by Jeff Carson
Nine…ten. He looked down, along the edges of the exterior walls of the house, seeing no footprints except the two elk tracks from earlier in the afternoon, and then he turned to walk again.
Oily lines of light reflected off his circular $120,000 Parnian desk in the center of the room. He ran his hand across the top of it as he walked by, feeling the small depressions of the exotic wood inlays. The small gesture gave him a sense that he was still in control of the situation. He was ready.
As he looked out into the dim night, panic hit him again, and he cursed himself for not buying some night vision binoculars at some earlier point in life. Then he would be seeing everything happening in that meadow and out in those trees.
Nine…Ten.
He walked back and stopped at his desk this time. He pulled the plug on his crystal whiskey decanter, poured a couple fingers in a glass, and then threw it back down his throat.
“Dah!” he said to the empty room as the liquid burned all the way down. He unclenched his eyes and shook his head, and then jogged to the rear windows.
Chapter 26
Wolf listened intently as Sheriff Gunnison finished recounting the details of Cynthia Ash’s death.
“Looking at the physical evidence,” Gunnison said, “the condition of the car and the way it tumbled into the forest, we figured her going one hundred twenty miles per hour.”
Wolf grunted in surprise.
“Yeah,” Gunnison said. “There was no surviving a crash like that. Car disintegrated in seconds. Her body was torn and burnt to nothing recognizable.”
Wolf walked back out into his living room and picked up the half beer sitting next to his chair and sipped it. “You get a BAC?”
“Did you just hear what I said?”
Wolf nodded. “I take that as a no.”
“No. There was…” he let out a chuckle that contained no sense of humor in it. “If she was driving under the influence when she crashed, we’ll never know. It was bad.”
“Did you suspect any foul play?” Wolf asked.
“What foul play?”
“I don’t know, tampered brake lines?”
Gunnison chuckled again. “Nah, I don’t think so. First of all, the car was too destroyed to check on something like that, and yes, I did think about it. But here’s my take. She was going one hundred twenty miles per hour”—he paused—“That’s just suicidal fast. She was blitzed, and that’s all there was to it. If she was going slower and missed a turn, I’d think maybe brakes. But this was just a swerve into the trees on a straightaway.”
Wolf stood thinking.
“You still there?” Gunnison asked.
“Yes. So what was the whole story?” Wolf asked.
“I just told you the whole story.”
“No, I mean, what bar was she at?” Wolf asked. “Who was she with? What can you tell me about before the crash?”
“She was at a bar on the lake, called Swanson’s, just a local joint. Kind of upscale. Wasn’t with anyone. Came in by herself. I guess she was upset, cryin’ with makeup all over her face. She’d had an argument with her ex-husband, went to the bar and started drinking.”
“Wait a minute, ex-husband? Charlie and Cynthia Ash weren’t married at this time?”
“Nope. Got divorced earlier that year as I recall.” Gunnison sipped something and exhaled into the receiver.
“And that would be something you’d recall?” Wolf asked. He walked back into his office and flicked on the light, pulled out a pen and paper and sat down at the ready.
“Yeah, you know, small town and all. And Ash was a pretty prominent figure here. Treasurer of the city government. Why you so interested anyways? Whatchu got goin’ on over there in the mountains of Colorado?”
“Charlie Ash lives in my town, now,” Wolf said.
“Pretty nice guy, huh?”
Wolf couldn’t tell if his tone was thick with sarcasm or not. “We’ve had two murders in town; I’m just looking into the Ashes. There … may be a connection. I don’t know yet.”
“No shit? Two murders?”—he whistled—“And you think they have to do with Cynthia Ash’s car accident?”
Wolf took another sip of the beer and set it down, then figured it was time to come out with it. “Have you had any murders, unsolved or otherwise, with the killer painting a red X on the victim, or near the victim?”
“No,” Gunnison said. “That’s definitely not something that’s happened around here.”
“What about unsolveds at about the same time of Cynthia Ash’s death?”
Gunnison let out an impatient sigh. “Look, I understand you’ve got a job to do, but I’m sittin’ here smellin’ steaks that just came in off the barbecue and they’re getting colder by the second. I can send you an electronic copy of the entire file tomorrow morning, first thing.”
Wolf didn’t answer. The silence mounted for a few seconds and then Gunnison caved in.
“Ah, Jesus Christ”—he huffed into the phone—“Okay…unsolveds. Shit, you know how it is. Things get all mashed up over the years.”
“Unsolveds?” Wolf asked. “Those stick in my brain for years. The specifics haunt me until the case is wrapped, and I’m talking about two years ago.”
Gunnison sniffed and paused for another moment. “There was a woman beaten and strangled, but up the road in Truckee. Younger, mid-twenties. A real estate agent. It was a Truckee county investigation in the end, but it was called in by a Realtor from South Lake Tahoe, so we called on it in the beginning.”
“And that was right about the same time as Cynthia Ash’s death?”
“Yep. I remember we were still pickin’ Cynthia and her car out of the forest, and we got the call about the murder.”
“Can you give me a few details of the scene?” Wolf asked.
