Swope's Ridge

by Ace Collins

  “It appears this man died from multiple gunshot wounds,” Curtis said. As McGee and Lije leaned in to get a better look, she added, “Looks like he was executed by a firing squad.”

  “Kent, any idea what states were still using firing squads in the 1930s or 1940s?” Lije asked.

  “Not something I ever looked into,” McGee said, “ but a quick search of the internet should tell us. When we return to civilization.”

  “Well, if there are any bullets still in the body,” Curtis said, “we can probably figure out who ordered his death. The states that did use firing squads would have records that’ll give us the make of gun and of the rounds. Should also check the various branches of the military. If we can trace the ammunition to a state or even the military, we can verify whether this is in fact Henrick Bleicher. And we would find out why he was shot.”

  She glanced at the man’s neck. “No dog tags, so probably not military. The lack of a uniform agrees with that. I’m guessing our mystery man was an American.”

  After again photographing the body with closeups of the bloodstain and the bullet holes in the shirt, she unbuttoned the shirt, examined the wounds, and recorded it all with the camera.

  “Let’s see if there’s some kind of ID in his clothing.”

  The man’s coat pockets revealed a pipe, a small pouch of tobacco, a toothpick, and some lint. In his pants pockets Curtis found a partially used matchbook, six one-dollar bills, a five, a twenty, and seven coins, but no billfold or any type of identification.

  “Lije, take a look at the money and see if it reveals anything about our guy,” she said.

  Lije picked up the pocket items and moved them over to the counter. McGee joined him. Heather had stationed herself by a window and was staring up toward the logging road.

  “Heather, he’s gone,” Curtis said. “His MO is that he watches, shoots, and then moves away. He’s missed twice today; he’s not going to try it again.”

  “How do you know that?” a still frightened Heather said. “How can you be so sure?”

  “Just like a fisherman knows when the fish have quit biting. I know the guy’s finished for the day. It’s all about experience. The only person who’s been shot at today is me. If I’m not worried, you shouldn’t be either. Lije, have you found anything in the money?”

  “The bills are all silver certificates, and the newest one is dated 1944. Coins come from the same era, but two do stand out.”

  “Why?” McGee asked.

  “One’s from Mexico. The other’s from Germany.”

  “The German coin could’ve been a war souvenir,” Curtis said. “And he could have picked up the Mexican coin on a trip. No mystery there. It really gives us nothing, other than he wasn’t robbed. All the clothing is from American manufacturers. There’s an Arrow shirt, Brooks Brothers suit. I didn’t see a laundry tag on the suit. The shoes came from Amarillo, from a men’s store, according to the stamping on the heel. The other clothes could have been bought anywhere.”

  Curtis turned back to the body on the table. “He seems to have suffered some type of facial injuries not long before his death. My guess is that he was beaten. I believe he was tortured before he died. When the post mortem is done, the coroner will do an MRI and CT scan to find out the complete nature of his injuries. I think someone was trying to get information out of him.”

  “There was a lot of gang activity during the thirties and forties,” McGee said. “Maybe he was a criminal and a gang worked him over.”

  “Not likely,” Curtis replied. “The style of execution is all wrong for that. This was a formal shooting, carefully staged. A gang rubout is most often accomplished with a single shot to the head or a volley of machine-gun fire that fills the body with bullets. This was precise.”

  Across the room Janie sighed. “There are only a very few moments I could say this, but I think this is one time I’m glad I can’t see.”

  “Don’t ask me to describe anything,” McGee replied. Then, as if startled, he walked to the table and the body. “Can we get a look at his arms? Maybe cut open the sleeves?”

  “Why? What are you looking for?” Lije said.

  “Tattoos. Marks on the arms. The Germans were big on marks.”

  Heather went into the kitchen and returned with a pair of scissors. She handed them to Curtis.

  “I guess it won’t hurt,” Curtis said, carefully cutting the sleeves of the suit coat and the shirt, right side first, then over to the left. On the inside of the left arm, she saw what appeared to be a tattoo. “Look at this,” the investigator said, pointing at the stiff appendage. “Our friend here seems to have what must be his initials tattooed on his arm. The state of decomposition makes it hard to read, but it appears to be a pair of letters, a highly stylized J or S here on his arm.”

  “Let me see that,” McGee said.

  “You have to look close, but it’s right here.” Curtis pointed to a spot on the man’s arm.

  McGee inspected the arm, careful not to touch it, then moved to the other side of the table. Leaning forward and using his pen to push the fabric out of the way, he pointed at a mark on the other arm. “There are a series of numbers tattooed on this arm.”

  “It’s like you expected those numbers to be there,” Lije said.

  “Even if the numbers hadn’t been here, the other arm proves all I need to know. This guy probably deserved what he got.”

  Curtis looked up at McGee. “So this means something special to you?”

  “Yeah, wrote a paper on it in grad school. Those aren’t letters, they’re lightning bolts. They mean this man was a member of the Schutzstaffel during World War II.”

  “Schutzstaffel?” Jameson asked.

