by Rachel Ford
And then there was the connection Tanney kept talking about, and Owen’s assumption that the shooter was a man. He really didn’t have anything more than probabilities to base that on. He’d have to be careful of that.
Not that he was trying to identify the shooter himself. But he wouldn’t want to bias the sheriff, just in case it was a woman.
As for the connection…he was more or less stumped. He’d examined the names hundreds of times, and the faces, and the stories. Their demographics differed in almost every respect: wealth, race, age, sex, state of residence. They trended white, male, and Christian. But there were outliers in every category.
Ricky Manilow was Native American; a bit of black sheep, but from a family with deep tribal ties. Adam James was African American, and Randy Khang was second-generation Hmong American. Annie Shaw and Mary Koehler were women. Richard Walker was a self-proclaimed Satanist, and Adam James had recently converted to Islam.
So what the hell do all of them have in common?
He thought Tanney was overly dismissive of their proximity to the interstates. That was a unifying factor. He felt sure of that.
But maybe there was more to it. Maybe there was some other, subtler, connection. He set up his tablet and started reviewing the files for the hundredth time.
Eugene Cooper, fifty-four years old. Male, Caucasian. Seven children with four women, two grandchildren. Prior domestics, and a history of child support delinquency.
Arrested for two separate sexual assault charges, neither of which went anywhere – the first because the victim stopped cooperating with prosecutors, circumstances unclear, and the second because the victim vanished. She was still listed as a missing person.
A bad apple, through and through.
Ray Danielson, twenty-eight years old. The exact opposite of Cooper: an upstanding kid, with no record at all. A former Eagle scout, a new dad, a Scout leader and a deacon at his church.
Richard Walker, sixty-two years old; a self-proclaimed high priest of Satan. A weird dude, by all accounts, but without a serious record: nothing worse on paper anyway than illegal substance charges.
Mary Koehler, forty-four years old. A widow and mom of three; secretary at her church; a 4-H leader, and a respected local businesswoman.
Owen woke up some hours later, asleep at the desk. His tablet had gone into sleep mode long before. Probably shortly after he had.
He yawned and stretched and stumbled into bed. He didn’t set an alarm, but he woke by six anyway. His normal sleep schedule consisted of working through the night and sleeping during the day. But it had been disrupted by his more regular hours – the kind of hours he needed to keep to interact in-person with most people.
He tossed and turned for another hour, at which point he abandoned sleep and rose. He showered and changed into fresh clothes. Then he decided to go get breakfast – and more importantly, coffee.
He grabbed his coat and wallet and headed for the door. He wasn’t creeping, exactly. But he did make an effort to step silently. He didn’t need to start his morning with Tanney, especially if the old man had something of a hangover from the night before.
He got past his door: one step, and then two. He breathed out.
Then he heard the soft sound of well-oiled hinges swinging and a door brushing over carpet. Tanney’s voice followed a moment later. “Jesus Christ. What are you doing out here?”
“Uh…”
“Damned near gave me a heart attack.”
“I was going to go get some coffee.”
“Ah. Me too.”
“Ah.” They stood there for an uncomfortably long moment before Owen volunteered, “Well, you want to come with?”
Chapter Fifteen
The print shop didn’t open until after ten, so Owen and Tanney headed straight to the diner. The sheriff’s cruiser was there in the parking lot, and the man himself was inside. He grimaced as they entered.
But Owen stopped at his table all the same. He offered a good morning, and a promise to deliver the documents as soon as he had them. Then he moved on, before the sheriff could change his mind.
Halverson’s wasn’t the only familiar face in the restaurant, though. Ted Walters and two of his buddies from the night before were there, all looking gray in the face and meaner than a kicked hornet’s nest. They were eating bacon and eggs and drinking black coffee – and scowling at everyone who entered or dared to speak.
Ted’s bloodshot eyes nearly popped out of his head at the sight of Owen and Tanney. He started to rise. One of his friend’s tapped his arm and spoke a single word.
Owen couldn’t read lips, but he was pretty sure he could tell what the guy had said anyway: Moses. Ted’s scowl deepened. He threw a glance at the sheriff, who was pretending not to watch. Then he sat back down and muttered something low and angry.
Owen and Tanney took seats nearer the door, and far from them. Tanney sat with his back to the door and his face to the three guys. Owen had his back to them but watched the door. Between them, they had any possible approach for trouble covered.
They ordered coffee: a pot to share. Tanney got eggs and bacon, with a stack of pancakes on the side. Owen got the same thing. The coffee came first.
Halverson’s breakfast came out before theirs did: a big platter full of eggs and sausage, hash browns and pancakes.
Owen shook his head. Everyone present, himself included, had decided to wage war on their arteries that morning.
Then their own food came out. It was fatty and salty and every bit as bad as he expected. But it managed to taste alright anyway. Owen started with the flapjacks. He buttered the top one, then the middle, and then the bottom.
He poured his maple syrup in reverse order: bottom cake, then middle, then top. Then he cut the stack in half. He turned the plate ninety degrees and did it again. Then he turned it forty-five degrees and cut, and ninety degrees and cut again.
He ended with eight perfect, wedge-shaped stacks.
