Nothing Left (Jack Widow Book 16), page 4
4
The two-lane road was mostly straight, but not completely. I walked and crossed over a point where the old blacktop became bumpier, worn-out pavement, like I had traversed a border between two townships, one with a good budget for roads and one without. It was the towns of Angel Rock and El Demonio. One thriving, the other rundown and abandoned.
I walked, stretching my legs out as far as I could, taking huge strides, not elegant but efficient. I covered ground faster this way.
Up ahead, I had expected to find Voss in some sort of trouble. Maybe the bad guy had returned to add her to his kill list. But when I arrived, she was alone. No backup. No sign of anyone else.
She hadn’t called for backup. She had called no one.
Voss stood over the dead cops, same as I had before. She didn’t know I was behind her, walking up the track. That wasn’t because she had no situational awareness. It wasn’t because she was bad at her job. It was because I was better. I was better than most people’s situational awareness. I was stealthier than most people. I had better be. The U.S. Navy spent $500,000 training me to be better, to be stealthier.
Voss stared at the state police cruiser, like she was studying the whole scene, trying to figure it out. She moved this way and that, tilting right, bending left, until she stopped and gazed at the bullet holes in the windshield. She investigated without backup, without a detective present. She was going it alone. It was unusual for a patrolwoman to be investigating a crime scene.
I asked myself: why? A thought struck me. The same thought that would strike anyone. Maybe she was more involved than just a patrolwoman who was passing by.
Then I looked at her car and knew exactly why. She was more involved, but not in a devious way. My ability to sneak up on someone might’ve been top-notch, but my ability to see obvious details was out of practice, which made me feel a little dumb.
Her black-and-white patrol car didn’t read: Angel Rock: Police, as I had originally thought. I misread it. It read: Angel Rock: Chief of Police.
Her title wasn’t Patrolwoman Voss; she was the chief of the Angel Rock Police Department.
Why was she not calling for backup? I thought. Being police chief meant she didn’t have to. Although she should. It was the right thing to do. She could take her time at a crime scene if she wanted to. Still, nearly an hour without calling for backup seemed excessive, out of place.
It made little sense to me. It was time to ask her.
I didn’t want to startle her, so I started making noise. I stomped my feet on the beaten dirt and walked up behind Chief Voss’s police cruiser. At the trunk, I stopped, and called out, “Voss. I’m back.”
She did a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn while in a crouch and drew her Glock, fast as if it had been done in practice countless times. She pointed it right at me. The weapon was ready to go before she made the full turn. A slow slipstream of dust and dirt drifted up behind her and whirled in the other direction like a tiny cyclone. I watched it circle and twist and die away into the night behind her.
I froze. My hands went up to the surrender position, as they had fifty minutes ago to the same woman, the same gun. I honestly wasn’t sure that she wouldn’t shoot first. The look in her eyes said that she was pre-programmed to fire, which no one would question. Two dead cops in the middle of nowhere at night was enough of a reason for any startled cop to shoot any stranger that snuck up from behind. No jury, judge, courtroom, or police officer would’ve even questioned the logic in her shooting me dead where I stood. And dead, I would be. I knew it too. She wasn’t the kind of cop to miss. She wasn’t the kind of cop to wound.
Luckily, Voss didn’t shoot me. Not yet.
I said, “It’s me. Widow.”
She kept her Glock aimed at me. She asked, “Why’re you back? I told you to meet me in Angel Rock in the morning.”
“I worried about you.”
“How so?”
“You said that you’d call backup. I walked away to town like you said, but I saw no one. No flashing lights or speeding reinforcements. I worried that maybe the bad guy had returned after I left you. Maybe he’d done to you what he did to them.”
“So what? You come back to rescue me? You think this guy could get the drop on me?”
I said, “I guess not. You’re pretty fast with that piece. Guess I was wrong to worry. I should’ve worried about the killer more. I can be wrong, you know. Wrong as the next guy. I’m only human.”
She said nothing to that. She stood from her crouch, and holstered her firearm.
I approached her slowly. I kept my hands up, but at shoulder height. I didn’t want to see her Glock pointed at me again. Twice in one night was enough for me.
She said, “Put your hands down.”
I put them down.
She said, “You should’ve kept going. Should’ve gotten a room for the night, and then met me in the diner, like I asked you. Now is not a good time to talk.”
“Why did you stay out here alone? Why did you send me away?”
She didn’t answer.
