Frank Reynolds had not been so lucky.
A 12-gauge sabot slug—coincidentally, the same Winchester XP3 brand as those he had loaded into his Remington 870 some two hours earlier—traveling at 1,700 feet per second and carrying nearly 3,000 foot-pounds of energy, entered his body just below his left armpit and blasted all the way through his chest, exiting just above his right nipple after destroying his heart.
Reynolds slumped in his tree stand, his safety harness preventing him from toppling out and falling to the ground. He dropped his gun but it fell across his lap and lay there unfired, balanced somewhat precariously.
Another man emerged from the still-dark woods and walked carefully up to the tree. He gazed upward at the still form of Reynolds for a moment, noting the shotgun hanging rather crazily across Reynolds’ lap. Then he broke the breech of his Ruger Red Label over/under and caught the bottom fired shell as it ejected. He dropped the shell into a pocket, closed the breech and leaned the gun against a nearby tree.
He returned to Reynolds’ tree and very carefully climbed the ladder to the tree stand. Reynolds’ eyes were open and his mouth hung slack; death had been instantaneous. The other man noted that the Remington’s safety was off and with a gloved fingertip he returned it to the safe position. He climbed down the ladder and retrieved his gun, then turned and walked off through the woods toward his own vehicle parked on a deserted farm lane a mile away.
Like Frank Reynolds, he wore an orange cap and an orange vest over his hunting coat and Carhartt brush pants. Anyone encountering him in the woods would immediately assume he was one of the thousands of deer hunters afield in Illinois that weekend. It was a variation of the old “hide in plain sight” strategy and the man was counting on it getting him safely out of the vicinity.
He was in luck. He encountered no other hunters on his way to the vehicle, and once there he quickly unloaded and cased his shotgun and stripped off his hunting clothing. He stowed the clothing and gun in the trunk of his SUV, a pewter gray Chevrolet Equinox. He quickly dressed in blue jeans, navy sweatshirt, leather jacket and a khaki bill cap, and slid beneath the wheel.
Full dawn was just breaking as the man drove down the farm lane, pulled out onto the highway and made the half-hour return trip to Macomb, where he had a room at the Best Western on East Jackson, only a few hundred yards from the Hampton Inn where Frank Reynolds had spent his last night.
He returned to his room, stripped down and took a long shower. Then he dressed again in the same clothes he’d just worn, went downstairs to the lobby and took advantage of the hotel’s complimentary breakfast buffet.
After eating he carried a disposable cup of coffee back to his room and sipped at it as he packed his single bag and shaving kit. He picked up his John Sandford paperback from the nightstand and dropped it into his briefcase and snapped it closed. He did a quick survey of the room to make sure he hadn’t overlooked anything—unlikely, as he was traveling light—then he dumped the rest of the coffee into the bathroom sink, rinsed it down and tossed the cup into the wastebasket.
He checked out of the hotel and loaded his luggage into the cargo space of the Equinox. He pulled out of the parking lot onto East Jackson and drove west toward the town square. He would pick up Highway 67 just off the square and take 67 north to Highway 34, where he would then head west, crossing the Mississippi River into Burlington, Iowa, and continuing on 34 for another couple hours before turning north again, eventually returning to his home in Des Moines.
En route, he would make one stop for gas at the Casey’s in New London, Iowa. While his tank was filling he would drop a Hardee’s bag into the trash receptacle next to the gas pump.
Inside the bag, in addition to a couple of used napkins and an empty sandwich box, was the shotgun shell he’d fired earlier that morning.
PART 1: EDITORIAL LICENSE
Be regular and orderly in your life so you may be violent
and original in your work.
-Gustave Flaubert
Chapter 1
The money is good, but that’s not why I do it.
Kill people, I mean. That’s what I do, and I’m very good at it. And yes, the compensation is usually more than adequate.
But don’t start jumping to conclusions. I’m not a spook. I’m not some ex-Agency, ultra-ultra-deep-cover, government-trained assassin who got my start in the military and, having discovered a unique talent, couldn’t let it go. Nor was I ever encouraged by my “Uncle” to put my special skills to use for the common good, in which capacity I might still have the occasional brush-up with colleagues who might or might not be among the so-called good guys and might or might not be people I should trust.
No. I don’t play at espionage. I don’t call secret phone numbers and get my orders from people who use lots of acronyms and won’t allow their names to be spoken aloud on an open line, and I don’t have hidden files tucked away somewhere that I can use as leverage if I find myself running afoul of a power player. I never served in the military, and the extent of my contact with the government consists of filing my income taxes every year, renewing the registration on my SUV and voting in the occasional election. The few times I’ve been called for jury duty I’ve managed to get myself excused.
Sounds pretty dull, doesn’t it? You’re right; it is. And that’s by design.
If you saw me on the street or in a restaurant or a shopping mall or an airport—and there’s a reasonable chance you have seen me in some of those places—you’d most likely give me no more than a passing glance. There’s quite a bit about me that’s just plain average—size, looks, clothing. I wear glasses, and my hair is getting thin on top.
