I wasn’t worried about that happening with James Collins.
It was during our second conversation that I discovered just how invaluable he might be. “I’m going to need more details about Reynolds’ personal life,” I said. “Daily schedule, where he lives, how much time he spends in the office, how often he’s in court if he’s a litigator, how often he and his wife go out, that sort of thing.”
“Already working on all of that,” James replied.
“You are?” I said. I’ll admit I was a little surprised, although maybe I shouldn’t have been considering how much time and effort he’d already invested.
“Yep. I’m already tapping into his daily work schedule and I can even give you the names of the clients he’s meeting with this week. I can also give you quite a bit of his wife’s schedule as well.”
“What? How are you getting all of that information? Please tell me you haven’t hired a private investigator.” The last thing I needed was an outsider who was in any way privy to our plans.
“Nope, didn’t have to.”
“What, then?”
“Well, I told you I run my own computer consulting business. Let’s just say that through my business I’ve come to know some…uh, geeks who are very good at probing for things.”
“You’re tight with some hackers, in other words.”
He laughed. “Hacking is such an ugly word,” he said, and I laughed myself. Among sporting dog people like me, hacking first refers not to invading someone else’s computer, but to overhandling a dog in the field…i.e., constantly blasting the whistle or shouting commands that the dog generally ignores. Hacking is an ugly word among dog trainers and bird hunters also.
But I didn’t bother explaining this to James Collins. Instead, I said, “Are you sure these are people you can trust?”
He laughed again. “You want to think about what you just asked me?”
I did, and the answer was obvious. What they were doing was undoubtedly illegal so they were probably bound by some sort of mutual understanding that if one of them went down, they’d all go down, unavoidably. Call it honor among paranoiacs.
“All right,” I said. “I think it’s risky but I’ll admit you might be able to shortcut things for me.”
“Well, if it makes you feel any better, the two guys I’m working with don’t know your name, or even that we’ve been in touch or what we’ve talked about, and they never will. But they did know Mandi, and they know what happened to her.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning even though I’m paying these guys for their help, they’d probably both do it for nothing. They want to see Frank Reynolds go down almost as badly as I do.”
So with the help of James Collins and his two hacker buddies, I put together a plan, and like I’ve already said, it turned out to be much easier than expected. I can’t begin to tell you how they managed to do it—even if they’d described the process to me (which they didn’t), I doubt if I could accurately recount it here—but within just a few days they were reading almost all of the email traffic in and out of Reynolds’ entire office, both business and personal of all the employees, plus all of their interoffice correspondence.
They also tapped directly into several of the employees’ computers, including Reynolds’ own. The most valuable of these turned out not to be Reynolds’ but the computer of his personal secretary, who—cue the bells signaling the grand prize winner—kept his appointment book, scheduled all of his meetings and—another big win here—made all of his travel arrangements.
That last, plus an archived Chicago Tribune article they discovered with a quick online search, was what led me to decide that Frank Reynolds would die from an accident while deer hunting downstate rather than being killed during a home invasion or a mugging in Chicago.
The Trib article was titled “Prominent Attorney Shoots Wall-Hanger” and it had appeared some three years earlier in the paper’s Sunday sports section. Frank Reynolds had shot a whitetail buck that scored high enough to make it into the Boone & Crockett record book, and the paper had done a surprisingly positive write-up…surprising because it didn’t include any of the anti-hunting, anti-gun sentiment that pervades so much of the mainstream media these days.
The story had characterized Reynolds as a hard-working and well-known Chicago attorney who was also a passionate deer hunter who never missed a season and almost always took a trophy buck. Reynolds was quoted extensively in the article and he even mentioned the name of the farmer—Patrick Wallace—on whose land he hunted every year. It was in Schuyler County, about five hours southwest of Chicago, an area known for producing large bucks.
From that point on, it was almost a cakewalk.
By monitoring the secretary’s computer and her emails to Reynolds, we found out when she made his reservations at the Hampton Inn in Macomb for a weekend in mid-October a few weeks before deer season. I was certain this was for a pre-season scouting trip as Reynolds had mentioned in the Trib article that he usually hunted from a tree stand and I was guessing he probably planned to hang one while he was there.
It took a little scrambling—I have a regular job, remember, and it’s one that comes complete with deadlines—but I managed to get myself to Macomb that same weekend. We knew Reynolds was driving down to Macomb from Chicago on Friday and I did the same from my home in Des Moines.
I stayed at the Best Western that night, which was next door to the Hampton where Reynolds was staying, and it was easy enough to follow Reynolds (at a discreet distance, of course) as he left town on Saturday morning and drove out to Patrick Wallace’s farm. James Collins had provided me with an aerial map of the entire area so I was already reasonably familiar with the topography.
I guessed Frank Reynolds would first go to Patrick Wallace’s farm to renew acquaintance—that’s what I do every year with those farmers on whose land I have permission to hunt—and sure enough, that’s exactly what he did. I was watching through binoculars from alongside the road a quarter mile away (my SUV parked behind a copse of trees) as they stood on the front porch of the farmhouse and visited for 15 or 20 minutes, then Reynolds returned to his Escalade, which he’d parked off to one side of the farmer’s lane, and opened the hatchback.
