Chapter 26
When Jojo walked into the Somerset County Courthouse on Saturday morning with Trident at her side, she could hear the noise of activity coming down the wide marble staircase from the cavernous courtroom on the third floor where the FBI and the ATF and who knows what other federal agencies had set up their operations.
A crew of workers had set up all kinds of complicated equipment, and she could feel the hum of data coming through it.
There were several people in the Pennsylvania State Police Office being helped by troopers.
Jojo didn’t wait for an escort this time, just went back to Conor McCaffrey’s office when she saw that the door was open.
He was seated at his desk just as he’d been when she came yesterday.
She would swear he hadn’t moved. Oh, he’d gone somewhere to shave and put on a clean uniform, but his eyes were hollow from lack of sleep.
And she wondered if he’d bothered to eat anything.
After all, he needed to keep up his strength.
She smiled at the thought—that was something her mother would have said …
so Jojo didn’t, just gave him a polite, “Good morning.”
Conor looked up a little surprised.
“I know you didn’t tell me to come by, but I have a ‘gift’ … and I’m not Greek.”
She could tell he had no idea what she was talking about.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m not operating on all cylinders yet. I need coffee. How about you go and make us some?”
Jojo froze. Was this what he’d thought she meant when she said she wanted to help? She wasn’t anybody’s go-fetch, make-coffee girl. And if he thought?—
“Sure, I’ll be right back,” came a voice from behind her and she turned to see Sergeant Michael Donnelly. “How do you take yours, Jojo?”
“Uh, black, just black.”
Conor gestured toward a chair. She took it and Trident stretched out on the floor.
“So tell me about this Greek … or not-Greek gift.”
“Sorry lame humor.” Jojo fished in her bag and pulled out some sheets of paper and handed them to him.
“I apologize that they’re handwritten. My uncles don’t have a printer.
I noticed troopers taking down contact information from the crowd at Royal Oaks on Wednesday, but I know many of the Amish just left.
They’re not comfortable being tagged and counted by the English.
I’m sure you have lists of the Amish who were invited, but a lot of people didn’t come who were invited, and a lot of people who weren’t invited did come.
The Amish brought grandma and cousins from Summersville and?—”
“And you know all of them?”
“No, but I found out all. My uncle Jonas and I went to the wakes for Clarence Yoder, Susanna Borntraeger, and Sarah Ann Miller on Thursday. All of the Amish community was gathered around, and I got names of people I didn’t know from people I did know.
I think you’ll find this list is pretty accurate. I don’t believe I’ve missed anybody.”
He sat back looking impressed that Jojo understood he needed to know the identity of every single human being who’d been on the property that night, since it was possible, maybe even likely, that the shooter had been milling around in the crowd before he went on his killing spree.
“I don’t know where else I could have come by this. ”
“See, I told you I got skills.”
He smiled a little then.
Donnelly returned with their coffees, and Conor sat back in his chair with his cup. He didn’t down the hot liquid as she’d thought he would, just sat sipping it … like maybe he didn’t really like the taste.
“So let’s say the two of us were working this case together—hypothetically speaking,” he said. “What would the first order of business be?”
“Low-hanging fruit,” she said instantly. Low-hanging fruit was starting with whatever was easy and most obvious.
“What would you see as the low-hanging fruit in this case?”
“The eighth man, the lone survivor, Bill Anderson. Maybe he saw something. He was sitting beside one of the murder victims.”
Bill Anderson was in the hospital. His swan dive off the ski lift chair had broken his leg in two places and he’d had to have surgery and metal pins put in to hold the bones in place.
Conor got to his feet. “I think that’s a great place for us to start.”
He said it casually, but she didn’t miss the “us” in the sentence. When he put his hat on, Jojo felt like the room got a little dimmer, that perhaps the red in his hair was so bright it’d been glowing.
As they walked out to the cruiser, Conor asked, “Do you know this Bill Anderson fellow?”
“Not well. But everybody in Somerset County knows Bill Anderson. He’s the president of the Rotary Club, some bigwig on the board of the Chamber of Commerce, has a thousand-watt smile and a ready handshake.”
“In other words, he’s a used car salesman.”
“Oh, no, no, no, they’re not used cars, they’re pre-owned.” Jojo opened the back door of Conor’s cruiser and let Trident hop in, closed it, and got into the front seat.
“He really is a used car salesman?”
Jojo nodded. “He owns a dealership. And funny! Bill makes everyone laugh. But his is the kind of humor that’s insulting—only you can’t admit that you’re insulted because then you can’t take a joke.”
When they got to the hospital, the woman at the information desk pointed out that visiting hours were not until later in the day and that dogs were not allowed on the premises.
Conor pointed out Trident was a police dog and that this was official business, made it clear he wasn’t impressed with hospital rules.
She folded and gave him the room number.
They knocked, and a weak voice called, “Come in.”
Bill Anderson lay in a hospital bed with his leg on the outside of the covers and a thing like a birdcage attached to it with wires going to metal pins that had been placed in the bones of his leg. He was staring out the window.
“Mr. Anderson, my name is Lieutenant Conor McCaffrey with the Criminal Investigations unit of the Pennsylvania State Police. May we have a moment of your time?”
When he turned his face toward them, Jojo was surprised at how different it was from every other time she’d seen him. He looked gaunt and tired, and perhaps he was in pain, but mostly he just looked smaller, sadder. He smiled in recognition at Jojo.
“I can’t be responsible for anything I say, officer. I’m on drugs.” It was a half-hearted attempt at humor, and he probably didn’t expect anybody to laugh.
“We’d like to talk to you about the night you broke your leg,” Conor said. “I understand you heard a gunshot.”
