The Obituary (Jefferson Morgan Mysteries Book 2)

by Ron Franscell

  “I’m sorry,” Morgan apologized again.

  “You didn’t hear any shots before he started shooting at you?”

  Morgan shook his head. “None. And hardly then. The gun was silenced somehow. And far. The bullets hit first, then I heard this sort of muted thump. I think so, anyway. I don’t know.”

  “Long shot,” Kerrigan said.

  “Long and bad,” a third voice spoke.

  Morgan turned to see Leigh Moody, the monolithic Perry County deputy who was leading the investigation.

  Six-foot-four and as serious as a heart attack, a fighter jet could land on the former Marine gunnery sergeant’s gray-fringed flat-top. His beat was three thousand square miles populated only by rattlesnakes, oilfield roughnecks, lonesome cowboys, hopped-up long-haul truckers, and pig-ugly roadhouse tarts in the north county, and he patrolled it alone. He was so tough and so prone to growling that the younger deputies and most of the townsfolk just called him “Gunny,” a nickname that suited him better than the feminine spelling of Lee.

  Between his two beefy fingers he held two small metal slugs as if they were sixteenth-century porcelain teacups.

  “These come out of the rain barrel,” he said, unsmiling. “Pristine. Looks to be a .300 Mag, so I’d guess our boy’s shooting an M24, standard U.S. Army sniper weapon. Won’t know much until we run ‘em through ballistics.”

  Morgan piped up.

  “So you think this guy is former military?”

  Finally, Deputy Moody smiled, his lips curling slyly beneath his white cookie-duster mustache. He knew guns, and he knew what it took to make a kill from a half-mile away, and everybody knew why: he’d been a Marine scout and sniper in Vietnam. Eighty-eight confirmed kills.

  “No, sir. If he was military, you and your little guy would be dead now. Graduates of the U.S. Army’s sniper school are expected to achieve 90 percent first-round hits at 600 meters with an M24; one shot, one kill. But that’s just the Army … Marines have higher standards. No, if our shooter was military, even Army, he wouldn’t have missed five shots. He’da gotcha dead center … emphasis on ‘dead.’ But he emptied his magazine and missed every time.”

  “He had a laser sight. I saw the red point on my hand.”

  Gunny did a quick calculation.

  “Coulda been up to eight hundred yards out. He had good weaponry, but not a good eye.”

  “So how does a civilian get a military sniper rifle?” Morgan asked.

  Kerrigan shrugged, not because he didn’t care, but because it was fruitless to care. Gunny just smiled his cynical smile as he dropped his two slugs into a plastic evidence pouch.

  “Inner-net. Gun shows. Black market. They’re out there. Like the man said, only outlaws got the big guns now.”

  “Or he’s been a cop,” Gunny said. “M24’s one of the preferred long-shot weapons in most police SWAT arsenals. We got one ourselves. But, hell, he might be a guy who works at Wal-Mart and just thinks he’s a damn good shot.”

  “A guy with access to military or law enforcement hardware,” Morgan pointed out.

  “There’s lots of them,” Kerrigan said, not at all reassuring.

  Morgan took a deep breath.

  “What about my mom?”

  “Nothing yet. It’s still my first priority.”

  “You think this shooting could be related to my mother’s disappearance?”

  Kerrigan glanced uncomfortably at Gunny, then at Morgan.

  “I don’t know, Jeff,” he said. “But it’s damned suspicious. I just can’t put it all together yet.”

  “At least you believe me now that we didn’t start the fire at McWayne’s mortuary? Right? Some homicidal nut is out there and doesn’t like what we found.”

  The sheriff held his hands up in a beatific shrug, neither confirming nor denying whether he believed Morgan. He had no answer.

  Morgan pursed his lips.

  “Fine. What now?”

  “Can’t stay here, that’s for sure,” Kerrigan said. “And you can’t leave the county. You got some place local you can hide out for a while?”

  There was only one place he felt safe.

  The sedative smell of press-day ink had settled in The Bullet’s newsroom. To Morgan, it was better than any pain pill. Or any stimulant, for that matter. He was wide awake at four a.m. and, for the first moment in a long night, finally felt some small measure of control over his fate. Here, in this place, he knew what had to be done.