  “The SS,” McGee explained. “We often call them ‘secret police’ or ‘storm troopers,’ but that was really another group altogether. Schutzstaffel was the real name for a military gang of sanctioned thugs. Himmler’s henchmen. Almost all of them had the twin lightning bolts tattooed on their left arm. A few added their military serial number on their right. We should have no problem identifying this guy now. He was obviously proud of who he was. We can track him down in the German war archives.”

  “What does that say about Schleter, the guy who built this home?” Lije asked.

  “If we had his body,” McGee noted, “we could make certain of one thing—we’d know if these two were fraternity brothers.”

  Curtis looked down at the man on the table. She knew Lije wanted their discovery to contain the answer to the Swope’s Ridge riddle. But she’d seen the body as something much simpler. She thought the German had murdered the man and hidden the body. But the evidence of an execution muddied that theory. Now the tattoos might well put the Swope’s Ridge mystery back on the table.

  “Diana,” Lije said. He was looking down into the crate. “There appears to be a bullet in here.”

  Grabbing her flashlight, Curtis quickly moved across the room. She studied the object where it lay, took several photographs from different angles, then picked it up with her gloved fingers. “It must have been lodged in the body,” she said. “Then when the body dried out, it fell out. Looks to be the proper vintage to go with the money. I’d guess it probably was fired by an FG42.”

  When no one said anything, she realized they didn’t know the significance of the weapon she had just identified. “This bullet is from a Mauser. That’s German. This was probably fired by an FG42, a weapon carried by the German infantry in World War II. Looks like our victim was shot by his own people. Might even prove he was a traitor. Working against Germany.”

  While working for the ABI, Curtis had once investigated the accidental shooting of an elderly woman. The woman’s husband had brought the weapon home from Europe at the end of World War II. The ammo was the same in that case as in this one. She was certain of it. It seemed, for the moment, that luck was on her side.

  9

  CURTIS REARRANGED THE FABRIC OF THE SLEEVES on the man’s arms, then found a tablecl
oth to cover the body, again taking a careful photographic record.

  Lije walked over to her, the open Bible in his hands. He pointed to a few underlined verses: Genesis 7:17–23.

  “Kind of a strange choice,” he said, “at least to my mind. If this man really was Henrick Bleicher, why would this be the only passage in the whole Bible that resonated with him?”

  Curtis shrugged. “What’s so special about that?”

  “Have no idea.”

  “What’s it say?”

  Lije handed her the Bible.

  And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth. And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters. And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered. And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man: All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died. And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.

  “I don’t get it. Why the flood story?”

  “Maybe,” Janie said, “this guy saw World War II as a second destruction of the world.”

  “As logical as anything, I guess,” the investigator said.

  “We also found four purple-satin page-marker ribbons, all identical, no writing other than that of the funeral home that gave them away. They look almost new, two inches wide by eight inches long. The Bible looks new. The pages don’t show any wear.”

  “I have a question,” McGee said.

  “Shoot.”

  “Was he embalmed?”

  “I don’t know,” Curtis said. “We’ll have to wait for the autopsy. My guess is he was killed in Germany during the war, put in the crate, and shipped here. Then, for some reason, Schleter created a tomb for him. The money was probably Schleter’s, and he put it in the pocket as some kind of superstition. It’s not uncommon for people to place special tokens with the deceased. A lot of cultures do.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t embalmed,” McGee said. “During wars, men were usually buried with no body preparation. If this man was considered an enemy of the state, he wouldn’t have been given any kind of special treatment after death.”

  “I can buy that,” Lije said, “but why didn’t they just toss him into a mass grave or burn him? This man was evidently shipped to the United States. That doesn’t make sense.”

  “That is strange,” Curtis said. “We’ve found nothing that would’ve called for him to be preserved and hidden as he was, much less crated up for a sea voyage.”

  “Then maybe he was executed here,” Lije said.

  His observation amused Curtis. “This thing’s bizarre, but now you’re really talking fairy tales. Bleicher, or whatever his real name is, was killed by a weapon carried by the Germans during World War II. It was an execution. If the shots were fired here, those carrying out the sentence would’ve used an American-made weapon.”

  Lije walked over to the counter where they had laid out the contents of the man’s pockets. He picked up the matchbook she’d found and tossed it her way. Catching it, she turned it over and noted the English words: buy war bonds today!

  “Open it,” Lije suggested.

  Flipping the cover, she saw a hand-scrawled word and a number written in pencil: Jupiter 4-7623.

  “That’s an old American method of writing phone numbers,” Lije explained. “Jupiter was the easy way to remember the first part of the number. The J-U in Jupiter would have been translated into 5 and 8. This man wrote it on a matchbook. That number, 584–7623, would have caused a phone to ring somewhere in the U.S., not in Germany. I think this SS officer made his way to America, called this number, then was executed by other Germans who were already here. Maybe Schleter was in on it. Maybe Henrick Bleicher was gunned down right here on this ridge. What I want to know is who would’ve answered when he dialed that number?”

