by Steven James
“The neighbor heard two initial shots. Those were the kill shots.”
He looked at me skeptically. “And how do you know the shooter didn’t fire the shots through the window first, then kill Ardis and Lizzie?”
“The angle of the first two bullets through the glass shows that they were fired from the first floor,” I explained, “but if the killer fired those before ascending the steps, it would have alerted Ardis and Lizzie, who would have hidden in a room since the only exit route is down the steps. Additionally-”
“He would’ve shot Ardis from the ground floor,” Jake said, tracking with me, “rather than from the landing.”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“Huh.” He gestured toward the plate glass. “You knew all this earlier, didn’t you? Just by looking at the trajectory of the bullet holes and knowing the position of the bodies? That’s why you were so concerned about the angles in the glass when we first got here.” He sounded impressed, but I noted a thread of contempt in his voice. “You knew it already back then.”
Well, I didn’t quite know it.
“I had my suspicions.”
When he replied I sensed that he’d taken offense, as if reconstructing the crime scene had become some kind of competition between us: “So then, after killing them, he fires the shots through the window.” Jake was pretending to take aim at the window, here from the landing.
“First he descends the stairs,” I corrected him. “The single shot fired from the landing was the final one to pass through the glass. He would’ve had to go to the ground floor and fire the two shots through the window first.”
“Why would he do that?”
I shook my head. “I have no idea. But I’m really wondering about that last shot the neighbor heard-the final bullet to pass through the window. The trajectory tells us it was fired from the landing. That means that after coming down the stairs, the killer would’ve had to return to the landing-stepping over Ardis’s body as he did-before firing again through the window.”
Mentally, I played out a few other scenarios, but at the moment I didn’t come up with any other event progression that took into account the timing and trajectory of the shots as well as the location of the bodies and their position.
“When the shots were fired, where Donnie shot ’em from,” Ellory called from the base of the stairs, “what does any of that matter, anyway?”
“Everything matters.” I didn’t like that he was referring to Donnie as the killer.
I pressed the master bedroom door open the rest of the way and stepped inside.
10
I studied the carpet for any evidence that someone might have entered the room.
“What is it?” Jake asked.
“We have no footprints leading from the front porch to the side of the house where the snowmobile was parked, so, assuming the killer rode it from the scene, he exited the scene through the laundry room. The family left their shoes, not just their boots, near the front door. Neither Ardis nor Lizzie was wearing shoes, so it appears the family habitually-”
“Takes off their shoes in the house.”
“Yes.”
Jake went on, paralleling my thoughts: “And if Donnie was the shooter, he would’ve had his shoes off in the house.”
“It’s likely.”
“However, if someone else was the shooter, he wouldn’t have taken off his shoes. After all, why would he?”
“That’s right.”
“So, mud on the carpet?”
Or water stains or shoe impressions…
It was more likely we’d find mud or impressions by one of the entrances to the home or on the pristine white living room rug. “Maybe.”
I inspected the carpet but couldn’t tell if the shoe impressions I saw were the same size as Donnie’s boots in the mud room. Natasha should be here any minute to process the crime scene. I’d have her check it out.
I descended the stairs, stepping past Ardis’s body as reverently as I could. “We’ll want to check the neighbor’s clock,” I told Ellory. “See if it has the correct time. If we really are talking about 1:48 p.m.”
“I’ll have an officer do it.” He stared past me toward the landing. “You think he forgot something maybe?”
“Who?”
“The shooter. That he might have been on his way out, realized he forgot something upstairs, went back to the landing to get it, and then fired the last shot through the living room window when he got there.”
“I really couldn’t say.”
Jake, who was still on the landing, answered, “That would make sense.”
While Jake came down the stairs to join us, I questioned Ellory about some of the issues that the rather disappointing and incomplete police report had left unanswered.
“Were the lights in the house on or off when you arrived?”
“They were on. All of them, except the study.”
“Were the exterior doors locked or unlocked?”
“The doors were unlocked, but that’s not so unusual.” He said the next few words with uncertainty, as if he’d stopped believing them: “There’s not much crime around here.”
“Appliances. Which were on?”
“You mean like the oven?”
“Yes, and the computer, television, the washer, dryer, a cooking timer-anything.” All of these things tell us what was happening, where people were, what they were doing, or when they were doing it.
He thought. “Not the washer or dryer. Or the TV. We checked the computer for a suicide note; didn’t find one though.”
“The computer is in the study?”
“Yes.”
I retrieved my laptop from the mud room. “Do you by any chance know the last webpage that was opened?”
He was looking increasingly disappointed in himself the more we spoke. “I didn’t look.”
“It’s okay. Thanks.”
In the small office nook attached to the living room I clicked to the internet history while Ellory asked Jake, “You’re a profiler. What’s your take on this?”
The web history was password protected. The Bureau has ways past that, however. I surfed to the Federal Digital Database and entered my ID number.
