by Rachel Ford
The human body is about sixty percent water, so it made sense that the effect was the same. But it’s an unmistakable sound.
And Owen heard it, more than once, amid all the other chaos.
Ted Walters heard the conversation. The guy at the wheel muted his line between most of the responses, but he kept it playing on speaker.
Ted wasn’t sure what kind of guy would be fastidious about laws regulating cellphone use behind the wheel, but not kidnapping. Whatever kind of guy it was, he’d found one.
So he heard Owen declare a change of plans, loud and clear. He saw the vehicle brake and swerve. So did the guy with the gun watching them. He glanced away for a brief moment, toward the road.
Then came the collision. The whole world seemed to be blowing up around him. Metal screamed and groaned. Glass broke and splintered. The vehicle lurched and started to spin.
Ted didn’t mean to close his eyes or scream. It just happened – some kind of involuntary reaction, like when the doctor taps your knee and it kicks out: A body working under its own forces. The equal and opposite reaction to every action.
Ted was still screaming when he opened his eyes again. His mind raced to process the new visuals before him. Because they were new. Everything seemed to have shifted.
Tanney wasn’t in his seat next to Ted anymore. Tanney had somehow wound up across the seat in front of them, with the guy with the gun. And he looked like some kind of demon. His eyes blazed and his fists swung.
The guy with the gun looked dazed. Blood trickled from his face in multiple places – trickled and gushed. Maybe he’d hit his head when the vehicle swerved.
Then again, Tanney’s knuckles were bloody too. So maybe it wasn’t that the guy hit his head, but that Tanney hit the guy’s head.
Then Tanney grabbed the guy’s skull and smashed it into the window. Things crunched and snapped inside the guy’s body. His head lolled to the side, at an angle that didn’t look quite right.
Another guy, meanwhile, was turning around at the sounds. He was in one of the back seats. He saw Tanney, and his eyes bulged, and he started moving his own gun.
Ted watched, but he didn’t try to help. His legs didn’t seem capable of it, and the truth was, he didn’t know who to help. These guys took him at gunpoint. Tanney and Day murdered Rick and Marsha. There were no good guys in the picture.
Then good sense kicked in, and he realized that he had an opportunity that might not present itself again. They were all distracted, all trying to kill each other. He could run, and let them figure out their own turf war, or whatever the hell it was.
Ted started to rise. Then, he froze.
The guy with the gun had spotted his movement. He swung the barrel a few degrees, until it was aimed right at Ted’s chest.
Then, the guy with the gun’s face exploded.
Halverson sent three follow up messages. They were innocuous enough, just in case someone had taken Owen Day’s phone.
Call me.
Need to talk.
Call me ASAP.
Unambiguous to Owen, but lacking details that might give him away to a captor.
No call came, though, and no more text messages either. Which didn’t surprise Halverson. He figured Owen was otherwise occupied.
He’d been barking orders ever since the message came in. He had deputies from all over converging on the property on Red Lake Road. He got into his usual cruiser, and the two detectives followed.
Which was alright with him. He wasn’t about to argue jurisdiction now. And more manpower and firepower seemed like a better idea than less.
Six vehicles screamed out of the parking lot in total: Halverson, Richardson, Murphy and Callaghan; and Davis and Brady.
Six vehicles screamed up the central drag, sirens and lights blaring and blazing, and out onto the road beyond.
Chapter Forty-Four
Owen’s airbags didn’t deploy, but the other guy’s did. It had something to do with speed and area of impact and all that, he knew. But the salient point to him was that he had a split-second extra, and the other guy didn’t.
The Range Rover had ended up in about the same situation as Sheriff Halverson’s vehicle the night before: nose lodged in a snowbank, backside resting on the road.
Owen figured a Range Rover would have an easier time of getting out of the snowbank. But he didn’t mean for that to happen.
Which is where the airbags did him a major favor – both because they give him time to act that the other guy didn’t have, and because it was standard protocol for doors to unlock when airbags deployed.
