Conard County--Traces of Murder Read online

  Hillary spoke. “There’s one thing. A man.”

  Gage looked between them. “As in?”

  “It doesn’t sound like much,” Trace admitted. God, they were handing Gage an awfully slim bit of evidence.

  “Instinct,” Hillary said flatly. “Trust our instincts.”

  Gage studied her for a moment. “Damned if I don’t. I spent too many years having to rely on instinct. Go.”

  So Trace went, explaining the times they had seen the guy, but most especially that morning and how he had disappeared at the truck stop.

  Gage rubbed his chin. “All right. A strange man. Not unheard-of around here since the college arrived. But this morning? I’d say you’re going on more than instinct. A casual observer wouldn’t have hurried away then covered his tracks.”

  “Exactly.”

  Trace was relieved that Gage didn’t deliver a raft of reasons why it could have been innocent. If there was one thing Trace knew for certain, it was that he had grown awfully tired of being dismissed. He’d had an instinct about Allan. Now he had an instinct about this. By God, someone had to listen, and now Gage was.

  Gage spoke. “You don’t have a good description?”

  Hillary answered, “If you suspect someone is watching you, do you stare back?”

  Gage gave a short laugh. “Only in a restaurant.” He sighed and took a swig of his coffee. “Okay, then. A stranger in dark clothes is showing an inordinate interest in you. When you show interest in him, he vanishes. That’s a problem.”

  “And that’s why I called you. I know you think Allan committed suicide, but—”

  Gage lifted a hand, stopping Trace. “Let’s be fair and honest here, okay? There was no evidence at the time to suggest anything else. None. We sure as hell looked for it.”

  Trace felt Hillary’s gaze on him. “I’ve been running amok.”

  Another chuckle escaped Gage. “No kidding. You were more than upset—you were maddened. It seemed like no one was listening to you. It would infuriate me, too. We heard you. I heard you. But without evidence, we had to go with what we knew for certain. Allan had PTSD. I don’t know if you have any idea how bad it was. He’d been shot up and discharged. Then his wife was killed and he started drinking heavily. Isolated himself as completely as we would let him. I personally kept doing welfare checks because he and I had hit it off.” He stared at Trace. “I gave a damn.”

  Trace lowered his head a moment. “I wish I could have been here longer.”

  “Seems like you were dealing with your own heavy-duty mess. Anyway, everything I knew? It looked like suicide. But yes, we tried to find proof otherwise. Now maybe you have it.”

  “Not really. Just some threads. I was acting like an ass, wasn’t I?” Trace looked at Hillary. “I went berserk.”

  He was surprised to see her smile. “A human response. We all have them.”

  Gage added, “Don’t apologize.” He looked at his coffee cup.

  Trace read the message and went to get him more. “You need an IV drip?”

  Gage laughed. “Sometimes I think so.” He drained his third cup. “All right. I’ll have my deputies keep an eye out for a stranger who seems to be stalking you in some way.” He cocked a brow. “Most of the time we don’t get a very good description anyway, so looking for unusual activity works pretty well. In the meantime, you two keep reading what you’ve got. Maybe you’ll tumble onto a better clue, but for right now, my suspicion agrees with yours.”

  He paused. “It just seems weird the guy would hang around so long. Unless there was more than one guy here to begin with. Can’t tell yet.”

  A few minutes later he limped his way out the front door and back to his vehicle.

  “What happened to him?” Hillary asked Trace.

  “Sad story. When he was undercover for the DEA, he went home to see his family. Apparently his cover had been broken. From what I understand, there was a car bomb. Killed his wife and kids and left him a mess in more than one way.”

  Hillary said nothing as she absorbed the story. “My heart breaks for him,” she said presently. “Bad enough for someone to try to kill him. Worse that they killed his entire family.”

  She turned and headed back to the office.

  Trace followed. The search had to continue.

  * * *

  HILLARY HAD TAKEN an immediate liking to Gage Dalton. He seemed sensible to her and like a good man to trust. Given that he must have helped reach the verdict that Allan had died by suicide, it was surprising how ready he was to listen to Trace.

  But it also said something that Trace had phoned him in the first place.

  Trace was soon clicking away at files and folders again, dragging emails into his single folder where they’d be easier to review by date. Hillary resumed her study of the written letters.

  Brigid had written a surprising number of them, as if she believed regular mail might be safer from scrutiny than emails. Or as if she had just liked to write her thoughts on paper, making them more enduring. It was amazing, however, because email had been a large part of everyone’s life for ages now.

  A slight chuckle escaped her.

  “What?” Trace asked.

  “Oh, I was just thinking of a time when I needed to write an actual business letter and I kept wanting to insert those emojis.”

  He smiled, too. “I remember the feeling. As if every sentence needed them for punctuation.”

  She tapped the stack of letters. “Brigid wrote without emojis.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “Irrelevant.” Hillary shrugged. “It just struck me how they are changing everyone’s writing, and I noticed only because they weren’t there.”

  “You’re going to make me laugh.”

