by Rachel Ford
A warning shot that had got Ted a stern talking to from the sheriff, while the kids, whoever they were, walked away scot-free. Which was as much evidence as any one of them needed that Trey Halverson didn’t know up from down.
So now the group nodded and murmured. All but Tony, who shook his head.
“Look at ‘em,” Ted said. “Walking in here like they own the place. Bastards.”
Tony drained the last of his beer and said, “Well, it’s time for me to head out.”
Ted snorted. “You better run on home, before the missus comes looking for you.”
“Told her I’d be home by five,” he said.
“It ain’t five yet.”
“No. But I’ve had enough.”
Whether he meant beer or company, he didn’t specify. Ted assumed company. The others of the party seemed to assume beer. Russ snorted. “No such thing as enough.”
“That crap you drink is so damned weak, it might as well be water.”
They went back and forth, laughing as they did. Ted ignored them. Tony wasn’t nearly as funny as he thought, and the rest of the group was too damned easily amused.
So Ted went on watching the Day fellow and the old guy. Was gramps going to be the next mark, he wondered? Is that how Day did it: got friendly with the target, and then whacked them?
He thought back to his recent conversations with the judge. Rick hadn’t mentioned making a new friend, or any out-of-towners. Ted would like to think they were on those kind of terms.
They’d known each other ever since they were kids. The judge had bought Ted’s back forty, when he needed the money, and paid him fairly for it. They’d chat over beers, and they’d talk about the state of the world, or how the grandkids were doing, or the good old days. They shared local gossip, and both had strong opinions on any and every thing that happened in town.
So if Rick had met some new guy who was poking around for reasons unknown, he would have said something. Then again, he probably would have mentioned it that night, if he hadn’t been shot first.
Ted finished his beer and plunked down the two dollars and fifty cents required for a refill. His change from the last beer, when he’d paid with a five. He sipped it absently and went on thinking. Went on watching the long-legged guy and his newest victim.
Tony headed for the door. The crew waved him off. Ted grunted something that approached a farewell, but could just as easily have been mistaken for relief to see the naysayer departing.
He was thinking about Rick, with his brains and blood all over a garden path. Dead and gone. No more afternoon beers. No more barbecues and conversations. Just gone.
He was thinking about the dumbass sheriff, who was letting the killer walk around freely right under his nose. No way justice was going to be served, not with Halverson in charge.
He was thinking about what he’d do, if he was sheriff. It involved rope and testicles and a 12-gauge, per Tony’s earlier recommendation.
And he was thinking about the guy with the long legs, sitting there ordering food without a care in the world. With the audacity to stare him right in the eye not ten minutes earlier. Like he was some kind of fool, who didn’t know the score.
Owen Day ordered a cheeseburger with curds and fried onions on top, and a side of fries. If he was going to gamble with heart disease, well, he might as well go big. That was something of a rule of his: never do anything in half-measures. Even stupid things.
He stuck to water, though. He was going to be behind the wheel. He didn’t want to impair himself, not even by legal degrees. He was fastidious about things like that.
Tanney got wings and the everything burger, and a glass of porter too. “None of that piss water for me.”
Owen glanced the old guy over, and tried to imagine him fitting that much food into himself. It didn’t seem doable.
Tanney, meanwhile, threw a glance around the room. The tables were filling up. The bar was already mostly full. The din had grown until conversation consisted of raised voices and a lot of head and hand gestures.
Owen was okay with that. Difficult conversation meant less of it. Less conversation suited him just fine.
Not Tanney, though. Tanney finished his once over of the place, and then started talking. “So, you know the sheriff?”
“What?”
“That was you talking to him at the diner, right? This morning?”
“Oh. Yeah, that was me.”
Tanney nodded. “You two friends?”
Owen shook his head. “First time I met him, actually.”
“You up here to sell him insurance?”
Owen frowned at that. “I’m an actuary, not a salesman.”
“Number cruncher, I know. Just as well. You don’t seem to have the personality for it, if you know what I mean.”
Owen decided to take that as a compliment. He said nothing.
“He didn’t seem too happy to make your acquaintance, though.”
“No,” Owen admitted. “He thinks I’m a crackpot.”
“Are you?”
Owen smiled and took a sip of his water. “Not as far as I know, no.”
“So why’s he think you’re a crackpot?”
“It’s a long story.”
Tanney glanced around. The place was packed. Their waitress was nowhere in sight. “Looks like we got plenty of time.”
Owen shrugged. His natural discretion told him not to broadcast his ideas. But he was feeling the length of the day, and the weight of unresolved business. What should have been a slam dunk with the sheriff and then Mrs. Wynder had turned into a series of failures. “I’ve got a theory, about the Judge Wynder killing.”
“That hunting accident everyone’s talking about?”
“It was no hunting accident. Someone shot him on purpose. A serial killer.”
Tanney’s left eyebrow crept upward. The right corner of his lip twitched. He shifted in his seat and cleared his throat. “That so?”
