A Murder In Passing

by Mark de Castrique

  “Sam. What’s up?”

  “Nothing really. Just checking in. I had a call from Mick Emory pleading for me to get you off his ass.”

  “I bet. Nothing that scumbag fears more than police cars in his parking lot.”

  “Is he still a suspect?”

  “He has no alibi and a store full of guns, scopes, and ammo. He claims he never talked to Fretwell.”

  “That’s what he told me. He said Fretwell left a message on his answering machine.”

  “Well, I’m tracking down the length of the call with the phone company because Emory said he erased the message. He also can’t find the bill of sale for the Beretta PX4 he told you he sold.”

  “Maybe he sold it to someone he shouldn’t have,” I said.

  “Maybe. Or he used it himself and doesn’t want it ever found. I’m going to let the sheriff lean on him for that in case it ties into the Nettles murder.”

  “Has your investigator friend made any progress?”

  “He said Nettles’ wife gave them a description of the stolen jewelry. They’ll check the pawnshops starting with Emory’s. The garage owner where Nettles left his car said he gave Nettles a lift to his American Legion Post. Nettles was getting a ride home from there.”

  “Does he know with whom?”

  “No. They’re still following it up.”

  “William Lang’s a member. That’s how he learned about Nettles’ death.”

  “I’ll mention it. And I’ve already given my friend Jimmy Lang’s name like you asked.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Any leads off ballistics for Jason?”

  “The slug was pretty well mangled. A few rifling marks survived. I don’t know if it’s enough for a match, but I didn’t tell Emory that. We’re pretty sure it’s a thirty-aught-six, one of the most common guns in the mountains.”

  “Not like a Remington fourteen and a half. You talk to John and William Lang yet?”

  “Yeah. Efird and I are just leaving William’s house. We spoke with the old man earlier.”

  “And?”

  “John Lang says he went straight home from the plant last night, watched PBS Newshour and the Nightly Business News, and turned in a little after eight. William went to a charity fundraiser for Mission Hospital. Some gala dinner and silent auction at the Renaissance Hotel. It lasted till ten. William won the high bid on an abstract painting by one of the artists in his daughter’s gallery. He showed us the piece. The most artistic thing about it is the frame. We’re headed to see the daughter now.”

  “When did that charity event start?” I asked.

  “Seven.”

  I realized whoever pulled the trigger at the Kenilworth wouldn’t have made it to a ritzy affair downtown at seven. “Do you think the old man could have managed it?”

  Newland thought a second. “He’s spry. With a bipod support for the rifle and a good scope, yeah, it’s within the realm of possibility. But why Jason Fretwell?”

  “I don’t know. He either thought Jason was me or he shot at me in the car and hit Jason by mistake.”

  “And motive?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Then watch yourself,” Newland said. “You must know something important and don’t realize it.”

  I knew more now than I did the previous night. The Ulmann photograph revealed the Langs’ secret. Had John Lang somehow known we were on the verge of that discovery? Had Brose’s friend in Charleston tipped him off? The possibility of so elaborate a conspiracy stretched credulity to the absurd. But I wasn’t ready to share that information with Newland. I’d made a promise to Lucille and I’d keep that promise until I had no alternative.

  “Well, if you figure out what I know, Newly, please tell me.”

  “Only if you promise not to go it alone.”

  We hung up after agreeing to check with each other at the end of the day.

  Nakayla returned with sandwiches and two bottles of root beer. We ate our lunch in the sitting area and I brought Nakayla up to date on my conversation with Newland.

  “Do you think holding back the information about the photograph is hurting his investigation?” Nakayla asked.

  “No. His line of questioning would be the same. If Mick Emory or his father had known the Langs’ secret, they would have used it against them forty-five years ago. If old man Lang killed Jason, then Newland needs something concrete for a motive. They never met or even spoke with one another. If he was trying to kill me, then I’ll wait till Newland has run all his interviews and has gotten his lab reports.”

  “Wait to do what?”

  “Wait to confront him. Show him the photograph and tell him I’m going to the police. I won’t be expanding the circle of knowledge because John Lang already knows the truth.”

