Back of Beyond

by C. J. Box

  “That’s what’s important,” Gracie mumbled.

  “Are you being sarcastic?”

  “Never.”

  “Well, don’t,” Danielle said, sliding into her sleeping bag and pulling the zipper up. “It’s boring.”

  “Justin is too good to be true,” Gracie said.

  “He is, isn’t he?”

  Gracie thought any more conversation would lead to an argument. “Good night.”

  “Good night, Gracie.”

  * * *

  She lay brooding in the dark for hours. Occasionally, she could hear a whoop or laugh from the direction of the campfire. Danielle’s breathing got deeper and she slept the sleep of the dead and Gracie wished she’d gotten that snake from Dakota.

  She’d never hated her father before.

  17

  Larry said to Cody, “A pattern is emerging in these cases.”

  Cody felt his scalp tighten. He stood. “You mean besides the method of death, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “At the office. Unauthorized overtime, as usual.”

  “Good,” Cody said, standing and gathering his files under an arm while holding the phone with the other. He snuffed out his cigarette, pocketed the keycard, and pushed his way out into the hallway. “I’m at a hotel and I saw a business center downstairs. I’ll go down there and fire up one of the computers so we can both be online.”

  “Want me to call you back?”

  “No way,” Cody said. “I’ve been waiting all night to hear from you. Don’t worry, I can walk and talk at the same time.”

  The hallway was shadowed and cavernous and he padded down the carpeting toward a curving staircase at the end. As he approached he could hear a swell of conversation and laughter from the lounge on the first floor.

  Cody descended the stairs. Across the lobby the receptionist saw him and nodded. He nodded back, gestured toward the closed door of the business center, and the receptionist indicated it was open for use. He sat at a PC beneath a window that looked out into the lobby. The doorway to the lounge was straight ahead, and he could make out bodies inside lining a bar. The men and women were well dressed with the women in dresses and men in suit jackets with no ties, about as formal as Montanans were likely to get. The crowd looked young and elite; professionals out after a concert or fundraiser. The kind he usually made a point to avoid.

  “So what’s the connection?” Cody asked Larry as he placed the files on the counter next to the computer.

  Larry said, “Before I spill it, let me say this is pure speculation at this point.”

  Cody sighed. “Of course.”

  “And it’s just me right now. I don’t have anyone else on the case to confirm what I’m saying or poke holes in it.”

  “Yes, Larry,” Cody said impatiently.

  “Let me walk you through it,” Larry said. “Got a pen?”

  “Sure,” Cody said, firing up the PC and waiting for it to boot. He opened one of the files to take notes on the front inside cover.

  “First,” Larry said, “we’ve got nothing new on our end. The arson tech is still sifting through the burned-out cabin and they’ve confirmed everything we thought. I talked to one of them today and he said there was no sign of accelerants, which tilts it toward an accident rather than a homicide, but in my mind it isn’t convincing. The place was old and dry to begin with and built with logs. Those kinds of buildings go up like a box of matches, especially when there is spilled alcohol on the floor to help it along. The guy said the fire spread normally from right in front of the open woodstove throughout the room.”

  Cody said, “Has anything else been found by the crime-scene techs? Hair, fiber, anything like that?”

  “Nope. It looks like whoever did it literally left no fingerprints. But more likely, he spent the whole evening in the living area and didn’t venture into the kitchen. There are some latents in the bedroom, as you know, but we don’t have any hits on them yet.”

  “Damn,” Cody said. “Call me if anything comes of that.”

  “Yeah,” Larry said. “I’m thinking the bad guy knew the best way to cover his tracks was to burn everything down around him when he was through.”

  Cody nodded. “I agree. It accomplishes a couple of things. The fire not only destroyed any latent evidence, the fire itself points us away from homicide.”

  “Speaking of,” Larry said, “the three victims other than Hank Winters I found through ViCAP all died within the last month. There might be more and there could be other methods of death, but for now that’s our universe, okay?”

