Shadows of the Dead--A Special Tracking Unit Novel

by Spencer Kope

  The head of IT gives a slow, unrepentant nod.

  * * *

  The truth of Murphy’s jailbreak is more troubling than we imagined. It was no mere clerical error that set him free, but a sophisticated attack on the county’s mainframe.

  The county’s secure network had been breached first, which gave the hacker indirect access to the jail system. At 4:53 P.M. the previous afternoon, Murphy’s bail was changed from one million dollars to a paltry two thousand dollars—a sum usually demanded for crimes like drunk driving or punching a guy in the face.

  Roughly an hour later, at 5:57 P.M., the True Bond bail agency in Port Angeles posted bail for Murphy after receiving a Mastercard payment from Mr. Arthur Bedlington of Seattle. This was all news to Mr. Bedlington when Detective Sergeant Sturman called him an hour ago. He stated quite emphatically that he didn’t know anyone named Murphy Cotton, had never called a bail bond agency in this life, let alone the previous day, nor had he authorized the use of his credit card to post bail.

  While Jason was on the phone with him, Bedlington checked his account information and confirmed that two hundred dollars had indeed been charged to his account by the True Bond bail agency in Port Angeles—the ten percent fee required to post the bail. After this discovery, it was impossible to get anything else out of him. He just wanted to call his bank and cancel his card before more charges popped up, as if having his account used to secure the release of a serial killer was the least of his concerns.

  It’s now Sergeant Thomas’s turn.

  Holding up two unlabeled DVDs in individual plastic cases, he states that they contain video of the jail parking lot. He then goes into some detail explaining how he came up with the idea to check the video—like that had never been done before—and no one was more surprised than he to see Murphy strolling across the parking lot and getting into a car.

  Using his department-issued laptop and a borrowed Epson projector, he plays the video against the pull-down screen at the front of the conference room. The video is awful. It’s everything I’ve come to expect from video surveillance.

  You can tell the car is a silver four-door—most likely an import. It pulls up to the sidewalk right as Murphy reaches the curb and seems to startle him. He hesitates and then stoops to look through the passenger window, as if talking to someone. A moment later, Murphy opens the door and gets into the car. Then, like a cart on rails, the silver sedan zips through the parking lot and disappears off-screen.

  The only good news is you can see the front, side, and back of the car at various points as it stops for Murphy and then hurries from the lot. The images may be horrible, but I can see the general configuration of the taillights, the position of the license plate, the location of the third brake light, and other identifying features. To most, these points would be useless.

  “Can I get one of those?” I ask, gesturing toward the duplicate DVDs.

  When the sergeant hesitates, Jason snaps, “Give him one of the damn DVDs!” He flings his hand at the sergeant in an irritated manner. “They can do more with it than we can.”

  That’s only partly true.

  I’ll be passing the video on to Dexter Allen at the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office back in Bellingham. He has a special program he developed over several years that allows him to analyze vehicle images based on different criteria. In some cases, he can identify a car right down to the make, model, and exact year of production. This information, when cross-referenced against the state’s Department of Licensing database, has helped identify a significant number of suspect vehicles.

  After everyone has finally said their piece, Angie looks across the long table at Becky and asks the one question yet to be answered: “So, how’d they get in?”

  “We’re efforting that as we speak,” Becky replies, sounding for a moment like one of the NASA technicians out of the movie Armageddon.

  “Meaning you don’t know.”

  “Meaning whoever hacked us is very good,” Becky shoots back with all the venom of a pissed-off pit viper, “and they obviously found a vulnerability in our system that we weren’t aware of.”

  “That’s just great,” Jason mutters.

  “You have something to say?” Becky snaps.

  Her dislike of the detective sergeant is clear as soon as the words escape her lips. Perhaps this is simply because she dislikes all cops, or it could be that she feels herself way above his pay grade and in a position where she shouldn’t have to tolerate any disparaging remarks he might throw her way. Wasn’t it bad enough that she had to put up with the sheriff?

