Trapline

by Mark Stevens

  The interview didn’t last long.

  “I really can’t believe a newspaper of your stature would put resources into this kind of a topic,” Lamott had said. He was so cool it was as if he’d been told everything ahead of time. “My only statement to you is that you have completely false information on all three counts and I am not going to give any one of them the time of day. I have better things to do.”

  No story ever ran. The editors backed off.

  Bloom hadn’t laid eyes on Lamott again until yesterday.

  Was it outside the scope to think Lamott had other enemies who might have a motive for a completely nonpolitical reason? Bloom needed to check back with some of his old Denver sources, see if Lamott might have prompted a rattle from an entirely different type of snake.

  Sitting at his desk in the small newspaper offices off Grand Avenue, Bloom made a list of ideas for stories. The list went into a daily e-mail to his editor and to his fellow scribe, a just-the-facts kind of reporter named Marjorie Hayes. Never one to question and never one to read much beyond official news releases and public relations come-ons, Hayes was a Chamber of Commerce dream. She never questioned motives and maintained a surprising ability to turn every story, no matter how rich and complex, into something two-dimensional. She knew everyone in town and was never piqued or dismayed by government decisions or commercial business plans. All plans were progress.

  Today, she looked exhausted and worn out. She sat at her desk making her way through the papers from Denver, Aspen, and Grand Junction—all online—and she wasn’t saying much. Her assignments since the shooting had been all reaction, basically stories with a litany of quotes capturing the mood of the town and its civic, business, and religious leadership. It was one of the quotes that had struck Bloom as odd.

  “Quick question,” said Bloom.

  “Sure,” said Hayes.

  “This quote from this guy at the Chamber of Commerce,” said Bloom.

  “Troy Nichols,” said Hayes, “the one on the board.”

  “That’s him,” said Bloom.

  “I can’t remember what he said,” Hayes said.

  That alone was odd, given the content, but it was further proof Hayes’ approach to the job was to organize information, not ponder its meaning.

  “Down toward the end of the story,” said Bloom. “Want me to read it to you?”

  “Sure,” said Hayes, who hadn’t so much as turned slightly from her computer screen. She was wearing a simple summer blouse with a green paisley print over a too-tight jean skirt. Her short curly hair, a reddish gold, looked recently re-colored. She was tall, slightly plump and never looked too comfortable in the office chairs and modest desks that constituted office space at the Post-Independent.

  “Okay, here goes,” said Bloom. “Here’s what he said: ‘When you claim to have all the answers, especially on such a volatile and incendiary issue as immigration, when you come into a town like Glenwood Springs, you are walking into the crossfire and people do feel strongly. For some, this is an extremely personal issue and they feel that being lax on immigrants is being un-American and threatens our way of life. I’m one of those. It’s true. Every citizen has to do their part. These people are breaking the law. Case closed. Of course nobody condones what happened, but there’s a certain inevitability to the shooting too.’”

  Bloom stopped, let the quote sink in.

  “What about it?” said Hayes.

  “From a Chamber guy?” said Bloom. “Did he say anything more? Did you happen to press him?”

  “On what?” said Hayes.

  “Inevitable?” said Bloom. “Did you ask him what he meant by that?”

  Hayes never pressed anyone on anything. Statements were swallowed whole, then regurgitated in ink. Hayes wandered into journalism as a curiosity, not a calling. She could have just as easily taken a liking to selling real estate or baking cupcakes.

  “He just sort of said it,” said Hayes.

  “Gotcha,” said Bloom, who knew not to come on too hard. He was still the untrusted one. Hayes knew enough people in town, he had quickly realized, to quietly spread doubt about his talent and attitude. “Did he happen to say anything else?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Hayes.

  “Did he say it kind of angry or just nonchalant, if you know what I mean?”

  Hayes sat back, folded her arms across her chest. If she’d been offended by the suggestion that she’d missed something, Bloom couldn’t tell.

  “There wasn’t any real mustard on it,” said Hayes.

