Fair Chance

by Josh Lanyon

  And generally speaking, Elliot liked woods and wilderness, howling or otherwise, but something in this particular stretch of cloistered, moldering silence played on his nerves.

  He followed the mostly overgrown access road for about a mile, crunching through yellowed leaves and browned needles. The air was cool and moist, scented with earthy, quiet, musty smells of pine and cedar.

  It was peaceful, but he didn’t feel peaceful.

  But, analyzing his unease, he didn’t feel actively threatened or unsafe. He didn’t have the distinct and unmistakable sense that he was being watched. But he didn’t feel alone either.

  He could not find any sign of anything wrong. Or even out of the ordinary. It looked like a long time since any vehicle had traveled the access road. There was no sign of injury or damage to trees or brush. No disturbed ground.

  No convenient graves or mass burial site.

  Nor had he expected to find anything like that.

  Elliot stopped to rest his knee. He hadn’t planned for this off-road venture, and he was wishing he’d brought a bottle of water when he heard a low animal whine from somewhere behind him.

  The hair on the back of his neck rose, and he turned, scanning the undergrowth.

  That was not the sound a cougar made. He knew that much.

  A black-and-white dog lay in the leaves.

  The border collie from his first trip to the house.

  “Hey,” Elliot said softly. “I know you.”

  The dog tried to rise and sank back. Her tail stirred feebly. Her cloudy blue eyes watched him with a sort of docile hopelessness.

  He’d believed Foster had killed the dog outright, but it looked like she had merely wounded it.

  Elliot pushed the bushes back, kneeling beside the dog.

  A deep blood-crusted groove crossed her haunches where the bullet had plowed across her back. A slug, then. Not buckshot.

  He felt through the soft, matted fur on her chest for a collar and found one. A heart-shaped tag read “Sheba” and offered a Bellingham phone number.

  “What are you doing all the way out here, Sheba?” Elliot murmured, and Sheba’s tail swished the dead leaves again.

  Great. Well, he couldn’t leave her here. He was no expert, but the wound itself did not look deep enough to be life-threatening. However, it was badly infected, the flesh teeming with hungry insect life. That didn’t bode well.

  He felt his pockets, found his handkerchief and, speaking soothingly all the while, carefully—after she’d dodged and ducked her head a couple of times—managed to tie her muzzle shut.

  Wriggling out of his jacket, Elliot tucked it around the dog as best he could. This was going to be one hell of a strain on his already painful knee, but it couldn’t be helped.

  He leaned one shoulder against a tree trunk, got his good knee braced for the additional weight, carefully gathered the dog into his arms and rose—with painful difficulty—to his feet.

  Sheba whimpered, struggling, but then subsided. He could feel her heart banging in panic against his arm.

  “It’s okay,” he muttered. “You’re okay, Sheba. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  She was trembling, her sides heaving in alarm, but he could manage her. She probably didn’t weigh thirty pounds, and most of what she did weigh seemed to be bones and fur.

  Even so, the mile back to the car was an effort.

  He talked to the dog the whole way, stepping carefully—neither of them could afford a fall—and at last crossed Corian’s lawn.

  It took more time and effort to get the dog settled in the cargo area, and then Elliot searched on his phone until he located a vet a few minutes away.

  The drive to the vet took less than ten minutes and Sheba was whisked away into the surgery while Elliot gave his information to the receptionist.

  When the formalities had been dispensed with, he stepped outside the glass doors and phoned the number on Sheba’s tag. The phone rang a couple of times and then a phone message clicked on.

  “Hi,” said a cheerful male voice. “You’ve reached Todd. You know what to do.”

  Elliot knew what he’d like to do. He settled for a terse “Hi, Todd. My name is Elliot Mills. I found an injured dog wearing an ID tag with the name Sheba. The tag has your phone number. Can you give me a call back?” He recited his own cell number.

  When no call from Todd was forthcoming—and there was no still no sign of the vet—Elliot tried phoning Greene Garden Landscaping.

  The phone rang a couple of times and a male voice shouted, “Yeah?” as though he was trying to talk over the buzz of the lawn mower Elliot could hear in the background.

  “Greene Garden Landscaping?”

  “Yeah?” repeated the voice impatiently.

  Elliot introduced himself. “I believe your company was servicing the Andrew Corian property in Black Diamond?”

  “Nope.”

  “You weren’t working for Andrew Corian?”

  “What’s the name again?”

  “Corian.”

  “What’s the address?”

  Elliot recited the address.

  “Nope.”

  “His neighbor mentioned seeing one of your trucks out there on a regular basis.”

  “What?”

  “Corian’s neighbor said one of your trucks was out there every week?”

  The buzz of the lawn mower suddenly cut off. The voice on the other end said, still very loudly, “One of my trucks? I’ve only got one truck.”

  “Okay. And you’re sure the Corian property wasn’t one of your accounts?”

  “I don’t know that name. I’ve got two Black Diamond accounts. Neither of them is for anybody named whatever you said.”

  A timely reminder that most of the public did not hang on every detail—or even any detail—of the criminal cases that obsessed close to every waking moment of law enforcement personnel.

