His cell phone rang.
He’d dodged her calls for a while now, but he had to answer. “Hey, Babe.”
“I was wondering when you’d finally get to me,” Sally replied, and he picked up the tone. She had something on her mind.
“It’s been a busy day.”
“How’s it going?”
“Fine.”
“How’s Williston?”
It never failed—she always knew. “How did you …”
“I got a call from someone.”
Mac closed his eyes and shook his head, a rueful smile on his face. “Meredith called, didn’t she?”
“Yup.”
Mac sighed and let out a weary, soft laugh. “I bet that was awkward.”
“Maybe a little, but I have to tell you, I’m glad she called so I could find out what my future husband is up to. You’re up in North Dakota in cowboy land on your own? I mean, what could possibly go wrong?”
The boys wouldn’t call Sally if he did as instructed, and he figured he’d finesse it if she asked too many questions about his whereabouts. He never counted on Meredith being the rat. He never thought she’d have the guts to call Sally. Unfortunately, his inability to read women’s minds, emotions, or courage remained solidly intact.
“I’m sorry you had to deal with Meredith.”
“I’m fine. She was fine. We talked.”
Mac cringed, almost afraid to ask. “About?”
“About recipes, you moron,” Sally replied tartly, the annoyance in her voice clear. “What do you think we talked about? We talked about you, and actually, believe it or not, about our wedding plans. Your ex-wife is worried you won’t make it to that date.”
“About our wedding plans?” Mac asked skeptically. “You talked about our wedding plans with Meredith?” This was not going well. He started staring at the mini-bar.
“Yes. The date we think we’ve set, where we’re having it, possible colors and styles for bridesmaid dresses, and possible honeymoon locations. You know, the stuff girls like to talk about.”
“Oh, yeah, I bet,” he replied, rolling his eyes. “My fiancée talking to my ex-wife about my wedding plans. Yup, just a normal phone call between two old friends catching up. Riiiight.”
“Well, maybe not.” Sally managed a small giggle, taking some joy in torturing him. “But she called to tell me what you are doing because, based on her own experiences with you, she figured, and rightly, I might add, that you wouldn’t have told me what you’re getting into. She called me to suggest I try to talk some sense into you, and buster, you better not hang up on me!”
Mac was smart enough not to do that but held his ground. “I’m not coming home until I get some answers.” He was ready to fight on this point. There was something up here, and he needed to figure it out.
“I know you’re not.”
“You do?” Wrong again.
“I can’t talk you out of this—I never can. I know you. You’re going to go all in on this just like you always do. That’s who you are. I’ve learned to accept that, and honestly, one of the things that I absolutely love about you is your determination to find the truth. Lord knows we could use more people around here who think like that.”
“So … you’re not mad?” Now he was completely confused.
“Mad?” He heard her sigh. “Yeah … no, I’m just, you know … worried. A cat has only so many lives, Mac. I guess the one thing that gives me faith is that, as reckless as you can be sometimes, you usually have a plan. So what’s your plan?”
“I do have one. I’m in the middle of it.” He explained his day and what he’d learned. “Tomorrow, I go see the sheriff about the Buller family murders. Depending on what I find there, I might be on my way back to the Cities very soon.”
Sally wasn’t convinced with the plan. “I don’t know that this sounds like a plan as much as a fishing expedition.”
“Sometimes that’s the plan. I mean, you can’t catch anything if you don’t fish.”
There was silence on the other end for a moment. “Cripes, you are, aren’t you?”
“What?”
“Bait. Tell me you’re not using yourself as bait.”
“Come again?” He winced. The fishing analogy was a bad choice. She’d figured out the part of his plan he didn’t really want to talk about.
“You’re using yourself as bait. Tell me a big part of your plan isn’t to draw some attention, draw some interest, and get those guys who tried to smoke Meredith to come out of hiding. You’re trying to draw them out.”
He didn’t respond. His silence undoubtedly spoke volumes.
“Jesus,” Sally muttered. “Really?”
“I am being extra, extra careful.” He explained the weaponry and the surveillance system he’d set up. “One thing about being out here in the middle of nowhere, you can see people coming. In the hotel here, I’m well protected both in the location of my rooms and the little system I’ve set up. I’m being as cautious as I’ve ever been because I realize, as you said, I don’t have any authority or a badge. I am on my own. But if I see them coming, I’m ready.”
“Yeah, if. If you see them coming. What if you don’t see them coming?”
“What I do is not without risk.”
“I know.” He could almost hear her shaking her head in worry. “I know.”
“Look, I’m finding information that will prove helpful in Meredith’s defense. Lyman and I know she didn’t do it, and we know she was set up. But knowing it is one thing …”
“And proving it is another. But just remember that the goal here is to create reasonable doubt, maybe prove her innocence, but not to prove her wrong.”
“I’m not up here to prove her wrong.”
