by D. L. Keur
“There, now. Back to your family.” She put the drake down, and, uttering soft mutterings, he waddled back to his mate who was now playing in the kiddie pool with her ducklings, scooping ground grain out of the feeder, wetting it, then feeding it to them, one by one, before wetting her own bill-full and swallowing it down.
The rooster decided it was his turn, but a glare his way got him backed off, again, especially when she picked up the garbage can lid she’d leaned against the coop wall. With a fluffing ruffle of feathers, he turned tail and stalked off.
Done, she opened the door to the chicken yard for them so they could free range, then headed to the horse barn.
Chesterton, her old gelding, nickered his welcome when she came in. “Hungry, old man?” she asked.
The other horses came in from their runs. As usual, Snake, her new horse, started pounding the floor boards of her stall. “Quit that, Snake,” she snapped with her best ‘hard’ voice, but, of course, Snake already knew it was all bluff. The four-year-old mare already had figured out that nobody was going to ‘make’ her.
Jessie rolled her eyes. “Brat!”
Tossing in flakes of hay to each, she gave special strokes to Chesterton before she got the fork and wheel barrow and started in on morning cleaning. The four geldings’ stalls were, as usual, the easy, quick jobs. All of them pretty much pooped in one place, peed in another, and kept their feet out of those spots. She was done in moments, the horses shifting this way and that as she fluffed their bedding back into shape. The three mare’s stalls were typically a mess, especially Snake’s. Jessie got the apple picker and started the job of sifting through the straw-shavings mix. “You know, if you’d try a little, you’d get your goodies faster,” she told the wily creature.
As if in answer, the mare reached a nose over and gave her a playful push. Jessie grinned and rewarded her with a scratch to her favorite spot just below and beside her withers. “There ya go, Snake.”
Tess and Sassy’s stalls needed bedding added, so Jessie had to fire up the Bobcat and go get a bucketful. By the time she was done, her dad walked in. “We’ve got all the kennels cleaned,” he said.
“That was fast.”
“Those new floors make it a lot easier.”
Jessie nodded his way. “Worth the expense, then?”
“Definitely. I’ll do the grain.”
“Tess needs an extra ration, Granddad says.”
“He told me, though she looks fat enough to me.”
Jessie agreed, but they’d feed her up, anyway. Darby knew horses better than either of them.
By the time she was done shoveling in the sawdust and getting it leveled, Oli was leaning against the wall, waiting with the last two cans of feed. “Hop to it, Jessie, my Jessie. It’s closing on breakfast time.”
She grinned. “Yeah, and you do love your oatmeal.”
His face went still. His nose crinkled a little. “Oatmeal this morning?”
She laughed out loud. “No. It’s something better. Gram and I got it ready last night. I put it into bake when I got back from my run.”
“Breakfast casserole!” he guessed, and she nodded. “Come on, then. Time’s a-wastin’. Race you to the house.”
Of course he beat her with his longer legs. “I should get a handicap to compensate for your height,” she complained.
“And I should get twice the handicap for being a quarter century older than you.”
He had a point.
***
11 – The Perp
Reid took a bite of an already cold sausage and egg muffin, chewing the tasteless, rubbery thing as he sifted through email, dumping what he could and marking the ones in order of priority that he’d need to answer. Next, he pulled up both Wilber’s and the ME’s report, attached them to a group email, and hit send to distribute them to his deputies. Then, checking the collate box, he printed out sixteen full sets of the grisly things for the reservists he’d called in: Cause of death, strangulation. But, worse, was the violence discovered upon turning the body over. Not only had the victim been raped—violently—but the body had been mutilated. The very thought made Landon’s stomach churn. The pictures made his eyes hurt. The only blessing was that the mutilation had been done post mortem. Thank God for some mercies. A plus was that they had the perp’s DNA, now, but it would take weeks to get that information back.
“Boss? We’re ready.”
