Long Range

by Box, C. J.

  She nodded her head and said, “I was wondering when you’d show up.”

  “May I come inside and wait?”

  She stepped aside so he could enter. The home itself was neat and warm. He moved through it tentatively. He didn’t want to act like he owned the place.

  She said, “My brother . . .”

  “He’ll be okay,” Panfile said to her. “He’ll be fine. As soon as my people hear from me that all went well, that you did everything we asked of you, he’ll be released.”

  “I’m supposed to believe you, aren’t I?” she asked. “I knew he should never have let himself get mixed up with you people.”

  “He’ll be fine,” Panfile said again. “You’ll be fine. We’ll all be fine.”

  “You won’t hurt them, will you?” she asked him. “Kestrel is just a baby. I’ve grown fond of her.”

  “I don’t hurt babies,” Panfile said, shaking his head as if disappointed in the question. “My intention is to give him a reason to come after me on my soil. That’s where I have the advantage. I want him away from here where he’s comfortable.”

  He’d told her too much. He said again, “Everyone will be fine.”

  “So what do you want me to do?” Hill asked.

  “Call the mama and ask her to come back first thing tomorrow morning. Make sure she brings the baby.”

  “What if she’s suspicious?”

  “She won’t be if you’re convincing,” he said. “Your brother’s life depends on it.”

  Hers did, too. But he didn’t think he needed to say it, and he didn’t.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  JOE HAD A VAST CHOICE OF PARKING SPACES ON MAIN Street in front of the hardware store. The only other vehicles on the block were by the Stockman’s Bar a few hundred feet away. They would likely be there until the bar closed at 2:00 a.m., which was fifteen minutes from now. He got out and shut off the engine and looked up. Duane Patterson’s apartment lights were still on, which didn’t surprise him. The man never slept.

  It was a cool, still night. Although no inclement weather had been predicted, Joe felt the bite of snow on the way in the air.

  He’d changed into a fresh uniform shirt and he clamped on his Stetson and took the unusual step of undoing the safety strap on his .40 Glock sidearm before mounting the stairs to the second level of the building.

  Joe paused for a beat outside Patterson’s door. He could hear Duane talking inside. And not just talking but shouting: “How much did she hear?”

  Was someone with Patterson inside? It was awfully late for visitors, Joe thought.

  He rapped sharply on the door and it got suddenly quiet inside. The peephole darkened for a moment while Patterson looked to see who was on the landing. Joe heard Patterson say something urgent and then the knob twisted.

  When Patterson opened the door and stepped aside, he looked both sheepish and terrified.

  “I’m sorry it’s so late,” Joe said. “Do you have company?”

  Patterson inadvertently answered the question by glancing to the side and behind him. The phone on which he’d been talking was tossed onto the back of a couch. It was a cheap convenience store burner.

  “I guess you know why I’m here,” Joe said.

  Patterson’s eyes betrayed that he did.

  *

  THEY SAT ACROSS from each other in threadbare chairs that Joe guessed Patterson had bought at a garage sale when he was in law school. The coffee table between them was littered with fast-food containers and empty cups. The apartment looked the same as when Joe had seen it last—like a bachelor hovel.

  Patterson sat forward with his elbows on his knees. As he waited for Joe to speak, he ran his fingers through his hair. His breath came in short bursts, and Patterson looked everywhere in the room except at Joe’s eyes. It was the same behavior a guilty hunter displayed when he knew he’d killed an elk in the wrong area.

  Joe said, “Stovepipe said something to me right after Sue got shot. He was pretty upset. He said he’d really come to like Sue when she visited the courthouse—that she’d bring him cookies and brownies.”

  Patterson didn’t respond.

  “It got me to thinking,” Joe said. “How often did Sue Hewitt visit the courthouse, anyway?”

  It wasn’t a question demanding an answer, and Patterson knew it.

