Of course, everyone thinks his or her puppy is the cutest in the world, regardless of breed, and I occasionally receive nasty follow-up emails from folks whose photos weren’t chosen, questioning not only my editorial qualifications but also my parentage and my sanity…is it any wonder I occasionally feel the urge to take on the type of moonlighting job I’ve described?
I spent about an hour going through the latest batch of puppy photos, selecting five or six and rejecting the rest. Despite the submission guidelines we publish every year some readers still sent us photos that looked like they were taken with an old Kodak Instamatic—remember those?—not understanding that these don’t come close to providing the quality and resolution needed for magazine reproduction. And yes, it’s almost a given that these same folks who can’t follow the submission instructions are also the ones most likely to complain if we don’t run their photo.
After looking at all the puppy pictures I cared to for a while—even a lifelong dog lover like myself can start feeling a little jaded after so many cute furry faces—I opened a story on canine nutrition by Tony Paulsen, one of my top writers. Tony’s copy was always clean and tight and required minimal editing, usually nothing more than adding or subtracting a comma or two. An editor’s ideal contributor, in other words, the kind who makes my life easier.
Tony had quoted nutritionists from several of the major dog food companies (coincidentally, all of whom advertised in my magazine) and he’d put together a comprehensive piece on feeding sporting dogs. It was informative and the quotes were colorful; apparently his sources knew how to speak in sound bytes. It was the kind of good, solid editorial I like to run, which is one of the reasons I usually respond with a “yes” to Tony’s queries.
This particular article also addressed one of my major ongoing pet peeves—namely, the tendency of many bird hunters to skimp when it comes to feeding their dogs. One of those myths that refuses to die says that all dog foods are pretty much the same and there’s no reason to pay for premium food when most dogs can “get by” on the bargain brand stuff you buy at Walmart or the grocery store. “You’re just paying for their advertising,” is the argument Joe Cheapskate usually offers to justify his refusal to buy a high-quality product from one of the major, nationally known dog food companies.
Numerous studies have shown the fallacy of this thinking, and it seems like it would be obvious that you shouldn’t expect any athlete—which is what a sporting dog is, in every sense—to deliver peak performance on a diet of junk food, but that doesn’t stop lots of hunters from feeding their dogs food that is primarily waste grain, slaughterhouse by-products and cheap fillers.
Tony’s feature included plenty of information to support the concept that you should feed your dog the highest quality food you can afford to buy and that this is no place to be looking for ways to cut corners or save a buck. Whether it would change any reader’s thinking on the matter was anyone’s guess, but we were giving it our best shot, and it was a message I liked to revisit on a fairly frequent basis.
When I finished editing Tony’s piece—a quick exercise as it didn’t require much work, as I’ve already mentioned—I saved it with an “.rev” added to the document name, indicating that it had been revised and was ready for layout. I then emailed it to the associate editor and the art director with a brief message informing them that the photos for the article (which Tony had also supplied) would be on the magazine’s ftp site. Steve, the art director, would retrieve them from there while Joe, the associate editor, took another look at the copy, checking for anything I might have missed and perhaps tightening up the wording a bit more.
After sending off Tony’s copy I glanced at my watch and saw it was 11:30, close enough to lunchtime for me to question whether I should start working on another story. I told myself to stop procrastinating and get to it.
Bad decision. Forty-five minutes later I was only halfway through an article on spring snow goose hunting written by a contributor I used only occasionally, usually no more than once or twice a year. His writing was mediocre and required quite a bit of work to get it into shape for publication; his saving grace was that he always supplied outstanding photographs to accompany his stories.
That was the case this time as well. The field shots of his Labrador in action were terrific but his copy was too long, too flowery and full of grammar errors. By the time I’d finished cleaning it up and editing it into something acceptable and sent it on to Joe and Steve, I felt like I’d earned not only my lunch but the rest of the afternoon off.
And why not, I thought. It was Friday and a perfect late fall day, we still had a couple weeks to go before we started releasing this issue’s files to the printer, and hunting birds was considered part of my job description.