Landon stood and, rubbing away the images that seemed imprinted in his eyes, went to the ready room where everyone who should be there was there. Murder, especially something this bad, made everybody sit up and take notice.
He passed out copies of the reports among the reservists—paid reservists. He’d managed that with some wrangling. Nobody paid reservists …but his county did. Now. Only fair. Even half pay was better than nothing. “Okay, Red’s briefed you, I know, but we’ve got some video of who we think is the perp leaving the scene right after dumping the body that I want you all to see. …John, if you’d get the lights? Red, go ahead and put the evidence on the screen.”
As the pertinent parts of the audio-video data began to play, Landon felt the mood of the room shift from normal to one of frustration and despair at the sight of the body from something like a couple of hundred feet up to down in close. When the second feed started, though, the room’s atmosphere shifted again to something he couldn’t quite put his finger on—maybe hope mixed with anger?—at the appearance of the red pickup truck with its driver just visible, if a blur, emerging from the cover of forest onto the old dirt road that was cut into the mountain. The image blurred then stilled again, closing in, and they got a good look at the driver, but his or her face was contorted and blurred. Later, the recording swooped in to get the front, then the back of the truck—no license plates.
Everyone sat forward. Somebody said, “He’s wearing a mask of some sort. Like a nylon stocking or something.”
Then, a voice Landon recognized as reservist Sam Hull asked, “These come from satellite?”
“Drones. One Jessica Marie Anderson was flying her new drones and caught this.”
“The search dog girl?”—Reservist Sam Hull, again.
And that was the second time someone associated Miss Anderson with dogs. “That’s her dad,” Landon answered, trying to keep the irritation he felt out of his voice.
“Nope. He and his dad train MWDs.” Then, at Landon’s look, Sam said, “Military working dogs. And, actually, military, police, protection, and bomb dogs, not SAR …search and rescue dogs. Jessie does SAR.”
“And you know this how?” Landon asked dryly.
Sam, who was a couple of years north of seventy, but tougher than wang leather and still outfoxing their self-defense trainer, smirked. “I’m good friends with Darby, her granddad. He dotes on the girl. That’s a secret, though. Don’t tell nobody. A lot of sparks between them about canines.”
Sam’s slipping into that specific ‘good ol’ boy’ redneck jargon on the ‘don’t tell nobody’ along with his pronunciation of the last—KA-AAY-nines—said it all—Darby Anderson was in good standing with those who counted as ‘good folk’ in this country. Landon sighed, but quashed his urge to shake his head.
“Can we go back to the first one?” This question was from one of the S.O.’s newest hires, David Kins, hired by Landon’s dad just before he retired. The kid had, at the time of his hiring, been just barely old enough to make the force, but he was proving to be a good deputy. “Sure,” Landon answered, glad for the rescue. “Red, do the honors, would you?” and the recording started again.
“Stop!” the kid yelped. “Go back a couple of seconds.” Then, “Is that the perp? That shadow?”
Landon frowned, walked up to the wall screen and squinted. “Where?”
The kid stood and approached the screen. His finger circled. “Right here.”
Again, Landon squinted. Then, instead, he stepped back and tried to see if distance helped so he could see what the kid was seeing. He failed
. “Red, run it back five seconds, then run it in slow mo, would you?”
Despite that, Landon still couldn’t make out what Kins was seeing.
“Can I try my hand on that laptop?” Dave asked. “I’m pretty good at manipulating video to enhance it.”
“Oka-ay,” Landon said. “Use a copy, not the originals, though.”
A few minutes later, the kid nodded. “Ready.” He touched something and what had been small was now focused and large. “…Right …here!”
Soft bursts of exclamations erupted through the room. Landon shook his head in amazement. The image, taken while the drone was first arriving showed a human figure just disappearing into the woods. “Good job, Dave!” He turned to the room. “And there’s the back of who might very well be our perp!”
“By my figures, he’s got to be somewhere around six feet,” Dave said.
