Past Master

by Richard Stockford

  Conroy listened, stony-faced, as Clipper read the Miranda warning from a card.

  “Do you understand the rights I have just read to you?”

  Conroy nodded once curtly. “I understand ’em.”

  “With these rights in mind, do you wish to speak to me?”

  “I got nothing to say to you, sonny, and I don’t need no damned lawyer, neither. You just do what you gotta do with my guns and give ’em back.”

  Clipper pushed back a little. ‘If you don’t want a lawyer, that’s fine. All you need to do to clear this up is tell us where you were last Tuesday and Wednesday, and yesterday morning about ten o’clock.”

  “Where I go is my business, damn it, and if it takes a lawyer to stop these fool questions, then I guess I do want a lawyer. And when I get one, you’ll be damned sorry you ever met me.”

  Clipper turned off the recorder and stood. “That’s probably a good idea, Otis. I think you’re probably going to need a lawyer, and when you find one, have him call me.”

  Peters escorted Conroy out of the building, then returned to Clipper’s office grinning.

  “Man, he’s pissed.”

  Clipper was just hanging up the phone. “Max Trimble can give us a couple of bodies, and he’ll see about a couple more from UMPD. I want round-the-clock surveillance on him.”

  Ready to quit at four-thirty, Clipper stopped by Doug Holland’s house. Sitting in the living room, he passed the FBI list to Holland. “I’m sure you heard, we had another sniping yesterday. About 10 a.m., someone in Brewer shot across the river and killed a guy working on the waterfront.”

  Holland studied the list. “I think I was doing some grocery shopping about that time, if that’s what you’re asking,” he said with a wry smile.

  Clipper chuckled. “No, it isn’t. I just thought you’d like to know that the feds are still keeping track of you, and I wondered if you know any of these guys or could add any names to the list. You still keep up with any of the people you used to serve with?”

  Holland shook his head. “Most snipers are generally loners by nature, and I’ve been out of the business a long time.”

  Clipper hesitated. “Actually, we’ve got a pretty good suspect, one of the people on that list.” Without mentioning Conroy by name, Clipper told Holland about the ammo they’d found.

  Holland nodded. “Stands to reason a man would have the rifles to go with that much ammo.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Monday morning, Clipper was at his desk just finishing a press release memo for Josh Preston. There was a tap on the door, and Ellen Davis stuck her head in. “Got a minute, LT?”

  “Sure, what’s up?”

  Davis slid into a chair and held up a notebook. “I spent most of the weekend thinking about those snipers. I got a friend who got me into the Bangor Daily morgue, and I found some pretty interesting stuff.”

  Davis opened her notebook. “The first sniping in Bangor was actually in 1940. A guy named Leland Hooper was shot dead in his front yard out on Outer Broadway, and a witness said the shot came from some woods more than three hundred yards away. Case was never solved, although apparently there was a rumor that there was a woman involved.”

  She glanced down and turned a page. “Things were quiet until 1951, but that summer, June 27th to be exact, a nineteen-year-old kid named Jason Kemper was killed by a sniper in front of a bunch of his friends down on Main Street and again, the case was never solved. Kemper was a suspect in an attempted rape and assault case at the time. And then, in 1958, a farmer was found shot dead in his field over in Dover Foxcroft. They thought maybe that was a hunting accident, but according to the article I found, he was scheduled to go to trial for rape the next week. After that there was a lawyer, shot on the courthouse steps in 1964 just after he successfully defended a rape case, a guy who was on trial for an arson in which a little girl was killed down in Newport in 1966, and another guy accused of rape in Newburgh in 1968. All by snipers and all unsolved.”

  Davis closed her notebook and tossed it on the desk. “Except for maybe that first one, every victim was involved in attacks on females.”

  Clipper was intrigued. “Grab a map and plot all those shootings by date and location,” he said, reaching for his phone.

  “I think I can add a couple more possibles to the list.”

