Dying For Revenge (The Lady Doc Murders Book 1)

by Barbara Golder

  I sighed. Nice try. What did I expect, someone strolling up in view of my camera, rifle in plain view? Besides, there was no assurance the killer had come up by the house, though it certainly seemed likely. I pushed away from my desk as the Kessler images came into view again.

  “Copy that off, too, Ben, would you, and take it over to Tom Patterson. It’s not much, but he might find something useful.”

  “Sure thing.” He slipped another disc in. I left him to his machinations and went to my study to call Eric Johanssen. He might just like another slam-dunk client to get off the hook, and Diego was a likely candidate.

  **********

  Tom Patterson replayed the file Ben Wallace had brought over for a second, then a third time. He recalled Ben’s story of how they had found it. Damn, he thought, that rascal is smart, smarter even than his mother, and that’s saying something. Ben said he’d delivered video to Grant Hudson, too, video that clearly corroborated Diego’s story. Push come to shove, Grant would be letting him go, probably in the morning. The marshall had called Patterson earlier, partly out of courtesy, partly to feed the law enforcement grapevine, and partly because his attempted murder case interfaced with the rape case Patterson was already working.

  In the meantime, though, Patterson knew Grant would have a run at trying to get something out of him that might give the court a better handle on the two other hoodlums they had arrested, and maybe that red-haired bastard that had raped that little Mexican girl. Patterson’s fist clenched involuntarily as the thought passed through his mind. He spent a lot of time with criminals, most of them petty in this county, thank God, but there was a special place in hell for rapists and child killers. Dale Cutter was a fine lawyer, and she’d use the information to the best advantage tomorrow in court. So, probably, would that mouthpiece Doc Wallace reportedly had hired for the Mexican. Patterson had no doubt that a duplicate file was on its way to Montrose even now. News travels fast in a small town, faster still now that people carried the internet in their pockets.

  She was an odd one, Doc Wallace. She came to town all alone and took up residence, knocking about that big old mansion all by herself, working day and night to convince the state to set her up as forensic guru of the Western Slope, which they had done with great joy once they figured out it wouldn’t cost them much. He was glad she had— she was first rate — but she’d remained apart from everything and everyone. Except maybe that priest. Word had it that she was the one that paid his salary. And now lately, she seemed to be running an illegal alien boarding house. It was out of character for her, he thought, but an improvement over that fervent isolation she had brought with her over a year ago. He’d never known anyone so distant, not a cop, not a coroner, not even a killer.

  Not even a killer, he reflected. Well, at least we know poor Diego isn’t a killer, he thought with satisfaction. That would cheer up the little Mexican girl that the other one had tried to murder, at Pelirojo’s behest, he was certain. Patterson himself would make a visit to Diego later this afternoon. He smiled with satisfaction. This time they might actually close the noose on old Pelirojo. It pleased him to no end to think so.

  He watched the video of people coming and going around Jane Wallace’s house the afternoon Kessler was killed. He called in the deputy who’d been there to work the crime scene to look at it with him one last time. Two sets of eyes were better than one. Besides, Jeff was known for his attention to detail. If there were something significant there, he would see it for sure. Patterson had learned in his almost too-many years of experience to supplement his own shortcomings with the strength of his staff. Not everyone did.

  Jeff brought the sheriff a soft drink — cold sugar and caffeine from the machine in the hall. Patterson liked his sodas like he did everything else: real and rich. He never understood the people who drank caffeine-free, diet sodas. What was the point? Chemicals and water. It was like walking though life half-asleep. For better or worse, Tom Patterson had his eyes open and his mind at the ready. He thought it made him a better cop, but he wasn’t entirely sure.

  “Take notes, Jeff—I want to talk to everyone you can identify that went up that road that day,” Patterson said. “If we can pull images off this, let’s make the rounds of the hotels and see whether we can identify the ones we don’t know, the tourists.”