  Claire and Colter had hastily packed some clothes and toys before Trey Kerrigan drove them to a safe house over in Blackwater. Two deputies would be posted outside the house around the clock, and Morgan would be allowed to come and go as he needed. But he already knew he’d land nowhere for very long, coming and going quickly, without notice. A moving target was harder to hit.

  Morgan left the overhead lights off. Instead, while his computer booted up, he turned on a small desk lamp and thumbed through the small pile of pink message slips Crystal had left for him the previous afternoon: Bob Buck. His lawyer, Dode Hicks. Bob Buck. An insurance salesman who wanted to write a weekly Christian fishing column. Bob Buck. Three complaints about lost quarters in newsstands. Two cancellations over a letter-to-the-editor from a local Baptist minister who zealously believed Mormons and Catholics weren’t real Christians but, in fact, cults. Bob Buck. And Bob Buck.

  Too early to return any of them, he knew. He tossed the messages beside his computer and logged onto the Internet. The local internet service provider, BarbedWire.com, operated in the back room of Gizmos, a combination electronics and auto parts shop. Signing on usually took two or three tries. The mom-and-pop ISP maintained an cyber-pipeline as ample as a soda straw, but it was Winchester’s only connection to the ethereal Web world.

  When the buck-snorting, bandy-legged pony on BarbedWire.com home page appeared, a digitized voice signaled the presence of new e-mail by hollering, “Yee-haw!”

  Morgan’s box was filled with the usual spam: mortgage offers, porn-for-pay sites, business opportunities for lazy people, prescription drugs for self-medicators, web cams showing college girls with names like Amber and Chelsea in the sorority shower (sometimes together), and enough penis-enlargement pitches that, if answered by any one man, might make him a freakish rival for the Alaska Pipeline.

  But his eyes were stopped cold by an e-mail address strangely out of place, a name and a time that didn’t fit together, and a slug-line that chilled. Morgan clicked on it.

  Subj: A good day to die

  Date: 7/1/2003 2:04:46 AM Mountain Daylight Time

  From: Shawn.Cowper@BarbedWire.com

  To: BulletEditor@BarbedWire.com

  I’m next. Save me.

  Morgan felt a sudden cold. He snatched up his phone and dialed the nursing station. At first, the duty nurse refused to give out any information, but rather than risking a long debate in the wee hours, she relented. She told him Cowper had had no visitors and had not yet regained consciousness. Then she hung up.

  Turning back to his computer, Morgan pecked out a reply to his mysterious e-mail correspondent: “Who are you?”

  Sitting in dark silence, waiting for a ghost to speak, a man’s voice startled him. It was the chirpy, disembodied drawl from his computer.

  “Yee-haw!”

  Morgan opened his e-mailbox again. Its single entry came from MAILER-DAEMON … his reply had been returned, undeliverable. An e-mail address that had been used only two hours before no longer existed. He cursed under his breath.

  It felt like a trap.

  A trap that had been laid in plain sight before him.

  A trap he could not avoid stepping into.

  A trap that might kill him.

  The next morning, before Winchester’s dowdy but dogged Main Street began to show signs of life, gray light spilled through the big front window of The Bullet. It was a little after six a.m. and rain had moved in.

  His two hours of sleep had been fitful, but even the filtered greyness of day comf
orted Morgan when he awoke in his chair, still sitting at his desk. He didn’t dream, or didn’t remember dreaming, but the vague anxiety of the long night still clung to his mind, the same way the dull ache of his wounds clung to his skin and bones.

  The newsroom was cool. He tried to stretch, but his shoulder was stiff, bruised. His hands prickled with tiny slices and microscopic shards of glass. The skin on his face and arms still felt brittle and warm, as if badly sunburned and unsalved. He tapped two more Percocets out of the little pill bottle and looked for something to wash them down, cold coffee, lukewarm water, anything at hand.

  He opened a warm diet soda he found in his desk drawer, and it promptly surged down the sides of the can faster than he could suck it in. He cleared a spot on his desk amid the litter of old newspapers, letters and photographs and plopped the wet can on a loose scrap from a reporter’s notebook, although the antique wooden desktop was already lacquered with more interlocking brown rings than a rusty chain.

