Inside were documents, but not many: simply a small stack of papers binder clipped with a yellow legal pad sheet of paper with scribbled notes clipped on top.
Meredith winced. “That doesn’t look like much.”
“So what is there?” Teddy asked.
“Notes,” Mac answered and held up the page. “Meredith, is that your husband’s chicken scratch?” he asked, handing her the yellow, lined sheet of paper.
She scanned the notepads. “Yes. He’s a lefty, and his writing is distinctive—lots of harsh, straight, left to right, vertical strokes.”
Mac scanned the notes, which were a long series of one or two word notations. Not a complete sentence on the pages. “Pretty … cryptic.”
“Frederick was dyslexic,” Meredith answered.
“Seriously?” Mac asked, surprised.
She nodded. “So, the problem with Frederick was that his notes never meant anything to anyone, except him. He had a system in his mind, so if he jotted down a name, a place, an object, a time, an event, whatever, there was always more to it.” She was scanning the page of random notations. “Unfortunately, three words could equate to a hundred with Frederick. It’s the way his mind operated, which was by memory. He’d hear or see something once, and he could just recall it. It always frustrated the lawyers he worked with, because they couldn’t understand his shorthand. They constantly begged him to dictate.”
The notations were many, with arrows and lines drawn to and between words, but as he scanned them, Mac understood what Meredith meant. They were almost in code, like the crumpled-up note in the garbage can from the night before. Williston, Ray, Buller family, County Road 4, Watford City, Telford, Deep Core, Murphy, PHI, and on and on with various dates listed but nothing tied to them. It was like one of his own mind-mapping exercises, where the notations meant something to him but others would have a hard time understanding what it all meant. He might have to call Dorothy to see if she could interpret Sterling’s hieroglyphics.
“What’s in the clipped papers?” Meredith asked.
“I have a death certificate. In fact, death certificates for a family of four and an investigative report from the Williams County sheriff—it looks like they were all murdered. They lived near Ray, North Dakota. There are the records for two thousand acres of property they lived on, which must be the record missing from the file at the firm.” He placed them on the desk, and then there were some other tax, land, and payroll records that he flipped through. It was not the bonanza he was hoping for.
Then he got to the last record.
“What is it?” Meredith saw his eyes widen ever so slightly.
“Uh … nothing,” Mac answered and then shook his head, yawned, and wiped his hand over his face to cover. “I’m just trying to keep my eyes open at this point. It was a long night.”
“Yes, it was,” Edmund replied, patting him on the shoulder. “Maybe you should get some rest, son.”
“Yeah, we can help you with all of this,” Uncle Teddy offered.
“No, that’s okay,” Mac replied, standing up and waving them off. “There’s not much here, but what is here I’ll run down to the law firm, discuss it with Lyman, and get copies made and take them home. I’ll get some sleep and then start going through all of this and see if I can make heads or tails of it.”
Mac gathered all the documents and placed them in the red-rope file, and the four of them descended the steps into the kitchen. Mac stopped and turned to his ex-wife. “Meredith, you go home with your parents, and don’t go anywhere by yourself. Take the security. I’m not kidding. Do you understand?”
She nodded. After last night, she wasn’t going to argue with him.
Mac showed himself out of the house and jumped into the Yukon. He drove south on Lake of the Isles Parkway, turned left onto Lake Street, drove east four blocks, and pulled over to the side of the street and parked. He dug out his phone and scrolled to the letter C and found the name.
The voice picked up on the third ring. “Coolidge.”
“Linc, it’s McRyan.”
“Mac, my boy. What’s up?”
“My conspiracy meter, and it’s on high alert. In my hand I have a copy of a cancelled check from Soutex Solutions to Shane Weatherly.” Mac knew Coolidge had a copy of the cancelled check as part of his investigation.
“How did you get a hold of that?”
“It’s a long story, but the very short version is that it relates to that case I stayed back here in Minnesota to investigate.”
