White River Burning

by John Verdon

  “You’re forgetting the little bit of static that got us involved to begin with.”

  “The fuck are you talking about?”

  “The text on Steele’s phone. The warning that someone on his side of the fence might want to get rid of him and then blame the BDA. And that’s exactly what Beckert did—the blaming part, anyway.”

  Hardwick uttered a derisive little laugh. “You think Beckert took that shot at you?”

  “I’d like to find out.”

  “You figure he left a signed confession in his cabin?”

  Gurney ignored the comment. “You know, the motive may not be as big a mystery as you think. Maybe there’s more at stake in the upcoming election than we know about. Maybe the victims posed bigger threats than we’ve imagined.”

  “Christ, Gurney, if every politician with hopes for a big future started exterminating everyone who might get in the way, Washington would be dick-deep in dead bodies.” Hardwick lifted his Grolsch bottle and took a long, thoughtful swallow. “You by any chance catch the Carlton Flynn show before you got shot at?”

  “I did.”

  “What’d you think of Biggs?”

  “Decent. Caring. Authentic.”

  “All the qualities that guarantee defeat. He wants to take an honest, nuanced approach to interracial problems. Beckert just wants to lock the troublemaking bastards up and throw away the key. No fucking contest. Beckert wins by a landslide.”

  “Unless—”

  “Unless you manage to come up with a video of him deep-frying live kittens.”

  Gurney had set the alarm on his phone for 3:45 AM, but he was awake before that. He used the tiny upstairs bathroom next to the spartan bedroom where Hardwick put him up for the night. He dressed by the light of the bedside lamp, strapped on his ankle-holstered Beretta, and quietly descended the stairs.

  The light in the kitchen was on. Hardwick was sitting at a small breakfast table, loading a Sig Sauer’s fifteen-round magazine. A box of cartridges was open next to his cup of coffee.

  Gurney stopped in the doorway, his questioning gaze on the Sig.

  Hardwick flashed one of his glittery grins as he inserted a final round in the magazine. “Figured I’d ride shotgun on your trip to the cabin.”

  “I thought you considered it a bad idea.”

  “Bad? It’s one of the worst fucking ideas I’ve ever heard. Could easily produce a hostile confrontation with an armed adversary.”

  “So?”

  “I haven’t shot anybody in a long time, and the opportunity appeals to me.” The glittery grin came and went. “You want some coffee?”

  43

  With the full moon lower in the sky now and a thin fog creating a reflective headlight glare, the trip from Dillweed to the Clapp Hollow trailheads took nearly an hour. Gurney drove the Outback. Hardwick followed in the GTO so they’d have a backup vehicle, just in case. In case of what, exactly, hadn’t been discussed.

  When they arrived at the trailheads, Hardwick backed his GTO into the one that led to the quarries, far enough to be out of sight from the road, then joined Gurney in the Outback.

  Gurney checked his odometer, dropped the transmission into low, and drove slowly into the gun club trail.

  It was half an hour before dawn. There was no hint of moonlight in the thick pine forest. The tree trunks cast eerily shifting shadows in the foggy headlight beams as the car crept along the rutted surface. Gurney lowered the front windows, listening, but heard nothing beyond the sounds made by his own vehicle and the occasional scrape of a low-hanging bough against the roof. The air flowing in was cool and damp. He was glad he’d accepted the offer of one of Hardwick’s light windbreakers.

  They arrived at the first two forks at the odometer readings predicted by Torres’s map. At the third fork, he purposely turned onto the wrong branch of the trail and kept going until he was sure the car could no longer be seen from the branch leading to the gun club.

  “We’ll leave it here and walk in,” said Gurney, donning a ski mask and gloves. Hardwick pulled a wool hat down over his head, added sunglasses, and wrapped a scarf around the exposed portion of his face. Activating the flashlights on their phones, they got out the car, walked back to the trail intersection, and proceeded along the correct side of the fork. They soon came to a large printed sign nailed to the trunk of a trailside tree.