I dress comfortably and rather conservatively. I recently became eligible for Social Security—I’m old enough to have served in Vietnam, but I was in college at the time and my number in the draft lottery was high enough to keep me there.
I don’t go out of my way to attract attention, but neither do I live an introverted, reclusive life. I’m not married, but I date casually, and I occasionally get invited to parties and cookouts and can hold my own in a conversation on a variety of subjects. People usually laugh at my jokes, and I keep myself reasonably well informed about most current events. I read extensively, and my house is full of books.
I also have a Browning gun vault full of shotguns, but those are primarily related to my regular job—I’m the editor of an outdoor sporting magazine, a “hook and bullet rag,” as such publications are irreverently referred to within the publishing industry. I’m a bird hunter by avocation, and a six-year-old German wirehaired pointer named Preacher—for Clint Eastwood’s grizzled character in the movie Pale Rider—shares my home.
Sometimes I use one of my shotguns for something besides upland game or waterfowl. That’s a safe enough practice, as I’ll explain later. When a shotgun is too large for the job at hand—when it’s necessary to get up close and personal to the target, in other words—I’ll occasionally use a handgun. But I never keep these after the job is finished. That’s Rule Number 3.
I travel a good bit for my job—I get quite a few invitations from advertisers throughout the hunting season, and by taking advantage of these invitations I’ve hunted in many locations and at many top-drawer facilities around the world. Sometimes—not frequently, but once in a while—my two jobs overlap. The advertiser picks up the tab for my hunt (in exchange for some editorial ink), and by staying an extra day or two—usually on the pretext of visiting an old childhood friend or a seldom-seen relative and always at my own expense—I manage to take care of the other assignment while I’m at it. It doesn’t happen that way very often, but it’s convenient when it does.
OK, so if I really don’t do it for the money, why do I do it?
Simple.
There are two things I can’t abide in this world—a bully, and injustice.
The two often go hand in hand, and when I encounter either, I bristle. When someone else has a problem with either, he or she will so
metimes seek me out to make the situation right.
Over the years, I’ve become very good at this. And that’s my real motivation—the feeling of satisfaction that comes from having done a job well, righted a wrong, balanced the scales or eliminated an oppressive threat.
It’s my way of leaving the world a little better place than I found it.
On a Friday morning in late November I drove to the branch post office a few blocks from my house. I have two boxes there, one for magazine-related materials and the other for personal use. I need the magazine box because I work out of my home and I prefer not to give out my home address to anyone sending a submission to the magazine. That could lead to contributors—and readers—dropping by unannounced, and that’s an invasion of privacy I can definitely do without.
The second P.O. box also helps me safeguard my privacy. It’s one of several I have throughout the metro area and through which I conduct my other business—the boxes to which checks are sent for services rendered, and the ones to which occasional inquiries are sent, asking about hiring me for those services. More shortly on how this system works.
On that November morning I was expecting to find a check in the second box. The previous Saturday I’d completed an assignment in Illinois during the state’s firearm deer season, and allowing for the time my client would need to confirm this and then send the check, I was reasonably confident it would be there, and it was, made payable to my innocuous-sounding LLC, a copy-editing and proofreading business.
I also checked the magazine box and found three articles from regular contributors, plus a couple of letters to the editor. No one submits actual manuscripts anymore; almost everyone emails me their stories. But the majority of them submit the photos to accompany their articles—and sometimes a copy of the article itself—on CDs, at my stipulation. They could have sent me their photos by email as well, or used an online file- sharing program, but I prefer not having to download their photos—too time-consuming, for one thing—or keep them filed on my computer.
I’ll admit I’m something of a dinosaur in these matters. Publishing’s digital revolution is moving at breakneck speed and lately I’ve been thinking it’s time to step down and let someone else take over as editor of my magazine, American Wingshot.
Magazines printed on paper are now called “dead tree pubs” by those wags in the industry who maintain consumers will soon be reading everything on their iBooks and their Kindles; and in fact, Trimedia, the corporation that owns American Wingshot and a dozen other shooting and outdoor titles, recently began offering all of our magazines in digital formats in addition to the traditional paper versions.
I don’t believe the transition to an all-digital universe is going to happen quite as quickly as some are predicting but I can’t deny the changes are occurring at an almost blinding pace. I’ve lost track of the number of design and editing programs I’ve had to learn over the years just to keep current in my job…when I first got into magazine work the writers were still submitting typewritten manuscripts that we sent out to have typeset, and the pages of the magazine were stripped together by hand. Now, of course, everything is done electronically.
Still, retirement is something that doesn’t come easily to a lot of folks, and I suppose I’m among them. But while I’m hesitant to take that step, neither do I want to make the mistake made by too many professional athletes, namely, staying one season too long.
