by Steven James
In the conversational lull following Jake’s words, I called Deputy Ellory, the officer who’d contacted the FBI Lab to see if they could identify the snowmobile tracks. The whole situation struck me as incongruous. Multiple homicides in a rural area and a possible suicide, and a deputy rather than the sheriff was taking the lead on this? It didn’t make sense.
Ellory picked up. A quick greeting, then I asked, “What made you think to call the Bureau?”
“I figured they’d have the fastest ways to look up the model of the sled. You know, like when they have tire track databases or something.” He sounded young enough to still be in high school. “How they do all that stuff on CSI.”
Honestly, it was a good idea. Most agents I’ve worked with wouldn’t even have thought of it. “Okay. Tell me about the house.”
“Well, actually, I wasn’t there too long. Your director told us to leave. Lizzie, we found upstairs. Mrs. Pickron—Ardis—she was on the steps. She was shot in the back. Probably with a .30-06.”
There was no mention in the police reports about the murder weapon being found. “Did you find cartridge casings?”
“No. That’s just what it looked like.”
“What it looked like?”
“The bullet hole, the entry wound. I hunt. You get to know gunshot wounds pretty good.”
He would have to know GSWs incredibly well to distinguish between calibers on an entry wound—I wasn’t even sure it was possible. Exit wounds yes, but—
Jake waved a couple fingers to get my attention. “Ask him about Donnie.”
I said to Ellory, “Have you found Donnie Pickron or recovered his body?”
“No.”
If the stretch of water was wide enough, we might have a chance at getting divers in to find him. “Any divers up there who can search the area?”
“Far as I know there’s just one guy around here who dives—Denny Jacobson. But he’s down in Florida this month. Visiting relatives, I think. Parents moved there last year, you know. But Donnie’s body is obviously down in that lake somewhere.”
We didn’t have nearly enough facts yet to know what was obvious and what was not, but I decided that pointing that out might not get us off on the right foot. “I was told there were no boot or shoe impressions, just the Ski-Doo tracks.”
“That’s right.”
“Has it snowed recently? Is there any chance footprints might have been covered or obscured?”
“No.”
“Are you a snowmobiler?”
“Everyone around here is.”
Growing up in Wisconsin I’d ridden my share of snowmobiles, but I hadn’t been on a sled in over fifteen years. Putting the question of the sled’s weight and the thickness of the ice aside for the moment, I said, “I understand this will depend on the speed, but how far do you think a Ski-Doo 800 XL would go without someone squeezing the throttle?”
“Let’s see . . . the trail along the lakeshore is pretty steep. I’d say he couldn’t have been going more than thirty miles per hour. Forty tops. That would mean . . .” He paused, obviously evaluating how that would relate to my question. “I guess it would cruise twenty, thirty yards maybe. But it went under a hundred yards from shore.”
Tonight when we arrived it would be too dark to get a good look at the lake, at least not with respect to its orientation to the surrounding terrain. We could check it out in the morning.
“We’ll be at the house in about twenty-five minutes. Does it work for you to meet us at the Pickrons’?”
“You betcha.”
End call.
The full moon, the first of the year, had risen, and from where it hung low in the sky it looked impossibly round and bright, like an unblinking orange eye staring at us from the heavens. Its light reflected boldly off the snow, lending a surreal feeling to the evening, a spectral glow whispering across the fields.
Jake broke the brief silence. “So, they haven’t found him yet?”
“Not yet. No.”
He typed a few notes into his iPad. I hopped off Highway 77 and began winding down the county roads that led to the Pickron residence just outside of Woodborough.
6
We’d missed supper, but Jake and I swung through a gas station and grabbed some snacks to tide us over. Now, I crumpled up my Snickers bar wrapper, set it between the seats, and turned onto the long winding driveway that led to the Pickron house.
A frozen marsh bordered the house on the north and west sides, and in the headlights I could see vast clumps of dead marsh grass cutting through the crust of snow. From the maps Jake had pulled up, I knew a forest lay south of the house.
The closest residence I’d seen on the way here was about half a mile down the road.
The house lay at the top of a rise that would have given the family a beautiful wide-open view to the north. We parked beside one of the cruisers out front, I grabbed my laptop bag, and as we walked up the snow-packed path toward the porch, I took a moment to note the snowmobile tracks on the side of the house closest to the woods. In the brisk moonlight I noticed that two pairs of boot prints led to them from the side door.
Deputy Ellory, a baby-faced twentysomething guy with sandy-colored hair and slightly vacant eyes, was waiting for us by the front door.
Two state troopers flanked him, and I asked them to wait outside. They nodded without saying a word, but the hard look on their faces told me how deeply the murders had affected them. How committed they would be to catching the killer.
Good.
Ellory, Jake, and I entered the home. No sign of forced entry. The temperature in the house was cool. Fiftyish. I set down my computer bag.