Owen leaped out of his vehicle and ran to the Range Rover. The door opened when he pulled the handle.
The driver had just unbuckled his seatbelt. He hadn’t gotten any further than that. He looked up, surprise and anger in his face.
But he didn’t stay passive for long. Owen grabbed for the gun in his chest holster. The guy reacted immediately. He reached for the gun himself, and swung at Owen with the other hand – an awkward, lefthanded blow. But it wasn’t meant to inflict damage. It was just meant to drive his opponent back, to make him flinch long enough to get the gun.
Owen didn’t flinch. He absorbed the hit, taking it on the jaw. It hurt, and it would probably turn into a bruise; but it didn’t break anything. He kept grabbing for the gun, and his fingers found purchase just as the other guy’s beefy hand reached the holster.
They grappled and pulled. The guy tried to twist away, out of Owen’s range. Owen seized him by the coat and hauled him out of his seat. The guy whipped his head forward.
Owen planted his knee in the guy’s groin, just as the guy’s forehead crashed into his own. His head swam, and he staggered a half step.
The guy groaned and staggered backward. Owen held onto the gun. So did he.
Somewhere behind them, a third shot sounded. Owen punched, hard and fast. He didn’t have a particular target. He couldn’t see straight yet. He just aimed for the general area of the guy’s face and throat, over and over.
His knuckles met flesh, over and over.
The guy hit back, but not as often, and not as hard. Maybe the crash had stunned him. Maybe the groin jab had done him in. Whatever it was, his face looked like a bloody pulp by time Owen managed to wrestle the gun from him.
He stared vacantly at the barrel, and then slumped down against the side of the vehicle. Dead, maybe, or beaten to within an inch of death.
Owen didn’t know. He staggered back toward the vehicle. He could hear voices. He wanted to believe they were Tanney’s and Ted’s, but that seemed unlikely. It seemed like too much to hope for.
He held the gun out in front of him, not quite straight but as straight as he could manage and pulled open one of the rear doors.
He found himself staring into the business end of a 9mm handgun – with Tanney’s face behind it. The face cycled through a series of emotions: surprise, annoyance, and then amusement. The gun came down.
“Son of a bitch,” Tanney said. “You made it.”
Owen glanced back at the vehicle. He saw three bodies slumped in seats, and Ted Walters hovering hesitantly in the rear. “What the hell happened?”
Tanney shrugged. “I got lucky. You hit the vehicle, the guy guarding us almost lost his gun – I swooped in and picked it up.”
Halverson and his caravan screamed onto the scene about two minutes later. They found three dead guys, and one living one. He wasn’t going to win any beauty contest anytime soon. That was for damned sure. Not after Day had gone to work on his face.
But he’d live.
The vehicle itself was a treasure trove of information. There were cellphones and call logs, and a whole arsenal of weapons in the back. There’d be GPS readings, too, to tell them where the vehicle had come from.
And there were ID’s on the dead guys, and an ID on the living guy. His name was David Walker. And Mr. Walker and his dead friends were all employed by Reed Correctional Services. The case was coming together.
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There’d be work to do, of course. Halverson suspected this went all the way to the top, to Roy Reed himself. But he’d need to be able to prove that. If they could turn Walker, it would go a long way to securing the convictions they needed.
But, of course, he didn’t need to worry about turning him. Not as soon as the FBI got a whiff of this. They’d swoop in and take the case away from him – away from him, and away from Davis and Brady too.
Either way, the bad guys would be brought down. That was clear.
What was less clear was how the hell Owen Day, Ted Walters and William Tanney factored in – much less, how they’d survived.
It took some serious interrogation to establish Ted’s part. But in the end, he admitted to maybe checking out Owen Day’s vehicle, and maybe looking like he was thinking about breaking in. He insisted that he hadn’t intended to do anything of the kind. It was the sort of thing, though, where someone might have got the wrong idea.
As for Tanney and Day, well, their story seemed somehow stranger yet, except that he knew just how big of pains in the ass they really were. They had stumbled into the Reed Hill boys’ crosshairs, through their haphazard so-called investigation.