  “Needle in a haystack, Tom,” Jeff said placidly. “We’ve already put out the word, and no one has come forward. If we noise it around that Doc Wallace has a video surveillance, someone’s likely to come forward, all right, but maybe just to file a nuisance suit, claim she hasn’t any right to film them. Personally, I wouldn’t think you would want to run the risk of putting a damper on things like this — too valuable.”

  Patterson sighed. Jeff was probably right. Patterson himself was as respectful of civil liberties as the next guy, but it sometimes got a little crazy here. Doc Wallace would win a suit if anyone brought one; at least he thought she would, but only after a fight. And she was an attractive target with all that money in the bank. Balance was everything. No need to poke that particular sleeping bear.

  “Fair enough. Let’s just see what we can find. If we identify anyone, you can tell them someone saw them going up the road that day.”

  White lies in the interests of justice were okay, even to his Baptist deacon daddy. It was only a small omission to leave out that the “someone” was really a tidy little digital camera in the service of a woman who didn’t even know she had owned it.

  The two of them watched the file in silence, two, three, then four times over, until they had compiled a reasonable list. It was surprising how many people they knew went up that way that particular day. Maybe it meant that Coronet Creek and Judd Weibe were really local favorites like the guidebooks said. Maybe it meant that Patterson’s directive to get to know as many of the residents as possible was bearing a little fruit. In any case, they had a list of five or six names.

  “None of these look like they’ll know much of anything,” Jeff remarked. “I already talked to that old lady, Mrs. Kovacs, and the girls she was with.”

  “Talk to them again. They might have remembered something.”

  Patterson forwarded the file to the spot that showed Kessler being shot. He was almost out of the frame. The camera caught the bottom half of Kessler’s dusty tunic. He had been looking over the creek from the empty parking space that Doc Wallace invariably used. He had walked back to the road, and the video caught the bottom half of his tunic.

  He could almost feel the bullets hit. There was a jerk to the rhythm of the flowing tunic, out of sync with the fluid motion of walking and the breath of the breeze against its folds, then Kessler staggered forward. He fell almost immediately, and the camera caught him reaching his hand out, grabbing some of the gravel in the drive in a fruitless effort to regain his feet or make his way to safety.

  “At least this time, Doc Wallace will be able to answer the question about time to death,” Jeff remarked.

  For reasons no cop ever really understood, the State attorney always wanted to know time of death, always asked how much the victim had suffered. It rankled Patterson. Was quick death somehow better? Was it less odious to smother a sleeping baby than to shoot a sentient man? Murder was murder and Tom Patterson had no use for it. The great measure of the pain lay not in the one who died, but in the ones left behind. That, he supposed, Jane Wallace could testify about with great authority.

  “Yeah. Suppose so.” Patterson flicked off the video. “Not much here, but I‘d better call Doc Wallace and thank her for sending it.”

  Jeff paused at the door. “Did you see the ballistics report? Two guns at least. Do you think this is a copycat?”

  Patterson’s temper flared. “Damn it, Jeff, I don’t know. Two guns. Two shooters? Two with the same agenda? I can’t connect the victims; I haven’t got a clue as to who did it. I have no idea why. Until I do, we are not releasing any more information to the press, we are not speculating, and we are working our
asses off to figure this thing out. The town is getting to be a ghost town. Anyone who can leave has. The ones who are left are jumpy as cats. And we are not, repeat not, buying into Wilson’s cockamamie theory that those accidents are part of this whole pattern. Bad enough people are worried about being out on the streets in town. If they think they aren’t even safe in their cars, we’re really going to have problems.”

  Jeff held up a hand and shook his head. “I’m not arguing with you, boss. Still, it seems odd, and Doc Wallace has pretty good instincts. I took a look at the stuff Ben put together and I’ve got to admit—it’s worrisome.”

