by Ken Oder
He climbed the steps. Cane chairs were strewn across the porch, lying on their sides. Ray righted the sturdiest one and sat down on it. He tipped it back on its hind legs to lean against the crumbling brick wall and looked out over a field of thistles to the edge of a forest. Crickets sawed in the weeds and cicadas clacked from the tree line.
In a short while, the cracked windshield of an old battered black Studebaker glared in the sunlight as it cut a path through the weeds and stopped beside the outbuilding. A tall, slim man got out of the car and fought his way to the porch through the overgrown shrubs. He was in his sixties and had thinning gray hair; he wore a blue business suit and oxblood wingtips.
“Boss,” Ray said, nodding to him.
“Jim,” Boss said. He brushed off his jacket and trousers, picked up one of the cane chairs next to Ray, and sat down on it.
“Changed my name,” Ray said. “For professional reasons. I’m Ray Middleditch now.”
Boss half smiled and crossed his skinny legs, his pants cuff riding up to expose a black nylon tube sock. “How have you been?” Boss said.
“Not great. Haven’t been able to find regular work since Dillon fired me.”
“I’m sorry about that. Dillon promised me he’d keep you on when I sold him the company, but he changed his mind. He claimed your skills didn’t fit his needs. There was nothing I could do.”
“So he told me,” Ray said, not entirely convinced.
“Perhaps I can make it up to you. I have a special project for hire.”
Ray smiled sardonically. Special project was Boss’s code phrase for a shady deal. “So that’s why you wanted to meet in the middle of nowhere. Why you drove up in an old rattletrap car no one would think you own.”
A breeze mussed Boss’s wispy gray hair. He smoothed it down with a delicate lily-white hand. The word prissy crossed Ray’s mind, but he reminded himself that the package was deceiving. Ray had learned that the hard way.
“This project is an ugly matter,” Boss said. “No one can know I’m associated with the dirty work required to resolve my dilemma.”
“What sort of dilemma?”
“Salacious allegations toxic to my reputation.”
“What kind of dirty work?”
“Homicides.”
Ray paused. “How many?”
“Five.”
Ray paused again. “Who are they?”
Boss handed Ray a list of names and addresses.
Ray looked it over. “Why do you want these people killed?”
“The old lady’s been blackmailing me since July. She regards me as her retirement plan. Big monthly payments. Big enough that she knows I want to relieve myself of them. She claims she told the others about me and they share in her bounty. She says they’ll expose me if anything happens to her, but I think she’s lying to keep me from harming her.”
“What makes you think she’s lying?”
“I know her and the others. She doesn’t trust them, and they don’t trust her. They wouldn’t shed a tear over her demise. In fact, they’d dance on her grave. My guess is she hasn’t told them anything.”
“Then why kill them?”
“I could be wrong. There’s a small chance they know what the old lady knows. I can’t take that chance.”
“What does the old lady have on you?”
“That’s none of your concern.”
Ray thought it over. He didn’t like it. “I have a history in Selk County. I’d have to dig in there for a good stretch of time to take them all out. Someone might recognize me.”
“You’ll have to work around that problem.”
Ray shook his head. “The risk is too great.”
“I’ve set the compensation high to account for that.”
“How high?”
“Ten thousand dollars per head, fifty thousand in total, all cash, twenty-five up front, twenty-five when all five are dead. I’ve got the first installment with me.”
The big numbers produced the desired effect, but Ray sensed that Boss wanted this deal badly enough to pay more. “Fifteen per head.”
“Twelve.”
Another counter might succeed, but provoking a man like Boss was a dangerous gambit. At twelve, Ray would make sixty thousand dollars, more than he could earn in two or three years even if he found a regular job, which seemed unlikely. “You’ll cover reasonable expenses?”
“Like what?”
“I’ll have to rent a house and buy a truck. I’ll need a scanner to monitor police radio transmissions. Nothing unusual beyond that. Living expenses, food, gas, and the like.”