  STOP!

  WHITE RIVER GUN CLUB

  TRESPASSERS PROSECUTED

  A quarter mile farther the trail ended at a broad, grassy clearing. Here, in the misty overcast, Gurney could see the first hint of dawn. On the far side of the clearing he could just make out the flat gray surface of a lake.

  To the left of the clearing’s edge, his flashlight revealed the dark bulk of a log cabin. He knew from Torres’s map that this was the one Beckert and Turlock shared. He remembered that there were a dozen similar clearings and cabins along the edge of the lake, connected by a trail which, going in the opposite direction, led eventually to the playground at Willard Park.

  “I’ll check out the inside,” said Gurney. “You take a look around the outside.”

  Hardwick nodded, unsnapped the safety strap on his holster, and headed for the far side of the cabin. Gurney moved the Beretta from his ankle holster to the pocket of his windbreaker and approached the log structure. The moist air here carried the distinctive scents of pine and lake water. As he got closer he noted that the cabin was resting on a traditional concrete-block foundation, suggesting the existence of at least a crawl space beneath it.

  He switched his phone from its flashlight to its compass app and proceeded per Payne’s instructions to the northeast corner of the building and from there due east to a foot-square piece of bluestone. Lifting it, he found a small plastic bag. Switching back to his flashlight, he saw that the bag contained two keys rather than just the one Payne had referred to.

  He returned to the cabin. The first key he tried unlocked the door. As he was about to push it open Hardwick reappeared from the opposite side of the building.

  “Find anything?” asked Gurney.

  “Outhouse with a composting toilet. Small generator. Big shed with a big padlock.”

  Gurney handed him the second key. “Try this.”

  “Better not be full of spiders,” said Hardwick, taking the key and heading back the way he came. “I fucking hate spiders.”

  Gurney pushed the cabin door open. Sweeping his flashlight back and forth, he entered cautiously and advanced slowly toward the center of a good-sized, pine-paneled room. At one end there was a stove, a sink, and a small refrigerator, no doubt run by the generator when the cabin was in use. At the other end there was a propane heater, a spartan couch, and two hard-looking armchairs set at right angles to the couch. Directly in front of him, there was a rectangular table on a rectangular rug with a rectangular pattern. Behind the table a ladder ascended to a loft.

  Curious about the possibility of a crawl space, he began looking for access. He worked his way around the room, examining the floorboards. Coming back to where he started, he moved the table, folded back the rug, and ran his light over the area.

  Had it not been for the gleaming brass finger hole, he might have missed it, so precisely aligned was the trapdoor with the surrounding boards. Bending over and placing his finger in the hole, he found that the door pivoted up easily on silent hinges. Shining his light down into the dark space below, he was surprised to see it was nearly as deep as a regular cellar.

  He descended the plain wooden stairs. When his feet reached the concrete floor he discovered that his head just cleared the exposed floor joists above him. Everything in the beam of his flashlight appeared remarkably clean—no dust, no cobwebs, no mold. The air was dry and odorless. Against one wall there was a long worktable, and on a pegboard above it were rows of tools—saws, screwdrivers, wrenches, hammers, chisels, drill bits, rulers, clamps—each group arranged in size order from left to right.

/>   It reminded him of the way the nuns at his grammar school used to line up the kids in the schoolyard after recess, in size order, from the shortest to the tallest, before marching them back into the building. He found the thought, like most of his childhood memories, unpleasant.

  He turned his attention back to the matter at hand, noting that the only empty space on the pegboard occurred near the larger end of the row of clamps. The missing clamp triggered the memory of his conversation with Paul Aziz and the photos of the crime-scene ropes showing flattened spots consistent with the use of a clamp.

  Against the opposite wall he saw a stack of two-by-four framing studs. He walked slowly around the cellar, making sure he wasn’t missing anything significant. He checked the floor, the concrete-block walls, the spaces between the joists above his head. He found nothing unusual, other than the remarkable orderliness of the place and the absence of dust.

