Winter Black Box Set 2

by Mary Stone

  “All right,” he replied.

  “All those ‘signs’ or ‘symptoms’ I just listed off, those are also indicative of posttraumatic stress disorder. And the likelihood that someone who experienced a traumatic event turning into a Frank Castle type vigilante is infinitely smaller than them developing a long-term stress reaction.”

  That was it, he thought.

  All the oddities Cassidy Ramirez had mentioned about Sun’s behavior over the past six months, everything she’d used to establish the potential for Sun to snap, it was posttraumatic stress disorder.

  “Whoever killed Tyler Haldane had to plan for it,” Aiden said. “They had to have monitored his routine for weeks or months to know exactly where they’d be able to get a clean shot at him.”

  Autumn nodded. “So, whoever this is, you’re looking for someone who probably experienced a traumatic event a long time ago.”

  16

  Golden sunlight streamed in through the wall-spanning window, and the rays glinted off the polished granite countertops, the stainless-steel appliances, and the syrupy splotch of drying blood and vaporized brain matter spattered along the tiled floor. But no matter how gruesome the scene of Ben Ormund’s death, Winter had seen worse during their investigation of Douglas Kilroy.

  Hell, she had seen worse before she was even in high school.

  Ben Ormund hadn’t been raped or mutilated, and whoever killed him hadn’t painted the walls with his blood. Like Mitch Stockley and Tyler Haldane, Ormund’s death had been painless. One shot that he likely didn’t even see coming and Ormund’s world had gone black.

  “Agents,” a brown and gold clad sheriff’s deputy greeted.

  He was young, likely no older than Noah, but his reaction to the gore was no more pronounced than Winter’s. Based on the close-cropped military style of his dark blond hair, he had seen worse too.

  “Morning, deputy,” Noah greeted. “I’m Agent Dalton, and this is my partner, Agent Black.”

  “Morning.” Winter’s salutation was stiff, but she lacked the wherewithal to force herself to come across as amiable.

  “I’m Deputy Eckley,” he replied, extending a hand to Noah first, and then to Winter.

  “Guess we’re outside the city limits, huh?” Noah observed.

  The deputy nodded. “Yeah, by a few miles. Along the coast here is a pretty wealthy area, and I’m sure you can imagine, there isn’t a lot of this around here.”

  “Doesn’t seem like it’s bothering you all that much,” Winter put in.

  She made sure to keep her tone non-accusatory. In truth, after their unscheduled meeting with ADD Ramirez a couple hours earlier, she had started to wonder if they would have to resort to questioning every law enforcement agent in the Richmond and Norfolk areas.

  They needed to narrow down their suspect pool, but so far, each crime scene had been immaculate.

  With a smile that contained more than a hint of sarcasm, the deputy nodded again. “Two tours in Iraq, agent. A guy with his head blown off ain’t nothing new to me, no disrespect to the dead. And this area might be pretty quiet, but Norfolk’s a big city with a big Naval base. Plenty of folks up to no good wander outside the city limits and wind up dead in my jurisdiction.”

  Winter smiled, liking this man’s forthrightness. “I’m sure.”

  “Now, this one here?” Eckley paused to gesture to the pool of coagulated blood. “I’m more’n happy to hand this off to the Feds. Guy shot in the head from a distance, not a shred of forensic evidence, no thank you. It’s all yours, and for right now, I’m here to help you.”

  “Shot from a distance,” Noah repeated before Winter could respond. “Any idea where the shooter might’ve posted up?”

  The deputy pointed at the bullet hole in the otherwise pristine glass. “See those rocks out there that sort of hug the edge of that cliff type thing?”

  Winter followed his outstretched hand and nodded. “You think that’s where he was?”

  “More’n likely, yeah. We’ve got a couple people out there working on backtracking the trajectory right now.”

  “I’d say you’re right.” Noah glanced from Winter to the deputy and back. “I can see them out there, and it looks like there are only a couple of those boulders big enough to hide a full-grown man. Unless our guy was dressed up like a rock to blend in, or unless he was wearing a ghillie suit laying in the grass out there, I’d say he was hiding behind one of them.”

