Run for Cover

by Michael Ledwidge

  “Lapuas,” Gannon said with a whistle. “That’s a long-range cartridge. Sniper rounds?”

  Barber nodded again.

  “That’s completely bananas. Was it an ambush?” Gannon said.

  “Maybe. But it’s a remote area with only one way in or out, so maybe they’re thinking the killer got boxed in just after he dumped the body.”

  “Couldn’t get out so he up and started blasting away at two FBI agents, a park ranger, and the county sheriff with a safari big game sniper rifle,” Gannon said.

  “Worst thing of all, it worked,” Barber said, snapping his book closed and tucking it into his pocket. “Since the son of a bitch got clean away.”

  “Well, at least the rocket scientists down at the BLM are in for some bad news,” Gannon said. “Law enforcement killed by serial killer is the kind of juicy headline even the government won’t be able to cover up. Good luck keeping the lid on this now.”

  “Exactly,” Barber said. “Especially since I already anonymously emailed every news outlet in the state about it.”

  “What now?” Gannon said.

  Barber took out his phone and looked at it and took a deep breath.

  “We’re to get Owen later this morning. His autopsy is done. After we eat and get a few hours’ sleep, we need to head over to the funeral parlor to pick out a coffin and arrange transport to the plane.”

  Gannon shook his head. Then he reached out and put an arm on his buddy’s shoulder.

  “I’m so sorry, John. About all of this. Your poor brother. This isn’t right. They have to catch this son of a bitch.”

  “Well, if they don’t, I’m going to,” Barber said coldly as the waitress approached with their plates. “If it’s the last thing I do in this world.”

  22

  A little after breakfast, Kit Hagen was on her feet coming out of her recovery suite’s restroom. She was trying to tie her skimpy hospital gown closed behind her with her free hand when she turned to see her Behavioral Science coworker, Francis Sinclair, standing there in the suite’s doorway.

  How do you like that? she thought. Her butt was literally in the breeze, wasn’t it?

  “Oh, hey, Kit,” he said, immediately turning around. “I’m sorry. Hey.”

  “That timing, Sinclair. Impeccable,” she said as she finally got things secured. “I don’t know about you, but they never showed this kind of tight-knit team-building in the FBI recruitment video they played me at Pepperdine Law.”

  “You need the nurse?” Sinclair said, still turned around as he stood by the door.

  Kit managed to carefully back toward the bed and drop into it without knocking over the rolling IV stand.

  “No, it’s okay. You can come in now,” she said.

  “First off, about Dennis. I’m so, so sorry,” Sinclair said as he stepped over to her bedside. “Everybody is. I keep getting texts. There’s literally hundreds of them. Mostly students.”

  She thought about Braddock. How he was the most beloved teacher at Quantico. How he hadn’t even wanted to go into the field.

  She thought about his wife, Anna. How nice she was. How they were college sweethearts. She thought about Anna’s garden, the way she kept their house. You could eat off the floor.

  This would shatter her, Kit thought. Just full obliteration.

  The only consolation was that he’d been killed instantly.

  Then she thought, no, the only real consolation was that she had been shot, too, so she didn’t have to tell Anna herself.

  “Everyone is asking about you, too, of course, Kit. They’re overjoyed that...that you made it. I am, too,” he said.

  She looked up at Sinclair. Tall and skinny with slightly spiky black hair, she always thought that the boyish thirtysomething looked like an aging skateboarder. No one would ever guess that he was an FBI profiler. Or had been with the marines thick in the shit at Fallujah.

  “How’s the arm?” he said.

  “The bullet just missed my collarbone. As my funny doctor put it, I dodged a bullet there. Get it? Anyway, I heard you’ve been up to the crime scene.”

  Sinclair nodded.

  “Just got back.”

  “Do you have photos?”

  He gave her a hesitant look.

  “Isn’t this too soon, Kit? I just actually came up to visit. They said that...”

  “What did they say?”

