His finger pointed across the length of the lawn to the dark woods at the left edge of the parking lot.
“That shot would have cleared your car, right?”
“Yes,” I said. “By a good five or six feet in front of the hood.”
“I think we ought to throw some light down there, Newly,” Efird said. “Headlights, flashlights, as much as we can get so we don’t destroy any evidence stumbling around during the search.”
“We could wait for daylight,” Newland said.
“That’s eight more hours of potential drizzle,” I said. “If you act now, you might find a depression where the guy lay in wait. I wouldn’t want that washed away.”
“Okay,” Newland agreed. “I also think he had to be close to the fringe of the woods. Otherwise, his aim would have been more limited by the underbrush.”
Efird organized four cars in a semicircle concentrating their beams on the target area. Then he and Newland stepped carefully into the woods.
In less than two minutes, Efird called out, “I think I’ve found the spot. Come straight in behind me.”
Nakayla and I watched Newland swing around and approach the way Efird requested. For another five minutes, they played their halogen flashlights over the scene and along the line of sight to the Kenilworth.
“Sam, you and Nakayla come in. Follow my beam.” Newland flipped his light in my face and then directed it along the ground, indicating the path we should follow. He guided us to a spot right beside Efird and him.
Efird ran his beam over a section of the ground in front of us. In a few spots, the wet, dead leaves had been scraped aside to reveal black soil underneath. I guessed the shooter dug in his boots as he lay in position.
“The slight incline matches the overall rise to the terrace,” Efird said. “He had a perfect angle, either resting his elbow on the ground or using a barrel-mounted bipod. If there’s a matching depression, it’s too faint to eyeball. The lab boys might be able to find it.”
“That could give us the height of the shooter,” I said.
Efird played his beam about five or six feet in front of the boot marks. “Maybe, especially if it’s an elbow imprint.”
“What’s that?” I pointed about a foot to the left. “At the edge of your light.”
Efird eased the beam over.
“Stop,” I ordered. “See the twigs?” I pointed to two stems with green laurel leaves.
“I don’t want to disturb the ground to get them,” Efird said.
“You don’t need to,” I said. “There’s no laurel around the immediate area. Clearly someone brought them here. And I can see the ends are cut.”
“Camo,” Newland said.
“That’s my guess,” I agreed. “He probably wove laurel in his hat to break the profile of his head. Against the backdrop of the underbrush and in this drizzle, he’d be virtually invisible.”
Newland looked at the front of the inn. “The shot’s probably sixty or seventy yards.”
“That’s my estimate,” Efird said.
“Then how did he know you’d pull up to the entrance?” Newland asked me.
“I don’t know that he did. If I parked my car in one of the spaces beside us, I’d walk up the drive to the front entrance. He’d have all the time in the world to shoot me in the back.”
“Yes, but you didn’t park. You drove up and he shot Jason coming out of the lobby. You think he would have known your car if he was planning to ambush you after you parked.”
“Not necessarily. A night vision scope with high-power magnification. My little limp with my leg. Easy enough to identify me.”
“How did he know you wouldn’t park around back?”
“He didn’t. The front lot is the first one you see driving in. He couldn’t be in two places at once so he had to pick one. This vantage point offered the best route of escape.”
“We need to look for signs of his flight as well.” Newland turned to Efird. “Do you mind working with Al and Ted to tape off the area?”
“No problem,” Efird said. “Are you taking Sam into the station for his statement?”
“No. I’d like to find a dry spot to talk before we go downtown.”
“How about my apartment?” I suggested. “There’s hot coffee. Efird, you’re welcome to come up when you’re done. I’ll give you the code.”
“Thanks. I might take you up on it.”
Nakayla put on a pot of French roast while Newland and I sat at my dining table.
“Have you had any threats?” he asked me.
“No.”
“Then who have you pissed off? And don’t say no one because you’re a master of annoyance.”
“You know I’m working on the skeleton case. I’ve interviewed several people in the last few days.”
