City of Windows--A Novel

by Robert Pobi

  Doyle walked ahead and knelt down a few paces past Whitaker. He touched his gloved fingertip to the icy road. “Near as I could figure it, Jameson was right here when he got hit.” He lifted his arm and pointed to forty yards beyond where his knee touched the earth. “He came around that corner, straight into the sun.”

  Not much in the way of lead time, Lucas recognized, and he slapped another mental Post-it up on the board in his head.

  Before coming out here, Doyle walked them through the file. It was back in the sport ute, but the sixty or so photographs were in Lucas’s pocket. He pulled them out, and they stuck together in the cold as he thumbed through the pile. When he found the one he was looking for, he held it up: it had been taken from this same vantage point. As now, it was the midst of winter, and the road was plowed but heavily crisscrossed with tire marks. One set emerged from the countless impressions and shot off frame, toward the guardrail. The photos were dated January 9 and would be three years old in a little over two weeks.

  Lucas turned to the mountain, a rutted chunk of ancient geological animosity that reached up into the sky, the top hidden in low-slung clouds. He pulled out the Leupold and sighted in on the tree line a little over five hundred feet up.

  Doyle stood up and went into narrator mode. “Deputy Jameson was delivering a prisoner from our county jail to Jackson. Local man. Not a career criminal, just a career dumbass.

  “It was somewhere between seven and seven thirty when Jameson rounded that corner. His prisoner was cuffed to the bar in the backseat, passenger’s side. Jameson got to about where I’m standing when the round punched through his windshield. Hit him square in the fillings. The Explorer swerved right, sped along until it hit the corner, jumped the guardrail, and tumbled down that slope into the river.”

  Lucas looked down at the river, seventy-five feet below the road. It was a good-sized flow that displaced a lot of water per second, and even now, in this inhuman deep-space temperature, it was too rough to freeze over. It rumbled by, gasping great gulps of steam into the air that weighted the nearby trees down in a white shroud. Weird cauliflower lumps of ice grew on the branches down by the water, opaque milky tumors built up over time.

  Doyle went on, “It took us four days to get the car out of the river and up the hill. Jameson’s body had been washed out, but his prisoner was still cuffed in the back.” Doyle smiled sadly and shook his head. “Drowned.” The word hung in the air on a lungful of condensation. “Coroner said the tumble down the bank broke his wrist in two places. He broke it another four times trying to get out of the cuffs after they went into the drink.

  “We found Jameson half a mile downriver, snagged up in some branches. Big hole punched right through his head.”

  “Did you find the slug?”

  Doyle was silent for a few ticks of the clock before he shook his head. “From what we were able to piece together, the round went through the front windshield, then through Deputy Jameson’s head. After that, it went through one of the back windows—we never could figure out which one. The roll down the bank and four days in rushing water did a lot of damage—all of the windows were gone. I had divers in there, and all we found were a few handfuls of glass.”

  Lucas thumbed through the photos until he found the ones he was looking for—images of the deputy’s SUV, taken in a garage back in town. The lighting was shitty, but there was no mistaking that the windows had all been smashed out. A fragment of the windshield remained, peeled away and curled up like the lid from an anchovy can.

  “You still have this vehicle, Sheriff Doyle?” Lucas asked, knowing what the answer would be.

  “We scrapped it.” Doyle shook his head. “And we never did figure out where the shot came from.”

  Lucas turned back to the mountain and nodded. “Five hundred feet up the side of that hill, approximately where the trees end. To the right, beside that pile of geological shit.” He cranked his aluminum hand up, and the sun from behind lit up his fingers.

  Doyle kept his focus on Lucas. “What did you say you did at the FBI, Dr. Page?”

  “I didn’t.” Lucas pocketed the scope.

  Lucas turned back to the corner where Jameson’s 4 × 4 had come from. He connected the dots in his head, doing what he did. The wind and cold and humidity disappeared, and he was back in time. Back in Doyle’s car. Back in January, three years ago.