“This guy on the ski lift three chairs in front of us, he leaned over and fell out of the lift, and Dickie and I just stared at him. I knew I’d heard a gunshot. I was in Afghanistan.”
Jojo nodded. “Then you do know what a gunshot sounds like.”
The two of them held a look for a beat. It didn’t exclude Conor, but it only communicated between the two of them.
“It wasn’t loud enough that I even thought about it until I saw the guy fall.
And then I knew he’d been shot, that somebody must be shooting at people on the ski lift.
” He stopped then and looked out the window, and there was a tremor in his voice when he continued without looking at them.
“I didn’t even try to get Dickie to jump with me.
I panicked, and I left him sitting there. ”
“Mr. Anderson, this isn’t your fault. It—” Jojo began.
He turned back to them. “I’m alive. I jumped out of that ski lift, broke my leg, but I’m alive, and Dickie’s …” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “Gone.” He looked out the window again, trying to gather his composure.
“So you must have heard the gunshot that killed David Blackburn,” Conor said.
“Is that who he was? The guy who fell?”
Conor nodded.
“They told me that seven people were shot. A bunch of them Amish. One of them was a little girl. Why? I mean, is this just some random shooting?”
“Maybe,” Conor said. “I think a more likely explanation is that there was a target, and that the other people who were shot were an effort to hide the real victim.”
“Who was the real victim? Who was the guy shooting at?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out.”
“You think it was Rick?”
“It could have been. Do you know anybody who would have any reason to kill Rick Dalton?”
“Hell yeah. Probably forty or fifty people. Those protesters. You saw them, Jojo, didn’t you?”
Jojo nodded.
“They were tree huggers pissed because he built a resort on their precious land.”
“And you think those protesters would have been violent enough to?—”
“One of them was the leader of some organization … I don’t remember. It was a bunch of initials. But he sent letters to Rick for months after the public hearing when the county zoning board granted the building permit for the resort.”
“Letters? What kind of letters? Threatening letters?”
“Yeah, but mostly they were just ranting Looney Tune letters about how he was destroying the planet.” Anderson turned to Jojo. “You saw the signs. One of them had this big picture of the earth and beside it were the words, ‘Planet Earth. There is no Plan B.’ That kind of dopey shit.”
“But this particular person singled Rick out and sent him letters?”
“Yeah. For months when they were building.”
“Do you know the man’s name?”
“Ethan something. Rick’s secretary’s got copies of the letters, I’m sure. You could ask her.”
“We’ll do that. Thank you. Is there anything else that you can tell us?”
“You think Rick was who they were shooting at?”
“We don’t know. It could have been. We’re working under the theory that one of the seven victims was the person the shooter was really trying to kill. We’re starting with Rick Dalton. But we’ll investigate every one of the victims.”
Bill Anderson’s eyes suddenly filled with tears.
“I didn’t even … I didn’t … I didn’t say a word, not a word.
I didn’t say, ‘I’m going to jump, come with me.
’ I didn’t say, ‘We got to get out of here. We’re going to get shot.
’ I just … it was a knee jerk. I just left my best friend behind and somebody shot him.
” His face crumpled then and his shoulders began to shake.
“We’re sorry to have upset you, Mr. Anderson,” Conor said.
“If you think of anything else, anything at all that would indicate somebody wanted to kill Rick Dalton, please give me a call. Here’s my card.
” Conor laid his card on the bedside table, but Bill Anderson didn’t look up, just nodded his head and sat with his hands over his face, his shoulders shaking.
As they left the room, they could hear him repeating, “I didn’t even say ‘Dickie, jump!’ I just left him there … to die.”
As they returned to the car, Conor told Jojo, “I have a list of all the protesters. We can find the name of this Ethan and whatever address he was willing to leave.”
“I had a run-in with one of the protesters. He seemed to be the most foaming-at-the-mouth of the group. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be the man we’re looking for.”
“What kind of run-in?”
“He was just being an ass to my niece. I made him back off. When the other protesters stepped away, he informed me that just one of them was enough because, let me get this right. He was ‘a legion of one,’ meaning the equivalent of six thousand Roman soldiers.”
They got to the barracks, and Conor went upstairs to ask the FBI to dig up whatever they could find on the protesters who’d been at the resort that night. When he came back into his office, he told Jojo he was going to the funeral service on Sunday.
“Would you like to join me?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said, got to her feet and made it out the door of his office before she allowed herself to smile.
She put the key in the ignition of her truck and started to crank the engine as a text dinged into her telephone. She pulled the phone out of her pocket, looked at it, and the smile that lit her face should have warmed the interior of the truck at least ten degrees. The message was brief.
“You, me, Coffa Cupee. Noon.” It was signed “A.”
Ali was back in town! Jojo didn’t realize how much she had missed her.
They’d been friends for years before Ali explained why she had reached out to Jojo that day after gym class.
Ali’s older sister Brittany had had a date with Liam once when she was in high school and when he came to pick her sister up that night, Ali developed an instant crush on the big, handsome man in a Navy uniform.
She remembered him telling her, “I’ve got a little sister your age. You’d like her.”
It always felt to Jojo like Ali’s presence in her life was Liam looking out for her … even from the grave.
Ali was supposed to be gone until the middle of next week on the Hawaiian vacation she’d won at a hair show in Las Vegas for a colorful design that involved shaving some poor volunteer’s head on one side and dyeing the hair on the other side ten different colors that were NOT among the original eight in the Crayola box.
Jojo was ridiculously happy, hadn’t realized how much she depended on the emotional support of her best friend, who’d been in her corner since that day in the girls’ bathroom at Somerset Area Senior High School when Jojo had been hiding in a toilet stall.