Cutting Edge

by Robert W. Walker

  Play it out. Play out the game. But this was no ordinary game. This was real life, with real consequences. A part of him didn't feel comfortable playing with people's feelings and emotions. It was anathema to all that was positive on the Internet, where such things didn't routinely exist. Sure, you heard of the occasional Net partners making a random date, falling in love in the real world and getting married, but you never heard of the statistics on the divorce rate for such Net surfers.

  Still, he had committed to the game in this world now.

  “Play it out,” he told himself again. Risk it all, he added as he found his way back to his booth, called the waiter back, asked the other man to deep-six the sandwich in favor of two veal scallopini lunches and a dark cabernet, or Chianti, perhaps.

  This was going to set him back some, but it was what Detective James “Bond” Pardee would do, right? he asked himself.

  The waiter only shrugged, lifted the sandwich plate, and made a beeline for the kitchen. Meanwhile, Randy awaited Darlene's appearance.

  “SEVENTEEN

  “Now it's your turn,” Lucas said to Meredyth. “How come we know so much already about the victim in Oregon, his name, his line of business? How did you first hear of him?”

  “Randy.”

  “Really?”

  “He saw something come in over the computer on it.”

  “So, what else do we know about the victim?”

  “We don't know enough about Little. We need to know a great deal more about him,” she suggested. “I understand he's originally from Texas—not far from Houston, in fact, a town called Sealy, where he grew up. He owns— owned—a mansion estate there, but he also maintains a house in Malibu, California. He was a man building a fortune, obsessed by work, was the way his wife put it.”

  “Who supplied all the details? You didn't get all that from a birthmark or from Randy.”

  “A sheriff's deputy found his wallet at the crime scene.”

  “Really? An oversight on the killer's part, perhaps? Especially if this has anything to do with Mootry, which I rather doubt...”

  She frowned in response, asking, “Do you always have to be so damned negative, Stonecoat?”

  He shrugged this away. “So... what'd they do, notify next of kin, put out an APB for information on the guy, what?”

  “Seems everyone in Oregon, or at least this area of the state, knew the victim well, at least by reputation. So they contacted his wife. She and their children are all torn up about it, they say. She had to be hospitalized after they told her. Still haven't officially identified the body beyond what was found at the scene.”

  “They found his wallet? But he wasn't wearing any clothes?”

  “It must've fallen. Got kicked up underneath the car, where an alert deputy found it.”

  A signal bell overhead pinged and lit up, telling them to fasten their seat belts for landing. The military jet touched down in Oregon with the ease of a glider, the expert pilot making it look easy. There wasn't much here, a small terminal and two strips of asphalt for an airport with a handful of the big carriers coming and going. The highway murder had occurred somewhere between Medford and Rogue River.

  They were immediately met by the local deputy, Harold Lempel, who had been sent to greet them, to take them first to the morgue and then out to the crime scene on Interstate 5 just outside Rogue River, Oregon. Harold was big at six feet three, his shoulders wide and thick as cinder blocks, his face about the same, with an affable smile and how-kin-I-hep-y'all-folks attitude.

  In the squad car, Lucas asked, “Are you the deputy who found the wallet?” Harold beamed. “Yes, sir, that'd be me. Was there anything else found at the scene?”

  “Just the worst nightmare I ever witnessed, and I've seen some road kills that involved power lines and bodies up trees, sir.”

  At the morgue, they were ushered into a deathly silent room where the victim—or rather what little remained of the victim—had been placed beneath a sheet, the arrow still protruding from the chest, creating a small teepee effect over the torso. The man who led them in was the local pathologist working for the Rogue River hospital. The nearest medical examiner was in Eugene, Oregon, and so far, no one from his office had come down. It was quite possibly a stroke of good luck for Dr. Sanger and Lucas that no official coroner had yet examined the body, since everything had been carefully preserved intact for the man or woman coming from Eugene.

  “FBI may be coming in this afternoon to have a look-see also,” said the doe-eyed, middle-aged pathologist. “Damnedest bit of grief I ever come across in all my years, I can tell you.”