“It involves your ex-wife, right? She’s accused of killing her husband. You’re doing the Spenser: For Hire bit on it.”
“Yeah, and you’re Hawk.”
“I like that,” Coolidge answered, a dapper dresser in his own right.
“Anyway, Meredith is accused of killing her husband and a woman he was found in bed with. I didn’t mention that when I saw you over the weekend. Here’s the kicker—the woman he was found murdered with is named … Callie Gentry.” Mac said her name slowly and waited for it to register with Coolidge.
It did, because after a few seconds of silence he could hear the DC detective rummaging about his desk. “Shit, Mac. Callie Gentry is the name signing the checks to Shane Weatherly.”
“Correct.”
“I’m listening.”
“Linc, I don’t know what I have here yet. I need a copy of your investigative file. Forensics reports, pictures, anything you got,” Mac stated as he thumbed through the documents from the safe again. “I think somehow your murder in DC and the ones I’m looking at here in the Twin Cities are connected, and it may all have something to do with land up in North Dakota.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Someone higher up the food chain took care of it.”
The sun was dropping quickly to the west, and a bitter northwest wind was rolling into northwest North Dakota as Speedy rolled up to the long driveway to the isolated farmhouse ten miles south of Williston. The house, set back in a small grove of trees, was almost invisible from the winding road, and it would be in the summer, with the foliage in full bloom. The little house was a comfortable yet extremely out-of-the-way resting place for Clint and Royce, whom he wanted and needed to keep a low profile.
Clint and Royce were his aces in the hole.
They were whom he and the company called when problems truly needed to be eliminated. He’d known them since childhood, all of them growing up in the same neighborhood in Midland, Texas. Speedy, the running back, Clint and Royce, the linebackers, all played under the Friday-night lights. After high school, Speedy went off to college at the University of Texas-El Paso, blowing out his knee as a sophomore. Clint and Royce stayed around Midland for a while, moving from ranch job to ranch job, and then they both disappeared. Speedy didn’t hear from or see them for years, until a chance meeting at a cowboy bar outside of Lubbock, when all three were well into their thirties. Late at night, with all of them having a few too many beers, his two long-lost friends revealed where they’d been, what they’d done, and the kind of work they were looking for.
Speedy kept that in mind.
A year later, their talents came in handy. First, he used them on a project in Texas to discourage some protesting locals from causing trouble.
In that case, the locals took the hint.
Two years later, there was trouble in Wyoming, and they were called again.
There, some people didn’t take the hint this time, and they were dealt with, and all that were left were their tombstones.
He was using them to do the same thing again, except on an exponentially more lethal scale.
Speedy still thought of both of them as friends, albeit friends who now made him uncomfortable. These days, he found himself always on guard when around them. Back when they were growing up, they were both decent guys who liked to race around in their pickup trucks, fracture an occasional law, and get in a fight and then go drinking with the combatant. They just liked stirring shit up. They were good o
ld boys seemingly bound for life on a ranch or as roughnecks out in the oil fields.
However, when he ran into them again those many years later, they’d both developed cold, lifeless, sociopathic eyes—especially Royce, always the smarter of the two. A glare from him, and the person it was directed at would turn and walk the other way for fear of what would happen if they stayed.
The boys were good at what they did and were well paid for their talents—well paid enough that they were talking retirement. Both had expressed their desire to put the guns away for good and retire down to their spreads in west Texas. You could do this kind of “work” for only so long before your past would catch up to you somehow or you ran into someone who was your equal.
If things worked out in North Dakota as he’d planned, Speedy had every intention of joining them. He was ready to leave his transient life of a year or two here then another year or two there out in the wilderness of places like Colorado, Wyoming, and now North Dakota.
He pulled to a stop in the driveway of the farmhouse, noticing the pickup truck parked in the small, slightly listing red-and-white barn set behind the farmhouse. As he walked up, Clint opened the door, bleary eyed and yawning, and let him in.