  A few words — no, some scribbled names written in fountain ink — began to bleed as the soda soaked into the leaf of paper. Morgan quickly realized they were Josh’s pool of suspects in the City Hall hacking. He rescued the stained piece of paper and wrote, in pencil, in the margin: call these people and see if they know anything.

  As he laid the note on Josh’s chair, where he’d surely see it, a different idea took root in Morgan’s foggy brain. Instead, he folded up the damp scrap, stuffed it in his shirt pocket and hurried out the back door of The Bullet into a clammy morning that had held no promise until thirty seconds before.

  Speed Stillwell and his four kids lived on the other side of the train tracks, on Buford Street, in that part of town where his ancestor railroaders and everybody’s poorer relations tended to settle. Their little white house, a Sears & Roebuck kit house pasted together on this spot before 1920, seemed to be rotting from the ground up. Its clapboards hadn’t been painted in years, and what few pickets remained on its fence had been gnawed by weather and neglect. The brilliant red paint on every window shutter was flaking as the weathered wood beneath cracked and warped. A “Beware of Dog” sign hung cockeyed by a single nail from the gate.

  Speed’s wife had died three years ago when her SUV rolled off an icy bridge. He retreated into boozing and the long nights when he was aboard some bootlegger or highball — trains not drinks — somewhere. He never gave up the thought of her, but he tried to wipe away the constant memory of her with liquor and railroading, and he still spent most nights every month between mythical railroad stops like Edgemont, South Dakota, and Honeyville, Utah. Anywhere but home.

  Morgan didn’t know Speed’s kids well, only that there were four of them. His youngest was Colter’s age, and by virtue of being the only kindergartner ever ejected from a Winchester youth-league soccer game for fighting, she was also apparently the toughest.

  The Stillwell kids, according to the other soccer parents who knew them better, were left on their own for the most part, but they stayed out of trouble and did well in school. They didn’t complain and they didn’t act out, except for the occasional soccer scrap. Somebody besides their father was feeding them, doing their laundry, helping with homework and keeping the peace.

  Morgan sat across Buford Street in his rattletrap Ford Escort, waiting for the Stillwell kids to come out to play. Speed’s 1976 Ford pickup was gone, so Morgan assumed he was out working the board. Again.

  He sipped convenience-store coffee from a steaming paper cup and listened to the execrable Curtis and The Bug on KROK’s morning radio show, finally back after a few days of dead air. He hated their poop-and-boobs humor, especially so early, but they always broke for a network news segment at the top of the hour. Unfortunately, he was a few minutes early.

  “So did your mom kiss you goodbye this morning, Bug?” Curtis asked, ever the straight-man.

  “Oh, dude, did she ever,” The Bug replied lasciviously.

  “Cool,” said Curtis. “Did she slip you the tongue?”

  The two of them cackled as the image sunk in. Morgan grimaced as the inane electronic banter continued.

  “So let’s give away a date with your mom to the seventh caller, dude,” Curtis said.

  “Yeah, if we still got seven listeners out there.”

  “OK, maybe a date with your mom and this new Dixie Chicks CD the Boss won’t let us play anymore.”

  “Yeah, they suck the big one, especially the chubby one.”

  “Dude, you don’t even have a big one.”

  “Shut up! Looky here —” a zipper sound effect rolls “— that bad boy is a good seven … Caller, you’re on the air, dude.”

  A smaller, familiar voice spoke.

  “Hi.”

  “Hey, dude,” The Bug said. “Who’s this — as if we didn’t know?”

  “It’s Grady,” all three said at the same time.

  “Grady-dude, you gotta let somebody else dial. Get a life, little dude. “Don’t you ever go to school?”

  “It’s summer.”

  “Oh yeah. OK, well, you come by the studio and pick up your Dixie Chicks CD and Roxanne will give you The Bug’s Mom’s measurements. We gotta get to the news, dude.”

  So much for segues. One of those solemnly familiar network-news themes popped up, followed by a solemnly familiar voice from New York or Los Angeles delivering a solemnly familiar account of yesterday’s news. The world in sixty seconds.

  But before Curtis and The Bug’s truncated broadcast had ended, the front door of the Stillwells’ miserable bungalow flew open. A little after eight a.m., the Stillwell kids came out of the house together. An older boy spoke earnestly to each of them before the three younger ones spilled out the crooked gate and ran down the slick street, off to whatever summer-morning adventures beckoned.

