Brian Freeman - Goodbye to the Dead (Jonathan Stride Book 7)

She got out of her truck and swapped her clog heels for a pair of winter boots. She zipped up her burgundy jacket, which wasn’t much protection against the cold. She didn’t bother with a hat. When she shut the door, she saw the dents and scrapes tattooing the yellow paint of the Avalanche. She was a terrible driver.

Maggie climbed from the parking lot into the deep snow lining the shallow slope. Dead weeds poked out of the drifts. She crossed under power lines where a strip of land had been cleared in the woods and headed for the next line of birch trees, whose black-and-white trunks were speckled like snake skins. The dark mountain loomed above the trees like a slumbering bear. She heard a lonely train whistle below her, near the river. Her face felt blistered by the wind.

Four months earlier, Jay Ferris had been here. He’d tracked a man in camouflage with an assault rifle. Maggie had checked other police calls since then. Two other reports had come in of gunfire in this area. One was only three weeks ago. Whoever the man was, he was still around. He was more careful now, but he kept coming back.

She pushed through the trees. The snow got inside her boots and made her socks wet. She dug in her pocket for some of the photographs from Jay’s camera, and when she compared them to the landscape around her, she thought she was in the right place. She studied the ground and the trees but saw nothing unusual.

Ten more minutes passed as she climbed higher. She couldn’t feel her feet or her fingers. She was about to turn back when she glimpsed a fleck of red color winking in and out of the black-and-white forest. She waded into the thicker trees, and as she got closer, she heard the flapping of plastic. What she’d spotted was a red bullseye target laminated and nailed to the trunk of a birch. The center of the target had a jagged hole where it had been shot away with numerous bullets, and the wood of the tree underneath was splintered and broken.

She looked deeper into the forest, and she saw other red targets. Six, eight, ten of them. One by one, she tracked them, and each one bore the marks of a hunter who had used them for practice. In the snow, as she walked, she found spent shell casings, too. Dozens of them, like dirty gold cigars at her feet. Dozens became hundreds.

She didn’t like it. Not one little bit.

After a quarter-mile following the targets, she came upon the carcass of a deer in a small clearing. It was a doe, frozen and stiff in the snow, its tongue drooping from its mouth. The deer had been dead for days. Its camel fur was a mass of darkened blood, and the animal was surrounded by more spent casings. The hunter had shot it and then come upon the body and kept firing. And firing.

Maggie started counting the bullet wounds in the dead deer, but she stopped after two dozen.

Someone was very angry.

‘A deer?’ Stride asked.

He leaned on the metal handle of his shovel. He’d cleared eight inches of snow from his driveway on the Point, and he was sweating. A quarter-mile away, the tower of the Duluth lift bridge shimmered over the ship canal like a monster of gray metal. Lingering snow flurries spat through the lights. In February, the bridge mostly stayed anchored to the ground, so the residents of the Point enjoyed a respite for several icy weeks from getting trapped by the coming and going of cargo boats.

‘Yeah. A deer. Shot to pieces.’

Stride didn’t answer immediately. He wiped his brow with his sleeve. On the street, he spotted the sedan of his friend Steve Garske passing behind Maggie’s Avalanche. The two men waved at each other. Steve’s Chrysler kicked up slush, and as his wheels hit the metal bridge deck, the whine sounded like a pack of stinging wasps. It was nine o’clock at night. He figured that Steve, who was a musician as well as a doctor, was off to a gig with his band at Amazing Grace.

‘I’m not sure what we can do other than notify the Department of Natural Resources,’ Stride told her.

‘I did that,’ Maggie said, ‘but that’s not what bothers me.’

‘Then what is it?’

‘This wasn’t hunting. This was rage.’

Stride frowned. Hunting out of season wasn’t uncommon, and neither was the occasional hunter who used his weapon to live out a Rambo fantasy in the forest. Even so, he’d worked with Maggie long enough to trust her instincts.

‘What else did you find?’ he asked.

‘He had plastic targets scattered in an unusual pattern. The heights varied. It was what you’d expect from someone walking through a crowd, picking off targets.’ She added after a pause: ‘Human targets.’

‘That’s a big leap, Mags.’

‘I’m just telling you what it looked like to me. I mean, I know we’re all sensitive after Columbine—’

‘No, I hear you. Do we have any idea who this guy could be?’

Maggie shook her head. ‘I passed Jay’s photos around. No one recognized him. Whoever he is, he’s under the radar.’

‘Well, let’s make sure our guys keep their eyes open around town.’

‘Do you want more bad news?’ Maggie asked. ‘Jay wrote about this guy in his column.’

‘The guy in camouflage?’

‘Yeah, Jay did a column in November on gun control and the expiration of the assault weapons ban. Camo Guy was Exhibit Number One. Jay talked about gun nuts carrying military-style hardware in our parks. Talked about chasing this guy, reporting him to the cops. And naturally how the cops did squat.’

Stride leaned against the yellow Avalanche next to Maggie and lit a cigarette. He stared at the pack in his hand with disgust, then shoved it into the rear pocket of his jeans. ‘Do you think this guy is a legitimate suspect in Jay’s murder?’

‘Probably not, but if we don’t rule him out, it’s raw meat for Archie Gale. Plus, I want to find him and see what makes him tick. He worries me.’

‘Okay. We’ll let the dogs out. Speaking of Jay’s columns, what about this prescription drug addict he wrote about last summer? The woman he called Holly. Do we have any way of tracking her down? He threatened to blow up this woman’s life in his column. That’s certainly a motive if she thought he was serious.’

‘Unless he made up the whole thing,’ Maggie said.

‘Is that possible?’

‘Jay wrote that he was picking up Lipitor at a pharmacy when he saw this woman Holly. The thing is, I checked, and there weren’t any pharmacy charges on his credit card last year. His medical records don’t show that he was taking any prescription meds. He wasn’t on Lipitor. So if you ask me, Holly is a fake. He made her up to make a point about prescription drug abuse.’

‘Okay. Well, that’s one we can cross off our list.’ Stride blew smoke into the night air. ‘How’s Nathan?’

‘You know what I think about him,’ Maggie said.

‘Yes, I do. Does he have an alibi?’

‘Sort of. I found the Sammy’s driver who confirmed that she delivered a pizza to Nathan at his apartment that night. It was too early for an alibi, but she said he looked half-dead and was hacking up phlegm. He put the moves on her anyway, which she said was pretty gross.’

‘Some things don’t change,’ Stride said. ‘How about the tip on the white Toyota Rav? The one that the kid spotted on Skyline Parkway?’

‘We’ve got a list of Rav owners in the northland who have some kind of criminal record. We’re working our way through them. So far, there’s no one that looks promising. I re-interviewed the kid, too. He admits smoking a few joints at Enger Tower that night. I’m not sure we can rely on his memory for details.’

‘Great.’

‘I’ve been backtracking through home break-in reports around the state, too, and I can’t find any MOs that look similar. The idea that this was a murder-robbery seems far-fetched. We’ve been watching pawn shops, but none of the missing jewelry has shown up.’