullet would punch through Wynder’s head and then hit the side of the house. It would have shattered glass or splintered wood. It would have ended up in one of the rooms, or putting a hole through the siding.
Then he reached the back of the house, and the angles were right again. A careful shooter with a good aim could have fired a bullet that would have ended up somewhere in the public lands across the road.
He got out of the car and leaned against the door. He stared at the house and ignored the cold metal against his back.
His gut told him this was no hunting accident. What were the odds of a stray bullet traveling five hundred-plus yards and hitting the judge square in the center of the forehead? He’d put money on winning the lottery and getting struck by lightning in the same day first.
But it was possible his gut was wrong. Freak accidents happened. In which case the bullet would be somewhere behind him. Somewhere past the back lawn or out in the lake. Maybe under the snow, in the dirt. Probably in the forest beyond. Acres and acres of forest. Maybe embedded deep in a tree. Maybe in the forest floor somewhere, or the bottom of the lake, where no one would ever find it.
And if his gut was right? If the kill had been too precise to be an accident? Well, the bullet might have wound up just about anywhere.
Which meant two things: he wasn’t going to be able to identify the gun used, and he wasn’t going to be able to calculate the shooter’s position from the angle of the shot.
So the only way to find the shooter’s position would be a canvass of the entire area, in every direction the bullet might have been fired from. That, and a whole hell of a lot of luck, to find anything that might indicate a shooter had been in the vicinity.
Which luck he clearly did not have, since the snow started falling before the first rays of morning sun that Saturday, and had buried everything.
Halverson got back into the cruiser and turned up the heat. He’d had a few cold cases in his career, but none of them involved murder. Mostly because there wasn’t that much murder in the county, and because murderers tended to be as stupid as any other criminals.
But Trey Halverson had the sinking feeling that his streak was about to end.
It was early to be drinking. As a rule, Ted Walters wasn’t a day drinker. Most of the time anyway. But he figured one of his oldest friends winding up with his brains blown out was as good a reason as a man ever had.
He was seated at the bar in a little place called Tiny’s Tavern. There were two guys beside him. One he liked, and the other he couldn’t stand.
The guy he liked was called Russ Leyland. The guy he hated was Tony Lancaster. Normally, he wouldn’t drink beside Lancaster if it was the only stool open in the whole place.
But they’d all known the judge. They’d all considered him to be a friend. They all missed him. And right now, that sense of loss united them.
So Ted sat next to Tony Lancaster, and Tony Lancaster sat next to him. They even exchanged civil nods. “Hell of a business,” Tony said.
“Damned right it is,” Ted said.
“Can’t believe someone would do that,” Russ said.
“Like to string him up by his nuts, is what I’d like to do,” Tony said. “Take shots at him.”
“Him and that damned sheriff,” Ted said. “Whole mess could have been avoided, if you ask me, if he just took care of them damned hunters.”
Russ nodded. Tony shook his head. “Nah. This wasn’t no hunter. Hunters don’t kill judges.”
Ted scowled at the other man. His magnanimity only extended so far. It was one thing to sit beside Tony Lancaster. It was another altogether to be contradicted by him. “That so?” he said, an edge in his voice.
“That’s so,” the other man confirmed.
Before Ted could formulate a sufficiently dismissive rebuttal, Russ offered, “Maxine thinks it was some kind of revenge. You know, someone he put away maybe. He dealt with some bad apples in his day, right?”
Ted snorted. Maxine was Russ’s live-in girlfriend and, in Ted’s humble opinion, a world class dumbass. “Bullshit. Maxine’s been watching too many of those damned crime shows.”
Russ shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Stands to reason,” Tony said.
“No it don’t.”
“Sure it does. I heard someone put a bullet straight through Rick’s face.”
Here, Ted nodded, and confirmed that that was indeed how it happened. “Saw it myself,” he said.
To which Tony nodded, and by which Tony seemed far less impressed than he should have been. He just went on with his own ridiculous theory. “Stray bullet my ass. That’d be like hitting a bullseye with your eyes closed. Now how often does that happen? Never.”
“You mark my words, Ted: someone did the judge in, on purpose.”
Ted was about to argue, but he paused. Then he frowned. He was thinking of a big guy, with broad shoulders and freakishly long legs, and a weird look to him. A big guy who had shown up at Marsha’s door that morning. A big guy who was new to town.
“I don’t know,” Russ said. “I guess I can see it both ways.”
“If it was deliberate,” Ted said, “it wasn’t done by no one local. I know that much.”
The other two men nodded. “Everyone liked Rick.”
Ted took a long, silent drink from his mug. Lousy beer, but he didn’t like paying for anything better. It all did the same thing in the end, anyway: gave him a buzz and got him flushed. “You know,” he said, “now that I think about it…I might have seen the guy that done it. Back at the house, this morning.”
Chapter Six
The old guy introduced himself as William Tanney. He told Owen he had three kids and four grandkids. He told Owen he lived in Iowa, by himself ever since his wife died a decade and a half ago. He told Owen he missed her. “Every damned day.” He told Owen he’d never had better hot chocolate than he had today.
None of which Owen had asked about. The old guy just volunteered it from across the table. He’d apparently abandoned sudoku after his failure with the one puzzle, and set his mind to conversation after all.
And being the only other warm body in earshot, Owen had been his primary victim. He tried his best to dissuade the old man, with half grunts and murmured replies. But it had done no good. William Tanney went on talking.
Owen harbored a little hope once the other man’s cocoa ran out. He watched him get out of his seat, stiffly and awkwardly, and bring the mug to the bin at the end of the counter. That hope survived until Tanney got in line to order again.
He got a coffee this time – decaf, thanks to a heart that didn’t always cooperate with caffeine. “It’s hell getting old,” he told the barista. “But it sure beats the alternative.”