“All right. Sixty thousand plus expenses.”
“Deal.”
Boss went out to the Studebaker and returned with a brown paper bag. “Here’s the first thirty thousand. Cover your costs as you work the project. When you’re done, I’ll reimburse your expenses and pay the remaining thirty.”
Ray nodded. “I’ll need some time to set this up.”
“How long?”
“Couple months. Once I’ve begun, I’ll want to space out the killings to make them appear unrelated. Cole Grundy’s shrewd. If he thinks he’s dealing with a serial killer, he’ll bring a lot of heat to bear.”
“Dispose of them however you like, but kill the old lady first. She’s the one milking me. Just in case I’m wrong about her and the others working together, make it look like she died of natural causes. That way, if the others have information against me, her death won’t cause them to go public.”
Ray nodded.
“A word of caution,” Boss said. “I realize you have a score to settle with Grundy, but he’s not part of our contract. Once you’ve completed my project, you can do as you please with him, but not before. I’m paying you to serve my interests, not to advance your personal goals. Understood?”
“I’ll keep my emotions in check. I always do.”
* * *
But six months after that meeting, Ray lost control of his emotions, broke his promise to Boss, and tried to murder Cole before completing the contract. By the time Ray got back to his rental house after shooting at Cole from Bobcat Mountain, night had fallen. He took an ice pack out of the freezer, slipped it into a cloth sleeve, hiked up his pants leg, and strapped the sleeve around his swollen knee.
He swallowed four arthritis pain pills, a quadruple dose. The bottle told him not to mix alcohol with the medication, but the hell with that. He poured a tall glass of Cutty Sark over ice. He sat down wearily in a wicker chair on the glassed-in back porch and sipped the blended scotch.
He let out a long breath and looked out at the night. Moonlight glistened on a broken-down rail fence at the far end of the yard. Beyond it, a dilapidated apple-packing shed stood on the edge of a defunct orchard, the branches of its trees barren, gnarled, and broken.
He took another swallow of scotch and thought about the afternoon’s fiasco. He had thought he could still hit a medium-range target with a rifle if the conditions were right—an unsuspecting victim, the scope finely adjusted to compensate for his failing eyesight, the rifle braced on a tripod, little or no wind—but he hadn’t test-fired Bowie’s .30-06 beforehand. He was accustomed to placing his sighting eye close to his .30-30 Winchester’s scope because it didn’t recoil, but Bowie’s weapon kicked like a mule. When he fired the first shot at Cole, the scope pounded the socket of his sighting eye and the barrel jumped two feet in the air. He swiped the blood out of his eye and took aim again, but it was no good after that. He flinched before every shot and missed by wide margins. He was lucky he got out of the hollow alive.
He ran the cool surface of the glass across his brow. Boss had been right when they met in October. Ray should have completed the contract before he turned his attention to Cole. Three of his five targets were already dead. Everyone thought the old lady died of natural causes. Someone else killed Betty Lou, which drove Leland to suicide, so no one could pin their deaths on Ray. Bowie’s corpse, an unplanned side product of the project
, still lay undiscovered on Bobcat Mountain. Ray was not implicated in anyone’s death and the law didn’t even know he was in Selk County. He had no reason to eliminate Cole now.
Hatred had distorted his judgment. It festered like a thorn under his skin, inflamed and poisonous, and it made him too eager. But that was unwise. Stalking Cole required patience. Killing him would tax all his skill, energy, and guile. The better course was to finish the contract and come back to Cole when he could take his time.
He took a big swallow of Cutty Sark and concentrated on the next hit.
Chapter Ten
A Kettle of Vultures
March 2-3, 1967, Thursday night–Friday morning
After the attack on Sheriff Grundy, Deputy Chase Dooley worked all night at Mrs. Tilden’s property gathering evidence. When he arrived on the scene, he and the sheriff found Mrs. Tilden crying softly on the floor beside her piano with her hands covering her ears. She didn’t seem to know where she was and the sheriff couldn’t calm her down. When the rescue squad showed up, the sheriff told them to take her to Dolley Madison Hospital.
