by Dan Walsh
Campbell noticed a thick notebook under Hank’s arm and realized what it was. The mugshot book. So that’s what this was about. Hank had asked him to come in and look at potential suspects. But why? It’s not like the Senator’s father would be in that book. He had to find out what was going on.
He decided to head back to his desk but keep an eye on the interview room. It wasn’t far from the coffee pot. When the two men came out, Campbell would suddenly feel the need to refresh his coffee mug. He was just about to sit when he heard the interview room door open. Hank walked out, closed the door and headed back toward his desk.
Maybe he should get that coffee now. He waited till Hank sat in his chair, then got up. “Hey Hank, isn’t that the college professor involved in that shootout last year? The one Sergeant Boyd saved?”
“That’s him.” Hank started tapping the keys on his keyboard.
“Wasn’t he just in here a couple hours ago?”
“He was.” Hank didn’t look at him, just kept on typing.
Campbell got the distinct impression Hank didn’t like him very much. Or maybe it was just Hank getting all hoity-toity now that he was Sergeant Boyd’s boy. “What’s going on?”
Hank stopped, turned and gave him a look that suggested he wanted to say, “None of your business.” Instead, he said, “He was in here a little while ago to talk about something with Sergeant Boyd. A private matter. On his way home, he stopped in at the Fun Spot Arcade for a few minutes and got jumped by two thugs.”
“Really? I didn’t see a mark on him.”
“That’s because he whupped them. Both of them. Apparently, he’s got some Muay Thai skills. Anyway, I left him in there to see if he can pick either one of them out. Why do you care anyway?”
“I don’t. Just passing time. Working on something pretty boring. I remember that situation last year got pretty exciting. The most action I’ve seen since I started to work here.”
Hank turned back to his screen, started tapping the keys again. “Well, sorry to disappoint you. But I don’t think this is anything like that.”
“Oh well, you know me…always looking for a little excitement.”
Hank didn’t answer. Just kept tapping away.
Campbell backed out of the space, turned and found the nearest exit. Once outside, he tapped the button on his personal cell for Vandergraf.
After a few rings, Vandergraf said, “Officer Campbell. Twice in one day. I’m kind of busy. Can we make this quick?”
“Sure. I’m pretty busy too. Just thought I’d let you know, that history professor, Jack Turner, came back to the police station again. He’s here right now.”
“Really? Do you know why?”
“I do. Apparently, after he left here the first time he stopped in at a local arcade, where two thugs jumped him. Unfortunately for them, he’s something of a martial arts guy, and they were the ones who got beat up. I didn’t see a mark on him. He must have reported it. I guess we called him back to look through our mugshots, see if he can spot the perps. He’s in our interview room right now doing that very thing. I don’t know if this has any relationship to what I called you about earlier, but thought you’d want to know.”
“I’m glad. I definitely do want to know things like this. Let me know if you hear anything more, especially if Mr. Turner IDs anyone in that mug book.”
“Will do.”
Campbell hung up and headed back inside. He wasn’t so sure he liked what just went down. Judging from his reaction, Vandergraf obviously had something to do with those thugs who’d attempted to attack Professor Turner.
They didn’t succeed, but it hadn’t been for a lack of trying.
Vandergraf hung up, put his phone back in his coat pocket. This wasn’t good. He was sure the next time he and the Senator met, he would be asked one question: Is the situation handled? The answer needed to be yes.
He took a deep breath and reminded himself to keep the big picture in mind here. He was relatively sure Paco and his big friend would not be in the Culpepper Police Station mug book. They lived two counties away and Paco had assured him that neither of them had ever been arrested in this town, or even in this county. Paco would know better than to lie to him on something like that.
The bigger concern was whether or not Professor Turner would drop this effort to find out any more information about the Senator’s father. He was sure now Officer Campbell would alert him if that happened.
Just to be on the safe side, Vandergraf looked up the contact information on the man he’d have to call, should that become necessary. The man’s name was Rob Strickland.
Rob Strickland had just become Plan B.
38
Jack had spent the last hour going over mugshots. A few of them bore some resemblance to the thugs who jumped him, but his guys were definitely not in that book. He was surprised to see just how many young felons lived in Culpepper. He’d always found it to be a pretty safe place. Other than the ordeal he and Rachel had endured last year, this confrontation at the arcade had been his first run-in with anything violent or criminal.
He closed the lid on the thick notebook and slid his chair out from under the table. Time to get Hank. As Jack entered the hallway, Hank happened to be coming this way.
“Well?”
“No luck. The guys who attacked me are either not from around here, or they’ve been very successful at never getting caught.”
“Do you want to meet with our sketch artist? She’s pretty good.”
“I don’t think so, Hank. I might feel differently if they’d actually hurt me, but I’m thinking of just letting this go. I really need to get back to the cabin, get back to work on my research project. But if these guys wind up attacking anyone else in town, and you catch them, feel free to call me back and I’ll see if I can identify them.”