  “They said to take it easy on you. Not to stress you out. That you might have suffered a concussion in the fall.”

  “A concussion? Really?” Kit said. “Interesting. That’s news to me. Give me a break, Francis. My eyeballs work. I’m awake and over eighteen. Let me see the photos.”

  “But—

  “But what?”

  “Some of them are pictures of Dennis.”

  “I don’t want to see those obviously or of the ranger or the sheriff. Just show me the ones of the original victim. I need to know.”

  “Know what?” Sinclair said.

  “If it’s him,” she said.

  Sinclair took his Nikon out of his kit bag and queued it up and handed it over.

  Braddock, who had been a profiler for twenty years, had taught her not to jump to conclusions, but at the very first photo, she started nodding.

  It was him, she thought. It was actually him. Shit! All the signs were there. The way the victim was positioned. The braided bungee cord ligatures at the wrists. The folded clothing left beside the body in a neat pile with the underwear on top.

  She looked over the victim’s body. The height was right. Five-seven or eight. He liked them tall. She was slender yet shapely at the bust and hips, especially the bust. That was a little off. He seemed to like them a tad thinner up top.

  As she did with the others, Kit took a deep breath before she finally looked at the face. Like the others, the hair was tied up with a black scrunchie, and the ears were removed and the face was cut up beyond all recognition.

  She looked through it all again before she handed back the camera.

  “So,” Sinclair said.

  She took a breath thinking about it.

  “It’s him, and he was waiting for us,” she finally said.

  Sinclair looked at her.

  “He had built a kind of perch up above the body. He lurked there waiting for us like a cat leaving out a chunk of cheese for a mouse.”

  “You don’t think the ranger interrupted him dropping the body?”

  “No,” Kit said, shaking her head slowly. “Why wouldn’t he kill just the ranger if he wanted to get out? Sneak up and shoot him while he sat in his truck. He had a scope on the rifle and Ranger Barber had to have catnapped a little. He was there all night.”

  “Good point.”

  “No,” Kit said. “I don’t think we just came upon him. If this perpetrator is anything, he’s meticulous. I think it was an ambush. He waited for us. And by us, I mean me and Braddock. He shot us on purpose.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ve been wondering about it myself. Because we’re covering it up? He’s pissed that we’re leaving the murders out of the papers?”

  “You think he’s upping the ante so we can’t keep a lid on it anymore? He’s looking for fame now?” Sinclair said.

  “Maybe. I mean, why go to all this trouble if no one knows how fiendishly clever he is? Do we know who the victim is yet?”

  “No, not yet. Like the others, he took the ID.”

  “Is it just you on this?” Kit said.

  “Yes. For now, it’s just me and the forensics team out of the Denver office. It’s all still such a scramble. With Dennis passed, they haven’t even appointed a new section chief yet.”

  “How’s the press on this?” Kit said. “On me at least. Are the jackals down there waiting? I’m getting out of here later this aftern
oon. Last thing I want is an O. J. Simpson white bronco ride out to the plane.”

  “The nationals aren’t here at the hospital yet, but I saw some vans setting up back at the mountain as I was coming down. Though I think I saw some local press hanging with the town cops in the waiting room off the lobby.”

  “Can you help sneak me out the back? I should be getting out around three, they said. My flight back to DC leaves at five. I just booked it.”

  “Of course, Kit,” Sinclair said as he put his camera away. “Of course. Least I could do. Kit, I’m so sorry again.”

  Kit looked at him, then turned and looked out the window at the distant mountains.

  “Me, too,” she finally said.

  23

  Kit was in no way ready for Dennis’s funeral back in Boston a week later.

  In no way shape or form, she thought as she sat in the crowded pew.

  It was the saddest thing she’d ever been a part of in her life. The church in Dorchester Heights in Southie was small, and it was filled to capacity like it was a Fenway Park World Series game. Everywhere large men were crying. The amount of people Dennis knew from his time as a Boston cop and then as one of the country’s most renowned experts in homicide investigation was astounding.

