Mariah Stewart - Acts of Mercy

“His statement, like you said before.”

“Exactly,” Sam agreed. “So while it’s tougher to get a handle on the killer where you have so little evidence, you really hope that it was one and done for him. Right now, all we know is that we’re most likely looking for a man because it would have taken a lot of strength to overpower Ross Walker, who, from the reports, was a big man.”

“A little over six feet, about two hundred pounds,” Coutinho confirmed.

“So we’re looking for someone with size and strength of his own. Someone organized enough to have researched where and when to find his victim and brought with him everything that he needed, took everything away with him when he left.”

“You coming out here any time soon, Sam?”

“I’d like to get out there as soon as possible. Ideally by tomorrow or Wednesday.” Sam wondered how the Foundation handled travel arrangements.

“Give me a call and let me know when you’re coming. I’ll have a copy of the file and all the statements we took ready for you.”

“Great. Thanks. I’ll be back in touch.” Sam hung up, and headed off to Mallory’s office once again to find out how he should go about getting approval for a flight to Lincoln, Nebraska, and wondering what he’d find once he got there.

Sam’s travel arrangements had been amazingly smooth and easy. Robert had a plane that he’d authorized to be used for the Mercy Street investigators, and Mallory took care of everything. At seven AM on Wednesday morning, Sam arrived at the local airstrip where the plane was housed. He parked his car in the lot and walked around the hangar and out onto the tarmac where he looked around. There were three planes that looked as if they were getting ready to go somewhere.

He walked to the closest one and asked the mechanic who was just coming down the steps if he knew which plane belonged to Robert Magellan. He was pointed to the first one in line-a trim Cessna Citation. At the top of the steps, Sam poked his head inside and called, “Hello?”

A trim woman in her midfifties came out of the cockpit.

“Can I help you?” She leaned against the doorframe and tucked a strand of auburn hair behind one ear.

“I was looking for the pilot,” Sam told her.

“You’ve found her.”

“Oh.” Sam realized that his facial expression must be registering his surprise, and he tried to cover it up.

“Great. Nice to meet you. I’m-”

“Sam DelVecchio. Yes, Mallory told me to expect you. I’m just about ready to take off. You can take a seat and get comfortable.” She gestured to the passenger section.

He dropped his briefcase on one of the chairs. “I didn’t catch your name.”

“Delilah McCabe.” She smiled but didn’t offer her hand. “We’re scheduled to take off at seven thirty and I make it a point to always leave on time. So if you’ll excuse me…”

“Oh, sure. Right. Go ahead and do whatever-”

“Just need to check with the mechanic.”

She disappeared through the doorway and Sam glanced around the interior of the small plane. With seating for seven passengers, the aisle was narrow, and he had to hunch his six-foot, three-inch frame in order to move to the front of the plane. He took the seat closest to the cockpit and laid his jacket across the seat next to him. He was wishing he’d brought along something to read other than his file notes when Delilah reentered the plane.

“All set?” she asked.

“Any time you are,” Sam replied.

“I’d invite you to come up front and sit with me,” she told him as she walked to the front of the plane, “but I don’t like to talk to anyone when I’m flying. I find it distracting.”

“Right. We don’t need a distracted pilot.”

She laughed and went into the cockpit, and prepared for takeoff.

The flight took much less time than he’d anticipated. By two in the afternoon, Sam was seated in the office of Detective Christopher Coutinho, going over statements given by the witnesses interviewed by the Lincoln police.

“Like I said,” Coutinho told him after he’d gone through nine of the fifteen statements, “no one saw anything.”

“I guess it would help me to understand that better if I could see the crime scene,” Sam said. “Can you give me directions from here? I’ll stop there on my way over to see Lynne Walker.”

“I’ll drive you. It’ll be easier for you to get around. I don’t expect your rental car came with GPS?”

“Actually, it did. And I went to college in Lincoln, though it’s been a while since I’ve been here. But I’ll take you up on the company.” Years in the Bureau had taught Sam to take advantage of any hospitality offered by the locals. Besides, he knew the more time he spent with the lead investigator on the case, the more he’d learn.

“Good. We can get started then, unless there’s something else you need to see in the file?”

“I would like to see the rest of the photos of the crime scene.”

“Oh. Sure. I didn’t email them all because there are too many.” The detective sorted through the file until he found a large, thick, brown envelope. “These aren’t pretty, but I guess pretty isn’t really an option when it comes to cases like this.”

Coutinho slid the photos from the envelope and turned them around so that they faced Sam, who studied each one, from the pictures of the kitchen and the back doorway, to the last close-ups of the dark line that ran across the victim’s throat and the burger that was half in, half out of his mouth.

“The burger was from a chain, as you can see from the paper it’s still wrapped in,” Coutinho pointed out. “Of course, we checked with every location in the city, but there were over a hundred of these things sold that night between the hours of six and nine thirty PM, which is when the ME thinks the murder occurred.”

Sam studied the photos one by one. “And since we’re dealing with an international chain, there’s no point in trying to analyze the contents, because all the food is premade before it gets to the restaurant. Gotta love that prefab fast food.”

“No fingerprints, by the way. There was some trace collected-some skin cells from under the victim’s fingernails and some hair from the front of his shirt. The results from the lab didn’t match up with the DNA we have from everyone he worked with that night, and there was no hit in the database.”

“You got people to volunteer DNA samples?”

“Yes. There was no problem getting them to swab. Usually you have to beg, but this time they all stepped up to the plate. Said they wanted to eliminate the time we’d waste trying to make one of them fit as a suspect.”

“And no one refused?” Sam asked.

“Not a one.”

Sam stared at a photo of Ross Walker. “As we discussed on the phone, this was well planned, well thought out. It took time to set this up. It’s hard to imagine someone from the mission following Walker outside, strangling him, stabbing him, changing his clothes, and then walking back into the kitchen again without anyone noticing the blood on his arms and face.” He looked up at Coutinho. “The killer would have had a tough time getting rid of all the blood while he was at the scene, but if he left by the back alley, as he most likely did, it would have been dark enough that anyone seeing him from a distance wouldn’t have seen any blood he still had on him.”

“We’ve spoken with Walker’s neighbors, with his coworkers, his family. From every account, he was a real family man. Rock of the community, devoted to his wife. Volunteered at the mission’s soup kitchen as soon as it opened, coached Little League soccer and softball. Like I said, no one knows anyone who’d want to hurt him.” Coutinho stood and folded the file. “We’ve talked to our CIs on the street, we’ve talked to everyone we could think of who has their ear to the ground out there. No one’s heard anything about Walker. There aren’t even any rumors.”