“Rage,” Jake said. “Donnie’s-or whoever committed these crimes-their behavior exhibits uncontrollable rage. We find this type of thing with people who snap. Something pushes them over the edge-job loss, marital problems, the death of a child.”
I downloaded the program I needed, and a few seconds later, using a 32-byte MD5 hash, I’d cracked the password and I was in.
Jake continued, “Almost always in cases like this, we find what we call a trigger event or a precipitating stressor. Do we know if there was any sudden trauma in his life recently?”
“No,” Ellory answered. “If there was I don't know what it would be.”
The web history had been deleted, but the hard drive hadn’t been wiped. It wasn’t difficult to click into the terminal window, enter a few lines of code that Angela Knight, my friend in the Bureau’s Cybercrime Division, had taught me, and pull up the files.
Someone had been surfing through the naval archives of Ohio Class fleet ballistic missile submarine, or SSBN, deployment records from the 1980s. I could hardly believe the information was made available to the public, but then again, the data was three decades old. A few mouse clicks told me that the Cold War archives weren’t considered matters of national security any longer, and a Freedom of Information Act request had apparently been filed by a group known as Eco-Tech four months ago.
Interesting.
Following up on that, I discovered that Eco-Tech had done some consulting for half a dozen Fortune 500 companies and two foreign governments-Brazil and Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, Jake kept his questions coming to Ellory. “Did Donnie have any mental or emotional problems that you’re aware of?”
“Not that I know of.”
I checked the time the sub archives were last opened.
/> Just minutes after the murders.
After the murders.
Odd.
Donnie was in the Navy. Maybe he was searching the sites.
But why then?
I heard a car crunch to a stop out front, possibly Agent Farraday. After I finished downloading the web history and email records to my laptop, I headed for the front door.
“Job dissatisfaction?” Jake asked Ellory behind me.
“Nope. He works at the sawmill over on Highway K. Far as I know he had no problems at work. Nothing like that.”
Boots on again, I stepped onto the porch. The frigid air bit at me, and I tugged on my wool hat. Natasha Farraday exited the car.
Natasha smiled. Early thirties. Dark hair. Demure. Spot-on professionally. Even though we’d never dated, I’d sensed for a while that she had a thing for me. However, because of my relationship with Lien-hua, who also worked for the Bureau as one of its top profilers, I’d made sure to keep things with Natasha completely on the friends-only level.
After she greeted me, a stern-looking fiftyish man with shaggy, wolfish eyebrows followed her out of the car, stuck out his hand, and introduced himself as the county coroner. “Jeddar Linnaman, good to meet you.”
I wasn’t sure I’d heard that right. “Jeddar?”
“Full name’s Jedderick, like Frederick but with an extra d. Everyone just calls me Jeddar.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“Agent Farraday told me all about you, Dr. Bowers. It’s an honor to work with you.”
The PhD wasn’t something I liked drawing attention to. “Thank you. Just call me Pat.”
After filling in the two of them on what we knew, I asked Natasha to pay special attention to the carpet fibers in the house and prints on the laundry room doorknob. “We’ll also want to compare the boots by the door to the size and visible wear patterns of the sole impressions outside the laundry room.”
“Got it.”
“The computer was accessed after the murders, websites having to do with submarine deployments. I’m going to want to pull all the sectors to get a byte-level data analysis.”
“That’ll take time,” she said, mirroring my thoughts.
“Yes.”
Depending on the size of the files and the computer’s processing speed, it could take up to twenty-four hours to upload the entire drive to the Cybercrime Division’s FTP server.
“Go ahead and do a cursory review of recently accessed files,” I said. “I’ll get the emails and web history to Cybercrime, but I’d like your eyes on the registry as well; see what else you can find.”
She agreed, then, carrying her forensics investigation kit, she entered the house with Jeddar Linnaman.
Already there was a lot to think about, and I needed to sort some things through. Taking a walk helps me collect my thoughts, so I stayed outside, zipped up my jacket, donned my leather gloves, and stepped into the night.
11
The two state troopers who’d been stationed on the porch had left when Natasha and Linnaman arrived, and with no one else around, the night closed in on me, embraced me, stinging and cold and quiet and still.
I headed down the driveway, mentally evaluating the clues.
Every crime occurs at the nexus of five factors:
(1) offender desire
(2) target availability
(3) location
(4) time
(5) lack of authority figure or supervision
Take away any of the five and you have no crime. Entire schools of criminological theory have sprung up over the last 130 years focusing on how to eliminate one or another of the factors from the crime equation.
Some investigators, mostly profilers and forensic psychologists, focus on the first issue-the offender’s motivation: Why does he do it? What’s going through his head at the time of the crime? Personally, I’ve found it’s more helpful to just accept the fact that this person was motivated, for whatever reason-and probably for more than one-to commit the offense.