He was wearing jeans and hunting boots and a hooded sweatshirt and cap…dressed for an October day in the woods, in other words, and not looking like an attorney. He removed a lightweight portable tree stand from the Escalade and headed off past the farmer’s barn and outbuildings and into the woods, carrying the stand’s platform in one hand and its two-piece ladder over his opposite shoulder. By entering the woods a couple hundred yards from where Reynolds had entered, and walking a parallel course—and by doing no small amount of dodging and ducking behind trees—I was able to avoid being seen but still keep him in sight most of the time.
He eventually made it down to a creek bottom and started following a main deer trail. He was in no big hurry, apparently, and he seemed to have an idea of where he was going. My guess was that he was heading back to a spot where he’d previously taken a good buck—maybe the Boone & Crockett qualifier—or somewhere close to that spot, anyway.
It took him nearly two hours to settle on a location and when he did it was along the main deer trail he’d been following, which ran roughly parallel to the creek. He propped the tree stand’s ladder against a tree about 40 yards from the trail and stepped back to make a survey of the area, checking for clear shooting lanes. Satisfied, he returned to the tree and began assembling the two pieces of the stand’s ladder.
I stood behind a large oak some 50 yards away and watched him. Reynolds appeared to be about my size, six feet tall and maybe ten pounds heavier. He seemed to know what he was doing, as it only took him a few minutes to get his stand positioned and bolted into place against the tree. When he finished he stepped back, gave the ladder one last tug to make sure it was set solidly, then turned and headed back the way he had come.
I waited 15 minutes to make
sure he’d left the area. Then I walked down to the stand myself and, standing just beneath it, withdrew my Garmin GPS unit from my pocket and keyed it to record the coordinates of the location.
That would make it a lot easier to find this spot again, especially in the pre-dawn darkness, when I returned in a few weeks for deer season.
Chapter 5
When I got home after making my run to the post office and the bank, the first thing I did was let Preacher out into the back yard to pee. She—yes, Preacher is a female; surely you’re aware of the increasing number of women entering the clergy, aren’t you?—did her business then trotted around the perimeter of the fenced yard, checking for signs of squirrels and other dangerous invaders. I stood on the deck and watched her for a couple minutes before going back inside to sit down at the computer and start on some editing.
The rest of the Frank Reynolds assignment had fallen into place without a hitch. The deer hunting angle was one with which I was especially pleased, as it went a long way toward helping me adhere to Rule Number 2, which is, “No collateral damage allowed.” When I first began taking these assignments, I vowed I would never kill anyone other than the intended target…that is, I would never kill a bystander or a witness or anyone else just to keep from being apprehended. Rather, I’d take the fall.
Sound a little too idealistic? Yeah, I suppose it does. But remember, I do what I do not for the money but to make things right. Killing someone else who just happens to be there—a victim of circumstance or bad timing—isn’t justifiable in my book. And I’ll admit, so far I’ve been lucky…it’s not a split-second decision I’ve ever had to make. I hope I never have to.
Shooting Frank Reynolds during deer season in the woods on private land before daylight almost guaranteed that no one else would witness what happened. It was still a gamble, sure, but a small one, and there’s always going to be some risk involved. Plus, there’s also a danger of overthinking these things. While I’m a firm believer in trying to anticipate and plan for contingencies, long ago I learned the wisdom of the old rule of KISS, which means, of course, “Keep it simple, stupid.”
For example, early on I briefly considered applying for a non-resident deer permit for Schuyler County, something that would have covered me if by chance I were spotted and stopped by a game warden on my way into or out of the woods. Because of Illinois’ growing reputation for producing trophy bucks, more and more out-of-state deer hunters were traveling to the Land of Lincoln to do their hunting. With my driver’s license showing I was an Iowa resident, a non-resident permit would easily explain my presence in the woods that morning.
Could I have carried false identification? Yeah, that always sounds good in theory, and I have used it occasionally—it’s not that difficult to find a supplier, either on the internet or by word of mouth. (I also know where to buy a handgun off the books, but that’s a story for a little later.) But in keeping with my practice of maintaining as low a profile as possible and sticking to the rule of KISS, I opted not to bother this time. The more people who have a hand in helping you do something illegal, the more chances there are that somebody will let something slip.
As far as applying for a non-resident deer permit to explain why I was in the woods that morning, that would create one more paper trail. I had no doubt that Frank Reynolds’ death would be thoroughly investigated, no matter how accidental it appeared. And while I didn’t know if the Schuyler County sheriff’s office or the Illinois DOC would go to the length of checking out every single deer hunter to whom a permit had been issued for Schuyler County, I thought it was smarter to keep my name off that roster altogether. I decided to roll the dice and bet that I wouldn’t be spotted during my brief time in the woods.
The odds were in my favor. Many hunters would take their deer on opening day and the fact that Frank Reynolds wasn’t going to be on his stand until the second morning of the season—another tidbit we gleaned by monitoring his appointment calendar and travel schedule on his secretary’s computer—meant I could expect fewer hunters in the woods and less chance of an encounter.