“Bullshit. I know it. And you know what? Your ex-wife knows it, too. She knows you well, Mac. You’ve always said she didn’t understand you, but I think you’re wrong. I think she knows exactly what makes you tick. Her concern is genuine, and as ill at ease as I might have been in talking to her, I’m glad she called me.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Yes, I am, but it was … it was a little strange, I’ll admit. And there’s another thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I can hear it in her voice. She knows she screwed up with you, Mac. I think she’s trying to make it up to you.”
“Make it up to me? How, by calling you? Tell me, how does calling you qualify as making it up to me? Please explain that concept to me.”
“By making sure you don’t screw it up with me.”
“Am I screwing it up with you?”
Sally sighed. “No. No, it’s just that I’m kind of looking forward to spending the rest of my life with you. So come back in one piece here, would you? Please actually be as careful as you’re telling me you’re being.”
“I will.”
“You promise?”
“I promise. Now can we please talk about something else?”
“Let’s. So tell me, how crazy is it up there? Is it anything like the stories say?”
“I don’t think they do it true justice. I mean, I’m not here five minutes before I got approached by a prostitute at a gas pump.”
“Excuse me?”
• • •
Phelps stifled a yawn as he pushed out the door of the County Line. McRyan had flipped his credit card out onto the bar to pay for the drinks and burger and seemed done talking to the Williston detective. Their conversation had lasted well over an hour.
He walked across the street to the apartment complex and jumped into his already started and warming SUV. With the headlights off, he watched McRyan exit the County Line, his head on a swivel, checking his six as he made his way to his Yukon. McRyan was being careful. In the bar, Phelps noticed the slight bulge in the man’s lower back as well as the slight bulge on his lower left leg.
Phelps let McRyan pull out of the parking lot and let him go a good twenty seconds before he pulled out, continuing to track him via
his cell phone signal. Despite a couple double backs, McRyan’s destination was clear—his hotel.
Ten minutes later, Phelps, pulled into the parking lot of the Traveltel and did a quick sweep, pulling by McRyan’s Yukon, parked nose out, and peered up to see the light on in his hotel room.
There was nothing more to be learned for the night, so Phelps exited the parking lot and made his way to the townhouse back on the eastern edge of town. Once inside, he pulled up the laptop computer and checked McRyan one more time, and the signal was strong from the hotel—he was settled in for the night.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“In twenty feet of water.”
With the sun up and the sky overcast, Mac studied the laptop screen, and the camera focused on the half-empty parking lot. He counted seventeen vehicles, all unoccupied. There were no threats in the parking lot at 7:00 A.M. on a brisk November morning.
Mac stood up from the desk, went to the window, and lightly pulled the curtain back an inch or two. He quickly scanned the lot with his own eyes and then took a broader view, looking to the convenience store across the street as well as the parking lot for a small strip of an office building. Mac committed the vehicles in his view to memory, let the curtain fall closed, stuffed his Sig in the back of his waistline, and then strapped the holster for his back-up piece to his left ankle.
Five minutes later, Mac sat down in the hotel restaurant for a bowl of oatmeal while he texted Riley, Lich, Lyman, and, thanks to Meredith, Sally that he was alive, well, rested, and breathing. He sat with his back to the wall, alternately reading from his phone and scanning the small restaurant, which opened out into the hotel lobby. With his breakfast devoured, he made his way out of the hotel to his Yukon. Sheriff Rawlings’s receptionist told Mac he would arrive promptly at 8:00 A.M., “Unless something happens overnight.”
Mac made the trip in five minutes, his eyes on the rearview mirror every thirty seconds, cataloging the vehicles behind him. At 7:50 A.M., Mac made his way to the sheriff’s office, said good morning to the receptionist, and took a seat.
“He should be along any minute,” the receptionist said as she stood up from her desk with a coffee cup in search of something with which to fill it.
When a man who looked as though he could be a linebacker for the Vikings walked in the door five minutes later wearing blue jeans, a black, button-down, collared dress shirt, a .45 on his right hip, and a black cowboy hat, Mac knew he was looking at the sheriff. The tall man strode over to the secretary’s desk and picked up some pink message slips.
Mac stood up.
“You must be McRyan,” the sheriff stated without turning around, scanning the message slips.
“Yes, sir,” Mac answered respectfully.
The sheriff turned around and leaned back against the desk and folded his arms. “I got Trudy’s message and did as you instructed. So I gotta ask—what brings someone with your pedigree to my neck of the woods?”
“The Buller family.”
The sheriff’s eyebrows rose in interest. “You don’t say.” Rawlings nodded and then waved with his right arm. “I think we best retire to my office and chat on that, then.”
Rawlings showed Mac into his office and into a soft leather chair in front of his desk.
It might have been the most comfortable office chair he’d ever sat in. “I gotta get me one of these,” Mac suggested, checking the chair out.
“My daddy, who was the sheriff of this county for many years, bought those chairs many moons ago.”
“Well, they’ve stood the test of time, that’s for sure.”
“When I took the job a few years ago, I brought them back. There are times I sit in those chairs rather than this new one behind the desk,” Rawlings said as he sat in his chair and leaned forward on his elbows. “So. Mac McRyan is in my office, and he wants to talk the Buller murders. Why?”