“I’m sure the Truckee Sheriff’s Department could,” he answered curtly.
“Listen, I just think things aren’t done here, you know? This guy could be killing here in my town now, and he could be killing tonight.”
“All right,” Gunnison said. He slurped again and ice tinkled in a glass. “We brought the whole cavalry in there, but I was one of the first in. I saw her. She was laid out on her back, lyin’ in a pool of blood underneath her head. It looked like there was a lot of anger involved with the whole thing. Our coroner said she was strangled first, and then beaten with a blunt object on the head. So, she was extra dead when this guy got through with her.”
Wolf took fast notes.
“After a thorough search of the house it looked like there was forced entry into an unlocked window at the rear of the property. But the front door was unlocked, because she was doing a ‘walk-through’ as they like to call it in the real estate biz and she’d left it that way. So we figure she walked in on a robbery in progress, and the guy had a psychotic streak and killed her.”
“Any sign of sexual assault?” Wolf asked.
“None.”
“And what was her name?”
“Mary. Mary…Richardson?”—he sighed—“Mary Richardson.”
Wolf wrote down the name and circled it a few times. “What about the neighbors?”
“None of them saw anything. This is in an area where the houses are few and far between. Lot’s of money. Multi-millions.”
Wolf frowned. “And someone got in through an unlocked window? Pretty lax security on a multi-million dollar house, no?”
“That was a whole thing. The house was for sale, and real estate agents were coming in and out of there. We think one of them left it open. Nobody fessed up to doing it, of course.”
“How about prints?” Wolf asked. “The murder weapon?”
“No prints on the body”—he sighed yet again, sounding impatient—“and no murder weapon found at the scene. Otherwise, clean as a whistle forensically. Large hand bruises on her neck, gloved hands, like I said, no prints. The blow marks to her head were on the left side of her face, the killer standing over her, spatter marks off to the kille
r’s right. Forensics said everything was consistent with a right-handed male, and that was as far as we got. Since that narrowed it down to about fifty percent of the population, we ended up getting nowhere fast with this, and it just cooled over the last couple years.”
“What about other agents? Showings on the—”
“I’ll send our file on Cynthia Ash tomorrow morning, Sheriff Wolf,” Gunnison said in a finalizing tone.
“Okay, thanks.” Wolf said. “You got a contact I can talk to at Truckee Sheriff’s Department?”
“Yeah. The Sheriff.”
The line clicked dead.
Wolf set his phone down next to the scribbled notes. He stood up and walked into the family room, picked up his beer and brought it to his lips but stopped short and set it back down. His body was heavy, felt bruised all over, and tacking on a hangover would make tomorrow unbearable.
He took a deep breath and stretched, sniffing his armpit. No deliberation needed, it was time for a shower. He walked to his bedroom and flicked on the light, then walked into his bathroom and flicked the switch there, too.
Pulling off his t-shirt, he cried out as a sharp pain stabbed deep in his lower back. It was the pinched nerve, or whatever the hell it was, and it was so painful that he collapsed to his hands and knees.
After an agonizing minute on the ground stretching and twisting his torso into various positions, the pain finally subsided.
He opened his eyes and stood up, feeling faint as he did so, so he put his hands on the counter and stared in the mirror. He looked like a tired hobo, he thought. His brown eyes were bloodshot, half closed with swollen eyelids, and his dark hair was sticking up in the back, like he’d just woken up from a nap against a brick wall.
As Wolf stared into his own eyes, he felt like he was staring straight at a feeling that had been niggling at him, an idea that was waiting in the dark to spring out into the light. He peered deeper, wondering what it was and just how long the feeling had been there. He willed his brain to tell him everything held locked away in his subconscious.
What was it? Something in the details of Cynthia Ash’s death? Details from Mary Richardson’s unsolved murder? Some passing comment from Chief Gunnison of the Tahoe PD he needed to make sense of? Some tenuous connection with Charlie Ash’s past and the murders occurring now?
Of course it was. It was all that.
He blinked and stood up, and then froze as adrenaline pulsed from his head to his feet.
No it wasn’t.
The feeling spawned from something he’d seen moments before and not yet registered. He was sure of it now, because he was staring at the reflection of a bright red X scrawled across his bedroom window.
Chapter 27
Wolf reached back and flipped the light switch, sending the bathroom into darkness, and then he reached out of the doorway and turned off the bedroom light.
He stood against the bathroom wall and stared at the reflection. The X looked black in the dim light, and it also looked to be on the outside of the window. He focused beyond it, into the night. There was no movement, no silhouettes of a person in the trees.
His pistol sat on a chair just inside his front door, which Wolf never locked when he was at the house. Surely he would have noticed if someone came inside. A cold wave of air certainly would have blown in the door and wafted over him. He wasn’t so sure, though. Not with the new construction. He hadn’t spent enough time in the place to know something like that.
One other gun was much nearer, a Walther PPK, right next to his bed inside the top drawer of his nightstand. But it wasn’t loaded. The clip was hidden in the lowest of the three drawers. Though Jack was well versed in firearm use, it had just made him feel safer to store his gun that way. He would need to move fast.