  Thus far, there seemed little interest in the death of Timothy Little in any place other than Rogue River. Speculation about the killing ran high there. Little was killed by renegade union men who got wind that he was going to sell the local plant. Word had it that some of the meanest of the homeboys just got together, got liquored up for courage, dug out their hunting bows, and went after Mr. Little, literally cutting him off at the pass.

  Meredyth instinctively pulled back when the sheet was pulled away. She and Lucas were treated to a Judge Mootry look-alike murder victim, a hacked-up torso—no head, no limbs, and no private parts. A thick titanium metal shaft, looking like a sleek metal post, with a stylized, aluminum-feathered end, protruded straight up and out from the heart, a direct hit.

  “Whoever this guy is, he sure as hell shoots straight,” said Lucas, more to hear his own voice than anything else.

  Harold, from a dark corner, said, 'They say the car had to be moving at between sixty-five and seventy when it left the road, and that the arrows—two of them—came straight through the windshield.”

  Meredyth was gasping for air, wanting to get out, and she did so. Lucas nodded to the little pathologist and said thanks before allowing Meredyth out. The place reeked from the indescribable fleshy items put up in formaldehyde-filled jars.

  “Seen enough to convince you there's something very bizarre going on?” she asked.

  “I have, but we're going to need pictures to convince Lawrence and the others back in Houston.”

  “Don't worry. I intend to get a copy of every photo they've taken here.” Harold had stayed back long enough for his third look at the body.

  He went past them now in search of a Pepsi-Cola machine down the hall, where he inhaled what was in the can in his bear like claw.

  Meredyth said to Harold, 'Take us to the scene, where it happened.”

  “Well, maybe first you'll want to see the car.”

  “You impounded it?” asked Lucas.

  “Had to get it outta there.”

  “You moved it.”

  “Don't worry,” he assured them. “We marked where it was, where it left the road, all that.”

  “Did you drive all over the surrounding area? Park your squad cars over vital evidence?” pressed Stonecoat.

  “We obscured some tire prints, but there wasn't much in the way of evidence found out there.”

  “Where's the sheriff? Why isn't he talking to us?”

  “Lowell... Sheriff Barnette's a busy man,” replied Deputy Harold Lempel. “He's up at the courthouse right now, dealing with news media, all that. He thought you'd appreciate his keeping the media off your backs.”

  Lucas wondered if the local sheriff thought there might possibly be a book or movie deal in it for him. “So you're our escort?”

  “'Fraid you're stuck with me. But the sheriff'll see you later on.”

  “Okay, take us to the vehicle.”

  Meredyth asked Harold, “Does the sheriff believe it was the act of local men?”

  “He has taken to the theory, yes'm. He knows... well, we all of us know some boys here capable of such if they get swimming in their booze.”

  “But you said yourself it'd take a hell of a shot to hit a moving target at seventy miles an hour.”

  “We figure those boys just must a come right up on the car, right next to it, passed it a bit, and fired thro
ugh the windshield, looks like... Looks to us like getting their game man was all they could think of.”

  “Their game man?” repeated Meredyth.

  Lucas poked a large finger at the deputy and asked, “And you believe that?”

  “Well, sir... what else might explain Mr. Little's getting himself killed like this?”

  “Did you know Little?” asked Meredyth

  “Everybody in these parts knows of Mr. Little.”

  Lucas asked, “A lot of people owed him big-time?”

  “Yes, sir, they did. Owed him their livelihoods.

  Meredyth seized on this. “And owing sometimes breeds contempt, doesn't it, Deputy?”

  “That's sometimes so, Doctor, yes.”

  “Was there any show of this contempt before now?” she added.

  “None beyond the usual palaver, no.”

  “Palaver?”

  “You know, beer-stool talk. Mostly nonsense, but that nonsense has some men behind bars this mornin', ma'am.”