Also, I was planning to get to the location of Frank Reynolds’ tree stand much earlier than he would, even if it meant going out there in the middle of the night. (I was in position by 3:30 that morning, about an hour before he arrived himself.) I hoped to have everything wrapped up and be out of the woods and on my way back to Macomb by sunrise. And, in fact, that’s exactly how it had gone down.
There’s another old saying to the effect that Fate favors the prepared individual, and that certainly seemed to hold true that morning. I caught a real break with the arrival of the huge 12-point buck that came up the trail just as it was growing light enough for me to have a clear sight picture on Frank Reynolds. Reynolds was so totally dialed in on the big buck—he was just preparing to shoot, in fact—that he couldn’t have been thinking of anything else when I killed him. The buck had provided the ultimate distraction.
At the range from which I shot Reynolds—I was less than 30 yards away, partly hidden by a tree—I was sure the slug would pass through his body, and a quick look afterwards confirmed that it had. I doubted that it would ever be found but even if it was, there was no chance it would ever be matched ballistically to any firearm—that’s the beauty of shooting a slug through an unrifled shotgun barrel like those of my Ruger.
After confirming Reynolds’ death I made a quick hike back to my SUV, parked on a deserted farm lane about a mile away. The night before I’d considered boosting some license plates off a vehicle in Macomb so my Iowa plates wouldn’t attract any attention but again decided that was just one more needless complication. The likelihood of my vehicle being spotted where I parked it that morning was pretty remote and I was planning to be back on the highway, where my out-of-state plates wouldn’t get a second look, long before anyone would discover Reynolds’ body and raise an alarm.
I changed out of my hunter’s clothing when I got back to the vehicle—no need to perpetuate the masquerade any longer than necessary—and was on my way back to Macomb just as dawn was breaking. The rest of my morning and my trip home were uneventful, and I was back in Des Moines by early afternoon. I’d discarded the empty shotgun shell when I’d stopped for gas and by now it would be buried in a landfill somewhere in eastern Iowa.
I was betting that Frank Reynolds’ death would ultimately be ruled an accident. The trajectory of the shot would be troublesome for investigators, as it would be obvious that he had been shot from a low angle at fairly close range. But I was still confident that for lack of any real suspects the authorities would eventually be forced to conclude he had been killed by a stray shot fired by a hunter whose identity they could never hope to conclusively determine.
In just about every sense, this would make Reynolds’ death—to borrow a term he himself might have used—a clean kill.
Man, was I ever wrong about this.
Chapter 6
I left Preacher on squirrel patrol in the back yard and went inside to start some editing. Working from home as I do, I spend most of my day sitting at a computer reading and revising copy, screening photos and answering emails. My associate editor and art director are located in one of Trimedia’s production offices in another state.
As I’ve already mentioned, all magazine pre-press work is now done electronically so when Trimedia purchased American Wingshot from its previous Des Moines-based owner a few years ago, the new owners said I didn’t have to relocate. They wanted me to stay on as editor and to sweeten the deal they set me up with a company computer in the spare bedroom I was already using as a home office.
The arrangement—it’s called telecommuting and it is becoming increasingly common throughout the publishing industry—has proved very workable. Three or four times a year I make a trip to the production office for planning meetings and the rest of the time my staff and I handle all correspondence by phone and email.
It’s an ideal situation. Early every morning, weather permitting,
I take Preacher for a long run at a public lake about ten miles west of Des Moines. (That is, she runs; I amble.) The lake is surrounded by several hundred acres of woods laced with hiking trails and we usually have the place to ourselves that early in the day, only occasionally encountering another dog walker, jogger or, in winter, a cross-country skier, all of whom Preacher greets effusively. With her wagging tail and whiskered face she charms almost everyone immediately.
We’re usually back home by eight o’clock or a little after and I’m online by 8:30. I work until lunchtime, break for a half hour or so, then get back at it until late afternoon. It is, I’ll readily admit, about as comfortable a work arrangement as anyone could hope for, and one which, as I said earlier, I’m reluctant to give up, the attraction of retirement notwithstanding.
This being late November, I was currently working on the early spring issue of the magazine, which always includes a six-page spread of puppy photos submitted by readers. Sporting dog articles make up a large part of our editorial content—yes, I’m one of those elitists who believes if you can’t hunt birds with a dog, you shouldn’t hunt them at all—and the puppy photo spread is one of the most popular features we run all year.
We usually only have space for about forty pictures, so there are several hundred that don’t make the cut. In the past few years we’ve begun posting these on the magazine’s website and that seems to partially appease the readers who submitted the runner-up photos, although there’s no question that seeing a picture of their pride-and-joy published in the magazine is the ultimate prize.
Because we strive for as much variety as possible, submitting a photo of a puppy from one of the lesser-known sporting breeds increases the likelihood of its being chosen; for example, if someone sends in a good picture of a Bracco Italiano or a Clumber spaniel or a small Munsterlander, it stands a much better chance of being printed than, say, one of several dozen black Labrador submissions.
The Killer in the Woods Page 4
