by Hadena James
If it was a teen girl, she had some damn fine shooting skills. Skills that would be honed over time, perfected until she could take a shot at two-thousand yards and adjust for wind and drag and take down her prey with the single bullet. Definitely not a novice around guns, she probably grew up hunting and things. Her cold, calculating manner might be noticed at school or it might not, depending on the school and her ability to hide the demon that lurked beneath the surface.
A psychopath would have probably enjoyed the kill. She’d probably have stood next to the body for a few seconds, watching as the blood drained from the back of the head. She probably would have blended in.
A sociopath would have enjoyed the kill through the scope. No need to go gawk at the dead, the trophy was stored in the mind. Sure they craved acclaim and praise, but they weren’t smug enough to stand next to a dead body and hope no one noticed. They too would have blended with the crowd.
I pulled my thoughts away from the psychobabble mumbo jumbo that accompanied parts of my job. Earlier in my career, I would have wondered if I had been channeling Lucas. Now though, I understood it was what made me good at my job. I didn’t think like a person, I thought like a predator. If I had been behind the scope, I would have watched her fall. I would have watched her bleed. I would have done it all from the safety and comfort of my sniper’s nest. No one would have looked at me because no one would have been around.
“Where was the body?” I asked Adams.
“Between some cars,” Adams pointed.
A grassy field was still full of stranded vehicles. The entire area was a crime scene, cars included. Besides, what happened if there was a car bomb set to go off when people left? More chaos, more panic, more death would have occurred. I’m sure some people had tried to leave in their cars, but the police; county, city and state troopers, would have stopped them.
Personally, I wouldn’t have planted a random car bomb. I would have put one on the buses housed at the local bus barn. They would have had timers or location sensitive detonators and would have exploded when they reached the chain link fence that enclosed the fairgrounds. Obviously, that hadn’t been the case with our bomber.
“Where, exactly?” I pressed.
“It’s marked,” Adams sounded irritated.
“By what?” I continued.
“Crime scene tape,” Adams huffed.
“There is crime scene tape all over the place. If you don’t want to be helpful, that’s fine, but just tell me that you don’t want to be helpful,” I snipped at him. I found a very tall man wearing a state trooper uniform and hat. “Excuse me, do you know where they found the body of the fair queen?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” he said. “I’ll take you there.”
“Thank you,” I didn’t gripe about the “ma’am,” although it was my first instinct. Behind me, I could hear Gabriel trying to soothe the ego of the Homeland Security Agent that was very unhelpful and sort of a jackass. He joined my mental list, just above Malachi’s name.
“Here you are,” the trooper pointed to the ground. There was a single piece of crime scene tape hanging from a car antenna. I raised an eyebrow and flipped the bird to Agent Adams, hoping he saw it.
“Everything all right?” The trooper asked.
“Fine, I just hate dealing with unhelpful people,” I smiled, but knew it didn’t look real.
“Anything else?” He asked.
“Have they calculated the trajectory of the shot? Or found the shooter’s location?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he pointed towards the back of the field. I saw a truck with a ribbon of tape hanging from the antenna.
“Thanks and it’s Marshal Cain, not ma’am,” I started towards it.
“Marshal,” the trooper kept up with me. “What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know yet,” I told him. “A reason to shoot a fair queen.”
“I understand,” the trooper said as he continued to accompany me to the truck.
The truck was red, but about half the trucks in the field were red. It had a blue light on the dash.
“Do we know who it is registered to?” I asked.
“Yes,” the trooper answered. “Dale Turner, he was a volunteer fireman in Marion County. His body was among those found when the grandstands were cleared.”
“So, he probably wasn’t the shooter,” I cocked my head to the side.
With a little effort, I climbed into the bed of the truck. My joints were still stiff from the flight. I drew my gun, using the roof of the cab, I rested my arms to steady myself. From here, I had a perfect view of the field of cars. Finding my target in a stampeding crowd would be a little harder, but it could be done.
“Ace!” Xavier shouted. “What are you doing?”
“Checking out the shooter’s view. Guess what, I could have killed you at least a hundred yards ago,” I told him.
“Comforting,” Xavier shook his head.
Chapter Four
There was a Budget Inn in Palmyra. We had rooms reserved there. I wasn’t sure why. It seemed just as easy to fly back to KC and wait for the next attack or some sort of evidence to turn up. Gabriel had said something about budget cuts.
So, I had a room at the Budget Inn in Palmyra. It wasn’t a bad room. For a small town, it was exceptional. The room was modern with painted two-tone walls. The two queen beds had flowery bedspreads as opposed to the more common paisley design. There was a desk, a flat screen TV and a refrigerator.
As for things to do in Palmyra while waiting on crime scene results and suspects to come out of the woodwork, well, they were a little short in the entertainment department. However, there was a Mexican restaurant. This made me deliriously happy as I hadn’t eaten Mexican in at least three days. I was overdue.
Gabriel must have known it. He knocked on my door and informed me we were going to the Mexican restaurant for lunch. This suited me just fine as I had a fridge to hold left-overs.