  Elliot wasn’t ready to give up yet. “Is it possible someone else was driving your truck? An employee? A family member?”

  “What? You think my wife’s driving out to Black Diamond? What for? What are you getting at?”

  “I’m not—I’m just asking if anyone else has access to your vehicle?”

  “Hell no!”

  Dial tone.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Police Chief Woll was not home to take Elliot’s call, but Mrs. Woll promised to deliver the news that Elliot had safely departed Black Diamond.

  Twenty minutes later Todd in Bellingham had still not returned Elliot’s message and the vet was delivering the good and bad news. The good news being that Sheba was going to pull through. The bad news: that Elliot could add an overnight stay at the vet’s to the already serious injury his credit card had sustained.

  “I don’t know if you realize it or not, but she was shot,” the vet said. “If that slug had gone deep, she’d have been paralyzed. Or killed outright.”

  “I know.” And in answer to the accusatory look in Dr. Mueller’s eyes, “She went after some goats.”

  “You shot her?”

  “Me? Hell no. I happened to find her, that’s all. I’m strictly a neutral observer in this.”

  The vet looked at him over the top of her glasses. “Oh, is that so?”

  Neutrality did seem to carry quite a price tag.

  “Maybe not. Anyway, I’ve called her owner, so hopefully we’ll be hearing from him soon.”

  Mueller was a short, trim sixtysomething with an iron-gray bob and a reassuring multitude of laugh lines around her eyes. “You might get reimbursed for your neutral observation, but I wouldn’t bet on it. It looks to me like she’s been living rough for a few weeks. Of course there’s always the chance that she might have run away.”

 
; “That would be quite a run. It’s about a hundred miles from Bellingham to Black Diamond.”

  “True. But most people don’t leave collars and tags on the pets they dump.”

  “Good point.”

  There was nothing else to do. Elliot left Sheba at the vet’s and headed back to Goose Island.

  The day wasn’t a total wash. He’d managed to save the dog. Greene Garden Landscaping was a dead end though.

  He’d suspected that Foster’s sudden sighting of Corian’s mysterious handyman was a little too convenient. Some people wanted to help out law enforcement so much that they manufactured clues and leads and suspects. Sometimes it was a deliberate effort to insert themselves into the investigation for reasons of their own, but usually it was unwitting. People trying to be good citizens and getting in the way.

  * * *

  Back home, Elliot did laundry, emptied the trash bins, cleared the dishwasher. But once these routine tasks were out of the way, he felt at an unfamiliar, even bewildering loose end.

  Since when could he not occupy himself for the space of a weekend? It wasn’t like he didn’t have plenty to do. There were papers to write, papers to read, papers to grade.

  He checked his cell phone again. Still no message from Tucker. Was that a good sign or a bad sign?

  How’s it going there? Elliot texted.

  Seconds passed. The white space below the blue bubble of his own message stayed stubbornly blank.

  Putting aside his own feelings, maybe this was actually a good sign. Whatever was happening on Tucker’s end was keeping him so busy and so occupied that he didn’t have time for even a quick text home. Excellent. Right?

  No news was good news.

  Probably. Likely.

  But it was...well, more than a little disappointing not to hear anything at all.

  Not even a cursory text acronym? Not so much as a CTN? Or how about one of those idiotic emoticons? The yellow face with the big drop of sweat. Or maybe the yellow face with the tears springing from its eyes. No time for a single press of his thumb?

  He was surprised to find that he was lonely. Lonelier than expected. He couldn’t remember the last weekend he’d spent on Goose Island completely on his own. He had grown used to their little weekend rituals.

  He should be grabbing this opportunity with both hands. He had a stack of books from peers he’d promised to read and review. He had his own article on lost Confederate treasure to research and write.

  No, what he should do was call his dad. Listen without bias, without prejudice to Roland making his case for Nobby. People made mistakes. It was part of the human condition. Even in the eyes of the law, intent counted for something.

  Was Nobb a continuing risk to society? Probably not.

  Was he a risk to himself? Unknown.

  Was he a risk to Roland? Not a chance Elliot was willing to take.

  But.

  Elliot already knew that Roland was never going to forgive him if something happened to Nobby while he was in prison—if he was attacked or fell ill?

  Prisons were not safe and healthy environments. Nobb was not a young man or a strong man.

  And Roland was not a fool.

  He did not call Roland though. And he did not crack open the stack of books he had promised to read and review. Instead he spent the remainder of the afternoon and a good part of the evening surfing the web and finding out what he could about Deputy Sheriff Jack Dannon.

  He read several articles on the 1996 abduction of Cerise Jakubowski by self-proclaimed “mountain man” and Canadian national Harlan Willeford.

  Willeford had stalked and grabbed Jakubowski, a world-champion runner, with the aim of making her his little wife on the prairie. But Jakubowski’s family had been quick to raise the alarm when she hadn’t arrived home after her Sunday morning run, and Jakubowski had fought her abductor every step of the way, so Willeford had not managed to disappear with her back across the border into Canada.

  Instead, he made for the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest and died in a shootout with the combined agencies of Whatcom County law enforcement.