Newland pulled a notepad from his jacket pocket. “Give me the details, and don’t give me any crap about client privilege. The guy’s still out there and he’ll soon learn you’re not dead. At least not yet.”
I didn’t argue. I gave him the whole story from the mushroom hunt to Hewitt Donaldson’s news that Chesterson dropped the charges against Lucille. When I finished, Newland immediately jumped to his person of interest.
“Mick Emory,” he said like the very words tasted bad. “Now there’s a waste of human flesh.”
“So you know him?”
“Oh, yeah. He’s been caught with the occasional fenced item. And we suspect he uses the pawnshop to launder cash. Not big amounts. Walking-around money for some small time meth dealers up in the hills. Did you come on hard with him?”
“I exerted the charms of my sparkling personality.”
“And Jason Fretwell was with you?”
“Yeah, he was playing the role of gun enthusiast.”
“Did he exert his sparkling personality?”
I remembered Jason pointing his mechanical hand at Mick Emory and pulling an imaginary trigger. “We both played with his head a little bit.”
“And then you gave him your card and told him to get in touch if he found the rifle for Jason.”
“Correct. Why?”
“Maybe it came in. Maybe he made a home delivery.”
I shook my head. “The guy’s chicken shit. All bluster.”
“You don’t have to be brave to hide in the dark and shoot someone who’s unarmed. That’s also chicken shit.”
Newland had a point, although I couldn’t see how our little tiff with Emory provoked such a reaction.
“Maybe Emory didn’t care which one of you he shot if he thought both of you dissed him,” Newland said. “Did Jason say anything after he was hit?”
“No. He was unconscious when I reached him.”
Nakayla set two cups of black coffee on the table. “He did say he had something interesting to tell Sam and me.”
“When was this?” Newland asked.
“When he phoned to say he got the job. Sam also heard him.”
“That’s right,” I agreed.
Newland took a sip of coffee and saluted Nakayla with the cup. “Excellent, thank you.” He set it back on the table. “Did Jason seem anxious or excited about whatever it was?”
“Hard to say,” I said. “He was excited about the new job and that he was coming to dinner. Whatever he wanted to tell us could have been mundane and still wrapped up in his overall emotion.”
Newland let it go. “If the shooter did think Jason was you, who would have seen you in those clothes recently?”
“I wore them last Saturday when I found the skeleton. So, it would be the mushroom club, Donnie Nettles, now murdered, Ed Bell who owns the property, Deputy Overcash, deputies from Greenville, South Carolina—.”
“Overcash,” Newland interrupted. “The deputy you said Chesterson threw under the bus?”
I sm
iled. “Yeah, but if he was going to shoot somebody, I figure it would be the D.A.”
Newland wasn’t amused. “And the others you’ve talked with were John and William Lang, Jennifer Lang and her partner Judith Crenshaw. Anybody else?”
“Well, if you’re asking for everyone, there’s Lucille and Marsha Montgomery. Also David Brose, the historian at the folk school.”
“Okay.” Newland looked back over his notes and then closed the pad. “I’ll talk to all of them. Starting with Mr. Emory. He has more guns than good sense.”
“Maybe one less. There was an empty spot in a display case of Berettas, a model that might match the gun that killed Donnie Nettles.”
Newland re-opened his pad and jotted a note. “Emory should have sales records.”
“Did you know his father?” I asked.
“No. Not alive.”
Nakayla sat down. I stared at Newland. It was an odd thing to say.
“I was a young patrolman. I was called to the pawnshop the morning Mick Emory found his father’s body.”
“The suicide,” I said.
“That’s what it looked like.”
“It wasn’t?”
“It was. According to the coroner’s inquest. But the investigation started as a homicide. That’s standard procedure. There was an old detective must have been thirty years my senior. Mark Patterson. He’s long dead. Patterson complimented me on the way I secured the scene at the pawnshop. He told me to always approach a death as a homicide. A killer will look for a way to pass off murder as something else. Usually an accident or a suicide because the best way to get away with murder is never have it revealed to be a murder. I never forgot what he said.”