I’d be foolish not to make the most of it.
Chapter 7
I ate a quick sandwich and a handful of corn chips, chased it all down with a can of ginger ale and changed into my hunting clothes. I sent an email to Joe and Steve telling them I was playing hooky for the rest of the afternoon to go out and chase pheasants with Preacher, then I loaded my shotgun and shooting bag into the SUV. I whistled Preacher in from the back yard and opened the tailgate and she jumped in without being told. She never needed encouragement when we were going hunting—she knew that from the clothes I was wearing—or out to the lake for a run.
We headed out of town to some farmland about a half-hour away that I had permission to hunt. I’d talked to the farmer before the season opened, and he’d told me to come out anytime. In addition to raising corn and soybeans he had a good-sized tract in CRP, and I was betting we could take a rooster or two before legal shooting time ended at 4:30 that afternoon. We hadn’t hunted here yet this season and I hoped the farmer, Roland Patterson, hadn’t allowed too many others to do so. Yeah, I’m selfish that way.
After stopping at the farmhouse and talking briefly with Patterson’s wife—she told me Roland had gone into town to pick up a new chain for his chainsaw, and also confirmed that no one else had hunted their land recently—I parked in the access lane to the CRP field. I slipped on my hunting vest, uncased my shotgun, and opened the tailgate. Preacher jumped down and stood expectantly while I dropped two shells into the breech of my Ruger—yes, the same gun I’d used for the Frank Reynolds assignment, and no, I wasn’t at all bothered by the association—and closed the action. “All right,” I told her. “Hunt ’em up.”
She coursed into the field and fell into a nice quartering pattern about 50 to 60 yards ahead of me. We covered maybe 200 yards when she began getting birdy, her docked tail a blur and her pace becoming even more animated. “Easy,” I called to her, hoping to head off a wild flush, and at the sound of my voice a hen pheasant lifted out of the cover about 20 yards ahead of her.
My mistake. My word of caution had spooked the hen; I should have trusted Preacher to handle the bird without any admonition from me. But Preacher did slow her pace a bit and continue quartering, and in another few moments she locked up on point.
“All right,” I breathed quietly to myself, moving up on Preacher with my gun at the ready. When I was within 10 yards of the dog a rooster broke cover, cackling and presenting a going away shot. I mounted the Ruger, centered the rooster’s white neck ring and fired. The bird came down almost without a flutter and Preacher broke her point to make the retrieve.
Bird dog purists might take me to task for allowing Preacher to break at the bird’s fall rather than remaining steady and waiting for me to give her the command to fetch, but I’m not quite that much of a stickler for letter-perfect performance. Pheasants are notoriously tough birds and hard to kill, and one that hits the ground wounded can be gone in a microsecond, leading a dog on a far-from-merry chase. Allowing the dog to break point on its own and get to the fall a little faster can sometimes make the difference between a recovered bird and one that gets away to provide a meal for a fox or coyote when it later succumbs to its wounds.
But I had ki
lled this rooster cleanly and Preacher had no problem locating it in the tall grass and retrieving it to hand. I patted her and told her what a good girl she was, then stood for a moment and smoothed the rooster’s feathers before slipping it into the game bag of my hunting vest. I opened the Ruger’s action and caught the fired shell as it ejected and dropped it into another pocket. I don’t leave litter in the field if I can help it, and that includes fired shells.
I reloaded and gave Preacher the go-ahead. We hunted on out through the CRP field and moved two more hens—one of which Preacher pointed, the other I flushed myself—before she located another rooster some 45 minutes after we took the first one.
It took two shots to bring this one down; I clipped some feathers with the first shot before dropping it with the second. The bird fell into a volunteer patch of sunflowers and I heard Preacher breaking stalks as she made the retrieve. She emerged from the sunflower patch with the bird held firmly between her whiskered jaws and trotted back to me with tail wagging and amber eyes glowing.