  He looked up at the mountain, focusing on the tree line. It was about twelve hundred yards out. Except for the car coming straight on, it was nearly identical to the shot that had killed Hartke—at least from a geometrical perspective.

  He turned back to the corner that Jameson had come out of just before a man with a rifle had ended his time on earth. Behind it was the guardrail, thirty yards of field, and the river beyond. A lot of terrain to cover if he got the men with the metal detectors out here.

  He looked over at Whitaker, and she was examining him, not doing a very good job of hiding her curiosity. He nodded and shrugged. “It’s possible,” was all he said. But they needed a way to tie this killing directly to the ones in New York; otherwise, all they had was a handful of conjecture held together by hope—not much in the way of a solution.

  Whitaker shifted out of observation mode and turned to Doyle, who was also looking at Lucas.

  “Suspects?” she asked.

  Doyle shook his head. “Nothing. We’re a rural area, so there’s enough bad ideas to go around. Mostly domestic violence and booze-fueled stupidity. Drugs and break-ins. ATV accidents and suicide. One dumb chain of events after another.” He stopped at that and nodded at Whitaker. “Most criminals don’t mean to be criminals; they just don’t have the brains to stay out of trouble. I’m sure it’s the same in the big city.”

  It was Whitaker’s turn to smile sadly and nod. “You have no idea.”

  “Yeah. Well,” he said as if those two words held all kinds of meaning.

  “How long was Jameson on the force?”

  “About eighteen months, give or take.”

  “He ever live out East? New York? He ever visit?”

  “Jameson? He was proud that he had never left the county, never mind the state. New York?” He smiled at that. “I can’t picture Billy Jameson in New York City. If you knew him, neither could you.”

  “He the kind of guy to make enemies?”

  Doyle snorted out a laugh. “He was a good kid. Some guys, you know, you slap a badge on them and it goes to their head. Kills their humility. Not him. He liked people, and people liked him. Didn’t hand out too many speeding tickets to the locals, which earned him a lot of friends. I used to bust his butt at the end of every month; I told him we depended on the revenue. He’d just smile and say these people were his neighbors and that his father said you never crap where you eat. Lived with his ma. Never got angry. He really didn’t deserve what happened to him.”

  Lucas was still staring up at the mountain. “Yet someone killed him anyway.”

  Doyle shrugged. “And you got a Muslimist shooting cops down on the streets of New York.” He straightened up and rested a gloved hand on his holster, his fingers curling down and touching Jesus’s crown of thorns. “Life ain’t fair.”

  Lucas turned to Doyle, and his line of sight dropped to the man’s holster, to the dual images of the Lord. “On that,” Lucas said. “We can agree.”

  64

  When they got back to town and asked about food, Doyle suggested a joint down the block. The distance between the station—a former insurance brokerage in a strip mall—and the restaurant clocked out at 305 steps for Lucas. But the wind funneling down the street made it feel like they were crossing Elephant Island in Shackleton’s footsteps, and by the time they stepped into Mackey’s Restaurant and Grill, he was ready to light his clothing on fire just to get a little warmth into his bloodstream.

  Mackey’s was a typical rural family hotspot, complete with tablecloths that looked like western shirts minus buttons overseen by a platoon of taxidermied mule deer hanging in
the rafters.

  They ordered coffee before sitting. Since arriving in the tiny hamlet the night before, Lucas developed the theory that becoming an alcoholic out here could be a useful survival mechanism; ethanol in your blood kept it from freezing. After their lips started working again, they ordered food and both lapsed into their own personal silence.

  Lucas’s expression must have been telegraphing his concentration, because Whitaker asked, “What’s going through your head?”

  Lucas wanted to shrug, but he was afraid that his ears would snap off and fall into his collar. “What have we found here, other than a reason to appreciate warm clothes?”

  “A small-town deputy who was killed for no apparent reason with no leads and very little to tie his killing to the ones back in New York.”

  “Yet here we are, trying to find a link.” He wrapped his good hand around the mug, willing more warmth into his hand. The weather here really was a completely different animal from back in New York.

