The Color of Wounds

by Frank Martorana

  A surprisingly calm voice came over the speaker. “This is Air-Three.”

  “Have you got the transmitter?” Merrill asked.

  “We’ve got it. Just turned east on Albany Street.”

  “Do you have a visual?”

  There was a pause, then, “Maybe. It’s not a definite.”

  “Keep us posted. We’ll follow.”

  “Roger that. When the cars thin out, we might be able to ID the vehicle.”

  Merrill fired up the van and made the block back toward Albany Street.

  “They’re headed east out of the village now,” the helicopter spotter said. “Okay. I’ve got the ride now; it’s black. Looks like a sedan. Yes, sir. That’s what it is, a black sedan. Older model. A Toyota, I think.”

  “Something’s wrong,” Kent said, as the car’s description sank in, but Merrill and the tech were too engrossed.

  The spotter’s voice came again. “The damn thing is turning into the animal hospital, for Pete’s sake.”

  Merrill hit the gas. “You gotta be kidding me.”

  “There must be a mistake,” Kent said. “We must have the wrong vehicle.”

  “That bastard better not be thinking of attacking the CVC,” Merrill said.

  The van’s grill lights were flashing and its siren blaring, as they screeched to a halt in the CVC employee parking lot. Out of nowhere, police cars had already surrounded the black Toyota. Law enforcement officers in helmets and bulletproof vests were crouched behind their vehicles, guns across the hood, all trained on the suspect car.

  Kent jumped from the van. “Hold it! Don’t shoot!” he shouted as he bolted across the pavement toward the Toyota, waving furiously to the officers. “Don’t shoot!”

  Suddenly the car’s driver-side door opened, and Kent heard the hideous, metallic clicks of safeties coming off a small army of weapons.

  Still charging, he saw Barry, his eyes wild with panic, stand up full height out of the car.

  “Don’t shoot!” Kent screamed, and with every ounce of strength in his legs he leaped toward Barry and covered him in his arms. They tumbled to the ground. Kent fought to stay on top.

  As they lay there tangled, Kent held his breath, waiting for the explosion of rifles.

  None came.

  He kept listening, straining to hear above his pulse that pounded in his ears.

  Still silence.

  Barry began to wiggle out from under him. “What the heck is going on?”

  Kent heard Merrill order his men to stand down, and he swooned with relief. Slowly, he sat up and leaned against the fender of Barry’s Toyota, letting his heart rate settle.

  “Did you take a maroon Jaguar backpack out of the locker room today?” he said.

  Barry rubbed a scuffed elbow. “Yes. So what?”

  “Where is it?”

  By now Merrill had joined them. Barry reached into the back seat and lifted the backpack out.

  Merrill took it, opened it, and grimaced at the fetid uniform. “What the hell is this?”

  “It’s the uniform the guy told me to put in the bag,” Kent reminded his brother.

  Barry looked confused. “All I know is that Mrs. Olsen called the school today and asked if I would pick up Kevin’s uniform. She was hoping I would drop it off after I got done at work here.”

  Kent knew Kevin Olsen was one of Barry’s best buddies and that he’d recently been hurt playing baseball.

  Merrill pawed through the bag. “The money’s all here.”

  “What money?” Barry said.

  “Are you sure it was Kevin’s mom who called you?” Kent said.

  Barry shrugged. “I guess. I mean, I got called down to the principal’s office, and one of the secretaries handed me this note that said Mrs. Olsen called and wanted me to drop off Kevin’s gym stuff since he’s been out. I didn’t think much about it.”

  Merrill looked at Kent, held up the backpack. “And you can bet, when Barry came out of work tonight, this would have been gone from his car.”

  Kent nodded. “Smart son of a bitch, isn’t he?”

  “Isn’t she,” Merrill said. “We’ve got at least one female. That much we know from the phone call.”

  CHAPTER 16

  It rained hard all night. The result was mud. Lots of it. And, as Murphy’s Law would have it, one of Kent’s best dairy clients called with an emergency—at four in the morning. That’s when the guy went out to the barn to start chores each morning.