  “Know anything about him?” said Bloom.

  “He’s been around,” said Hayes. “Owns a distribution business or something.”

  There were few types of stories better than pots calling kettles black. Bloom wondered how much a trucking business might rely on cheap labor.

  But inevitable?

  It almost meant Lamott had it coming.

  If anything, Bloom would have pounced on the comment, played it up. You could see a quote like that making national news, having Troy Nichols on a talk show like Bill Maher or Rachel Maddow, being sliced and diced.

  “You get the feeling that the shooting must have been someone from Glenwood Springs?” asked Bloom, trying to lob the question over with a friendly “let’s chat” vibe, not an indictment of the town.

  “No,” said Hayes. “Hadn’t considered it, really. What an awful thing to think about.”

  Yes, thought Bloom, and even worse, an actual awful thing really happened.

  Right here.

  “Maybe I’m off,” said Bloom. “Lamott wins the primary last Tuesday. He spends Wednesday doing interviews and making appearances along the Front Range, thanks his campaign staff. They announce the Western Slope stops on Thursday. He hits Colorado Springs and Pueblo and then comes up through the San Luis Valley on Friday and he stays all the way up in Leadville, half-hour stops here and there. So the Glenwood Springs stop is more full-blown walk-and-talk event, not a whistle stop.”

  Hayes had leaned back in her chair and turned to listen.

  “The campaign had approved the Glenwood Springs stop but didn’t put out the details of his walk until mid-day Friday. And, of course, they post it on his website—”

  “In English and Spanish,” said Hayes.

  “Correct,” said Bloom. “And they even mention the pedestrian bridge thing, the photo shoot. They have it listed to last five minutes on the itinerary.”

  Bloom stopped to let it sink in, see if Hayes saw the same issues.

  “You’d have to know this area fairly well to recognize, you know, the opportunity,” said Hayes.

  “You see,” said Bloom. “That’s kind of the way I’m thinking about it, too. Unless the shooter was looking at every campaign stop, every public appearance and every schedule and every town for the right configuration.”

  Hayes’ look suggested a glimmer of understanding.

  “Maybe not someone we know,” said Bloom. “Someone connected to an organization here. It must have taken a few people to pull this off.”

  “Organization?” said Hayes.

  “Maybe they call themselves something,” said Bloom. “A loose network. A hate group.”

  “Hate group?” said Hayes. “Here?”

  “Do you think it’s possible?” said Bloom.

  “Actual hate groups?” said Hayes.

  “Just a thought,” said Bloom. “I’m sure the cops are talking to everyone who has ever thought a mean thing about illegal immigrants. Somewhere in that group is a guy with some seriously bad-ass sniper skills who owns a long-range rifle.”

  Hayes said “hmmm” in a distracted way and shook the mouse to her computer as if it was dead, not asleep.

  Hayes’ sudden interest in her computer was likely due to the approach of Chris Coogan. It wasn’t as if reporter
s couldn’t shoot the breeze, but Coogan had been pushing Hayes to turn up her productivity. Hayes bristled at Coogan’s editing style on a number of levels and resisted his coaching with disdain.

  “Ever going to let me know you and Lamott had history?” said Coogan.

  “I’ve got history with lots of folks,” said Bloom.

  “This particular folk came to our city and you covered him,” said Coogan. “Think it was important you told me you once tried to chew his ass?”

  “Who called?” said Bloom.

  “Is that important?” said Coogan.

  “It seemed irrelevant until yesterday,” said Bloom. “At least, in my mind. Never published a word in Denver. Somebody called?”

  “Yeah,” said Coogan. “The campaign wanted to make sure, since there are now going to be many stories to come, you know, that we had options in case your bias started to show.”

  Bloom didn’t have to look to know that Hayes was enjoying this, pretending to ignore it at the same time.

  “No bias here,” said Bloom. “Got bigger things to work on than that.”

  “Do yourself a favor,” said Coogan. His tone was stone cold. “Keep me in the loop on everything. Everything.”

