After a big bend, the lane entered a woody patch and deteriorated to a series of deep dips and ice-covered puddles. Several old vehicles sat back from the road under the trees, rusting to dust amid the vines and fallen branches that left the headlights to look like eyes peeking from the shadows. Bill slowed the truck to a crawl and then came to a stop, just feet from a fairly large sand quarry filled with water, commonly called a sandpit around these parts. The surface of the water was the only area Rainey could see not covered in thick trees and undergrowth, except for the small clearing where they were parked. She heard Bill take a deep breath and exhale slowly.
“I will not keep you here long. Just talk me through what you know. Don’t tell me what the police told you. Tell me what you know. You know your father’s behavior. You know what he would have been doing. Tell me only that for now.”
Bill nodded and began. “He always parked right here, under this tree. See that stump just above the water line. That’s his spot. There’s a good sandy bottom there. Good place to catch Bream. Shad run through the creek too.”
“This doesn’t look like a creek. It looks more like a pond, a big pond” Rainey remarked.
Bill pointed out the windshield at what appeared to be a finger-shaped peninsula about seventy-five yards offshore, pointing directly at them. “The creek is actually about three hundred yards north of here. See those trees out there. We call it Track Island. A mining company built a track in the twenties and brought train cars in to take out the sand dug up from about sixty yards out on both sides of that strip of land. The quarry formed an elongated horseshoe-shaped sandpit. When they were finished, the rails were pulled up and the creek was allowed to flood the pit. Eventually, the creek changed its natural course to run through the north end.”
Rainey could talk fishing and fishing holes. She was Billy Bell’s daughter of Bell’s Bail and Bait. “I bet this is a great fishing spot then, kind of a natural Shad holding pond, isn’t it? Did a lot of people know your father came here?”
“Oh, pretty much everybody, I guess. It’s private property. You have to have permission to fish here, but lots of people do. It’s not a secret hole, if that’s what you’re asking. We used to sneak down here and swim, as kids. The owner would run us off most of the time. It’s really not a place for non-swimmers to be hanging out. It’s shallow, maybe three feet at the most, here close to shore. It may not look like it, but it’s a rock ledge covered in a few inches of sand. About five yards out, the ledge stops and then it drops off into a sharp slope to the bottom. It gets to a depth of about forty feet out by Track Island. I saw a guy messing around one night in a four-wheel drive in the shallows. He went too close to the edge of the ledge and his truck went right over the side. They finally sent divers out there to find it. It had rolled all the way to the deepest point. A couple of kids have drowned in there too. An old hobo guy floated up once.”
“I suppose that’s why I saw all those ‘No Trespassing’ signs we passed on the way in.”
“Yeah, Mr. Read would shoot a shotgun over our heads if he caught us down here. Scared us shitless when those birdshot pellets rained down on the water, but we kept coming back. It was kind of a game and certainly a rite of passage to get chased by old man Read.”
“Read? Any kin to Ellie Paxton’s husband?”
“Yes, Mr. Read was Burgess’s grandfather. Burgess’s parents died when he and his sister were young and his grandparents raised them. I think it was a car accident, but I don’t really remember. I do remember when his sister was killed in an accident right after he graduated from high school—ran off the Tarr River bridge over by Old Sparta. Since all the Reads are dead now, Ellie inherited the farm and six or seven sandpits. Dad said she is sitting on a gold mine of mineral rights. She can just sit back and collect the checks from the mining company. I had no idea sand was such a lucrative business.”
“There are an awful lot of deaths around Ellie Paxton, don’t you think?”
“You’re right and not the only person that has noticed. People joke that Ellie Paxton Read is a black cat; it’s bad luck if you cross her path, but none of the deaths were anything but accidents, except her parents, and she didn’t cause that. She seems to take it all in stride, though. I guess when you’ve been through what she’s been through; a little town gossip is a blip on her radar.”
