Rough Country: A gripping crime thriller

by T. J. Brearton

  “We got her phone?”

  Kruse reemerged from the bathroom. “Yeah. We got it. Little stickers on it and everything.”

  Reed felt a tightening in his spine; finally, the phone. “You go through it?”

  “Thing was busted.”

  “Busted?” The tightening cooled off.

  “Smashed. Someone took a hammer to it. We found it in the trash.”

  They stood looking at each other, just breathing. “You know what this means,” Reed said, but then neither man spoke. Kruse was probably thinking through it the same way he was. It meant a couple of things: One, Kasey either went from Aimee Hetfield’s house to Snow’s place before she died, or the killer brought it back there after strangling her in the woods. Maybe then smashed it up and put it in the trash. Which highlighted Snow as a suspect, except for the fact that he’d hidden evidence, then taken his life right after, which didn’t quite cohere.

  Two, whoever smashed it had things they didn’t want discovered. Which highlighted no suspect in particular.

  Three, with the carrier subpoenaed, they’d get the call log and the last five days’ texts, with any luck. It wasn’t a total loss.

  “We never talked about Daryl’s phone,” Kruse said. “He’s got a couple of calls to Kasey, going back a week ago.”

  “Her to him or him to her?”

  “One of each.”

  “Huh,” Reed said. “If he’s trying to hide their communication, why destroy her phone and not his own? It was on his person. In his pocket, undamaged.”

  “Good question. Maybe there’s a burner phone we haven’t seen yet.”

  Reed grunted thoughtfully. He sat down on the bed, feeling the weight of a long day. His thoughts turned to Mike, then moved off, back to the case. “How about any religious stuff?”

  “Religious stuff?”

  “In Kasey’s room at Snow’s.”

  “You mean like crucifixes and Bibles?”

  “Any religion at all.”

  Kruse leaned on the cheap bureau and crossed his arms. “Not that I noticed. Not that anyone has pointed out to me. The girl was definitely staying in that room. Living there. I mean, tampon wrappers in the bathroom, toothbrush in the medicine cabinet, boxes of Apple Jacks cereal in the cupboard, her books, her bag, all of it. She was living with Snow for at least thirty days.”

  Reed stared at the floor, saying, “Right after being at the Wheelers’.” He glanced up at Kruse. “What are you thinking at this point?”

  “I don’t know, man. Why you asking about religious stuff?”

  “I just… you know, something I’ve noticed. I’ve been in a few of these people’s homes now. Haven’t seen one crucifix. Not one Sacred Heart picture with Jesus throwing the peace sign. Kasey was killed on a Sunday night – in the statements from these people closest to her, you never see anything about church.”

  “Yeah,” Kruse said. “Huh. Well, to me it looks like a few things. That Kasey and Tyson were an item, she broke it off, and he pursued her, got angry when she wouldn’t come back to him.”

  “And the phone winding up at Daryl Snow’s?”

  Kruse walked to the door and looked out the window, as if wondering whether he was followed. “Could be that Aaron Mosier and Logan Terrio went out to the house to plant the phone there, to draw attention to Snow. Frame him or put the spotlight on him as concerned citizens…”

  “But I was there before they came,” Reed said. “And Snow was already dead.”

  Kruse nodded, but held up a finger. “We don’t know that Kasey went to Daryl’s with the phone or the phone made its way there after her death, brought by Snow, brought by Mosier and his buddy – which could’ve been exactly what they were coming back for.”

  Reed almost felt the pain of that one working through his brain. “But why leave the phone and then come back for it? Already smashed and in the trash?”

  Kruse’s finger curled back into his fist and he lowered his hand. “Don’t know.”

  “I’ll tell you what I wonder.”

  It was Kruse’s turn to grunt, in the form of a question.

  “Maybe Snow was the one to pick her up from Aimee Hetfield’s.”

  “Huh.”

  Reed said, “Snow drives her out to his place. She leaves her phone. Then they go off into the woods together. He strangles her, carves her up.”

