by Alex Grecian
“That’s a whole lotta gear,” Caleb said. “What’re you hunting?”
“What is in season right now?”
“Um, wild turkey, but those firearms are gonna blow a turkey all to hell. Deer season doesn’t open for a few more days.”
“I am getting an early start,” Travis said. “Do you have anything that might punch through a cinder-block wall?”
“Um, what?”
“Never mind.”
Goodman cleared his throat. “He’s not from around here, but I’ll vouch for him.” He flashed his badge and winked at Caleb.
“Thanks, Sheriff.”
“All right,” Goodman said. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
“I’m gonna need you to register first,” Caleb said, turning a countertop computer around. “Just fill out the form there. Only takes about a half hour to hear back. They most always okay people, no problem.”
“I told you, Doc,” Goodman said. “I got a friend can hook you up easier than this.”
Travis smiled at him. “But this is one-stop shopping.”
2
Skottie heard footsteps on the porch. She put down the roll of tape she was using to seal up the broken front window, grabbed her Glock from the end table, and went to the door. Travis stepped over the threshold.
“I apologize for the hour,” he said, “but I need your assistance. The situation has escalated.”
“We’re all wide awake here.”
He caught the door before she could close it. “I brought a … Well, I brought someone else who might be helpful.”
He gestured and Sheriff Goodman stepped into the light from the open door. He had his hat in his hands, and his thin hair was flying about in the breeze. “Trooper Foster,” he said. “Good evening to you.”
“Travis,” Skottie said, “have you lost your mind?” She kept her gun down at her side, but she was extremely conscious of its weight in her hand.
Before Travis could say anything, Goodman held up a hand. “Ma’am, I know you and me didn’t hit it off, but I never meant any harm to you. And I think I might already be a part of this situation you got.”
“And what situation is that?”
“Well, now you mention it, I’m not so sure what your connection is to all this. But I got two dead bodies up in my county. And this fella’s missing his dad.” He pointed his thumb at Travis. “So we got a stake in this.”
“I have spoken with the sheriff and I believe he has—”
Skottie cut him off. “My connection? Look at this place. Somebody must think I’m involved.”
“What happened?” Goodman’s lips were pulled tight, and without his hat he looked somehow vulnerable. Skottie realized she wanted Goodman to argue with her, wanted someone she could push back against and yell at. But it was clear that he wasn’t jockeying for position.
“We had a break-in.” Skottie sighed. “Come on. You’re letting in all the cold.”
Goodman entered and closed the door behind him. He looked around and raised his eyebrows at the sight of the plastic bags billowing into the room. Skottie and Emmaline had vacuumed up the broken glass and set the couch upright again, but duct tape and plastic garbage bags were the best solution they had come up with to temporarily replace the big window.
“Are you all right?” Travis said.
“Yeah.”
“Your daughter?”
“She’s with her father.”
“And where is Bear?” Travis was looking around as if his dog might be hiding behind a door, waiting to spring out and surprise him.
“He’s with Maddy,” Skottie said. She hoped that was true. She hadn’t spoken to Brandon since he’d told her the dog was lost and wounded. “We caught one of the intruders.” Skottie motioned for them to follow her and led the way into the kitchen, where Emmaline was leaning on the counter, her shotgun still aimed in the general direction of Christian Puckett’s head. “Sheriff, I think you two have met.”
Goodman made a sound like a gasp and a cough uttered at the same time. He took a step back and balled up his fists, torqued his body, and pulled his arm back. A second before he punched the wall, he took a deep breath and opened his hands.
He spoke to Skottie without looking at her. His gaze was fixed on the pots and pans hanging from a rack above the oven. “Sorry. Don’t mean to cause you more trouble. This boy broke into your house?”
Skottie nodded.
“Nobody got hurt?”
“Well, he did. And one of the other guys might’ve cut himself. There’s blood.”
“You sure he wasn’t trying to stop them other fellas?”
“Sheriff—”
He held his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Okay, I believe you. But this is—”
“So I guess you didn’t send him here,” Skottie said.
Goodman glared at her. “Ma’am.” He tipped his hat at Emmaline before turning his attention back to his deputy. “Nephew, what’re you doing in this nice lady’s house?”
Christian glowered up at him, but didn’t speak.
“Heinrich put you up to this?”
The deputy looked away.
“What’s my brother want with these people?”
There was no answer.
“I surely do wish you’d turned out worth a damn.” Goodman looked at Skottie. “Tell me, how’m I supposed to explain this to my sister?”
“I’m sure she knows her son’s no good.”
“Don’t make it easier to say it out loud. What’re you gonna do with him?”
“As soon as I arrest him, I’ll have to take him in and explain what happened here. That might get me in some trouble with my boss right now.”
“You know what he was doing here?”
“I think they were trying to run me out of town, but I want to find out more from him before I do anything. My lieutenant is gonna want details, and I don’t have any.”
“Well, it don’t look like my nephew wants to talk to nobody just yet. Maybe when his bladder starts cramping up you’ll get him in a gabby mood.”