Aside from the general hustle and bustle of a restaurant at lunch time, it was relatively quiet at our table. Xavier and Gabriel showed off their Spanish skills by ordering our lunch in the waiter’s native tongue. He didn’t swear at them, so I guessed their Spanish was at least passably good. I spoke as much Spanish as I did Klingon, meaning I wasn’t much help. I knew the word for “bathroom” was “bano,” but I figured that was about as mush Spanish as I would ever need. Besides, melting pot or not, I was not good with learning Romance languages. I had taken three years of French and knew how to order coffee, ask for the bathroom and find out the price of a horse. As long as the questions were answered in English, I would know where the bathroom was and the cost of the horse.
We didn’t discuss the bombing at lunch. Or the shooting of the fair queen. The town had suffered enough without us discussing gory details at their only Mexican restaurant. This was emphasized by the fact that the place was nearly packed and people kept coming in. There was now a line waiting for tables.
“Yes,” Lucas said, touching my shoulder.
“Yes what?” I asked, frowning at him.
“I’m anticipating your question.”
“I don’t have a question,” I responded, looking at the ever lengthening line. It dawned on me then that the “yes” was really “yes, they are lining up because we are in here.” It hadn’t been a question on my mind until Lucas said something. Normally, I didn’t approve of gawkers at crime scenes or at the US Marshals’ Death Squad. Here I was willing to cut the townspeople some slack; they had just been devastated by a bombing.
My nose wrinkled automatically at the thought of the bombing. This bomber was smart. I didn’t like smart people who did terrible things. I was used to serial killers who tortured other people because they were a little bit off in the morality department. But, blowing up a group of people at random was just wrong on a whole different level.
A single thought consumed me for the rest of lunch. I had to text Nyleena when I got into the privacy of my own hotel room. My moral compass
, flawed on a good day, had just begun spinning wildly.
My hotel room was quiet. I appreciated the lack of people. I enjoyed quiet. I enjoyed it so much, I debated whether this was an area that required me to call Nyleena or if a text would do. After several minutes, I called my personal Jiminy Cricket for advice.
“What’s up?” Nyleena asked.
“Are you at lunch?” I responded.
“If you consider sitting at my desk with a container of yogurt and a package of cookies while staring at gory descriptions written by the FBI’s Violent Crimes Unit lunch, then yes, I’m at lunch.”
“I had Mexican.”
“Sounds better than yogurt and cookies,” she gave a long sigh and I heard something hit her desk with force, even through the phone.
“Don’t throw ink pens,” I scolded her.
“Are you spying on me?”
“No, I just know that when you are frustrated, you have a tendency to throw your ink pens at your desk and I heard it hit the top of the wood.”
“Creepy. So, what’s up again?”
“Can’t this be a social call?”
“Sure, if it wasn’t you on the other end while working on a case.”
“How do you know I’m working a case?”
“Because everyone on the planet saw the Serial Crimes Tracking Unit splashed all over the TV an hour or so ago. I didn’t think you did bombings.”
“I don’t. That’s actually why I’m calling.”
“I can’t help you with a case,” Nyleena reminded me.
“It isn’t about the case, it’s about my opinion of bombers.”
“This should be interesting,” Nyleena was smiling over the phone. I didn’t need to see it to know it.
“Ok, well, it would appear that I have a prejudice against them. I think they are worse than serial killers. Like a whole lot worse than serial killers. For whatever reason, in the bad guy hierarchy in my mind, bombers rank right up there with child molesters and animal torturers.”
“I believe that,” Nyleena said after a few moments. “I think you should be more concerned that animal torturers are higher than serial killers on your bad guy hierarchy.”
That gave me a moment of pause. I tried to figure out the justification and came up with nothing. We’d just ignore it, if possible.
“So, that doesn’t make me strange?” I asked.
“Strange? You?” Nyleena actually chuckled. “Ace, you’re a death magnet. Serial killers flock to you like groupies at a rock concert. Yet, you think it might be strange that you have a prejudice against a particular type of killer?”
“When you put it like that,” I sighed.
“I think if that is your strangest idiosyncrasy, you’re batting a thousand. Since I know it isn’t, it isn’t that bad. It is far more justified than your dislike of Italians.”
“I don’t dislike Italians. I dislike Romans.”
“There are no Romans anymore. There are only Italians and Vatican Citians,” she said the last like she wasn’t sure about it.
“See, Italians and Catholics are fine.” I shrugged and realized a few seconds later that she hadn’t seen it. One day, I’d learn to use video conferencing or whatever they called it.
“Well, my lunch break is officially over, so I’m going to ignore your inquests into whether you’re a bigot or not and whether that’s bizarre or not and go back to work on Malachi’s chicken scratch report. The man should learn to type.”
“He knows how to type. He types very well. Somewhere in the neighborhood of eighty words per minute.”
“Well, he handwrites his case files.”
“He enjoys being a pain in the ass.”
“Agreed,” Nyleena hung up. I lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling for a long time. I was a bigot. I had never thought that possible. It required effort to be a bigot. It required constant dislike and the discovery of new reasons for said dislike. Maybe I did have something I believed in after all. I wasn’t sure it made me feel any better, so I decided to ignore it.