  Andy Bennett tapped the map on Clipper’s desk. It was later in the afternoon, and Bennett had come in at Clipper’s request.

  “I been talking to some of the old guys, and Toady Rucker, he was a game warden back in the sixties, he remembered another case up in Greenbush that got put down to a hunting accident. He couldn’t remember the name, but it was 1963, and he said he was always suspicious of it ’cause the guy was an outlaw, and he was hit right between the eyes. When they dug the bullet out of the tree he’d been standing in front of, it wasn’t a soft-nosed hunting round. Toady figured maybe military .30-06.

  “And then Paul Waddell, he was a state trooper, told me about a guy around 1965 over by Lead Pond who was a pretty well-known local troublemaker and wife-beater. He got shot right out of his fishing boat in the middle of a lake. That was back in the late fifties. Case never went anywhere.”

  Ellen Davis added red dots by the town of Greenbush to the north and Lead Pond to the east. The map now showed eight red dots spread in a circle around Bangor.

  “And we’ve got four more open cases and one closed we could add as well,” mused Clipper.

  Davis was writing in her notebook. “Yeah, and the timeline’s interesting too.” She laid the open book on the desk.

  1940

  Leland Hooper

  Bangor

  1951

  Jason Kemper

  Bangor

  assault suspect

  1958

  Nathanial Obie

  Dover Foxcroft

  rape suspect

  1963

  Unknown

  Greenbush

  1964

  Armand St. Pierre

  Bangor

  lawyer defending rape suspect

  1965

  Unknown

  Lead Pond

  1966

  Mark Simms

  Newport

  arson suspect

  1968

  Kenneth Eldridge

  Newburgh

  rape suspect

  Clipper grimaced. “It’s interesting, all right, but it’s also ancient history and right now, we’ve got plenty on our plate. Speaking of that, how are you guys coming on the Beaudreau interviews?”

  “We’re just about done. Nobody had anything good to say about him, but nobody looked real good for it either.”

  Clipper thought for a moment. “Okay, Ellen, why don’t you give a copy of your notes and the newspaper stuff you’ve collected to Andy, and maybe he’d be willing to dig up some of the old State Police case files and run with it. As I remember, he used to be moderately good at this stuff back in the day.” Clipper grinned and ignored Bennett’s extended finger. “I want you to stick with the Carpenter case. Spend some time with Mrs. Carpenter—follow up on her statement, maybe get a little close to her if you can. That one still smells a little different from the others to me.”

  As Davis and Bennett were leaving, Clipper took a call from Max Trimble. “My guys have talked to the ex-snipers in Liberty and Rumford,” he said. “They’re both alibied pretty good; one of them is in a cardiac ward and the other one’s working down state. Only found one of the silencer owners so far, the guy up in Macwahoc. He looks clean, too.”

  “Well, for my money, we concentrate on Conroy.”

  “How long can you shadow him?”

  “There’s no place to hide a stakeout around his place, so I figure we’ll just let him see us and keep the pressure on till he does something stupid. It’s not my first choice, but it’s all we got right now.”

  As Clipper and Trimble talked, the hunter sat and patiently drew a clean patch through the bore of his rifle, savorin
g his growing need, anticipating the next cleansing. What had started as simple retribution, a matter of honor, had evolved into a physical and emotional imperative, a raison d'etre that once again gave meaning to a miserable existence.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Northeast of Orono lies the picturesque township of Hudson Maine. With a population of just under fourteen hundred spread out over forty square miles at the north end of Pushaw Lake, it consists mainly of hardwood forest and rolling farmland, largely unchanged from its settlement in the early 1800s.

  Near the town’s eastern edge, there was a quaint country path, one lane of cracked pavement bordered by late fall blooms trickling over time-worn stone walls, shadowed under a stately interwoven canopy of mature elms as it meandered through overgrown farmland.