  “Well,” the deputy chuckled, “I’d bet my right nut that our perp wasn’t wearing a ghillie suit, but we’ll let the pros determine that.”

  Noah offered the man one of his patented, disarming grins, and Winter fought against rolling her eyes. Even when he employed it on someone else, his charm was still so damn effective that it was aggravating.

  “Shall we go see?” Winter asked, forcing the edge from her tone.

  “After you then, agents,” Eckley said. “Let’s go see what we can see.”

  The two men shared the basic details of their respective military careers with one another as they walked through the lush grass of the yard and then to the more unruly vegetation beyond.

  As the late morning sun gradually warmed the top of her head, she wished she had a hat. A giant, obnoxious floppy hat like Autumn had worn on the one occasion they’d driven out to the coast. Winter didn’t know how the woman did it, but somehow, she made the hat look good.

  Before the three of them had closed the distance to the rocky outcropping, a woman’s voice cut through Winter’s thoughts.

  “Hey, deputy!” she called. When Winter glanced up from the tall grass, the woman waved an arm above her head. “We’ve got something. You…you need to see this.”

  Winter and Noah exchanged fervent looks and increased their gait to just below an outright jog. Deputy Eckley kept pace, and once they reached the crime scene tech, the sunlight glinted off a light sheen of sweat on his brow.

  Beneath the standard, navy blue jacket emblazoned with the yellow block “FBI” letters, Winter was sure she had begun to roast. She could already feel her button-down blouse stick to her body, and she could only hope that the visible part of her shirt wouldn’t be stained with sweat before they were finished.

  “Amy.” Eckley nodded to the woman. “These are the Feds, Agent Dalton and Agent Black.”

  “Agents,” Amy replied. “You’re going to want to see this too. I’ve been doing this for almost thirty years. I even worked in Miami for ten of that, and I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  Miami? The Florida metropolis was a hotbed for cartel activity, and almost every other organized crime group had set up shop in the last few decades.

  Pablo Escobar’s reign had only been the start of what was to become of Miami, and if Amy had spent ten years in the city, Winter wasn’t even sure she wanted to know what she had seen.

  But they’d already found their victim, so what in the hell was left that could cause the unabashed wariness behind Amy’s dark eyes?

  As they picked their way through the rocks and debris behind the shorter woman, the only sound was the distant rush of the Atlantic Ocean.

  Winter’s heart rate had picked up, but now, she knew the source wasn’t physical exertion. Every step felt like it took a full minute, and by the time they arrived at the boulder beside which a second crime scene tech stood, Winter was sure an entire hour had elapsed.

  She had imagined everything from a severed head on a pike to a Satanic altar, but when her eyes settled on the object of the tech’s awe, she took in a sharp breath.

  “Is that….?” Deputy Eckley began but didn’t finish.

  In response, Amy nodded as she brushed a piece of ebony hair from her face. “Yes, deputy. It is.”

  “Fuck me,” Noah breathed.

  With a sigh, Winter wiped the beads of sweat from her brow. Over the past hour, her hopes that perspiration would not show through her pastel blue shirt had been dashed. She’d zipped up the lightweight FBI jacket to hide her sweaty
shirt, and now she thought she knew what a pan felt like when it was covered in foil and stuffed in the oven.

  As Noah and the sheriff’s deputy conversed inside the air-conditioned house, she had slunk into a patch of shade to call Aiden Parrish to provide him with an update. He’d told her and Noah that he had a meeting scheduled for that morning, but by the time they returned to the house, it was close to one in the afternoon. After only one and a half rings, he picked up.

  “Parrish.”

  “It’s me.” Even to her own ears, her voice sounded strained.

  “How’s it going out there?” There was a note of what she could only describe as a cross between curiosity and concern in his voice.

  “It…it’s going.”

  “Did you find anything?”

  She couldn’t help the dry chuckle that slipped from her lips at the question. “You could say that.”

