Fifteen Coffins

by Tony J. Forder

  Fifty-Three

  Grateful for the lack of incline on the uneven terrain, Sydney rushed headlong through the wood, ducking and weaving between the outstretched branches of closely knit trees. Some she had to push back by leaning into them, ignoring the scratches they left behind. She knew the area well, and as if seeing it from above she considered the direction in which Hank was most likely to run.

  To her left lay an upscale trailer park. In its favour was the potential for hiding places, or even the possibility of jacking a car or truck to make good his escape. On the flip side, homes and vehicles meant people, any of whom might decide to play hero for the day. Ahead lay a much denser wooded area, which eventually gave way to a vast expanse of open land leading into the outskirts of Columbia. Being the outdoorsman that he was, Hank would back himself in the woods. He’d put distance between them initially, then hunker down and listen, reacting to the sound of her approach by either moving further away or using practiced stealth to position himself ready to spring a surprise attack.

  Sydney slowed, but continued moving straight ahead, holding the rifle facing forward, flashlight clasped along its barrel to light the way. Anticipating anything and everything, she picked her way through the woodland with care, yet also with grim determination and laser focus. The man who murdered her father was not about to get clean away. She would not allow that to happen.

  Then something forced her to stop. She’d had the foresight to switch her cell to vibrate rather than ring if called or when receiving an incoming message, and now it shifted around in the pocket of her shorts. She paused to read the text that had come in. It was from Benton.

  Where RU? Wait for me.

  Sydney thought about it for a second or two. If she had read Hank correctly, he was somewhere in the woods ahead of her. If she hadn’t…

  Her reply to Benton read: In woods. U head to trailer park.

  Almost immediately the cell vibrated in her hands.

  No! Wait for me!

  This time she decided to ignore the message. As annoyed as he would be with her, Benton would do the right thing as he always did. He’d rant and fume and fill his head with dark thoughts and cross words, but he would also see the sense in what she had suggested. Why have them both scouring one area when between them they could each cover the only two logical destinations?

  Pressing on, Sydney looked as far ahead as she could see whilst still retaining a peripheral view. The old adage about not seeing the wood for the trees came back to her, and she didn’t want to miss the obvious. Hank might have already decided to secrete himself, finding shelter in the undergrowth, or behind the sturdy trunk of a tree. Blood rushing in her ears sounded implausibly loud, drowning out any possibility of her hearing a rustle of leaves or the snap of a dry twig. Her senses limited, she moved more slowly but still with conviction in her heart. Hank was improvising, and out here he was better at that than she was, but he lacked her determination not to allow him to escape, and Sydney believed that more than made up for any combat deficiencies.

  Fifty paces further in, with the army of trees barring her way growing in terms of both volume and circumference, Sydney heard the movement a fraction before she saw it. But by then it was too late to react. The lower branch of a tree snapped as it whipped through the air and struck her full in the face. Despite her momentum, the blow sent her crashing backwards onto the rutted woodland soil, driving the air from her lungs. She landed heavily and the back of her head bounced off the unyielding ground. Breathless, she found no cry for help, only a desperate wheeze as pain began to thunder through her body.

  Together with the rifle, the flashlight had also spilled from her grasp as she took off through the air. It lay on the ground with its beam pointing away, affording only a meagre splash of light somewhere close by her legs. As her fearful gaze travelled up, she first saw Hank’s boots, and as her gaze shifted higher her eyes focussed on Deputy Solomon’s gun pointing right at her.

  ‘You guessed right,’ Hank said in a voice laced with both admiration and regret. ‘I hope you sent the sheriff off in the other direction, because I really don’t want to shoot him.’

  ‘Just… just like you… don’t w… want to shoot me, right?’ Sydney managed to gasp, easing up onto her elbows. She raised her eyebrows as she stared pointedly at his firearm, having already seen the Remington lying more than a yard away and out of easy reach.

  ‘I’ve got my gun on you because I didn’t want you wasting time scrabbling around on the floor for your own weapon. I need you to listen to what I have to say, and to do that I need to maintain control of the situation.’