  “Oh, I have a few things to say,” Jason begins, but then checks himself and glances at Angie for the briefest of moments. When she makes no effort to restrain him, he continues.

  “We’ve been saying for years that we need a server that’s separate from the county,” he growls. “Instead, you continue to lump us in with road maintenance, human resources, and all the other noncritical county departments. I mean, really: Who gives a crap if the Parks Department gets hacked?” He gives an exaggerated shrug to emphasize the point.

  “The sheriff’s office, the courts, and the jail all deal with confidential information. I’m talking about records and court proceedings that can either deprive people of their freedom or set them free.”

  He glances around the table. “We just let a serial killer walk out the jail door,” he says, his tone suggesting that he still can’t believe it himself. “I don’t even want to think what’s going to happen when the press and the public find out about this—and they will. If I have to tell them myself, they will.”

  Tapping straight down onto the tabletop with his rigid index finger, he says, “We need a dedicated system maintained by personnel who answer to the sheriff’s office, not IT. That means personnel who can pass the same polygraph exam and background investigation that all our deputies and support personnel are required to pass.” He locks eyes with Becky, letting the full weight of his words press upon her.

  The year before, she’d been arrested for driving under the influence. After a search of her pockets during booking, deputies found a baggie of eighty-milligram OxyContin pills, a frequently abused prescription painkiller. She worked a plea deal that included treatment, and managed to keep her job, but this didn’t sit well with the sheriff’s office, which expressed legitimate concerns about someone with a drug history having access to every aspect of the criminal justice computer system.

  It takes Becky but a moment to digest Jason’s meaning, and then all hell breaks loose, and the room reverberates once more with the echoes of raised voices, shouts, and accusations.

  Just like that, we’re back in the Inferno.

  * * *

  The room is still loud and oppressive five minutes later when Jimmy’s phone rings. Checking the caller ID, he elbows me and tips his head toward the door. The phone is on its fourth ring by the time we make it to the relative quiet of the hallway, and Jimmy quickly answers on speakerphone before the call disconnects.

  “Haiden,” he says by way of greeting. “I’ve got you on speaker. What’s up?”

  “Hey, Jimmy,” the FBI computer forensics expert replies in a voice that somehow manages to simultaneously convey alarm, surprise, excitement, and fear. “Remember how you asked me to keep an eye on that draft document in Murphy’s email account?”

  “Yeah, why? Did something change?”

  “The numbers,” Haiden Webber replies. “I checked the account a couple minutes ago and the numbers looked … different. At first I thought maybe I was remembering them wrong, but since I’d written the two original strings of numbers on a Post-it note and stuck it to the screen, I was able to compare them against the draft.” He takes a deep and audible breath. “The beginning of each number is the same, but the last half has changed.”

  “New coordinates!” Jimmy utters the words as if they’re a curse.

  “What’s that mean,” Haiden presses, “another victim?”

  “Th
at would be my guess. Any idea how recently the draft was changed?”

  “It was sometime in the last two hours. I’ve been trying to check at least every hour during the day, and every four hours in the evening and at night, but it’s hit-or-miss. We had a staff meeting that ran long and I just checked it when I got back a few minutes ago.”

  Jimmy sighs. “Well, we’ve had some changes on this end as well. Murphy made bail last night. He’s been in the wind for almost eighteen hours and we just found out this morning. Do you think he has access to that email account through another computer or device?”

  “I’d almost guarantee it,” Haiden replies. He has more questions, of course, many more questions, but right now there’s just no time.

  Jimmy promises to call later and fill him in, and then asks Haiden to text the new coordinates to his phone. When he hangs up a few seconds later, we stare at each other for a long and dreadful moment, and then he pockets the phone and, at a fast walk, leads the way back into the conference room.

