Chapter 50
Conor trudged up the steps in front of the courthouse, opened the big doors, and went inside, metaphorically kicking himself in the butt. He had excuses. Sleep deprivation highest on the list, followed closely by stress, stress, and stress.
Still, he wasn’t the kind of man who lost his cell phone. Well, technically it wasn’t lost. He knew exactly where it was—on his desk. He’d just forgotten to take it home with him.
He passed the dispatcher’s office on his way to his own and Linda called out to him.
“Oh, good. I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “I won’t have to call in somebody off patrol. The FBI agent wants to take some evidence down to the property room.”
Law enforcement had to maintain a strict chain of evidence or defense attorneys could get important information thrown out in court.
Protocol demanded that two people be present any time a piece of evidence was moved.
Of course, this case was never going to go to trial, since the suspect was deceased, but Conor was a by-the-book kind of officer.
All he wanted was to retrieve his phone, go home, and go to bed.
“Sure, I’m glad to do it,” he said.
He went up to the third floor where the FBI was closing up shop.
One agent was busy dismantling the whiteboard where pictures of the victims had been posted.
It had made Conor sad in a way he couldn’t explain that there’d been no photographs of the three Amish except the ones taken of their bodies in caskets.
Not that the FBI had suffered from a lack of photographic documentation. After they’d put out the word that they’d like to have still photos and videos that guests had taken the night of the celebration, they were overrun with pictures.
“I understand you need an escort down to the property room to sign in this evidence,” Conor said.
“Indeed I do,” said an agent and picked up a couple of boxes that had a depressingly small number of items in them, each bagged and tagged.
The shell casings, the fabrics from the woods where somebody had stapled Mylar between two trees.
Conor shook his head as he fell in beside the agent, mumbled “bootlegger’s turn” under his breath.
“Excuse me,” the agent said.
Conor apologized. “I’m sorry. I’m so tired I’m babbling. I was just remembering how Jojo did a one-eighty in a pickup truck.”
“Yeah,” the agent said, “I heard something about that.”
Conor pointed to the evidence bag that contained small pieces of Mylar that’d been stapled to the trees.
“The killer hung Mylar between trees, made her think she was about to have a head-on collision when it was just a reflection of her own headlights. How could you come up with a trick like that?”
“Just watch Goldfinger.”
“What?”
“Don’t you remember that scene from the James Bond movie Goldfinger? The baddies took a mirror and put it on a mountain road and James Bond came around the corner, saw the headlights, swerved and ran into a wall. That’s how they captured him.”
“I wasn’t much of a James Bond fan,” Conor said. “Here, let me carry one of those,” he said reaching for a box.
Edgar McCandless was at his post in the property room and Conor stood as a sworn witness, while the FBI agent transferred into his custody every piece of evidence they’d gathered in the case—small pieces of Mylar …
from a James Bond movie, the cast of a boot print, a ski helmet, he didn’t know what that was about, and the shell casings.
He glanced at them, reading, “Payback’s a bitch.” Then he stopped and stood very still.
“Wait a minute,” he said, and picked up the sealed evidence bag containing the second shell casing. It lay in his hand, but he was looking at the letters L O O upside down. Or maybe he was looking at them right side up.
He turned the casing over and over in his hands. The FBI agent probably thought his exhaustion was messing with him again.
“That’s L O O”—he turned the casing upside down—“but it could also be 007.”
Officer McCandless smiled. “Well, it is 007, isn’t it? How about that?”
The FBI agent clearly had already figured that out. “We used AI to spit out every possible meaning for the numbers/letters on the casings.”
Conor had seen the FBI lists, hundreds of meanings, the initials for organizations—Loyal Order of Moose—sayings like Legion of One, flight numbers, whiskey labels, and NASCAR numbers.
James Bond’s identification as the seventh agent in the 00 section of the British MI6 had probably been on the lists, but Conor hadn’t noticed.
The last time he’d heard James Bond’s name was in the Gen-Z teenage speak of the babbling boy in the backseat of his cruiser as they drove to his grandparents’ chalet the night of the shootings.
“… dead bodies falling out of the lift chairs, hitting people on the head, like a scene from some James Bond movie … that dude’s the guy, he’s got rizz … total alpha …”
After they signed in the evidence, Conor accompanied the agent back upstairs, then Conor stood in the doorway of the county courtroom which for the past ten days had been a war room.
