by BJ Bourg
Dawn’s eyes burned and her jaw ached as she fought to control her emotions. “Lily,” she began, “I have some terrible…um…something awful has happened.”
Sensing something was wrong, Lily’s eyes watered. “What is it?”
“Sweetie, I don’t know how to say it.” Dawn hesitated and blinked away a tear that spilled from her eye. “It’s your dad and your brother.”
Lily threw a hand to her mouth. “What is it? What happened?”
“I’m so sorry, honey,” Dawn said. “They’re gone. They passed away.”
Lily gasped out loud and shook her head, tears spilling from her horrified eyes. “No! Please…no! Please…no!”
Dawn wrapped her arms around Lily and squeezed the trembling teenager as tight as she could. Lily was screaming in Dawn’s ear and shaking uncontrollably. It was all Dawn could do to hold onto her. “I’m here, Lily…I’m here for you.”
“Oh, my God, no! This can’t be happening! Oh, God…Dad! Roger! No! Please, God…no!”
Dawn could feel the cool wetness from Lily’s tears as they rained down the side of her face and neck, mixing with her own. She knew she was supposed to be strong and emotionless, but this was too much. Her heart broke for Lily like it had never broken for anyone else—including herself.
“Baby, I’m so sorry,” Dawn said, as she clutched onto the sobbing teenager. Not knowing what else to do, or how to make the young girl’s pain go away, she just kept repeating how sorry she was and held Lily as tight as she could.
“Daddy, Roger…please don’t leave me alone! God, please let this be a dream.”
CHAPTER 44
3926 Highway 3, Gracetown, LA
I was numb as I stared down at Sally’s body. She lay on one side, her eyes half closed and seemingly staring at me in an accusatory manner. I felt a sense of guilt for hanging up on her yesterday. What if I’d agreed to meet her? Maybe she’d still be alive. I forced the thought from my mind and tended to the task at hand. There’d be time for regret later. At the moment, I needed to figure out what happened to her and who might want to hurt her.
I hadn’t been at the scene for ten minutes when the sheriff called to say they’d located Shannon. He was at his friend’s camp and he was in possession of over fifty cut alligator lines. They’d written him a summons for damage to property and released him. After a moment of silence, the sheriff asked if I thought Sally’s death had anything to do with the sniper killings.
“I’m just getting here,” I said. “So, I don’t know much.”
“I’m fixing to meet with the special agent in charge and I’m going to demand he tell me everything he knows about this case.”
Although he couldn’t see me, I nodded my agreement. “They know more than they’re saying, that’s for sure.”
“Keep me informed, and I’ll do the same.”
After hanging up and pulling on a pair of latex gloves, I squatted beside Sally and gently pushed open her eyelids. Petechial hemorrhages were present in both eyes—a strong indicator of strangulation. Rigor mortis was fixed, which told me she’d been dead at least eight hours.
Over the next two hours, I visually examined the area surrounding her body, took dozens of photographs, and wrote pages of notes. When I’d documented the scene with photographs, I solicited Buzz’ help to measure the location of her body—using two fixed points of reference—and began searching the surrounding area for evidence. It didn’t take me long to realize this was not the scene of her murder. This was simply where she’d been dumped.
The coroner’s investigator arrived a short time later and I helped him ease Sally into a body bag and onto a spine board. We then carried her up the embankment. We struggled a bit, because the dirt was soft and the angle steep, but finally made it to level ground. I frowned when I saw the long line of police cars—some marked and some unmarked—lining both sides of Highway Three. The officers were huddled in groups, speaking softly, a somber expression on all of their faces. They all stopped talking when they saw us approach the hearse and they stood in silent respect.
Once Sally’s body was secured and the hearse was gone, I loaded my crime scene gear in the back of Buzz’ patrol cruiser and checked my phone. I’d received a text message an hour earlier, but didn’t have the time to look at it until now. It was Dawn letting me know she had taken Lily to the criminal operations center in Payneville, which was just down the road from Gracetown.
I walked to the officers huddled along the highway and fielded some of their questions—they wanted to know what happened and who did this to Sally, the latter of which I couldn’t answer—before following Buzz to his cruiser. I’d noticed a news van parked a few hundred yards away, but the officers wouldn’t let the reporter get close. For that, I was thankful.
Buzz and I rode in silence until we reached the criminal operations center. I thanked him for the ride and unloaded my gear.
I found Dawn in Sally’s cubicle, rummaging through her desk and going through her computer. “There’s got to be a clue here,” she said, not looking in my direction. “Something to indicate what she was working on or what she was doing.”
I sighed and grabbed a chair from the neighboring desk and took a seat. I was tired and hungry, but I didn’t feel like eating or sleeping. I wanted to know who killed Roger and Sally.
After Dawn grew tired of searching Sally’s desk, she turned to me and I gasped when I saw her swollen eyes. “Are you okay?”
She lowered her face. “I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t be strong for Lily. The poor girl broke my heart.”
“Yeah, I feel you.” I glanced around the office. “Where’s she now?”
“Dean’s sister came pick her up. She’s got four daughters, two of them around Lily’s age. Lily said she’s close to her cousins and she wanted to be with them.”