  ‘Go ahead and… say what you… what you have to say. Nothing I hear will change my mind… about you.’

  ‘I don’t expect it to, Sydney. I owned up and now I’m through talking about what I’ve done. I want to offer you one final opportunity to quit. You pick yourself up and head back the way you came, tell your friend Benton you saw me running off in the opposite direction. You do that, I’ll make my way out of here and you’ll never have to see me again.’

  ‘Go to hell.’

  Hank closed his eyes. Sydney was tempted to make a dive for her weapon, but she hadn’t yet tested either her bones or muscles since being downed by the hefty branch, and she didn’t know if she could move at all, let alone rapidly enough to get the drop on him.

  Instead she waited him out, and when he looked her way once more she said, ‘You’re going to have to put your theory to the test.’

  ‘And what theory is that?’

  ‘You said you were more likely to put that gun of yours to your own head than you would mine. So, do one or the other, because in thirty seconds I’m going to slide over to that rifle, and if you haven’t killed me by the time I reach it, I’m going to aim it your way and shoot you in the face.’

  His face crumpled. Sydney thought she detected tears glistening on his eyelashes, but the glow from the flashlight barely reached him so she couldn’t be certain. ‘Don’t make me choose, Sydney,’ he implored her. ‘Please, don’t make me do that.’

  ‘You want me to apologise for putting you in an awkward fix, Hank? You honestly think I give a damn about you or how you feel?’

  ‘You did once.’

  ‘And look at how you trampled all over that.’

  ‘What I did to your daddy almost broke me, and I can’t bear the thought of doing the same thing to you. Just please don’t put me to the test, Sydney. I honestly don’t know how I’ll react if you do.’

  ‘Fifteen seconds. That’s all you have to decide.’

  ‘Let me tell you something, and then perhaps you’ll change your mind.’

  ‘I’m never going to do that,’ Sydney said. ‘But you go ahead and tell me if you like. It’s your time you’re wasting.’

  ‘I can give you Chauncey Jubb and Chase Ebben.’

  ‘Give me them how?’

  ‘Your daddy kept a key to my place. On a hook by the sink. Take it, use it, you’ll find a floor safe in the closet in my bedroom. Combination is 0-1-2-5-9-8. That’s the date the Broncos won their first Superbowl. In the safe you’ll find recordings and video files on a flash drive. See, Chubb used me as his bug man, to both set them and sweep for them. But I thought I might need some insurance one day. Either that or a way to buy my way out. I got pretty much every sordid detail, every awful thing the mayor ordered. Him, Ebben, few others, including Andy Weekes. I got them talking about drugs, about leaning on people, even hits. In the hands of a good prosecutor, it’s more than enough to put them all away. Oh, and one more thing. Might not be enough to prove he did it, but I was following Ebben and I got film of him entering and leaving the home of Mr and Mrs Kasper on the night they were both murdered.’

  Sydney swallowed hard. Evidence like that was hard to convict on without context, but the suspicion alone would ruin everyone involved, and arrests would undoubtedly follow. None of them were going to get away with what they had done. It was more than she could have ho
ped for, but it didn’t let Hank off the hook.

  ‘You expect me to thank you?’ she asked him.

  ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘But I’m hoping it buys me a break. A head start at least.’

  ‘It buys you nothing,’ Sydney spat out, flecks flying from her mouth. She felt a resurgence of anger. ‘You really think I’d just let you walk away, Hank? You murdered my daddy. Nothing you could ever say or do can ever make up for that. Nothing.’

  He looked up in the air as if searching for guidance. He held his gaze upright for several beats. ‘Sydney… I’m begging you.’

  ‘Hank,’ she said in a flat monotone. When his eyes flickered towards her in anticipation, she continued with two words, softly and deliberately spoken: ‘Screw. You.’