  Kruse tilted his head back and forth, getting out the kinks. “But she never called him for the pickup?”

  “That might be the burner you mentioned.”

  “Huh,” Kruse said. “Well, but then there’s the drugs, though.”

  “Right. Then there’s the drugs.”

  Kruse continued, “Which brings me back to Tyson, since he tested positive for the psilocybin, too. Let’s say Snow gives Tyson some drugs, gives him a scalpel to use… or maybe it’s Aaron Mosier. Talking to Tyson, getting into his head. This Tyson Wheeler, he’s a big athlete, he’s pulling some good grades. But he was abandoned by his mother, right? She’s gone. That might mess with you. And then he’s on frigging hallucinogens. I’m not making any excuses, I’m just saying that burning his house down? That’s the guilt he feels for strangling his girlfriend and carving her up, amplified by the drugs. Talk about a bad trip.”

  Reed pictured it, the two boys going to the website, Aaron Mosier and Tyson Wheeler, watching the Inside Edition episode on Melanie Hollander together: Hey – want to try it on Kasey?

  The problem was, other than that, neither had a motive. Tyson, maybe, if he was a jealous lover. Maybe Aaron had moved in on Kasey. But then there was the phone, and Daryl Snow, and Daryl killing himself. It just seemed to go round and round.

  After a bit of silence, bugs tapping against the window, Kruse looked up. “Anyway. We’re going over to search Mosier’s place in the morning, yeah?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Yeah, Jeremiah Mosier is none too happy about it. Hey, so what did you get down in Hume?”

  They talked about it – not much to tell – and Kruse grunted a couple more times and nodded.

  “All right,” he said a few seconds later. “Catch you bright and early.”

  Early, sure. Reed wasn’t sure about bright.

  Reed waited until Kruse was back in his car and pulling away. The headlights reversed and then swung out onto the road, the engine noise fading. He could hear the bugs hitting the cabin windows, like they were trying to get in.

  Which they were.

  He picked up his phone and listened to the message from Jeremiah Mosier first. Mosier sounded like he was barely containing his outrage, trying to be polite, giving all assurances that his son, while leading a different sort of life, was not involved in Kasey Stevens’s death, none of it.

  Sanjay Varma next. He’d driven up from Jersey and was awaiting instruction. He said there was a backup camera they could look at.

  Virginia Leithsceal: “Having a hard time tracking down the person behind the website with my limited resources. Might need to look into it more when I come up there.”

  And finally, the unknown number, a woman. “Ah, Investigator Raleigh, this is Katherine Zurn. I’d like to talk to you about what happened to my brother, Daryl… About what he did. You left your card here at the house… Can we meet? Um, thank you.”

  Left his card at the house?

  And then he remembered: Katherine was married to Andy Zurn, Kasey Stevens’s biological father. He was going to need more than his crude drawings to keep straight the family tree – like maybe a small team of genealogists and a few satellites.

  Reed put down his phone. After a moment he went to the bathroom and started the shower.

  He did some good thinking in the shower. They said something about “negative ions,” but he thought it was just the lack of stimuli. Like being in a sensory deprivation tank. He organized his morning while scrubbing down, and when he got back to the bed, he didn’t bother to dress and fell asleep in the towel in a matter of minutes.

 
And dreamed about depressed kids going around with circles carved into their flesh, the wounds oozing blood.

  17

  Day Three

  Way to go

  It was May, so in upstate New York the sun rose before six and filled the windows of the motel cabin like a spotlight. Reed got up to a growling stomach and dressed. Upper body: a solid dark blue button-down and then a gray blazer. Lower body: Levi jeans, boot fit. He went out looking for food, got about two miles up Route 9 and hit a Stewart’s for an egg sandwich and a coffee.

  Virginia called while he was chowing down in the van.

  “Morning,” she said. “How you doing?”

  “Any more dead bodies and I’m going to have the attorney general calling me. I’ve got three major crime scenes being processed. Four, really – Mandalay woods, the burned-down house, the diner, and Daryl Snow’s place. I’ve got one suspect sitting in the hot seat, his father a pillar of the community threatening lawsuits. And the other person of interest has a lawyer father.”