  Patterson remembered the spreadsheet the red-headed Wallace kid had left with the disc. It troubled him, too, and the pattern fit. Even he wanted desperately for them to be accidents. The cop in him knew there had to be a reason. These killings weren’t just random no matter how much he tried to convince himself. Still, with a County Commission to answer to and a Visitors’ Bureau that took a dim view of doing anything to upset the tourism apple-cart at the same time they were screaming for him to protect the public, he was loathe to move ahead until he was sure, and not only was he not sure, he didn’t have a clue. It nagged at him that being sure might mean that there was another body in Doc Wallace’s morgue. Then again, with nothing to go on, how could he do anything but raise blood pressures? If God himself told him to go out and prevent the next murder, he wouldn’t know where to start.

  “Get the hell out of here and get started on those interviews,” he growled, angry at his own impotence.

  Jeff cocked an eyebrow and backed out of the door, closing it softly. Tom Patterson reloaded the file for the umpteenth time. Maybe there was something he missed.

  **********

  The deputy on the other side of the door leaned against the wall, with a worried look on his face. Patterson was still looking at the tape for something he missed. Jeff was trying to forget something he had seen and wished he hadn’t. On the edge of the screen, among the parade of people going past Jane Wallace’s house, there was a familiar cowboy boot, one with an artful metal tip. Tom Patterson’s boot. What had he been doing on the road to the trailhead that afternoon?

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  JUNE 15

  “The slugs are all .22s,” I told Tom as I pushed the reports across the desk at him. “And both the one from Kessler and the one from the Hummer match the gun Ivanka Kovacs brought down. The others are different. Same caliber, same class, but not the same gun. Two guns. Two shooters. I think we’ve got a tag team here, Tom. Two killers with the same agenda but two guns.”

  Tom looked thoughtful, but I knew he wasn’t really reading the reports I had given him. He was trying to find a way around the data, something that would spare him standing up in front of a camera and admitting we had not one, but two, certifiable crazies in town, picking off the hapless and, until recently, unarmed residents of Telluride.

  Finally he grunted in agreement. “All right, you’ve convinced me.” Then, as an afterthought, he added a hearty, “Damn! Though I suppose it’s better than having a lunatic and a copycat. At least a tag team ought to have the same motive, similar history. Find one, we’ll find the other. Maybe...”

  “Look at this.” I pointed to the timeline Ben had prepared, the one sitting on top of the spreadsheet that had started this whole thing with his analysis of the demographics of death in Telluride. “First trusty death was the explosion, isolated up on Silver Pick. Nobody around. One on the jeep trail to Bridal Veil Falls a week later. The next two on the road into town, there at that high curve above the river. Then Town Park, the Ophir Wall and Aspen Street. Then my back yard. The killers are getting gutsier. And it seems they have to know their victims for all of them to be so wealthy. So what’s the connection?”

  Patterson sighed and held up a hand. “Stop, stop!” He tossed the spreadsheet aside in disgust at the situation, not at himself or me, and certainly not at Ben. “Nothing holds these cases together, at least nothing I can see.”

  “Ben couldn’t find anything either, other than the fact that these people were all rich kids who relocated here from somewhere else.”

  “So has most of Telluride. You can’t swing a dead cat in this town without hitting a trust funder.”

  “Two killings, in cars, on the road into town. I wonder if that means something?”

  “Of course, it does. We just don’t know what.” Tom leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head, looking up at the ceiling. “The murders started in the spring. Maybe they’re linked to something else that happened in the spring.”

  “Like what?”

  The legs of Patterson’s chair sounded sharply against the tile floor of the office as he brought himself upright again.

  “If I knew that, I’d have this solved. Why don’t you set that boy of yours on that one?”

  He sounded irritated, and I responded in kind.

  “No need to be pissy, Tom. If it weren’t for Ben, neither one of us would have connected the dots on this. Not all of the dots, anyway.”

  There was a short silence, then Tom spoke again. “I suppose so. Even so, he’s probably got the best shot of all of us at figuring out who is responsible. Turn him loose, please.”

  “I couldn’t stop him if I tried, Tom. He’s run a bunch of different analyses, but so far nothing other than the trust fund connection. Of course, there’s nothing much to cross analyze either. Ben can’t even figure out how the victims were chosen.”