Watching her bring in the rooster, I once again couldn’t help thinking the same thought I’d had many, many times over the years—namely, that anyone who keeps a sporting dog only for a pet and denies that dog its heritage by not allowing it to participate in the sport it was bred for is doing something that borders on criminal.
Like I said earlier, I’m an elitist about this stuff.
Chapter 8
The following Wednesday the smug satisfaction I’d been feeling over the completion of the Frank Reynolds assignment went right out the window.
I made another run to the post office that morning and checked both boxes. I found the usual assortment of magazine-related material in the magazine’s P.O. box, and a letter from James Collins in the other.
This was an immediate red flag. As a rule, once they’ve sent me the check for my fee, clients never contact me again. I prefer that—insist on it, actually—and I suspect that in most cases the clients prefer it as well, wanting to wash their hands of our transaction as quickly as possible. Living with killing someone—even when it’s someone who deserved to die, and even if they’ve paid someone else to do the actual killing—is something most people find at least a little difficult to do.
But wrestling with their conscience is their business. I don’t give refunds, nor do I offer words of consolation or reassurance to anyone suffering after-the-fact regrets. As I mentioned earlier, my screening process pretty much eliminates the faint-of-heart anyway, so I don’t worry about my clients confessing to anyone…and by extension, implicating me.
Even if they do suffer some guilt pangs, their instinct for self-preservation is usually all-powerful and will override those feelings. They will eventually find a way to make peace with what they’ve done, because it’s true that time heals almost all wounds, even if the wounds are those of conscience and self-inflicted.
Also, as someone once noted, self-forgiveness is typically a very easy trait to acquire…especially when you can remind yourself that you’re not the one who actually pulled the trigger.
None of this seemed likely in James Collins’ case, however. If I’d read him right—and I was confident I had—he wasn’t the sort to have dedicated himself to avenging his sister’s murder and then have qualms about the rightness or wrongness of it after the deed was done. His commitment to the entire exercise, as evidenced by his months of tracking Frank Reynolds and compiling enough evidence to convince me to take the assignment, plus his willingness to pay the fee I quoted him—$10,000—told me that he was solid and would be able to live with what we had done.
I was reminding myself of this as I tore open his envelope. I could have waited until I got home but I’ll admit my curiosity got the best of me. Best-case scenario, he was just sending me a follow-up thank you, although he’d already included a sticky note to that effect when he’d sent me his check. So I couldn’t help wondering why he was contacting me again, unless it was to send me a copy of Frank Reynolds’ obituary, which would have undoubtedly run in the Chicago Tribune the previous week.
It was not a thank you note. Nor was it an obituary, although it was a newspaper clipping from the Trib. Affixed to the clipping was another sticky note with a handwritten message that read, “I know I’m probably breaking the rules by contacting you again but I thought you should see this. Do we have a problem? J.C.”
I peeled off the note to read the clipping. It was dated three days earlier. The headline read: “Deer Hunter Arrested in Attorney’s Death.”
Shit.
I gave the story a quick read. It stated that Carlyle Wilson, 32, of Rushville, Illinois, had been arrested and charged with manslaughter in the death of prominent Chicago attorney Frank Reynolds. According to the story, Wilson was the hunter who had discovered Reynolds’ body, and he had immediately reported it. He led a team of Schuyler County Sheriff’s police to the scene and explained that he’d been attempting to track a deer he’d shot at and missed earlier that morning when he had come upon Reynolds slumped in his tree stand.
So far, so good. Although Wilson’s gun had been fired, the police had no reason to doubt his story about missing a deer or suspect that Wilson had fired the shot that killed Reynolds. His promptness in reporting what he’d found and his willingness to lead them right to Reynolds’ body were points in his favor.
Then Charlie Flanagan entered the picture.
Charlie Flanagan, also 32 and also of Rushville, had come forward to say that the night after Wilson had found Reynolds’ body, he and Wilson had been drinking at the Rushville Tap and Wilson had confided to him that he had accidentally shot Reynolds. Flanagan claimed Wilson broke down at that point, saying that he didn’t know if he could live with himself, knowing he had killed another man, even though it was an accident.
