Mystery: The Sam Prichard Series - Books 1-4

by David Archer

  “I can't believe there were this many killings like this, and I've never heard about it before. That's incredible. This many cases with similar MOs should have been blasted all over the news; the FBI should have been camped out here. How on earth could this happen?”

  Indie nodded. “I thought the same thing, so I looked them over. Check it out. These cases are spread over a pretty large area, from Loveland to the north, down to Colorado Springs. He didn't ever do two in one city in the same year, and usually he didn't go back to a city for at least three years. We've got two stretches when he just stopped altogether for a while; there's only one killing in all of oh four, and none at all between November of twenty ten and January of twenty twelve.” She pointed at the dates she had charted. “To me, it looks like these cases all got very little attention. None of the victims were wealthy or notable in any way.”

  Sam nodded. “I see that, but now he's chosen Caleb Porter. That's out of character if this is him.”

  “Unless he chose him just to make sure he got your attention, or to give you the chance to win an early round. He'd figure that Porter is off limits, now that you know about him, so maybe he wanted to give you one, so you'd feel more confident and work harder on the other two.”

  Sam shook his head. “I don't think that's it,” he said. “In this new note, he said that if I can identify the woman who's next, he'd let her live, but he didn't say anything about sparing Caleb. I'd guess that he'd consider any attempt to protect Caleb as nothing more than a challenge to his talents, so I expect him to move Caleb to number one, if I find the woman.”

  “Or to number three. That way, he could go after the one you didn't know, then take Porter out last. Maybe what he's hoping is that you'll finally stop him then.”

  Sam rubbed his eyes. “I did something today that I never thought I'd do,” he said. “I called your mother and asked Beauregard for help.”

  Indie's eyes went wide. “And?”

  “He said I'd win the game, but not every hand. To me, that means I'll catch the guy, but some of the victims are going to die. He wouldn't say how many, but then he said I should remember Sun Tzu.”

  “The Art of War? That guy?”

  “Yeah. I'm going through all of the Sun Tzu quotes we had to memorize in the academy, trying to figure out which one is pertinent. I think it's the one about knowing yourself and knowing your enemy.”

  “If you know yourself and your enemy, you can win a thousand battles? That one? I had a professor in college who used to quote that all the time, in my psych class. He said it was the most powerful advice that anyone has ever written.”

  “The problem is, how do I get to know this guy? I mean, all we've got are old murders that may or may not be his work. These don't tell us anything about him, about who the man himself is, and I don't mean his name; I'm referring to his personality, the way he thinks.”

  Indie shrugged. “Maybe they can. I've got access to the actual police files on all of these; let's pick some and go through them with a fine-tooth comb, and see if we can get any sense of how he thinks.”

  Sam thought about it for a moment. A lot of times, there will be little details in police files that are not given to the public. Police and FBI profilers use those details to build a psychological profile of the perpetrator. If Sam and Indie could do something along that line, it might give them insights into the killer that would help him figure out the next move he needed to make in the “game.”

  “It's worth a shot,” he said. “Which ones catch your eye?”

  Indie looked over the list. “We've got a lot to choose from. I see two MOs, here: the ones where he takes a single victim who's alone, and the ones where he kills someone right in front of their loved ones. If we take a dozen of each and go through them, I think we'll be getting a fair sampling of his methods, and if we can figure out a pattern to them, we might have an edge.” She tapped a few keys, and the list on the screen began losing items. “I told Herman to choose twenty-four at random from each category. Let's see how he does.” A moment later, there were two groups of links on the screen, labeled “Alone” and “Not Alone.”

  Sam looked at the two lists. “Random is as random does,” he said in a bad Forrest Gump impersonation. “Let's see what we've got.”

  3

  Indie smiled and clicked the first link in the “Alone” section, which led to a digitized version of the complete police file on the case.

  Thirty-two-year-old Michael Henson was jogging along the side of Highway 83, behind the Valley Country Club, at five thirty in the morning on June fifth in 2007. Numerous witnesses came forward after the news of his murder was released to say they had seen him, and many said they saw him out there every morning. No one saw what happened to him, however; he was discovered laying half in the road by a motorist, and when the driver stopped to see if he was okay, he found that Henson had been shot through the head. Police were called, but Henson's body was the only evidence they found.

  The Medical Examiner said the bullet that had killed Henson was relatively small, probably a .223 Remington, but with a powerful charge behind it. It left a small entry wound that passed through the helix (the top edge) of his left ear and penetrated the skull just behind it. The bullet mushroomed on impact with the skull, causing it to roughly triple in diameter, so that the actual impact on the brain inside was three times as destructive as it had been on the skull itself.

  The brain is made up of very soft tissue, and so when a chunk of metal invades it, it can't absorb the impact as well as denser tissue, such as muscle. The distorted slug not only penetrated the brain, but also shoved it to the right of the skull with enough force that the skull there was fractured from the inside. It shattered and the skin containing it was ripped as the brain was pushed ahead of the ballistic forces and out through the resultant opening in the cranium. The mangled brain was found fifteen feet away from the body, in the grass on the side of the road.