Speedy took a seat at the table in the small and tidy kitchen.
“Coffee?” Clint asked.
“Yes,” he answered as he tossed his leather gloves on the table. Royce came shuffling into the kitchen in sweats, his hair unkempt and heavy circles under his eyes. He sat down at the table, and Clint soon joined them.
“So you weren’t followed?” Speedy asked to get the conversation going.
They both shook their heads. “Dumped the Suburban, and we were on the road back here within a couple hours of that,” Royce explained as he drank his coffee. “We kept a good eye in the rearview on the way back up here, and there was nothing. Very quiet.”
Speedy nodded. “I’ve been doing a little discreet checking. The police down there have no leads, at least so far. McRyan told the police he thought it was a professional who broke into Hilary’s house, but he had no description beyond a male who jumped into a black SUV. The police continue to investigate the break-in and search for your vehicle. I imagine they’ll be scrubbing traffic cameras and whatnot, so hopefully you dumped the SUV in a place that was not monitored.”
Clint and Royce gave him a look.
“Okay,” Speedy answered nervously. “So you properly disposed of the vehicle in a place where it won’t be found. Then, I’d say you got away clean.”
“For now,” Royce suggested. “I don’t get a sense that this McRyan dude goes away real easily. I can’t help but feel as if we’ll be hearing from him again.”
“Which begs the question, why was McRyan at Hilary’s to begin with? Last we knew, he was in DC,” Clint asked. “Then all of a sudden he shows up at her house right when we’re there? How does that happen?”
“Maybe luck?” Speedy offered.
Royce shook his head. “Come on, Speedy. He was going there for a reason. I suggest you find out what that reason was. That may tell you whether we’ll be running into the man again.”
Speedy nodded. “We will. We’re not done paying attention to him. We have someone on that.”
“Who?” Clint asked quietly, his eyes dark.
“Don’t worry about it,” Speedy answered, waving him off. “I don’t even know. Someone higher up the food chain took care of it.”
“No, who?” Royce challenged. In this line of business, the minute they replace you is the minute when you have to start looking over your shoulder. You go from asset to liability.
Speedy knew what they were thinking. “It’s not a competitor, it’s not a professional, and you haven’t been the least bit replaced. We haven’t contracted with someone else, although to answer your question specifically, I don’t know exactly who is ‘watching’ McRyan. It’s someone the boss knows and trusts who is watching matters in a different way but has eyes on the situation. Look, as of now, McRyan’s in the Twin Cities, and we just need him to stay there, and thanks to you two, there is plenty to keep him occupied down there.”
“There’s nothing in the law firm files,” Royce stated. “We have everything from Sterling’s and Gentry’s briefcases and all the documents they had that matched up with what Weatherly had. So if McRyan just sticks to trying to get Sterling’s wife off, we should be fine. If he engages in mission creep and decides to spread beyond that …” He let the words hang in the air.
Speedy shrugged. “Let’s cross that bridge when—and if—we get there.”
“Let’s hope we don’t get there,” Royce replied. “He’s an hombre we have to respect. He’ll fight back, and he is not the least bit afraid to throw down.”
“Well, he’s not here now,” Speedy answered.
“I can tell you this much,” Clint stated, kicking back. “It feels good to be back here, hundreds of miles away. I feel like I could sleep for days.”
“Me, too,” Royce muttered.
“Then get some sleep and lie low for a few days,” Speedy suggested. “If anything comes up, I’ll call.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Are you nuts?”
Mac took a two-hour nap when he got home, followed by a quick shower, and then a late lunch of tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. By 4:00 P.M., he was energized enough to get back at it, the adrenaline of an interesting case coursing through his veins.