Startled, Landon asked how he knew that. “By the size of the victim who’s five-foot-six, according to the ME’s report. Taking in the time of day and the angle of his shadow, I’m guessing, though. Somebody good at this could probably give you an exact height, maybe even a weight, but, hey, at least we know it’s probably a male—slim hips and no boobs—he’s thin, and he’s got short, dark, wavy hair, right?”
…Which narrowed it down to a few thousand possibilities in this county alone, never mind people from outside the area. Same with what they now could identify as probably a 2007 to 2013 red, long bed Chevy pickup—probably a 1500, and, for sure, a single cab. It wasn’t much, but at least it was something.
Landon turned to the room. “Okay, people. You know the drill. I want to know everything there is to know about Sue Bigsby, and I want Debbie Ferris found. We need to know where that money came from, too, and we really need to find that truck. Start with DMV records on the truck and go from there. Check out every red truck that matches in this county, and, if that doesn’t hit pay dirt, move out from there.”
Turning to Kins, he said, “Dave? My office.”
The kid’s face blanched. “Y-Yes, sir.”
Landon sighed. Why do they always think I’m going to eat them?!
***
12 – Dead Wrong
“So, how do you know so much about enhancing video and figuring out height and the like?” Landon asked.
Visibly, Dave relaxed. “It’s a hobby.”
“A hobby.” Some hobby. Maybe this kid should have gone to college, not the police academy.
“Yes, sir.”
“You know anything about anything else that might help us?”
The young man’s face dropped to look at his hands. “Not really. I do fly drones, though—cheap ones—so I’m used to looking at their feeds.”
“You do,” Landon said dryly and shook his head. “And never mind the privacy laws!”
The kid squirmed. “I only fly them in remote areas. …Sorry, sir.”
Landon indicated the two sitting parked on his counter and reminded himself that he needed to lock them up, since, thanks to obvious interference by someone, he and his office were personally responsible for them …for all of Ms. Anderson’s equipment. The terseness of the note from Judge Peterson had been clear. “And what do you think of those drones?”
Dave’s face lit up. “Oh, man. Those are state-of-the-art! They’re way beyond anything I’ve ever even seen except in videos!”
“So they’re good ones?”
“Oh, yeah!”
“Is there any way of proving that those drones took those audio-visual recordings?”
The kid looked startled. “Yeah. The metadata is still intact on the videos and each drone has its own signature.” The kid paused. “Well, unless somebody messed with them.”
“Can you tell?”
Dave grinned. “That’s easy. We download the flight record and GPS data from their onboard chips—kinda like an airplane’s black box.”
“Oka-aay. Can you do that for me without disturbing the evidence?”
“Sure. Just need a thumb drive.”
Landon frowned and, opening his drawer, extracted the thumb drive Jessie had handed him. “Would that be on this?”
“What’s on it?”
“I don’t know. The woman who owns those drones gave it to me.”
“God, I’d love to meet her!”
Landon stared. The kid practically had a mental hard-on. “Let’s stick to this, for the moment, shall we?”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
The kid got up. “If I can use your computer, sir, I can tell you if what you need is on that stick to prove what we have to,” Dave said.
Landon stood up. “Be my guest.”
Moments later, the kid accessed the data on the tiny data storage device Ms. Anderson had given him and, that quick, Dave Kins showed Reid that, not only had the woman provided the entire video feeds of both machines, but also the downloads of their entire flight history, including the ones that matched the IDs of their evidence.
“Ooo. There’s something else on here, too,” Dave said, excitement in his voice. “Look! She enhanced it! And it’s an expert job!”
And it was. Their perp was loud and clear. But the face was still all a blur.
“Can you tell if that blur was done by the owner of the drones?”
The kid went back and got the laptop from the other room, then checked things Landon couldn’t even begin to recognize. “No. It’s all virgin footage,” Kins said.
“Then what’s blurred his face?”
“A stocking maybe? Or a mask of some kind?”