I asked, “Why all this time? Where’s backup?”
Silence.
I said, “I saw Angel Rock. It’s pretty small. Are there no other cops available right now?”
I waited for her to answer, but she just looked away, off into the distance.
A long moment passed between us, and finally she said, “They didn’t come because I didn’t call them.”
“Why?”
“I’m the police chief. I don’t need their help,” Voss said. She looked around again like she was searching for the answers. “I don’t have to tell you anything. You’re lucky I let you go.”
“Okay. Do it alone. I get that. I like that. But these are two dead cops and it’s the middle of the night. Don’t you think that all your guys should be out here? Probably call the FBI as well. You need forensic teams and manpower out here scouring for evidence.”
“It wouldn’t matter. This guy is long gone. Believe me.”
“Then call the U.S. Marshals. If he fled, he could be across state lines by now. You’re gonna need to do a manhunt.”
“It wouldn’t make any difference,” she said. I felt like she was hiding something.
“How do you know that?”
“No one kills two cops, and hangs around.”
“You’re wrong. Maybe he headed toward Angel Rock.”
Voss said, “No way. The tracks head off in the other direction. Plus, I would’ve seen him.”
“Maybe he turned around down the road. Maybe he ran that direction because he was scared, and then, turned around somewhere. You can’t track tire tracks on blacktop. Too many other tracks to account for, even on that empty road.”
Voss nodded, and said, “It’s not your concern, anyway. I think you should turn around and wait for me in the diner like I asked.”
“I can’t do that. If you won’t call for backup, then I can’t leave you out here alone. It wouldn’t be right.”
“Why not? Because I’m a woman?”
“No. It’s just not my style to leave a man behind. Or a woman. Besides, my mother wouldn’t approve of that.”
She asked, “Are you close to your mother?”
“She’s dead. Killed in the line of duty. She was a small-town sheriff, not a police chief like you. But everyone called her Chief. If she knew I left you out here alone, she’d curse me from the grave.”
Voss dropped her shoulders a bit and cracked a smile.
I asked, “Besides, you aren’t telling me something. So what is it? What’re you not telling me? Did you know these guys? They weren’t your cops. I know that because they’re state police. So what’s going on?”
Voss said nothing.
I asked, “You didn’t just let me walk away because you knew me? Did you?”
“No. That wasn’t the only reason. But I know you. Obviously.”
I stepped closer to her, and stopped. I asked, “Who are these guys? They aren’t ordinary state cops, are they?”
“What makes you say that?” Voss said, and looked at me with her pale blue eyes. They mesmerized me in the moonlit night. She seemed too well-lit to not be on a movie set. But sometimes, nature was like that.
I said, “These two guys are definitely some kind of detectives or higher-ranking cops. More so than just the kind that I’d find in your department. Yet, they’re sitting out here. Alone. No backup. Their car is turned off. Keys are in the ignition, but the engine is off and cold to the touch. And they’re parked pretty far off-road. They’re not parked right on the shoulder. They were out here for something. Some reason. And it wasn’t a stakeout. Not out here. There’s nothing to stake out. Not unless they were investigating the grazing buffalo or the wind turbines. No. They were here waiting to meet someone, or they already met someone. Someone who didn’t like what they had to say. Someone who killed them for it.”
Voss said nothing.
I said, “That’s it. They were here meeting someone, and that someone shot the hell out of them. And you know something. Don’t you?”
“What? You think I met them and shot them?”
I stayed quiet.
She said, “You think I lured them out here, and murdered them in cold blood?”
“No. I don’t. This was an act of passion. Heat-of-the-moment sort of thing. The shooter is amateur. No question. He probably never even fired a gun before in his life. You’re a professional, a trained police officer, and a chief. I bet you’re quite the marksman, too. No, this wasn’t premeditated at all. This is completely sloppy.”
“Because of the bullet patterns?”
“Not patterns. But the lack of. There is no pattern to it. The bullet holes are everywhere. The hood. The seats. Their torsos. The rear bench. This guy didn’t do any aiming at all. Probably even had his eyes closed and jerked the trigger like a novice, the way he had seen in the movies. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if he screamed while firing like he stole it right out of a damn Rambo movie.”
Got John Rambo on the brain, I thought.
Voss asked, “What’s the other part?”
“What other part?”
“That look on your face. There’s a second part nagging at you. What is it?”
“The big thing is motive.”
“You know the motive? How?”