  With an urgent swipe of his hand, he motions for Jason and Nate to join us. They pop from their chairs as if the cushions were spring-loaded and hurry around the table. When Sheriff Eccles looks at Jimmy with a concerned expression on her face, a pained visage that begs for good news rather than bad, he simply says, “The coordinates in Murphy’s email account were just changed.” She immediately understands the implications.

  No more words are necessary, but Jimmy says them anyway: “We need to get there before Murphy does.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The town of Quilcene, Washington, population 596, is an isolated cluster of buildings around U.S. 101 that one might miss entirely if they happened to glance down to change the radio while driving by. Located on the Hood Canal, a fifty-mile stretch of natural waterway that defines the eastern edge of the Olympic Peninsula and separates it from the much smaller Kitsap Peninsula, it’s a place of natural beauty and horrifying forests.

  In fairness to the town, almost everyone on the planet would find the forests and endless march of trees absolutely delightful. I’m not one of them. Hypothermia and death have a way of anchoring such opinions.

  The town was named for the Quilcene, the saltwater people who originally inhabited the area. They were one of nine groups of Coast Salish peoples, collectively known as Twana, who once lived along the length of the canal.

  Of the nine, only the Skokomish remain.

  I blame the trees.

  * * *

  Like Quilcene, the Falls View waterfall is easy to miss but not hard to find. Those who seek it need only travel along U.S. 101 to the Falls View Campground just four miles southwest of Quilcene. It’s a magnificent waterfall, though it lacks the volume of its bigger brothers—and dries up completely four or five months out of each year.

  We neither sought the waterfall nor stumbled upon it by accident. Rather, we were led here by a digital marker on a GPS, a location dictated by a latitude and longitude entered into a draft email in a psychotic’s personal email account.

  As we hike into the area, I can’t help thinking that the coordinates are bait, and we’re the eager rats walking into a trap. Perhaps like the rats we found in Murphy’s fifth-wheel, their dissected corpses wearing miniature plaster masks just like the mannequins at Murphy’s Misery.

  Even under normal conditions I’m anxious among the trees. This sudden, paranoid thought about traps and creepy rats sends my anxiety into overdrive and I find my eyes casting about, my six senses trying to take in everything at once and absorbing nothing.

  That’s why I don’t see it right away.

  I’m ten feet behind Jimmy and Detective Halsted, and just stepping around Nate, when I realize the group has stopped. Seven sets of eyes are staring ahead and to the left, and when my gaze follows, I see what fixes their attention so firmly. With a sharp, involuntary gasp, I take several stumbling steps backward.

  The base of the waterfall is just a stone’s throw away—so close I can feel its mist upon my face. Like a shimmering white-and-silver ribbon, it stretches from the overhang two hundred feet above, down to the plunge pool below.

  Its movement is like a ballet of water, mist, and fleeting rainbows—an undulating dance to music that only the water can hear … but it’s not the waterfall that captures my attention.

  Instead, my eyes are drawn to a spot ten feet off the trail where a body sits with its back up against a Douglas fir. The body hears no music, sees no waterfall, feels no condolences. It sits facing us, as if contemplating our purpose. A bullet hole the size of a pea is drilled into its forehead just to the left of dead center.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I hear Nate mutter.

  “Secure the scene,” Jason says in a quiet but solid voice. Without another word, the four Clallam County detectives begin searching the area for evidence while the two Jefferson County patrol deputies who joined us in Quilcene start stringing yellow police tape.

  Crouching in front of the body, I stare into the dead eyes. One of them is slightly misshapen, a result of trauma inside the skull caused by the violent entry of the bullet. Based on the size of the hole and the fact that the skull is otherwise intact, I suspect the killer used a .22-caliber handgun.

  There’s stippling around the wound, so this was up close.