  Cody nodded as if Larry could see him. He could hear Larry shuffling papers.

  “The first was a William Geraghty, sixty-three, of Falls Church, Virginia. The police report on him says he was a midlevel Democratic political consultant. He was found at his beach house three and a half weeks ago. His cottage was burned down and his body was found in the wreckage. The police there initially called it an accident but a few days later a witness said they saw a vehicle coming from the place in the dark shortly after it was established the blaze took off. No good description of the vehicle or driver, but because the cottage was located on a dead-end road and it was the middle of the night, the car was considered suspicious. The autopsy of Geraghty sounds real similar: blunt-force head injuries and lack of smoke in his lungs. The cops there list it as a possible homicide and the case is open. I spoke to the lead detective in Falls Church and he basically said there has been no progress in the case; no further leads at all.”

  “Sounds familiar,” Cody said.

  “Yes. But in this case the fire damage was total. They didn’t have rain to stop it. Which means no hair or fiber, and no DNA to run.”

  While Larry talked, Cody Googled the name “William Geraghty” and found items including his death notice in the local paper and older references to his involvement in political campaigns throughout the country. He would study the items later, when Larry was done.

  “What do we know about him besides his job and his death?” Cody asked.

  “I’m getting to that, but let me do this in my own way.”

  Cody knew better than to try and get Larry to cut to the chase.

  Larry said, “The second victim identified by ViCAP is Gary Shulze, fifty-nine, Minneapolis. This was two weeks ago. He was a professor of literature at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. His body was found at his cabin near a place called Deer River in the northeast corner of the state on Lake Winnibigoshish. Same thing we’re getting used to: burned cabin, body inside, head injuries. The difference here is it appears there was a deep puncture wound into his brain as opposed to bludgeoning. The wound was initially explained away as a postmortem injury caused by glass shards driven into his body by falling timbers, but the coroner doesn’t rule out the possibility it was caused by a knife blade driven into his skull and withdrawn. Obviously, the locals initially thought it was a suicide or accident, but Shulze’s wife Pat convinced them her husband had recently cleaned up his act and had undergone some kind of conversion. She said he was loving life. There was no way he’d do himself in, she said. Of course, we’ve heard that kind of thing before from loved ones, but the detective told me she was so convincing that they listed the case as open even though they have their doubts.”

  Cody opened another window on the browser and Googled the name “Gary Shulze.” In addition to his participation on various literature councils and a personnel listing for the U of M faculty, there were death notices in both the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the Western Itasca Review.

  “Same total crime scene devastation as Geraghty,” Larry said. “No traces of evidence have been found that point to anything other than an accident involving a single victim.”

  Larry sighed. “The last one before Hank Winters is the one we know about, the close one in terms of time and mileage.”

  Cody said, “Karen Anthony.”

  “Yeah, her,”
Larry said. “Forty-six-year-old hospital consultant living in Jackson Hole and Boise. She’s a little different because her place in Jackson—actually Wilson, Wyoming, outside of town—was some kind of historic home she’d refurbished. Like Geraghty’s, the place is pretty remote and only accessible by a two-track through the trees. A neighbor saw a vehicle come down their shared road about a half hour before he noticed the flames up on the hill and called the fire department. The Teton County Sheriff told me they got a partial on the vehicle: dark blue or black SUV, single driver, light-colored license plates, which apparently means out-of-state but the witness couldn’t tell which.”

  “That’s no help,” Cody said. “Finding an SUV in Wyoming is like looking for a fly at the dump—they’re everywhere.”

  “I know,” Larry said.

  “So,” Cody said, opening another window and typing in Karen Anthony’s name, “we’ve got three victims who basically died the same way, burned in their homes long before the fire could be put out. And the victims are all roughly middle-aged and professional. And alone. That’s a string of similarities but really not much to build on.”