Just like they’d come for Halverson himself when he questioned Abbot, the Reed Hill team came for Tanney and Day next.
The fact that the pair had survived – them and Ted Walters – proved that God must have a soft spot for fools and jesters. There seemed to be no other explanation.
But Halverson was alright with it. They were fools, but they’d been useful fools. They’d helped him crack the case of a career. And – through some miracle – they’d lived.
Chapter Forty-Five
Owen’s thoughts turned in a different direction. He’d answered questions for hours and put up with well-meaning but aggravating attentions from paramedics. He’d refused emergency treatment. He had a headache, that was it.
And anyway, his mind was too busy to be bothered with that. He was thinking about the case, and his theory from earlier.
He knew the attempt on his and Tanney’s life got back to Reed Hill. He knew the attempt the night before on Halverson came back to Reed Hill, and the assassination of AG Sean Abbot. And he felt that Marsha and Rick Wynder’s death did too.
But not in the same way. Something was wrong there. It didn’t fit the pattern.
If someone had sent a team to clean up the Wynder’s, they wouldn’t have done them one at a time. Why wait? Why increase the risk of being spotted?
And if someone had sent a cleanup crew like the one that had taken out Abbot, they’d have done it differently. They’d been very particular about making Halverson’s death look like an accident. They could have shot him and fled, long before Owen showed up.
But they hadn’t. They’d tried to stage an accident. That’s what got them caught.
The same way they’d been caught with Sean Abbot. They hadn’t left a home invasion scene for the cops. They’d left a suicide, or tried to anyway.
So why blow Rick and Marsha’s heads off, days apart? Why not set up a murder suicide – a husband who offs his wife and then himself, or a wife who offs hubby, and then herself? Why create not one, but two unsolved homicides? Why invite the cops into the picture?
The answer was so simple, so obvious, it was almost laughable. Because they were different killers. He’d already theorized that Rick’s killer had been different than Marsha’s.
He hadn’t been looking for yet another set of killers. But that was the answer, wasn’t it?
Someone had killed Rick, and someone else had killed Marsha, and yet others had killed Sean Abbot. Three separate players, with three separate motivations. All of them tied to Reed Hill in their own way. But all of them different.
Abbot had been cleaned up by the Reed Hill team, the way they’d tried to clean up Halverson and Owen himself. Why?
In his own case and Halverson’s, it was obvious: he’d talked to Sean Abbot.
So what was it about Sean Abbot that made talking to him a death sentence offense? What did he know that made him so dangerous?
And why now? The Wynder investigation happened years ago. It seemed clear, now, that Abbot’s inability to find anything on the judge wasn’t as legitimate as he made out. Maybe he’d accepted a bribe. Maybe Reed Hill’s people had something on him.
But either way, Reed Hill had got Sean Abbot to play ball years ago. Abbot had left politics since, just like Wynder had retired. So he was no threat to anyone.
Or was he? There was only one death in all of this that had no direct connection to Reed Hill. That was Marsha Wynder. Someone had murdered her in her own home. But not because of what she knew, or what she’d done, or what she might have found out from asking the wrong question.
They’d killed her to steal a laptop from the premises, and something from a desk drawer in Rick Wynder’s private office.
Sean Abbot had killed her to take a laptop, because that laptop contained something – some kind of dirt or leverage that Rick Wynder had used during the Reed Hill investigation. Something he’d used to convince Abbot to find nothing.
Maybe the same pictures the cops had found by Abbot’s body; maybe something else entirely. But whatever, someone had offed Rick Wynder, and then Sean Abbot had sensed his opportunity to get back the leverage Wynder had on him.
Maybe killing the widow had been part of the plan all along. Maybe Marsha had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Either way, Abbot killed her.
And then, when Halverson and Owen himself started sniffing around, Abbot’s handlers in Reed Hill decided he was a liability. It was time to cut their losses.
