by Rachel Ford
“Well obviously as a perpetrator.”
“I see.”
“You see?”
“What reason is that, Mr. Walters?”
“I told you: he’s been up to no good all week. He tried to pick a fight with me and some guys at Tiny’s.”
Richardson’s face change again. Something like a grimace passed over it. He said, “Ah. I heard about that.”
“Well, I don’t know what you heard,” Ted said, “but I’m telling you what happened. He tried to jump us.”
“Understood. But back to Sheriff Halverson, do you have any evidence Mr. Day was involved?”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you: he’s been up to no good all week. Coming after me and the guys. Marsha too, I’d bet you anything. And now Halverson. He’s a serial killer.”
The conversation didn’t improve from there. Richardson listened for maybe half a minute more; and within a minute, he was ushering him out of the building with, “Thank you for your time,” and “We’ll look into it,” and a bunch of other nonsense that he knew damned well they didn’t mean.
And then Ted was on the sidewalk again, in the wan midday sunlight – fuming and furious and bewildered.
What was it with these clowns and Day? How could they not see what was right in front of their faces? Did they need a signed confession before they took it seriously?
His sympathy for Halverson vanished. The man was a damned fool, in a department of damned fools. He deserved what he got.
But his determination redoubled. If they wouldn’t listen to him, he’d give them no choice. He’d find evidence – solid evidence. Then they’d have to hear him out.
He hopped into the truck and started the engine. He was about to pull out of the lot when a different idea crossed his mind.
He wouldn’t come back here. They’d laughed him off the premises one too many times. He wouldn’t be coming back to them. They’d be coming to him.
Because he’d go straight to that reporter, the one who was poking around: Nancy Krispen. He’d take his evidence to her, and they’d wake up to read about it in the morning news. And then they’d be the ones coming to him, asking for his help.
And if anything happened to Halverson or anyone else in the meantime? Well, that would be on them. He’d tried to stop it already. He’d done his bit.
* * *
Walker’s men wrapped up their work with a quick job of shoveling the snow back into place along the bank. It wouldn’t hold up to any kind of close inspection. There’d be shovel marks all throughout it.
But no one would be inspecting a snowbank on a random country road in the middle of nowhere. They’d be blitzing past it at forty miles an hour – and that’s if they stuck to the speed limit. More likely, it’d be fifty or sixty or even seventy.
And it’d look no different at forty, or fifty, or even seventy miles an hour than any of the other banks in the area.
The Reed Hill team had been their primary objective. Their secondary objective was to pick up what remained of the deceased team’s work. To wit, eliminate Owen Day, William Tanney and Trey Halverson.
Halverson was going to be the hardest. Not because of the law enforcement angle. No one worried about that. A country sheriff was no kind of threat to them.
But he’d already been tipped off by the last crew. He’d be on the alert. Which, by itself, probably didn’t materially change much. It wouldn’t happen in a vacuum, though.
His deputies, his friends, and his family would be around. And more people meant more potential witnesses – more potential corpses to be disposed of afterwards.
There was the problem of public perception and interest, too. A sheriff running off the road after a storm and dying of his injuries was a tragedy.
The community would come together and remember a great man who had been lost too early. It wouldn’t matter if it was true. It was human nature: the devil himself would be eulogized as a saint, and a geezer with a foot in the grave and another on a banana peel would be declared taken far too soon. It was as predictable as clockwork.
A sheriff being killed in some kind of hit and run, or robbery gone wrong, would have been worse, but acceptable. The Reed Hill team could have chosen that route, and things would have worked out.
Robberies happened. Hit and runs happened. People would chase their tails trying to locate the thief or track down the driver. Maybe they’d find a patsy, and make the charges stick. Or eventually they’d move on. They’d remember the incident with a shake of their heads. Remember that time when some son of a bitch shot the sheriff for a hundred bucks? God, I’d like to get my hands on him. That would be the end of it.
But a group of four weirdos trying to bump that same sheriff off? That was a whole new ball of wax. That got people fired up wanting investigations and justice. It got people wondering if that could happen to the sheriff, what’s to stop it from happening to us? It struck fear into the populace’s hearts. And when people were afraid, they were stupid, and troublesome. They’d want answers, and solutions, and assurances that they personally had nothing to worry about.
So Halverson would have to be handled carefully. They couldn’t afford another mess. It had to look natural, and it had to happen quickly, before the sheriff started thinking too long or too hard about what had happened.
A tall order. But that’s why they earned the salaries they did: because they fixed the big problems. They fulfilled the tall orders.
Still, Walker figured it would be best to handle the easy situation first. Clean up the civilians, before they started any more trouble.
So they headed toward Yellow River Falls when they were done, in search of Owen Day and William Tanney.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Brady didn’t believe him at first. But Owen told him to check the dashcam footage. The detective frowned. “Dashcam footage? They had that? I thought they put out some kind of composite sketch of the guy?”
“Of the leader’s face. I guess he was wearing a mask when he was in front of the car, so they didn’t get a good look at him. But he took it off when he talked to me. He tried to act like he was some kind of emergency responder or cop or something.”