  And at the far end of that bucolic path sat a disgusting pigsty of a hovel, crouching in a weedy clearing behind a motley collection of vehicles which included two old Chevy pickups, a rusted-out Mazda and two Harleys. Cracked and warped clapboard siding that might have once been white; vacant, dusty windows, haphazardly covered with torn shades and bedsheets nailed up on the inside; a sagging roof of battered asphalt shingles wearing a blue tarp bonnet at one end. All hunkered precariously over an ancient crumbling stone foundation.

  The “international headquarters” of Satan’s Sect MC.

  Julius Markowski brushed long brown hair out of his face with the back of one hand as he tried to simultaneously lean closer to both the oil lamp on the table and the wood stove in the corner. He was struggling to sew the newest patch onto his vest, but the combination of dim light and near freezing temperature was making it difficult. Despite that, he was happy; at 18, he had finally achieved his highest ambition, advancing from prospect to full-patch member of Satan’s Sect.

  As outlaw motorcycle clubs went, Satan’s Sect was tiny—the president, Mad Mark Cooper, believing that a small, aggressive group was more effective and easier to control than a large mob. He demanded that every member display the one-percenter patch on his colors—and the appropriate attitude to go with it—and it was a requirement that every member keep a gun.

  Cooper wanted a tough, experienced membership, so it was also a requirement that every member have at least one felony in his resume. Markowski had fulfilled that requirement with last week’s burglary of Perkins Greenhouse and Flower Shoppe out on Route 9. His take had only been seven dollars and change but, with the break-in and theft, the felony box was checked, and tonight Cooper had presented him with the bottom rocker to the club patch, the final step to full membership.

  The other reason Cooper was satisfied with a small membership was that it meant a bigger cut of the drug and theft money for him.

  Even so, with nine full-patch members, counting Markowski, and two more prospects, Cooper’s wife had finally gotten tired of the gang hanging out in her living room, so they had moved into this shack on an abandoned farm that once been belonged to Booger Watson’s grandfather. As a reward for finding the house, Cooper had promoted Booger to vice-president, and right now, Booger and Cooper were holding forth on the responsibilities entailed in full-patch membership.

  “The biggest thing is, you don’t take no crap from nobody.” Booger tapped his Bud long-neck on the table for emphasis. “You crawl, the whole club looks bad, so you hang tough, no matter what. You unnerstan, Ski?”

  Markowski nodded his head among a chorus of muttered approval from the other members present that Tuesday evening in November. Raymond “Gunslinger” Rogers, Timothy “Butthead” Butters and Michael “Eyeball’” Iwoniski all slouched around the large kitchen, beers in hand, while Mad Mark, Booker, and Julius sat at the battered kitchen table.

  “’n the other thing is, you see a brother in trouble, you jump right the hell in. We all got each other’s backs.”

  Markowski nodded again, concentrating on his stitches and desperately trying to think of a better nickname than the hated Ski—or worse, Julie—that had followed him since the first grade.

  Cooper slapped a meaty hand on the table. “You want to be paying attention, here, Julie,” he said, as if he’d read Markowski’s mind. “You—”

  His mouth snapped shut at the pop of a rifle shot and a loud metallic clank from the front yard. He was on his feet at the second clank, reaching for the Astra .380 at the small of his back and running for the front door.

  The hunter was a little disappointed at how easy it was. He had driven to within about three hundred yards of the shack, leaving his car backed into a narrow opening in the old stone wall that had once led to an open field. Moving silently in the ghostly moonlight, he’d walked to a spot where a tree had fallen beside a small brook about one hundred yards from the clearing, from which he had an unobstructed view of the front of the building and the vehicles parked there.

  Grinning to himself, he knelt behind the tree and took careful aim at the death’s head decal on the bulging Harley gas tank.

  Mad Mark skidded to a stop on the front steps just in time to see a small flash from the roadside and the simultaneous explosion of the headlight of Eyeball’s ’02 softtail. It was the last thing he saw, because the next bullet was placed directly between and just above his own headlights.

  Gunslinger, Butthead, and Eyeball, perhaps because they had already been on their feet, were next out the door, and they fared little better than Mad Mark.

