Chapter 10
Pennsylvania State Police Lieutenant Conor McCaffrey was just out for an afternoon drive in the country, literally.
He’d been driving around all day to familiarize himself with the highways and byways of Somerset County.
He wasn’t exactly a city boy. He’d grown up in rural West Virginia, but he had been stationed for the past five years at the PSP barracks in Bridgeville, one of the multitude of small boroughs surrounding Pittsburgh. His radio crackled to life.
A traffic accident. Injuries unknown.
McCaffrey was on Kingfisher Road, probably the closest unit.
In only a couple of minutes, he came upon a line of stopped vehicles and pulled around them in the oncoming lane, empty because obviously the accident had stopped the cars from coming from the other direction.
Fifty yards farther up, however, the road narrowed and there was no way to get around a big brown UPS truck, so he pulled over to the side and got out, stepping into the unseasonably cold day and continued on foot.
He was a big man, had often been accused of looking like an Irish brawler, with red hair and a ruddy complexion that he had inherited from both sides of the family.
His breath came out in a puffy white cloud in front of him as he came around the side of a cattle truck loaded with cattle, the pungent aroma of manure filling his nostrils.
That’s when he heard it.
Bang.
It was unmistakably a gunshot.
McCaffrey took out running, resting his hand on his own sidearm as he weaved in and out of the stopped traffic. When he got to a converted school bus, the last vehicle that was blocking his sightline to what was on the road ahead, he slowed.
As he drew closer, he could see some of the scene and what he could see didn’t make any sense. A woman stood in the road, her black hair blowing in the cold wind. She held a pistol out in front of her in a two-hand grip with her feet planted for a steady stance on the asphalt.
Obviously, the gunshot had come from that pistol, but what had she been firing at and why?
Easing his way along the side of the school bus, he kept it between himself and the woman, his hand still on his sidearm.
His mind flashed to the conversation he’d had years ago with a fellow state police officer from Utah.
They had been at a state police training session, and he’d asked to be introduced to Sgt.
Hank Bentley, wanted to meet the man and shake his hand.
Bentley had been one of the responding officers to the Trolley Square shopping mall in Salt Lake City when a gunman pulled out a weapon and started firing randomly, eventually killing five people and wounding four.
An off-duty police officer, Kenneth Hammond, was eating dinner at the mall with his pregnant wife when he heard the gunfire. He drew his weapon, ran out into the hallway, and set his back against one of the stone pillars holding up the roof. Edging around it, he returned fire.
Bentley and the rest of the officers responding to the active shooter call on their radios came rushing into the mall, weapons drawn, ready to engage. And the first thing Hank Bentley saw was a man with a pistol standing behind a pillar, leaning around it to shoot.
Bentley had only seconds to make a determination.
His own pistol swung toward the man, and he was beginning to squeeze the trigger when he pulled up short.
Motioning for the other officers to take cover, he slipped behind a sign and shouted at the man behind the pillar, who then identified himself as an off-duty police officer.
It was Bentley’s quick thinking that saved the officer’s life.
He could have shot him, had a perfect open line of sight, couldn’t have missed someone he could reasonably have assumed was the shooter who was killing people.
But he hadn’t done it, and McCaffrey wanted to talk to him about it, wanted to know why.
They’d sat together over a beer in a crowded bar, and Bentley had said what McCaffrey expected but wanted to hear in his own words.
“Why didn’t you shoot?” McCaffrey asked.
“Because he looked like a cop.”
“He was dressed in cutoffs and a T-shirt, and he looked like a cop?”
“You know what I mean. It was just the way he was standing, his body language, his posture. He looked like a cop, and I wanted to give him a chance to identify himself.”
All of that flashed through McCaffrey’s head in the blink of an eye because he was about to make the same judgment about the woman with black hair who stood in the middle of a crowd of people with a drawn pistol she had just fired.
With his hand on his sidearm, he leaned back so that he was behind cover and called out authoritatively, “This is the Pennsylvania State Police. I need for you to holster your weapon.”
“Yes, sir,” she responded immediately. “Holstering my weapon.”
The woman’s body posture changed instantly.
She didn’t turn toward him but relaxed, stepped back, and pointed the pistol at the ground.
Then she put the pistol into the holster at her side, which would have been visible if she hadn’t been wearing a ski jacket that covered it.
Pennsylvania was an open-carry state where it was legal to openly carry a handgun, on a belt or in a holster, without a permit.
But to carry a concealed weapon or a loaded gun in a vehicle required a Pennsylvania License to Carry Firearms.
“I have a valid LTCF in my wallet,” she told him. Then she lifted both hands, kept them where he could see them, and didn’t move another muscle.
McCaffrey stepped out from behind the cover of the school bus and strode toward where the woman stood.
He hadn’t gone more than a few yards before he could finally see the whole scene and understood what had happened.
A mangled black buggy lay in the road. The horse, still in the harness, lay unmoving in a pool of blood.
McCaffrey advanced on the woman who had still not turned to face him, hadn’t so much as twitched, and spoke conversationally to her back.
“I’m Pennsylvania State Police Lieutenant Conor McCaffrey.” Only then did she turn to him, rotating slowly, the wind blowing her black hair out of her face, her cheeks rosy.
“My name is Jojo Kaufmann,” she said, casually keeping her hands high and making no sudden movements. She had a surprisingly low alto voice, not masculine-sounding … sultry. She cocked her head toward the unmoving animal lying on the asphalt. “His leg … I had to put him down.”
McCaffrey was now only a few feet from the woman when he noticed the dog, a big brown dog sitting beside the woman’s leg, unmoving but alert and as tensed as a coiled spring.
The scene had been frozen until that moment, like a snow globe that hadn’t been shaken up yet.
No sounds, utter silence. Then a harsh, raspy voice burst the moment like a soap bubble.
A man marched away from a car that was on the side of the road, smashed into a tree.
He was a big man with a florid face, and he was pissed.