Shadows of the Dead--A Special Tracking Unit Novel

by Spencer Kope

  “How can he eat ice cream?” I mutter, shivering at the mere thought.

  “He wasn’t sitting in the snow without a jacket,” Jimmy reminds me.

  * * *

  We make small talk and enjoy quiet company as the sounds of the hospital drift up and down the halls. It’s the end of the case, the end of a monster’s reign, a new leaf for Melinda, a hero’s welcome for Hanson. Such things bring their own warmth, create their own comfortable glow.

  “So … we did it,” I say at length, the words quiet and with an edge of wonder, the way one might speak after accomplishing the insurmountable.

  Jimmy smiles and pats my arm.

  The pleasant, gratifying moment lingers—only to be shattered by the sound of Tug laughing at some joke in the hall. In my mind, I imagine him waving the rectal thermometer playfully for the nurses and then pointing at my room.

  Grabbing Jimmy by the collar, I hiss, “Seriously, get me out of here.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Christmas Eve

  Life is often a double-edged sword.

  On one side is the strength and happiness of a life well lived, and on the other is the sorrow and insecurity of too many poor decisions. The good news is that we choose the edge that represents our life—most of the time. We can choose the edge that garners love and respect, or the one that cuts deep and festers, rotting us from within.

  Charice and Melinda have had plenty of the cutting and festering in their lives, but it’s in their power to turn the sword. In a moment, they can find themselves on a different path, one that might be rocky at first, but which will lead them to a better place.

  I think they’ll choose a different path, a stronger path.

  At least I hope so.

  * * *

  When I finally arrive back at Big Perch, Heather makes me tomato soup and a cheese and pepperoni sandwich for lunch. Eating slowly in a semi-reclined position on my couch, I taste each bite with deliberation, as if I’ve never eaten before nor will again.

  Outside the living room’s tall bay windows, my deck is covered in virgin snow. Beyond, the world is white and still. The wind has quieted since last night, and as I look down upon the Puget Sound I find calm waters. Gone are the heaving waves and the windswept whitecaps that hindered Lorcan’s northbound journey. What remains is tranquil beauty, and it’s this image that I carry with me when I finally drift off to sleep on the couch.

  When Jimmy calls at four, I’m already awake.

  “I thought you’d want an update,” he says, sounding almost apologetic. When I assure him that an update is exactly what I want, he continues, his voice now buoyant.

  “You remember the place in Tacoma; Sheryl Dorsey’s house? Well, it’s owned by one of Lorcan’s shell companies. Apparently he had similar houses in Portland and Sacramento, and I’m guessing they’ll find others by the time Haiden and Diane get through.”

  “Is it a rental?” I ask.

  “Not even close,” Jimmy replies. “It’s more like a junkie boardinghouse, but with a twist. Instead of cash, they pay in stolen cards. A driver’s license or credit card gets you one night’s stay; a stolen Social Security number gets you three nights. The volume is staggering. Sometimes they’d have twenty people flopping there at the same time. All those credit cards, debit cards, passports, and driver’s licenses we found when we raided the house were from just one week of activity.”

  “So it was all about identity theft?”

  “In a big way,” Jimmy replies. “There was more in Lorcan’s house, I’m talking boxes and boxes, and he had a notebook completely filled with Social Security numbers. Haiden says he was either acting as an information broker or setting up bogus loans and credit lines.”

  “Probably a bit of both,” I say.

  None of this makes sense.

  “Why would he risk that?” I ask. “He owned a business that employed over a hundred people, he was earning huge paydays as a computer security specialist, and he seemed to have more money than he knew what to do with.”

  “True, but the way Haiden tells it, he was making three to four times that selling information on the dark web. Besides,” Jimmy adds after a pause, “maybe it wasn’t about the money.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Lorcan was a hacker first, before anything. Maybe that’s his heroin.”

  I think on that for a moment and then give a tired sigh. “People are funny.”

  I can almost feel Jimmy smiling on the other end of the phone. “Yes, they are,” he says.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Christmas Day

  Heather gets her wish.

  It’s a white and bright Christmas morning when we start out for my parents’ place in mid-county. The road crews have had more than a day to plow and sand, so all the main roads are passable, as well as many of the secondary roads.

  Jens and I always spend Christmas with my parents. And since we can’t bear the thought of Ellis being alone at Little Perch on Christmas Day, we drag him along with us. He protests, as he does every year, but the true measure of his feelings will be in the quiet, thankful smile he’ll have on his face this evening when we all sit around the large dining room table for Christmas dinner.

  Tonight, he and my dad will probably get sloppy from too much eggnog, and no doubt a tear or two will be shed for all that came before and all that remains. Ellis is, after all, family; if not by blood, then by choice.

