Run for Cover

by Michael Ledwidge

  “I know. Utah Macy’s clerks are real nice but need to work a tad on the tempo. Moving forward as your ballistic forensics consultant, I’ll try to be more punctual.”

  She smiled.

  “I wasn’t sure if you were coming at all, actually,” she said, looking at him. “You know you can still back out if you want.”

  “Back out? Are you joking? Can’t now,” Gannon said, pointing at his cheek. “See? I shaved. All gone. And I got a haircut, too.”

  “I see,” she said, nodding. “You’re already fully committed.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “Once the razor comes out, I’m in it for the long haul, Kit.”

  39

  They landed in Jackson at a little after one in the afternoon and changed into hiking clothes. It was about an hour and a half after that when they brought the Nissan Armada they’d rented at the airport to a stop at the rim of the hollow on Grand Teton.

  “How you feeling?” Gannon said, looking over at Kit as he ratcheted back the emergency brake.

  Kit stared out the window without speaking. She looked tense. She’d been silent on the ride up the base of the mountain. Silent pretty much since they’d landed.

  “I guess the bears must have eaten all the crime scene tape,” she finally said.

  “I can pretty much tackle this part alone from what you’ve already told me,” Gannon said. “Wait here. I’ll be back in a bit.”

  Kit let out a breath.

  “Appreciate you saying that, Mike,” she said, staring down at the glove compartment. “I’d be lying if I said there is where I want to be right now.”

  She suddenly threw open her door.

  “But that son of a bitch stopped me from seeing that crime scene once,” she said. “I’ll be damned if I let it happen again.”

  It was bright and cool outside as they got their bags from the back. Gannon sat for a moment on the tailgate, staring up at the magnificent upthrusts of pale rock.

  When he finally stood and turned toward the fall-off, he saw they were almost eye level with a cloud bank. He looked down where its shadow, big as a city, slowly moved across the land far below.

  A minute later, he was following Kit slowly down the steep switchbacks into the hollow. He was sweating by the time they halted in a flat clearing.

  “What do you need to know?” Kit said as she slung off her pack.

  She showed him where they were all standing when the first shot killed the sheriff and where her partner, Dennis, had lost his life. Gannon pinned each location with a handheld GPS tracker he’d brought as Kit knelt down and then lay beside a low rock.

  “The shots came from there,” she said, pointing.

  Gannon squatted down beside her and followed her finger up a slope to their left. There were two rock ridges along the top of it, one in front of the other. She was pointing to where there was a kind of saddle in between them with a small stand of trees on the farther of the two ridges.

  “Was he in those trees?”

  “No. He was somewhere down in the rock in front of them.”

  Gannon stood.

  “Okay, you’re going to take a look at the victim scene over there, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “While you’re doing that, if you could leave your bag on the rock where the sheriff was shot, I’ll go up to take a look.”

  Gannon walked across the stony ground. The slope was farther away than it had seemed from the clearing, the terrain dipping down into a dry creek bed before he made it to its base.

  It had been like that in Afghanistan, he thought as he scrambled upward. The massive size of the mountains threw off your distance perception, made things look closer than they really were.

  It was good twenty minutes of an uphill slog over the rock until he arrived where Kit had been pointing. He looked around. There was a different angle of the mountain summit from this new perch, and as he looked up, he could see what looked like ice was wedged in between the narrow chambers of rock.

  It was a minute later of searching around before he came upon the flattop of a half-buried boulder.

  He stepped up on top of it and looked down the unobstructed sightline into the clearing below where Kit was standing, taking a picture.

  “Bingo,” he said as he took off his backpack.

  He whistled as he pinned the GPS tracker and saw that the distance from where he was to the shooting scene was 1,110 yards.

  “Eleven football fields and a first down,” he mumbled as he took out the Leupold Mark 4 spotting scope he’d brought. He telescoped out its tripod and took a knee behind it as he had a look down the steeply pitched terrain.

  Even after he zeroed in the focus, Kit’s image danced and wavered behind the reticle. It was because of the distance. The phenomenon, known as mirage, happened because temperature variations along long distances to the target made the light refract like a straw in a water glass. The only thing good about that was, if you were experienced, you could get a decent read on your windage from it.

  Kit was really moving around, not just left to right but also up and down, Gannon saw, which meant the erratic wind was pretty much playing havoc between their two points.

  Gannon checked the barometric pressure reading off the tracker and took down some notes in a Moleskine notebook, getting his dope. After he was done, he collapsed the scope to rifle level and then took a good hard look around the boulder perch for snakes.

  He had a history with mountain snakes. Once while in Afghanistan up in the mountains, one had slithered over the back of his left ankle as he lay half-asleep on the floor of a firebase. The wait before it was gone was among the longest in his life. Being a city boy and no Eagle Scout, he wasn’t sure if he should move immediately or stay still or shoot at it or what.

  “Gannon mountain sniping rule numero uno,” he said as he finally lay prone down behind the scope. “Make sure environment is thoroughly snake-free.”