They left Emmaline to her lonely vigil and returned to the living room.
“Mind if I sit? Been a long night,” Goodman said.
Skottie motioned toward the couch and Goodman lowered himself with a sigh that he dragged up from somewhere deep in his body. Then he took the pistol off his belt and leaned forward, put it on the end table nearer to Skottie than himself. Goodman held his empty hands up in a gesture of peace. He took off his hat, put it on the back of the couch behind him, sat back, and crossed his legs.
“Now,” he said. “I’m hoping me and you can bury the hatchet here so we can go after the killer of that woman at the lake and the fella in the tractor fire. Could be my hands are officially tied. But maybe we can help each other out.”
Skottie put her Glock on the table next to the sheriff’s pistol, and a moment later Travis took his Eclipse out of its holster and set it with the other two weapons. Three chunks of metal that were largely useless without a hand to point them.
“What is it you want?” Skottie said.
“Take a look at this,” Travis said.
He sat next to Goodman on the couch and handed a file folder to Skottie. She took it and sat across from him in Emmaline’s best armchair. The manila folder had the Noah Roan Foundation logo embossed on the front, and there was a label on the tab that read BORMANN.
“They are holding my father captive,” Travis said.
“Who is?”
“My dad’s church,” Goodman said.
“Purity First?”
“That’s the one.”
“You know that for a fact?”
“I have not seen him,” Travis said, “but Reverend Goodman is using my father as leverage against me. Against the Foundation.”
“You need to call the authorities,” Skottie said.
“Ma’am, I am the authority,” Goodman said.
“So what’s this?” She opened the fol
der and looked at the first densely typed, single-spaced page on Roan Foundation letterhead.
“Each of us has information,” Travis said, “and I need everything I can get if I am to plan what to do. I have to find out if my father is even still alive.”
“This is your whole file on the Nazi?”
Travis leaned forward and tapped the letterhead. “You see, Ruth Elder’s death probably would have caused our investigation to dead-end if we had known, but since we had no idea our witness was dead, we kept poking around. While my father was out here doing the legwork on this, my mother was busy trying to corroborate and strengthen the claim against Bormann from our end. And yesterday she found a second witness.”
Which Skottie could see for herself. The second page in the file was a list of names culled from a newsletter subscription pool. The sixth name on the list was circled: Winnie Shrimplin.
“Armed with Ruth Elder’s information, Rudolph Bormann’s name, and the camp he was assigned to in the war, my mother went looking for other survivors who might remember him. We try to keep track of everyone who came out of the camps, everyone who might be willing to help us. Winnie Shrimplin was briefly in Ravensbrück but was shipped out to Mauthausen-Gusen, probably on the same train that took Ruth Elder.”
“Where is she now?”
“Living in Spain. She is not well enough to travel. But we do not really need her here. Earlier this evening, I sent photos of two men to my mother and she passed them along to Mrs. Shrimplin. We are waiting to hear back from her. It has been a long time, of course, but it is possible she will be able to make a positive ID from one of those pictures.”
“You said Sheriff Goodman’s dad is holding your dad,” Skottie said. “So that’s the Nazi, right?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“But you still need another witness?”
“To connect him to the war crimes, yes.”
“Where’d you get the pictures?”
“From the church,” Goodman said. “My brother, Heinrich, hangs this stuff in the hallway. He’s in charge of the church now. The guy with the glasses is my dad. The other guy’s my uncle Jacob. Not my real uncle, but he was my dad’s best friend for as long as I can remember. He died a few years back, and Dad doesn’t leave the house or church grounds much since that happened. If what the doc says is true, my dad pretty much has to be this Bormann guy you all are looking for.”
Skottie turned the page and looked at printouts of the photos Travis had taken. They were pictures of pictures, blown up and grainy with a smeared reflection of overhead lights across them, but the men’s features were clear. Neither of them looked familiar to her, but she stared hard at them anyway, trying to see something evil in their eyes or in the set of their jaws. She paid special attention to the man with glasses, wondered what Goodman was feeling, knowing what his father must have been. Finally she turned them over and moved on.
“I thought you said there were two pictures,” she said. “Who’s this?” She held up a third printout of a man slightly younger than the first two. He looked vaguely familiar to her, but she couldn’t place him.
“That,” Travis said, “is Dr. Joseph Odek.”
“I know that name.”
“He is definitely not Bormann, but he is … Well, he is a very bad man just the same, and if the church is somehow tied to him …”
“He’s from South Africa,” Skottie said.
“Yes,” Travis said. “He has been arrested twice for human trafficking and poaching, but he managed to skate away both times.”
“He was on the news.”
“He has been on our radar for a very long time.” Travis’s voice was even lower than usual, and he seemed to be forcing his words out through clenched teeth. “I even met him once.”
Skottie’s eyes opened wide. “Is that who cut you? Your throat?”
“Odek is a problem for another day,” Travis said. “But I would very much like to find out how Bormann knows him.”
“What kind of doctor is he?”
“Why?”
“If Odek’s a doctor, maybe he did something at the camps,” Skottie said.