  When he came to one end of the stack of studs he noted that it was twelve studs high by twelve deep. The ends on that side were aligned perfectly with each other, no stud even a millimeter out of place. It occurred to him that such an obsessive concern for symmetry could be the basis of a clinical diagnosis.

  As he was moving past the perfect eight-foot-long stack, however, his eye was caught by an irregular shadow at its opposite end. He stopped, aimed his beam of light across that end of the stack, and saw that one stud was sticking out about a quarter of an inch, noticeable only because of the faultless alignment of the others.

  It seemed unlikely that a factory-cut stud could have emerged from the process a quarter inch longer than others in the same batch. He laid his phone-flashlight on a stair tread, the beam aimed at the stack. He began to disassemble the stack, one row at a time.

  When he reached the level of the protruding stud, he felt, for the second time since he’d become involved in the case, an unmistakable frisson.

  The center sections of four studs in the middle of the stack had been cut away, leaving only about two feet at each end. The result was a concealed compartment two studs wide, two studs deep, and four feet long. The ends of the cut studs had been lined up with the ends of the intact studs—with the exception of that one stud end that stuck out.

  He saw the reason for it. The end was kept from being aligned with its neighbors by the contents of the hidden compartment: a classic Winchester Model 70 bolt-action rifle, emitting the distinctive odor of a recently fired weapon; a red-dot laser scope; a muzzle-blast suppressor; and a box of 30-06 full-metal-jacket cartridges.

  Gurney gingerly made his way back up the stairs. As he stepped up through the open trapdoor into the main room of the cabin, Hardwick came in the front door. In the pale light Gurney could see that he’d removed the sunglasses, hat, and scarf that were supposed to be hiding his identity from possible security cameras.

  “No need for that ski mask,” he said to Gurney. “We’ve got what we need to go public.”

  “You found something?”

  “A used branding iron.” He inserted a small dramatic pause. “How do I know it was used? Because there appears to be burned skin stuck to the letters on the end of it. The letters, by the way, are KRS.”

  “Jesus.”

  “That’s not all. There’s also a red motocross bike. Like the one that was seen zipping away from Poulter Street. You find anything in here?”

  “A rifle. Probably the rifle. Hidden in a pile of lumber in the cellar.”

  “Is it possible we’ve got these evil bastards by the balls?” Hardwick’s innate skepticism appeared to be battling with the satisfaction of a successful hunt. He looked around suspiciously, his flashlight beam stopping at the loft. “What’s up there?”

  “Let’s find out.” Gurney led the way up the ladder and stepped into an open-ended room above the kitchen. The underside of the steeply pitched roof was paneled with pine boards, and their distinctive scent was strong. There were two beds, one on each side of the space, made up in crisp military style. There was a low bench at the foot of each and a rectangular rug on the floor between them. The loft reflected the obsessive orderliness apparent everywhere in the cabin—all straight lines, right angles, and not a speck of dirt.

  Gurney began checking one of the beds and Hardwick the other. Feeling under the mattress, he soon came upon something cold, smooth, and metallic. He lifted the mattress out of the way, revealing a slim notebook-style computer. Almost simultaneously Hardwick pointed to a cell phone taped to the bottom of the footboard of the other bed.

  “Leave everything where it is,” said Gurney. “We need to call this in, get an evidence team out here.”

  “Who are you going to call it in to?”

  “The DA. Kline can get Torres reassigned to him on a temporary basis, along with the evidence techs, but that’ll be his call. The key thing going forward will be for the investigation and the personnel working on it to be controlled by an agency outside the WRPD.”

  “Another option would be the sheriff’s department.”

  The thought of Goodson Cloutz gave Gurney a touch of nausea. “I’d vote for Kline.”

  Hardwick’s icy grin appeared. “Sheridan will have a hard time with this—having been such a huge fan of Beckert. Going to be tough for him to see the big shit getting sucked down the drain. How you think he’s going to deal with that?”