“The world is a comedy to those that think; a tragedy to those that feel,” Rainey recited a Horace Walpole quote she used to have tacked above her desk at Quantico.
The quote came in a note from a serial killer she interviewed her first year with the BAU. She kept it as a daily reminder to think more and feel less. It had been tough those first few years of not necessarily hardening to the depravity she saw, but learning to think through it. But to the killer that gave Rainey the quote, it was his way of explaining why not feeling the least bit of remorse while chopping off a woman’s head made him happy.
Rainey wasn’t through mining information on Ellie Paxton. She was a victim of the precipitating event that led up to Rainey being in the truck with Bill at that moment. “Ellie is a farmer, now? She doesn’t look the type. Collecting mineral rights checks—that I don’t think she would have a problem with, but running a farm? That seems a stretch.”
“She rents the land to the Sweets. Lots of people do. Their operation is large enough to stay afloat and buy the equipment to handle multiple farms. One man on modern machinery can do the work of ten, or so Skylar says.”
“I guess that payroll savings buys a truck like this.”
Rainey kept the mood light to this point. It was imperative to keep Bill’s emotions in check. His information would be more accurate without the fog of mourning. Now, she refocused him on the shooting, and would follow this pattern of light banter and return to the shooting until she had extracted what she could from this grieving son.
“Your father always parked his truck under that tree?”
“Yes, always. He was very much a creature of habit. If the sun was shining, he was down here for a couple of hours at least. My mom always knew where to find him between noon and six.”
Rainey tried to remember back four days. “It got up to fifty, if I remember right. It was warm the day before but really windy.”
“I talked to Dad on the seventh. He said the wind was blowing so hard he couldn’t get a good cast in.” He let a second or two pass, before saying, “I wish the wind had been blowing the next day too.”
Don’t let him think, Rainey thought to herself. She said, quickly, “So, you talked to your father often?”
“Yes, he really was my best friend. He was a great dad. I’m just sorry my kid won’t have the chance to know him. He would have been a great grandfather too.”
“I’m sure he would have,” Rainey granted. She was losing him. It was better to get what she could now, before he became too emotional to be of any use. Harsh as it sounded to play him like a piano, she had to keep him in key for just a few minutes more. “Can we walk to where forensics indicated the shooter might have been?”
“Sure, it’s right up on that ridge over there.”
The snowflakes were becoming larger as they exited the truck. They landed on her black wool coat displaying tiny ice crystal works of art. Rainey pulled the knit hat a little further down over the exposed parts of her ears and neck. She followed Bill into the thickening brush on the other side of the clearing, blinking away the snowflakes as they landed on her lashes.
“It’s really starting to come down,” Bill called over his shoulder.
Rainey jabbed her hands in her coat pockets and pulled the wool closer to her body. “Yes, it is. My body isn’t used to this kind of weather anymore. I lived up North for a while. This would be an average day up there.”
The climb became steeper, as they followed a recently worn path to just below the top of the ridge. Rainey could see there had been lots of traffic, probably the crime scene techs, but there were older signs of traffic too, farther up. So
meone had been coming down that ridge recently and rather frequently.
She asked Bill, “The ‘No Hunting’ signs, does that mean no hunting, or is that just for out-of-towners?”
“No, Mr. Read never allowed hunting on his land. He said he didn’t want some yahoo shooting him in that back trying to bag a deer. The Read house is back that way; a couple of miles, but there are also trails all through these woods. People have hiked and camped in here for years with Read’s permission, but no hunting allowed. There are a couple of sand ridges where he allowed target shooting, but they are farther up the road.”
“So, whoever shot your father was poaching.”
“Yes, it would seem so. Ellie told the investigators that she’d been hearing shots back in here, but she can’t see who comes and goes from her house, and assumed people were just target shooting down at the sand ridges.”
“Had your father mentioned hearing shots?”
“If he noticed them, he didn’t say anything to me.”