  And they all apparently loved him like a brother or a father, she thought as she stood in the second row behind Anna and the kids and the grandkids.

  She lost count of how many cards she was handed by state troopers and FBI agents and DEA guys who told her if she needed anything—and they meant anything, any help whatsoever in nailing the son of a bitch who killed Dennis—she was to give them a call.

  “There goes the greatest cop who ever lived,” said a well-dressed broad-shouldered hulk of man in front of the church as four full-dress marines put Dennis into the back of a Cadillac hearse.

  Kit turned to him.

  “Hi, you’re Kit, right? I’m Bill Ferguson,” the big man, said gently shaking her hand. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Thank you. Wait. Bill Ferguson?” Kit said peering at him. “Head of the New York Office Deputy Director Bill Ferguson?”

  “Since last year, guilty as charged,” he said as another football-player-sized fiftysomething offered his hand. “This is my brother, Judge Joe.”

  “I remember now,” Kit said, shaking his hand. “The Ferguson brothers. You grew up with Dennis, didn’t you? Dennis told me stories about you two.”

  “He lied. I wasn’t there. Bill did it,” Judge Joe said, smiling.

  Kit smiled as she remembered that he was actually a federal judge. Not just any federal judge either, but the chief judge of the US District Court of Maryland.

  “You guys went to grammar school together?” Kit said.

  “Yep. Went to St. Margaret’s together, then the police academy,” Bill said. “I was the one who got him his application. He didn’t even want to go, but I convinced him. This was before he met Anna. See, before Anna, Dennis was different. Before Anna, Dennis was...”

  “Completely stone-cold crazy,” Judge Joe said.

  “In the best way possible, of course,” Deputy Director Ferguson said. “I mean, he was a legend. He ever tell you about his first arrest?”

  “No,” Kit said. “Never. I have to hear this.”

  “He’s nineteen, okay?” Director Ferguson said. “Just got out of the academy. Day one, he’s sent out on a foot post by himself. Two minutes out the door, two blocks from the station house, he comes across these two huge rough punks beating the living crap out of each other in the street. Dennis immediately goes for his belt. For his radio, right? Call it in?

  “Hell, no. This is Dennis the menace. Out comes his piece. ‘Freeze, you blankety blanks! Up against the mother-blankin’ wall!’ Like he’s the star in a Starsky and Hutch episode. The two guys immediately do as this insanely fired-up kid tells them, and then what does he do? Call for backup?

  “Hell, no. He handcuffs them together, and he marches them back into the station house through the neighborhood at gunpoint. ‘Hey, Sarge, two for assault,’ he yells, like he’s been there for twenty years. Imagine. This is five minutes in on day one at nineteen.”

  “Wow,” Kit said, smiling. “He never told me that.”

  “Yeah,” Bill said shaking his head. “What a crazy, good, fun-loving, life-loving, caring cat he was.”

  Kit looked over at the hearse. They were closing the door now.

  “Listen,” Deputy Director Ferguson said as he passed her something.

  Kit looked down at his card.

  “My personal is on the back. You need anything on his investigation, you call me, okay? I mean it,” he said.

  24

  The funeral for John Barber’s brother, Owen, was on the same day as Dennis Braddock’s back in Utah in a place of worship called the Harmony Church of Our Lord.

  Off Route 191 several miles south of Barber’s ranch, it was the only structure visible in a vast desolate stretch of high desert.

  Gannon, running a little late at the wheel of his pickup, saw it from miles away. You couldn’t not see it if you wanted to, he thought. Against the immensity of rock and pale dusty land, its high glowing white spire drew the eye like a magnet.

  The lot was so full he had to park on the shoulder of the desert road. He sat for a second looking at the summer sun glinting off all the police vehicles among the pickups. There were ones from Arizona, Colorado.

  Gannon tightened his just-bought stiff black tie as he looked out at them.

