Dead Too Soon: A Thriller (Val Ryker series Book 3)

by Ann Voss Peterson

  “An hour ago. What took him so long?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Give it to me.”

  Hess’s voice grew softer, the words hard to discern.

  Grace’s mind raced. She knew the name Burke, but it couldn’t be. It couldn’t be. She scooped in a breath of oxygen and held it, struggling to hear over her own pulse. Grace picked up a word here, a name there. Burke, rain, explosives, Prairie du Sac, police… each syllable a dot to connect, but even though she missed at least half of what Hess said, the half she managed to string together shook her to her core.

  When Hess bulled back into the room, the acid taste of bile filled Grace’s mouth. She swallowed rapidly. Opening her eyes wide, she fought back the urge to cry.

  Carla followed him inside, a cell phone in her hand.

  “Ready?” Hess said to Carla.

  Carla raised her phone and tapped the screen. She gave Hess a nod.

  Hess stepped toward Grace, the mattress dipping under his weight. He raised his hand, and before Grace could fully prepare herself, he backhanded her, his knuckles cracking across her cheek and mouth.

  Grace’s head wrenched to the side. For a second, she was stunned, unable to think, to move. Then a stinging heat blossomed over her cheek. The taste of blood drowned out the taste of bile.

  “I’m sorry.” Her speech was slurred, her lips not functioning the way they should.

  “What did you say?”

  “Prison. I’m sorry you were convicted for something you didn’t do.”

  “It doesn’t work that way, Gracie. You can’t apologize for someone else’s sins.”

  Carla let out a cruel laugh.

  Grace focused on Carla, on the phone in her hands. After Hess had hit Grace, she hadn’t been thinking. She’d almost forgotten Carla was there.

  Watching everything. Recording everything.

  Now Grace had really done it. She’d become more than a liability. She had a feeling she knew what Hess was going to do with that video. Hess would send it to Aunt Val. He would torment her with it.

  Hess drew back his fist. Grace could see the punch coming as if in slow motion. She twisted to the side. She pulled against the handcuffs.

  She couldn’t duck.

  She couldn’t fight.

  Hess’s knuckles hit just to the right of her nose. The force shuddered through her cheekbone. Her head snapped back. Pain exploded through her whole head, her whole world.

  Grace coughed, wheezed. A string of blood and spittle dribbled from her mouth and stained the front of her tee shirt. Tears blurred the room.

  No.

  Grace couldn’t let Aunt Val see her cry. This would be hard enough for her to witness without that.

  Grace raised her chin and opened her eyes wide. When Aunt Val saw this, she wouldn’t see a helpless victim. She’d see a girl willing to fight. A girl willing to die. A girl searching for some way to help.

  And Grace finally had an idea of how she could.

  Val

  Where Kasdorf’s property was a foot deep in snow the day before, today the place resembled Venice, Italy, without the architecture, gondolas, and risi e bisi.

  Rather than risk getting stuck in the muddy driveway, Lund parked the car along the shoulder. Water filled the ditch and roared into the culvert that tunneled under the road.

  Val and Lund headed into the woods. The muck made for slow going, Val’s crutch skidding on layers of wet leaves and the occasional patch of ice. Cold mist hung in the air and dripped from the trees. They reached Kasdorf’s deer stand, but the outdoorsman was nowhere to be found.

  “So what do we do now?” Val asked, not liking the idea of trudging all the way back to the car without getting the information they came for.

  “He’ll show. He’s probably watching us now.”

  Val scanned the branches. “Maybe we should go back to the barn. Take a look inside.”

  “Got a warrant?” a gruff voice said from behind them.

  Val turned around. She hadn’t heard him approach, not the snap of a twig or rustle of fallen leaves, and yet Kasdorf stood twenty feet away, his rifle slung at his side.

  At least he wasn’t aiming it at them this time.

  “We need your help,” Lund said. He glanced at Val. “Maybe we can help each other.”

  “Doubt it.”

  Doubt was a touch better than no. Seemed like as good an invitation as they were going to get. “Yesterday, at the station, you thought officers confiscated something,” Val said. “What was it?”