I had a good idea what Lily was feeling at the moment, and I knew the worst was yet to come. “Did you tell her Roger killed Dean?”
“I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”
I nodded my understanding, and we both just sat there in awkward silence until Dawn finally looked up. “Did you find Sally’s phone?”
“No. She was clean. No purse, no wallet, no money…nothing.”
Dawn shook her head. “She didn’t show up for work this morning and no one has heard from her or seen her since Dean’s party.”
I snapped my fingers. “What about Sergeant Eric Boyd? He was with her at the party, remember?”
“I spoke to Cindy over in evidence, and she said she and her husband were talking with another couple in front of Dean’s house until late, and she saw Sally leave the party alone. Watched her get into her car and drive away. She commented to her husband that Sally shouldn’t be driving, because she’d been stumbling around drunk.”
I was thoughtful, as I recalled seeing Sally and Eric making out on the swing. “Let’s check with him anyway, to see if they had plans past that night.”
“Sure, thing. I’ll run his name and see what I can find—”
The fax machine screamed from the corner of the room and cut her off.
“That’s for me.” Dawn got up to retrieve the documents that were coming through. “I had the personnel section pull up Sally’s department-issued cell phone account and print up her latest calls and text messages.”
When she walked back to where I was sitting, she held a stack of papers in her hand. She flipped to the last page and squinted to focus as she ran her fingers line by line. Her hand suddenly stopped and she looked up at me, a puzzled expression on her face.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It was you.”
“Me?”
She nodded slowly, searching my eyes with her own. “You were the last person to speak with Sally.”
CHAPTER 45
“She called my phone at about eight last night,” I explained, “but I didn’t talk to her. In fact, I rejected the call.”
Dawn turned the page so I could see. “It sa
ys here y’all spoke for two minutes.”
She was right—the records showed a conversation from her cell to mine that lasted for two minutes. “That’s impossible. I turned my phone off right after I rejected the call.”
“Why’d you reject her call?”
I sighed. “She’d called me earlier on Sunday while you were on the phone with Captain Ansley. She wanted to meet to discuss something, but I thought she was just trying to get back with me.”
Dawn raised an eyebrow. “That sure of yourself, are you?”
“No.” I would’ve laughed if the situation wouldn’t have been so grim. “Not at all. It’s just that she’d been trying to get back together with me, and I really didn’t have time to deal with it. We broke up, it was mutual, and it was time to move on. I just got the feeling she wanted to talk about us, so I turned her down. Besides, we were in the middle of this case.”
Dawn was chewing on her lower lip, as she often did when she was thinking, and studying the phone record. “But it says y’all spoke for two minutes.”
“I didn’t even answer the call.” A thought occurred to me and I fished my phone from my pocket. “Unless…”
“Unless what?” Dawn wanted to know.
I clicked on the Recent Calls section on my screen and scrolled down the list to eight o’clock yesterday. Sally’s number was lit up in red. I then clicked on the Voicemail section and turned it so Dawn could see. “She left me a voicemail. It’s one minute and seventeen seconds long.”
“Well, hurry up and play it.”
After pressing the voicemail and switching the speaker feature on, I held it between me and Dawn. It was Sally’s voice, but she was whispering and we had to listen carefully to make out everything she said.
——
London, please call me back. I overheard a conversation between Roger Pierce and Eric Boyd. Eric is recruiting Roger to infiltrate the military and turn against his own people. Roger has to prove that he is capable of fulfilling some screwed up mission by killing a man, a woman, and a child. He’s going to do it, London…he’s going to kill a child. I overheard him admit to killing that alligator poacher and that young girl. You have to do something! Please call me back! [Noise in the background.] Shit! I have to—
Who in the hell are you talking to? [A man’s voice.]
——
Next, we heard the sound of screams, cursing, and grunting, mixed with stomping and furniture being knocked over. Suddenly, everything went quiet except for a sick wheezing sound. When the sound stopped, there was a final thump and then the phone went dead.
Dawn rubbed her throat. “We just heard Sally die.”
I dropped my phone on the desk and stared at the floor. “I should’ve answered her call.”
Dawn put a hand on my shoulder. “It wouldn’t have saved her life. She would’ve just been caught on the phone with you, instead of leaving you a voicemail.”
She was right, I knew, but at least we would’ve known what was going on.
Dawn played the recording again and then asked if I recognized Eric’s voice.
“I only talked to him for a few minutes at the party, but it sounds like him.”
“Do you think it’s enough to get a warrant?”
I pursed my lips. “I doubt it, but we can try.”
While Dawn began preparing affidavits for arrest and search warrants, I called the sheriff and told him what we’d learned.
“Hold on, London,” the sheriff said, “let me put you on speaker phone so Special Agent Tucker Hibbitts can get in on the conversation.” After a few seconds, the sheriff came back on the line. “Okay, London, repeat what you just told me.”
