Chapter Seven

I got to work early the next morning, but Darrell beat me there. He had the records from his investigation into the murders of Kip Wells and Racer Moritz spread out on the table in the conference room. This wasn’t the first time he’d done that. We didn’t get many cold cases in Black Wolf County, and Darrell didn’t like unfinished business. So whenever things were slow—which happened a lot—he hauled out the file and insisted on going over the details with me.

Every time Darrell brought out the crime scene photos, they sickened me all over again. Nearly every square inch over every surface inside the mobile home was covered in blood, much as it had been in Gordon Brink’s bedroom. According to Darrell’s theory of the crime, Racer Moritz died first. He was found at the back of the trailer, stabbed so many times that the autopsy couldn’t give an accurate count. The postmortem blood test showed that he’d been drunk and high on weed at the time of his death. There were no signs of a struggle, so Darrell suspected that Racer had been asleep or unconscious when the murder occurred.

Kip Wells had been found just inside the trailer door. Darrell speculated that the killer murdered Racer and then waited for Kip to return before attacking him from behind. All the knife wounds—more than a hundred, the coroner said—were in Kip’s back. The frenzied attack on his body had continued long after he was actually dead.

Then there was the message from the Ursulina, painted on the trailer wall in Kip’s blood.

For as much time as Darrell had spent on the investigation, he didn’t have much to show for it. The trailer where the killings occurred belonged to Norm Foltz, who used it as a campsite when he took hiking trips in the forest. He was an amateur photographer and naturalist, so when he wasn’t in a courtroom, he was usually in the woods. Sometimes he went alone; sometimes his son, Will, went with him. But because of Norm’s extended stay in Stanton for a trial that summer, the trailer had been unused for a few weeks. It was impossible to know exactly when Kip and Racer had begun squatting there.

But why were they dead? And who killed them? Darrell didn’t know. Honestly, in Black Wolf County, nobody cared. Kip and Racer had bullied people around here from the time they were teenage dropouts. If there was a break-in or theft in town, deputies usually knocked on their doors first. Even the 126 had banned them, and it took a lot of bad behavior to get thrown out of the 126. Many of their worst crimes went unreported, out of fear of retaliation. One woman had accused them of rape, and a week later, her house burned down. People got the message to keep their mouths shut. So when the Ursulina ended Kip and Racer’s reign of terror, pretty much everyone was grateful. If anyone knew anything, they didn’t rush to give Darrell evidence to solve the case.

Even the Ursulina hunt, filmed for television by Ben Malloy, turned out to be a bust. Darrell let Ben and his volunteers trample through the forest surrounding the crime scene, because he hoped someone might find evidence of the real murderer while searching the ground for Ursulina tracks and Ursulina poop. But we didn’t find a thing. Kip and Racer’s killer, like the Ursulina, had disappeared from the woods without leaving a trace.

“Question,” Darrell said, as we sat across from each other at the conference table. He liked to use me as his sounding board, as if the process of thinking through the case again would help us unearth something we’d missed.

“Kip, Racer, now Gordon Brink,” he continued. “What are the similarities between the cases?”

“Well, the crime scenes obviously,” I replied. “The Ursulina message. Plus, the extreme violence in how the victims were killed.”

“And the differences?”

“The crimes happened six years apart. The victims back then were two local thugs versus an out-of-town partner at a corporate law firm. There’s nothing to connect them. We’ve got different murder weapons and different locations, one residential, one in the national forest.”

“What about possible motives for Kip and Racer?”

“Take your pick. They had their fingers in a lot of pies, everything from drugs and poaching to theft and assault.”

“And Brink?”

“Presumably the lawsuit.”

Darrell frowned. “So what does your gut tell you? Are we looking at a copycat or at the same killer?”

I reflected on what to say. “Well, everything about the second crime scene feels staged to look like the first. They’re the same, but they’re also different. That sounds like a copycat, doesn’t it?”

I didn’t have time to find out if Darrell agreed. Before I could say anything more, I heard the rustle of paper and the loud crunch of someone eating potato chips. I looked up and saw Ajax in the doorway of the conference room. He listened to us, with his tall body slumped against the doorframe. “You’re both forgetting something, you know.”