  “Got it,” said Bloom.

  “And what now?” said Coogan.

  “Mulling that,” said Bloom.

  “I got one suggestion,” said Coogan. Suggestion meant directive. Bloom indulged Coogan, who had five fewer months in town that he did. He was another refugee from the big-city newspaper meltdown. In Coogan’s case it was Albuquerque. During his short stint at the editorial helm of the Post-Independent, Coogan showed an unbridled passion for anything that involved mayhem and strife.

  “Shoot,” said Bloom.

  “I want a complete breakdown on who is calling the shots from the investigation side,” said Coogan. “And I want to know if our local cops, the city and county, think the investigation is being handled well. No doubt they’re feeling flattened, steamrolled. There’s got to be tension.”

  “Probably true right there,” said Bloom, who generally liked to keep editors on his good side.

  “Maybe go in with a bit of a pretense,” said Coogan. He was in his mid-fifties, had curly light brown hair and a ruddy complexion. He ran hot and hyped-up. He wore wire-rim glasses a bit too large for his face. “Maybe go in looking to profile the lead agents. Tell them we want to know who’s running the show, make them feel a little flattered, you know, and then get inside their heads, find out what they’re thinking.”

  It was hard to picture any of the cops taking a break from their work to talk about themselves, but Bloom kept that reaction to himself. Coogan’s idea machine was theoretical, out of idea books or stolen from journalism websites like Poynter. With the national layer of bureaucracy now involved in Glenwood Springs, highlighting the inevitable pissing match over turf and tactics held about as much interest for Bloom as running down to cover the local elementary school bake sale.

  “I like it,” said Bloom. “I’ll put that in the mix.”

  “Are you heading out?” said Coogan. Asking how soon Bloom was heading out was his passive-aggressive way of saying get the fuck out of here. Hayes was gathering her things, making it obvious. She could probably take a bite out of her stapler like it was a peanut butter sandwich.

  “Momentarily,” said Bloom. “Couple of calls to make.” A true statement on any given day, at any given moment.

  “I want to crawl up inside the cops’ heads and download every scrap,” said Coogan. “The more you think about the shooting, the more you think about the organization it took and the planning, some amount of teamwork. Very short notice for the event itself—”

  “I was saying the same thing to Marjorie—”

  “Almost like a terrorist cell, a terrorist cell of deep, racist hate,” said Coogan.

  Coogan pulled assumptions from air thinner than the atmosphere around Pluto and he expected reporters to thank him for the insight. Bloom preferred to connect the actual dots, from one fact to the next.

  Coogan drifted off, leaving Hayes unscathed. It was hard to imagine what absorbed Coogan’s time. Coogan made himself available to the publisher, who was pressured on a daily basis to deploy a reporter for some PR puff piece or pressured for the opposite reason, to steer the reporters away. The walls between advertising and editorial space, in theory, kept the two from inter-mingling. In this newspaper, the walls were wet tissue. Bloom hadn’t directly changed or altered any story due to external influences, but he knew you didn’t propose stories that would harm the reputation of the Hot Springs Lodge, which was practically the town’s cash drawer, or the banks or the key Chamber of Commerce types of businesses. You didn’t.

  Bloom was nobody’s circus monkey, but he was still in the process of ingratiating himself into the community. Denver was a small town in some ways, at least among the civic and business leadership, but by comparison Glenwood Springs was like one of those spooky caves that carried a whisper from one end to the other like the whisperer’s lips were close enough to lick your hammer bone. There was a layer of dug-in town leadership that called the shots. Provoking the wrong individual—no matter how innocent—might mean Bloom would be quickly out on the streets. In that case, Bloom would never know what hit him. Or why.

  And then what?

  Then, nothing.

  Being bounced from Glenwood Springs would be journalism’s way of saying adios.

  fifteen:

  tuesday mid-day

  It was a world-class shot. Allison had heard tales of longer shots, but those targets were elk, deer, or the occasional bear or moose—not a human. The added wrinkle here was the wind coming out of the canyon, over the right shoulder of where the shooter had allegedly stood. Or sat. Or something.