  “Exactly,” Larry said. “I spent half the day reading and rereading all of the police reports, trying to find something that linked them beyond the obvious and trying to find a connection to Hank Winters.”

  “And?” Cody said.

  “Nada,” Larry said. “The cops I talked to couldn’t come up with anything either. When I told them about the other cases, they were surprised there were similar incidents. So nobody has been looking into this as a pattern, including the FBI.”

  “So,” Larry said, “I took a flyer and called Geraghty’s wife in Falls Church. I told her who I was and what I was investigating, and you know how that goes. She was falling all over herself trying to help. My guess is she hadn’t heard from the locals since shortly after the fire because they didn’t have anything to tell her. So she was excited I was working it.”

  Cody nodded, then said, “Hmmm,” so Larry would know he was listening.

  “I asked the usual. Any enemies, ex-wives, business problems or rivals, financial problems, et cetera.”

  “Hmmm.”

  Larry said, “What she told me was almost too good to be true. She said they’d had some real rough patches in their marriage but that Geraghty had straightened up in the last few years and everything was fucking wonderful. She said that was the worst part about it all—that things were going so well when it happened.”

  Cody felt a jangle in his chest. He said, “Didn’t Shulze’s wife say kind of the same thing?”

  “That hit me, too,” Larry said. “So I kept asking Mrs. Geraghty questions. She was a little reluctant at first, but she finally spilled the beans. Geraghty was a big drinker for a long time. A good-time-Charlie type who spent a lot of time on the road with other political types. Between the lines, I got the vibe he was abusive to her when he was on a toot. But she said after he got a DUI he finally entered a twelve-step program and cleaned up his act. She said he’s been stone-cold sober for the last two and a half years.

  “So I called Pat Shulze,” Larry said. “After a while, I got the same story. Shulze had checked himself into rehab three years before because the university made him, and it took. She said it was like having the guy she married back. He was writing a book about his recovery and doing speaking engagements at faculty association meetings around the country, I guess. He even had a Web site on recovery where he answered questions and such.”

  “Damn,” Cody said. “So what about Karen Anthony?”

  Larry said, “I called her sister in Omaha. Same deal. She said Anthony was a hard partier all her life until the last five years, when she found Jesus and AA. So it looks like our guy is targeting ex-alcoholics.”

  “Christ,” Cody said, thinking of Hank. “That’s just wrong.” Then: “For the record, there’s no such thing. But we can talk about that later.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Larry said.

  Cody paused. “I’m trying to wrap my mind around this. So we’ve got a guy traveling the country and setting up rendezvous with recovering alcoholics, then bushwhacking them in their homes. I see a pattern but not a motive.”

  “Me neither,” Larry said. “I’ve been racking my brain. Who would want to go after people who’d straightened out their lives? What’s the point of that?”

  Cody grumbled that he didn’t know, then thought of something. “Larry, did any of the locals in Virginia, Minnesota, or Wyoming find any AA coins at the scenes?”

  He could hear Larry shuffling through papers. “No mention of them anywhere,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean anything for sure. They didn’t catalog every item they found at the scene. No reason to.”

  “Unless,” Cody said, “the bad guy is taking the coins with him like he did with Hank. That way the locals wouldn’t even have a reason to bring the AA angle into the picture. Hell, we wouldn’t have gone down that road if I didn’t know Hank took his coins with him everywhere he went.”

  “I didn’t think of that, dammit,” Larry said. “Or I would have asked the detectives.”

  “Find out,” Cody said.

  “I will tomorrow,” Larry said. “But we still don’t know why our bad guy even knew them at all.”

  “I don’t know,” Cody said, “unless maybe the victims did something to the guy before they sobered up. Maybe, I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t come up with a scenario that makes any sense. Not without knowing if the victims even knew each other or were ever in the same place.”

  Larry agreed. “We’ve got four different locations thousands of miles apart. Four different lines of work. I can’t see where they possibly intersect.”