I nodded, and said, “In a second. First, let’s talk about the other reason that I know you had nothing to do with this.”
“What reason?”
“Clean-up.”
She said nothing.
“Right now, you’re calm and collected. You’re a professional. That makes you smart. You’d have killed them in a place where they could’ve been disposed of with little fuss. Out in a desert somewhere. New Mexico has got desert land. Right? Or you’d dump them in El Demonio, the abandoned town. No one would find them. But you wouldn’t have killed them here, in the open like this, near a road. This is a desolate road, but any car could’ve come cruising along, or a nighttime pedestrian. A couple out on the road trying to get some privacy. A group of teenagers out here looking to drink a case of beer and not get caught, hoping to escape the sheer day-to-day boredom of small-town life,” I said, and paused a beat. Then I said, “Hell, even one of your deputies could’ve come out here, trying to take a nap for an hour. You couldn’t have predicted that. You could’ve guessed, sure, but not with one hundred percent accuracy. You wouldn’t have taken a chance.”
Voss nodded and said nothing.
I said, “So no, I don’t believe you’re the killer. You’d have picked a better spot. If you were going to do something like this in the first place, you wouldn’t even have considered this place. It’s too open. Too uncertain. Too great a risk. And they came out in a cop car. You know they have GPS. It’s hard to hide a cop car. Plus, I’m here. If you had killed them, then I’d be dead and buried along with them. No question. Because you would’ve had to kill me too.”
Voss said nothing.
I said, “Now, the shooter’s motive. That’s clear. Look at the circumstances. The shooting itself. The act. It looks like rage. Right?”
She nodded.
I shifted my weight and looked back down at the well-preserved foot tracks, and said, “It was done out of anger. Heat of the moment. Perhaps these guys gave him some bad news. This is clearly a meeting place. A rendezvous. Maybe even a drop-off point. My guess is that they were meeting with some lone individual and they said or did something that didn’t hold up to their end of the bargain. This set the shooter off and he went into a rage. After they got back into their car, he started firing his gun at them and they didn’t expect it.
“And I don’t think that he even expected it.
“I think that this guy’s demeanor or background or whatever showed that he was such a pushover, a novice, that the two dead cops never would’ve expected that he was capable of such a thing. They never even stopped to think that this guy would turn on them. It wasn’t even in the cards for them.
“This was the act of a desperate man, a guy pushed beyond his limit.”
Voss said, “Like the shooter reacted out of pure desperation?”
“In the world of dogma, you become free the day you decide to go to hell.”
Voss twisted from the waist and stared up at me with a look that I haven’t gotten in a while. It was a look that said to me freak. People had inadvertently given me this look many, many times and usually it was out of reflex more than anything. I never took it personally.
She said, “What?”
“It’s from Aniekee Tochukwu.”
“Who?”
I said, “He’s a psychologist, wrote a book I read once.”
“You can read?”
I smirked, and said, “It doesn’t matter. I just think it applies here.”
“Why?”
“Because our shooter acted out of desperation. That’s clear. Therefore, he’s a desperate man.”
Voss said nothing.
I said, “These cops trusted the shooter’s inexperience or his weak demeanor or his brittleness or all of it. See, they thought he was delicate, a gentle guy, a meek guy. They didn’t think he was the type of guy who stands up for himself. Ever. He probably never had before.
“I’d guess that if you can identify these cops, then you can easily search through their computer’s search histories or cell phone histories and find that they probably had files on this guy. Maybe even psychological reports. They assumed he was predictable and a weakling. Someone they could manipulate. I’d bet this wasn’t the first time. Probably not even close. That is the other mistake they made. They got complacent, overly confident. They misjudged him. They overestimated their abilities and underestimated his capabilities. My guess is that they must’ve either had something on him, something that controlled him so he would do their every bidding, or they were completely stupid.
“But then again, it could’ve been a little of both. They’re dead and he’s not. So they were stupid to underestimate him, but I think they had something on him, and it was something strong enough that they figured no man would risk never getting it back. Probably some kind of evidence. Maybe state’s evidence. Whatever it was, it was serious.”
Voss asked, “So you think they were blackmailing this guy?”
“Maybe, or maybe he was an informant. But what’s the difference? Isn’t that what cops do to informants? They blackmail them with jail time for leads, for information, right?”
Voss stayed quiet.