Since he stopped being a cop full-time, he didn’t miss the day-to-day paperwork and other mundane aspects of the job. He liked his freedom, the ability to take on other projects, and to live life on his terms. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t bored from time to time. And what he really did miss about the job was the juice he got from an interesting case. When he had a complex case, he could stay up all night thinking, ruminating, and noodling on it until he put the puzzle together.
Suddenly, that was this case.
It had gone from the simple question of did his ex-wife murder her husband to a possible layered conspiracy involving multiple murders in three different locales.
What would have made this even better in some respects would have been to have his usual white boards, lamps, and FBI or police resources at the tips of his fingers. Even better would have been to have his partners, whether they be the boys, whom he would see later, or Wire. She loved convoluted cases. The boys liked the rough and tumble of police work, the sweating of suspects, the confrontation of it, but Wire, ex-FBI, was a little more intellectual. She liked puzzles as much as he did, and the more twisted the better.
Alas, he didn’t have the resources or his partners, for the most part. So for now, the long sheets of paper on the wall in his basement would just have to do. By the time he’d dried off from his shower, he had Coolidge’s case file in his e-mail. Now it was printed off and spread across the banquet folding table he’d set up in the basement opposite the murder wall.
Coolidge’s investigative file had a ballistics analysis. The bullets used on Weatherly and Kane were from a .22, and it was thought a suppressor was used. Mac inspected the casings from last night—those from Meredith’s bed and from his chase—and he knew they were for a .22, and a silencer, one that effectively suppressed the sound, was used. Meredith said there was a “pop” when the intruder shot at the bed but that it wasn’t very loud, and Mac concurred based on his experience from the chase. Using a .22 and a quieter popping sound from a suppressor and Coolidge’s theory that these guys used a Ruger was making more sense. Discreetly, Gerdtz and Subject were going to see if there was a ballistics match with the weapon in Coolidge’s case. Mac wasn’t holding his breath, but it was worth a shot.
The dirt in Kane’s car was mud with some sand mixed in. The sand was a high-purity quartz type not necessarily indigenous to Virginia or Maryland. The boot tread was for a Lowa Renegade Hiking boot, size twelve, a popular hiking boot sold in stores all over the country. That was it for the forensics from Coolidge.
The
credit cards or cell phones for either Kane or Weatherly had not been used since stolen. Other than Mac’s call to Coolidge about the Gentry connection, Coolidge’s investigation was ice cold, and he was working another homicide now—such was the life of a homicide detective in DC. Nevertheless, Weatherly was connected to Meredith’s case, which necessitated a new sheet for his murder wall, entitled Connections—Weatherly and Sterling/Gentry. When he started looking at the connections, the evidence started to fit together and make some sense.
The original connection was the check to Weatherly from Soutex Solutions, which was signed by Callie Gentry.
There were bodies in Washington, in the Twin Cities, and as he’d now learned, possibly in North Dakota. The Buller family murders, and more so how they were committed, created another possible connection.
According to the investigative report, Harold and Melody Buller and their two children were murdered nearly seven months ago, on April 19. All four of them were shot multiple times in the torso, but for all of them, the kill shot was the one to the forehead.
“That’s a connection,” Mac muttered when he wrote “Head Shots” on the page.
Sterling, Gentry, Weatherly, Isador Kane from the EPA, and now the Bullers, all shot multiple times, but all were also shot in the head, execution style, either in the front or the back. Even if they were found immediately, there would be no heroic medical saves.
“Even the kids,” Mac muttered, shaking his head, angry at the depravity of it.
The only saving grace was that at least with the head shot, death was instant. If their eyes never opened, then they didn’t suffer the fear of it. The lights just never came back on after they went to sleep. But the murders, the method of it all evidenced a special kind of ruthlessness and viciousness he’d seen before but still had difficulty getting his mind around. He just couldn’t imagine how a person could get there, no matter how many times he saw it. He accepted it, wasn’t even that fazed by it anymore, but it still mystified him. A person simply lacked a soul if they would murder an innocent child lying in bed.
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