Chapter 35
Conor McCaffrey kept his hands stuffed down in his pockets because he had run out of the barracks so fast when the call came in that he’d left his gloves behind.
The scene on that half-mile stretch of Long Bottom Road was lit up brighter than a high school football game on a Friday night.
The FBI forensics guys had brought in floodlights and were combing through the woods beyond the railing at the dogleg looking for anything, anything at all—up to and including hair follicles.
So far, nobody had found anything.
Well, that’s not entirely true. They had found the missing phantom car.
He looked over at Jojo, who was standing by herself, staring into the trees beyond the dogleg turn, trying to picture what it had looked like when there had been a piece of shiny Mylar stretched between two trees there, reflecting back to her the glare of her own headlights.
The Mylar was gone. They’d only found pieces of it where it’d been ripped away from the staples that held it at just the right angle to …
He walked over to where she was standing, didn’t say anything, just stood beside her.
“Somebody really wants me dead, don’t they.” Her husky voice was so soft it surprised him.
He shook his head. Ethan Cole was still out there.
Conor had cast a big net, extended it past Pennsylvania by entering Cole’s information in the NCIC, National Crime Information Center alerting every law enforcement agency in the country.
So far there hadn’t been a single hit. Cole was the kind of man who would have ambushed Jojo on her way home. But this …
“This is such an odd way to kill somebody,” he said.
She held out her phone. “Cheap murder weapon, though. Amazon will bring it right to your door. Free delivery if you have a Prime membership.”
On the screen of her phone was the response to typing “Mylar” into the Amazon search engine. It showed a picture of a long roll of what looked like silver Christmas wrapping paper.
“VIVOSUN highly reflective Mylar film roll, 4 FT x 50 FT, coated 2 Mil Silver. Just $29.99,” she said. “Not that you’d have to buy it. Just go to some construction site and pick up a leftover sheet.”
Builders nailed, stapled or glued sheets of Mylar behind drywall, under roofing or on attic rafters to reduce heat loss in winter and keep heat out in summer.
“It … looked just like a car was coming right …” Her words rode a bitter sigh out of her throat and Conor knew she might be feeling a little foolish for having been fooled by what had been set up in the curve.
Partly to change the subject and send her mind in another direction, but mostly because he just wanted to hear again an explanation of how she had pulled off a maneuver that stunt drivers spent years learning—a bootlegger’s turn—he asked, “Would you mind going over the story one more time?”
He didn’t even know the maneuver had a name until she told him.
So Jojo started at the beginning, how she had left the barracks after they had gotten back from questioning Kyle Barnes and had started home down her usual route.
“You always come this way?”
She nodded.
“So anybody could find out you always come this way.”
“Or they could look at a map and see it’s the shortest distance between two points.”
“And the bootlegger’s turn …?”
She described it again, told him about Tie Rod and his moonshining ancestors and that day in Afghanistan when it had saved their lives.
“You’d seen it done … but you never did it yourself.”
She shook her head. “Don’t have much occasion to use a maneuver like that in rural Pennsylvania on the way to Walmart for Fritos and bean dip.”
She turned and looked full in his face. “Who thinks up a thing like this? Mylar strung between trees to make a mirror, so you think you’re about to have a head-on. What kind of mind thinks that up?”
Conor knew it was a rhetorical question, and he didn’t bother trying to answer it.
The most important question on his mind was the bunker buster question that answered all the other questions.
Why was someone trying to kill Jojo Kaufmann?
Was it possible that she was supposed to have been one of the victims on Wednesday night when a sniper set up shop on a rooftop of a chalet and shot seven innocent people off a ski lift?
It had to be the same murderer, didn’t it. It would be such a stretch of coincidence to believe there happened to be two separate murderers at work in one little county at the same time. But how were they connected?
If Jojo hadn’t acted fast last week, turned off the lights and emptied the lift chairs, there might have been even more victims. Was that what the murderer was mad about? That she’d interfered?
Trident was sitting beside her watching her. Conor had noticed quickly that her dog kept his eyes on her face all the time. He wasn’t interested in squirrels and rabbits and the other things most dogs got distracted by.
Conor supposed Trident still viewed her as his handler, as she’d been in Afghanistan where life and death hinged on his obedience. So now, he followed her every motion, his eyes glued to her face.
Well, Conor had to admit that he couldn’t blame the dog for staring at her. Conor managed not to, but it took an effort. How had a woman that beautiful managed to stay single?
That was not a rabbit hole he needed to go exploring right now.
He began to tick off on his fingers. “So somebody tries to shoot you while you’re driving down the road and when that doesn’t work, they try to get you to kill yourself by running off the road.”
“And maybe there’s one more.” Jojo turned her blue eyes to his face.
“One more what?”
“Attempt on my life.”
Conor stood up straighter. “And it was such a nothing burger it slipped your mind and you forgot to mention it?”
“I didn’t say anything about it because at the time I didn’t think of it as somebody trying to kill me. And maybe it wasn’t, maybe?—”
“Just tell me about it.”
“I came to your office on Friday morning to offer my help. That afternoon, I went out to feed the calves and when I came back across the pasture, Roosevelt was waiting for me.”
“Roosevelt?” He almost said, “Teddy or Franklin?” but didn’t.
“Our bull. He is a vicious beast, meaner than any bull I’ve ever seen. Uncle Jonas keeps him locked up tight in a pen.”
“But he broke out of the pen?”
“He didn’t break out. Somebody opened the latch on the gate.”
“And you didn’t think that meant?—”
“I live in a house with an old man who spent over an hour yesterday evening telling Bible stories to Melinda and Joey.”
“Are they his grandchildren?”
“They’re nobody. They don’t exist. Uncle Levi was talking to thin air. He can’t even remember his own dog’s name. I just assumed that he’d somehow left the gate unlocked. But now …”
“Are you sure he didn’t?”
Jojo shrugged. “Uncle Jonas swears Uncle Levi was with him all day helping him mend a fence on my cousin’s farm. Said there was no way he had time to go back to the house and unlock the gate and let Roosevelt into the field.”
Conor shook his head, baffled and bewildered. “What do you think?”
She didn’t answer at once. “I think … that no matter how addled Uncle Levi is, he’d never let that bull out of its pen.”
“Which means somebody else did.”
“Give the man a Kewpie doll,” she said with half-hearted levity. “Somebody else. Who?” It was no secret in Somerset County that Jonas and Levi Yoder had a dangerous bull. Still, who would have thought of using it to kill Jojo?
“It has to be somebody who knows a whole lot about you. Somebody local.”
“Which means the person who killed all those people at Royal Oaks is local … right?”
“The FBI is still looking into the mass-murderer angle.”
Conor didn’t buy that scenario, though. It had been his opinion in the beginning and nothing since had changed his mind. He believed this mayhem was homegrown.