And why not? Sean Abbot was retired. He had nothing left to offer them. Nothing but risk.
So Abbot kills the widow, and Reed Hill kills Abbot, and tries to kill Halverson and Tanney and me. Which left just one question: who killed Rick Wynder?
Owen thought he knew, but he didn’t say anything. Not to Halverson or the detectives. Not to Tanney on the way back, as they limped along to the hotel in Owen’s battered SUV. He was quiet the whole trip.
The same could not be said for Tanney. The old man was a nonstop chatterbox. He couldn’t believe they’d made it through that. He thought for sure they were goners. My God, Owen should have seen Ted Walters’s face: the guy almost pissed himself.
And so on and so forth.
They were pulling into the parking lot when Tanney glanced over. “You okay, Owen?”
He nodded. “Fine.”
“Maybe you should have taken that ambulance ride. You did hit your head pretty hard.”
“No. I think I’m thinking clearly for the first time in weeks.”
Tanney didn’t say anything to that. They pulled into a spot near the door, and Owen killed the engine. They sat in silence for a moment.
Then Tanney said, “Well, you going in?”
Owen nodded and followed the old man back to the hotel. He was walking stiffly and slowly, like the long, perilous day had finally caught up to him.
“My daughter’s going to hit the roof when she hears about this. I don’t suppose there’s any way to keep my name out of it. It’ll be in the papers soon enough.”
“I guess,” Owen said.
The kid at the desk nodded at them. Owen nodded back.
Tanney went on, “Wesley’s going to have a conniption fit. As for Mike – well, that’s the only good thing about having an irresponsible kid, I guess. They don’t give a shit what you do.”
Owen said nothing.
Tanney looked him up and down. “You sure you didn’t whack your noggin, Owen?”
“I’m sure.”
“Then what’s wrong?”
“I’m thinking about the first killing. Rick Wynder.”
“What about it?”
“Well, who did it?”
“That’s obvious, isn’t it? Whoever’s calling the shots at Reed Hill. That Reed guy. Roger or Roy or whatever his name is.”
“That’s what Halverson thinks,” Owen said.
Tanney frowned at him. “But you don’t?”
“Do you?”
Tanney considered, then shrugged and turned toward the main hallway. “Come on,” he said. “You’ve got another theory. I can see it in your eyes. But I need to sit down. Then you can tell me all about it.”
Owen followed him through the lobby and down the hall. They stopped outside room 110, and Tanney fiddled with his keycard for a moment. Then the door beeped quietly, and he turned the handle.
Tanney gestured to the armchair. “Take a seat,” he said. Owen sat, and the old man fumbled with his coat and scarf. “Tell me about it. What’s your idea? If it wasn’t the Reed Hill boys, who the hell was it?”
“That’s easy,” Owen said.
“Is it?”
“The Midwest Interstate Killer.”
Tanney groaned. “My God, you don’t give an idea up, do you?”
“Not when I’m right.”
Tanney slung the coat over a hanger. “Alright. So this interstate killer: why’d did he go after Wynder? You think he was part of the whole conspiracy?”
Owen smiled. “No. To be honest, I think he’s as surprised as I was. He was taking one guy out, and it just spiraled out of control after that.”
“Why Wynder, though?”
“Same reason he got Cooper, and Danielson, and Koehler. Same reason he got Shaw and Khang and Manilow. Same reason he got all of ‘em.”
“Which is?”
Owen shrugged and watched the old man. He was winding his scarf around the neck of the hanger, neatly and methodically. “They did something they shouldn’t have and got away with it. Cooper – he was a rapist, and a killer. Koehler – the perfect widow – bumped her husband off. Danielson – well, I don’t know. He worked with kids, right? So was he a pedophile?”
Tanney glanced up and shrugged. “How the hell should I know?”
“Because you shot them. Didn’t you?”
Tanney froze for a fraction of a second. Then, he laughed out loud. “My God, you really did hit your head Owen. Me, a killer?” He turned back to the wardrobe with the hanger.