Bill reached a level spot in the climb, a natural ledge. In front of Rainey stood a manmade formation of vines and twigs that to her thinking was a sniper’s nest. It may have been meant as a hunting blind, but looking down on the clearing at what exactly?
“You’re a hunter, Bill. Would this be where you would hunt on this land?”
“With all the open fields just through those woods? No, this would not be my choice. If I were hunting here, I’d put my blind at the edge of the woods in the corner of that west field we passed coming in. Plus, if I were poaching, I wouldn’t be in the one place on this vast property that I know people come often.”
Bill moved to stand exactly in the middle of the area Rainey supposed was a sniper nest.
“They said the shot came from here.” He pointed at the ground. “The footprints went from this spot to the top of the ridge, joined the larger steps, and vanished into the swamp on the other side.
Bill stepped aside, so Rainey could stand where he indicated the shot was fired. She blinked the snow from her eyelashes again, and imagined Wellman Wise innocently sitting on his favorite stump on a sunny February day.
“Is the grill of his truck chrome?”
“Yes. It’s a bright red truck with chrome trim.”
Rainey turned to Bill. “Do you see what I see?”
“No, not really,” Bill said, confused.
“The sun was bright that day. I remember it because we took the kids to the park. What time was he shot?”
“Sometime between two and three pm.”
Rainey looked for a sign of the sun, but she wasn’t going to see one. The clouds were low and thick above her, their snow production increasing rapidly.
“I’m turned around. Which way did you say was west?” She asked while brushing snow from her face.
“That way,” Bill said, pointing over Rainey’s shoulder, up the ridge.
“If your Dad’s truck was parked where we are, there is no way a person up here could not at least see the rays bouncing off all that glass and chrome, and his truck was red, especially, if they were standing to take a shot. Plus, he was wearing an orange safety vest.”
Bill studied the scene and then the color left his face. “He was murdered, wasn’t he?”
“You say it was one shot and he died almost instantly,” Rainey said, unwilling to spare Bill’s feelings anymore.
She crouched down inside a hollowed out thicket, shaped almost like a gun turret. The brambles made good cover, but she could see the clearing through several small openings. The back of the turret was open, allowing egress unseen from below, up and over the ridge behind a natural hedge of blackberry vines and tangled undergrowth. “Where did the bullet hit him?”
“Dad must have heard something. He walked back toward the truck and stopped in front of it. He was standing, facing this direction when the bullet entered here,” Bill put his finger on his upper chest, “about mid-sternum.”
Rainey picked up a stick and gently turned some forest debris on the ground, toward the front of the suspected sniper’s nest. The wet leaves stuck together like pancakes covered in a thin white icing of snow. Under the debris was a seemingly innocent mound of sand. The forest floor around and under the pile was made up of several inches of undisturbed decaying vegetation, brown wet leaves interspersed with sticks and stems. Sand, although easily accessed by simply moving the vegetation, had been scooped into place and purposely covered with another layer of leaves. Someone had created a natural shooter’s ridge out of what was available, rather than carry a bean or sand filled bag to the spot.
Rainey did not disturb the sand. She gently placed leaves over it and backed out the way she came in.
Bill demanded an answer, “Was he murdered?”
“Bill, I can’t conclusively answer that question, not yet, not to any standard I would feel comfortable with. What I will tell you is what I see. That sand shouldn’t be there. It’s a makeshift sand bag for a shooter. If a shooter needs to raise or lower the aim, they nudge the sand under the weapon. The bullet penetrated in the sniper’s triangle, an area formed from nipple to nipple and up to the center of the throat. Snipers aim there because if the round lands within the triangle the target will be either killed instantly, paralyzed, or incapacitated and dying rapidly. There was no brass left behind. This is obviously a well-traveled trail. Someone has been to this spot a lot and recently. This shooting position is concealed and too well maintained to be naturally occurring, but painstakingly meant to appear that way. I’m just having a hard time believing the person who shot from this position was an amateur making a deadly mistake.”