  “Marybeth did an analysis of the courtroom logs from the last six months,” Joe said while slipping his notebook out of his breast pocket and flipping it open to the most recent entries. “She cross-referenced the log Stovepipe kept against the county calendar. You’re familiar with the calendar, of course. We were both surprised to find out that Sue visited the courthouse twenty-six times in the last half year. This didn’t jibe at all with what Judge Hewitt told me in his chambers after Sue got shot. He admitted he’d taken his wife for granted, and when she recovered—if she recovered—he wanted to try to spend more time with her. He said he felt guilty about neglecting her, leaving her out there at that house for seven months a year by herself.

  “So it didn’t make sense,” Joe said. “Either they barely saw each other, like the judge claimed, or Sue made a habit of visiting him often in his chambers. But it makes sense now. Do you know what Marybeth found?”

  Patterson shrugged and stared at the tops of his shoes.

  “Of the twenty-six times she came to the courthouse, Judge Hewitt was away twenty-five of them. He was gone on one of his hunting or fishing trips or attending a conference somewhere. Which means she came to the building to see someone else.”

  Patterson once again ran his fingers through his hair and looked away.

  “My wife also accessed the records of the Eagle Mountain Club with Judy’s permission,” Joe said. “They keep track of how often members come and go, even in the off-season. They’ve got a piece of equipment that reads the bar code on the sticker on every member’s windshield. I don’t know why they do that, but they do.

  “Anyway,” Joe said, glancing down at the figures he’d written in his notebook, “Sue passed through the gated entry two hundred and thirty-one times in the last six months. That’s not a crazy number, since she’d go get her mail and groceries in town at least a couple of times a day. But the weird thing is that Sue used her membership code at the front gate another thirty-one times during that same period, meaning that instead of just driving through the gate she stopped at the key-code box and punched in her number so the gate would open. Now, why do you suppose she’d do that when all she had to do is drive up and let the gate open automatically?”

  “Don’t know,” Patterson grumbled.

  “There are two explanations,” Joe said. “Either she drove a vehicle without a club bar code sticker, but I doubt that. I saw those stickers on both Judge Hewitt’s SUV and Sue’s BMW. There were no other cars in their garage.”

  “Okay.”

  “Or, more likely,” Joe said, “she gave the code to someone else so they could come and go whenever they chose. And I’m sure it doesn’t surprise you to know that those key-code accesses also corresponded to times the judge was out of town.”

  Patterson shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He looked toward the window as if there were something out there. Anything to avoid Joe.

  “Then there’s Dennis Sun,” Joe said. “I thought he might be our suspect at one point, so I went out to his ranch and saw that state-of-the-art long-range shooting facility. At the time, I didn’t even think to ask who else he let use it, so I asked him that question tonight.

  “Mr. Sun said he only let a couple of locals use his range because he didn’t want things to get out of hand. He knows what a big deal long-range shooting is and he didn’t want folks knocking on his door all the time. I think you know what he told me.”

  Patterson cleared his throat and asked, “What?”

  “Mr. Sun said he allowed his two local hunting guides to use the range. He said he did that because he wanted to keep them happy and sharp when they went on hunting trips. But ther
e was one other: Dr. Thomas Arthur. Sun said he wanted to accommodate the new doctor and help keep him around, so he encouraged him to use his range whenever he wanted. He even gave Dr. Arthur the code to the front gate and a key to the facility so he could use it when Sun was in Albania shooting a horror movie, or something like that. I’ve never seen any of his movies.

  “Then I asked Sun if Dr. Arthur arrived with a spotter. He said he did. And he said it was you.”

  Patterson sat back in his chair with his legs splayed out. He rubbed his face with both hands and moaned.

  Joe leapt up from his chair and snatched the burner phone from the couch before Patterson could react. It had been used moments before and the screen had not yet gone to sleep, for which Joe was grateful. Getting the password out of Patterson at that point might be difficult.

  “Give it back,” Patterson pleaded.

  Joe ignored him as he scrolled through the apps and found the one he was looking for.

  “VoiceAlt,” he said aloud. “This is the app Marybeth told me about. If you open it before you place a call, it alters your voice so it’s unrecognizable. And here it is.”