  “What will that accomplish?”

  I shrugged. “I’ll have poked the tiger, and maybe he’ll come out of the underbrush.”

  The office phone rang. Nakayla started to get up to answer.

  “Finish your sandwich. Whoever it is can leave a message.”

  We heard the beep and then a voice said, “This is William Lang. I’d like to talk with—”

  I didn’t hear the rest of his words because I jumped from my armchair and ran for the office line. “This is Sam,” I managed to say before Lang finished speaking.

  “Mr. Blackman. Uh, the police were by.” He suddenly sounded flustered like he was better prepared to talk to a machine. “They told me about the shooting and that your friend was severely wounded.”

  “Yes.” I said nothing further. He’d made the call.

  “I guess they came to me because of our meeting at the plant. I realize I wasn’t the most gracious in my response to your questions. And I was devastated when I got that call about the murder of a friend of mine.”

  “Donnie Nettles. I knew him. Great guy.”

  “Right. He mentioned he was there when you found the skeleton. And that’s the other thing. I was upset when I thought my uncle’s remains had been discovered. I overreacted. With you and with Lucille Montgomery. I knew she’d been angry with my uncle, and, well, I read more into that than I should have.”

  “All right. If you didn’t fire the shot, then you have nothing to worry about.”

  “I didn’t. Do you have any idea why someone would try to kill that young soldier?”

  “No. Not a clue.”

  “Did you go see Mick Emory after you asked my father and me about him?”

  I wasn’t about to give William Lang a play-by-play of my investigation. “Why would that matter?”

  “Just thinking out loud. Emory’s a pretty good shot. We’ve crossed paths at some of the local turkey shoots. Believe me, it doesn’t take much to set him off. He’s as unstable as a Mason jar full of nitroglycerin. And he doesn’t like people snooping in his business. No offense, but if you grilled him about my Uncle Jimmy, he’d have taken it personally. And someone who’s only a pretty good shot could have hit your friend by mistake.”

  “If I talked to him.”

  There was a long, silent pause.

  “Well, that’s all I wanted to say. Sorry for what happened.”

  “I’m sorry for what happened to your uncle.”

  “We’ve been told those remains weren’t my uncle. They’re from a black man.”

  “I’m sorry for what happened to your uncle,” I repeated. “That’s all I wanted to say. Goodbye, Mr. Lang.” I hung up.

  “What was that little game?” Nakayla asked.

  “It’s called poke the tiger’s cub. I want to see what gets back to John and how he reacts.”

  “You’re playing with fire.”

  “I know, but at least I’m taking the heat off Lucille Montgomery. John Lang will be more worried about what I might do.”

  The phone rang again.
This time it was my cell. The number had a 706 area code. In for a penny, in for a pound. “Chief Warrant Officer Blackman.”

  Nakayla rolled her eyes.

  “Yes, sir. This is Staff Sergeant Walker Gilchrist from the sniper school.”

  “Yes. You’re calling about SPC Fretwell?”

  I heard him swallow.

  “I am, sir. It’s true then? Fretwell’s been shot?”

  “Yes. He’s hanging on, but it doesn’t look good. I’m trying to fill in the background for our investigation.”

  “Man. I heard he lost an arm and now this. Poor Little Ghost. Can’t catch a break.”

  The hair on my neck rose. “Little what?”

  “Ghost. Little Ghost was the nickname I gave him.”

  Little Ghost. Who then was the Ghost? Jason must have been on a fishing expedition.

  “You spoke with him yesterday?”

  “Yes, sir. In fact it was about the Ghost.”

  “His nickname?”

  “No, sir. The original. Willie P. Lang.”

  From the corner of my eye, I saw Nakayla stiffen. She couldn’t have heard Gilchrist’s end of the conversation, but my astonished expression must have alerted her something big had happened.

  For her benefit, I asked, “Willie P. Lang was the Ghost?”