“I know it sounds crazy,” Owen said. The other man’s amusement was palpable. He tried not to be offended. “But he’s not the only one killed like that. For the last decade or so, there’s been ‘hunting accidents’ and unexplained shootings up and down the interstate.”
“Which interstate?”
“A few of them, through the midwestern states.”
Tanney shrugged. “They’re hunting states, right? Hunting accidents happen.”
“Yeah, but not like this. It’s a pattern. It’s always in remote areas.”
“Like where people are hunting?”
“It’s always single shot kills.”
“Which you’d expect with from an accident. A killer would shoot more than once, just to be sure, right?”
Owen shook his head. “No, these aren’t random shots. These are kill shots. An expert marksman.”
Tanney looked skeptical. “Or bad luck. People die in hunting accidents all the time, Owen.”
Which was true enough. People did die hunting. About a hundred people, every year, and some fifteen hundred injuries. Some of those injuries and deaths were self-inflicted: falling from a stand, tripping, accidental lacerations, and so on. Some of them resulted from faulty equipment, and some from poor judgement. Alcohol played a role plenty of times.
Of course, it often played a role in the non-self-inflicted injuries too. “Failure to identify target,” “victim out of sight of shooter” and “careless handling of firearm” showed up in the injury reports, both fatal and nonfatal, more than they should have.
But all the time? No. He figured that was a perception thing: people went out into the woods with guns. Sometimes they didn’t come back again. That’s just what happened when people did things with guns.
It was a perception problem, a kneejerk reaction because guns were involved. Maybe popular culture had hardwired people to see guns and think dangerous. Maybe the repeatability of hunting accidents, the fact that every year there’d be one or two or three that made the news, regular as clock
work, made them somehow seem more regular than they were.
Whatever it was, though, it was there. People thought of and talked about hunting accidents in ways they didn’t for other sporting deaths.
Thirty-five hundred people drowned a year. The number climbed to almost four thousand, when boating accidents were taken into account. Thirty-five-plus times the number of hunting deaths. But no one would say people died swimming all the time. Because it wasn’t true.
Just like it wasn’t true about hunting. People from every state in the union hunted. Almost a quarter of the state hunted in some places. But even where less than one percent of the population hunted, that could mean a lot of hunters. Like in California, with its quarter of a million-plus registered hunters.
And looking at numbers as opposed to percentages, the data was even more staggering. Texas alone had over a million registered hunters, with Pennsylvania approaching the million hunter mark. Over seven hundred and fifty thousand people hunted in Michigan. Wisconsin, Minnesota and New York had over half a million hunters each.
So it was true that people did die hunting. But not all the time. Not even close. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
Which he tried to explain to Tanney. But the old man’s eyes glazed over and he shook his head. “You really are a numbers guy, aren’t you? But you know what I’m saying. People die hunting. It happens, right?”
“Not like this. I’m telling you, this is a pattern. This guy is good. He leaves no evidence. They don’t even find the bullet. He comes off the interstate looking for someone to kill, he waits until he finds a target, he gets back on and leaves. No one ever figures out what happened, or why. Sometimes one hit a year, sometimes two. But it’s always the same.”
Chapter Eight
Tanney wasn’t buying it. He was on his second beer, too, and starting to voice his criticisms more vocally.
Even when Owen brought out his tablet and started flipping through the reports he’d put together, he wasn’t convinced. He listened for a minute, but then waved the device away impatiently. “I’m not saying they’re not dead, Owen. I just don’t see anything that tells me they were deliberately killed, much less by some kind of serial killer.”
Owen was trying to clamp down on his frustration, but not having a good time of it. This was the third time he’d struck out that day, and he didn’t know if the fault lay in his presentation of the facts or his audience.
By round three, though, he was starting to suspect the problem was closer to home.
“Look,” he said. “Eugene Cooper, fifty-four years old, Michigan resident. Found with a bullet hole through his throat ten years ago. No bullet ever recovered from the scene.”
“Right.”
“Ray Danielson, twenty-eight years old. Wisconsin, nine years ago.”
Tanney tapped the screen vigorously, which caused his windows to shift and his text to enlarge. The old man stared in confusion. Owen restored the screen. This time, Tanney pointed instead of touched. “He wasn’t even shot with a gun.”
Owen nodded. “Someone shot him with his own crossbow. They recovered the murder weapon that time, but it was his own.”
“So what’s the connection there?”
“That one’s a little shakier,” Owen admitted. “He’s the only one who wasn’t taken out with a gun. But he was the only victim that year. The only one without a suspect, I mean.”
Tanney snorted. “Sounds to me like you’re just compiling unsolved hunting deaths together and deciding they were all done by the same guy. Like that’s your link: someone died during hunting season, so they had to be killed by your killer.”
“They weren’t all during hunting season,” Owen said.
Tanney threw his hands up. “They’re not all during hunting season. They’re not all gun deaths. So what is your pattern?”
“They’re all along the interstates. There’s one to two a year.”
“I thought the judge was out in the country somewhere?”
“About ten minutes off the interstate.”
“So…not on the interstate, then.”
“Close enough.”