He watched the officers dismantle equipment, unplug the computers, make stacks of papers.
One agent was taking the victim photographs off the whiteboard and suddenly Conor stepped forward.
“Wait, don’t take that one,” he said. It was one of the hundreds of pictures that’d been submitted when the FBI asked the community to help.
It was nothing special, merely showed the three company owners standing together at the bottom of steps leading up to a speakers’ platform, perhaps after Rick Dalton gave some kind of welcome speech.
Dalton was in the middle, Tom Garner, who owned the construction company was on the right and Charles Whitman, who owned the builder’s supply on the left.
Conor stared down at the picture, the only one he’d seen of all three together the night of the shooting.
They were all wearing red ski jackets.
What an odd coincidence.
“Could you box up these pictures a little later?” he asked the agent. “I’d like to go through them one more time. I’m looking for something.”
Conor spread out on the table the pictures that’d already been taken off the whiteboard.
He was looking at ski jackets. A pink one, a lavender one, a green one, colors he didn’t even know the names of. Lots and lots of black ones. A large woman in an orange jacket bore a striking resemblance to a pumpkin. There was light blue, navy blue, purple, red …
Red.
He looked at the photo and froze. The man wearing the red ski jacket in the photograph he held in his hand was David Blackburn, the man Jake Hadley had intended to kill. The man who was having an affair with Hadley’s wife Cynthia.
He and the other three men who were shot were all wearing red ski jackets. Was that just a wild coincidence, or did it mean something?
Did Hadley know Blackburn was wearing a red jacket, so he killed everybody wearing one just to be sure he got him?
Then it thrummed in his mind. Jojo had been wearing a red ski jacket. She covered it up with a black one when she saw the church bishop. Would she have been shot if she’d been wearing the red jacket?
Somebody had been trying to kill Jojo ever since that day. Was it possible that she was the intended target, that the shooter had been going after Jojo and shot those four men in red ski jackets trying to get her?
Who’d have a reason to kill Jojo? They had assumed from the get-go that his motive was that she had joined the investigation. The killer feared, for reasons unknown, that Jojo would be able to identify him.
But what if that wasn’t the motive at all? What if somebody wanted to kill Jojo for an entirely different reason?
What could that reason be?
His tired mind offered up not a single possibility, and the delicate structure of conjecture he’d built collapsed under its own weight with a little sparkle, like a soap bubble.
Red ski jackets.
James Bond and 007.
Goldfinger.
The boy who’d dragged Conor to his grandparents’ house that night thought James Bond was “the rizz,” a “total alpha.”
That boy.
Jojo had said Jason Crawford had been at the wake for Susanna Borntraeger. He must have met her when she was on rumspringa. Could he possibly have been the English boy she was dating? And after Susanna talked to Jojo, she went back to the Amish and got engaged.
Did Susanna dump Jason? Did he maybe blame Jojo?
Boy, was that out on a limb.
That was out on a limb and dangling from a vine.
It’d be absurd to chase a theory like that now after they’d already caught the killer.
Ridiculous.
Crazy.
He tried to think of other words—preposterous—he could use to describe it as he hurried back to his office to grab his phone.
“Linda, can you find me an address for Jason Crawford,” he said as he passed her office.
“He’s not home.”
He stopped dead in the hall and went back to the doorway. “And you know that how?”
“Because Jojo asked for his parents’ phone number half an hour ago. She called, asked to speak to him, and his mother said he was at his Uncle Harold’s house milking cows. Jojo asked for that address.”
Conor went to his office and picked up his phone off the desk to call Jojo.
That’s when he saw he had a voice mail from her.
He listened to the message with a sense of growing dread.
Add her “silly suspicions” to his “silly suspicions” and they didn’t seem all that silly anymore.
Suddenly, he felt fear settle down into his guts, a dull ache like appendicitis.
He hurriedly clipped the phone to his belt and started out the door, then he heard a sound behind him.
It was the dog, Trident. He was sitting upright and alert on the pile of blankets he was supposed to be asleep on.
The dog uttered a little sound, maybe like a whine.
“Fine, Trident, you want to go with me?”
The dog didn’t move.
“Help me out, boy, I don’t know the right words.” He made a classic come-on gesture, and the dog walked to him and sat down in front of him.
Without another word, Conor turned and trotted out to his car with Trident at his side. He opened the back door, and the dog obediently hopped into the backseat.
Conor got behind the wheel, and they headed off together into the night.