  “Yes, sir. One of the best snipers to come through the training program. I’m second generation and my father served in Vietnam with Lang. Dad said the guy was so good that by the time you knew the Ghost was there, you were already dead. The North Vietnamese Army had a fifteen-thousand-dollar bounty on his head. Eighty-six confirmed kills.”

  “What did SPC Fretwell want to know?”

  “If I knew where the Ghost lived now. He said he’d run across the name in Asheville, and if that Willie P. Lang was the same man, he’d like to meet him.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That I’d double-check with my father, but I thought he said Lang was from North Carolina.”

  “Have you talked with your father?”

  “Not yet. He’s on a fishing trip with some buddies in Idaho. Not exactly territory with great cellphone coverage. I can call you back after I hear from him.”

  “That’s all right. You’ve cleared up my questions.” At this point, I didn’t want to get the military involved, especially since I was impersonating an officer.

  One thing still bugged me. “Fretwell was looking through a list of the top ten snipers in history. Would the Ghost be on that list?”

  “Maybe. If it was just Americans. My dad said Lang could have been in the top tier, but he missed a mission. In fact, my dad went in his place and killed eight high-asset NVA officers. Those would have been Lang’s and put him ahead of White Feather.”

  I remembered that was the name of the top sniper on the list Fretwell read on the Internet. If Lang was in that league, the shot at the Kenilworth would be little more than point-blank range.

  “Thank you, Staff Sergeant Gilchrist. I appreciate your help.”

  “Just get the bastard, sir.”

  “We will.”

  Nakayla sat patiently, waiting for me to collect my thoughts, thoughts that were zooming around in my brain at ninety-miles-an-hour.

  “William Lang was one of the military’s top snipers. That was the information Jason wanted to tell us.”

  “And William Lang killed him?”

  “I don’t know. Jason heard Lang’s name when I questioned Mick Emory.” I flashed back to the confrontation in the pawnshop. “In fact, he started to ask about Lang but I cut him off, afraid he would give Emory more information than I wanted.”

  “So, Jason tried to contact Emory later from our office,” Nakayla said.

  “That makes sense. And when he didn’t hear back, he pressed on yesterday with a call to his former instructor at Fort Benning. The question is whether William Lang knew Jason was tracking him down. If Jason left a detailed question on Mick Emory’s machine, then Emory might have informed Lang and not told the police about it.”

  Nakayla frowned. “What’s in it for Emory? Blackmail? Why should he think one sniper trying to connect with another is blackmail material?”

  “Right. If Emory’s not involved, then William Lang heard it directly from Jason.”

  “Call Newland,” Nakayla said.

  “Okay. But I’m only going to ask that he obtain the records for my apartment line from the phone company so we can see Jason’s outgoing calls.”

  “And if there’s one to William Lang?”

  “Then we have to figure out how he was in two places at once.”

  “The Kenilworth and the charity ball?”

  “That would explain Jason’s shooting. I was thinking about Jimmy Lang and how the Ghost could be in two places at once. The Mekong Delta and the Kingdom of the Happy Land.”

  “You have a plan?”

  “No. But Jimmy Lang did. I’m just going to implement it.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Greed. Did the motive behind the deaths of Jimmy Lang and Jason Fretwell come down to so mundane a word? Nakayla and I reviewed everything we’d learned to date, eliminating all the usual suspects—love, jealousy, blackmail, revenge—to be left only with greed and its coverup.

  My theory was constructed on a foundation of circumstantial evidence, incriminating but not conclusive. The case would have to be made by the perpetrator, which meant I had to bait a trap, and I didn’t know if Detective Newland would sanction an operation that could either go wrong in its execution or taint evidence for a court of law. I also didn’t relish being shot.

  Nakayla and I divided up duties. She went shopping for the supplies while I made two phone calls. I reached Hewitt Donaldson at his home and asked him to research inheritance laws in North Carolina. Then I tracked down Nathan Armitage and explained the resources I wanted to borrow from Armitage Security Services. He was shaken by Jason’s shooting and readily offered his assistance.

