01 Storm Peak

by John Flanagan

  There was a long pause. An ominous pause, while Lee considered and discarded various unpleasant and painful things she might like to do to Jesse next time she saw him. Finally, she croaked at him, “Christ, Jess! It’s three fifteen!”

  “Three seventeen,” he said, unmoved. “Now wake up.”

  “I’ll kill you for this,” she threatened, but he heard a rustling of movement at the other end of the line that told him she was sitting up in bed. Then she said, “Hang on a minute. It’s freezing here. Let me get a sweater or something.”

  More movement. More rustling of cloth. Then Lee, sounding more awake but no less displeased, was back on the line.

  “All right, what is it?”

  “Tell me, Lee, why do you think our killer dumped the dentist in the trash container?”

  Lee’s temper finally took over. “Jesus suffering Christ on a bicycle, Jesse! Because he didn’t have a coffin handy, I suppose!”

  Jesse refused to rise to her anger. “Come on. Think now.”

  Her voice was heavy with sarcasm when she replied, “Well, let’s see: those trash containers are picked up and taken out to the county dump beyond Hayden, then the contents are dumped and bulldozed over. I guess that he was trying to hide the body, don’t you?”

  “That’s certainly what it looks like,” Jesse agreed. Another flood of sarcasm rushed down the line.

  “Well, I’m glad we agree on that! Now could I please go back—” He interrupted her. “I said that’s what it looks like. And, of course, all the pickups and the dumping are done automatically, aren’t they? Chances are, no one would spot the body during that process, right?”

  She breathed heavily, then said with great control, “Right.”

  “So …” he said, continuing very deliberately. “That’s why the killer left our dentist’s hand hanging out through the hatch. He did it on purpose. He wanted you to find the body!”

  “What? Are you crazy? Why would anyone want the body found if they’d just pulled off a murder?” The anger and the sarcasm were gone now. She was wide awake and listening, although she couldn’t see how he’d reached his theory.

  “Think about it, Lee,” he said eagerly. “You kill a man and dump his body in a trash container, right?” He paused for an answer.

  “Right,” she said. “Go on.”

  “Now, that body was pretty much on the floor of the container, correct? The trash was on top of him.”

  “Pretty much,” she agreed. “There was some trash already in it when he was put in there, but not a lot.”

  “Right. So, except for maybe a few inches of trash under him, he’s on the floor of the container? So how does his arm manage to stand up at a forty-five degree angle so that his hand can be caught halfway up the hatch?”

  There was a pause. It hung there on the line between them. Finally, Lee began to answer, slowly, “Well … he maybe got it caught on something when he …” She stopped.

  “On what, Lee? Remember, he would have put him in through the hatch. The hatch was open. So there was nothing there to stop the arm just flopping down beside the body. Now maybe if that hand had been caught down near floor level, that might have been accidental. But think on it! Where did those cops say the hand was?”

  “It was halfway up the hatch. You’re right, Jess. I can’t see any way that it would have stuck up there waiting for the killer to close the hatch on it.”

  “Unless he held it there and jammed it in the gap when he closed the hatch.”

  Again, another silence that stretched on and on. Finally, Lee had to ask the question. The obvious question.

  “But … why?”

  And Jesse had the obvious answer. “Because he wanted the body found.”

  It was obvious. It just didn’t make any sort of sense at all.

  “Damn,” said Lee, with considerable feeling. “I think you might be right.”

  “That’s sure as hell what it looks like, isn’t it?” said Jesse, with a strange sense of relief that Lee hadn’t found some obvious, unnoticed flaw in his line of reasoning. Jesse hated being wrong when it came to an investigation. Hated it with a passion. That was one of the qualities about him that had made him such a good cop. On those few occasions when he had been proven wrong, he went out of his way to find the correct answer next time around.

  He picked up the base of the old phone now and carried it back to the bed. He sank down on the lumpy old mattress and pulled the covers over his legs again.