“I understand,” Hank said. “I’ll do that.” They shook hands and Jack headed toward the lobby.
Once in the car, he felt a ping in his conscience that he should call Rachel, let her know what happened. He’d certainly want to know if anything like this had happened to her. He found her number and hit the phone icon. If he had timed it right, she should be in between classes.
“Hi, Jack. So good to hear your voice.”
“Glad I got you.”
“Taking a break from your research?”
“Wish I was.”
“Oh? What are you doing instead?”
“I’m just leaving the police station. Spent the last hour or so looking at a bunch of ugly guys in a mugshot book.”
“What? Why? What’s going on?”
“Nothing to worry about. Wasn’t even sure I should call you. Then I started feeling guilty about not calling you, so I knew I should. Now, before I tell you what happened, you need to know I’m fine. I wasn’t hurt, and the whole situation is over with.”
“Jack, if you’re saying all this to reassure me, it’s not working. What in the world are you talking about? What happened?”
He spent the rest of his time driving through downtown Culpepper filling her in. He finished just about the time he’d turned onto the country road that led toward the cabin.
Her first comments were, “Well, I’m very glad you’ve been taking those Muay Thai classes.”
“You and me both.”
“And Hank’s sure these guys weren’t targeting you?”
“He is, and the more I thought about it, the more I think he’s right. They couldn’t have known I’d be at that arcade playing pinball when I did. I only decided to do it on the spur of the moment. Haven’t visited that place for years before today. I don’t know who they thought I was, I’m just glad it wasn’t me. And really, I’m fine. Not a scratch on me.”
“Well, I’m glad. While I have you on the phone, thought you’d like to hear this, one of my morning classes canceled. Between last night and today, I’ve been making quite a dent translating that German notebook into English.”
“Really? Come across anything
profound yet? Anything even close to a smoking gun?”
“Not really. More like totally bizarre. Especially now that I know what this is. Most of it has been running like what I said at the cabin. Notes the killer took while he was scoping out the various places where these B-17 pilots lived.”
“That sounds significant. If what he wrote connects these obituaries to the journal.”
“I’d say they definitely do. But I’m not so sure Sergeant Boyd would agree. The killer’s very clever. So far, I haven’t found any of the names of the men who died. I’m pretty sure he made little codenames for them. When you know what happened and what he was up to, it’s pretty clear what’s going on. He’s casing them. Writing down all their habits and patterns. Every now and then his hatred for them slips out by some little thing he says. He also occasionally justifies what he’s doing and why. At the end of each one, he says ‘Justice served.’”
“Well, that sounds like a pretty solid connection.”
“To you and me it does. But I’ve gone back and re-read some of these things after I translated them, trying to see them through the lens of someone who had no prior knowledge. That’s where the cleverness stands out. You can tell he’s writing something that sounds ominous and sinister, but he always falls short of saying anything specific. I don’t know. I haven’t finished it yet. There’s a chance I could finish it tonight. Maybe something more obvious or blatant will surface. You want to plan on me coming back to the cabin tomorrow night, so we can go over this together?
“Definitely. But maybe you could do something while everything is fresh in your mind.”
“Like what?”
“Go back over your translated copy and highlight in yellow all of these kinds of things you just mentioned. The things that give you pause, or make you think are significant. And especially highlight anything he says about his son, if he ever shows up in the parts you haven’t finished yet.”
“Sure, I can do that. Well, I better go. I’m at the door for my last class of the day.”
Jack spent the rest of the car ride to the cabin going over the things Rachel had said. It was a little disappointing. He’d hoped there would be glaringly obvious statements directly connecting the journal to the obituaries. They could still come from the pages she hadn’t translated. But he also realized, someone as meticulous and thorough as old man Wagner was proving to be, wasn’t likely to make such an obvious error.
Jack thought about another possible angle to pursue. During some of his World War II research for his other books, he had learned about the codebreakers at Bletchley Park. Many of them were mathematical geniuses. Total nerds but brilliant. The FBI and CIA still employed people with these skills. People with deductive reasoning powers like Sherlock Holmes, who could take something that everyone else skips right over and see all kinds of patterns and subtle routines emerge.
Of course, right now they weren’t dealing with the FBI or the CIA. They were dealing with the Culpepper PD.
He drove his BMW over the winding pathway cut through the trees until he reached the clearing. As he put the car in park, he remembered what Joe and Hank had said about the DA not wanting to see any cases—especially circumstantial cases—that weren’t backed by rock-solid evidence.
From what Rachel had said so far, they were still miles away from that.
39
Jack stepped onto the porch, the obituaries scrapbook under his arm. He unlocked the cabin door and walked inside. The day was mostly shot. There were only a few hours left before dinner. He wasn’t in the mood to start digging out his Dresden research materials. He set the scrapbook on the dinette table, stared at it for a few moments.
After his meeting that morning with Joe and Hank, and his phone conversation with Rachel, he realized…this is what he wanted to do. Work on this.