  The eyes bother me. You would expect that most people would die with their eyes closed, as if they’d gone to sleep. In my experience that’s not the case. That said, my opinion on this matter may be slightly skewed, since most of the bodies I see died suddenly or violently. I suppose there’s something about a bullet penetrating your skull that pops your eyes open and keeps them there. Still, it’s disquieting when you look into them and no one looks back.

  “Clouded over,” I say to Jimmy, gesturing at the eyes.

  “So, death was at least three hours ago,” he replies.

  Aside from the pupils dilating upon death, the potassium in red blood cells begins to break down, causing the eyes to cloud over. This process takes about three hours and is sometimes a better indicator of time of death than rigor mortis or livor mortis.

  Standing, I brush the leaves and dirt from my knees. “Didn’t you say that the Onion King was squeamish about doing his own killing? I thought that’s why he brought Murphy into his little freak show and helped him perfect his fix.” I put the word in air quotes.

  “It’s not the first time I’ve been wrong,” Jimmy replies. He glances over at me. “Probably won’t be the last.”

  “So … where does this leave us?”

  Jimmy wipes his hands on the bottom of his jacket and sighs. “I suppose it’s a race now, only we have no idea where the finish line is or even what direction we’re supposed to run. We’ve got a serial rapist out there who just decided to do his own killing.”

  Pulling his jacket tight against the chill, he adds, “I’m afraid he might grow to like it.” Looking down at the empty husk that was Murphy Cotton, he turns and walks away.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Betsy is finishing her climb to ten thousand feet, cutting through the sky in a northeasterly direction that will take us back to Bellingham and a much-needed reprieve from the simmering nightmare wrought by Murphy Cotton and the Onion King.

  The Gulfstream G100 is configured to seat eight passengers. When Jimmy wants to rest or be left alone he’ll take one of the seats at the tail of the plane, but normally we’re seated as we are now, near the middle of the fuselage in chairs facing each other with a small table between us.

  Jimmy didn’t say much on the drive north to Port Angeles, so when we boarded Betsy at the airport I was a bit surprised that he took the seat opposite me; I just assumed he’d want to be left alone.

  “Something’s bothering you,” I say when he remains silent.

  He looks up … and in that look and that moment I realize how understated the words are. There are a million things about this case that would give one pause, but the killing of Murphy Cotton has affected
Jimmy in a way I’ve rarely seen.

  He shakes his head and mutters, “Dark wolf rising.”

  “Say again?”

  He looks away, his eyes finding the window and the angry sky beyond. “It’s something a friend used to say,” he finally replies, his eyes still on the window: “Dark wolf rising—the perpetual struggle between good and evil.”

  I wait for him to continue and prod him when he doesn’t. “What’s that mean?”

  He looks at me now, a blank stare on a whitewashed face. After a few seconds, he seems to return to himself and sighs deeply, saying, “Sorry. This case…”

  “I know.”

  He just nods. “Did I ever tell you about my friend Danny Bear Cloud? We served together in the 460th Security Forces Squadron in Aurora, Colorado.”

  “Yeah, wasn’t he Cheyenne or something? Taught you a few things about tracking before you knew where it would lead you?”

  “Crow, actually, out of Montana. And the tracking he taught me was limited to animals. It was Danny who first got me interested in hiking and camping, among other things. More importantly, he was a good storyteller; around the campfire, in the office, in the car, it didn’t really matter where you were, it seemed he had a story or legend for just about any occasion.”

  Jimmy smiles, but it’s a small smile, a distracted smile, the expression of one whose thoughts are still a thousand miles away. “Danny always took special pleasure in educating the yellow eyes about Indian ways.”

  “Yellow eyes?”

  “Mah-ish-ta-schee-da,” Jimmy says, pronouncing every syllable fully. “The literal translation is eyes yellow. It’s what the Crow called the whites—never white man like you see in the movies, just yellow eyes. The name supposedly goes back to the first meeting of the two races; whether they were a trapping party or explorers, I don’t know. One or more of them may have had jaundice, or at least that’s the going theory for the reference.”