Flanagan waited until Monday morning to report Wilson’s confession, presumably out of a sense of civic duty. Wilson was arrested later that day, although he denied making the confession Flanagan claimed to have heard. Wilson was charged with manslaughter and was now being held in the Schuyler County jail without bail.
Shit.
I re-read the clipping twice, and it raised several questions. My first instinct was to discredit Charlie Flanagan’s account, if only because I knew with absolute certainty who had really killed Frank Reynolds. But knowing that as I did, I then had to ask why Charlie Flanagan would fabricate Wilson’s confession and turn him in, especially if the two were at least drinking buddies.
There could be a hundred answers to that question, and most of them would probably involve some petty grudge, the kind that flourishes in small towns…hell, in towns large or small, for that matter. Maybe Carlyle Wilson had somehow wronged Charlie Flanagan in the past, or Flanagan at least believed he had done so. Pinning Reynolds’ death on Wilson would more than even the score.
But—trying to give Flanagan the benefit of the doubt for a moment—I also had to wonder about Wilson’s alleged confession. Had he really confessed as Flanagan claimed, maybe as a result of too many beers and the mistaken belief that the shot he’d fired earlier at a deer had accidentally struck and killed Frank Reynolds?
It seemed unlikely. There was no mention in the newspaper story of Wilson’s location when he shot at the deer (and perhaps the police hadn’t bothered to ascertain this), but if Wilson was a reasonably competent hunter, he had to be aware of where his shot had gone…at least approximately, even though he missed the deer.
Shooting at a deer standing on the ground, Wilson wouldn’t have been firing at an upward angle from close range (as I had when I killed Reynolds) and because Reynolds had been sitting in a tree stand, the only other possibility of Wilson hitting him accidentally would have occurred if Wilson had been up on one of the adjacent ridges, firing downhill.
Of course, I had the advantage of knowing that wasn’t what had happened. But if Wilson had been uphill from Reynolds, taken a shot at a deer below him, perhaps through some trees or screening brush, then gon
e downhill to follow up on the deer he’d missed and found Reynolds, was it conceivable Wilson might have concluded his shot had struck Reynolds?
Again, I couldn’t make it fit. It called for too much coincidence. Wilson had to know the direction and basic trajectory of the shot he’d taken at the deer, and he would have been able to determine immediately that the trajectory didn’t match up with where he’d been when he shot in relation to where he found Reynolds’ body. Unless, that is, his shot at the deer had been in the same—almost exact—direction as where he found Reynolds.
No. Too much coincidence. Nor did I believe Wilson would have jumped to the conclusion that his shot at the deer might have ricocheted and struck Reynolds. According to the newspaper story, Wilson had told the police he discovered Reynolds’ body when he’d been attempting to track the deer he’d missed. That suggested he had come some distance and had not fired the shot at the deer anywhere close to where he found Reynolds.
So back to the first conclusion I’d reached, which was that Charlie Flanagan was lying when he claimed Wilson had confessed to killing Frank Reynolds. When they’d come to arrest him, Wilson had denied making this confession but apparently the police chose to believe Charlie Flanagan.
At that point they also must have erroneously concluded that Wilson’s account of shooting at a deer was false, and that he had accidentally shot Reynolds from nearby, as indicated by the upward angle of the shot, something that would have been easily determined by any reasonably competent medical examiner. Apparently they believed that Wilson had simply pulled the trigger unintentionally—maybe he’d stumbled?—as he’d been passing close to where Reynolds was sitting in his tree stand.
It wasn’t rock solid. For it to have happened that way, Wilson would have had to have been walking along with the safety off and his finger on the trigger—something no responsible hunter would have done. Even if Wilson had been following the deer he’d shot at and was anticipating having another shot if he jumped the deer a second time, it was unlikely he’d have been walking with the safety off…or at least, I was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt on this.
The Killer in the Woods Page 5