“He is too young,” Travis said. “I believe he was a medical doctor at one time, but he found better ways to make money. Better for him.”
“Does that … I mean, what kind of—”
A familiar tune started playing in the dining room. Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River,” her ringtone for Brandon. The phone had slipped down onto a chair and it took Skottie a minute to find it, but just as she picked it up, it stopped ringing. She opened her recent history and saw that the call had indeed come from Brandon. She decided he could wait. She returned to the living room, sat back down, and kept the phone in her lap on top of the file folder.
“Sorry,” she said. “Can I ask you something?”
“What is it?” Travis said.
“I asked you before what kind of doctor you were and you changed the subject.”
“Does it really matter?”
“Not really. But I’m curious.”
“I am a doctor of theology.” Travis waved a hand in the air, and something about the gesture made Skottie think he wanted a cigarette. “God and morality and that sort of thing.”
“Why didn’t you just say so?”
“My views have evolved over time and are complicated. I do not share them lightly.”
Skottie looked at him a moment longer, then turned her eyes down, back to the file. “Anyway, there’s not a lot of new information in here.”
Travis narrowed his eyes. “It is a pending investigation,” he said.
“I didn’t mean anything by that,” Skottie said.
“No, you are right. I am tired and I am worried. When the file was put together, we were waiting for more information from my father.”
His eyes held a brittle sheen, and Skottie almost reached out to pat his hand. She stopped herself and shook her head again.
“I only meant I think I can add to this,” she said. “I did some digging of my own. You know Ruth Elder was with someone at the café when she saw Rudolph Bormann.”
“Yes,” Travis said. “Her friend Peggy.”
“And Peggy’s a nickname for Margaret. One of Maddy’s books has characters in it who are twins, but they turn out to be the same person: Peggy and Margaret.”
“Margaret Weber was Ruth’s friend Peggy?”
“I think so.”
“Then we must assume Bormann killed Mrs. Weber because Ruth told her something.”
“Which gives us a motive.”
“I’m still having trouble with this,” Goodman said. “If you told me somebody in my family was a Nazi, I’d guess it was Heinrich, not my dad.”
Travis nodded. “I am sorry.”
“Besides, my dad’s not exactly a young guy. Hard to see him running around killing people.”
“Look, it was Margaret Weber’s son who burned up in that tractor fire. He was just identified a few hours ago.”
“He was murdered,” Travis said. It wasn’t a question.
“The coroner hasn’t officially determined that,” Skottie said. “But yeah.”
“So are we thinking the Nazi killed our witness? Then killed the witness’s friend, and then killed the friend’s son? Why the son?”
“Maybe Margaret told her son about Bormann, or maybe he didn’t have any idea what was going on, but he tried to protect her or went looking for her and stumbled on something. When was the last time you heard from your dad?”
“Two days after he arrived in Kansas,” Travis said. “He talked to Ruth Elder, and she had described Rudolph Bormann. She told my father her story, or parts of it. Enough that we were able to go to work at our end, my mother was, and find our second witness in Spain. My father was supposed to call again after he had scouted this area a bit.”
“But he didn’t.”
“No,” Travis said. “Which is unusual for him.”
“He was supposed to chec
k in with Ruth Elder again, too. When she didn’t hear anything from him, she wrote everything down in a diary and hid it among her things for her daughter to find.”
“Why go to so much trouble? If she wanted my father to have the information, why hide it?”
“In case Bormann got to her first,” Skottie said. “Remember, she was trained in shorthand so she could help in the war effort, but German officers couldn’t necessarily read it. Then for years after, it became a secret language between her and her daughter. She was trying to make sure her account of things would outlast her. She must have been terrified.”
“And rightly so.”
Skottie nodded. “But could a ninety-year-old man do all this?”
“How old was Wes Weber?”
“Had to be a lot younger than ninety. Unless Bormann snuck up on him and pushed him off a cliff, then dragged his body into a tractor to burn it … Well, I don’t buy it.”
“So he has some help,” Goodman said. “My brother?”
“I think he has a whole army of helpers.”
“The church?”
Her phone rang. Brandon’s number again. She swiped the green button to answer.
“Brandon? Maddy okay?”
There was a hesitation before the person at the other end responded. “Was Brandon the fat guy?”
Skottie stopped breathing. “Who is this?”
“You need to listen real careful now.”
“No, you listen to me—”
The connection ended. Skottie stared at the phone, then looked up at the room. Travis and Sheriff Goodman were watching her.
3
“What has happened?”
“Somebody just …” Skottie left off and shook her head. She could barely breathe. She pulled the last call up and dialed the number back. The phone rang once and a different male voice answered.
“Is this Skottie Foster?”
“What is this?” she said.
“I apologize for my friend, ma’am. He gets excited.”
“Who are you?” Skottie held a finger up at Travis, who had stood and was hovering over her, trying to hear the other end of the conversation.
“Well, ma’am, I’d rather not say.”
“What do you want?”
“You didn’t call the police,” said the man on the other end of the call. “Or they’d be here by now.”