  The older boy rolled his mountain bike from beside the house, where it must have spent the night unchained. Except for a thin, dirty-blond rat-tail that hung over the back of his collar, he looked to Morgan like every other seventh-grader in Winchester: winter-pale skin, Walkman earphones, too-short black jeans, mud-caked Reeboks, Broncos cap with a brim rolled nearly into a tube, a denim jacket with some colorful logo, and a slightly nerdy countenance that suggested he had no idea there was a bigger, badder world out there. And didn’t care.

  Morgan got out of his Escort and crossed the street. The drizzle had faded to a nearly invisible mist that condensed on his shirt in minute droplets. As he got closer, he saw the embroidered logo on the kid’s jacket: KROK-FM.

  One of many prizes, no doubt.

  “Grady?”

  The kid didn’t hear. His Walkman was turned up. Morgan touched his shoulder and the boy jumped.

  “Sorry,” Morgan apologized as the kid sheepishly hung the earphones around his neck, revealing two hearing aids wrapped behind his ears.

  “Are you Grady?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hi. I’m Jeff Morgan, editor of The Bullet. I knew your dad back when we were your age.”

  Grady fiddled nervously with the zipper pull on his jacket and kept his eyes on the cracked sidewalk. “He’s, like, working.”

  “Yeah, I figured. But I wanted to talk to you.”

  Grady shrugged.

  “Broncos fan?”

  “Sorta. Yeah.”

  “Who’s your favorite player?”

  “McCaffrey. He’s cool.”

  “Yeah, Eddie’s cool. Tough, too. You gonna play next fall?”

  “Football? Nah. Don’t like the program. It’s a waste of bandwidth.”

  Morgan briefly wondered what kind of “program” a junior high school might have, but he wasn’t here to talk X’s and O’s.

  “So, you planning to join the computer club?”

  “They don’t have a computer club. It’s called Tech Habitat, and I was in it last year after school.”

  “Cool name. What happens in Tech Habitat?”

  “You know, computer stuff. Like, writing our own programs and stuff. And g
ames and stuff.”

  “You like computers?”

  Grady shrugged.

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “I bet you know some cool stuff, huh?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “You got your own computer?”

  Now in comfortable territory, Grady started to warm up a little. He even smiled a little, showing his braces.

  “Yeah, custom kluge. It’s got, like, a dual processor, overclocked to one-point-two gigs each side, and a gig of RAM. Starbuster three-D graphics accelerator. Firenze audio and awesome VoxPop speakers. It’s like pretty awesome, but one of my friends has this new rig with a hyper-threaded Pentium Four running three-point-oh-six gigs. It’s so sweet, you know?”

  Morgan didn’t. He responded with one of the few technical computer terms he knew.

  “Windows?”

  Grady was insulted.

  “Pffft. Too primitive. I have better. Linux. Like, waaay better. Waaay cooler. It’s like, whoa.”

  He said it with such sly pride, Morgan knew the kid was a desperado geek, just who and what he was looking for.

  “Hey, I bet you could help me down at the paper. I have some viruses in my e-mail. You think you could disinfect my computers?”

  “No sweat. Prolly just a Klez worm, or Bugbear.”

  “Probably won’t take a computer whiz like you long at all to fix it, huh? And I could pay you.”

  “Cool.”

  “If you could do it today, that’d be great.”

  Grady shrugged.

  “Whatever.”

  “Where you headed now?”

  “Library.”

  Morgan handed Grady his card. On his way out of the yard, he paused at the broken-down gate and its dangling dog sign.

  “You got a dog?”

  “Did.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Dorkfaces busted him. Got wedged in puppy jail. Then deleted.”

  Morgan was sympathetic. He also knew who had hacked the City Hall computer, delivered an e-mail bomb threat to the “dorkface” mayor, and scrambled KROK’s programming. On that basis alone, the hacker couldn’t be all bad. And Grady Stillwell — a pale, intelligent, scruffy, intense and abstracted kid who took his job as a surrogate father seriously, disliked authority, was slightly deaf, and preferred to spend summer days in the library instead of the sandlot — was a budding hacker.