“Who would want to kill my father? He was just an old retired military guy. He had no enemies.”
Rainey looked down the ridge to the clearing. The wet snow was becoming heavier and stuck to the dried old stump, which now appeared a cold and lonely shrine to the man that kept company with it most afternoons. The snow infused fog created by cold air contacting the warmer water swirled on the surface of the pond.
She turned to Bill and spoke the blunt truth, “He had at least one.”
Chapter Four
1:16 p.m.
Fog and Snow, 26.1oF, Windchill 14.5oF
By the time they arrived back at the Wise residence, fog had settled on the land and the snow fell steadily, increasing in volume by the minute. Rainey asked to be dropped at the van, so she could move it closer to the house now that most of the mourners had gone in the wake of the coming blizzard. Katie was right. Rainey would not make it home tonight.
Before she exited the truck, Rainey turned to Bill. “Don’t say anything to anybody about what we’ve discussed. If your father was murdered, then there is a killer somewhere in this town. Alerting that person could prove dangerous.”
She left the truck and climbed in the van. A shudder went thru her body, as the wind whipped the icy air under her coat. Inside the van was not much warmer, but at least she was sheltered from the wind chill. Rainey hit the Bluetooth button on the steering wheel and waited for the “Ready” from the automated voice system.
“Call Katie,” Rainey said, and took a deep breath.
“Hey honey,” Katie’s cheery voice answered.
About to spoil her wife’s good mood, Rainey replied, “You sound chipper.”
“I have to show you this. I’ll put you on Facetime.”
“Hang on, I’m in the van on the hands-free system. Let me get the phone out of my pocket.”
Katie voiced concern, “Oh, are you driving in this? Don’t answer then. Concentrate.”
“No, I’m not driving. That’s why I called. I don’t think I could make it to the Interstate on these two-lane roads back here.”
“Good,” Katie said, surprising Rainey. “Stay there and stay safe.”
Relieved at hearing no disappointment in Katie’s voice, Rainey said, “I’m glad you aren’t upset that I stayed.”
“No, I’m fine. I’m glad you’re safe and warm. I was just a
little bitchy this morning. I’m ready for a break and I can’t wait to go away with you for an evening of quiet, just the two of us.”
“Hang in there. Relief is coming. I have my phone out now. What did you want to show me?”
“Okay, I’m hitting the button.”
Rainey’s phone sounded a notification and Katie’s face appeared on the screen. Rainey touched the “Accept” button.
“Well, hey there, good-looking,” Katie said, smiling brightly. “I see you’ve changed into the clothing I sent with you. The hat is a nice touch.”
“My ears were cold. Thank you very much for the change of clothes, particularly for the extra socks and boots.”
Katie’s image bounced on the screen as she moved from the kitchen to the dining room. “You are welcome. Now, look at your children. They have never been so still in their lives. They are mesmerized.”
The image on the screen changed from viewing Katie to the interior of the room. Rainey could see Leslie seated at the dining table. She smiled and waved at Rainey through the camera and then looked down to her right. The camera moved closer to the big window that looked out onto what was now a snow covered backyard, with huge flakes falling from the sky. The backs of three little heads were poised just inches from the glass, hands pressing little steam prints onto the panes.
Katie’s voice said, “They have been standing there for ten minutes. Not saying a word.”
On cue, Weather, started talking and pointing outside. “Go, go, go.”
“No, honey, it’s too cold.”
Weather went to her recent default position when faced with a response that did not please her. She plopped onto her diaper-cushioned rear end, face reddening, and began to wail loudly. Her brothers were confused, but in solidarity began to fuss as well.
Rainey glanced at the clock on the radio. “It’s nap time.”
The sound of Rainey’s voice stopped Weather’s antics, and turned off the boys’ half-hearted cries. They looked up at Katie, who put the phone closer so she they see Rainey.
Colde & Rainey (A Rainey Bell Thriller) Page 8