  The details of that day were unclear, but two facts remained: Jakubowski had survived the ordeal. Willeford had not.

  In fact, he had been shot thirteen times. The fatal head shot was reputed to have been made by Jack Dannon, who had at that time worked for the Bellingham Sheriff’s Department.

  That the fatal shot was “reputed” to have been made, not actually, officially reported—let alone confirmed as fact—was just one of the discrepancies of the case.

  According to one—also unconfirmed—account, Willeford had tried several times to surrender after he had been cornered. In another, also unsubstantiated, account, he had been dispatched after he had been taken into custody, while begging for his life.

  Not good. Not necessarily true, either.

  As for Dannon himself, he had been involved in a couple of shooting incidents through the years, but had chalked up no other fatalities. Interestingly, he had switched sheriff departments three times over the course of his career, but it was a fairly long career, so that might not mean anything.

  Then again, it might.

  The deputy sheriff had been married five times. Five? His current wife was, like Dannon himself, active in something called Cowboy Action Shooting. That internet rabbit hole led Elliot to a couple of lost hours and the discovery that there were a number of international organizations devoted to “preserving and promoting the sport of single-action shooting.”

  In addition to a predictable obsession with the Second Amendment, these organizations did seem to revel in a Renaissance Faire-style mania for “history,” real or imagined. Members dressed in costumes, used weapons “typical of the taming of the Old West,” and adopted shooting aliases. Dannon’s alias was Wild Jack Daniel.

  An interesting history—and a lot more colorful than Police Chief Woll’s CV.

  Woll’s membership in MacAuley’s club of killers seemed to be based on a long-ago incident when he had still been an officer with the Seattle Police Department. After making a routine traffic stop, he had approached the compact vehicle—and the passenger had opened fire on him. Woll had been hit twice, but had still managed to return fire as the vehicle sped off. One of his shots had struck the driver, who crashed the vehicle into a telephone pole, killing both herself and her passenger. A bag with less than an ounce of cocaine was recovered from the vehicle.

  Having been through a similar experience, Elliot felt instant kinship for Woll.

  That didn’t mean that Woll couldn’t be Corian’s accomplice—well, yeah. Actually, yeah. It probably did. He just didn’t buy the idea that Dannon or Woll or any cop would be Corian’s accomplice. The very idea was offensive. And, he believed, highly unlikely from a psychological standpoint.

  Granted, as Yamiguchi had untactfully pointed out, he was not a profiler, psychiatrist or psychologist.

  More and more, Elliot was inclined to believe that MacAuley had somehow got wind of that rumor and used it to lure him to his den of iniquity—or whatever that awkward attempt at seduction was supposed to have been.

  He wasn’t ruling out the possibility that Corian might have had an accomplice. Only that MacAuley would have information on who that might be. Especially since, according to MacAuley, he hadn’t known, let alone socialized, with Corian.

  All the same, Elliot was going to do his best to get that guest list from MacAuley.

  One of the problems they’d run into trying to build a working profile on the Sculptor was that although there was a great deal of information about Corian, that information had all been carefully curated by him and consisted of press releases and official biographies.

  Despite Corian’s wide circle of acquaintances, finding someone, anyone, who could be con
sidered an intimate had been nearly impossible. There was the Capitol Hill ex-wife, but the prosecution team had almost immediately deemed her a hostile witness.

  And there were Corian’s foster parents, Ellen and Odell Haysbert, but like the ex-wife, they weren’t talking—though possibly for different reasons.

  Elliot considered the Haysberts while he mixed garlic, salt, black pepper, rosemary and olive oil to make a paste for chicken cacciatore. Maybe he’d have a try at talking with them. No disrespect to Pine or Tucker, who had both tried to interview the couple, but they could both be a little abrasive in their interrogation techniques.

  Interesting to think that both Tucker and Corian had been raised in foster care—with such different results. And yet there were similarities. Both men had built successful careers and lives out of nothing. Created personas for themselves? Maybe. Both were bigger than life. Physically large but big in personality, as well.

  You had to take both nature and nurture into account. Even so, there was probably never going to be a satisfying answer as to the question of what made one person choose to dedicate his life to protecting and defending the weak and the other to preying on them.

  Elliot evenly coated the chicken pieces in the rosemary paste and turned on the Dutch oven. Really, he should let the chicken marinate for a couple of hours, but he’d forgotten about it and now it was too late. He browned the chicken pieces, then dumped in the mushrooms, pancetta, celery, onions, marinara sauce and wine.

  That was going to be one big tasty mess. It already smelled great and he was starving. He put the lid on the pot and went to find Tucker’s interview notes.

  It didn’t take long. Tucker’s home office was as neatly organized as his cubicle at the Seattle field office. Elliot flipped through the pages of Tucker’s cramped and careful writing.

  No mention of foster siblings, but Elliot knew from Tucker’s situation that there was a good chance Corian had not been the only child living with the Haysberts.

  Yeah, someone—he—needed to follow up on that angle. If there had been foster brothers and sisters, had they been close? Had they kept in touch with Corian? Because if they were tight and they’d stayed in contact...right there might be the first real lead on that mysterious and murderous unsub.