  Finally, Lee replied, “I’m damned if I can see any other way his hand could have been caught way up there. The sonofabitch wanted us to find that body.”

  “He wanted us to know someone had been killed,” Jesse amended slightly. Lee took that on board, then nodded. He couldn’t see her but somehow, he knew at the other end of the line, she was nodding slowly to herself.

  And she was. “Okay, Jess,” she said. “So where do we take it from here?”

  Jesse thought for a moment, then shrugged. “Nothing much we can do about it at the moment,” he admitted. “You’ve put a request in to the Minnesota State Police and the FBI to see if Howell had any sort of record, or if they had any sort of idea why someone might want to kill him, haven’t you?”

  “Yes,” Lee replied. “Did that first thing this morning. Expect them to get back to me sometime tomorrow. Forensic boys from Denver are flying up to take a look at the crime scene too.”

  “Maybe they’ll turn something up,” said Jesse without a great deal of conviction. “Anyways, not much you can do now until the morning.”

  He yawned and stretched. He was feeling tired now. The sudden surge of energy and adrenaline had gone. The blankets felt very welcoming.

  Lee said, in a measured, ominous tone, “Nothing more I can do until morning, you say?”

  “That’s right,” Jesse yawned again. This time, Lee heard him. “Might as well go on back to sleep, Lee,” he said.

  “Well that might be a little hard right now, Jess. Tell me. The forensic boys aren’t coming till tomorrow. The FBI and the Minnesota Police won’t be getting back to me till tomorrow. Is there any goddamn reason why you couldn’t have waited till then?”

  Jesse heard the venom in her voice now. He held the phone away from his ear, looking at it curiously.

  Finally, he put it back again and said in an injured tone. “Well hell, Lee, I thought you’d want to know about it right away.”

  The only answer he received was the sound of Lee’s phone as it was slammed back into its cradle. That simple message spoke volumes to him. He thought it might be a good idea to avoid the sheriff the following day-at least until the afternoon.

  SIX

  The Minnesota Police had no idea why anyone might have wanted to murder Alexander Howell. Lee spoke to the police chief from the small town where Howell had lived for the past seventeen years. Chief Morrison was almost apologetic that he couldn’t offer some skeleton from the past for Lee to hang the case on.

  “Just a very ordinary man, Sheriff,” he said after they’d exchanged greetings and Lee could finally ask if he had any information at all on Alexander Howell.

  “Aged forty-four. Had a small dental practice here in town. From all I hear, he made a reasonably good go of it. Nothing special. Nothing outstanding, mind you.”

  “Were you one of his patients?” Lee asked, hoping that maybe she’d get a personal angle on Howell. The answer dashed those slim hopes.

  “Not me. There’re three other dentists in town and Howell’s surgery was way the other side from me.”

  “Any professional jealousy? Maybe he’d argued with one of the others over patients? Anything like that?”

  “Can’t help you there either. They all seemed to get on just fine. Seems like there was plenty of work for all of them. They even used to get together for a night out once every couple of months.”

  Lee frowned. She was grasping at straws but that was all that was being presented.

  “Is that usual?” she asked. The
re was a slight hesitation from the other end and she knew that Chief Morrison felt she was grasping at straws too.

  “Well, I don’t know how it’s usual or not,” he said, “but it’s pretty understandable, I would have thought. Dentists are a little like cops, aren’t they?”

  “How’s that?” she asked, not following his line of reasoning.

  “We-ell, they know their patients dislike ’em, stands to reason they’d get together socially once in a while to tell each other their troubles.” He paused, then added in explanation, “Same way we cops do, without civilians around.”

  “I guess so.” Lee sighed. “Anything else? He married? Got a girlfriend? Anything like that?”

  “Divorced,” said Chief Morrison. “Six years ago come February.” He added quickly, before Lee could ask, “But there’s nothing there either. All the neighbors have said he and the ex-wife were good friends. They agreed on a settlement and he never welshed on paying. Not in six years.”