  “Still, your sheriff here thinks there was sufficient animosity toward Little to see him murdered in this brutal a fashion?” Meredyth pressed.

  “Well, talk around Medford was he—Mr. Little, that is—was going to close down the plant.”

  She shook her head. “I thought there was a planned buyout.”

  “Some figured it was one step removed from a shutdown, that the buyout was ASCAN's way to write off tax losses, or so I'm told. That at the very least, they would move the plant elsewhere, to some big industrial park outside Kansas City, I think.”

  “Still makes a weak argument for murder, Deputy Lempel.”

  “Gotta agree with you, sir, but Sheriff Barnette's got to do what he's got to do, I reckon.”

  “Gotcha,” added Lucas, knowing that in the face of publicity doing nothing could be lethal. Lucas again said, “Let's have a look at the car.”

  The deputy gestured for them to follow him, and behind his back they had a quick powwow, Lucas saying in a whisper, “Still, if this guy was about to cut off everybody's livelihood...”

  “Whataya saying, Lucas? That news of the Houston arrow murderer has spread, and that the killer or killers here-”

  “A copycat can't be ruled out. Not on what little we've seen.”

  She silently but reluctantly had to agree. “You think Lawrence already knew as much? That he sent us on this wild-goose chase just to get me off his back for a while?”

  “Maybe... maybe not.”

  “Can't you make up your mind?”

  “Can't say... Too little to go on.”

  “God, you can be exasperating with that.”

  “Caution is a pill you may wish to try yourself, Doctor.”

  She only gritted her teeth and continued on, following Deputy Lempel through a pair of double doors, across a parking lot, and to an impound lot.

  The clean two-and three-centimeter holes in the windshield looked like large, oversized bullet holes, and they told the whole story. Even safety glass, designed to hold in place like a shaky spider web, was no match for the crossbow arrow when the arrow was traveling at something upwards at 115 miles per hour and the car at seventy, and given the impact that must have occurred. What car manufacturer's test involved steel-shafted arrows at such speeds? If Little was traveling at sixty-five miles an hour, and two arrows :came careening through his front windshield, he was headed :or disaster even had they missed his vital organs.

  Lucas's high whistle filled the impound yard where he stood, staring at the damage. 'The crossbow had to be light-powered with a scope to make this kind of hit, and it'd be pulling upwards of two or three hundred pounds, depending on the distance the sharpshooter took. Maybe the killer did come up close on the vehicle.”

  “Then perhaps the sheriff was right, that some good of boys drove right up to the vehicle, and in a drunken state, someone fired.”

  Lucas and Meredyth considered the possibilities as they looked over the Alamo rental, a once beautiful 1995 Olds Cutlass, midnight-blue with ocean-blue interior now stained with an ugly brown-purple, the sort of hue you got by mixing all the Easter egg colors together, Meredyth thought.

  Lucas thought the bloodstains looked like bear paw tracks in the mud.

  The passenger-side seat was untouched, but the driver's seat was ripped and bloody, and here one of the two arrows remained embedded in the cushion.

  “What do you make of this?” she asked Lucas.

  “The man was hit by two arrows.”

  “No, only one in his body out on the hood where we found it,” said the deputy. “Damnedest sight I ever seen.”

  “The second arrow had to've hit him, too,” countered Lucas.

  “How can you tell?” she asked.

  “At the speed this second arrow was traveling—to cleanly slide through the glass”—Lucas's partitioned mind thought how carmakers would now have to design tests to ward off crossbow attacks—”this cushion wouldn't be enough to stop its progression into the backseat,” he explained as he climbed about the interior, pointing. “So, it had to be intercepted by something far more substantial than the cushion, most probably Mr. Little's arm, from the look of these blood spatters. See how they fan out in rays in this direction. There on the passenger-side panel and window as well.”

  Meredyth shook her head in disbelief and confusion. “But if he was traveling at seventy miles an hour when the damned arrow hit, how could the killer have placed a second one into his heart with the car careening all over the road?”

