Chapter 31
He moved stealthily through the woods, gracefully, making no more sound than a deer, quiet for no reason other than quiet was his nature. Being careful was his nature. It felt good to have the rifle slung over his back. It felt right and pure.
He was proud, had a right to be proud that he’d picked off seven people out of moving ski lift chairs in a blizzard, one after another, didn’t miss once.
He thought about the glimpses he’d gotten of the bullets ripping into his targets.
That’s what he liked best about deer hunting, watching the bullet explode in the animal, blood squirting everywhere, the deer’s knees buckling and falling to the ground.
He’d been hunting deer since he was seven years old, bagged his first buck at ten.
He would never forget it. His father had stood with his hands on his shoulders in the deer blind, speaking softly in his ear, telling him to place the crosshairs on the buck’s chest—center mass, don’t get cute and go for a head shot …
center mass—take a breath in, let it out slow, don’t pull the trigger, squeeze it slowly.
BAM!
The recoil of the rifle slammed into his shoulder and would have knocked him down if his father hadn’t held him up.
The bruise it left turned his shoulder, upper arm and chest black for a week.
But the buck had fallen. It hadn’t been very big, was too young for antlers, but it had been meat for the family and fresh meat that cost nothing more than the price of a bullet was always welcome.
You could turn venison into any and everything—venison stew, venison steaks, venison hamburgers, meatloaf and spaghetti sauce.
And when there was no more venison and the littles were hungry, he and his father would go out again and bag another deer.
Didn’t give a fig for state hunting regulations.
When you’re hungry, it’s always deer season.
Leaving the woods, he continued on a trail that led along the ridge above Old Hickory Road. With no leaves on the trees, the view was spectacular. You could see for miles. The sky was blue. The sun was shining.
It would be a moving target again, but he’d already proven seven times that he could hit more than just a deer standing still. And he’d hit this moving target, too.
He would take Jojo Kaufmann out. He hated the feel of her name in his mind, how it slimed every other thought near it.
Jojo Kaufmann needed to die! Not just die but die at his hand. Retribution. Payback.
That bitch had earned the bullet he was about to put in her skull.
He paused at a rock, considered squatting down behind it, but was sure there was a bigger one another fifty or seventy-five yards ahead that offered a view of the curve in Old Hickory Road.
So you could see cars coming and going. You could see a blue pickup truck rattling down the road, slowing for the curve. Yeah, that’s where he’d take her out.
He found the rock he’d been looking for. It was perfect. He knelt behind it as if kneeling at an altar, rested his elbows on the top, put the sight of his Winchester to his eye and looked through it at the road below.
And then he waited.
Jojo bounced along Old Hickory Road in her heater-less, or as she liked to think of it, “heater-free,” pickup truck, grateful that the weather had broken, the skies had cleared, the temperature had begun to go back to normal for this time of year.
Meaning that during the day the snow on the ski slopes would become dangerously thin, but it would be replaced by the snowmaking machines every night.
The other resorts had not opened over the weekend in respect for Rick Dalton.
But they would be opening the following weekend and would be open on weekends from now until the weather stayed dependably cold and the snow—both real and manufactured—remained dependably unmelted.
Then they’d be open every day. And the tourists would come.
Old Hickory was the most direct route into town for all the Amish in this part of the county so there was considerable buggy traffic.
Her family had traveled it when she was a little girl.
And Uncle Levi’s horse, Thunder, knew the way back to the farm even when Uncle Levi didn’t and could be counted on to bring the befuddled old man home from wherever he went whether he liked it or not.
The English might think they knew a road well, but when you’ve puttered along one in a horse-drawn buggy your whole life, you get to know every bump and crack intimately.
She approached the corner where the stump of a hickory tree still stood, though the tree had been struck by lightning before she was born.
There was a lump in the asphalt on the road in front of it.
Not a big one, like a bedspread after you make the bed and realize you left a sock in the sheets. She dodged to miss it.
Suddenly, the driver’s side window on her truck exploded!
The tempered safety glass shattered into small, rounded “pebbles” instead of sharp shards, filling the air with thousands of tiny glass cubes.
Trident barked in surprise as he slid off the seat into the floorboard when she yanked the wheel hard left, scrambling to keep the truck from running off the road and down a steep incline on the right.
Angling across the center of the road, she hit the brakes hard and slid to a stop under a rock overhang.
Jojo leapt out of the vehicle, drawing her weapon as she did, keeping low behind the open door, her heart hammering in her chest, her head on a swivel, scanning the woods all around.
But the shot hadn’t come from any place she could see.
It had come from higher up on the ridge above her, blocked from view by the overhang.
Trident remained flattened on the front seat until she moved from her position behind the truck door to the wall of rock about ten feet away, flattening her back against it, her gun in front of her in a two-hand grip.
She motioned with her chin and Trident surged out of the truck and was at her side in two leaps, his eyes pinned to her face.
Her hands on her weapon were steady, but her insides were quivering. Someone had just fired a high-powered rifle at her and if she hadn’t dodged that lump in the road, the bullet would have caught her in the left temple. And whoever had fired the shot was still out there.