  He dialed in on Kit again and mimicked holding a rifle, right finger along the trigger, left one in and under, firmly gripping an imaginary sandbag rest. He closed his eyes and listened. The sound of the wind, the soft warbling of a bird. The faint smell of the pines.

  As he lay there with the cold of the stone underneath him, he could almost feel his cheek brushing the cheekpiece.

  He thought about the eye that had been on the glass weeks before. The patience required.

  “One,” he said, finally opening his eye before the spotting scope and mimicking the trigger pull.

  He imagined the crash and buck of the gun as he touched it off, then slid the pretend bolt back and forth and shifted slightly to where the FBI agent was killed, then pretended a second pull.

  “Two,” he said.

  40

  “So, what’s the story?” Kit said as he got back.

  She seemed to have wrapped up what she’d been looking for, Gannon thought as he watched her packing a camera back into her bag. He thought about how hard it had to be, her coming back here. Then he put it aside.

  “This guy was damn good, Kit,” Gannon said as he sat on a rock and wiped sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his light fleece. “Even with a one-half minute of angle precision rifle, it was some pretty incredible marksmanship.”

  “One-half minute of what?” she said.

  “Minute of angle,” Gannon said. “Think of a slice of pizza with the distance between the side edges as one degree of angle. At the tip of the pizza, the distance is tiny, right? But as you head up toward the crust, it starts to spread wider and wider. The better the rifle, the more you can tighten that spread. Even at long distances, a precision rifle chocked into a bench stand will put rounds on target consistently within a fraction of an inch of each other. You see?”

  “Not really. You’re saying there’s a lot of variables that only an expert would know?”<
br />
  “Yes. A thousand-yard shot from a higher to lower elevation at high elevation in high erratic winds with no test shot to get a better read on the windage is professional shooting. I mean, with this distance and elevation and this crazy wind, if a novice with a good rifle missed within two hundred feet, you’d buy him a beer. Because under long-range conditions, the temperature of the barrel or even the temperature of the ammo being off a degree or two could cause a wide miss. A human head is only seven inches wide. This guy laid into two of them twenty feet apart from way the hell up there in quick succession. It’s not long-range black magic wizardry stuff, but it’s damn close.”

  “Not Tiger Woods, but he’s on the tour?”

  Gannon nodded.

  “Well put. You’re looking at a highly experienced hunter for sure or an extreme hobbyist. Probably ex-military shooting with a top-shelf rifle.”

  Gannon stood.

  “I could talk for hours about it if you want, but maybe at a diner or something. I’m starting to get hungry. You hungry?”

  “I’m starving,” Kit said. “When you were talking about pizza a second ago, I started to salivate.”

  Gannon laughed.

  “Let’s get going then. That Twix you gave me was my breakfast. I’m about to eat one of these rocks.”

  41

  After a late lunch at the diner in town, Gannon and Kit checked into two rooms at the same hotel he and John Barber had stayed at.

  It was getting dark when Gannon got out of the shower and saw the text from Kit suggesting an attempt to contact the medical examiner.

  Gannon cursed softly under his breath twenty minutes later as he brought the Armada into the lot of the medical examiner’s office back on Pearl Street and saw only one car.

  “Damn, looks like we’re too late,” he said to Kit in the passenger seat beside him. “We’ll have to try back again in the morning.”

  They were still in the lot making a U-turn when they saw the figure emerge from the small building’s front door.

  “On second thought,” Gannon said as he saw that it was the same heavyset doctor he and Barber had dealt with the first time they’d been there.

  What was his name again? Gannon thought.

  “Dr. Thompson?” he called as he pulled up alongside him.

  “Yes. Can I help you?” Thompson said as he stepped over, still holding his keys.

  “I’m Special Agent Hagen, Doctor,” Kit said, leaning sideways to show him her credentials. “And this is my partner, Gannon.”

  Gannon reached over and extended his hand to the doctor.

  “You can call me Mike.”

  “I was wondering if I could speak with you about the shootings up on Grand Teton.”

  “You keep some inconvenient hours, Agent Hagen,” the doctor said, checking his watch. “I was just about to have dinner. Couldn’t it wait until tomorrow?”

  “We actually just got off a plane and are starving ourselves,” Gannon said quickly. “Could we maybe talk over dinner, Doc? Our treat.”

  A smile played on the doctor’s lips as he thought about that.

  Gannon was pleased by the lack of recognition in the doctor’s face as he looked back at him. He was newly shaven and shorn and wearing a suit. The doctor seemed completely oblivious that they had already met. He must have thought Gannon was just another FBI agent, Gannon realized. He certainly wasn’t going to tell him otherwise.

  “A dinner meeting. That’s an interesting prospect,” the doctor finally said. “There actually is a nice new place not far from here.”

  “Lead the way, Doc,” Gannon said.

  42

  The restaurant Dr. Thompson directed them to was five minutes away on the west side of town in an expensive-looking hotel.

  The lobby inside had walls that soared up four stories, and down one of them came a loud and powerful cascade of water. Through some architectural acoustical trick, the rumbling sound of it disappeared as one went deeper into the hotel under an arch.