I said, “Whatever the real circumstances, they picked the wrong guy. That’s for damn sure. You bully a man long enough and you’re gonna get punched in the nose.”
Voss gave me that sideways look again. She asked, “Any guesses what their means of blackmail was, Sherlock?”
“Lurid pictures to hide from a rich man’s wife. Or a politician trying to keep something from going public. Maybe it was information that’d get him sent to prison. Proof of a crime that he committed or just old-fashioned embarrassment. Who knows? Cops are privy to a lot of sensitive information about the public.”
Voss looked back at the dead cops, at the unmarked cop car, and thought for a moment. I could see the wheels were turning in her mind. It was written on her face. She turned back to me, and asked, “How do you know all of that?”
“Just look around. Isn’t it obvious? Look here,” I said, and led her away from where she had been searching. She followed me over to the front of her police car’s halogen lights. I pointed at the ground, tried to keep my boots pulled back away from the tracks. I asked, “See the footprints?”
She shone her flashlight’s beam across the dirt and followed the tracks of two men that led from the unmarked Ford police car, with the two dead cops in it, back to where we stood. She asked, “Is that the cops’ footprints?”
I nodded, pointed, and said, “Now look there.”
Voss looked at where I pointed, and said, “Only three sets of footprints. I can see that. There’s also a set of tire tracks over there, but how do you know that there wasn’t another guy in the shooter’s car? Or three? Or four?”
“Because look at how they were standing.”
I pointed at the three sets of footprints, to a spot where they converged together in a cluster. I said, “This is a meeting place. The cops were waiting for a third person. A third man. A single man. Not two or three or four. They wouldn’t have met with a guy who brought along company. At least, not without their guns drawn. They would’ve been suspicious if the guy had come with someone else in his car. Look here. They waited in their car for the shooter to show up. Once they saw him pull up in his car, they got out to meet him.”
I looked down at the tracks, traced them backwards with my eyes. I imagined where the car must’ve been parked, and where it had driven up from the road, and then, I saw it turn off onto the beaten dirt.
I pointed at the place where the shooter’s car had been parked, and said, “He parked his car there and got out. He walked to meet them right here. The cops made him stand out in front of their headlights, and waited right here in the middle, between both cars. Right out in the open. Only then, after they could get a good look at him, did they get out and walk over to him.”
The two-lane road was mostly straight, but not completely. I walked and crossed over a point where the old blacktop became bumpier, worn-out pavement, like I had traversed a border between two townships, one with a good budget for roads and one without. It was the towns of Angel Rock and El Demonio. One thriving, the other rundown and abandoned.
I walked, stretching my legs out as far as I could, taking huge strides, not elegant but efficient. I covered ground faster this way.
Up ahead, I had expected to find Voss in some sort of trouble. Maybe the bad guy had returned to add her to his kill list. But when I arrived, she was alone. No backup. No sign of anyone else.
She hadn’t called for backup. She had called no one.
Voss stood over the dead cops, same as I had before. She didn’t know I was behind her, walking up the track. That wasn’t because she had no situational awareness. It wasn’t because she was bad at her job. It was because I was better. I was better than most people’s situational awareness. I was stealthier than most people. I had better be. The U.S. Navy spent $500,000 training me to be better, to be stealthier.
Voss stared at the state police cruiser, like she was studying the whole scene, trying to figure it out. She moved this way and that, tilting right, bending left, until she stopped and gazed at the bullet holes in the windshield. She investigated without backup, without a detective present. She was going it alone. It was unusual for a patrolwoman to be investigating a crime scene.
I asked myself: why? A thought struck me. The same thought that would strike anyone. Maybe she was more involved than just a patrolwoman who was passing by.
Then I looked at her car and knew exactly why. She was more involved, but not in a devious way. My ability to sneak up on someone might’ve been top-notch, but my ability to see obvious details was out of practice, which made me feel a little dumb.
Her black-and-white patrol car didn’t read: Angel Rock: Police, as I had originally thought. I misread it. It read: Angel Rock: Chief of Police.
Her title wasn’t Patrolwoman Voss; she was the chief of the Angel Rock Police Department.
Why was she not calling for backup? I thought. Being police chief meant she didn’t have to. Although she should. It was the right thing to do. She could take her time at a crime scene if she wanted to. Still, nearly an hour without calling for backup seemed excessive, out of place.
It made little sense to me. It was time to ask her.