  More cops. Super. He had seriously debated whether to come at all.

  His son, Declan, in his own new dress shirt and black tie, sat in the passenger seat, looking at the police vehicles along with him. Looking with concern.

  “For people who are supposed to be living under the radar, I have to say, we sure have a real funny way of doing it, Dad,” he said.

  “C’mon, this is a funeral. You think they’ll be looking for fugitives?”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Declan said as they got out. “What kind of fugitives would be dumb enough to attend a cop funeral?”

  There was a US Army color guard in the vestibule just inside the church’s door. The church itself held about four or five hundred people, and it was all but standing room only. Up on the altar, a cello was playing music so sad and beautiful, it was torturous. Gannon did a double take when he saw that the female soloist was actually Stephanie Barber.

  Down in the front, Lynn was a puddle, but John Barber looked to be fine as he stood in the front row beside his eighty-five-year-old mother, who was in a wheelchair.

  Gannon watched him squeeze his mother’s hand. Truth be told, he was pretty concerned about his friend. Ever since they’d flown back with his brother in the rear of the plane, the man had been quiet.

  Too quiet.

  Once Stephanie was seated, the preacher, sitting beside the altar, stood. He was a very thin and tall handsome young man still in his twenties. Gannon didn’t know why him being so young made things even sadder but it did somehow.

  “Blessed are the peacemakers,” the young preacher said, “for they shall be called the children of God. Let us bow our heads and pray for God’s blessing.”

  Gannon looked out at the crowd as five hundred heads lowered.

  He had been to his share of funerals. Sometimes they made him sad, and sometimes they made him angry.

  This one made him feel very weary, Gannon thought, as he bowed his own head and looked down at the hard, white marble of the floor.

  25

  Kit Hagen’s morning drive to work down 619 from her condo in Bristow was always one of the best times in her day. It was an almost perfectly straight shot on a country lane lined with white horse fences and gorgeous rolling fields and American flags on poles by dirt drives.

  Exactly two weeks from the morning she got shot, s
he was at the wheel of her Crown Vic zipping east and heading back into work at Quantico bright and early. Waking up, she’d been somewhat worried about what kind of face she would show to her coworkers after the shooting. But now as she found herself back in the rhythm of her commute on such a beautiful morning, she thought, who gives a shit.

  The funeral was over, she thought as she looked at the sun breaking over the rolling hills. The tears had been cried. Now it was time to do one thing.

  Tear up the country from one end to the other to find the monster who had killed her partner, Dennis.

  A quarter mile before where 619 made the turnoff to the south, her phone rang. She glanced at it there in the drink holder. It was a 575 area code.

  575?

  The phone had stopped ringing by the time she put on her left clicker and pulled into a gas station.

  She looked up the area code on Google. 575 was for New Mexico.

  “New Mexico,” she said, her eyes going wide as she thumbed the Call Back button.

  “There you are,” said a man’s voice. “This is Detective Lampard. Dan Lampard, San Juan County sheriff’s office. How are you doing today, Agent Hagen? This is Agent Hagen, right?”

  “That’s me,” Kit said.

  Kit remembered San Juan County because it was where they had picked up their best and pretty much only lead in the NATPARK case.

  After the Rocky Mountain Park murder, the female victim’s pickup truck had been stolen, and they had found it in the parking lot of a motel over the state line in New Mexico. In the truck was a bottle of Gatorade with some backwash in it that contained male DNA. It wasn’t the victim’s fiancé’s or brother’s or father’s, so they had sent it into the Bureau’s NDIS, National DNA Index System. But there had been no match.

  “I do remember you, Detective. How are you?”

  “I’m doing fine. Sorry for calling so early. I read about your situation there in Wyoming in the paper. We’re real sorry about Agent Braddock. He was a real nice fella. And we’re pulling for you. I’ve actually been trying to contact your office, but they said you weren’t back to work yet. I take it you haven’t received the report I sent you from that online DNA place? Genodex Labs?”