  Then Joe opened the file for calls sent and received. All of the received calls were from a single number, 307-360-2247. All of the placed calls were to the same number except for one: 911.

  “So you used this phone yesterday morning to call the emergency dispatcher,” he said. “That’s when you left the message about locating a rifle in Nate’s mews. You knew they wouldn’t recognize the number, but you made sure they didn’t recognize your voice, either.”

  Patterson looked away.

  Joe asked, “So the question is why the two of you took a shot at Judge Hewitt. Or was Sue the target?”

  “God no,” Patterson said sharply, as if offended by the question. “I loved her. I really loved her.”

  Joe tried to keep his face slack, but a chill ran over his skin beneath his clothing.

  “Did she love you back?” Joe asked softly. “She must have thought highly of you to visit you at work all those times and give you her club access code.”

  “I think maybe she did,” Patterson said. “At least, she almost said it a couple of times.”

  “Almost?”

  “It wasn’t like we were having some kind of torrid sexual affair,” Patterson said. “Sue would never do something like that. But she was lonely and she said she loved my company. We had long talks, that’s all. She was starved for friendship, is how she put it. I told her things I’ve never told anyone in my life, and I made it clear to her that she was the one for me.

  “But she wouldn’t leave him. He treated her like crap and ignored her, but she couldn’t make herself leave him. It was like he had some kind of sick hold on her and she couldn’t break it. As long as the judge was around . . .”

  Patterson’s voice trailed off.

  Joe said, “So you figured if you killed him and pinned the blame on someone else that she’d eventually be with you.”

  Tears filled Patterson’s eyes. His shoulders heaved with sobs. Joe judged the man to be genuinely remorseful. It wasn’t an act. He was as upset as he was delusional, Joe thought.

  “He just ignored her,” Patterson said haltingly as he cried. “She was the loveliest person I’ve ever met. She genuinely cared for people—even him. She was so lonely, and she’d suffered a lifetime of neglect. You know how he can be. You’ve seen how he’s treated me over the years.”

  “He also fought for you to be named county attorney,” Joe said.

  “That’s just so he could manipulate me,” Patterson said bitterly. “He knew that if I owed him, I’d do what he said. He liked to hold that over my head.”

  Joe knew it to be true.

  “Was Sue aware of the plot?” Joe asked.

  “Of course not,” Patterson said. “She was a wonderful person. I never told her what I planned to do. I knew she wouldn’t go along with it. But I did it for her, Joe. She needed someone to break the spell he had over her.”

  Patterson’s face suddenly morphed into an ugly mask as he said, “She served him dinner every night. She told me that. He sat there at his table and stared out the picture window and waited for her to serve his dinner. This wonderful, beautiful woman . . . served him. So I knew where he would be that night. Waiting to be served.”

  “How did you convince the doctor to be involved?” Joe asked. “Or did you pull the trigger yourself?”

  “No, no. I could never make a shot like that. I was the spotter.”

  “So why did he agree to kill him?”

  “You know, it doesn’t seem like murder when it’s that far away,” Patterson said. “When you kill something so far from you that you can’t even see the target, it’s more like a game than a crime. We had no idea Sue would be in the room with the judge at that time. I didn’t know it until the next morning.”

  “Again, why did he agree to be the shooter?”

  “I was tipped that our doctor is running a very lucrative side business in illicit prescription drugs,” Patterson said. “He’s got wealthy customers from all over the country. I could have brought a case against him that would have put him away for a lot of years.”

  Joe nodded. That explained the sudden arrival of Missy, but he didn’t bring her up.

  “Did you threaten him with prosecution unless he helped you?” Joe asked.

  Patterson didn’t want to admit it. But after a heavy half minute of silence, he whispered, “Yes.

  “I promised him it would be just one shot,” he added. “But it never works out that way, does it? Things just go to shit. I’ve had dozens of clients over the years who did something wrong that wasn’t so bad but it led them on a spiral where everything got out of control. I should have known it could happen to me.”