  Heather is joining us this year, and from the moment she walks through the front door my mother can’t get enough of her. It’s not the first time they’ve met, it’s not even the tenth time, but from the way she dotes on Heather you’d think they were the last two women on the West Coast.

  Jens and I always suspected that Mom wanted a daughter; this just proves it.

  * * *

  After a sit-down breakfast of bacon, scrambled eggs, cinnamon rolls, and traditional Norwegian sylte—a pleasant name for headcheese—Dad stokes up a good fire in the living room and we gather around to open presents.

  The wrapping paper on the two dozen gifts under the tree is quickly reduced to confetti as we take turns opening them, revealing two signed first editions for me, gift cards and clothing for Heather, a couple hats for Ellis, and a new Bluetooth stereo for Jens.

  Mom and Dad score the real prize. Jens and I pooled our money and bought them a portable infrared sauna for the spare room. Mom likes to claim that cold is in her blood, that it’s part of her heritage, but we’ve noticed she does a lot more complaining in the winter than she used to.

  With the gifts unwrapped we all turn to our stockings.

  Over the years, the tiny oddities, candies, and useful trinkets found in our stockings have become the highlight of Christmas morning. Each item is chosen for its unique nature, gourmand appeal, or shock value. Some past items have included coal from the Titanic, French truffles, edible chocolate-covered crickets, a watch made from the metal of a dismantled Soviet SS-22 nuclear missile, and a letter signed by Calvin Coolidge.

  We all try to outdo one another, but ever since Mom learned how to shop online she’s been the undisputed champion. I swear she spends half the year shopping for just the right items. It’s an obsession.

  This year I have her beat.

  As Heather slowly empties her stocking, charmed by everything she finds, her hand finally reaches the small wrapped box stuffed into the toe. I wait until she’s finished removing the paper, and then, before she can open it, I step in front of her and take the box from her hand.

  No one in the room knows what’s coming, so when I drop to one knee I hear a single gasp behind me—my mother. When I open the box and reveal the engagement ring within, the whole room gasps. I say the words just the way I practiced them, looking up into Heather’s loving face with my parents, my brother, and Ellis behind me.

  The moment is perfect … I only wish Jimmy were here.

  Heather’s lips quiver as she stares at the ring. Tears begin to tumble from
her eyes, and then she throws her arms around me and kisses my mouth, my cheeks, my forehead. I fall slowly backward onto the living room floor as the kisses keep coming and the room erupts with the sounds of joy and laughter.

  When she pauses long enough to look into my eyes, I ask, “Is that a yes?”

  EPILOGUE

  Bend, Oregon—Monday, January 19

  She lies where she died, a lump of still-warm broken flesh on the barren, cold summit of a nameless hill overlooking the semiarid scrub of middle Oregon.

  The man sits on his haunches several feet away, occasionally bouncing lightly, as if perched on a spring. He stares with unconcerned eyes at her body, throwing pebbles at her outstretched leg with the measured frequency of a metronome and counting the times he can successfully bounce them off her dead thigh.

  The things you do to kill time.

  He waits and watches, his senses tuned to his surroundings: the sights, smells, vibrations, and sounds of this exact moment in time, so that he’ll know instantly if something changes, but nothing does. It’s just like before. As the minutes march on, he grows increasingly frustrated and the pebbles become larger and the throwing becomes harder.

  Twelve times he’s repeated the steps.

  Twelve times he’s failed.

  He glances at his watch, a stainless-steel Casio synced with the U.S. “atomic clock” in Boulder, Colorado. The digital readout is self-adjusting and flawlessly displays the day, month, year, hour, minute, and second. It’s accurate down to one billionth of a second, or so the salesman told him when he purchased it three years ago.

  Such precision, such accuracy, and yet the watch betrays him, neither moving forward nor back, but continuing to tick tick tick the time away, as if it were an ordinary watch and this was an ordinary day. He feels the urge to fling it from his wrist, but tosses another pebble instead, harder this time. The stone bounces off the abused thigh and lands almost in the same spot he’d plucked it from a moment before.

  His failure makes no sense.

  The codes had been difficult but decipherable, and the images, though obtuse, came into focus and started to make sense when you studied them long enough, stared at them long enough, screamed at them long enough. He was certain his interpretation was correct from the moment he discovered it, and he’s certain now; it’s the only thing that makes sense. And yet here he is again, having diligently followed the instructions of the codes and images, and nothing has changed.

  His great result is no result.

  The only thing different this time was the age of the catalyst. The others were in their late teens to early twenties—at the peak of their energy. This one is older; could that mean the difference between success and failure? Was that the one element that ruined the experiment?

  He didn’t think so.

  He’d walked a circle around the body fifteen times; once for each year, just as before. He’d elevated the arms and then returned them, so they were perpendicular to the body, pointing east and west. And he’d spread the legs into a wide stance and then returned them so that they pointed south, just as before. He even used true north as his guide, expecting that Da Vinci would have done the same.