  “You think there is one?”

  Lucas turned the question over in his head a few times before answering. “The general mechanics of the murder look very similar in everything from weather conditions to yardage to elevation to type of target. But that’s all we have—similarities. Without a way to concretely tie our shooter to Jameson’s murder, we’re just wishing.” He took a sip of coffee and noticed that it was already getting cold. “But it feels like our guy. Not that that means anything.”

  “What about the missing slug?”

  “I was thinking about that; an off-the-shelf .300 could easily go through a windshield at twelve hundred yards, go through a human head, then exit a back window. Jameson could have been killed with a regular deer-hunting round. Problem is, one of our armor-piercing rounds would do the same thing at that distance and elevation—through the windshield, through Jameson’s head, and out the back window.”

  “So we need to find that slug,” Whitaker offered.

  “Ideally, yes. But that will take time. There’s a good square mile to search, and most of it is either under ten feet of snow, or is occupied by a river; the chances of never finding it are better than I’d like to think. Which means we need another way to connect Deputy Jameson’s killing to the murders in New York—if there is one. That connection lies in linking Jameson to Hartke, Kavanagh, and Lupino.”

  “And we still haven’t figured out how they are related to one another.”

  “Which brings us back to why the fuck are we here?” he said into his mug. Crawling around on that frozen road earlier made him feel like an actor in a Scandinavian film noir—all that had been missing was a Volvo and a little more silence. “At least Doyle doesn’t have his head up his own ass.”

  “Did you see the CSPOA stickers on his SUV?”

  “The eagle stickers?”

  “You don’t know what they are, do you?”

  Lucas shrugged. “Fraternal order of sheriffs or some such deal.”

  She shook her head. “Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association.”

  “Okay.”

  “The CSPOA is of the opinion that since local law enforcement, and sheriffs in specific, are the highest authority in a county, their power supersedes that of the federal government, including the FBI, ATF, and DHS. They feel that they are the only ones who can decide what’s constitutional and what’s not in their own backyards—they value the concept of interpretation. They pick and choose the laws they want to uphold.”

  Lucas interrupted with, “Idiots convinced of their own superiority always make me nervous.”

  “Me, too. Especially when racism is baked into the formula. From a certain perspective, they are vigilante anti-government people masquerading as patriots under the guise of authority. It can be a bad combination.”

  “Like your Jade Helm people?”

  Whitaker smiled. “Exactly.”

  The waitress, a woman in her sixties with pineapple earrings and pink Nikes, brought their order over. They were both silent as she slid the plates onto the table. She gave Whitaker a dirty look, then walked away without asking if they wanted anything else.

  Whitaker picked up her fork. “Doyle is not happy that we’re here, asking questions.”

  Lucas looked out the window at the snow whistling down the street. “Neither am I,” he said, going to work on his food.

  Lucas was one mouthful into his mushroom omelet and Whitaker had barely dented a BLT with extra cheese, mayo, and mustard when his phone buzzed. He checked the screen and was surprised to see Bobby Nadeel’s number come up—almost as surprised that his phone worked out here.

  “Dr. Page.” Lucas never dropped character with students.

  “Dr. Page, this is Bob Nadeel.”

  Lucas could tell Nadeel thought he had good news.

  “I think we’ve found something that might help you. It’s not very big, but it’s a definite link between your victims.”

  Lucas put his fork down, wiped his mouth with his napkin, and tried not to yell when he said, “What?” He checked his watch, which was still on East Coast time. He had handed the data off to Nadeel and the other kids—what?—less than twenty-two hours ago.

  “We know how the victims are related. I’d like to take the credit, but Caroline was the one who nailed it. She’s better at abstract thinking, and it was her algorithm that picked it up.”

  Whitaker saw the change in Lucas’s expression, and she put her sandwich down, took a swig of coffee, and wiped her mouth. She leaned forward to listen.