  She was silent a moment. “Not a morning person?”

  He tossed the emptied cup of coffee in the foot well, then took a calming breath. “Sorry.”

  “No, I get it.”

  “So,” he said, “we need to get into that website.”

  “Right. Crack through to the owner operator, maybe get an IP address.”

  Finished with his sandwich, Reed balled the wrapper and tossed it beside the coffee cup. Normally a squared-away soldier, neat and clean, for some reason this morning he didn’t care.

  Well, because of Mike, that was why. But he had to try to put that away for the time being.

  Virginia asked, “You want to hear a story about where wetiko comes from?”

  “I sure do.”

  “Aliens,” she said.

  “Aliens.” He watched a couple of older men push into the doors of the Stewart’s and said, “You’re cheering me up.”

  She laughed. “No, well – I’m still digging. But aliens that came a long time ago. What I read… this goes all the way back to ancient Sumer.”

  “Heck of a place, ancient Sumer. The first real party city, right?”

  “Right. And the alien beings are called the Anunnaki…”

  He sat up straighter. “The what?”

  “I’m putting this all together for you and I’ll send it over.”

  “Yeah, email it all to me. But you just said, ah…” He flipped through his notebook, back to the previous day’s interviews with Aaron Mosier and Logan Terrio. One of them had said something similar, hadn’t they? About a tattoo they wore?

  He couldn’t find it.

  “You mentioned something about cleansing ceremonies,” Reed said. “Yesterday. When we talked about the contents of Kasey’s stomach…”

  After a moment, she said, “There are ways to try to cleanse the spirit of wetiko. Certain meditative practices, some uplifting-type ceremonies… and then there’s the more drastic.”

  “Drugs and stomach carvings?”

  “Taking hallucinogens can be part of it, apparently. Whether it’s Ayahuasca ceremonies or ingesting psilocybin. One theory is that the wetiko virus feeds on the fear of death. So reducing death anxiety is recommended.”

  Reed wanted to listen, but he also needed to get going. He backed out of the parking space and turned around. He put Virginia on speaker. He said, “What if this was some kind of religious or cult ceremony gone awry?”

  “Could be. When do you get the phone stuff?”

  “Should be later today. Soon,” he said.

  “Right now we just have the social media. But I’ve been staring at these images they’re posting, bleak and isolating. Links to articles on artificial intelligence replacing jobs, about climate change…”

  He thought of Aaron Mosier again.

  Virginia continued, “I start to get the picture of two kids who feel no hope for the future.” After she sighed, she said, “I don’t know. Maybe they believed in this thing.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But I don’t know how it helps you.”

  “Let me work on that.” Reed was moving south on Route 9. Along here were stately homes with wide views of Lake Champlain, the low mountains of Vermont on the far side. The cabin he’d seen and liked was deeper in the woods than this, and on a different, more isolated lake. Was he crazy to be thinking Mike would ever want to come up here to some cabin and fish and hunt with him? That he could rekindle what he’d lost with his son? Or that they’d ever even shared the type of bond he was now missing?

  He asked Virginia, “The symbol on Melanie Hollander is the same, right?”

  “Very close. Definitely the same kind of iconography.”

  “But not a perfect match. So, like, maybe lending to the theory that someone saw the website, tried to copy what they saw.”

  “Could be,” she said. “So, that’s assuming the Melanie Hollander people were into this wetiko stuff, too. Even if it’s a copycat thing.”

  “Right.”

  “So now we’re talking about over twenty years of people thinking about this stuff, maybe believing in it.”

  “Yes,” he said. Then, “Thank you, Virginia.”

  “You’re welcome, Reed.”

  Bahrain, he thought. Where it shined like Vegas and smelled of shit and concrete.

  You wake up and it’s 100 degrees, development everywhere, more shining casinos and whorehouses. But the giant plastic pearl located downtown keeps Allah from seeing the debauchery.