  “Is laughter so bad, even now?” Some of the darkest moments in life were the best ones for black humor. It could help make life tolerable, but civilians would probably be appalled by it. Regardless, her comment hadn’t been morbid humor. If it made Trace laugh, he needn’t feel awkward about it.

  Just about the time they both began to yawn and stretch, Hillary found another item. Her heart thudded. “Trace? She writes here that she has seen ‘it’ twice. She doesn’t explain.”

  Trace leaned over and looked. “What’s the date on that?”

  Hillary did a swift mental calculation. “Three weeks before she died.”

  He swore and stood up, rolling his chair backward with his legs. “We’re onto something.”

  He left the room, and after a minute she followed, only to find him in the refrigerator. He glanced at her.

  “I’ve got to eat. My mind is getting fuzzy. You?”

  Only then did she realize how many hours had passed. Her stomach announced them with a pang.

  “Life is getting pretty boring in some ways,” Trace said as they pulled containers out. “We run, we eat, we read. Man, you’re here for the first time and I should be showing you around. Giving you something to look at besides the inside of that office.”

  “I don’t expect it. We have a task.”

  He had just begun to open a container when he straightened. “I’m going to shovel the sidewalk, clean off the cars.”

  “Sounds good,” she responded and joined him in dressing for the outdoors. “My body is going to calcify in that chair.”

  “It feels like it.”

  He looked at her as they stepped out into the frigid air. “I guess now we know how often people in love communicate.”

  She laughed. “All the time?”

  “Seems like it.”

  Hillary threw herself into shoveling and sweeping with evident relish. Trace felt much the same. An ordinary task but one that loosened muscles, stretched his body. No running yet, but this worked a very different group of muscles. He almost wished there was more sidewalk and driveway.


  Beneath the snow, ice had formed. Trace took the shovels back to the garage and brought out a bag of salt. Hillary had begun sweeping the snow from the cars with a long brush.

  “There’s an old military joke,” Trace said. “So old that everyone has probably heard it.”

  “What is it?”

  “You see that ice scraper you’re holding? Well, the story goes that some guy is retiring. One of his men asks, ‘Where are you retiring to?’ And the soldier holds up an ice scraper. He says, ‘I’m going to head south and stop at every gas station and ask them what this scraper is. The first place I find that says they’ve never seen one, that’s where I stop.’”

  Hillary laughed. It sounded even prettier on the fresh, cold air. “I haven’t heard that.”

  “Maybe because you don’t have any place far enough south for it.”

  “It would be hard to completely escape snow.”

  As they returned inside, wet pavement began to emerge from beneath the last of the frozen snow. The shoveled snow lined it like a white necklace. Overhead the sky promised more.

  * * *

  STAN WITHERSPOON WAS feeling fairly proud of himself. Hurrying into that messy parking lot had left no trail, and he’d had the sense to hide himself in the men’s room just in case the two soldiers had seen enough of him to identify him on sight. He’d been relieved they hadn’t come inside.

  But he wasn’t completely proud of himself. He’d allowed himself to be seen in a manner that had aroused enough suspicion to bring them looking for him. When he’d dared look toward the Mannerly house, which he could glimpse from the parking lot, he’d seen a sheriff’s vehicle. His heart had stuck in his throat.

  Stupid.

  Stupid or not, he was among truckers who were mostly strangers in these parts, even more so than he. So he ordered himself a large breakfast, unsure when he’d eat again. It wasn’t as if he kept his student apartment well stocked. Pointless to spend money on food he might have to abandon.

  But now he had another problem to solve, and as the routine duty of eating soothed him, it cleared some of the fear from his mind. But not all of it. His hand shook a little as he lifted his fork.

  He should just leave. Seriously. He hadn’t heard of any trouble heading his way from Afghanistan. No ringing cell phone to alert him to a problem.

  He’d tied up the loose ends and just needed to move on before he did something else stupid.

  He wasn’t cut out for this. Not at all. Three years in the Army hadn’t prepared him for this. Damn, he’d been a clerk, a paper pusher, an inventory specialist. He’d never gotten closer to a fight than that argument with his roommate, a discussion that had earned him a punch in the gut.

  No, he wasn’t cut out for violence. It was one of the reasons he hadn’t reupped even though he had no civilian prospects.

  But it had gotten him this moneymaking job. It astonished him to find out how much more contractors were paid than the soldiers. Then he’d been offered a whole lot more money for falsifying the type of records he’d once kept honestly.

  A simple enough task. Shave the inventory from the contractor shipment numbers.

  Later had come the part about pulling a select but limited number of weapons from the crates in the equipment compound. As an inventory specialist, he had full access. Easy to remove smaller numbers of weapons, place them in a predetermined place and let the insurgents pick them up. He hadn’t even had to deal with the money they paid. He never did know who was getting the money. He just knew what came down the pipeline every time he succeeded in delivering. But he had known enough about the insurgents to arrange Brigid’s death.

  He liked the money, though. A whole lot. It made up for a miserable life. In a few years he’d be able to retire. Nothing fancy, but he wouldn’t have to worry about finding a job for years to come.