  “This is going to take some fine police work,” Cody said. “Can you pull in the cops in all those states to help?”

  “Some,” Larry said, his voice dropping. “But you know how it goes. They’re all up to their asses in alligators. They’ll probably all agree to help, but no one is going to make this top priority. I can’t blame them. I’d do the same thing if one of them asked me. I’d put it on the back burner and concentrate on my local caseload. I wouldn’t drop everything to go investigate this based on my speculation.”

  “What about the Feds?” Cody asked.

  “I’ve got a call in to them,” Larry said. “Which means I had to clear it with the sheriff and Bodean. Luckily, I asked Tubman in the middle of another blowup with the coroner who, by the way, announced his intention to run for sheriff next year.”

  “Did Tubman ask about me?” Cody asked.

  “Not yet. But Bodean hit the roof. I walked him through what I had so far thinking he’d ease off, but he came unglued. He said if I heard from you I was to tell you to get your ass back here ASAP.”

  Cody exhaled deeply. “Duly noted.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised to see Bodean throw his hat in the ring for sheriff,” Larry said. “He seems to suddenly be doing damage control.”

  Cody’s mind was elsewhere. He said, “Larry, this seems like the right track, but I can’t see things coming together fast. I need them to come together fast.”

  “I need a lot of things I can’t get,” Larry huffed. “Like a raise and some hair.”

  “Sorry,” Cody said. “I’ve got to think about all this. We have to be able to connect the victims with somebody or someplace. Then we can get the other agencies and departments moving, once we’ve done that.”

  “Agreed. But it’s that first part that seems impossible,” Larry said, gloomy.

  “You can do it,” Cody said. “If anyone can.”

  “Yeah,” Larry said, “I know.”

  “I’m still going after Justin tomorrow,” Cody said. “I’ll turn on that satellite phone. Call me with anything else, and I’ll do the same.”

  After a beat, Larry said, “Are you going to alert the Park Service that you’re entering their sacred domain?”

  “Hell no.”

  “Cody…” />
  “They’ll just muck it up. I don’t have the time for them to have a bunch of meetings and go up the chain of command. I have to find my boy and put this bad guy on ice.”

  Larry was exasperated. “How many violations are you going to break on this deal? I can’t even keep track.”

  Cody shrugged. “I don’t care,” he said.

  “Look,” Larry said, “you may not care but I’m complicit in every stupid thing you do. So I’m going to cover my ass a little. I’ve already figured out that the sheriff is so distracted by Skeeter I can claim I told him everything at some point and he’ll probably believe me. He won’t know the difference. Of course, Bodean is a different animal. I’ll have to figure out how to bypass him.”

  Cody agreed.

  Larry said, “And tomorrow I’m going to call a buddy of mine named Rick Doerring with the Park Service. He’s the ranger I met last year.”

  Cody shook his head, not liking where this was headed. “Last year?”

  “Yeah, remember when someone from Bozeman called in that they saw a small plane headed toward Yellowstone? Remember, the citizen said the plane looked damaged and it was flying real low toward the park.”

  Cody vaguely remembered the incident. From what he could recall, the FAA had no record of the aircraft and there were no reports of a missing plane. Since Larry and Bodean were the departmental assignees to an interagency Homeland Security Task Force, they’d had to scramble because unknown airplanes headed for federal land were a big deal these days. Rick Doerring was on the task force as well. The plane was never found, and no one ever reported it missing. The incident faded away quickly.

  “Rick is a good guy,” Larry said. “Almost normal, for a Fed. I may run this by him on the sly and see what he says.”

  “I can’t stop you,” Cody said. “But at least give it until the afternoon. By then, I should be deep into the park where he—or you—can never find me. I don’t want their help with this unless it’s on my terms.”

  Larry didn’t agree, but he didn’t argue.

  “Look at the bright side,” Larry said. “Your son is likely not a recovering alcoholic.” It was meant to be funny.