  “Kronlein shot,” Sam said. “There have been cases where the bullet shattered the skull and literally blew the brain right out of it. In the most famous case, the brain was found completely intact in the crotch of a tree.”

  “Yuck,” Indie said. “It's bad enough we gotta read this stuff, do you really need to provide such graphic mental images?”

  Sam grinned and kept reading. Police found no cartridges, no powder residue, and no other evidence that might have been left behind by the killer. From the way the body was found, the ME decided that Henson had still been in motion when the bullet struck and almost certainly did not know it was coming. His footprints in the soft earth beside the road showed that his stride had not lengthened, so he wasn't trying to flee, and the skid marks left by his body said his velocity was no greater than an average jogger's speed.

  Based on all of the factors they could see, the ME concluded that the fatal shot was probably fired from a moving vehicle. Since the bullet struck squarely from the side of him that appeared to have been facing the road, and considering that Henson had not been aware of the danger, the shot was almost certainly fired as the vehicle passed Henson while going in the same direction of travel as he was.

  “He never saw it coming,” Sam said. “What gets me is that the killer fired from a moving vehicle; that's not easy to do, not with any accuracy. Our guy would have to practice, and stay in practice.” Sam sucked on his bottom lip for a moment. “Okay, this tells us that he's obsessive about what he does. To practice hitting a moving target from a moving vehicle means that he's got an isolated place set up with a track or something, and some kind of moving target to aim at as he drives.”

  Indie looked at him. “Then he's got money. He'd have to own a place like that, don't you think? So that he wouldn't run a risk of someone finding it?”

  Sam nodded. “That makes sense. He wouldn't want to set it up on public lands, and if it was someone else's property, they'd discover it sooner or later, somebody would. Hunters, if no one else. And all that being logical, then h
e probably lives somewhere outside of any town, somewhere he isn't worried about people stumbling across him, or hearing gunshots. This guy's a hermit of some kind, but he's not one who shuns technology; he's got a computer, at least, and knows about forensics.”

  “Probably watches CSI,” Indie said. “Everyone does, and they think all the stuff they see there is actually true.”

  Sam nodded. “Yeah,” he said, “cracks me up. They show just enough real science to be convincing, then they blow it all with test results that can't possibly be true.” He sighed. “Okay, so we know the guy is probably fairly rich, which also fits with the fact that these killings happen at all hours of the day and night. If he had a job he had to go to every day, he'd probably be most active during his off-duty hours, and we'd see a pattern to it. He's aware of and knows how to use modern technology. The fact that he's using a .223 bothers me a bit; most of them are rifles, and firing a rifle from a moving vehicle would mean one of two things. He's either extremely strong, strong enough to hold and aim a rifle accurately with one hand, or he isn't working alone. Someone else would have to be driving for him.”

  Indie was tapping keys. “Look at this,” she said. “Thompson Center Contender, a .223 single-shot pistol. Here's another one, Magnum Research Lone Eagle, .223 single-shot pistol. Both of them are considered hunting guns, and someone as obsessed as our guy might like the idea that he's only got one shot.”

  Sam looked at her. “I think you hit it on the head, Babe,” he said. “In each of the cases where someone was with the victim, they always reported only hearing a single shot. We haven't seen a single one where he missed and had to fire again. And the single shot theory would explain why the only time he ever killed two was when he could do it with one shot! I wonder if there are any reports of someone being fired at once, and missed?”

  “Telling Herman,” Indie said. “Let's go on through these while he looks that up.”

  She clicked on the next link. This one was about fifty-year-old Thomas Ritter, who had been shot by the same type of round, but through the center of his forehead. The shot blew out the back of his head, also nearly removing his brain completely. Ritter had been at home in Golden, mowing his yard, when it happened. Witnesses reported hearing a shot, but no one had seen anything.

  Next was Caroline Bitner. She had been driving along Constitution Avenue in Colorado Springs when a single shot came through her windshield and struck her just above her right eye. She had not died instantly, but the loss of almost half of her brain left her a vegetable on life support that was turned off a month later. She was twenty-eight years old and the mother of two children, whom she had just dropped off at day care only minutes earlier. Her car had remained on the road and slowly lost speed, drifting slowly to the right, until it was stopped by a curb. Witnesses said they heard nothing, but only saw her slump over in her seat as the car began to slow.

  Then there was twenty-year-old Martin Planck. Martin was a bicycle messenger, riding through downtown Denver in May of ‘09 when he was shot from behind. The bullet entered dead center at the back of his skull, and exited through his nose, obliterating his face completely. In this case, the bullet went on to strike the driver of a passing car in the left shoulder, but its energy was so spent that it was only a minor wound. A witness said she saw a man in a gray car point something at Planck just before he flew over the handlebars of his bike, but she did not get a license number or any description of the shooter. She did not hear a shot, so police were not convinced that she had actually witnessed the murder at all.

  They went through the rest of the “Alone” cases, picking up tidbits as they went. In one case, a man in Boulder had walked into his living room and found his wife, whom he had thought was still out shopping, dead on their sofa, her head almost completely blown away. Her bags of groceries were spilled on the floor beside her, indicating that she had been walking and fallen onto the sofa. A hole in the screen on the window was the only evidence that the shot had come from outside, but no one had heard anything.