  Gunslinger died empty-handed as a round drilled neatly through his sternum. He did have a gun, a Ruger .22 pistol, but he kept it in his truck because it pulled his pants down when he carried it.

  Butthead would have shared Mad Mark’s fate, but he tripped over Gunslinger’s sagging body, and the bullet that that had been aimed at the bridge of his nose simply knocked him unconscious as it scored a fiery fracture line down the top of his head.

  Eyeball did pretty well; he jumped off the steps and managed to trigger off two shots from his vintage Colt detective special, before a bullet shredded his lungs.

  One of the .38 caliber lead slugs blew out the rear tire of Booger’s bike, and the other might have hit the moon if it had had the legs.

  As Eyeball sank to his knees, Booger and Markowski remained frozen at the kitchen table.

  Booger licked his lips. “Y-you better get out there boy,” he said, staring wide-eyed through the open front door into the now ominously quiet night.

  Markowski shook his head slowly from side to side. “Nuh-uh, I ain’t goin’ out there.” His vest fell to the floor unnoticed as he slid down in his chair.

  “Damn it.” Booger lurched to his feet, face contorted in rage.

  With all of his targets down in the front yard, the hunter turned his attention to the house just in time to see a rising black silhouette cast onto the shade covering the kitchen window.

  Hot urine ran down Markowski’s leg as the kitchen window exploded inward and Booger arched impossibly backward, battered by three bullets to the kidneys.

  They hit the floor together, Booger dead and Markowski in a dead faint.

  Trimble’s face was grim when Clipper got the scene in Hudson. Harsh work lights set up around the farmhouse cast dark shadows under his eyes as he spoke over the sound of two portable generators. Like Clipper, he was dressed in jeans and sweatshirt under a heavy coat, unshaven and rumpled.

  “No precision sniper this time,” he said shaking his head. “It was more like a full-on infantry attack.

  Clipper looked at the evidence technicians hovering over three bodies in front of the shack. “Who’re the vics?”

  “Well, they were the Satan’s Sect motorcycle gang, but I’d say the gang’s pretty well defunct now. There’s another one in the house. The shooter killed four out of six that were here and put a fifth one in the hospital.”

  “The sixth?”

  Trimble gestured towards an indistinct figure in the back seat of a nearby state cruiser. “Useless. All he knows is that there was some shooting out front and then he fainted. Never got outside the house. He sa
ys there’s two or three gang members who weren’t here tonight. I got guys looking for them now. Haven’t been able to talk to the wounded one yet. He was hit in the head and the medic said it didn’t look good.” Trimble sighed. “From what we can piece together so far, the shooter—looks like only one—was back down there.” He nodded towards the road. “We found some .223 brass. No silencer, we got neighbors a half mile away who heard the shots around eight-thirty. A dozen or so, rapid-fire. Looks like he shot up the bikes, and then picked off the bikers as they came through the door.”

  Clipper knew that the Sect, like most other small motorcycle gangs, supported itself mainly by dealing drugs. “You suppose they cut in on somebody’s business?

  Trimble shrugged and nodded at a man walking towards the cruiser. “Artie Higgins is our motorcycle gang guy. He hasn’t heard any rumbles, but we’ll check it out.”

  Clipper shrugged. “Well, we can rule out Otis Conroy, at least for this one. We’ve been on him all night.”

  Chapter Thirty

  On Wednesday morning, Clipper reviewed the day’s reports, called Ray Wheeler to arrange a meeting, then called his troops together in the conference room.

  “You’ve probably all heard, but someone took out most of the Satan’s Sect motorcycle gang up in Hudson last night. One shooter with a .223, from about a hundred yards out. Four dead, one hanging on in the hospital, and one survivor who didn’t see anything. It might possibly have been gang- or drug-related but, until we hear something to the contrary, we’re going to assume that it’s the work of the sniper.” He grinned. “I think the quiet times are over for a while.”