“He was right.” I suddenly became conscious of my prosthesis, damp from the rain and irritating my stump. “I lost my leg because someone tried to kill me by making the attack look like Iraqi insurgents. A murder passing for a war casualty.”
“Nothing new about that,” Newland said. “King David sent his loyal soldier Uriah into the front lines of battle so David could marry his widow Bathsheba. Lust, betrayal, adultery. Pick a motive. Maybe the worst is when murder passes for righteousness, soaking streets in the Middle East with the blood of innocent men, women, and children, or leaving a smoking pile of rubble and bodies where the Twin Towers of lower Manhattan once stood. You can try passing it off as something else, Sam, but it’s still murder.”
Chapter Twenty-one
I woke at four when a voice from a subconscious corner of my brain refused to stay mute. Nakayla lay sleeping beside me, her breathing as regular as a metronome.
We were at her house where we came after I gave Newland my statement at the Asheville police station. I couldn’t face going back to my apartment. Jason had spread his clean clothes across my bed in preparation to either hang or fold them. I would deal with them later.
The voice in my head that roused me wasn’t Jason’s or Nakayla’s. It was Detective Newland posing a question he hadn’t asked. “If you were that easy to identify, then why weren’t you?” I’d argued that the shooter would have been able to spot me walking from the front parking lot to the Kenilworth. A rifle scope powerful enough to yield a perfectly placed shot to Jason’s head could also provide an image magnified enough to see the quarry wasn’t me. Although the shirt and slicker Jason wore were mine, they weren’t that distinctive. But, the artificial hand at the end of his right sleeve was. That trumped our similar height and coloring.
If I wasn’t the target, then why Jason? His involvement with the case started and ended with Mick Emory. Newland would be all over that lead. Either the shooter had made a hasty decision to fire based solely on clothing, or he knew damn well who was in his crosshairs. That meant parallel investigations, one with me as the target and the other focusing on Jason Fretwell. And if it were tied to Jason’s involvement with our case, then there was some connection Nakayla and I were unaware of.
“I’ve got some other interesting information for you, but it can wait till we’re all together.” Jason’s words from yesterday afternoon. From the time Nakayla and I left for the folk school to when we spoke with him at the mouth of the Nantahala Gorge, Jason had learned something of interest to both Nakayla and me.
Suddenly, I had an urgent desire to get back to my apartment. If any trace of Jason’s information existed, it would be there.
I slid out of bed, felt along the floor for my prosthesis, and dressed in the guest room. I wrote Nakayla a short note asking her to call me when she got up.
The rain had stopped and the cooler air of a high-pressure system dispersed the last remnants of the clouds. Traffic consisted of a few Saturday morning delivery trucks and farmers headed to the Asheville market on Charlotte Street. In no more than fifteen minutes, I pulled into the long driveway of the Kenilworth.
Retracing the route I’d taken less than twelve hours earlier, I sped passed the site where the gunman had waited. I parked in the rear and jogged to the exterior door, still unsure as to who had been the bullet’s target.
In my bedroom, Jason’s duffel bag sat empty at the foot of the bed. His socks, underwear, shirts, and slacks were on the spread where he’d laid them after taking them out of the dryer. On the nightstand were the two Jack Reacher novels I brought him the previous Monday. A slip of paper marked a spot about two-thirds of the way through the top volume. The makeshift bookmark was blank, a strip torn from a sheet of computer paper.
The chair at my small desk was pulled out. Jason had sat there. When I touched the spacebar of the keyboard, the computer screen flared to life. The text on the page read,
WELCOME TO THE US ARMY SNIPER SCHOOL.
WHEN YOU VOLUNTEER TO UNDERGO THE TRAINING HERE, YOU ACCEPT ONE OF THE MOST DEMANDING CHALLENGES THE ARMY HAS TO OFFER. SNIPERS HAVE A PROUD HERITAGE WHICH CAN BE TRACED BACK TO THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR. UPON COMPLETION OF YOUR TRAINING, YOU WILL BE A MEMBER OF THAT ELITE GROUP. IT TAKES A SPECIAL TYPE OF SOLDIER TO MEET THE CHALLENGE. HIGH STANDARDS HAVE ALREADY BEEN SET, NOW IT IS UP TO YOU!