Brady frowned at him. “You know if you’re lying about this, it won’t look good for you. You know that, right?”
“Just look at the damned tape,” Owen said back.
So Brady stepped out of the room. He was gone for a minute or maybe two, and then he returned. He resumed his seat.
“Well?” Owen asked.
“I’m waiting.”
“For what?”
“The footage. Richardson’s getting a laptop.”
Which was true enough. Another minute or two passed, and then Pornstache hurried into the room. He carried a laptop in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. The coffee was apparently for himself, because he started to work on it as soon as he handed the computer over.
Brady clicked, and tinny road sounds issued from the laptop. Owen stood and came around the table. He wasn’t under arrest, yet anyway, and he was curious. He’d heard the deputies talking about the footage, but he hadn’t seen it for himself.
Brady frowned at him but said nothing. Pornstache took a break from the coffee to say, “It starts thirty seconds before the sighting of the vehicle.”
And it did. Twenty-five seconds of gray footage showed Halverson cruising down a frozen highway to an oldies country soundtrack. Then, the lighting changed. The road ahead got a little brighter. Halverson’s voice, tinny and disembodied, asked, “What the hell?”
The road went on getting brighter, like a vehicle was approaching fast from behind, with their high beams on.
Then the view changed again. Light filled the other lane. A huge black SUV filled the screen, so close it almost clipped Halverson’s hood.
“Son of a bitch,” the sheriff said. Then a siren sounded.
The SUV jammed on its brakes, and Halverson’s vehicle swerved hard and fast to avoid it. The
flash of deploying airbags obscured the screen for half a moment.
When they vanished, the SUV had squealed to a halt too. Four men in ski masks poured out, all of them carrying guns. Halverson moaned groggily in the background.
“Son of a bitch,” Brady said.
“Was I right?” Owen asked, pretty sure that he knew the answer already.
But Brady didn’t reply. He went on watching. The tape rolled, and Owen watched as the four guys assessed the scene. They were looking for a way into the SUV without leaving prints in the snow. They talked about where to hit Halverson to make his death look natural.
Then they got to the part Owen knew: the part where he and Tanney showed up at the scene. Brady let it play until the black Cadillac sped off into the night.
“We already had cars on the way,” Pornstache explained.
Brady clicked and tapped and rewound the footage until right before the four men exited the black SUV. He played again, pausing and frowning and clenching and unclenching his jaw.
“Like I said,” Owen said, “Tanney and I aren’t the guys you’re looking for.”
Brady didn’t apologize or acknowledge he was wrong. He pointed out that he was just doing his job, and that he hadn’t accused anyone of anything.
“Didn’t you?”
“I was just asking questions. That’s my job.”
“You said that already.”
Brady cleared his throat. “This changes things. I’m going to need that footage, Richardson.”
“Of course. You think the guys who tried to hit Trey were the same guys who got Abbot, then?”
Brady nodded. “I do. I need my team to analyze it, but the clothes look identical. And the height and build could easily be a match.”
Owen snorted. It hadn’t been that long ago that Brady was saying the same thing about him and Tanney.
Brady ignored him. “We’ll need our tech guys to enlarge the shots, so we can make out detail and all. But I’ll bet anything they’re our guys.”
“Timeline would work out too,” Pornstache said. “They got your guy, and then came down here and got our guy.”
“Which means they’re already long gone,” Brady said.
Pornstache nodded grimly. “They know the area, that’s for sure. They knew how to get around all our roadblocks.”
“You don’t need to know the area for that,” Owen said. He wasn’t sure if they even remembered he was still there. “Your roadblocks were on the interstates and main highways, right?”
Pornstache nodded.
“Anyone with a phone and maps application can figure out how to get where they need to be without using the main roads. This isn't mountain country, or the desert. There’s main roads to side streets to back streets to gravel roads to old tracks to mud paths. And most of them are going to be on the map.”
“Not all of them will be plowed.”
“No, but one’s all they need.”
“Shit,” Brady said. “They could be in another state by now. Swap plates, maybe even swap vehicles.”
“The plates were a dead end, too,” Pornstache put in. “Registered to some ninety-something year old widower who lives in an assisted living facility.”
“And who knows how many sets of those they have. They probably swapped five times by now.”
“They’re long gone,” Pornstache concluded.
Owen was about to nod along, but then he froze. “Maybe not.”
Brady turned back to him, his bulldog jowls set in an annoyed scowl. “What?”
“They were here to kill Halverson, right?”
“Obviously.”
“But they didn’t. Tanney and I showed up before they could.”
“So?”
“So what if the reason your roadblocks were a bust had nothing to do with the bad guys cruising the outback looking for a way back to wherever the hell they came from? What if the state troopers didn’t catch them because they didn’t actually go anywhere? What if they’re somewhere in the area, lying low and biding their time?”
Halverson was in the passenger seat, lying to Deputy Murphy. Apparently, she couldn’t quite accept that the hospital let him out. Not with the welt on his forehead as swollen as it was.