Deputy Toby Vess arrived a short while after the ambulance drove away, and he convinced the sheriff to go home and ice his back. The sheriff briefed them on the shooter’s attack, and then Toby drove him home.
It was dark when the county’s senior forensic technician arrived in his van, but Frank Woolsey was determined to collect as much evidence as possible during the night so he and Chase drove to Kirby’s Store in Fox Run to borrow a generator and lights. By the time Toby Vess returned to Mrs. Tilden’s house, they had rigged up the lights and were searching for bullets in and around Cole’s car.
Toby had just come off a double shift, so he left at ten and Chase managed the crime scene through the night. By four in the morning Frank and Chase had found a bullet embedded in the road, two lodged in the car’s frame, and another that had cracked the wheel well of the blown front tire. Then Chase located the entry point of a bullet in the engine head. By the time Frank dug out that last bullet, dawn had broken.
Chase sent Frank back to headquarters with the bullets and climbed Bobcat Mountain to investigate around the big white pine where the sheriff saw the shooter. The sun was up and the light was good when Chase reached the spot. A few feet below the bole of the tree, he found a patch of scuffed-up pine tags, and in front of that, three half-inch-square indentations in the soil, each about two inches deep, set in a wide triangle. He stared at them for a while before it came to him: a tripod. Chase looked down at the property below. From that spot, the shooter had an unobstructed view of the sheriff’s patrol car less than a hundred yards away. A challenging shot with a handgun, but a sure hit with a scoped high-powered rifle sighted with a clear eye and braced on a tripod. The sheriff was lucky to be alive.
As the sun rose higher, a shaft of light pierced the pine canopy to fall on a piece of metal a few feet up the slope. Chase climbed up to it. A shell casing lay embedded in the pine tags. He picked it up with a kerchief and inspected it. It looked like a .30-06 long casing. He put it in an evidence pouch.
On the other side of the tree, he found a trail of disturbed pine tags heading south. He walked along it above the Mundys’ house and then down to a graveled area next to a bend in Whippoorwill Hollow Road. Tires had made troughs in the gravel, but there were no treads there or on the shoulder. No boot prints either.
He walked the road back to the Tilden house and climbed in his truck, planning to take the shell casing to headquarters, when he saw a large kettle of vultures circling over Bobcat Mountain, forty or fifty birds, their wings tipping, banking in the wind, around, back, around again, dropping, rising, dropping again. A few disappeared below the tree tops.
Chase wondered what sort of carrion could have attracted so many buzzards. It had to be a large carcass, he thought, a white-tail deer or a black bear, but big game rarely ventured out of the sanctuary of the park so soon after hunting season.
He counted the birds. Twenty-three in the air, and twenty or more had dropped out of sight into the pines before he started counting. More descended while he watched and the others circled ever lower.
His curiosity piqued, he wanted to take a look, but the only way up there by truck was an old logging road. It would take him an hour to drive out of the hollow, around the mountain range, and back to the mouth of the logging road on Bobcat’s other side. It wasn’t worth the time, and he was too tired from working all night to climb the mountain on foot again.
Nothing up there could be related to the attack on the sheriff, he told himself. The summit was a good five hundred feet above the tripod prints, and the trail indicated that the shooter fled down the mountain, not up it.
Chase watched the last of the buzzards disappear below the treetops. He stared at the summit for a while longer, then cursed, got out of the truck, and walked across the Tilden property to the woods.
By the time he scaled the mountain, the buzzards were jousting in a patch of dense brush near the summit. They were big, ungainly black birds with red heads, squawking, flapping their wings, thrusting hooked sharp beaks at one another. They were in such a frenzy that shouting and waving his arms didn’t drive them off. He fired two shots in the air and two more in the ground near the birds before most of them took flight. Even then, four hopped up the slope to the end of the old logging road and stood glaring at him with their beady eyes and hunched shoulders, like a quartet of undertakers.