Landon shook his head. Something, for sure. Still, though, they now had enough detail to I.D. the truck. Landon could see practically every dent and every scratch on its front, back, top, hood, and bed, and even a few on the driver’s side door. “Get detail stills from that footage printed and out to the troops,” he told Kins.
“Yes, sir.”
Watching the enhancement through one more time, Reid frowned. Jessica Marie Anderson was, it seemed, pretty good at her job. “Ex-job,” he muttered. Now he wanted to know why she no longer worked that job. What had she done to get her pressured to resign, because that was his bet about what had actually happened. PTSD? No way. What had she done?
His eyes went to the drones. She had not been happy with him. Well, he wasn’t happy with her, either. She’d known that was a murder, and she’d not divulged that knowledge. The crime scene had been compromised, evidence lost, all because they’d been investigating what they thought was an injury/accident. But this was murder, and Jessica Anderson had known it right from the start and not said a thing. Landon shook his head, muttering unpleasantries.
Bringing up the 9-1-1 recording, Landon listened to it yet again. There it was. The hesitation, the pauses, the omissions, but, especially, the carefully chosen words. “Smarty.” And all because she didn’t want to part with her precious equipment was his bet.
On a whim, he dialed Blaine S.O, and, finally, after a run-around, got a call back from the undersheriff, a Reggie Dennison.
“Jessie was really good at her job,” the man told him. “She never jumped to conclusions, was meticulous in cataloguing the evidence, and, when you asked the right questions, had brilliant insights into what may have gone down. She pays attention to details. But she does have an aversion to violence and to carrying a gun. That was known from the start before we even hired her. I think it’s why she quit the force.”
Quit? So she’d really quit? “Elaborate?”
“The gang retaliation we had last fall. We lost a couple of good officers because of that mess, and Jessie was one of them. Right in the middle of an investigation on some beheadings. Our special crime analysis team got stranded in the middle of it, and the S.W.A.T. team couldn’t reach us. Destroyed our units. A couple of us took rounds. Between the injured and dead, it was a massacre—a mob against a handful of us. But Jessie’s a crack shot, and she’s ice under fire. I found that out the hard way. She’s the reason she, Jacobs, and I are al
l still breathing. But the fact that several of our deputies were killed and the fact that both she and her dog were injured—”
“Dog?”
“Yeah. Acer, she called him. Don’t know if she still has him or not. He was hurt. Don’t know how badly. Anyway, I think the whole incident destroyed her confidence. I think she blames herself for the deaths. But, under fire, she’s got her father’s steel. I can personally attest to that, and so can Captain Jacobs. If you need a very good deputy and a great CSI, you can’t go wrong with Jessie.”
When the man hung up, Landon Reid sat back and thought. He’d been wrong—dead wrong.
***
13 – Surprise Visitor
Jessie heard the dogs in her father’s kennel complex explode with ‘intruder alert’. All her dogs stood up. An all but silent growl rumbled in Milo’s throat. Closing out her spreadsheet, Jessie switched screens to those of the security monitors.
It was a sheriff’s rig and a dark shadow went through her at the sight of the tall, lanky form of the sheriff getting out of the vehicle. Absently, her hand reached down. Several noses touched it. “Brave Hunde. What do you suppose he wants, now? My desktop computer, too?”
The dogs suddenly all sat. Milo then sank into his sphinx crouch. Acer and young Mitch visibly relaxed. Then, they dropped into ‘downs’, Acer with a soft groan between Britta and Sumi. “Yeah, my sentiments, exactly. You’ve got the easy part, though.” But she paid notice. Her pack did not consider Sheriff Reid a threat. Unfortunately, she did.
Surprised by a second visit from him, Jessie wasn’t prepared for it—not mentally, not physically. And, with her dad and grandparents gone to town, and John somewhere out on the property working a group of pups, she’d have to face this alone.
She stepped to the door, all dogs rising and padding along with her. She took a steadying breath, then opened it.