  Sydney rolled over to her left-hand side and leaned across, stretching out her right hand. Her fingers brushed up against the plastic casing and hard steel sections of the Remington. Clawing wildly, she hooked into the trigger guard and eased her arm back, dragging the rifle with it. Her hand folded around the weapon and she lifted it off the ground, bringing it around to grip more steadily with both hands. With each additional movement she became more convinced that she would feel the punch of bullets from Hank’s gun thumping into her body and ending her life. She carried on regardless, until she was staring down the barrel at him.

  ‘You got one in the chamber?’ he asked her.

  She nodded. ‘Always.’

  Hank smiled at her one last time as he aimed his gun.

  They both fired simultaneously.

  Fifty-Four

  Sydney slept long into the afternoon; by far the best and longest period of uninterrupted sleep she’d enjoyed in a month or more. She awoke to a tumult of aches and pains resulting from being struck by the tree branch. There were nine messages on the house phone, whose ringer she had switched off, and more listed on her cell.

  Warren East, her FBI partner, had called and left his best wishes, cackling with laughter at her having given the agency a bloody nose. He apologised for not having been in touch before, explaining that he and his fellow agents had been warned off, their careers on the line if they ignored those orders. Sydney needed no time to realise that, had the roles been reversed, she would have contacted him despite the warning. That alone told her where their respective feelings for each other stood.

  Three of the voicemails left on Sydney’s cellphone were from her ASAC. The first was a message of congratulations without much inflection or emotion, but with a request to call him as soon as possible. The third was a curt directive instructing her to do so. SAC Doman from the Sacramento field office politely informed her that they needed to talk. One of the remaining messages had been left by the Office of Professional Responsibility. She now understood why her own boss wanted to speak with her so urgently. She was being thrown under the bus, and for a brief moment she wondered why that didn’t hurt more.

  Another message left Sydney sitting at the dining room table wearing a broad smile, a warm sensation settling in her stomach.

  ‘Hello, Sydney. This is Dexter. Sheriff Lowe came to see me a short while ago. We had a long talk. I don’t know what to say to you, other than first to mention once again how sorry I am for your own loss, and secondly to reiterate that I’ll never be able to thank you enough for what you’ve done for me. I don’t imagine there will ever be a time when the loss of Kevin won’t hurt me deep inside, but at least now he will not be hated and vilified by the town he loved living in so much. At last people will know the truth about him. My boy can rest in peace after all because of you. Thank you for that, Sydney. And God bless you.’

  Her smile fell away as swiftly as it had appeared. Do people know the truth even now? she asked herself. Will they ever? The question brought to mind Jordan, and how she had kept him in the dark. Sydney decided to put that right immediately. She called and laid it all out for him, step by step, omitting nothing relevant. It came as no surprise that his first thoughts were for her and how she had coped, rather than flaring up and angrily demanding to know why he was only just learning about everything she had endured.

  ‘How’s everybody dealing with it?’ he asked, after seeking confirmation that she was unharmed and no longer in any danger.

  ‘It’ll take time for events to filter through,’ she replied. ‘But people here will soon learn that Kevin Muller did not murder fourteen fellow students as most of them have believed for the past two months. My guess is, if Dexter decides to hang around, they’ll embrace the man with open arms and welcome him back into their fold once more. Whether he accepts their apologies is entirely up to him, but from what I’ve seen the man has that kind of charity in his heart.’

  ‘What about the other side of the coin? I mean, those who were responsible for what happened.’

  ‘I imagine there will be uproar when people learn how Michael Copping and his gun-loving friends were using many young locals to help run a drug manufacturing and dealing operation. Chris Tabbert will spend the rest of his life behind bars, and I don’t think his father will ever return to Moon Falls after whatever time he does in prison. I’m sure Benton will have the media all over that as soon as he and his colleagues have brought all relevant charges and due process has been followed. Dexter Muller will have his say in that as well, and rightly so.’

  ‘I can’t believe you exposed all this, Syd.’ Jordan sounded proud of her, but also a little hesitant. Sydney discovered why when he spoke again. ‘But if I’m hearing you correctly, you’re saying you believe the people ultimately responsible have yet to be arrested.’