  Petty Officer 2nd Class Jason Gides had lost his mind in Bahrain.

  You didn’t mess with hard drugs in the Navy, since you got bloodwork twice a year. And Coast Guard guys, who often worked with DEA like Reed had, were more straight edge than that. Functioning alcoholics, maybe, but no one was tripping out on mushrooms. But, Gides… Gides had gotten into something.

  When they’d pulled him off the floor of a casino downtown, he’d been completely freaked out. Seeing demons everywhere, his pupils wide and filled with terror. He’d told Reed that the reptile demons had big erect penises and they wanted to rape him.

  People said Gides had lost it because Gides had spent eight months fearing for his life off the coast of Iran; Gides had been in a place where nothing made sense and every form of divinity had been evicted. But Reed had never seen an autopsy report, nor heard about the toxicology, before Gides finally ended it in his hotel room, having cut open his own throat. And as soon as it’d come out that Gides was on LSD, the Navy buried it.

  Point being: when you got into things like hallucinogenic drugs, you rolled the dice.

  If things were nice and lovely around you – they called it “set and setting” – it helped ensure a good trip.

  But.

  If things were already a little bit of hell, like Bahrain was already a little bit of hell, you were in for it.

  And the aliens would come for you.

  “Here’s the problem,” District Attorney Tallman said from behind the desk in her office. “I’ve got no one to prosecute. Who I want is Tyson Wheeler. Remind me why I can’t have him. Besides his being deceased.”

  “His alibi,” Reed answered. “His father’s and his eleven-year-old brother’s statement. The fact that his phone pings show no movement on the night of – his phone was at his house the whole time, suggesting – not proving, just suggesting – that he was, too. That, and no physical evidence of him at the crime scene.”

  Tallman opened her hands. “What about the medical examiner? You said skin cells.”

  “It’s more likely the killer wore gloves.”

  “Does that mean traces of plastic? If it’s gloves, then it’s premeditated.”

  “Getting evidence off the body is tricky,” Reed said.

  “I know. I got elected last year, but this isn’t my first rodeo,” Tallman said.

  Everyone was on edge this morning, Reed thought. He could understand. It was day three of a murder investigation that had turned into a much bigger
mess, with two apparent suicides and he – the lead investigator – didn’t have any solid answers. That’s what they wanted, that’s why he was here – solid answers. He had two suspects on hold, but not enough to stick to either of them.

  He felt the edginess too, but when things got like this, he had ways to deal. It probably came from his time downrange. When things got tight, he kind of went into himself. Hence the earbuds and the music. Maybe it was a way to feel something solid when everything else was shifting and uncertain.

  “Listen, Reed, I don’t need to tell you – most people in this community have already closed the book on this. A lovers’ quarrel turned ugly, drugs involved, and – okay – Tyson Wheeler drew this thing in her stomach because they were into some kind of beliefs, conspiracy theories, whatever. Yet here we are.”

  “I’ll leave prematurely convicting a dead teenager to the community,” Reed said. “What I want is what connects Kasey Stevens and Melanie Hollander. That connection might not reveal a killer directly, but it will give us motive. And from there we’ve got a much better shot of pinning this on the right person.”

  Her eyes narrowed. She seemed to be assessing whether he was making her job harder or easier. “I read the statement from Tyson’s father. Mr. Wheeler says his son was under mounting pressure. He had an injury last fall that almost blew his chances for the football season, and it took a lot of work to recover. His grades even slipped a little – I’ve reviewed his transcript. So here’s a young man trying to climb his way out of a hole, and he’s only sixteen. Already under all this pressure. That’s how I would present it.”

  “That’s a theme, yeah.”

  She blinked. “What does that mean?”

  “It means Aaron Mosier’s father said the same thing about Aaron. That he was anxious and depressed at Brown, dropped out before his first semester was even over.”

  She sniffed and looked out the window. “We’re too soft on our kids. And maybe you’re being too soft on Aaron Mosier.”