When I was done, a man with a heavy country accent introduced himself as Tucker Hibbitts. “My team and I have been tracking this particular killer for about eight years. We believe he’s recruiting impressionable young people to join the military as Trojan horses. They enlist in the military, go through boot camp, and get their orders like regular soldiers. Hell, they talk, eat, act, and shit like real soldiers. The only difference is that they’re ruthless and have no real loyalties other than to their cause, which is to wage war on the Unites States from the inside.”
“Have they succeeded?” I asked.
“Did you hear about the military sniper who turned on his own squad and killed a dozen of them before they finally got him?”
“Dean Pierce, my sniper who lost his life this morning, told me about it.”
“That kid was a plant. What about the terrorist who strapped bombs to little kids and sent them in the midst of our troops—did you hear about that incident?”
“I saw it on the news.”
“He wasn’t a foreign terrorist…he was another plant. We’ve had seven confirmed attacks on our soldiers by members of this group.”
“How do you know they’re all connected?” I challenged.
“Every one of these seven traitors came from a town in the United States where sniper-style murders have taken place—and the victims in each case were a man, a woman, and a child. We don’t know how, but they’re all connected.”
“If what you’re saying is true, these young people are being recruited and then battle-tested before being sent off to war.” I was thoughtful, appreciating the mental aspects behind such training. “They have to prove they’re mentally capable of killing a man, woman, and child, and this is done before they’re faced with the actual situation.”
“That’s correct.”
“Brilliant concept, if you think about it.” I realized quickly that they didn’t share my appreciation for the tactics, so I asked for the locations of the small towns connected to the traitors.
“North Dakota, Tennessee, Kentucky, Nebraska, New Mexico, Mississippi, Texas…and now Louisiana.” Hibbitts was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was somber. “We got close a few years ago in Tennessee—maybe too close. We sent a team of SWAT operators after him in the mountains, but only one made it out alive. That was a bad day in our history.”
“Today was even worse,” I said, secretly writing a note to Dawn to run an address query on Eric Boyd. “Why’d you send your men after him again if they got wiped out the first time? Didn’t you learn your lesson?”
“We sent highly trained snipers this time. We figured the best way to take out a single bad sniper was with a team of good ones.” He sighed. “I guess we’ll drop a bomb on the bastard next time.”
“Any of the traitors from Utah?” I asked.
“No, why?” Hibbitts asked.
“No reason.” I’d moved to stand behind Dawn and watched as the computer screen lit up with address results on Boyd. He’d moved around a lot, that was for sure, but it was no coincidence that he’d lived in small towns in every state Special Agent Hibbitts had mentioned…including Utah, where Patrick’s son was killed.
“Include that in the warrant,” I said aloud to Dawn.
“What warrant?” Hibbitts asked.
“We’re going after Eric Boyd. If you want in, you’d better get your ass to Payneville within the hour.”
After hanging up with the sheriff and Hibbitts, I called Patrick. “How’s it going over there?” I asked.
“All’s quiet. Your guys are wrapping up the crime scene investigation and we’re about to leave. Jerry said we’re heading to your criminal operations center.”
“Good. We’re preparing an arrest warrant for the Trinity Sniper.”
Patrick was quiet for a long moment. Finally, he asked in a low voice, “Do you really know who’s responsible for killing my son?”
“I have an idea.”
“Who?”
“Not over the phone.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want you going rogue on me. I’ll need your help on this one.”
CHAPTER 46
Tuesday, September 4
It was nearly daybreak and a cool breeze was blowing in from the north, helping to keep me comfortable in my thick gh
illie suit. I had moved into position on Sergeant Eric Boyd’s property under the cover of darkness and set up in the open field east of his house. I wanted the sun to come up behind me, which would blind him and keep me hidden if he scoped that area of his property. During the night, I had taken clumps of the surrounding vegetation and attached it to my suit, so I could blend perfectly into the background. I couldn’t afford a mistake on this operation.
My earpiece whispered to life and Jerry radioed that he was in position with Ray. “I’ve got eyes on the operators,” he said. “They’re ready to go.”
Seven members of the FBI’s high-risk entry team had joined forces with our fourteen-member entry team, and they had made their way stealthily through the dark to positions of cover in front of Eric’s house. Team One took cover behind a large pickup truck, while Team Two crouched in a large ditch in front of the house, and Team Three set up behind the only tree on the property.
While the property was black as sin, there were motion-activated floodlights on all corners of the house, so the teams remained at least fifty feet from the house. We knew the lights could work against us by exposing the entry team if they approached the house, but they could also alert us if Eric tried to make his escape. We decided to hang back and use it to our advantage.
Sheriff Chiasson’s voice suddenly came over the radio. “Command Post to Sierra One, any movement from the house?”
“Negative,” I whispered, pressing my left thumb against my chest to activate the button for my throat mic. “Everything seems quiet.”
“Ten-four,” the sheriff called. “All teams standby. We go at daybreak.”
The radio went silent and remained that way until the sun started peeking over the horizon behind me. I kept my right eye glued to the ocular lens of my scope, slowly scanning the windows on the eastern side of the house. White shades were pulled shut, leaving no room to see inside. I scanned the back of the house, noting that a narrow concrete sidewalk led from the back of the house to a wooden bridge that crossed a deep ditch. Beyond the ditch, thick forestland bordered the rear of the property.