“Oh, yeah?” Darrell asked. “What’s that?”

Ajax came into the room and sat down across from me. His long legs stretched out, and I felt him rub my calf with his boot under the table. I pushed my chair sharply backward. He grinned and extended the bag of potato chips to offer me some, but I waved it away.

“There’s someone connected to both crimes,” Ajax said.

“Who?” Darrell asked.

“Norm Foltz. Kip and Racer were in his trailer. He’s the one who found the bodies. And now we’ve got Gordon Brink, who was on the other side of Norm in the mine lawsuit. He has links to all the victims.”

“Norm also has no motive,” Darrell pointed out.

Ajax’s thick eyebrows teased up and down. “Well, it was a monster’s moon. Who knows what happens to Norm after midnight? Maybe he transforms into a werewolf or something.”

“Not funny,” Darrell said.

Ajax shrugged off the reproach. “Okay, well, Norm has no motive that we know of, but that’s different from not actually having one. Like Rebecca says, Kip and Racer were into everything. As for Brink, there could have been something personal between him and Norm that we don’t know about. And I’ll tell you something else. I didn’t see Norm at the movie at the 126 on Sunday night. So where was he?”

Darrell hated to acknowledge that Ajax was right, but in this case, we both knew that somebody needed to ask Norm some questions.

“Okay, go talk to him,” Darrell told Ajax. He looked at me. “Take Rebecca with you.”

My horror must have shown on my face. “Why not do the interview yourself?”

“Sorry,” Darrell replied, shaking his head. “Norm and I are best friends, everybody around here knows that. You guys talk to him first. Find out what he knows.”

Ajax practically hummed with satisfaction at the assignment. He crumpled up his empty bag of chips and hopped to his feet, and he pointed his long finger at me like a gun. “Come on, Rebecca. Chop-chop.”

I waited until he left the conference room, and then I groaned. “Darrell. Are you kidding? Me and Ajax?”

“You’re going to have to learn to live with him sooner or later. You might as well start now.”

That was true, but I did a lousy job of hiding my annoyance. In the office, I shrugged on my coat, then followed Ajax out of the courthouse building, trying to keep up with his long strides. The Christmas snow lingered on Main Street and on the roofs of the buildings, but the day was bright and clear. Ajax slipped Foster Grants over his eyes as he slid behind the wheel of his cruiser. I kept a stony silence as I took the passenger seat next to him. He squealed his car into a U-turn and sped out of town like a Ferrari driver at Le Mans. Somehow I think this was supposed to impress me.

Ajax shot a sideways glance across the car and saw my mouth bent into a sour frown. “Jesus, lighten up already.”

“Lighten up?” I fired back. “Do you really have the balls to say something like that to me?”

“What’s eating you?”

“You know what. What did you say to Ricky? Did you tell him we were sleeping together?”

He chuckled. “Hey, we were just kidding around. Everybody knew it was a joke.”

“Everybody?”

“Sure, the whole gang at the movie. That’s what we do, you know that. We drink, we shit on each other. Hell, Ruby was right there. She heard everything I said, and she knew I was kidding.”

My fists clenched. “Don’t do it again. Don’t joke about me and you. Not to Ricky, not to anyone. Got that?”

“Got it,” he replied with a sarcastic salute. Then he shoved his sunglasses down to the end of his nose like Tom Cruise. “But just so you know, anytime you want more than what Ricky’s packing, I’m happy to help out.”

“Oh, shut up, Ajax. Just shut the hell up.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

We didn’t speak for several minutes after that. I fumed in the passenger seat. We headed into the nowhere land that occupies most of the county, past miles of white-flocked evergreens hugging both sides of the highway. Eventually, Ajax got to a lonely T-intersection, where the 126 crossed with a dirt road that I knew well. Going left led toward Norm Foltz’s house, which was next door to the house where Darrell and his family lived. On the other side of Darrell was the house where I’d grown up with my father and brother. Almost a quarter-mile separated each of the lots, but we were all neighbors.