Tanney watched him throughout and shook his head. He smothered the first cake in butter, then syrup; and then he cut a slew of uneven strips.
Owen looked away from the disorder and focused on his own food. He was still working on his flapjacks when a phone rang, loud and sharp in the relative silence of the diner.
Owen threw a glance around, searching for the source of the disruption. It was Halverson’s phone.
The sheriff frowned at it, not annoyed, but with some kind of concern. His work phone, maybe. Maybe that’s why he had the ringer on, and so loud.
He picked up the call. “Halverson.” He listened for a moment and grunted some kind of confirmation. Then he listened some more and went very pale. “Say again?” He remained silent for a good ten or fifteen seconds. Then he nodded. “Right. On my way.”
Halverson stood and dropped a twenty on the table by his half-eaten plate. He headed for the door, not quite at a run. But close.
Damned close.
Owen craned his neck to see the parking lot. The sheriff did start to run when he got outside. He jumped into his vehicle and flipped on the lightbar. He pulled a U-turn, and whipped out of the parking lot, heading out of town. The siren sprang to life a moment later.
Owen’s last sight of the car was a screaming streak of red and blue lights barreling down the road.
Trey Halverson reached the Wynder home just after eight in the morning. He found three people waiting for him by the front door: a woman in her early thirties, a man of similar age, and a woman in her early or mid-twenties. They all looked vaguely alike, and they all looked something like Judge Wynder. The youngest looked like Marsha Wynder too.
Their kids: Rick’s from his first marriage, and Rick and Marsha’s from theirs. Which explained some of what he saw in their faces.
They were all shivering. They’d been outside since they made the 9-1-1 call, maybe before. They all looked a little pale. The youngest, Brittany, seemed stunned. She was staring blankly into the horizon, like she couldn’t quite
comprehend what they’d found.
But the oldest two, Elizabeth and Josh, were talking. There was curiosity in their expression; interest, and maybe even something worse. Not glee, exactly, but amusement maybe, particularly in the young man’s face. And something stony and cold in the young woman’s.
Theirs had never been an easy relationship with their stepmother. He knew that. It had something to do with Rick’s first wife, Donna.
Rick would say Donna poisoned the kids against him and Marsha, that she wanted to ruin their relationships. But Halverson had his own ideas about the matter. Donna didn’t hate Rick. She wasn’t trying to ruin his life.
She hated Marsha. She wanted to make her life misery. She blamed the other woman for the dissolution of her own marriage.
Which was irrational, but such things usually were. Infidelity had played its role in the end of their marriage. Everyone in town knew about the judge’s indiscretions during those last years. Rick admitted it later on and took the full blame: when things got difficult, he’d tapped out instead of buckling down and trying to fix it.
But none of it involved Marsha. She and the judge hadn’t started dating until almost three years after the divorce settled.
She was his first serious relationship afterwards, though: the point where Donna had to face the awful truth. Rick was never coming back. This wasn’t a restless season. He wasn’t sewing his wild oats. It was no midlife crisis from which he’d recover and come running home.
It was over.
It was bad enough that Marsha had her own kids already. But then Brittany came, a few years later: insult to injury. Rick hadn’t just replaced Donna, he’d replaced their whole family.
And all of it, as she saw it, got back to Marsha.
Which attitude the kids picked up, as she no doubt meant them to. Those had been some unhappy visitation weekends for Marsha.
Halverson had seen it firsthand. Elizabeth and Josh would openly disrespect her. They’d hurt Brittany and torment their stepmother’s cat. If she valued something, they would break it, or soil it, or leave it out to be rained on. If she disliked something, they loved it and wanted more of it. If their father included her in their time together, there would be no peace.
A deeply unhappy family.
And not much had changed since childhood. Judge Wynder paid for their educations. He helped them get started in life. But they’d never dropped the hostility toward Marsha.
And now the woman they hated was dead.
It was too early to be jumping to conclusions, of course. But Halverson knew how these things went. When people thought about murder, they pictured home invasions. They pictured thieves or rapists breaking into their home in the dark of the night.
Which did happen, of course. But not nearly as much as the alternative, especially where women were concerned. Statistically, most women were killed by someone they knew. Statistically, that someone was male.
They were killed by lovers or former lovers, or would-be lovers. By fathers or sons. Or stepsons. The kind of stepsons who would wear a half-grin while their stepmother lay dead nearby, maybe.
The sheriff kept all of that to himself, of course. He parked by the front door, lights still strobing. He killed the siren and stepped outside.
The three young people swarmed him, all talking at once. Brittany was half-choked when she spoke. The other two were not.
“She’s dead,” Josh said. “At least, I suppose it’s her. You can’t really tell anymore.”
“Someone shot her,” Brittany said. “They killed her, Sheriff.”
“She’s upstairs,” Elizabeth said. “In the hallway.”
He ascertained that they’d stumbled onto the scene that morning. They didn’t say it directly, but he had the feeling that this might be yet another compromised crime scene: three young people, heading in after long flights and a long drive – and a potentially contentious reunion. They would be looking for their rooms, and maybe breakfast. Not a dead body.