  “She’s down, trying to calf, and too weak to stand,” the farmer said. “Two feet showing. That’s all.”

  “How long has she been at it?” Kent said.

  “Must have started sometime during the night. She wasn’t doing anything when I finished chores last night.”

  “Is she in the maternity pen?”

  “She’s in the creek. Must have gone down to get a drink and couldn’t get back.”

  Kent winced. “Okay. I’ll be right over.”

  It took Kent half an hour to get to the cow, a beautiful Holstein, and less than five minutes to determine that her problem was a uterine torsion. It took another two hours of rolling in the mud to untwist the uterus, pull the calf, and get mom and daughter on their feet and to the barn. By then Kent’s coveralls were soaked through with mud, creek water, manure, and uterine fluid.

  He stripped off the coveralls and washed up best he could in the milk house while the farmer thanked him and promised to send some money when he could.

  “This was like the old days,” he said to Lucinda, when he got back in the mobile unit. “Calls like this one are the reason I became a veterinarian in the first place. Down and dirty. Good outcome for the patient and an appreciative owner. Nowadays, I don’t get to be on call much. I miss all the action. I miss getting messy.”

  “Oh, shit,” he said as he pulled from the farm lane onto the highway. “I was supposed to meet Merrill this morning.” He looked at his watch, “I’m going to be late.”

  The tires of Kent’s truck hissed through a film of water that covered Albany Street. As he and Lucinda passed the park, he told himself not to look at the remains of Willard Covington, but he couldn’t help himself. Some quirk in his subconscious said, “Study this. Remember this.”

  Inside a circle of yellow crime scene tape, all that was left of Covington was his leatherstocking-clad right leg, cut off at the knee and held upright by his shoe like a macabre hosiery mannequin. His left shoe was empty. His head, arms, torso and upper legs had been blown to powder by the bomb. One of the squatting Indians was missing his head. The other one was toppled over.

  A flock of pigeons circled overhead, reconnoitering their devastated perch like jet fighters seeking to land on a disabled aircraft carrier.

  “What a mess,” he said to Lucinda and forced himself to focus on the road.

  Minutes later, he entered the circa-1940 Greek revival building in the middle of Jefferson that housed the village offices and its police station. It was Merrill’s second home. Merrill had asked Kent to meet him there—more like ordered him to—for a meeting with a state police investigator. Through the glass, Kent saw Merrill seated behind the desk in his cramped space. He was hunched forward, both elbows on its flat surface, locked in a loud argument with a short, bald man in a trench coat who leaned aggressively toward Merrill from the other side of the desk. Their noses couldn’t have been more than a foot apart, and they spit their words like cats facing off.

  Kent stood in the doorway and listened without interrupting them.

  “I told you, Merrill, ‘no homicide—no investigation.’ It’s as simple as that,” the visitor said. “That’s how it works now-a-days. And you know why!”

  “Money!” Merrill shot back. “I know about money, and budgets, but we have a very dangerous person, or persons, out there. I need an investi
gation before the homicide.”

  “Then you’re going to have to take it up with the governor. And good luck with that, because he’s gonna figure you got more than your share of the pie already. That little thing we did at the high school cost a mint and came up with zilch, zippo. The governor will say that we already spent a small fortune on a vandalized statue.”

  Finally, both men noticed Kent and looked up at him. In unison they said, “What’s that smell?”

  “Sorry, I had a calving. I only had time for a partial cleanup,” Kent said.

  “Jesus,” Merrill said and pointed to a chair. “Sit down wind.”

  “I don’t know how you guys do it,” the other man said.

  Merrill pointed a thumb disrespectfully at the man. “Kent, this is my friend Norman MacKinnon. He’s a detective with the state police. He’s been assigned to our case. Norm, this is my brother, Kent Stephenson. He’s the guy our bomber has picked to talk to. And that flea-bitten hound is Lucinda, his sidekick.”