Never bring a knife to a gunfight. Or a pistol to a rifle fight. She was outgunned, but the Glock was all she had. No, not all. She had Trident. Keeping her back to the wall, she scooted along it to the edge where she could point up the hillside and spoke a one-word command: “Search.”
Trident had been trained to track and trail.
His sensitive nose could detect the presence of anything that didn’t belong to the environment—explosives, TNT, RDX, PETN, AN/FO, chlorates/perchlorates and black powder.
He could distinguish among more than a dozen different drugs.
When she worked with the DEA in Chicago, she always carried Narcan in her pack in case Trident alerted on fentanyl.
In the woods, the out-of-place smell the dog would be seeking was human, and he immediately began a search pattern, working a grid he could envision in his mind, his nose to the ground and then to the wind, yo-yoing up and down, casting for a scent.
Jojo came along behind, darting carefully from tree to tree up the slope.
All of a sudden, the dog went rigid for a second and then surged up the hillside to an outcrop of rock where he stopped, his metronome tail frozen, and he dropped into a sit. His amber eyes were as hard as glass, riveted to something she couldn’t see.
She approached the rocks carefully, saw no one. Leaning close to Trident’s ear, she said softly: “Show me.”
The dog rose, his nose to the ground and moved closer to the rock before he stopped again, froze and sat.
Lying on the dry leaves and twigs, almost invisible, there was a spent shell casing. Turning toward the rock outcrop, her eyes scanned the ground behind it, where she could distinguish what looked like two round indentions. Knee prints.
The shooter had knelt here behind this rock, sighted on the road, and had a clear shot. Just as the Ski Lift Sniper had lain on the rooftop with a clear shot at the lift chairs as they filed past him like ducks in a shooting gallery.
But whoever had fired the shot at her was long gone now.
Trident would know if he were still anywhere within a hundred yards.
Holstering her weapon, she commanded the dog to follow the scent trail, and he tracked it to a gravel road at the top of the ridge where it vanished.
No footprints or tire marks that she could see.
Tenting her hand on her forehead to shade her eyes, she squinted up and down the deserted gravel road and saw nothing. Then she pulled her cell phone from her pocket, punched favorites and Conor McCaffrey’s cell number.
“McCaffrey here,” he answered.
Jojo didn’t mince words. “Somebody just took a shot at me with a high-powered rifle, blew out the side window of my truck.” A random thought fired through her mind like a comet: no heater …
and now no window. “I found the spent casing, a couple of knee prints, didn’t touch anything.
I’ll wait here for the forensics team. About nine miles out Old Hickory Road, my truck’s parked under a rock overhang.
” She paused. “And if we’re lucky, somewhere in the interior of my truck is a bullet that we can use. ”
They’d been unable to retrieve anything more than bullet fragments from the shooting victims, not enough left to reveal markings that would identify the rifle that’d fired them.
There was silence on the other end of the line. Jojo could imagine a bewildered look on Conor McCaffrey’s freckled face, trying to process all she’d just said, and she smiled.
He let out a breath. “All righty then … so why?”
“You got me, pal, I couldn’t tell you.” Jojo heard her voice.
It sounded hard and brittle—nerves. “But it’d sure be a stretch to believe that some random stranger just happened to decide they wanted me dead less than a week after I was a witness to a mass shooting with the same MO.
Maybe the …” She refused to use the media’s grandiose moniker—the Ski Lift Sniper.
“… shooter doesn’t like that I’m helping you on the case. ”
“So why would he think your help would be so crucial he has to take you out … unless you know something that’d help you identify him.”
“If I knew something that’d identify the person who murdered seven people …” It still took her breath away. “He’d be in jail!”
“Maybe it’s something you don’t know you know.”
“I suppose …” This was muddying the waters and getting them nowhere.
“I don’t know what I don’t know. But I do know that there were some pretty impressive trophies on the wall in that unimpressive trailer where Ethan Cole lives.
Unless he bought them at a yard sale, he must know his way around a deer rifle. ”
“And maybe said rifle is in that trailer. I’ll see if I can get a search warrant.”
Jojo’s phone vibrated in her pocket right after supper that night. She kept the ringer turned off most of the time because the sudden, unexpected sound seemed to jolt poor Uncle Levi. Amish life was quiet. The world didn’t often intrude with harsh sounds.
“Swing and a miss,” Conor McCaffrey said when she answered. “Big miss.”
“No rifle, huh.”
“No rifle, no suspect, nothing. It appears our friend Mr. Cole has decided to … go walkabout, relocated with no forwarding address.”
“He bailed?”
“Packed up and left. I’ve already put out a BOLO (Be On the Look Out) on him as a person of interest in a murder case.
Hopefully he’ll get scooped up soon. I called to give you that news, and to ask if you’d come with me tomorrow to the Vanguard Construction Company.
Most of the Amish at the event were carpenters who worked for that company, right? ”
“Uh huh. Have you been able to dig up anything that makes you think Tom Garner might have been the intended victim?”
“Nope. You know everything I know.”
“I just wish I knew everything I know.”
“All we can do is shake the tree. Maybe some suspects will fall out.”