  “Maybe he’d started to,” Lee essayed but Chief Morrison contradicted her firmly.

  “Already checked that. Thought you’d ask. As of the first of this month, he hadn’t missed one support payment.”

  Lee thought for a long moment, then sighed heavily. “Well, thanks for your cooperation, Chief Morrison. I really appreciate it.”

  “Sorry I can’t give you any help with it,” he replied, “but my boys haven’t turned up any reason why anyone would have wanted to kill him.” He paused. “You got forensics on the case?”

  “They’re coming in from Denver today. I don’t hold out too much hope that they’ll come up with anything.”

  “They rarely do,” Chief Morrison agreed comfortably. After all, it wasn’t his problem. “Well, Sheriff, let me know if there’s anything further my boys can do.”

  “Thanks, Chief,” said Lee, and broke the connection.

  She swung her boots up onto the desktop and fiddled for a few moments with a pencil, tapping it idly on her teeth, thinking through the conversation she’d just had. She was beginning to harbor the fear that she would never get to the bottom of this crime. Whoever it was who had murdered Howell, and why ever he’d done it, the perpetrator was probably hundreds of miles away by now, back in his hometown in Florida or the Carolinas or somewhere else to hell and gone out of Lee’s jurisdiction.

  There was a tap at her door. “Come,” she called and the door slid open a crack to admit Tom Legros’s face.

  “Those scientific fellers from Denver ought to be arriving soon, Sheriff,” he reminded her. “You want I should go out and pick them up from the airport?”

  Lee swung her feet down from the desk and reached for her gunbelt where she’d hooked it over the back of one of her two wooden visitors’ chairs. She swung it around her hips with the simple ease of long practice.

  “No. I’ll go get ’em, Tom,” she replied. She finished buckling the belt and reached for a typed form that had been in her in tray when she’d arrived that morning. “You go take a look at this, if you will.”

  Legros glanced quickly at the sheet she’d given him. There’d been a breakin at a small convenience store located fifteen miles out of town. Cigarettes and liquor stolen and a small amount of cash.

  “Sounds like much the same thing as happened out at the Springs City Diner last week,” he mused.

  Lee nodded. Someone had broken into the diner in the small hours of the morning. The MO looked similar and the burglars had taken the same mix of product and available cash.

  They both exited her office and headed for the parking lot. “Take a look at it and let me know what you think.”

  He touched the brim of his Stetson in salute. They came out into the parking lot and Lee stopped as the icy wind hit her.

  “Damn, but it’s cold!” she said, pausing to zip up her windproof uniform bomber jacket. Tom looked critically at the driving mass of gray clouds that rode overhead.

  “Could be in for more snow if that wind drops a little,” he ventured. Lee pulled on her gloves and headed for her Renegade.

  “Just what we need,” she said grumpily, and yawned. Damn Jesse for waking her in the middle of the night. Things were bad enough without being short on sleep.

  SEVEN

  She collected the forensic team, then returned to her office. They didn’t need her kibitzing while they went about their tasks and she had work of her own to do.

  As ever, the paperwork on her desk seemed to have mysteriously multiplied itself tenfold since she’d been gone. It seemed to double if she simply stepped down the hall for a cup of coffee.

  On top of the pile was Tom’s report on the breakin at the convenience store. She rose and moved to the filing cabinet by the wall and rummaged through it until she found the file on the breakin at the diner. She compared the two. There seemed little difference between them. Probably the same perp. The MOs were identical. Door locks had been jimmied and the intruders had smashed open the cash registers in both cases, taking the cash that was in there after the day’s takings. Then, in both instances, they’d helped themselves to cigarettes and a few cases of beer—the only kind of liquor that both establishments had on hand.