There are reasons why I shouldn’t own a smart phone. One, I don’t actually know how to use them. Two, when I do figure something out, I use it to death. I thought my phone’s computer voice was going to go hoarse the first week I had the new smart phone that Gabriel insisted I start using. Three, I’m clumsy. This problem had been partially solved by making me get a protective, waterproof case. So far, so good on that, I hadn’t dropped it in or on anything. The fourth was more difficult to explain. I do not like to be bored. I do not like to wait. I am a dedicated multi-tasker. I can watch TV, play video games, and listen to music all at the same time without ever missing any part of it. I can even sing along to music while watching TV and playing video games, never miss a plot point in whatever I’m watching or screw up a lyric.
Having a phone that allowed me to play video games, while I surfed the web on my laptop and watched mind-numbing TV in the form of The World’s Dumbest, was a disaster. My current gaming addictions were Clash of Clans and Farm Heroes. Three weeks earlier, I had zipped through 200 levels of Candy Crush in less than a week and decided it wasn’t really my sort of game. Someone had suggested the other two and I had immediately latched onto them. Hell, one was a military strategy game against live people. I was hooked.
My phone wouldn’t load the game today though. The battery needed to be charged. The charger was in my bags. My bags were not in my hotel room. I sighed and got up, grabbing my Kindle. Some weeks ago, I had started a bunch of books. One still hadn’t been finished. Not because it wasn’t interesting, but because my life had gotten in the way, along with some excessive video gaming.
Misha Burnett’s Catskinner’s Book opened to where I had left off the day before. It was an interesting read. I wasn’t entirely sure I liked it, but I wasn’t sure I didn’t either. It required me to get to the end and maybe think about it for a day or two to make up my mind about it.
Technically, I’m a speed-reader. I don’t like the term myself. I read, I read often and my mind has just gotten trained to read at a fast pace. Sometimes, the Kindle slowed me down, but I figured that was a good thing.
I had gone through about seven Kindle pages when my phone once again warned me that the battery was low. I was going to have to go search for my bags or I could pop over and borrow someone else’s charger, if they had it. Putting the Kindle on the table, I got up, grabbed my phone and entered the bright sun-shiny day.
After a mass killing, it seems almost insulting to have a bright, hot day, filled with brilliant sunshine and balmy winds. It should be storming its ass off with tornado warnings sounding in the distance. It wasn’t. The heat instantly caused sweat to form on my skin. The humidity made me feel damp all over. The beauty of Missouri weather was that it wasn’t just hot, it was wet and hot. We could go months without rain, but that did nothing to dampen the humidity that always hung in the air, ready to frizz out curly hair and make your clothes cling to all the wrong spots.
“I was just coming to get you,” Gabriel opened his door.
“This iPhone is dead,” I told him.
“That’s what chargers are for. I know you’ve used them before.”
“I don’t know where my charger is,” I answered. “Well, I do, it’s in my luggage, but I don’t know where my luggage is. Did Homeland Security lose it?”
“No, all our luggage is being held by Homeland. For some reason, they were concerned about the extensive knife collection and the three back up Tasers you had packed.”
“We have our own plane. Why did they search my luggage?”
“Because they can,” Gabriel sighed. “They searched all our luggage once we arrived. Something about sweeping for bugs and other sources to leak information.”
“But they let me keep my iPhone and my laptop?”
“No one said their rules made sense. We are going to go get the luggage now, but Adams would like a word with you. I do not suggest being irritating.”
“I don’t have
a charming side.”
“Sure you do, it shows itself when you keep your mouth shut and your clothes on,” Gabriel informed me.
He had me there. I was charming when I was quiet and clothed. I wasn’t a bad looking gal, even with the handful of visible scars. As long as you were just looking at me and not talking to me, I was probably very pleasant.
That never lasted long with me though. Poor Adams, he was in for a really bad hour or so. It really irritated me that they had searched my bags.
Jail
Nick sat in his truck, cursing the starter. The rebuilt mechanical necessity was still a piece of shit and had gone out yet again. He didn’t have the money for a new one. He didn’t have money for lunch, let alone a starter. He’d packed a bologna and cheese sandwich and a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos for lunch and his cooler contained half a dozen Fantas and a couple of bottles of water. Not the good water, but water from the sink faucet used to refill the bottles, because he couldn’t afford bottled water either.
His ex-wife was sucking him dry. Between child support for his daughter and maintenance payments to his wife, who of course, didn’t work, he couldn’t make enough money in a month. He didn’t mind the child support. He did mind the maintenance. Missouri didn’t have alimony. It was also a “no-fault state,” Nick didn’t know exactly what that meant, but it seemed to mean that even though his ex-wife was 100% responsible for their divorce, he had to pay for it.
“Hey Nick, need a ride?” A guy he worked with came up to his window.
“I guess so,” Nick sighed. “It’s the starter again. I just can’t seem to scrape up the cash to get a new one. The ex is sucking the very life from me.”
“We’ve all been there,” the guy patted Nick on the back as Nick walked to his car. There was a very good chance that the guys he worked with now, did indeed, know that. They all had life experiences that included things like divorces and ex-wives from hell. It must have had something to do with construction work.