The latter is a concern for me in my other line of work, as well. As I already mentioned, I’m not a youngster; and while I’ve kept myself in reasonably good shape—living with a large, high-energy sporting dog pretty much dictates that a sedentary lifestyle is not an option—there’s no denying that I’m neither as strong nor as quick as I once was. Needless to say, that could have fatal consequences for someone besides my intended target…namely, yours truly.
But enough navel-gazing. After leaving the post office that Friday morning I drove to my bank to deposit the check into my LLC account and while sitting in the drive-up lane waiting for my receipt, I thought about what I’d done to earn it.
Chapter 2
The job had been fairly easy, all things considered. My client was the brother of a girl named Mandi Collins who had worked as a clerk at a prominent Chicago law firm. She was twenty-four years old and, according to her brother James, she had died during an episode of kinky sex with one of the firm’s senior partners, Frank Reynolds, some eighteen months earlier.
She had been found dead in her apartment, an apparent victim of autoerotic asphyxiation. Her death had been ruled a suicide but her brother was convinced that the attorney had actually strangled her and then hung her in the closet (her brother’s rather ironic phrasing, not mine) to cover his own ass.
James, by the way, was the one who had found her. He was four years older, and in the tradition of big brothers everywhere he had always kept a protective eye on his kid sister. They were close and had keys to each other’s apartments and when she hadn’t answered her phone or text messages for several days and missed a standing Friday lunch date with him, he’d gone to her place and let himself in.
Their parents were too distraught over Mandi’s death to delve into the matter but her brother had pursued it with pit bull determination. He already knew, because his sister had confided in him, that she was having an affair with the attorney. James had taken this information to the Chicago police but they quickly dismissed it. The girl’s death had all the signs of being a straight-forward, accidental suicide and there was no indication of foul play, or even anything to indicate anyone else had been in the apartment when she had died.
Frustrated but determined to see justice done, James Collins had eventually located me.
That’s not especially easy to do, but the fact that it is difficult is one of the ways by which I can evaluate the—ahem—sincerity of a prospective client. If said client manages to make it to the first contact stage—and again, I don’t make this easy—that tells me that he or she is truly, perhaps even desperately, interested in retaining my services.
The whole exercise involves a circuitous route that begins with responding to a fairly innocent-sounding online ad that hints at what I do. The client is then taken through several “blinds” that lead to some rather convoluted email exchanges. Only after successfully passing through this series of baffles will the client be given one of my P.O. box numbers (not the one reserved for magazine correspondence) with the simple instructions to send me, via snail mail, a phone number.
Why snail mail to a P.O. box? Because, like ’em or not, the U.S. Postal Service is still a lot safer in many ways than any kind of online correspondence. Even before all the revelations about NSA’s data gathering on American citizens, it was fairly well known that anything you put online—anything—is fair game for anyone. In simplest terms, once you post it or email it, it’s out there in cyberspace forever, which means there’s a strong likelihood that someone can find it again if they try hard enough.
Also, even if deleting messages completely protected the sender and the recipient, a lot of people are just plain sloppy housekeepers when it comes to keeping their inboxes and “sent messages” file clean. Some folks go for weeks or months without deleting anything, which means—again—the messages are just sitting there waiting to be found.
So when the client and I reach the stage that I’m ready to make actual contact, I provide a P.O. box number and ask for a phone number. I call them on a disposable cell phone—yes, a “burner”; I buy them at various retail stores around the city and throughout the state—and if they ask my name I tell them to call me something like John, or Bill, or Steve. That’s for their convenience only, and of course it leads nowhere.
That’s how it had worked with James Collins, and I told him to call me Tom.
As clients go, he was almost too good to be true. First of all, he’d done his homework. When I called him and he described the circumstances of his sister’s death, it was obvious he’d spent lots of
time dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s. He had detailed answers for all the questions I asked, and by the time we finished our first conversation I too was pretty well convinced that Mandi had been killed by her boss.
Whether her death was intentional or accidental I wasn’t so sure. But what was certain was the fact that after a cursory investigation Frank Reynolds had walked away from the whole situation free and clear. Correction: he really hadn’t had to walk anywhere because he’d never been considered a suspect in the first place. With Mandi’s death ruled a suicide and the cops unwilling to probe more deeply into the matter, Frank Reynolds was going to get away with either murder or manslaughter, take your pick.
James Collins wasn’t willing to let it go at that.
“I know in my gut he killed her,” he said during our first phone conversation. “I know what that probably sounds like but I’m not just some bereaved family member wallowing in denial. There are too many things that point to Frank Reynolds’ involvement.”
“Such as?”
“OK, this is probably gonna sound a little weird coming from her own brother, but Mandi wouldn’t have…needed to be doing what she was supposedly doing when she died. She was a good-looking girl—OK, hot—and she never had any trouble finding…partners. In fact, I gave her a hard time about that on a pretty regular basis, always ragging at her to be careful. When she told me she was having an affair with her boss I nearly took her head off.”
“Being involved with someone and having a healthy sex life doesn’t mean she didn’t occasionally…uh, fly solo.”
The Killer in the Woods Page 2