  “Are we playing twenty questions?” Though pointed, the query wasn’t hostile. Not yet, anyway.

  “No, sorry. I’m just still trying to wrap my head around it.”

  “Jesus, what the hell happened out there? The victim was shot in the head, wasn’t he? Wait, he didn’t have family there, did he? No one said anything about that.”

  “No, no, nothing like that.” Squeezing her eyes closed, Winter massaged her temple with her free hand. “You’re not going to believe this. If I hadn’t seen it for myself, I don’t think I’d believe it, either.”

  When she paused, there was silence on the other end of the line. She pulled the phone away from her face to check if the call had been disconnected, but the sweat smeared screen told her the call was still live.

  “Aiden?” she asked.

  “I’m waiting on you. We’ve already established that I’m not playing twenty questions.” His voice was as flat as she’d ever heard it, and she was reminded of their meeting with ADD Ramirez. Aiden had left the office before her or Noah, and she hadn’t interacted with him since. Apparently, plenty of the irritability remained.

  “Right,” she sighed. “It was the weapon. The rifle used to kill Stockley and Haldane. We—”

  “Wait,” Aiden interjected. “Wait, you found the murder weapon? Where?”

  “In the same spot where we believe the killer took the shot at Ormund.”

  “They left the murder weapon at the crime scene?” She could tell he still thought she was fucking with him. “Winter, I swear to god, you’d better not be—”

  “I’m not,” she replied quickly. “I told you it was crazy. But, yeah…a Barrett M98 Bravo was sitting behind a bolder that matches the trajectory our guys determined to be the sniper hide.”

  “A Barrett M98 Bravo was just sitting out there in the rocks when our shooter didn’t even leave behind a shell casing at either of the other murders?”

  “A disassembled Barrett M98 Bravo,” she corrected. “And the shell casings were there.”

  “Casings, as in plural?”

  “Yes. All three. And before you ask, we checked. No prints, no trace evidence. No footprints, absolutely nothing. As far as we can tell, we might be hunting a damn ghost. And, you know what else? You know what one piece of the rifle was missing? The firing pin. Our shooter kept the damn firing pin, or they tossed it off the cliff into the damn ocean.”

  Winter could almost hear Aiden shaking his head.

  She lifted her braid from her sweat sticky neck. “That’s not it, either.”

  “Christ, what else?”

  “They left a note for us. It—”

  For the second time, Aiden cut her off before she could elaborate. “A note? As in a BTK, Zodiac Killer, Ted Kaczynski note?”

  “Not a manifesto.” She was getting irritated now and knew it came across in her voice, but she was too sweaty and dehydrated to care. “A note. On a notecard. All three shell casings were lined up beside it. It was typed, so we won’t be able to do any kind of handwriting comparison. It’s on its way to forensics now to check for ink type, etc.”

  “What did the note say?” The sharpness had vanished from his voice, and he sounded as fed up with the day as she felt.

  “It said, and this is verbatim: ‘Stockley, Haldane, Ormund. This is just the beginning. Good luck, agents.’”

  17

  Noah glanced up as Winter made her way into the spacious kitchen. The click of a camera shutter was punctuated by the din of quiet voices as a pair of crime scene techs worked to wrap up their initial analysis of the area.

  Strands of Winter’s ebony hair had come loose from the neat braid, and he caught the glint of beaded sweat on her forehead as she pushed the matted pieces away from her face. He wondered how much of the flush on her cheeks was from the heat and how much was the start of a sunburn. After all the years spent at his grandparents’ ranch, Noah had become accustomed to long-term exposure to the sun, and the occasions he suffered a burn were few and far between.

  For the beginning six months of his first tour of Afghanistan, he’d been among the few Marines in his unit who had been able to withstand the bright sunlight without complaint. Between the ranch and the Middle East, he had sweated so much that he hardly paid any attention to the sensation these days.

  “How are you not dying?” Winter asked as she approached.

  With a grin he knew would make her at least a little crazy, he shrugged. “Good genetics, I guess. It’s weird, you know. You’re the one who’s always cold too.”