  “You should know.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then check with the sheriff.”

  “Mr. Kasdorf, we didn’t remove anything from your farm, and neither did the sheriff’s office. But I think I might know who did.”

  He stared at her for a long while before he spoke. “I’m done talking to cops.”

  “I’m no longer police chief. I resigned.”

  “What’s happening on my property is my business.”

  “This is important, Mr. Kasdorf.”

  “You got a warrant?”

  “I told you. I’m not a cop. I resigned. But I could call Chief Olson if you’d like. Dixon Hess might have left something in that barn when he kidnapped my niece. We might have to take the whole place apart to find it.” She gave her threat a few seconds to sink in. “You want to talk to us, or Chief Olson and the FBI?”

  Kasdorf’s anger dissipated, leaving his expression emotionless, his tone flat. “What do you want?”

  “Dixon Hess blew up the Merrimac Ferry yesterday.”

  “I heard.”

  “You hear where he got his explosives?”

  “No clue. Bastard likes to break laws.”

  Lund shook his head. “He’s never used bombs before.”

  And that was one thing that hadn’t added up. The reason Val had failed to warn the Columbia County tactical team. Hess had cut people, burned people, occasionally shot people, even stitched one woman’s lips together. But he’d never had anything to do with explosives. He hadn’t been in the military, hadn’t held a job in mining or any other explosives-related field, and had no such training. That suggested one thing.

  Val stared at the grizzled survivalist. “He might not be acting alone. And if you don’t tell us what he stole, we might be inclined to believe it wasn’t stealing at all.”

  Kasdorf didn’t react, not the blink of an eye or twitch of the lips. “I got no love for Hess. You know that.”

  “Then tell us what he took.”

  Kasdorf grunted but didn’t answer.

  This wasn’t working. Kasdorf might be paranoid, but he wasn’t easily frightened. At least not by what he knew were empty threats. Val knew better than that.

  Kasdorf was a survivalist. A loner. A paranoid conspiracy theorist. He hated police. Didn’t trust government. Was afraid to death that someone would take away his cache of weaponry, much of it illegal. And for good reason. Yet there had been times when he had taken risks. When he’d gone out of his way to help, even when it wasn’t in his best interest to do so.

  Val stepped toward him. Chin raised, she stared straight into his eyes. “My niece. He has her.”

  Val noticed a softening around the man’s weathered eyes. Or at least, she wished it were so. She pressed on. “I know you hate police.”

  “I’ve got reason.”

  “Yet you still called 911 when you saw Hess abusing Kelly Lund years ago. And you called again yesterday when Grace was in trouble.”

  “So?”

  “Hess has already attacked a school bus full of innocent kids. Now that he has whatever it is that he stole, can you imagine what more he can do? The elementary school. The playground. He can wage a full-on terrorist attack.”

  “Why is that my problem?”

  “Those people are innocent.”

  Kasdorf shook his head slowly back and forth, as if he might not even be aware he was doing it.

  “I don’t care what e
lse you have in your stash,” Val said. “It’s none of my concern. Like I said, I’m not a cop. But I need to know what Hess took. I need to know who might be helping him. I swear I won’t tell anyone where the information came from.”

  “Why would I believe you?”

  “Because I love my niece. And I’m desperate.”

  Kasdorf squinted into the trees and gnawed his lower lip. “Not going to tell you what I had.”

  Val let out a heavy breath. Short of dropping to her knees in the muck and begging, she wasn’t sure what to do.

  “But… I can tell you what I’ve heard some collectors braggin’ about.”

  A slow grin spread over Lund’s lips. “Rumors. A hypothetical situation.”

  “Right.”

  Val kept her focus on Kasdorf. Smart. This way Kasdorf could tell her what she needed to know without actually admitting anything. She wished she’d thought of it. “Go on.”

  “Claymores. Know what they are?”

  “Mines,” Lund said.

  Kasdorf nodded. “A directional anti-personnel mine. About the size of a small lunch box, but instead of holding a sandwich, they’re packed with C-4 explosive and seven hundred steel balls.”