  “Maybe they’re random, then, after all.”

  I didn’t like that idea. It was hard enough to figure out connections when they were predictable at some level. Random murders were much harder.

  “I don’t think so, Tom. This is a killer with an agenda. There’s always a connection. It looks like someone has a real grudge against trust fund babies. The question is why, and how did the killer find out the victims were trust funders, and how did he know where and when to kill them?”

  “You got me. Have Ben keep working on it. Maybe if he and Jeff work on it together they’ll come up with something.”

  I knew Jeff was the sheriff’s right hand tech man. He and Ben spent a lot of time over coffee talking about the latest in computer advances. I had listened a couple of times. It made my head spin.

  “I will. I don’t need to, but I will.” I started out of the office, then paused at the door to look back at Patterson. “Where are you on the Houston murder?”

  Our celebrity killing had gotten lost amid the rest of the mayhem my office was handling, and I hadn’t touched base with Patterson since the day of the arraignment.

  Patterson scowled and tossed the morning paper at me. Wilson had been hard at it again.

  “Turns out Houston was a trust fund kid, too. His old man is some sort of genius engineer with a boatload of patents. It is the considered opinion of the local press that Houston’s murder fits in this series, too, so now all of Mountain Village is in an uproar. Never mind the fact that Houston was shot in the comfort of his own home, at close range and with a different caliber gun.”

  He pounded the edge of his desk with his fist in frustration. His foam coffee cup teetered from the impact, and he caught it just as it went over, sending a brown spray across the papers on his desk. He swore under his breath as he grabbed from the waste-basket at the side of his desk.

  I said nothing as I watched him mop up the spreading coffee. I’m used to dealing with death, even with murder. It’s part and parcel of my work. I am not used to hitting a brick wall in putting the pieces of a murder together.

  “The heat’s got to be on you, Tom. How is it that you’ve managed to keep any kind of lid on this, especially with Wilson at work?”

  “I’ve called in every chit I’ve got. The governor’s been on the phone to me twice this week already, wanting to set up some sort of task force, send in National Guard to protect the town. I managed to talk him out of it, for now at least. That’s all we need to really set off a full-scale
panic, especially since about half the town thinks the murderer has to be some sort of deranged veteran.” He paused. “Veterans, I guess, in light of the ballistics. Whoever it is, is one helluva marksman. I’m not sure I could make those shots myself.”

  He made one last pass with the napkin and pointed to a report, now half-brown with stain.

  I leaned over the desk, looking at Ben’s summary of the range data. The longest shot was the one in Ophir, nearly a hundred yards. Town Park was a little less, about eighty yards. There was no guess at the range on the shot that killed Cosette Anira and no idea where the shot had come from. The dense clump of trees that had almost certainly concealed Paul Kessler’s killer was only about 50 yards from where the blood spatter indicated he had been hit.

  “Good distance,” I agreed. “But how in the world does this guy get around town with a rifle, shoot people in the middle of the day and never get caught?”

  Tom Patterson’s voice was glum, but his answer was as good as any I had.

  “Ghost, maybe?”

  **********

  Pete Wilson sat back in his chair and looked at his computer screen, satisfied. It was a good try and who knows, in this day and age, it might get him some notice. He had no real desire to go back to living in the city; life in this little Colorado town was sweet. The work wasn’t hard, the people were pleasant and he was something of a celebrity in his own right. Still, he had that urge to be noticed and to shake things up by his own might. That was hard in a town full of celebrities. The local newspaperman was just one more transplanted local among others, part of the great unwashed.

  This story might change all that. The town was stewing in its own fear, thanks, he liked to think, in part to his reporting of the murders. Hell, a couple of homicides a day wasn’t all that unusual in the Chicago beat, but how rapidly murder and chaos had descended into Telluride stunned even him. People were afraid, afraid in a way that the rich and protected rarely are. They paid good money to be kept safe from predators, and here, in the backwash of a box canyon in Colorado, one had them trapped.