  They shook hands. MacKinnon’s grip was firm and genuine, which fit his solid build and keen eyes. The corners of his mouth lifted almost automatically into a smile, a trait Kent guessed he had a hard time controlling, and was the reason MacKinnon shrouded his mouth with a thick mustache. Heaven forbid a detective should be caught smiling.

  “Sorry about the smell,” Kent said.

  “No problem,” MacKinnon said, then turned to Merrill, “Reminds me of a corpse we found in a dumpster a while back. Been there at least two weeks.”

  Merrill laughed. “Now that you mention it.”

  Lucinda approached MacKinnon and accepted a gentle pat on the head.

  “Nice-looking dog,” MacKinnon said. Then, as Lucinda sniffed his pant legs, creating an olfactory record of this new person, he said, “I know about the CVC, and the stuff you guys do there. Pretty amazing. Helps put DeWitt county on the map, to say nothing of bolstering our economy.”

  Kent gave a polite nod. “Nice of you to say so.”

  “Norm and I were just discussing the case,” Merrill said.

  “If that was a discussion, I’d hate to see the two of you arguing.”

  Merrill brushed it off. “Just cop-speak. We do away with the subtle niceties.”

  MacKinnon nodded agreement.

  Merrill held up a huge ceramic mug sticky with dried coffee streaking its sides. “Want a cup?”

  “Sure, thanks.”

  Merrill refilled his mug, MacKinnon’s Styrofoam cup, and one for Kent with a tarry substance from a crusty Bunn-O-Matic. Over his shoulder he said, “You want to fill him in, Norm?”

  “I was telling Merrill we are having a hard time getting a commitment from the higher-ups for a full investigation. Money is the thing. Or lack of it.”

  “No surprise there.”

  “To be honest, the big cheeses did what they usually do.” Norm accepted his coffee from Merrill and swirled it with a wooden stir stick. “Actually, it’s what they have to do, given their budget and manpower limitations.”

  “And what is that?”

  “They came out guns blazing on the morning of the explosion. That’s when evidence is fresh. Ninety-plus percent of all crimes are solved within the first forty-eight hours. So they hedge their bet by hitting it hard then. At the same time they put on a big show for the taxpayers with the helicopter and all that and give the press a few good quotes to get them off our backs.”

  “But,” Kent said, following Norm’s reasoning, “if the case is not solved in forty-eight hours, it goes on the back burner, and the police move on to the next catastrophe.”

  Norm took a noisy sip of coffee and wiped his mustache with the back of his wrist. “Maybe it gets a few more days, depending on what else is going on, but after that we can’t allocate as many man hours to it. Unless there’s a homicide, as I was reminding your brother here when you came in.”

  “Well, I have to agree with Merrill, for once. We’d like to solve this thing before we have a homicide. I mean, Jesus, a kid I’m very close to could have gotten killed in that stake-out yesterday.”

  “Yeah. I was there. Sorry about that, for what it’s worth. But it’s not hopeless. We do have some information.”

  Kent leaned forward, spirits buoyed. “Good. What have you got?”

  “Wait,” Merrill said. “We need to let out a little of Kent’s barn smell for me to concentrate.” He slid the window as wide as it would go. “Much better.”

  Kent scowled. Lucinda sniffed the fresh air as it came in.

  MacKinnon laughed and pulled a small spiral notebook out of his jacket pocket and flipped a few pages.

  “For one thing, the explosive that took out Mr. Covington was one of the new generation of plastics. Very concentrated and powerful. A little bit goes a long way. Probably used a piece not much bigger than a pack of gum to blow the statue.”

  “Wow,” Kent said. “The airport security people must love that stuff.”

  “The only thing that keeps it from being a bigger problem than it is, is that it stinks bad.”

  “But probably not half as bad as you do at the moment,” Merrill said and made a big deal of waving a clipboard to clear the air.

  Kent ignored him.

  MacKinnon chuckled and shook his head. “You grew up with this guy? I feel sorry for you.”

  “You get used to him after a while. Sort of.”

  “I guess. But like I was saying, bomb-sniffing dogs can pick the stuff up easy.”

  Kent stroked Lucinda’s head.