  “We’ll find out.”

  Hardwick’s eyes narrowed. “You think the little creep’ll try to pull off an end run around the branding iron and rifle to keep from admitting he was wrong?”

  “We’ll find out.” Gurney switched his phone from Flashlight to Call mode.

  In the middle of entering Kline’s number, he was stopped cold by a burst of canine howling and snarling. It sounded like a crazed pack of—of what? Wolves? Coyotes? Whatever they were, there were a lot of them, they were in full attack mode, and they were coming closer.

  In a matter of seconds the chilling sound had reached a wild intensity—and it seemed to be concentrated directly in front of the cabin.

  The frenzy of the sound was raising gooseflesh on Gurney’s arms.

  He and Hardwick reached for their weapons in unison, flicked off the safeties, and moved to the open edge of the loft where they had clear lines of sight down to the windows and door.

  A high-pitched whistling sound pierced the din, and as suddenly as the savage uproar began, it stopped.

  Cautiously they descended the ladder, Gurney first. He moved quietly to the front of the cabin and peered out through one of the windows. At first he saw nothing but the dark, drooping shapes of the hemlocks surrounding the clearing. The grass, which in the beam of his phone light had been a deep green, was in the dawn mist a featureless gray.

  But not entirely featureless. He noted a patch of darker gray, perhaps thirty feet out from the window. He switched his phone back to Flashlight mode, but its beam only created a glare in the fog.

  He gradually eased the front door open.

  All he could hear was the slow dripping of water from the roof.

  “The fuck are you doing?” whispered Hardwick.

  “Cover me. And hold the door open in case I need to come back in a hurry.”

  He stepped quietly out of the cabin, Beretta in a ready-to-fire two-handed grip, and advanced toward the dark shape on the ground.

  As he drew nearer, he realized he was looking at a body . . . a body that was somehow contorted, twisted into an odd position, as if it had been thrown there by a violent gust of wind. After moving a few steps closer, he stopped, amazed by the amount of blood glistening in the wet grass. Still closer, he could see that much of the clothing on the body was shredded, exposing ripped and gouged flesh. The left hand was mangled, the fingers crushed together. The right hand was missing, the wrist a grisly red stump with splintered bones sticking out of it. The victim’s throat had been lacerated, the carotid arteries and windpipe literally torn to pieces. Less than half of the face was intact, giving it a
hideous expression.

  But there was something familiar about that face. And the muscular bulk of the body. Gurney realized with a start that he was looking at what was left of Judd Turlock.

  IV

  THE HORROR SHOW

  44

  Twenty-four hours after the discovery of the gruesome homicide at the cabin, Gurney was heading into the County Office Building for an early-morning meeting with Sheridan Kline.

  The ponderous redbrick exterior, coated with a century of soot and grime, dated back to the structure’s original use as a mental facility—the Bumblebee Lunatic Asylum—named after its eccentric founder, George Bumblebee. In the midsixties the interior of the structure had been gutted, redesigned, and repurposed to house the local bureaucracy. Cynics enjoyed pointing out that the building’s history made it an ideal home for its current inhabitants.

  The lobby security system had been upgraded since Gurney’s last visit during the harrowing case of the bride who’d been decapitated at her wedding reception. It now involved two separate electronic screenings and the presentation of multiple forms of identification. He was eventually directed to follow a series of signs that brought him to a frosted-glass door bearing the words DISTRICT ATTORNEY.

  He wondered which version of Kline he’d be meeting with.

  Would it be the baffled, disbelieving, nearly speechless man he’d encountered on the phone the previous morning when he’d called to tell him about the discovery of the rifle, the branding iron, the red motorcycle, and Turlock’s mauled body? Or would it be the man who showed up an hour later at the scene with Mark Torres, Bobby Bascomb, Garrett Felder, Shelby Towns, and Paul Aziz—hell-bent to demonstrate his decisiveness by issuing nonstop orders to people who knew far more about processing crime scenes than he did?