When he approached the brush, the sickeningly sweet scent of decay knocked him back. He covered his nose and mouth with a kerchief before he started pulling away giant creeping vines to find a dead man in the undergrowth. The top of his head was blown off and there was a dry hole in his chest. Dried blood matted his blond hair and crusted what was left of his head and face. The buzzards had been at him for a while. Dead a week or more, Chase guessed.
The undertakers on the summit squawked as Chase searched the dead man’s pockets. No identification. Nothing. He stepped out of the brush and looked around. Scuff marks in the pine tags ran from the patch of brush down the slope. He followed them. As he passed a clump of bushes, the sun glanced off a wine bottle. He picked it up with a kerchief. Hombre, its label said. Clean and unsoiled, the bottle hadn’t been there long. He set it down by the bushes for retrieval later.
He followed the scuff marks around a fallen pine to its lower side. Bits of bone were scattered on pine tags there. A large concave piece picked clean of blood and tissue appeared to be part of a human skull. Rodents and birds had scratched in the soil all around it. They’d probably made off with more than they’d left behind.
Chase looked at the brush where the corpse lay and pieced together what he thought had occurred. The man had been killed where Chase stood, a bullet to the head and another to the heart. The killer dragged the corpse up to the patch of brush, leaving behind the trail of scuffed pine tags.
Chase scanned the terrain below him. Imprints in the tags caught his eye. He knelt beside them and a chill went up his spine. The same tripod that had stood down below had been set up here on the summit.
Chase took in the view. From that spot, a shooter could take aim at a target on the Mundy and Tilden properties and the field across the road. A long-range shot, three hundred yards, requiring a marksman. But a Baby Browning had killed Betty Lou, not a high-powered rifle. Chase stared at the Mundy property for a long time, trying to deduce a connection between the corpse in the brush and Betty Lou’s murder or the attack on the sheriff. He could not.
Raucous squawking brought him out of his thoughts. The quartet of vultures had returned to the corpse. They flapped their wings and lunged at one another, fighting for dominance over their prize. Chase drew his gun and headed up to the corpse.
Chapter Eleven
The Photograph
March 3, 1967, Friday noon
Cole’s back was sore the morning after the attack. He planned to take the day off, but without the distraction of work, he couldn’t kee
p his mind off Carrie. He took a pain pill at ten o’clock, strapped on his back brace, and drove in to Jeetersburg to sheriffs’ headquarters, a two-story brick building on the outskirts of town with a large lobby in the center of the first floor and two long wings stretching away on either side.
He parked behind the building and went to the county’s lead forensic technician’s office on the ground floor in the east wing. Frank Woolsey was a short, stocky man in his early sixties, bald with a fringe of long gray hair gathered into a ponytail that dribbled down his back, a moustache waxed and twisted into points like twin silver toothpicks, and intense green eyes under bushy gray eyebrows. When Cole walked in, Frank was behind his desk sipping a cup of coffee. His eyebrows darted upward at the sight of Cole. “Thought the doctors told you to stay home and rest your back.”
Cole sat down across from Frank. “I’m on light duty.”
“Light duty like dodging a killer’s bullets?” Frank grumped.
“Light duty like sitting here talking to you,” Cole said in a tone that warned Frank off the subject. “What did you find at Bessie’s place?”
“Five bullets. Thirty-aught-six longs.”
“The most popular hunting rifle in the county. Won’t narrow the search much. You find anything at that big white pine?”
“It was too dark to search the mountain last night. Chase is up there now.”
“Keep me up to speed. In the meantime, take a look at this.” Cole spilled Bessie’s envelope and photograph out of the evidence pouch onto Frank’s desk.
Frank emitted a low whistle. “I always thought Betty Lou was a helluva looker, but I never got this good a look at her.”