  Lund grunted. “How would someone get their hands on something like that? Dark web?”

  “You know the old Badger Ordnance Works?”

  Val and Lund exchanged looks. This was the second time the abandoned ammunition plant had come up in as many days. Val nodded.

  “Guy said his old man found a shipment of them at the plant years ago. Set ‘em aside. Collector’s dream.”

  Lund let out a low whistle. “And illegal as hell.”

  Val’s chest felt tight. That jibed with the damage they’d seen on the ferry. She’d have to find a way to pass the information to Olson without telling him the source, see if he could get the feds to confirm the ferry was destroyed with a Claymore mine. The idea of Hess with a weapon like that was terrifying.

  She tamped down her alarm, trying to keep it out of her voice. “How many mines?”

  Kasdorf shifted his feet again.

  “It’s only a rumor, right?” Lund said with a lighter tone than Val was able to muster. “Just some guy that you don’t know bragging?”

  “Four.”

  Val felt his answer like a sharp kick. So there were three more out there. Three more booby traps ready to take out countless officers or whoever else tried to get in Hess’s way.

  “Anything else?” Lund asked.

  Kasdorf picked his teeth with a dirty fingernail, then went back to lip chewing.

  Val felt sick. “What is it?”

  “Was going to do a little construction, you know?”

  “Construction?” Val prompted.

  “Damn purple rock. Tough to dig any kind of foundation around here without blasting.”

  Val wasn’t sure if it was lack of sleep or stress, but she wasn’t following. “Claymore mines aren’t used in construction.”

  The survivalist stared at the mud under his boots.

  “But ANFO is,” Lund said, his voice barely above a whisper.

  Val shuddered. Aluminum nitrate combined with fuel oil. The type of bomb that destroyed the Lake Loyal Fire Department and a wide swath of town. “How much ANFO, Dale?”

  Kasdorf looked straight into her eyes. “Two tons.”

  Chapter

  Twenty-Two

  Lund

  “Two tons?” Lund stared at Kasdorf, hoping he’d misheard the amount. “How in the hell did they take two tons? That would take forever to load.”

  “Also take forever to unload. Which is why when I bought it, I also bought the box trailer it was stored in.” He glanced from one to the other. “Uh… Hypothetically.”

  Val looked like she had a headache. “So Hess just hooked up his hitch to your wagon and drove away with enough explosives to blow up half the town?”

  “You blaming me or the Constitution? It’s a man’s right to bear arms.”

  Lund’s ears were still buzzing when he slipped back behind the wheel. The thought of one Claymore mine in the hands of Dixon Hess was scary. That the monster had three more of them along with almost as much ANFO as Timothy McVey used in Oklahoma City knocked the breath out of him.

  Back in the car, Val called Olson and left a message, then she stared out the windshield, rubbing her right hand, the one Lund knew was numb from the MS. He was worried about her. Oneida’s death would be a tough thing to handle in a normal situation. With all that Val was already facing, it seemed impossible. “Talk to me.”

  “I have to stop him, and I don’t even know where to start,” she said.

  “We. We have to stop him.”

  “We.” Val gave him a pressed-lipped smile. “Any suggestions?”

  “Look for ex-cons with experience in explosives who served time in Waupun while Hess was there.”

  Val nodded. “How about the explosives themselves? What can you tell me about ANFO and these mines?”

  Lund wasn’t an expert in explosives. That had been Bix Johnson’s role in the department. But since Lund was in charge of fire inspections, and his rural district included many quarries and construction zones, being familiar with blasting agents and the guidelines for handling them was part of his job. “Well, I can tell you ANFO is pretty stable. That’s why it’s used in mining. It requires a smaller explosion to set it off.”

  “And the mines?”

  “The C-4 in Claymores is stable, too. They also need some sort of trigger and a detonator.”

  “Detonators. I suppose he stole those from Kasdorf, too.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Kasdorf wouldn’t have stored the explosives and the detonators together. He wouldn’t risk blowing himself up.”