Other theorists study victimology or location: Who was victimized? How can you keep these people from being in high-risk areas at high-risk times? Some researchers study how people perceive public and private spaces and the likelihood of crime in those locations. Others track the temporal fluctuations of crime. And, of course, some criminologists try to increase (or give the appearance of increased) law enforcement presence, such as leaving empty police cars on busy roads or installing fake video surveillance cameras in conspicuous places.
Five factors.
Stop one, stop the crime.
Yet even though it’s vital to deter crimes whenever possible, I’ve always been more in the business of solving them after they do occur.
Like today at 1:48 p.m.-if the recollection of Mrs. Frasier was correct.
Three initial questions rolled through my mind: Why then? Why there? Why Ardis and Lizzie?
As I walked toward the mailbox, I clicked through what we knew so far about the progression of events:
1:48 p.m.
Shots fired-Still need to confirm the time.
2:41 p.m.
Snowmobile tracks veering off the trail are discovered entering a stretch of open water on Tomahawk Lake. Deputy Ellory photographs the tracks, then calls the FBI, emails the photos to the Lab.
3:30 p.m.
The Lab identifies the tracks, and local law enforcement narrows down the pool of possible victims to four people in the area who own that model snowmobile.
4:02 p.m.
Officers follow up on the owners and find Ardis and Lizzie Pickron murdered; Donnie missing.
4:30 p.m.
Admiral Winchester, the Chief of Naval Operations, is already pressuring FBI Director Wellington to have agents look into the case.
A thought: So why the FBI and not NCIS? But the answer was immediately obvious: the Naval Criminal Investigative Service only investigates crimes involving active duty military personnel, and Donnie was retired military rather than active duty.
That left the Bureau rather than NCIS, but still-why the high-level interest in a sawmill worker’s disappearance?
That was the big question. The hinge upon which all the other facts swung.
The Navy’s interest in the crime and the recently accessed websites on Ohio Class submarines didn’t support the theory that the snowmobile’s trip off the ice and Donnie’s disappearance were the result of a simple suicide or a haphazard accident during a flight from a crime scene.
It didn’t appear to be a robbery gone bad either.
When you move through a case, it’s best to ask the sensible, obvious questions first, just like a reporter might do: Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?
So, where had Donnie been earlier today? Did he show up at work? If this was a setup to make him look guilty, why would he be targeted? What had he done or what did he know that caused him to end up in someone’s crosshairs? And what might decades-old submarine deployment records have to do with anything? And why would Donnie-or anyone else-have been so careless as to look them up on his computer after the murders?
And of course, what about the three shots through the window? Either they were fired out of necessity or they were not. But what necessity?
Questions, questions.
Too little data.
I started back for the house. The moon had slipped behind a stray cloud, leaving the stars to rule the night. Seeing them reminded me of the times in college when I worked as a wilderness guide in North Carolina. After enough nights out on the trail you begin to know which stars will appear first, emerging slowly through the late twilight. There you are, Vega, and Castor and Arcturus, so good to see you. How’ve you been? How has the night on the other side of the world been treating you?
Everything was so simple in those days, life bared down to the basics of survival. Eat. Sleep. Climb. Paddle. You’re forced to put all the niceties and creature comforts of modern life behind you and get back to the essentials. Survival. Rel
ationships. Encountering the real.
I looked at the house again.
Encountering the real.
Life.
Death.
Two bodies. A missing snowmobiler.
Pausing at the side of the house, I bent and took a picture of the two sets of boot prints with my phone. Committed the imprint patterns to memory.
Then, leaving the stars behind, I quietly ascended the porch steps.
After a body is moved, the crime scene is altered forever, so contrary to what you might see in the movies, forensics examiners and evidence response teams are not typically in a hurry to remove bodies from a scene. Unless there’s something present that would contaminate or destroy evidence (wind, water, etc.) they’ll leave the corpse, sometimes for several hours, as they photograph it, check the core temperature to establish time of death, look at bloodstain patterns, and study the degree of and locations of the pooling of blood inside the body before removing it for an autopsy.
I spent another hour or so studying the scene, evaluating what I did know and comparing that to what I did not, then when Natasha and Linnaman were preparing to remove the bodies I realized it was almost 9:30 p.m. and I still hadn’t called my brother.
I went into the study, eased the door shut. Hesitated for a moment.
Then pulled out my phone.
12
I imagined that even if Sean didn’t invite me to stay at his place, Amber would, so I decided it might be best to try his work number first.
No one answered at the bait shop, which surprised me, since, with his beer and liquor sales, I’d expected that he would be open until at least 10:00 or 11:00.
I confirmed the number and tried again. Nothing.
He didn’t own a cell, so that left his home number. I didn’t have him on speed dial, but I found the number and tapped it in, hoping Sean would answer instead of his wife.
Amber picked up after two rings. “Hello?” I heard the splashing clatter of pots in water, and I could picture her standing beside the sink doing the dishes. Her honey-colored hair tied back in a loose ponytail.