  She shrugged. They both looked the same. But then, break and enter wasn’t such a sophisticated crime that you’d find a great variation in method. A door’s locked so you break it. The logical tool is a crowbar. You go in, you steal cash and any booze that’s available. She guessed that one break and enter would look pretty much like another. Most of the ones she’d seen in the past had. Still, having two happen within a week was a definite pointer to one person or group being at work. Sooner or later, she guessed, they’d make a mistake and she’d nail them.

  She put both files in the filing cabinet and returned to her desk. There was a memorandum from the mayor, querying her about overtime payments incurred by members of the sheriff’s department during the previous month. She sighed. If only she could get criminals to operate on a reasonable timetable—say, nine to five—she’d have that problem licked. She reached for a writing pad and a pencil to draft a reply to the mayor.

  The pile of paperwork had diminished by more than half when there was a tap at her door. The leader of the forensic team put his head around the doorframe.

  “All finished?” she asked and he nodded, holding up his collection of sample cases.

  “I’ve taken scrapings from under his nails, hair samples, samples from his clothing and all the rest,” he replied. “You can inform the police in Minnesota that the family can have the body for burial anytime now.” Lee nodded her thanks.

  “I’ll drive you back to the airport,” she said, starting to rise. He waved her back into the chair.

  “Cab’s good enough, Sheriff. You’ve got plenty on your plate.”

  She smiled gratefully. “So, when can we expect your report?”

  He screwed up his face thoughtfully. “Give me a couple of days, Sheriff,” he said. “It’s a pretty simple case, I know, but we’re snowed under down in Denver at the moment.”

  “It’s a simple case for you,” Lee said, with some feeling. “I wish it was the same for us.”

  He nodded. “You don’t have a lot to go on, do you?” he asked.

  “We sure as hell don’t.”

  “Well, look on the bright side. Three out of five violent crimes in this state go unsolved anyway.”

  Lee raised an eyebrow at him. “Go ahead,” she said. “Make my day.”

  EIGHT

  He’d been keeping track of the media coverage of what had become known as The Silver Bullet Murder. He smiled now, shaking his head at the fanciful term. How journalists loved to dramatize events.

  But this time, the notoriety suited his purpose. In the past, he’d taken revenge on the people who had crossed him and then quietly faded away. But that no longer gave him the same feeling of satisfaction. It wasn’t quite enough. He wanted something bigger, something more noticeable. Sure he had a specific target in mind, but this time, that k
illing was going to be the culmination of a whole series of events. He wanted more than revenge on just one person and he wanted the world to know about it. He was tired of remaining anonymous. It was time to move on to a new phase. So this time, he was going to punish the entire organization. He wanted something big. Something newsworthy. Something that attracted attention from a much wider base than just the town he happened to be in. And for that to happen, he needed the media attention that a whole series of seemingly unrelated killings would generate.

  So in that sense, a phrase like “The Silver Bullet Murder” was just what he needed. It was a handle for other journalists and news services to latch on to and, in the days immediately following the discovery of the body, the Murder—he always thought of it capitalized like that—had made it onto the Channel 6 local news in Denver, and then been picked up by the CBS Network coverage as well.

  He smiled cynically as he made his way into Mrs. McLaren’s cozy breakfast room. Coffee was standing ready on a warming plate and the baskets of fresh rolls and doughnuts were laid out ready, as ever. He poured himself a cup of coffee and took one of the doughnuts, putting it onto a plate with a paper napkin, then moved to the two-seater, overstuffed sofa, where a copy of the Denver Post was waiting.

  As he’d expected, the media reveled in a major crime being committed in a travel resort. There was something doubly pleasing to people who were slaving away at their jobs in the dead of winter to read about bad luck happening to someone who was off having a good time.

  He’d been mildly interested to see that his victim had been a dentist. He’d never liked dentists. Never understood how anyone could willingly take on such a job. Serves him right, he thought, smiling again.

  He quickly scanned the front page of the Post, a small frown forming. US troops in the Middle East were still fighting a losing battle. NASA was bleating for funds to mount a manned expedition to Mars and in Washington, the president had met with a delegation from a group of African countries asking for foreign aid.