  Stonecoat looked her in the eye. “There were two arrows, fired simultaneously. Now, unless the bowman was using a double crossbow...”

  'Two assassins?” She nodded. “My God.”

  'There had to be two bows fired at the same instant, and that meant two sharpshooters, two assassins at minimum.” It made them each rethink the Mootry killing while Harold gulped, burped, and exclaimed, “Damn, you think so? That'd fit the sheriff's suspicions.”

  'The blood here, I take it, has been determined to be that of the victim?”

  “According to tests,” replied Deputy Lempel. “We'll want copies of any and all tests and photos your department has shot, Deputy,” said Meredyth, a sense of gloom invading her heart. “Yes, sir, ma'am, Dr. Sanger.”

  “Now, will you take us out to the crime scene?” she asked, trying to quell her nerves.

  “Right away, at your service. The Medford Police Department is at your service,” he repeated it like a well-rehearsed line.

  Stonecoat whispered in her ear. “You okay? You look a bit pale-faced.”

  “I'm fine. Let's get on with it.”

  EIGHTEEN

  They stood on the lonely stretch of Interstate 5 outside Rogue River, Oregon, where Timothy Little had met his death, dusk just beginning her first warnings, the western sky enormous, entertaining no clouds, stern and grim and going on forever. This particular stretch of highway was all loneliness and silence, alloyed with the vague and trivial life of insects. The roadbed here rose ahead of them on a slant that took a sharp curve and a hill ahead. In the median there were trees, a thick copse of jack pine and fir wherein black holes peeped out at them. Anyone or anything could be hidden in the dense woods around the scene of the murder.

  If it were a setup, there could be no better isolated spot to attack long-awaited prey. Other than the black tire marks of the single vehicle, there was no indication a chase took place, no second set of squealing tires.

  “If we're here, looking at where the car came to rest,”

  Lucas said to Harold Lempel, “then whereabouts did you decide Little first lost control of the car?”

  “Back up yonder,” Harold pointed.

  'Take us back there, please.”

  There was nothing save a police marker to indicate what horror had taken place here two nights before. Harold backed the squad car along the shoulder. Passing motorists, seeing his flashing lights, slowed, but not by much, children in back seats waving naively and wildly at t
hem.

  In a moment, they came to the spot where Little's tire marks indicated he was first in trouble. Lucas and Meredyth climbed from the squad car to have a cursory look at the black tire marks snaking all over the road.

  Meredyth asked Deputy Lempel, “Your office has gotten no calls from witnesses; absolutely no one saw anything?”

  “Not squat, Doctor. People must've seen something, flashing lights twirling with the car, something, but no... nobody wants to get involved.”

  Lucas looked up and down the roadbed, his attention again going to the median across from them. Once more a stand of trees provided a dark cave in the crook of a bend just before the motorist would reach the bridge up ahead. Lucas walked across the asphalt to the median, stepped past road kill, and walked toward the trees, while the others stared after him. He pointed toward the trees ahead and shouted across the roadway, saying, “I'm going down there to have a look.”

  Two cars sped by, making it impossible to hear him. He went toward the grassy tree oasis some hundred or so yards off to the left.

  “What's your friend doing?” Harold asked Meredyth.

  “He's part Indian,” she said with a shrug, which seemed to say it all.

  “A tracker, you mean?”

  She had read somewhere in Stonecoat's file that he listed among his abilities hunting and trapping and tracking, all lessons learned from his days on the reservation near Huntsville, Texas, where he had grown up.

  “We scoured the whole area. He ain't going to find anything in the median anyway.”

  Both the deputy and Meredyth put their dark glasses on. It had been a brilliant morning in which white struggled against the blue sky of an Oregon afternoon, one of those days when the wind tells you you're lucky to be alive so you can breathe it in, and now the sun in the west blinded them with golden plumes, making it difficult to see just what Stonecoat was up to. In fact, it was as if the Indian had walked into a time warp. He had essentially disappeared. Meredyth could just barely pick out his form. He was camouflaged by the stand of trees he now knelt among.