  Nadeel continued, “We entered everything on that hard drive you gave us into spreadsheets, and I mean everything; I don’t think we left out a single byte of data. The obvious avenues were employment, schooling, and social circles. There’s a theory regarding social structures in beehives that denotes that hive members don’t interact with others of a higher—”

  “It’s called eusociality, Bobby. Can you get to the point?”

  “Sure. Of course. We went through the obvious avenues to connect the victims, but to be honest, we didn’t put as much backbone into it at the front end as we could have. It’s not that we were being lazy, it’s just that like you said, the FBI’s digital people have already gone at this with their big bad supercomputers. So we did as you directed and concentrated on the holes in the data, focusing on what wasn’t there.

  “We factored in the kinds of phone calls that people usually make—you know, spouses and kids and work and mechanics and siblings and credit card companies. Then we looked for calls that each victim should have made but didn’t. Nothing stuck out. Same thing with credit cards; we looked for things that should have been there but weren’t. It took us all night, but Caroline’s algorithm—which was real old-school, by the way: Euclidian—came through.”

  “Bobby?” Nadeel was playing this up for political reasons, but Lucas was cold and tired, and his omelet was starting to wrinkle.

  “Sure. You can forget Atchison. He has nothing to do with the rest of the gene pool. But the other three victims have a hole in their service records during January, eighteen years back. The dates aren’t all identical, but there is an overlap of six days where all three were not present anywhere—January 7 to 13. Hartke was off from January 5 to 15; Kavanagh from January 7 to 13; Lupino was gone from January 5 to 16.”

  Lucas emptied his coffee without taking the phone from his ear.

  “So we dug in on those dates. Not one of the victims used their cell phones during those six days. Same thing for credit cards, which was anomalous; there isn’t a six-day period on any of their credit card histories that is inactive. The longest we could find was a two-day break on Kavanagh’s statement over Christmas break in 2009.” Nadeel paused. “We did a countrywide search for those six days, focusing on events that would involve law enforcement. We came up with a massive list of criminal events—you wouldn’t believe the shit that goes on in this country when you look at the stats. It’s amazing that the whole country hasn’t been shot by their
neighbors.”

  “Bobby?”

  “Yeah. Sorry. Only eleven percent of crimes during those dates spanned more than a single day; four percent spanned more than two days; two incidents spanned more than three days; and a single one spanned five, beginning on the first day of our six-day period. It’s an eighteen-year-old case—an arrest by federal marshals that went wrong. A family got pinned down in their cabin, and the good guys jumped the gun. Everyone died. The government didn’t release the names of the personnel or officers involved, so there was no way to tie your victims to this event. But those six days were bugging me.

  “So I did a little research and found out that since 9/11, the federal government has the right to redact personnel from reports destined for review—even the FOIA can’t free the files for a period of ninety-nine years after a case is closed. So I went off-road; I searched WikiLeaks and found three-hundred-and-seven internal FBI and DOJ memos referencing the event, all dumped a little over three years ago. We searched for your victims but found nothing until we reduced their names to initials and, well, there they were. All three were involved in an incident that became known as Bible Hill. And you’ll never guess where it is.”

  Lucas thought back to Sheriff Doyle standing out on the road, looking up at the mountain. About where Deputy Jameson had gone in the river, drowning a small-time criminal in the back. “Carlwood, Wyoming.”

  Nadeel was silent for a moment. “How did you know?”

  Lucas looked up into the rafters, at the crowd of glass eyeballs staring down. “Lucky guess.”

  65

  Lucas watched them flex their respective muscles, establishing alpha. Doyle was leaning against the rifle rack in his office, both hands resting on the tooled Jesus twins on his holster. The long guns behind him were greased and dusted, the bluing worn down on the high spots. He eyed Whitaker for a few quiet seconds before saying, “Whyina hell would you want to go up there?” The declaration was the closest thing to swearing the sheriff had demonstrated so far. He shifted his weight, and his hands crept back over the pockets of his holster so they were resting on the rubber grips of the dual Glocks.