  “Okay. If not from Kasdorf, where could Hess get them?”

  “Unfortunately, a lot of places.”

  “I was afraid you’d say that. Like where?”

  “I’d put my money on quarries and construction sites. A lot of them have their blasting agents secured with no more than a padlock. There’s also a lot of that stuff just generally lying around.”

  “Lying around?”

  “Farmers used to use dynamite to remove tree stumps or break up outcroppings of rock, like Kasdorf was talking about. An alarming number of old farms have some pretty dangerous stuff, collected by Grandpa and just forgotten.”

  “So looking for where he got the detonators isn’t going to get us anywhere.”

  “Probably not.”

  Val offered him a subdued smile as a thank you, then fell back into her shell of silence. She stared at her hands in her lap, stroking her right fingers as if willing sensation back into them. When she finally spoke, it was a whisper. “What if it’s not enough, Lund? What if we can’t beat him?”

  Lund’s lungs emptied again, and no amount of breath seemed to fill them. He wanted to offer an answer, suggest a path to follow, lend her a little hope. But he had no answers, no path, no hope to give.

  Some we.

  They stopped off at Val’s place. Braving the destruction again, Val climbed up to her bedroom to change out of the uniform she’d been wearing since yesterday morning and into a pair of jeans and a plain button-down shirt.

  They parked Val’s car in the garage, letting Olson worry about picking it up when he had the chance. Then they drove Lund’s pickup to the Doghouse. Rain beat on the windshield and sloshed under the tires. Lund switched on the radio in time to hear a forecast for more rain, so much a flash flood warning had been issued for the area.

  “Just what we need. More rain. Between that and the ground still being frozen underneath, we’re going to need a boat.”

  Val said nothing.

  “What are you thinking about?” Lund asked.

  “That I smell like a smokehouse.”

  It was true. The smell of smoke hung thick in the air, clinging to Val’s clothing like cheap perfume. “Yeah, you’re making my eyes water.”

  “It�
��s as bad as that aftershave you were wearing yesterday.”

  “You don’t like my aftershave?”

  She turned to look at him, her mouth a flat line.

  He couldn’t help but laugh. “It was expensive.”

  That brought a grin. “It’s eye watering.”

  “Okay, I’ll agree to throw out the aftershave if you agree to not let Hess start another fire in your house.” He’d meant it as a joke, but the smile faded from Val’s face, and she stared out the window, no doubt worrying about Grace.

  Val broke the silence as Lund turned into the tavern’s gravel soup parking lot. “At least Jack made it.” She pointed to an SUV with Illinois plates.

  Even though Lund had never met Val’s friend Jack, he’d met her car. Her former car. A Nova that Grace had stolen in an effort to get home and make sure her aunt Val was okay. “About time your friend got a new ride.”

  Val nodded vaguely. “Maybe she’ll have some ideas.”

  After a quick word with Nikki, who not only embraced their idea of making her tavern their headquarters but volunteered her laptop and one of the cabins she rented out for Jack to stay in, they found Val’s friend waiting in the tavern’s back room, a carafe of coffee on the table and a steaming cup in her hand.

  Jack “Jacqueline” Daniels had a no-nonsense way about her that Lund immediately liked. She reminded him a lot of Val other than the fact that she was a brunette… well, and her clothes.

  Dressed in dark jeans, a cashmere turtleneck, and a black blazer, Jack looked pretty slick. And although Lund didn’t know a thing about fashion, he had to admit her outfit was très chic or très bien or whatever French term was fashionable for those who knew fashion.

  Jack gestured to the vintage Hamm’s beer sign on the far wall, lake, waterfall, and campfire seemingly alive with shimmering light. “I must be in Wisconsin. I haven’t seen one of those in ages.”

  “I feel like I haven’t seen you in ages.” Val crossed the room and the two former sisters in blue gave each other a brief hug.

  “Good to see you, Val. I wish it was under better circumstances. I’m so sorry about Oneida. And Grace. And… all of it.”

  “Me, too.”

  Jack sniffed the air. “Do you smell fire?”