I didn’t want to startle her, so I started making noise. I stomped my feet on the beaten dirt and walked up behind Chief Voss’s police cruiser. At the trunk, I stopped, and called out, “Voss. I’m back.”
She did a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn while in a crouch and drew her Glock, fast as if it had been done in practice countless times. She pointed it right at me. The weapon was ready to go before she made the full turn. A slow slipstream of dust and dirt drifted up behind her and whirled in the other direction like a tiny cyclone. I watched it circle and twist and die away into the night behind her.
I froze. My hands went up to the surrender position, as they had fifty minutes ago to the same woman, the same gun. I honestly wasn’t sure that she wouldn’t shoot first. The look in her eyes said that she was pre-programmed to fire, which no one would question. Two dead cops in the middle of nowhere at night was enough of a reason for any startled cop to shoot any stranger that snuck up from behind. No jury, judge, courtroom, or police officer would’ve even questioned the logic in her shooting me dead where I stood. And dead, I would be. I knew it too. She wasn’t the kind of cop to miss. She wasn’t the kind of cop to wound.
Luckily, Voss didn’t shoot me. Not yet.
I said, “It’s me. Widow.”
She kept her Glock aimed at me. She asked, “Why’re you back? I told you to meet me in Angel Rock in the morning.”
“I worried about you.”
“How so?”
“You said that you’d call backup. I walked away to town like you said, but I saw no one. No flashing lights or speeding reinforcements. I worried that maybe the bad guy had returned after I left you. Maybe he’d done to you what he did to them.”
“So what? You come back to rescue me? You think this guy could get the drop on me?”
I said, “I guess not. You’re pretty fast with that piece. Guess I was wrong to worry. I should’ve worried about the killer more. I can be wrong, you know. Wrong as the next guy. I’m only human.”
She said nothing to that. She stood from her crouch, and holstered her firearm.
I approached her slowly. I kept my hands up, but at shoulder height. I didn’t want to see her Glock pointed at me again. Twice in one night was enough for me.
She said, “Put your hands down.”
I put them down.
She said, “You should’ve kept going. Should’ve gotten a room for the night, and then met me in the diner, like I asked you. Now is not a good time to talk.”
“Why did you stay out here alone? Why did you send me away?”
She didn’t answer.
I asked, “Why all this time? Where’s backup?”
Silence.
I said, “I saw Angel Rock. It’s pretty small. Are there no other cops available right now?”
I waited for her to answer, but she just looked away, off into the distance.
A long moment passed between us, and finally she said, “They didn’t come because I didn’t call them.”
“Why?”
“I’m the police chief. I don’t need their help,” Voss said. She looked around again like she was searching for the answers. “I don’t have to tell you anything. You’re lucky I let you go.”
“Okay. Do it alone. I get that. I like that. But these are two dead cops and it’s the middle of the night. Don’t you think that all your guys should be out here? Probably call the FBI as well. You need forensic teams and manpower out here scouring for evidence.”
“It wouldn’t matter. This guy is long gone. Believe me.”
“Then call the U.S. Marshals. If he fled, he could be across state lines by now. You’re gonna need to do a manhunt.”
“It wouldn’t make any difference,” she said. I felt like she was hiding something.
“How do you know that?”
“No one kills two cops, and hangs around.”
“You’re wrong. Maybe he headed toward Angel Rock.”
Voss said, “No way. The tracks head off in the other direction. Plus, I would’ve seen him.”
“Maybe he turned around down the road. Maybe he ran that direction because he was scared, and then, turned around somewhere. You can’t track tire tracks on blacktop. Too many other tracks to account for, even on that empty road.”
Voss nodded, and said, “It’s not your concern, anyway. I think you should turn around and wait for me in the diner like I asked.”
“I can’t do that. If you won’t call for backup, then I can’t leave you out here alone. It wouldn’t be right.”
“Why not? Because I’m a woman?”
“No. It’s just not my style to leave a man behind. Or a woman. Besides, my mother wouldn’t approve of that.”
She asked, “Are you close to your mother?”
“She’s dead. Killed in the line of duty. She was a small-town sheriff, not a police chief like you. But everyone called her Chief. If she knew I left you out here alone, she’d curse me from the grave.”
Voss dropped her shoulders a bit and cracked a smile.
I asked, “Besides, you aren’t telling me something. So what is it? What’re you not telling me? Did you know these guys? They weren’t your cops. I know that because they’re state police. So what’s going on?”
Voss said nothing.