Not unless one of them had played some role in effecting that death.
He told them the rest of his team would be arriving shortly. He told them to go on waiting outside. He advised them to get into their vehicles and turn on the heat.
Then he pulled on a pair of gloves and turned for the house. He checked the front door before he opened it. He saw no sign of any tampering. No locks had been jimmied, no wood damaged.
The door was unlocked. Naturally: the kids had been inside, and then come outside. Sunlight filtered into the great hall in long columns through the windows. The corresponding dark patches looked very dark.
The kids probably turned the light on during their initial pass through, and switched it off after them. They would have been too addled to think of lights on their exit.
Halverson turned on his phone’s flashlight application and checked the light switch. Nothing of interest there: no bloody thumbprints, or other convenient markers left behind by the killer.
He flipped the switch, and light flooded the hall. He glanced all around. Nothing looked out of order. There were no overturned tables or vases, no muddy footprints, no sign of disruption or disturbance anywhere.
He made his way through the house quickly, ducking into the adjacent rooms as he passed. He saw a suitcase in the downstairs den, and a half-eaten bowl of oatmeal. The kitchen looked like it had been used recently.
There was a pile of trash in the middle of the bathroom floor. Halverson made a mental note of that, and the empty can nearby. Then he headed upstairs.
He found Marsha Wynter. She was hard to miss. She was laying prone in a pool of blood and tissue. The heavier concentration of blood had soaked into the rug underneath her, and congealed on the hardwood. The edges, where it was thinner, had dried up, leaving a brown residue behind.
Not a recent killing, then. Which meant Elizabeth and Josh might very well have alibis: plane tickets, or witnesses to confirm they left at such-and-such time, making the drive impossible to reconcile with Marsha’s time of death.
He moved around the body carefully. There were faint outlines of prints on the floor, preserved in dried blood. Nothing whole: just an outer edge of the shoe here, a partial of the toeprint there.
But enough to get an idea of the size of the shoe. Whether it was a large foot depended on gender, really. It looked to be somewhere between a man’s ten or eleven, which would be roughly a woman’s eleven or twelve.
Average, for a man; large, for a woman. Which further increased the odds of the perp being male.
He noticed a hole in the wall where a bullet had struck the wooden trim, in a direct line from Marsha Wynder’s body. There was fragmented wood and splinters around the depression, but no bullet.
He moved on, following the bloody partial footprints. There were four lines of them: two heading toward Rick’s office, and two heading out.
One of the latter stopped at the body. The other continued down the hall, growing fainter and fainter until they disappeared from sight altogether. The crime lab boys would probably find microscopic traces of Marsha’s blood all through the house. But his eye could not.
He reached the office and flipped on the light. He studied the scene before him and frowned. There was a revolver on the desktop and a clear space where Rick’s laptop usually sat. There were splinters and papers and a badly deformed drawer on the floor beside the desk.
He rounded the desk carefully, avoiding the faint prints. He found exactly what he’d expected: a gaping hole in the desk where a drawer had been pulled out.
The woodwork of the drawer on the floor corresponded to the rest of the desk, though it had been shot twice, presumably at close range.
So was this a robbery gone wrong? Someone had taken a computer, and maybe whatever had been in that drawer. Money, maybe, or some other valuable.
Had Marsha Wynder stumbled across the thief, and been killed for the unlucky discovery? He tried to envision the scene: the widow, home alone some time during the night, hear
s a noise and emerges to find – what?
A thief making off with her husband’s computer?
No. That wouldn’t fly. It didn’t explain the desk drawer, or why it had been shot. It didn’t explain the gun on the desk. It didn’t explain why she wouldn’t have just called 9-1-1 and locked herself in her room. It didn’t explain the back and forth between her body and the office, attested by the series of bloody footprints.
Chapter Sixteen
Halverson let the forensic team do their job. He interviewed the kids.
Brittany was more distraught now than she had been in the beginning. Maybe she’d had time to process her find. Maybe it had all started to really sink in. Or maybe she’d just thawed out enough to express herself.
Whatever it was, she spent most of her time crying or fighting tears. When she wasn’t puking, anyway. Which she did twice, first when she recounted finding the body, and then later, when she talked about her mom not returning her calls.
“I thought…I thought she must be asleep, you know? She knew we were coming, but she’d said she wasn’t sleeping well. I thought maybe she had finally got to sleep, you know? But…but I guess she was…well, like that.”
The other two, the step-kids, were another story altogether. There was no grief, and no pretense of grief.
Elizabeth spent as much time asking questions as she did answering them. She wanted to know everything about Marsha’s death. Did he think she’d suffered much? Was it true what Brit had said, that the body was unrecognizable? Did he think they’d have to have a closed casket, then? She wouldn’t like that. Not the beautiful Marsha Wynder. That was a bit ironic, wasn’t it: the beauty queen, with her face blown off? She was practically cackling.
But her brother did her one better. He laughed outright. “So the old bitch is dead, is she?”
He shrugged off Halverson’s shock, too. “I’m sorry for Brit. Really, I am. But as for Marsha…if you ask me, whoever fast-tracked her for an eternity in the toasty place did us all a favor.”