“ONE SHOT—ONE KILL”
MISSION
TRAIN SELECTED SOLDIERS TO ENGAGE POINT TARGETS WITH LONG RANGE PRECISION FIRE; TRAIN SNIPER FIELD CRAFT TECHNIQUES; DEVELOP SNIPER DOCTRINE; AND PROVIDE SUBJECT MATTER EXPERTISE TO THE FORCE.
The website’s URL was www.specialoperations.com/Schools/Army_Sniper/
Jason had been looking at the information for the school at Fort Benning where he’d received his training. I clicked the arrow to go back to the previous screen. It was a GOOGLE search for sniper school, Fort Benning, Georgia. One more click back and the page switched to the Military Channel’s Top Ten Snipers. I scrolled down to number one. Marine Corps sniper Carlos Hathcock. Nicknamed “White Feather.” He served two tours of duty in Vietnam. Ninety-three confirmed kills with unconfirmed kills in the hundreds. He was so deadly the North Vietnamese put a thirty-thousand dollar bounty on his head. Hathcock died from complications of multiple sclerosis in 1999.
The fact that Jason would have been looking at these sites wasn’t unusual given his special ops training. What was eerie and an unacceptable coincidence was his shooting occurred within a few hours at the hands of a sniper.
Nothing else showed up in the browser’s history. Nothing was written on the notepad I kept by the phone. But I picked the pad up and examined the top sheet. A faint depression showed where the pressure of the adjacent ballpoint pen had made an imprint. It could have been from my writing on the previous sheet, but the letters were a childlike scrawl. Jason trying to write with his left hand.
I opened the desk drawer and found a number two pencil. I laid the point on its side and lightly ran the lead back and forth over the sheet.
A phone number appeared. 706-555-6505. I wasn’t familiar with the area code. Then a word appeared under it that was a mystery unto itself. “ghost.” Two more words followed. “missed miss
ion.”
I went back to the computer and called up the Web page for the sniper school. I clicked the Contact icon. The identical phone number appeared. Jason Fretwell had called someone at Fort Benning and discovered something he wanted to share with Nakayla and me. Something tied to “ghost” and “missed mission.”
The time was close to five o’clock. That was early for even the military. I dialed the number and got a recording. “You have reached the U.S. Army Sniper School. Leave your name and a brief message and we will get back with you as soon as possible.” The male voice was clipped and authoritative. The beep sounded and I hung up. My inquiry wasn’t one I wanted to leave on a machine.
I figured the school would probably open at eight, nine at the latest. I didn’t know whom Jason had talked to, but the army kept good phone logs. I debated whether to turn what I’d found over to Newland or pursue it myself. The answer was easy. I’d been a Chief Warrant Officer. I knew my way around the military bureaucracy far better than an Asheville police detective.
For the next thirty minutes, I searched the Internet using word combinations with “ghost,” “sniper,” and “army,” but I found nothing remotely relevant. There wasn’t anything more to do until I could reach someone at Fort Benning. I lay down on the sofa and fell asleep.
My cellphone rang.
“Hello,” I muttered.
“Sorry,” Nakayla said. “Did I wake you? You told me to call.”
My head cleared quickly. “What time is it?”
“Seven thirty. What’s going on?”
I summarized the notepad and Web information. “Jason made a call to Fort Benning.”
“If he actually spoke to someone. Does your landline phone keep a list of outgoing calls?”
“No. Just incoming.”
“Well, we can check with the phone company. You don’t know if he was tracking down someone he served with?”
“No, but the fact that he was looking at the top snipers in history might be a clue.”
“Who was number one?”
“A marine named Hathcock. Vietnam.”
A Murder In Passing Page 20