  “Is it six hundred yards?” said Allison.

  “Within a few,” said Chadwick.

  “It would take somebody with solid experience,” said Allison. “Anything beyond a gentle breeze over that distance, you’d be clueless where the shot would end up.”

  “Agreed,” said Chadwick.

  And then there was the elevation and adjusting for the drop.

  “What did the wounds say about angle?”

  All the way down from the Flat Tops, Chadwick said they wanted her to look at the scene without the cops’ vision of events bouncing around in her head. So he hadn’t said much about the case. The only conclusion Allison could draw was that the cops didn’t have much. Or didn’t have anything.

  Allison had fought back a rare case of nerves as they approached the scene, side-long glances from the cops and officials as the sea parted to make way for her inspection. The air had been thick with doubt. If Trudy had been there, she would have lost count of the black auras and clogged throat chakras.

  “Six or seven degrees north of horizontal,” said Chadwick. “He was above his target, but not by much.”

  “Plus the bullet drop,” said Allison.

  “Correct,” said Chadwick.

  “Were there any strays?”

  “Four,” said Chadwick. “Two hit the steel decking on the Grand Avenue bridge deck behind the pedestrian bridge to the west. Those two bullets are most likely in the water, but they left a mark. A third bullet was in the rear quarter panel of a southbound late-model Chevy pickup, a carpenter on his way to a job in Aspen. The last bullet, though of course we don’t know the order, was on the front bumper of a northbound minivan, family of five from Alamosa on their way to the hot springs pool.”

  “A spotter,” said Allison, almost without thinking it through. The first two shots had likely hit the cars, then they adjusted and hit the decking and adjusted again. “How you’d pick up the misses without a spotter is beyond me. No dirt or dust to kick up, no idea how to adjust.”

  “It’s a problem,” said Chadwick.

 
“And how many of the shots hit Lamott?”

  “Two,” said Chadwick. “One high in the chest, one in the shoulder.”

  The hill they were standing on was steep. The pitch was walkable, but you’d want to hold onto a branch or something for stability. The ground was rough. The trees were sparse, but two were substantial enough to climb. The space between trees consisted of bare dirt and scruffy bushes and grasses that looked sad and beat-up.

  Allison squatted on the trail, tried to calm her breathing like a sniper. Her thoughts buzzed in a swirl that started along the lines of “what the hell do you think you are doing here?” to “make this quick and be on your way” to “maybe, just maybe, you can help.”

  “Suppressor?” said Allison. A few hunters preferred to shoot with a suppressor because they cut down on noise and saved their ears.

  “The witnesses said the noise was kind of muffled,” said Chadwick. “More of a tick-tick-tick.”

  “So yes?”

  “That’s our supposition at this point,” said Chadwick.

  “How many heard them? How many pointed to this area?”

  “Four solid witnesses,” said Chadwick. “We got a guy right down below the hill, he was out in back of his house painting this new trellis, said he hadn’t heard that sound since street fighting on the way into Baghdad during Desert Storm. He knew instantly what it was, though at the time he figured the shooter was someone who picked an unsafe place to test a gun.”

  “But he isn’t sure,” said Allison. “Really sure.”

  Chadwick shook his head. “Not with suppressors. They throw sound like a ventriloquist.”

  “Good one,” said Allison.

  “Thanks,” said Chadwick.

  There was a non-cop side to Chadwick. He was more teddy bear than grizzly and his eyes hadn’t gone jaded and accusatory.

  “So you’re going by bullet angle?” said Allison.

  Allison propped an imaginary rifle like she was sighting it, right elbow jabbed into right thigh, left elbow resting on left knee. The grade was so steep that her left leg didn’t come up high enough to hold the rifle level. Or steady. To be reliable at this distance, the weapon would have carried some weight.