  “This is quite a nice hotel, don’t you think?” the doctor said as they headed past the waterfall. “It’s designed after that new one in Aspen. There’s a whole push in the town now to really compete for the deep-pocket jet-set ski people.”

  “It’s usually not this crowded,” he said as he guided them to the left of the check-in desk toward a modern-looking restaurant packed with people. “Some Silicon Valley conference thing has been going on for the last couple of weeks, I think.”

  A bartender wearing a shiny black shirt came over and smiled at them.

  “They have a great premium scotch collection,” the doctor said. “Do you like scotch?”

  “We love premium scotch,” Gannon said. “Don’t we, Agent Hagen?”

  Kit gave Gannon a look as the doctor smiled.

  “I’m partial to Talisker 18 myself. Is that something you might like?” Dr. Thompson said.

  “Hell, yes,” Gannon said, tossing a hundred-dollar bill on the bar top. “Set us up. Three Taliskers.”

  Whatever that is, Gannon thought.

  “Please,” the doctor said, smiling as the bartender lifted a bottle. “Call me Walter.”

  Ten minutes later, a tall hostess led them down some steps into the sunken dining room. Like the bar, it was very dimly lit and had a campfire feel from a huge glassed-in electric fireplace tucked into one of its dark stone walls.

  “Now, here’s what I call my kind of work meeting,” the doctor said, raising his cut crystal glass to the flickering light.

  “Mine, too,” said Gannon, raising his own thirty-dollar highball.

  They all turned as a waitress brought a huge cake covered with sparklers over to a table of clapping corporate-suited Asian businessmen who were singing “Happy Birthday.”

  “Now, what did you specifically want, Agent Hagen?” the doctor said after a fastidious sip.

  “Please call me Kit. We were wondering if we could see your office’s copy of the autopsy report on the female victim who was brought down off the mountain,” Kit said.

  “The Jane Doe?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  The portly doctor took another finicky sip and then nodded as he sat up in the booth seat.

  “I did the autopsy myself,” he said. “State actually tried to take it away from me with all the publicity and everything, but I put my foot down. I’m a twenty-year veteran board-certified forensic pathologist. I started doing this straight out of medical school in San Francisco. Press or no press, I’m more qualified than the hacks in the State Department to do the investigation, and they knew it. So they finally backed off.”

  He yawned and sipped a little more whiskey.

  “These country people, I swear,” he said. “Perhaps you might have noticed I’m not exactly the cowpoke type. I moved out here with my wife because of her family. You can’t imagine the kind of blockheads I’m often forced to deal with.”

  “How did the Jane Doe die?” Kit said.

  The doctor swirled his scotch in the firelight as he looked at her.

  “She was strangled,” he said, turning and staring into the fire. “There was a distinct ligature furrow on the neck and a subconjunctival hemorrhage in the left eye. All the other injuries were postmortem. But I must say, I don’t quite understand why you’re here now. I sent in the report over a week ago to your office to that... Agent Sinclair? Is that his name? I would have thought you would have ID’d her by now.”

  “No, Doctor,” Kit said, perplexed. “If you consider that the face was disfigured and there was no identification found, even on a high-profile case like this there’s at least a three-week wait for any DNA match.”

  “But didn’t you see the report? I would have thought you’d be all over the breast implants. They have the manufacturer identification numbers on them as clear as day.”


  43

  Gannon and Kit exchanged a look.

  “That’s exactly why we’re here,” Gannon said, sitting up straight. “There seems to be some kind of mix-up with the reports.”

  “Could you get us another copy?” Kit said quickly.

  “Tonight if at all possible?” Gannon said.

  “Tonight?” the doctor said with a pained look on his face.

  Gannon lifted his scotch.

  “This is as high-priority as you can imagine, Walter,” Kit said.

  They listened to the clack of plates and murmur of people around them as Dr. Thompson peered deeply into his drink.

  “Since you’ve been so cordial,” he finally said with a sigh. “After we eat, it’ll be the least I could do.”

  An hour and a half later, Kit had her laptop out and open in the dark corner of the fancy hotel bar when Gannon returned from the medical examiner’s office.

  “This just in. Good news,” he said as he produced the manila envelope he was hiding behind his back.

  “Oh, fantastic, Mike,” Kit said as she immediately tore open the autopsy report.

  She put on the flashlight from her phone and placed it facedown on top of her empty highball glass to create a makeshift reading lamp.

  “Wow, straight to action,” Gannon said, watching her square the sheets on the tabletop. “You don’t waste time do you, huh?”

  “Never,” she said, licking her thumb and flicking the first page over. She looked up at him. “Truly, you did great with the doctor, Mike. You have a soft touch. I like it. You must have been a good cop.”

  “I had my moments,” Gannon said.

  “Hey, I was going to grab another drink. That Talisker stuff actually is pretty good. Can I get you one?”

  “No. One was enough for me. A glass of water would be great though,” she said as she tapped at her laptop.

  “Score, Mike,” Kit said, smiling from behind the computer as Gannon came back.

  “No? What? Not an ID? Already?”