  “What about the assault on you?” Joe asked. “Did you two have a falling-out?”

  Patterson said, “No, like I said, things went to shit. When I found out Sue got hit instead of Judge Hewitt, I panicked. I had to steer the investigation away from me.

  “It was a setup. I told Tom where to be that night and where I would park my car. I scrunched down under the steering wheel and let him take a shot through my windshield so it would look legit.”

  Joe nodded.

  “I loved her,” Patterson said again.

  “That’s why you’ve been so upset,” Joe said, trying to appear empathetic, even though he wanted to draw his weapon and pistol-whip Patterson’s head. “Your reaction to Sue’s shooting and death seemed kind of over the top at the time. Especially during that press conference. Now it’s clear why you were so emotional. You accidentally killed the woman you loved.”

  “I’ll never meet anyone else like her,” Patterson sobbed. “I mean, look at me. Look where I live. How I live.”

  “I’m sure you’re right about that,” Joe said. Then: “Is the sheriff in on it?”

  “What? No. Of course not.” Patterson wiped tears from his cheeks and cleared his throat. “He’s just incompetent. I knew he wouldn’t figure anything out. I’ve seen him bungle case after case since he got here. I wasn’t worried. I had no idea Judge Hewitt would bring you in on the investigation.”

  Joe felt flattered, but he didn’t react. “Is that why the two of you took a shot at my pickup tonight?”

  “I knew nothing about that until a few minutes ago,” Patterson said. “That was Dr. Arthur acting alone. He’s losing it, I think. The pressure is getting to him.”

  “So that’s who you were talking to on the phone when I knocked on the door?” Joe asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you buy a couple of burner phones to communicate with each other?”

  “Yes.”

  “You learned some things representing and prosecuting dirtbags.”

  Patterson closed his eyes.

  *

  “THE PERSON WHO drove the county vehicle to plant the rifle at Nate’s place,” Joe said. “That was you, wasn’t it? You have acc
ess to the county motor pool.”

  Patterson nodded meekly. “Arthur didn’t want to hand over his rifle, but I made the case to him that it would keep us both in the clear.”

  “Was it your intention to blame Nate all along?”

  He nodded again. “If necessary. You know his reputation,” Patterson said. “Nobody would put it past him.”

  “I would.”

  Patterson seemed too exhausted to argue, so he simply looked away.

  “Does Dr. Arthur know I’m here?” Joe asked. “I heard you say something into the phone when I knocked on your door and you looked through the peephole.”

  Patterson nodded. “I might have said something.”

  “Either you did or you didn’t,” Joe said.

  “Yeah, I think I did.”

  Joe stood up and hovered over Patterson for a minute. The county attorney was still seated and sweating through his scalp.

  “I think we should leave right now,” Joe said.

  “Where are we going?”

  “County jail,” Joe said. “I assume you know the way in.”

  “Is there any way—”

  “Nope.”

  “My life is ruined,” Patterson cried. “I should be in jail. I’ll never have the woman I wanted because I fucked up everything.”

  “Yup,” Joe said. “Now stand up, turn around, and let me cuff you.”

  “Jesus, you don’t have to do that,” Patterson said.

  “I just want to.”

  “Really, Joe. I’ll go willingly. Or better yet, just leave me here and go on your way. I’ve got a shotgun in the closet and I’ll end it all before you get to the bottom of the stairs.”

  “Stand up and turn around,” Joe said through gritted teeth.

  When the cuffs were ratcheted tightly around Patterson’s wrists, Joe said, “How well do you know Dr. Arthur?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You coerced him into this, but do you know his heart?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’ve been around game animals who were shot or poached with high-powered rounds all of my career,” Joe said. “I’ve dug hundreds of slugs out of carcasses so they could be sent to the state lab. Never in my experience has a slug splintered into so many particles that it couldn’t be recovered. Modern bullets aren’t known to do that. Sue Hewitt’s injury was the first time I’d ever heard of it happening, even though Dr. Arthur claimed that’s what happened.”