  Newland called toward late afternoon reporting that the interviews with Jennifer Lang and Judith Crenshaw at the gallery yielded nothing. Neither claimed to know Jason Fretwell even existed. At the time of the shooting, Jennifer had been at the same charity event her father attended.

  I suggested a followup question Newland might ask Jennifer about the charity auction, and I told him I was checking some background information through my contacts in the army that might shed light on Jason’s military service. Newland interpreted that to mean I suspected someone in the army held a lethal grudge against Jason and the shooting had nothing to do with the Lang case.

  Again, the detective advised me not to go it alone.

  Nakayla returned with a simple, black frame the size of the Ulmann photograph, some parchment, and an inexpensive fountain pen. She also bought an oilskin large enough to double-layer wrap the frame.

  Nakayla experimented staining the parchment with weak coffee for an aged look, drying it in our small microwave, and then using the fountain pen to print on it with black ink. After several attempts, we finally developed a process that would pass a cursory examination. When Hewitt phoned with his legal research, Nakayla drafted the information into a short note on the treated parchment, and we wrapped it and the newly framed photograph in the oilskin.

  “When will you place the calls?” Nakayla asked.

  “After I’ve planted it.”

  “Will you wait until dark?”

  “No. Too dangerous. There’s a chance I could be followed. If so, I’d rather deal with that in daylight. We’ll leave the office in my car. You can drive and I’ll get out at some point when we’re confident no one’s behind us. I’ll walk back to the parking deck for your car. You go straight to Nathan Armitage’s house. You’ll be safe there. I’ll join you later.”

  Nakayla handed me the oilskin. “Are you conce
rned about Lucille’s judgment?”

  “To be honest? Yes. But I can’t think of another way to get definitive proof.”

  We left as planned. Nakayla headed north on Lexington, driving slowly in hopes of being able to pass through an intersection just as the light changed. We were the last car to make it across Walnut Street. Nakayla sped up, made a quick right on Woodfin, and I hopped out in half a block at Chicken Alley, a narrow lane of backdoors and dumpsters with a colorful mural of roosters painted on the corner brick wall. Cute, but not exactly a tourist thoroughfare.

  Two hours later at a little after five, I pulled into the pasture on the Kingdom of the Happy Land. My errands had taken me to Nakayla’s for my “Land Rover” prosthesis, to my apartment for my Kimber forty-five semi-automatic and shoulder holster, and to a hardware store for a crowbar, hammer, and chisel. As I carried the tools and oilskin package up the trail to the Kingdom’s last stone chimney, Lucille’s words rang in my head. “There was no new beginning for us, only an unhappy ending.”

  A new beginning. A real treasure. With Jimmy Lang’s phrases, I could create a plausible story for Jimmy telling Lucille he would pick her up at work. A story that explained the missing Ulmann photograph, Jimmy’s presence on the Kingdom of the Happy Land, and the disappearance of his pickup. Whether it was true or not didn’t matter so long as no one knew anything to contradict it.

  The light through the pines held the soft, magical quality of late afternoon. The stone chimney of the long-vanished cabin seemed to be washed in its golden glow. I circled the base, seeking a spot where the old mortar was widest and weakest. I wouldn’t want the markings to appear fresh and show the dust of my invasive attack.

  The stone mason of more than a hundred years ago had been a craftsmen. The rocks had been selected and shaped to fit tightly together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Most of the mortar was behind them so the dry-stack technique weathered the elements almost as if the chimney was one solid stone. Like a rigid house of cards, dislodging the wrong rock could bring a section of the chimney tumbling down.

  I raised my search higher until, at eye level, I spotted a eight-inch rock with a larger stone above it overlapping the two on either side. The perimeter edges were caked with moss that had worked its way into the narrow crevices. I used the chisel to penetrate the gap, working the blade around the stone until I could slide it to the left, enlarging the opening on the right. I inserted the flat end of the crowbar and jiggled it back and forth while pushing deeper into the chimney. Then I pressed my weight against the crowbar’s curved end, forcing it to the right and applying all the leverage to the back of the stone. It popped free like a molar extracted by a dentist.