  Then that Brigid Mannerly. Twice. The second time had been enough to warn him she didn’t feel easy with what she saw through the chain-link fence. She wasn’t just walking post. He knew the sentry schedule around the compound. Knowing was part of his success.

  It hadn’t been difficult to find out who she was, pretending he found her attractive. Nothing dangerous had begun rolling down the pipeline, but he set about arranging her death anyway.

  Then his boss had told him Brigid was married and would be heading home to a husband in Conard County. He’d never heard of the place, but he found out quickly enough. Brigid’s killing might not have been enough. Then he didn’t feel safe even when he finally heard she’d been blown to bits.

  The fear returned. Married couples didn’t keep secrets from one another, did they? His boss didn’t seem to think so.

  Now here he was, a murderer. Twice. And contemplating two more.

  God, he hoped he didn’t have to do it again. And two of them? How could he get rid of two of them at the same time? They never seemed to be apart for long. Not anymore. He should have acted the first few days after that woman had arrived. Then Mullen had gone home at night. Now...

  Now they rarely separated for any appreciable time.

  Hell. Hell, hell, hell.

  * * *

  LITTLE MORE THAN a quarter mile away, refreshed by showers and lunch, Hillary and Trace dived in again. They were whittling away the most recent letters and emails, carefully reading every single word for hints.

  “I don’t like this,” Hillary said later. “Not at all.”

  “The job?”

  “No. Time for a fresh pot of coffee or I’ll fall asleep.”

  “We’ve been working hard,” he pointed out.

  “Yes, but we’re not finding the head of this nail.”

  Interesting phrasing. He wondered if it was something Norwegian or something she had come up with all on her own. He didn’t ask. What was the point? He just liked listening to her.

  She washed the pot before starting fresh coffee. Then she washed cups, which had been standing for a while.

  “I should have washed up,” he remarked.

  She shrugged. “Does it matter? I noticed it and I dealt with it.”

  He was much the same himself. Training. Experience. This time he felt he’d fallen down on the job.

  While the coffee brewed, he went to look out the kitchen window. Snow fell again, but gently this time. The kind of thing you wanted to see on Christmas Eve.

  “Do you celebrate Halloween in Norway?”

  “More so now than in the past. Movies brought your kind of celebration to us, but beyond a carved pumpkin and trick or treat, I believe you call it, we don’t decorate much. We tend to prefer house parties the weekend before, possibly with costumes.”

  “Sounds very civilized.”

  She laughed. “It’s a time of year we like horror movies. One of my favorites is called Dead Snow.”

  “That sounds shivery.”

  She grinned. “Suitably so. Zombies.”

  “Oh man, you’ve got them, too?”

  “Some things become worldwide.”

  He turned fully from the window. “Did we export them to you?”

  She shook her head slightly. “I don’t know. The word seems to go back a very long way. Should we look it up?”

  “And go back to a computer?” He pretended horror, drawing another laugh from her.

  “There can’t be much left to look through,” he remarked, taking his coffee and remaining on his feet. Chairs had begun to look like an abomination to him.

  “Reading back to front didn’t help much. Maybe we need to go the other direction. Something was building, yes?”

  “They both apparently knew something was going on. I wish they’d tell us.”

  She didn’t sit, either, instead leaning back against the counter. “It is there. We’ve found three references. We must be overlooking something.”

  “Maybe it’
s encoded in invisible ink.”

  “That would fit.” She poured her own coffee.

  “If you were home in Norway right now, what would you be doing?” His curiosity was honest. How different might her life be?

  “At this time of year in weather like this? Well, the days are getting shorter right now, much shorter than here. Much colder. Other than that, I don’t think we’re all that much different than the rest of Europe.” Her expression turned wry. “We are a modern country.”

  “Never thought you weren’t. Just curious about cultural differences.”

  “Maybe some. I don’t know. I don’t live here.”

  He laughed. “True. I’m just curious, is all.”

  “Anything to talk about to avoid going back to that damn desk, hunting for—what is your expression? A needle in a haystack?”

  “That’s it, and that’s what we’re doing.”

  “I know.” She sighed and refreshed her coffee. “I don’t like being hunted by that man. I want to get to him and find out what he’s doing.”

  The guy truly troubled Trace, too. The big question, apart from what Brigid and Allan might have discovered, was why that man had hung around so long if he was involved in either killing in any way. The lack of answers bugged him and goaded him.

  As a man of action, he hated sitting on his hands. He believed Hillary felt the same.

  “I don’t like the feeling we’re caught in a game of cat and mouse.”

  Her mouth twisted. “But we seem to be. Are there any weapons in this house?”

  The question told him all he needed to know about her state of mind. “I think Allan had some long guns in a locker in the basement. Maybe some knives, too.”

  “Then we should prepare. If this man was involved in Allan’s killing, possibly in Brigid’s, he will stop at nothing.”

  No, he wouldn’t. But it still didn’t explain why he was here two months after Allan’s death.

  That question bugged him as much as anything. Did he think Allan had shared information with Trace? Or that Brigid had shared concerns with Hillary?