  She crossed her arms over her dark jacket and huffed. “I guess that’s bad genetics, then. What’s going on here? What’s our next step?”

  “These guys are working on wrapping this up,” he said, gesturing to where the techs milled around the breakfast bar. “There isn’t much here, though. They’re already pretty confident we aren’t going to get much from in here. They’ll do some more print dusting and picture taking, but that’s about it.”

  “What do we know about Ben Ormund?” she asked. “So far, the killer’s targeted other killers.”

  “That’s our next step. We’ve got to figure out how Ormund fits the profile. He was a psychology professor at Christopher Newport University. I suppose we’ll start there.”

  “If we’re going to go talk to a bunch of college faculty members, then I need to change or take a shower or something.” Gesturing to herself, she flashed him a flat look. “I’m pretty sure I smell like a week-old gym sock right now.”

  His sudden laughter drew the attention of the two techs, and he bit his tongue to stifle the sound. “That’s graphic. You keep a change of clothes in the car, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “All right, then we’ll stop by the cop shop, and you can do whatever you need to do there while I see what they’ve got on Ben Ormund. Two birds, one stone.”

  When Noah came across the report of a sexual assault Ben Ormund had been accused of some two decades earlier, he wasn’t sure if he should be relieved or apprehensive. He consulted with a couple deputies while Winter donned fresh clothes, and they were all under the impression that the woman who had filed the report had moved to the other end of the country.

  However, when Noah searched for her records in the federal database, there wasn’t a thing. If she had moved to California or Washington, she lived completely off the grid. There were no utility records, no financial records, no housing records, or government welfare records. Nothing. According to his search, she had simply vanished.

  Grating his teeth together, he closed the laptop as Winter emerged from a hallway at the other end of the room. A handful of sheriff’s deputies sat at desks throughout the space, but no one paid any special attention to their FBI visitors.

  The overhead light caught a droplet of water as it rolled from the end of her braid to streak down her blazer. Her cheeks were still tinged with pink, but the outright flush from earlier had lessened. Tucking the slim computer beneath one arm, he rose to stand.

  “You took an entire shower?” he asked.

  “As opposed to half a shower?” s
he replied, scrunching up her nose. “Or a quarter of a shower?”

  “Well, you smell great now. Definitely not like a week-old gym sock.”

  “Uh, thanks, I guess?”

  “Any time, it’s what I’m here for. Moral support, compliments, you name it.” He raised one arm to check the time. “Quarter after two. Plenty of time.”

  “I’ve never noticed that before.” Winter’s attention shifted to his wrist as she took hold of his arm and squinted at the watch. “Is it new?”

  Even through the material of his suit jacket, he felt the unmistakable warmth of her grasp. As his pulse rushed in his ears, he fought to maintain his neutral expression.

  How did this make any damn sense? How did an innocuous touch evoke so much nervousness and anticipation?

  They were in the middle of a station full of sheriff’s deputies, and all he could picture was wrapping his arms around her shoulders to kiss her, to taste her tongue on his, to get lost in the warmth of her closeness. The pervasive image was as frustrating as it was tantalizing.

  But when her blue eyes flicked up to his, he was overcome by a realization that made his breath catch in his throat. The seemingly innocent physical contact had been made with purpose, and if they hadn’t been surrounded by sheriff’s deputies, he would have leaned in to press his lips to hers.

  Clearing his throat, he ripped himself out of the space-time bubble in which he and Winter had just been suspended.

  “Noticed what before?” he asked.

  “Your watch. I don’t know a ton about watches, but I learned a little bit growing up with Grampa Jack.” The corner of her mouth turned up in a smile as she released her hold. “And, from what I can tell, that sure is a fancy watch.”

  “It is,” he confirmed. “My granddad collects them. He gave me this one back when I got out of the military. It’s been in the shop for a while now, just got it back a few days ago.”

  “How much is it worth?”

  He shrugged. “A lot. I never bothered to check. It’s old, vintage, I guess. Probably part of some limited collection from the ‘60s or ‘70s or something.”