To avoid tracking dirt or snow into the house and contaminating the scene, the three of us took off our shoes, or in my case, boots, in the mudroom just inside the entrance. Ellory asked me, “So, you gonna process the scene then?”
“An agent will be here shortly to do that,” I answered. Eight pairs of shoes and boots were positioned neatly against the wall—some men’s, some women’s, two for a little girl.
Lizzie will never use those pink boots again, never again run out into the snow to play.
I looked away, asked Ellory, “Any other officers here? Any other troopers?”
“We tried to keep the scene clear, like they said.”
“What about the sheriff?”
“He’s down with the flu,” Ellory told me.
Down with the flu? With a case this big?
He must have been deathly ill or remarkably negligent.
“So,” Ellory went on, “if you’re not processing the scene, you’re here to . . . ?”
I slid my boots toward the wall and donned a pair of latex gloves. “I’m here to take a look at the temporal and spatial aspects of the crime. See where that leads us.”
He looked at me quizzically.
“I’m a profiler,” Jake offered. “We track violent serial offenders: arsonists, rapists, mostly murderers.”
“So you two hunt serial killers?”
“Yes,” Jake said.
“So you’re like a team or something? Like on TV? Like on Criminal Minds?”
Jake straightened out his shirt. “We work together whenever we’re called upon to do so.” He sounded like he was at a press conference.
“And you think this crime is . . . that there’s a serial killer?”
“You never can tell on these things.”
“Actually,” I cut in, “at this point we have no reason to believe that the killer or killers are linked to any other crimes.”
Ellory looked at me, then at Jake. “Okay,” he said. “Good.” He indicated the doorway to the main part of the house. “It’s right through here.”
7
The three of us entered the living room.
White carpet. Nicely appointed. The room was color-coordinated in light green, apart from the recliner, which didn’t quite match the walls and couch. The vast, drapeless plateglass window facing the marsh had
three spread-out bullet holes with an expansive network of cracks fingering away from each of them. The police reports Ellory had sent us had mentioned these bullet holes but had not included a photo.
Jake glanced around briefly, then headed toward the kitchen, where I noticed a purse on the table.
I studied the scene. No sign of a struggle. Neither room had been ransacked. No disarray of drawers, papers, or furniture that might indicate the killer was searching for something.
Following Jake momentarily, I went through the purse, confirmed it was Ardis’s. Memorized its contents.
A laundry room lay just off the kitchen and contained the side door that, based on the tracks outside, the killer or killers apparently used to exit the premises. I surveyed the room, layering it into the mental map I was forming of the interior of the house, then returned to the living room.
On the east side, a flight of stairs led to the second level. Through the railing I could see Ardis’s body lying grimly on the steps. According to the police reports, her daughter Lizzie had been killed on the second floor landing, in the bathroom doorway.
I felt a wash of nausea. Considering the number of bodies I’ve seen over the years, you’d think I would have gotten used to this by now, but each time I work a homicide, it hurts just as much as it did the last.
Ellory saw me gazing toward the stairs. “They told us you wanted us to leave the bodies alone, so I had one of the guys turn off the thermostat. Figured that’d help keep the bodies cool. Preserve ’em.”
I faced him. “When did you do that?”
“I don’t know. Couple hours ago.”
“What was the temperature set at when you turned down the thermostat?”
Silence. Then, “I don’t know. I don’t think we checked. Why?”
Jake answered from the kitchen. “Knowing the room temperature and the current temperature of the bodies would have helped us narrow down the time of death.”
Ellory looked confused. “But we already know that: 1:48 this afternoon.”
I stared at him. This information hadn’t been in the police reports. “How do we know that?”
“One of the neighbors heard five gunshots and thought it might be Donnie out target shooting.” He gestured toward the window with the three bullet holes. “Turns out he was killing his family instead.”
“Is there any indication that he wasn’t target shooting?”
“That he wasn’t?”
I approached the window. “Yes.” I studied the three bullet holes in the window and the cracks spiderwebbing away from them. The holes were in an off-centered, downward-sloping triangular pattern. The maze of cracks covered at least a third of the window.
Hmm.
I turned and looked at the sight lines to the landing. A five-meter-long open hallway stretched the length of the living room, revealing the three doors on the upper level. From the police reports I knew two of them were bedrooms; the bathroom door lay at the end of the hallway just to the right of the stairs, although from here I couldn’t see Lizzie’s body.
“Well, Mrs. Frasier heard five shots.” Ellory was watching me. “There’s three bullet holes right there in the glass. And each of the two victims was killed with a single shot. That’s five shots.”
“Yes, it is.” I went back to examining the window, thinking about the shot progression.
Timing and location.
Mrs. Pickron is on the steps, her daughter was killed in the doorway to the right of the stairs.
The bedrooms are on the left.
The bullets had traveled through the window as well as the storm window, another sheet of glass several inches away that was meant to seal the room from the cold Wisconsin winters.
This window covered most of the wall and with the marsh outside—
Someone might have been able to look in and see the killer.