  That was something he hadn’t figured out until just recently.

  * * *

  His therapist had called his ideas delusions. He would have stopped going after the first such utterance if not for his mother, who insisted that he continue his treatment or forfeit access to his substantial trust fund.

  The sessions were weekly, so he tolerated them.

  Besides, he had bigger problems these days, mainly the report a few months earlier about the so-called “Leonardo” killer. The article itself was shruggable, the kind of story most would scan quickly before moving on, unless the deed happened in their hometown.

  He knew about the article only because he keeps an eye out for such stories. His computer runs automated news searches for terms like homicide and body, but only when they match the names of the eleven—now twelve—towns and villages that he has scribbled down on a torn sheet of paper in his top drawer.

  His therapist knew of his interest in Da Vinci, and particularly the Vitruvian Man. It was the main element of his so-called delusions, and it was only a matter of time before she too stumbled upon the article. She followed such things, and if the Leonardo story gained traction, she would put two and two together and arrive at him.

  That’s why she had to go, risky as it was. No doubt her patients would be high on the suspect list, but he’d seen to that, forcing her to delete all the files related to him. He also deleted her schedule and pulled his substantial file from her filing cabinet. It now smolders in his wood-burning stove.

  The trail has been erased … mostly.

  There were things about him that she never knew, never imagined. Things that drove him crazy, true schizoid-nuts, the bang-your-head-on-the-wall type of stuff. It was the quest for Leonardo’s secret that kept him on an even keel, that gave him hope, that kept him from putting a gun in his mouth.

  Glancing down at Dr. Emma Nicholson as she cools on the frigid winter ground, he’s struck once more by how beautiful she is. It was the one thing that made their sessions tolerable. He tosses another pebble at her thigh and finally accepts the failure.

  Still, this could change everything.

  Even if they find no link to him, the police will be all over Emma’s history, her patients, where she lived, where she worked out, where she ate. He feared this most. And yet, it was Emma who had taught him to embrace his fears, to take power away from them.

  A smile suddenly cracks across his frozen face and he rises. Walking ten paces to his backpack, he unzips the main compartment and digs around a moment before finding it. Closing the flap, he makes sure the backpack is zipped up tight before laying it back down and then walking back to Emma’s prone form.

  Kneeling, he hikes her shirt up until the bottom quarter of her breast is exposed. Twisting the cap off the red marker, he writes seven words on her belly in bold block letters, taking care not to smudge the ink before it dries. Pressing the cap back in place, he stands and studies the seven words, the grand revelation.

  “Goodbye, Doc,” he says, and as an afterthought, he reaches down and straightens her shirt, hiding the exposed belly and the contagious words. They’ll find it soon enough, but it’s a game now, and the pieces must be played one at a time.

  He leaves the cold summit cloaked in the same indifference with which he arrived, though without the company of the beautiful and gifted Dr. Emma Nicholson. When he reaches the bottom of the hill he glances back, but only for a moment. There is no regret or remorse in the gesture, just the quiet discomforting knowledge that time marches on and nothing has changed.

  * * *

  When the wind kicks up later that afternoon, it comes from the south, a warm and steady breeze with occasional gusts that push the hastily smoothed shirt back up the torso of Emma Nicholson.

  The exposed words look like a wound: red, raw, and open. To the casual observer they would mean little, just another clue among clues, something to be documented and entered into evidence. To the right eyes … well, those seven words will turn the world upside down.

  Someone waits for those words.

  They don’t yet know that they wait for this revelation, but they wait nonetheless. He made sure that the words and those seeking them will find one another. The first four words—FBI DONOVAN AND CRAIG—read like a partial postcard address, as if Emma’s body were the message and her death the cost of postage. The words perch on her belly, scratched there in letters two inches high.

  If the first four words are the address, the last three are a warning. In other circumstances they would be fun words, the kind of words you say while cooing at a baby or playing hide-and-seek. Here, in this context, they’re poignant and chilling.

  I SEE YOU.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I want to say a huge thanks to my editor, Keith Kahla; my assistant edito
r, Alice Pfeifer; and my agent, Kimberley Cameron. This would be a lesser book without their tremendous expertise and dedication.

  I’d also like to thank the men and women of the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office who provide an endless supply of ideas and inspiration. They represent the real law enforcement that I try to portray in my books.

  Finally, thanks to my wife, Lea, for putting up with me when I disappear into my study for hours on end. After thirty years she certainly knows what it means to be an author’s wife.

  ALSO BY SPENCER KOPE

  Collecting the Dead

  Whispers of the Dead

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SPENCER KOPE is the crime analyst for the sheriff’s office of Whatcom County, Washington, where he provides case support to detectives and deputies. Prior to that, he was an intelligence operations specialist with the Office of Naval Intelligence. He lives in Lynden, Washington. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five