Tanney finished his beer and shook his head. “Look, Owen, you’re doing me a favor driving me around like this, and I don’t want to piss you off. But it seems to me you’re grasping at straws here.”
“I’m not grasping at straws, dammit.”
Tanney shrugged. “Okay? What’d the sheriff say.”
“He wouldn’t even look at the data.”
“Well I did. And I say you got nothing.”
“You haven’t seen it all either.”
Tanney sighed and looked around for the waitress, like he was hoping their meal would be out soon. Like he was hoping she’d provide his escape. But she was nowhere to be seen. “Fine. Show me the rest.”
Owen, though, shook his head. He was convinced that his earlier plan had been the right call. “You need to see it printed out, side-by-side. Along with the map. Then it makes sense. They’re all killings off main interstates. Richard Walker, Mary Koehler –”
“Wait, there was a woman too?”
“Two of them. Mary Koehler and Annie Shaw.”
Tanney scratched the back of his head. “I’m still not seeing that pattern…”
“He’s not picking his victims based on gender.”
“Then what is he doing? Following the interstate until what? He comes to an exit that he likes and finds a hunter? Or someone in their yard?”
Owen nodded. “Has to be. Unless he’s picking areas beforehand.”
“And that’s another thing. You keep saying ‘he.’ What makes you think this killer – if he exists – is a guy?”
Owen shrugged. “Nothing, I guess. Statistically, there’s a better chance. But I guess it could be anyone.”
“I still think it’s a bunch of bunk. But picking people off from the road or whatever? Feels like a feminine kind of crime, if you ask me. Impersonal, a little cowardly.” He threw another glance around the room and shrugged. “I probably shouldn’t say that nowadays. But you know what I mean. It’s not a man’s crime.”
Owen figured most serial killers were cowardly. He’d never heard of one who challenged his victims to any kind of fair combat. But he wasn’t going to belabor the point. Nor was he going to touch the rest of that comment. Not with a ten-foot pole. “Okay: whoever it is, they might be scoping the area out beforehand. Or maybe they just spend hunting season on the lookout for victims.”
“And this new generation of men, half of them have never even touched a gun. Not like it used to be. I bet you find as many women who can shoot better than those guys.”
The waitress returned now, which gave Owen a natural out from response. He was glad of that.
She carried a tray with a plate of wings and two burgers and baskets of fries. She was all smiles as she set them down. “Sorry about the wait.”
“No problem,” Owen said.
“Can you shoot?” Tanney said.
She glanced over at the old man. “What?”
“You know how to shoot?”
She nodded. “Course.”
“I’ll bet you’re a good shot.”
She smiled and shrugged. “I do alright.”
“You hunt?”
She nodded again. “Every year. I got my tags on opening day.”
“Already? Damn.”
She grinned. “My boyfriend’s still out there, trying to get something. I told him he better, because I will never let him hear the end of it if he doesn’t.”
Tanney laughed and she asked about refills. Owen got more water. He got more beer. Then he waited until she’d gone, and said, “See? Told you. A new generation. Hell, you should see my granddaughter shoot her little bb-gun. Dead accurate.”
“Alright, but that’s not the point.”
Tanney nodded, taking a bite of his burger. He murmured his appreciation, declaring it damned good. Owen tried his own. It wasn’t bad, and neither were the
fries.
“Your point is that whoever killed the judge killed these other people,” the old man said through a mouthful.
“Exactly,” Owen said. One of the guys from the bar was heading their way, toward the restroom. One of the older guys who had been talking to Marsha’s friend. He waited until he passed to continue. “Wynder’s death was no accident. It was deliberate.”
Tanney grumbled something through a mouthful of burger. He had a ravenous appetite for an old guy. He gulped it down and went on. “So you keep saying. But you haven’t shown me a damned thing to demonstrate a connection.”
“The connection is a combination of factors. The proximity to the interstate…”
Tanney grumbled about that but didn’t interrupt.
“The timing – all more or less around hunting season.”
“It is or isn’t. More or less is just a fancy way of saying it isn’t.”
“And the lack of evidence. They don’t find anything to identify the shooter. They don’t find a bullet. They’re not going to find a bullet with the judge. You mark my words.”
Here, Tanney snorted through another mouthful of burger. “What do you think, this gal is out there picking her bullets up after she’s done?”
Owen nodded. “Yeah, I think in a lot of cases he probably is. Or she.”
“That’s nuts. That’s asking to get caught.”
“Twelve – now thirteen – unsolved hunting accidents in a decade is a lot. Especially in five or six states.”
The waitress returned with Tanney’s third beer. “Here you are.”
He smiled broadly and thanked her.
“You’re very welcome. Is there anything else I can do for you folks?”
The old guy nodded. “You can tell that boyfriend of yours he better appreciate you. You tell him he’s a lucky man.”
She laughed. “Oh, I do: every day.”
Tanney laughed and raised a toast her way as she headed to one of the other tables. He sighed. “Ah, to be young again.” Then, he turned back to Owen. “As for you…you’re making assumptions again.”
Owen had resumed his own thoughts. He looked up now. “What?”
“You. You’re assuming. And you know what they say about that, right?”