  ‘Yeah. Chauncey Jubb, and his hatchet man, Chase Ebben. But their time has come. Hank provided us with plenty of ammunition to use against them. Ben collected it all together in the early hours of the morning, and both he and Isaac are working with the Assistant District Attorney to figure out which charges to put up in the warrants for their arrest. Both of them will be picked up today.’

  ‘You actually believe they ran the entire operation?’

  ‘According to Ben, there’s more than enough on the recordings Hank had to incriminate a whole bunch of people we’d never have reached otherwise. And, yeah, it’s looking as if Jubb not only knew but also had a finger in the pie. Same goes for Ebben, who is also implicated in the murder of Sonia and Gerry Kasper.’

  Sydney nodded to herself as she spoke. Obtaining sufficient evidence against them was going to be a long, hard road to follow, and it would be a lengthy case and eventual trial, but Benton believed the recordings were enough to ensure nobody was released on bail, so they would all find themselves behind bars for the foreseeable future.

  ‘What I’m struggling with but have to ask you anyway,’ Jordan said, anxiety causing his voice to modulate, ‘is if even after these two powerful men are charged, exactly how safe are you, Syd?’

  ‘Me? If you’d asked that a day or two ago I would probably have told you how concerned I was. But with the police being involved, together with the FBI all over again, nobody is going to be stupid enough to take any action against me.’

  ‘Why don’t you come back here, then, Syd?’ Jordan asked. It was a perfectly reasonable request, one she had been waiting for since telling him everything. ‘Bring what you need and wind things up from San Diego. The sooner you’re out of there the better.’

  This was not the right moment to tell him what was on her mind. She needed to take a beat and think it through some more. Instead she said, ‘I can’t right away. The agency are going to want to talk to me, and I still have statements to provide.’

  ‘It’s not your case, though, right? You’re just a witness.’

  ‘That’s true, but an important one. My evidence will go a long way to making sure these people pay for what they did.’

  They discussed the merits of him still flying up for the weekend. Sydney tried to put him off, but he insisted on joining her. Sydney wasn’t sure how she felt about that, but she knew they would have much to discuss so she let it
go before they said goodbye.

  In the constant whirl of information flapping around inside her head like moths trapped in a jar, the murders of Sonia and Gerry Kasper were never far away. Not that she ever expected an answer, Sydney nonetheless resolved to one day ask Ebben why he had killed them. She understood that he had probably gone to their home to find out what Sonia knew, what she and Sydney had talked about. Was there any reason for that visit to have led to murder, other than the man being a psychopath? The couple would know justice if she had anything to do with it. Meanwhile, Sydney had to deal with the fact that for whatever reason, she had unwittingly led a murderer to their doorstep.

  On the precipice of becoming overwhelmed by all that had taken place and slowly succumbing to melancholy, Sydney shook it off and blew out some pent-up air. Sometimes when you put a lid on a case you didn’t have all the facts or all the players trapped inside, and that was a part of life you had to swallow down like the bitter pill it was. In this instance, she was determined not to let it go or put a seal around that lid. Yet today wasn’t a day for focussing on the unknown or the negatives. It was about reflecting and taking some pleasure from the positives that had come out of what had happened here. She hoped Kevin Muller would rest easier, as his father most certainly would. More arrests, charges and prosecutions would follow. Moon Falls was about to be disrupted once more, but it would overcome and endure as it had always done in times of enormous strain.

  Despite being on her second cup of coffee of the day, the thought of returning calls to the Bureau filled her with dread. Were her actions so wrong? Would the result help her to fight off any charges filed against her? Sydney doubted it. She had continued to represent herself as an active FBI agent despite specifically being instructed not to. That she had uncovered a significant illicit drugs production and distribution operation, plus the truth regarding the execution of fifteen high school students, was unlikely to be enough for the agency to overlook how she managed to achieve those results. She had abused her position. Perhaps the very best she could hope for was a posting to some region where she’d spend the rest of her career bored out of her mind, doing a job she lacked the heart to care about. That was how the Bureau tended to deal with their problematic agents.