However, Ajax turned in the opposite direction.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“I need to stop home first. I forgot my lunch.”

“Can’t you skip it?”

Ajax shook his head. “Man, are you on the rag, or what? Give me a break. It’ll take five minutes.”

He drove fast enough to get a little skid on the rear tires. The unplowed road was rutted with tracks in the snow. Three miles from the highway, we got to his house, which was a freshly built two-story big enough for a large family. The yard had been cleared, but there were still a few dozen tree stumps jutting out of the drifts. It was more house than you’d expect from a thirty-year-old deputy, but we all assumed that the sheriff had kicked in cash for his nephew.

“Want to come in?” Ajax asked.

“No, I’ll stay out here.”

“Suit yourself. I won’t be long.”

He got out of the car and marched up to his front porch. I saw the door open, and his wife, Ruby, came outside to greet him. He gave her a peck and then slapped her ass as he went inside. She glanced at the cruiser, which was when she spotted me. Her mouth pushed into a thin, unhappy line. I got the feeling that Ruby wasn’t convinced that her husband had been kidding around at the 126.

Ruby had a lush shag of deep mahogany hair that hung well below her shoulders. She was bony and small, except for the basketball-sized bump in her stomach. After she’d left the mine, they’d had two kids back to back, and the third was due in the next month or so. Her face was Barbie-doll pretty, in the same Ken-doll way that Ajax was handsome. She had fair skin, a sharp little dimpled chin, and big green eyes that could turn from sweet to ferocious in a blink. The genetic combination of Ruby and Ajax was undeniably impressive. Their kids were gorgeous.

She tramped through the snow. It was cold outside, but she wore no coat, just a holiday sweater and jeans. I knew she was coming to talk to me, so I got out of the car and lit a cigarette as I leaned against the door.

“Hi, Ruby.”

“Rebecca.”

“How are you? Feeling okay?”

“Fine.”

“Number three won’t be long now, huh?”

“No, not long.”

“Good.”

That was all we said, but I heard a different, unspoken conversation going on between us. Ruby knew what her husband was like. She knew that Ajax cheated on her every chance he got, because you couldn’t keep that kind of thing quiet in Black Wolf County. But Ruby was also intent on making sure that no matter who Ajax slept with, he always came home to her and her kids. She’d mess up any woman who tried to get in the middle of her marriage, and the look in her green eyes told me that she thought I was exactly the kind of woman who might try to do that. I was trying just as hard to tell her that nothing was going on between me and Ajax.

Finally, Ruby got more pointed.

“So where’s Darrell? Don’t you usually ride with him?”

“He asked me and Ajax to do an interview.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Gordon Brink got killed,” I added.

“Yeah, I heard.”

“So that’s all it is,” I told her, which was as close as I could get to saying out loud that I wasn’t trying to steal her husband.

“I suppose you’re talking to Norm,” Ruby said.

I covered my surprise that she’d guessed right. “Well, we’ll be talking to everyone who knew Brink. That’s how these things go.”

“You should start with Norm, that’s all I’ll say.”

“Why?”

“Ajax didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“About Norm and Gordon.”

“No, what about them?”

Ruby glanced over her shoulder at their house. Ajax was still inside. I could see her weighing whether to say anything, but I think she loved the idea of lording a secret over me. “I had a deposition with Norm at Brink’s house a few days ago. Norm was trying to get me to say the men were harassing Sandra and the others at the mine. He kept pushing hard for X-rated details.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I said the worst sexual harasser I ever saw at the mine was Sandra.”

“So what does that have to do with Norm and Gordon?”

“We took a break midway through,” Ruby explained. “I had to pee. I have to pee like every twenty minutes with this kid sitting on my bladder. When I was done, I passed the back door to the house on my way back. I saw Norm and Gordon out in the yard, and I could hear they were having an argument. It was really hot, like they might go after each other. Gordon was shouting at Norm.”

“Was it about the deposition?” I asked.

Ruby shook her head. “No. It didn’t have anything to do with the lawsuit. They were arguing about Gordon’s son. Jay.”