  Sam said, “That shot wasn't made from a moving car. Passing a house and seeing a victim, then managing to make the shot, would be pretty much impossible; he stopped and aimed that one.”

  “So he's not fanatical about doing it while moving. He's willing to take an easy shot if he can get it.”

  Sam sighed. “I don't think so,” he said. “My guess is that he had chosen her as a target, but didn't get to take the shot when he wanted to, so he followed her home and waited for an opportunity. He parked and watched her carry the bags in, then waited ‘til she passed the living room window and fired.”

  Indie shook her head. “Then he won't give up on one just because he doesn't get to kill when he wants. It's not about the opportunity, it's about the target he's chosen.”

  Sam nodded. “That's how I see it, yes. That confirms for me that Caleb isn't safe, but I already thought that.”

  They found one case that stood out. Forty-two-year-old Cassie Morton had been walking her dog in a park in Longmont when she was shot, but the bullet did not strike her in the head; instead, the shot took her right through the base of her throat and all but decapitated her. This case happened in ‘08, and the place where she died was almost three hundred yards from the nearest road. A witness near the park entrance said she heard a gunshot from not far away, and saw a red pickup truck driving away at normal speeds just afterward.

  “Holy cow,” Sam said softly. “A shot like that, if we're right about his choice of weapon, would take incredible skill. This guy wouldn't use a scope; it'd be useless to his moving shots. To make this one, he'd have to aim high, over the target, and count on gravity to bring the bullet down to hit what he was aiming at. He had his windage right, but it looks like he underestimated the amount of drop, so the bullet hit lower than he intended.”

  Indie looked at him. “What's windage?” she asked.

  “When you fire a bullet at a long-range target, you have to take a lot of factors into account, and one of them is the direction of the wind. If it's blowing at all, it can change the trajectory of the bullet, move it to one side of the target or the other, so you miss. If you're good, you can estimate how much it will move it, and aim to the side of the target so the wind can bring it to where you want it. He got that right, but he didn't aim quite high enough for a head shot, so the bullet came in low and hit her in the throat.”

  Indie shivered. “You do know it's freaky that you can talk about things like that as calmly as you talk about the weather, right?”

  Sam looked at her. “And that's from a girl whose mother talks to a ghost?”

  “Beauregard isn't mine, he's Mom's, and I don't want to hear about it. You're the one who called and asked for his advice, remember?”

  “It was a moment of weakness. I've got two more people whose lives depend on me finding this clown, and when it comes to something like that, I'll take any help I can get from anywhere!”

  “Well, we're gaining some insights, so let's keep going. Ready for the 'Not Alone' group?”

  “Lay on, MacDuff,” Sam said. He added, “Macbeth,” when Indie looked at him strangely. “What? You think I wouldn't know Shakespeare?”

  She didn't say anything, but clicked the first link in the new group.

  Charles Murphy, forty-seven years old, was sitting on his back deck with his wife, Dierdre, when he was shot. Dierdre said she heard a car moving through the alley behind their home, and then a shot rang out. She felt something splatter the side of her face, and turned to ask her husband if he had spit on her. That was when she realized that the top of his head was missing, and began to scream. Neighbors came out of the house next door to see what was wrong, and found Dierdre trying to pick up his brains and put them back into his head. The only evidence found was the marks of some worn tires in the alley.

  “The fact that no spent cartridges are ever found sort of confirms the single-shot pistol theory, for me,” Sam said. “Almost all .223 rifles are assault rifles
, with multiple-round magazines. They're semi-automatic, so they eject cartridges. If he was using one of those, I'd think there would have been at least a few cartridges found along the way. Granted, there are devices that catch the cartridges, but they'd add weight to the gun, and make it even harder to fire from a moving car.”

  The next was the case of two killed with one shot. Twenty-three-year-old Danny Morgan and his wife of only seven days, Geneva, were at an outdoor table at a bar in Greeley. Witnesses said they were smiling and happy, and that just as Danny leaned forward to kiss his wife, a shot rang out and both of their heads seemed to explode. The bullet entered the back of Danny's skull, exiting through his right eye and removing most of the right side of his face, then entered Geneva's head just over the bridge of her nose. Because it was already mushroomed from hitting Danny but still had energy and momentum, it took out both eyes and left a hole the size of a man's fist in the back of her skull. More than a dozen people reported hearing the shot, but only one claimed to have seen the shooter, describing him as a tall man wearing western clothes, who walked calmly away as the bar's patrons began screaming. The witness said he tried to follow the shooter, but the panicking patrons overran him and knocked him down. By the time he got to his feet, there was no sign of the man.

  The investigating officers discounted the witness, saying he seemed too drunk to have actually tried to pursue, but Sam thought it was probably true. “Only two kinds of people will try to follow someone they just saw commit a murder in front of their eyes,” he said. “A heroic type who believes he can handle the situation, or someone who's too stupid or drunk to know better. The panicky crowd that knocked him down might well have been himself, but I think he was telling the truth about what he saw and what he wanted to do, even if he was too wasted to do it.”