Or killers.
Ellory seemed to read my thoughts. “We figured the perp might have been shooting at someone out there—or maybe someone fired back. We looked for footprints in the snow before you came. Nothing.”
“Always strive to separate evidence from coincidence.” The words of my mentor Dr. Calvin Werjonic echoed in my head. “Truth often hides in the crevices of the evident. Be always open to the unlikely.”
In high-velocity impact fractures, glass on the exit side of plate glass will have a larger opening than the entry side, and I could tell that the bullets had been fired from inside the house. In addition, when fired through plate glass, a bullet will create a cone-shaped fracture called a Hertzian cone that surrounds the hole on the downrange side of the glass. The Hertzian cones for these three holes confirmed that the entry point for all three bullets came from inside the house.
From inside the house.
A bullet passing through glass will cause radial cracks extending away from the entry point, but they’ll terminate when they meet other cracks already present. So when you have multiple gunshot holes, by studying the pattern of cracks you can deduce the order in which the bullets passed through the window. In this case, the webbed cracks in the glass caused by the hole on the far left met the cracks from the bottom hole, but did not pass them. The cracks caused by the remaining bullet hole stopped at the cracks caused by the other two.
This pattern told me that the bottom bullet had passed through the glass first, the one above it to the left had been fired second, and the remaining bullet third.
“There was a pause before the final shot,” I said quietly. “Did Mrs. Frasier mention that?”
Ellory was staring at me. “How did you know?”
“The angles. What did she say exactly?”
“She heard five shots—two in succession, then a pause and then two more. A little bit later she heard the fifth shot. But how did you know?”
“The angles,” I repeated. “She remembered it that distinctly?”
He shrugged. “I guess she’s got a good memory.”
Once again I gave my attention to the web of cracks in the glass.
“What are you thinking, Pat?” Jake asked from somewhere behind me.
“Just trying to compare what we know with what we’re assuming,” I said.
“You said angles.” Ellory sounded confused. “What are you talking about?”
We didn’t have any wooden dowels or laser pointers, but I could use something else to show him. “Do you have a pen?”
He handed me one from his pocket.
Taking a pen of my own and one from Jake, and using a chair so I could get to the holes, I slid the pens into each of the three bullet holes’ entrance and exit holes so that the men could see the angles from which the bullets had been fired.
“When you eye up the angles against the layout of the room, you can see that the last bullet must’ve been fired from somewhere on the landing at the top of the stairs. The other two were fired from the ground floor.”
I headed for the steps.
“What is it?” Jake asked me.
“I need to see the bodies,” I replied softly.
8
Jake said nothing but joined me at the base of the stairs.
Ardis lay sprawled awkwardly a few steps above us, facedown, her head turned sideways toward the railing, her left arm extended above her head in a way that looked like she was reaching forward, almost like someone trying to win a race, lunging toward the finish line. Reaching for eternity.
She’d been descending the stairs when she was killed.
Seeing her corpse brought the harsh reality of death home again.
Right here, lying before me was a woman who, earlier today, had been breathing, thinking, existing—alive—and now she was gone. That quickly.
It struck me that one day I’ll die in the midst of something just as she did—a dream, a hope, a doubt, a relationship. And that’ll be it. Such a simple truth, such an undeniable truth, yet one we desperately avoid addressing in our lives. As one of the mathematicians I’ve studied, the seventeenth-century p
hilosopher Blaise Pascal, bluntly put it, “The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play. They throw earth over your head and it is finished forever.”
The last act is bloody.
However fine the rest of the play.
I knelt beside Ardis’s body.
Late forties. Slightly overweight. Blonde hair, now splayed sadly across the steps. She had gentle-looking features, wore jeans, wool socks, no shoes. Earlier, I’d found no phone in her purse. I felt her pockets. Nothing.
The pattern of blood spatter on the carpet confirmed that her body hadn’t been moved. Based on the angle of the blood droplets on the wall and railing, the shooter would have been positioned directly behind her near the top of the stairs when he—or she—fired.
She was fleeing when she was killed.
Her flannel shirt was a mess of blood from the fatal gunshot wound to her back, centered almost directly between her shoulder blades.
From the police reports I knew that Donnie was forty-eight, and, with the age of the couple, I wondered briefly if Lizzie might have been adopted. Something to check on later.
I inspected Ardis’s hands. She had short unpolished fingernails that might contain the DNA of her attacker if she’d been able to scratch him. We’ll see.
No visible defensive wounds on her hands or forearms.
Behind me I heard Jake asking Ellory if they’d moved anything. The deputy said no.
“This is how you found her.”
“That’s right.”
I looked into her unblinking eyes.
Ardis.
Her name was Ardis Pickron.
Anger tightened like a knot in my chest and I was glad. Forget objectivity. I like it when things get personal. I want to feel grief and want it to be like a hot knife inside of me. It keeps me focused on why I do what I do.