He tried to shrug it off, which only made her more suspicious. Finally, she asked the question she’d clearly been thinking. “It wasn’t their idea, was it? It was yours.”
And then, mercifully, his phone rang. He answered it halfway through the first ring, eternally grateful to whatever guardian angel had intervened at exactly the right moment.
Murphy went on driving. He said cheerily, “Halverson here.”
The guardian angel turned out to be Richardson. “Sir,” he said, “did Murphy reach you yet?”
“She did.”
“Oh, good.”
Halverson wasn’t so sure about that. Not if she continued her current line of inquiry. But he said, “What’s going on?”
The other man blew out a sigh. It came across loud and windy. Then he said, “I don’t even know where to start.”
“At the beginning,” Halverson suggested, partly to be a smart ass, and partly because he hoped it would be a long story. Long enough for Murphy to forget to grill him when he got off the line, or at least exciting enough to distract her.
So Richardson did. He told him about Owen Day and William Tanney, and how they’d come in that morning to report seeing Sean Abbot shortly before his death. He told him about the detectives who came down, and the footage of the two guys in Abbot’s house – who matched two of the guys in his own dashcam footage.
Then he sprung the final piece. “Sir, we think they’re going to try another attack – against you.”
“Jesus, Richardson. Talk about burying the lede.”
Richardson stammered out an apology, along with, “You told me to start at the beginning.”
“Well, for future reference, tell me that kind of stuff first, okay?”
“Understood.”
Halverson shook his head. Murphy glanced over from behind the wheel, a question in her eyes. “You’re sure about that?” he asked.
“No,” Richardson admitted. “But the facts fit. It explains why none of the patrols saw the SUV, and why no one stopped it: it wasn’t going anywhere.”
“It was in the area all along,” he said.
“Exactly.”
Halverson considered for a long moment. Long enough for Richardson to ask, “You still on the line?”
“I’m here. Just thinking.”
“Ah.”
“I think I know why they killed Abbot, and why they tried to kill me.”
“Sir?”
“I need to talk to that detective. What did you say his name was?”
“Brady? Davis?”
“Either, or. Maybe both. Just get them on the line, pronto.”
Which Richardson did. Halverson led with questions. He wanted to know all the details about Sean Abbot’s death. The detectives didn’t seem to want to be forthcoming at first. Which, of course, is why he started by pumping them for info.
There was no way in hell he was going to give them what he knew only to have them ride off into the sunset without reciprocating.
He wanted to know how Abbot had died: bullet wound to the skull, in an apparent suicide.
That piqued his interest, and a whole new line of questions: Was there a note? Did he give a reason?
The detective called Brady answered that there was, on both counts. With a little prodding, he provided details. The note accompanied images of Abbot with underage girls. Brady made a point to emphasize that the authenticity of the images had yet to be verified.
Halverson didn’t doubt them, though. On the contrary, it explained a lot. It explained the investigation into Wynder. It explained how so much smoke had turned up no fire at all.
That, he kept to himself. He asked about the scene, and the video: a kind of nanny cam, installed to keep an eye on the grandkids as they played vid
eogames.
He asked about physical evidence: none, as far as their team had turned up yet. Tests pending on prints and fibers, of course; but no breakthroughs expected.
Then, the detectives wanted their own questions answered. What was Halverson’s theory? What possible link could there be?
By now, Murphy had them maybe half an hour out of town. “It’s a conversation that needs to happen in person,” Halverson said.
The pair protested, but he fully expected that. Hell, he would have, in their shoes. But he needed to think. Right now, he had an idea. An idea, but no proof. He had a series of deaths all connected to Reed Hill – Covington, Wynder, Abbot and very nearly himself.
He wasn’t going to make the mistake the journalist had, of opening his mouth before he could back his theory up. So he said instead, “Those plates you said came from a retiree’s Cadillac?”
“Yeah?”
“I need you to do something for me. Find out if that retiree has any relatives who work, or used to work, for Reed Hill Correctional Facility.”
Silence on the other end of the line. “Reed Hill?”
“You heard me. See if you can find out by time I get there.”
Chapter Forty
The deputies and detectives reunited Owen and Tanney before they called Halverson. Tanney wanted to get out of there. Owen said they should stick around.
“Jesus, Owen. We’re not prisoners. We can go when we want. And I haven’t eaten in hours. I’ve had one cup of coffee – and it was a pretty shitty cup of coffee at that. I’m starving.”
So Owen saw it the old man’s way. Tanney, he reasoned, probably shouldn’t be going without meals. Not at his age, and not after the night they’d had. Killers and assassinations probably didn’t do much for his blood pressure and whatever else. Going hungry would just make it worse.
So he let the woman at the front desk know they were heading out for a bite. “They’ve got my number,” he said. “They know how to contact me.”
She nodded and told them to have a good day. She looked about as exhausted as Owen felt. He supposed it had been a hell of a time for the entire department. It wasn’t every day your boss almost gets bumped off by a hit squad.