Todd Ritter - Death Notice

He found the crime scene easily enough. On the outskirts of town, it was the place with the most people gathered there. The entire road was closed, forcing Nick to stop his car on the hard shoulder.

Sitting in his car, he surveyed the scene. On one side of the barricade was a crowd of curious onlookers. They craned their necks and talked among themselves, their faces all displaying the same shell-shocked look. On the other side of the police tape was a mix of sheriff’s officers and state troopers. They, too, stood around and chatted while looking as stunned as the bystanders.

The only people in the crowd unfazed by the situation were the only three faces Nick recognized. And that was because they worked for him.

Tony Vasquez was the first to spot Nick as he flashed his credentials and ducked under the police tape.

“You made it,” he said, lifting the brim of his campaign hat. A full-time state trooper and part-time bodybuilder, he was the only task force member who wore a uniform. It sure as hell made him look intimidating, which Nick knew Tony liked. But he also wore it with a certain amount of pride. Only 2 percent of the state’s troopers were Hispanic. And Tony was one of the best. With stats like that, he had every reason to be proud.

“We placed bets on if you’d show up or not,” he said. “I won.”

“How much?”

“Twenty bucks from Cassie and the chance to bench-press Rudy.”

“Well done, Vasquez.”

Rudy Taylor, the bench pressee, was nearby, kneeling before a patch of ice on the side of the road.

“Is this where he was found?” Nick asked.

Rudy nodded. “But he didn’t die here.”

“How can you tell?”

“No blood. No struggle. Just the box he was dumped in.”

Stump short and toothpick thin, Rudy Taylor was considered the odd duck of the team. His size didn’t help. Neither did the bowl haircut that made him look like a grade-school science club president. But he was the best crime scene technician they had. Rudy could survey a scene for five minutes and find ten things a whole team had missed after looking for an hour.

“What about tire marks or footprints?” Nick asked.

Rudy stood and stomped the frozen ground for effect. “There’s not too much of that on this ice. I did find something in the snow over there.”

He pointed to a footprint a few feet away. It was marked with a yellow evidence tag.

“You wax it?” Nick was referring to impression wax. Sprayed from a can, it let them make impressions in the snow without destroying the footprint itself.

“Yeah,” Rudy said. “It belongs to the first responder.”

“Where’s the body?”

“The medical examiner took it away fifteen minutes ago.”

The answer came from the last member of Nick’s team—Cassie Lieberfarb. She stood behind him, a state police baseball cap pressed onto her frizzy orange hair. On her feet were the bright green galoshes she always wore in the field. She called them her profiler boots.

“How was Florida?” she asked, her eyes zeroing in on Nick’s face.

“Hot and sunny.”

“Then where’s your tan?”

Nick shrugged. “I used sunblock. Now back to the murder—who’s the victim?”

“Caucasian male,” Tony said. “Mid-sixties.”

“Just what our guy likes,” Cassie added.

“When is the autopsy?”

“At four.”

Nick compiled a list of things that needed to be done that day. He and Cassie had to examine the corpse before the autopsy started. While they did that, Rudy would supervise the collection and examination of evidence. Tony would wrangle up the best sheriff’s officers he could find and start the legwork. When they met up again eight hours later, they’d hopefully have a time of death, a cause, and enough evidence to point to a suspect. Only Nick and the rest of them already had an idea who the killer was. As for why he killed, none of them could begin to guess.

“Has the victim been identified?” he asked.

“The first responder did an ID,” Tony said.

“Who was that?”

“The police chief.”

“Let me talk to him.”

Cassie pointed to the crowd, picking out a woman in uniform who was dwarfed by the other cops around her.

“She is right there,” she said with sisterly pride. “Her name is Kat Campbell.”

Nick took a moment to size up the chief. She looked exhausted. Her kind eyes were dimmed by the dark circles sagging beneath them, and she moved in the weary, slump-shouldered way of someone carrying a heavy load on her back. Discovering a murder in your own backyard would do that.

“Are you Chief Campbell?” Nick asked as he approached.

The chief nodded. “Are you in charge of the task force?”

“I am,” he responded, shaking her hand. “Nick Donnelly. BCI, the Bureau of Criminal Investigations.”

She eyed his civilian clothes, hoping in vain to find something that indicated his rank and position. Since there wasn’t, Nick volunteered the information.

“I’m a lieutenant,” he said. “But in rank only. In reality, I’m just part of a team trying to catch bad guys.”

“We thank you for the help.”

“Just so we’re clear, the county sheriff has turned the case over to us. So the state police, specifically the BCI, is in charge of the investigation. I hope that sits well with you.”

Kat responded tersely. “Understood.”

“Good. I heard you were first on the scene.”

The chief briefly described everything she had seen and done that morning. It was all by the book, from finding the box to forming a perimeter around the crime scene. That made Nick happy. Sometimes local cops did more harm than good.

“I was told you knew the victim.”

“Only by sight. Perry Hollow’s a small town. After a while, you know everyone.”

Her voice caught on the last word, and for a second, Nick worried that the chief was going to start crying. But she swallowed hard and kept her emotions in check.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “We’ve never had a murder before. So it’s been a bad day.”

Nick had no doubt. For Chief Campbell, it was probably the mother of all bad days. And she didn’t know the half of it yet. Once she did, her day was going to go from bad to downright miserable.

Kat understood the situation perfectly.

She knew the limitations of Perry Hollow’s police force. Between her and Carl, they barely had enough manpower to write speeding tickets, let alone investigate a homicide. She knew the chain of command in such a situation. If the local cops couldn’t handle a case, jurisdiction moved to the county sheriff. And the sheriff, who was busy running for re-election in the fall, didn’t want to get his hands dirty in a homicide that—if unsolved—could sully his reputation. So he had called in the big guns—the state police. They had the manpower and equipment and a special investigative task force led by lieutenant-in-rank-only Nick Donnelly. Most of all, Kat knew that she needed them more than they needed her, which is why she vowed to do anything that was asked of her.

So, when Nick asked if there was a place his team could work out of, she offered her office. When he wondered if they could make full use of her police force, she introduced him to Carl Bauersox, his eager baby face poking out of his too-tight jacket. And when Nick sought a private place where they could talk, she led him to her patrol car.

And there they sat, the heater cranked on high while the slowly fogging windshield painted the action outside a gauzy gray.

“So why do we need to speak in private?” Kat asked.

Nick answered with a question of his own. “Have you ever heard of the Betsy Ross Killer?”

“No. Interesting nickname, though.”