  Curtis was stunned. That theory could explain why the corpse was holding an English-language Bible and had United States currency, but it didn’t answer why the man was here. And it didn’t explain how he met his end. After World War II, German immigrants didn’t execute other German immigrants. In all her studies of crime, she had never read of that happening.

  “We need to know a whole lot more about this man,” she said. “And the place to start is Germany. Schleter and Bleicher both were there before coming here. If we can find what tied them together, we just might begin to understand why they both ended up on Swope’s Ridge.”

  “I’ll make our reservations,” Lije said. “Been several years since I’ve been to Europe.”

  Then the words in the letter he’d received from Jonathon Jennings hit him. Jenning’s pen pal, Omar Jones, needed help. The clock was ticking. Lije had a favor to fulfill for an innocent man who didn’t get a reprieve. So no matter how much he wanted to, he couldn’t go to Europe. He not only had to stay but needed Janie, Heather, and McGee too. Looking over at Curtis, he said, “I’ve something I really have to do. Can you handle going to Germany alone?”

  “What?”

  “A death row case in Texas.”

  Curtis seemed confused. “You’re going to Huntsville?”

  Lije shrugged. “I have to save an innocent man. Can’t have another Jennings haunting me.”

  Curtis nodded. “Okay. No problem. I know German and I know the country. I have some contacts who can help me gain access to information. I’ll catch the first available flight to Berlin. You do what you have to do.”

  Lije nodded. He would try. But was he up to the task?

  10

  BARTON HILLMAN PULLED UP TO THE EXXON-MOBIL station just inside Batesville and stepped out of the Crown Victoria issued by the state of Arkansas. Sporting a police package, the car used super-unleaded fuel. He yanked the nozzle out, shoved it into the gas-tank neck, and squeezed the pump’s trigger. He ignored what it cost to fill the twenty-two-gallon tank. This was on the state’s bill, not his, even though the outing was not state business.

  He was a hero. A shootout with drug dealers in West Memphis a month ago had confirmed that. The series of speeches he was making at various small-town chamber dinners and civic clubs was great public relations for the state and would not go unnoticed by the legislature, which would probably be generous with funding in the next session. Essentially, Hillman was on top, his foot on the throat of anyone who would dare challenge him.

  Still, he left nothing to chance. He controlled every action and person who came into his sphere of influence.

  After finishing at the gas pump, he stretched, then got back into the car, pulled onto Highway 167, and headed north. He drove across the White River bridge and up the winding four-lane blacktop to the summit of a nameless but formidable Ozark hill. After stopping at a traffic light, he rolled through the small community of South-side. Ten minutes later he eased into a deserted rest stop, retrieved his mobile phone, and scanned the directory. Finding the number he needed, he hit Send and waited for a reply.

  “This is Barton Hillman, head of the Arkansas Bureau of Investigation. I need to speak with James Ray, please.”

  During the early 1980s, James Ray Burgess and Hillman had been fraternity brothers at the University of Texas. Each was smart, straightforward, and ambitious. They had come from lower-middle-class blue-collar families. They shared a love for athletics. After graduation, Hillman had made his way back to his grandparents’ home state, Arkansas, and landed at the ABI. Burgess had stayed close to home and gotten an administrative position in the Texas penal system. For the last few years h
e’d been the warden of a special unit called death row, located just outside of Livingston. The actual death chamber remained in Huntsville. Due to the state’s very efficient assembly line of death, the warden had made more trips to the death chamber and had witnessed more executions than anyone else in the country.

  “Barton,” a voice broke onto the line, “it’s been a long time.”

  “Too long, my friend.”

  The two caught up on each other’s lives, engaging in the usual banter. But when Burgess asked if Barton had found a new love, Hillman went silent. A clear image of a beautiful young woman took the place of the scene outside his windshield. For a moment, time moved backward, and the warmth in his heart mixed with a chill on his spine. How long had it been? In one sense the time had flown by, but in another, each day was still an exercise in pain and anguish.

  As a matter of self-preservation he shook loose the memory like a dog ridding itself of an unwanted flea. He had to avoid looking back. “No, still haven’t found anyone. Too busy, I guess.”

  “Beth was quite a girl,” Burgess said. “Such a waste. Did they ever catch the hit-and-run driver?”

  “Nope,” Hillman answered, attempting to force his voice to remain steady and strong. “And after twenty years, I doubt they ever will. It’s just another cold case.” He took a deep breath before adding, “We had ten wonderful years. That’s more than a lot of folks have.”

  Not all the memories were cold. Not all were bitter. At least one he had never told anyone brought him great satisfaction. A decade later he still kept that one concealed. “You know, it might sound strange, but in my gut I’m sure that driver has paid for what he did. That’s more than I can say about a lot of unsolved crimes.”

  An awkward silence was broken only when the warden changed the subject. “That shootout in Memphis was big news even in the Dallas and Austin papers. Your quote to the press was one that’ll no doubt live forever. Even Leno used it.”

  “Leno, huh? So I made The Tonight Show. I didn’t know. I missed it. But doing Larry King was a blast. He said my quote much better than I did.”