I asked, “You didn’t just let me walk away because you knew me? Did you?”
“No. That wasn’t the only reason. But I know you. Obviously.”
I stepped closer to her, and stopped. I asked, “Who are these guys? They aren’t ordinary state cops, are they?”
“What makes you say that?” Voss said, and looked at me with her pale blue eyes. They mesmerized me in the moonlit night. She seemed too well-lit to not be on a movie set. But sometimes, nature was like that.
I said, “These two guys are definitely some kind of detectives or higher-ranking cops. More so than just the kind that I’d find in your department. Yet, they’re sitting out here. Alone. No backup. Their car is turned off. Keys are in the ignition, but the engine is off and cold to the touch. And they’re parked pretty far off-road. They’re not parked right on the shoulder. They were out here for something. Some reason. And it wasn’t a stakeout. Not out here. There’s nothing to stake out. Not unless they were investigating the grazing buffalo or the wind turbines. No. They were here waiting to meet someone, or they already met someone. Someone who didn’t like what they had to say. Someone who killed them for it.”
Voss said nothing.
I said, “That’s it. They were here meeting someone, and that someone shot the hell out of them. And you know something. Don’t you?”
“What? You think I met them and shot them?”
I stayed quiet.
She said, “You think I lured them out here, and murdered them in cold blood?”
“No. I don’t. This was an act of passion. Heat-of-the-moment sort of thing. The shooter is amateur. No question. He probably never even fired a gun before in his life. You’re a professional, a trained police officer, and a chief. I bet you’re quite the marksman, too. No, this wasn’t premeditated at all. This is completely sloppy.”
“Because of the bullet patterns?”
“Not patterns. But the lack of. There is no pattern to it. The bullet holes are everywhere. The hood. The seats. Their torsos. The rear bench. This guy didn’t do any aiming at all. Probably even had his eyes closed and jerked the trigger like a novice, the way he had seen in the movies. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if he screamed while firing like he stole it right out of a damn Rambo movie.”
Got John Rambo on the brain, I thought.
Voss asked, “What’s the other part?”
“What other part?”
“That look on your face. There’s a second part nagging at you. What is it?”
“The big thing is motive.”
“You know the motive? How?”
I nodded, and said, “In a second. First, let’s talk about the other reason that I know you had nothing to do with this.”
“What reason?”
“Clean-up.”
She said nothing.
“Right now, you’re calm and collected. You’re a professional. That makes you smart. You’d have killed them in a place where they could’ve been disposed of with little fuss. Out in a desert somewhere. New Mexico has got desert land. Right? Or you’d dump them in El Demonio, the abandoned town. No one would find them. But you wouldn’t have killed them here, in the open like this, near a road. This is a desolate road, but any car could’ve come cruising along, or a nighttime pedestrian. A couple out on the road trying to get some privacy. A group of teenagers out here looking to drink a case of beer and not get caught, hoping to escape the sheer day-to-day boredom of small-town life,” I said, and paused a beat. Then I said, “Hell, even one of your deputies could’ve come out here, trying to take a nap for an hour. You couldn’t have predicted that. You could’ve guessed, sure, but not with one hundred percent accuracy. You wouldn’t have taken a chance.”
Voss nodded and said nothing.
I said, “So no, I don’t believe you’re the killer. You’d have picked a better spot. If you were going to do something like this in the first place, you wouldn’t even have considered this place. It’s too open. Too uncertain. Too great a risk. And they came out in a cop car. You know they have GPS. It’s hard to hide a cop car. Plus, I’m here. If you had killed them, then I’d be dead and buried along with them. No question. Because you would’ve had to kill me too.”
Voss said nothing.
I said, “Now, the shooter’s motive. That’s clear. Look at the circumstances. The shooting itself. The act. It looks like rage. Right?”
She nodded.
I shifted my weight and looked back down at the well-preserved foot tracks, and said, “It was done out of anger. Heat of the moment. Perhaps these guys gave him some bad news. This is clearly a meeting place. A rendezvous. Maybe even a drop-off point. My guess is that they were meeting with some lone individual and they said or did something that didn’t hold up to their end of the bargain. This set the shooter off and he went into a rage. After they got back into their car, he started firing his gun at them and they didn’t expect it.
“And I don’t think that he even expected it.
“I think that this guy’s demeanor or background or whatever showed that he was such a pushover, a novice, that the two dead cops never would’ve expected that he was capable of such a thing. They never even stopped to think that this guy would turn on them. It wasn’t even in the cards for them.