  MacKinnon studied his notes some more. “Another thing. The charge was planted high up on the statue. At least that’s what the experts think, based on the pattern of damage and the path of debris.”

  “What’s that tell you?”

  MacKinnon rolled the corner of his mustache in his fingers. “Well, they figure the bomber climbed the statue to place the explosive, maybe on Covington’s shoulder or head. Now that’s a little different because most perps like to stay low, and hidden. You know what I mean? You’d figure they’d stick the bomb around the base.”

  “It would fit for kids and vandalism. Wouldn’t it?” Kent said. “They’d be more likely to climb. It might make a more spectacular explosion, too.”

  “Could be.” MacKinnon sipped his coffee. “Then there’s the postcard. It was ordered by the Jefferson Association of Businesses and printed in Peoria, Illinois. One printing of a thousand, two years ago. Sold only in Jefferson. We have a man interviewing employees at businesses around town where they’re sold. So far, no one remembers who bought them or anything suspicious.”

  “It was postmarked in Jefferson,” Kent said. “So we pretty much knew that it originated here anyway.”

  MacKinnon held up a finger. “True. But it means at least one person in town has seen his, or her, face.”

  “Given what Barry said about the phone voice, there has to be a woman. Maybe other people with her, but there has to be at least one woman,” Merrill said.

  “I agree,” MacKinnon said. “And you were right about the handwriting. He—or she—used their off hand as a low-tech way of disguising their handwriting.”

  MacKinnon’s review of the facts made an infinitesimal amount of information seem like a major dossier. The man was a gifted placater, but even so, it made Kent feel better.

  “So you have made some headway after all.”

  “A little.” MacKinnon took another sip of coffee, grimaced, and set the cup down an arm’s length away. “But I’m not finished yet. I’ve got a couple more things. We had a team go through the school. No prints or anything like that. One interesting thing though, a janitor noticed a young woman wandering around one day last week. He couldn’t remember just when. He just figured she was a parent, except she did go into the team locker room.”

  “Did you get a description?” Mer
rill asked.

  “All he could remember is that she had short blond hair.”

  “That’s it?”

  MacKinnon shrugged. “I guess he was wrestling with one of those big floor buffers at the time. All he can remember is her hair. Short, blond. But,” he said, holding up a hand to keep the floor, “that jives with a couple of statements taken at the explosion site that mention a woman with short blond hair.”

  “Could any of them describe her?” Merrill asked.

  “Some.” MacKinnon looked at his notes. “Short. Petite. Short blond hair like I said. Maybe wearing a green Army jacket.”

  Merrill rocked back in his chair, folded his hands behind his head, and stared at the ceiling. “We need to find that girl.”

  There was a determination in his voice that pleased Kent immensely.

  “Absolutely,” MacKinnon said and closed his notebook. “That’s about all I have.” He looked at Kent. “One more thing. I know our guys talked to him, but tell me again what Barry Fairbanks had to say.”

  “Okay,” Kent said, not knowing just what MacKinnon was after. “He was in class, physics I think, second period. His teacher got a call on the room phone asking Barry to come down to the office after class. He did, and, when he got there, the secretary handed him a note. It said Kevin Olsen’s mother had called and asked if Barry would pick up Kevin’s uniform so she could get it washed. He said he didn’t think anything of it. The note described the backpack and where it would be. The rest you know.”

  MacKinnon held up his hand. “But anyone in Jefferson would know that Kevin Olsen, the high school’s star pitcher, scholarship golden boy, was out with a concussion after a baseline collision. Right?”

  “Right,” Kent said. “A few days ago in a sectional game. It was the talk of the town.”

  “And it wouldn’t be too hard to find out he was Barry’s best friend. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “So anybody could have called the school and set him up.”

  Kent didn’t like MacKinnon’s inference. “He’s a trusting kid.”

  “I believe you. What I’m getting at is that whoever is behind this has an incredible knowledge of Jefferson and its people, especially you.” MacKinnon twisted his face into a quizzical expression. “Can you think of anyone who has an ax to grind with you?”