“Let me tell you a story,” Mac said and recapped what had brought him to Williston.
“So their names show up in the notes of a big shot lawyer in Minneapolis. That lawyer and his lady friend are shot dead. Your client, the lawyer’s scorned wife, is accused of that murder, and yet you think that whoever killed those two down in the Twin Cities killed the Bullers up here. Why?”
“I don’t know—yet. There are holes in my theory,” Mac replied. “But I read your report, Sheriff Rawlings. It was in Sterling’s safe.”
“How would he have gotten hold of that?”
“Please. He was a lawyer, a really good lawyer, with money and connections. You get the idea.”
“What’s your point?”
“Between you, me, and the wall, you don’t believe meth heads killed the Bullers, do you?”
“You know I don’t.”
“You played politics with the task force, probably because you need their help, right?”
“I do.”
“But you don’t buy their conclusion.”
Rawlings stood up from his desk chair. “Coffee?”
“Black is good, thanks.”
Rawlings handed Mac a cup of coffee. He took his seat and opened a locked filing drawer to his desk. “You saw the written report. Here’s the file—evidence, pictures, everything. Give it a look, tell me what you see.”
Mac flipped through the evidence, paying particular attention to the forensic evidence, or the lack thereof. No prints and no forced entry. Then he looked at the photos of the bodies.
“What do you see?”
“I think I see what you see, and I think I see something I’ve already seen,” Mac answered. “Any chance we could go out to the farm?”
“Sure, let’s go.”
The Buller farm was located a half hour northeast of Williston. The farmhouse, a one-story ranch style, was set back a hundred yards north of Highway 2. To reach the farmhouse required a left turn off the highway onto a long dirt road and then another left turn onto a gravel driveway fifty yards in length. The house itself was set inside four large trees sitting on the four corners of the farmhouse’s yard proper. Farther north, another thirty yards behind the house, were three green aluminum-sided barns containing the machinery to farm the surrounding acreage. Looking even farther north, along the dirt road from the highway, Mac noticed a drilling platform, the natural gas flame burning in the overcast sky. He looked back past the farmhouse to the highway and began to appreciate the isolation of the farm: another house not visible in any direction, the only traffic along the highway being oil-related trucks, the odd pickup, and then a black Escalade.
Mac glanced back over to the back door of the farmhouse, where Sheriff Rawlings cut the seal and then put a key into the dead bolt.
“Sheriff, I’m a little surprised this is still a sealed crime scene seven months later.”
Rawlings nodded. “Me too, but the Bullers were renters, and I’ve heard nary a peep from the owner, Gentry Enterprises, so it’s just been sitting here as is.”
“Hmpf.”
“Isn’t costing anything at this point,” Rawlings continued. “And I still view it as an open investigation, so I’ve been content to leave it as is until someone comes forward.”
Inside the house, Mac opened the case file and took out the photos, focusing on the ones of the victims. He walked through the kitchen and turned right, down a long hallway back to the bedrooms. The master bedroom was to the left. The bed and the bloodstained mattress remained, along with the spatter on the white wood headboard. Mac set the picture of Harold Buller on the left side of the bed and the one of his wife, Melody, on the right. Both were shot several times, but both were also shot in the forehead.
Next, he went out to the hallway and to the bedroom on the left, the son, Adam’s, room, where the scene was the same. Mac placed the picture on the boy’s bed, him lying peacefully on his back, sleeping. It was the same in Sydney’s room, the little girl shot three times in her upper chest and then in the head, leaving no doubt. Mac’s anger welled up inside. A little six-year-old girl murdered in cold blood.
It wasn’t an accident, an act of negligence, a case of wrong place at wrong time, or even a senseless drive-by shooting. This was the purposeful murder of a little girl. There could be no possible witnesses left behind.
Mac looked back at the sheriff.
“Worst case I’ve ever had,” Rawlings said calmly, yet a despondent look occupied his face.
“It’s not your first homicide investigation, is it?”
Rawlings shook his head as he leaned against the doorjamb. “I worked homicide in Chicago for six years before I came home here to Williston to run for sheriff. As you can imagine, I saw some shit down there, but there was never …” His voice drifted off as he took his cowboy hat off and scratched the back of his head. “I never saw anything like this. The kids …”
“The assassination of a six-year-old girl and ten-year-old boy,” Mac replied angrily. “This is no damn break-in by meth heads. Who is that task force fucking kidding? There are no signs of forced entry, there are no prints, and the shots are of a professional—the ones to the chest are just to cover that.”
“That’s what I think too. It has all the looks of meth guys shooting the place up and then taking everything out of the medicine cabinet, laundry room, and from under the kitchen sink. It wouldn’t be the first time something like that happened around here since the boom started. Meth is a huge problem, no doubt. And I’ll admit I kind of thought that is what it was at first as well. But then a day or so later, when I was sitting in that chair you so like, having myself a quiet little whiskey and looking at these crime scene photos, I realized that was not the case.”
Blood Silence - Thriller (McRyan Mystery Series) Page 23