“This was the act of a desperate man, a guy pushed beyond his limit.”
Voss said, “Like the shooter reacted out of pure desperation?”
“In the world of dogma, you become free the day you decide to go to hell.”
Voss twisted from the waist and stared up at me with a look that I haven’t gotten in a while. It was a look that said to me freak. People had inadvertently given me this look many, many times and usually it was out of reflex more than anything. I never took it personally.
She said, “What?”
“It’s from Aniekee Tochukwu.”
“Who?”
I said, “He’s a psychologist, wrote a book I read once.”
“You can read?”
I smirked, and said, “It doesn’t matter. I just think it applies here.”
“Why?”
“Because our shooter acted out of desperation. That’s clear. Therefore, he’s a desperate man.”
Voss said nothing.
I said, “These cops trusted the shooter’s inexperience or his weak demeanor or his brittleness or all of it. See, they thought he was delicate, a gentle guy, a meek guy. They didn’t think he was the type of guy who stands up for himself. Ever. He probably never had before.
“I’d guess that if you can identify these cops, then you can easily search through their computer’s search histories or cell phone histories and find that they probably had files on this guy. Maybe even psychological reports. They assumed he was predictable and a weakling. Someone they could manipulate. I’d bet this wasn’t the first time. Probably not even close. That is the other mistake they made. They got complacent, overly confident. They misjudged him. They overestimated their abilities and underestimated his capabilities. My guess is that they must’ve either had something on him, something that controlled him so he would do their every bidding, or they were completely stupid.
“But then again, it could’ve been a little of both. They’re dead and he’s not. So they were stupid to underestimate him, but I think they had something on him, and it was something strong enough that they figured no man would risk never getting it back. Probably some kind of evidence. Maybe state’s evidence. Whatever it was, it was serious.”
Voss asked, “So you think they were blackmailing this guy?”
“Maybe, or maybe he was an informant. But what’s the difference? Isn’t that what cops do to informants? They blackmail them with jail time for leads, for information, right?”
Voss stayed quiet.
I said, “Whatever the real circumstances, they picked the wrong guy. That’s for damn sure. You bully a man long enough and you’re gonna get punched in the nose.”
Voss gave me that sideways look again. She asked, “Any guesses what their means of blackmail was, Sherlock?”
“Lurid pictures to hide from a rich man’s wife. Or a politician trying to keep something from going public. Maybe it was information that’d get him sent to prison. Proof of a crime that he committed or just old-fashioned embarrassment. Who knows? Cops are privy to a lot of sensitive information about the public.”
Voss looked back at the dead cops, at the unmarked cop car, and thought for a moment. I could see the wheels were turning in her mind. It was written on her face. She turned back to me, and asked, “How do you know all of that?”
“Just look around. Isn’t it obvious? Look here,” I said, and led her away from where she had been searching. She followed me over to the front of her police car’s halogen lights. I pointed at the ground, tried to keep my boots pulled back away from the tracks. I asked, “See the footprints?”
She shone her flashlight’s beam across the dirt and followed the tracks of two men that led from the unmarked Ford police car, with the two dead cops in it, back to where we stood. She asked, “Is that the cops’ footprints?”
I nodded, pointed, and said, “Now look there.”
Voss looked at where I pointed, and said, “Only three sets of footprints. I can see that. There’s also a set of tire tracks over there, but how do you know that there wasn’t another guy in the shooter’s car? Or three? Or four?”
“Because look at how they were standing.”
I pointed at the three sets of footprints, to a spot where they converged together in a cluster. I said, “This is a meeting place. The cops were waiting for a third person. A third man. A single man. Not two or three or four. They wouldn’t have met with a guy who brought along company. At least, not without their guns drawn. They would’ve been suspicious if the guy had come with someone else in his car. Look here. They waited in their car for the shooter to show up. Once they saw him pull up in his car, they got out to meet him.”
I looked down at the tracks, traced them backwards with my eyes. I imagined where the car must’ve been parked, and where it had driven up from the road, and then, I saw it turn off onto the beaten dirt.
I pointed at the place where the shooter’s car had been parked, and said, “He parked his car there and got out. He walked to meet them right here. The cops made him stand out in front of their headlights, and waited right here in the middle, between both cars. Right out in the open. Only then, after they could get a good look at him, did they get out and walk over to him.”