Forgetting the crippling pain that had just brought him to his hands and knees a minute before, Wolf sprinted to the bed and jumped, landing in a roll and sliding off next to his nightstand. To his surprise there was no pain.
He kept his eyes on the doorway into the living room as he slid open the drawer and reached inside the unzipped case for the pistol. His hand closed around the small grip and he pulled it out, and then he opened the bottom drawer.
For agonizing seconds he felt vulnerable as he dug for the clip, like a deer frozen in semi-truck headlights that had no choice but to stay as certain death barreled toward him. All the killer had to do was turn the corner and shoot him as he fumbled for ammunition. Or stick his arm out from under the bed.
Wolf rammed the clip home and racked the slide, and then bent to look under the bed.
Nothing.
He looked over at the window, now only a few feet away. The mark was clearly on the outside of the glass. He wasted no time walking to the bedroom doorway and peering out into the living room. His belt holster with his department issue Glock was undisturbed, coiled on the wooden chair inside the door.
He held his breath and strained to listen. Blood pounding in his ears, and the twang of a Telecaster guitar coming from the speakers was all he heard.
He turned around and looked back out the window past the red mark of death. Still no movement.
Then he looked closely at the linoleum floor inside the entry of the front door. It was completely dry, save a small puddle of melt water surrounding his boots underneath the wooden chair where his pistol sat. Since Wolf hadn’t been home enough to shovel a path to his front door in the last few days, if someone would have entered, they would have tracked in snow with them. That left two options: Either someone had been inside the entire time, or nobody was inside.
If they’d been inside the whole time, why wasn’t he dead? He had given the killer ample opportunities – digging in the refrigerator, sitting as he mindlessly drank beer, pacing the house in distracted phone conversations.
There hadn’t been any noticeable footprints outside when he’d arrived. That was something you noticed living alone and in the middle of nowhere—a strange set of footprints to your front door that disappeared inside. Had he left the kitchen door to the carport open? The thought raised his pulse.
First things first, he thought. Straight ahead of him was a hallway bathroom and his spare bedroom door. He swept both rooms and found everything exactly like he’d left it – undisturbed and without murderers inside.
Keeping the pistol aimed in front of him, he walked through the family room. Looking outside was out of the question, because he’d had all the blinds closed and never bothered to open them when he’d gotten home.
That last thought stopped him in his tracks, and then he back-shelved it and continued to the kitchen. He twisted the knob. It was locked.
After another five minutes of checking every conceivable hiding spot in the house, Wolf walked back into his bedroom and over to the window.
The X looked to be lipstick, just like the others. It was scrawled in jagged, angry swipes, gone over a few times to make sure it was very visible. Even more so than the X written on the helicopter cockpit window, Wolf surmised.
He returned to his thought about the window shades. They’d all been drawn when he’d gotten home, he was sure of it. All except one – this window right here.
Wolf remembered leaving the shade drawn up the other day. He’d pulled it when he got out of the shower in the morning, and never bothered to put it back down when he left for work. There was no rhyme or reason why he’d done this. It was just something he remembered.
And now here was this mark.
He leaned against the window and checked the ground below. A set of deep, scraping footprints came in from the left, stopped under the window, then led back the way they came along the back of the house.
Wolf went into the family room, shut off the stereo, and began dressing. He buckled on his duty belt, put on his jacket, boots, and hat. Gripping his Glock now, he slowly opened the door.
Like he suspected, there were one set of footprints into the house – His.
He shut the door and went from ro
om to room, shutting off lights if they were on, and peeking through the shades. After fifteen minutes of staring into the dark from every angle outside, he had finally traced the complete route of the person’s tracks outside. They’d gotten out of their vehicle at the front of the house, walked into the carport past his pickup truck, out the back to his bedroom window, and then returned all the way to the vehicle. And since the vehicle was no longer there, that meant they were gone.
Wolf unlocked the kitchen door and stepped out. The cold bit his face with needle teeth so he buried it down into the neck of his jacket. He stared at the footprints for another few seconds and went back inside.
He dialed Rachette on his cell phone.
“Hello?” Rachette said.
“Hey, it’s me.”
“What’s up?”
“Listen, I’m at home and I just found a red X written on my window.”
“What? I’ll be right there. Have you called the station?” He clanked something in the background and breathed into the phone.
“No, wait. Get to the mayor’s as fast as you can, bring everyone. But nobody goes in until I get there.”
“What? No way, I’m coming out—”
“I’m not in danger. The mayor is, go now!”
Wolf flew out the door, not getting very far with his explanation to Rachette in the few seconds it took to exit the ranch gate, where cell service died for the next five miles.
Chapter 28
Wolf drove along the river and into town, flew down Main, took a right on Fourth and mashed the accelerator up the steepening road to Wakefield’s house.
Wolf’s heart was pounding in his neck, because a frantic call had come over the radio a minute before. It had been Patterson calling for backup with high-pitched panic in her voice.
“I’m on my way,” Wolf had said, and then been driving at the edge of crazy ever since.