As he looked down at the scrapbook, Hank’s words played over in his mind: This could all be exactly what you said. I’m just saying that, right now, all you really got is a scrapbook filled with old newspaper clippings. Everything else is you connecting up the dots for us.
For Jack, this was more than a bunch of loosely connected dots. He wasn’t some kind of overly-passionate guy driven by emotions. He hated the thought that somehow he’d given Hank this impression. Even Jack’s books were known for “their meticulous commitment to historical details.” His rational mind and even his gut instincts told him…this scrapbook was exactly what they’d said it was—a trophy book for a serial killer.
But he also understood what Joe and Hank were saying. They needed proof. Unswerving, unwavering proof. Of course, it would be circumstantial. It would have to be. There was no DNA involved. No video. No murder weapon. But he knew a little bit about how circumstantial cases could be made when circumstantial evidence was the only kind available, and done so in a way it would hold up in court.
Back in college, he had done a paper about the circumstantial evidence used in the O.J. Simpson trial. That case, of course, had ended with Simpson being found not guilty. But Jack had cited many cases in his essay where defendants had been found guilty on nothing but circumstantial evidence. For circumstantial evidence to be effective, it must not only implicate a defendant’s guilt, there must also be no other explanation for the evidence that could be shown that supported his innocence.
Jack sat in a dinette chair and opened up the scrapbook. This scrapbook, all by itself, seemed to undeniably support old man Wagner’s guilt and rule out any notion of innocence. What other explanation could be offered to suggest a man would innocently gather together a collection of obituaries like this? Wagner didn’t know any of the men, wasn’t related to any of the men. They had all lived in different cities, some in different states. The only thing that linked the pilots together was that they had all had flown in the same bomb group during World War II.
Wagner was not a B-17 pilot. He was not even an American. Not even an adult. He was a little boy, orphaned by the actions of men like these pilots. That goes right to motive. Wagner had a motive to be angry at these men, especially if Jack could prove these men flew in the bomb group that dropped the bombs over the city where Wagner lived, and that these bombs had actually killed his family.
This information was knowable. This information could be substantiated.
Jack got his laptop and sat with it in the recliner. He opened it to the file of notes he had already begun in Word. Next, he opened Google and began searching through a number of World War II aviation sites. Sites he had already found related to the 379th bombing group. For the next hour, he scoured through the sites and some others pulling on threads and following new leads. He made a list of the pilots then added to that list all the missions they had flown, what cities they had bombed. Most of them occurred in 1944 and the early months of 1945.
He went back and forth between the eight pilots and the cities they had bombed, looking for connections. Quite a few had flown together in some missions, but not in all. After checking and crosschecking the list several times he finally discovered one city, one mission that all eight pilots had flown on together.
When he realized what city, he was stunned. “Unbelievable,” he said aloud. It was exactly what Rachel had guessed.
The mission was Dresden. February 14th, 1945.
These eight men had all flown in the third bombing raid. The first two raids had taken place the night before, conducted by the British. Those were the raids that had created the horrific firestorm that had totally consumed the beautiful historic town. Mission three had taken place the following day. From his research, Jack knew the controversy surrounding this mission had been enormous.
Why had American generals agreed to participate in this mission in the first place? For almost the entire war, the Americans had resisted the urge to carpet bomb German cities or conduct any missions that primarily targeted German civilians. But not this time. This time we said yes to the British. Dresden had already been completely annihilated the night before. Coming in for the at
tack the following day represented the worst kind of piling on. We were killing the survivors, those who had somehow managed to make it through the firestorm. Men, women and children. The elderly. Emergency workers. Those trying to save the wounded and dying.
Those were the people being killed in the third raid.
The American raid.
And very likely, old man Wagner’s family. Only he wasn’t an old man then. Just a scared little boy.
A scared little boy who grew up hating those who had destroyed the people he loved. A little boy who vowed one day to exact his vengeance.
Talk about motive, Jack thought.
Jack sat at the dinette table finishing up his gourmet chicken pot pie. Well, the box said it was gourmet. In frozen food language, gourmet must mean three or four additional chunks of chicken. He still couldn’t get over the information he’d uncovered in his internet search.
Especially, the irony of the thing.
Dozens of German cities had been bombed. Hundreds of bombing missions had been flown. What were the odds that he would pick the one town, the same town, for his doctoral dissertation that old man Wagner had lived in, had been orphaned in, as a little boy? And of all the cabins along the banks of the various lakes surrounding Culpepper, what were the odds Jack would pick this one for his retreat?
And…that this would be the cabin that had served as the refuge and hideout of a serial killer taking revenge on elderly B-17 pilots because they had flown on the same mission over the same city that Jack had picked to study some seventy years later?
This revelation wasn’t exactly the proof he needed to convince Hank or Joe to investigate this case, but it certainly had to matter. It had to help the cause. It meant that old man Wagner had come from Dresden, that he was a Dresden survivor. What else could it mean? Why else would he stalk and pursue these pilots?
His phone rang. It was Rachel.
He picked it up. “Hi, Rachel. Didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.”