23

ARN AND ANA MARIA HAD left Hot Springs early after an early morning soak in the mineral pools. By the time they arrived in Cheyenne, Ana Maria was nagging him to grab a bite somewhere when Sam left a voice mail offering to buy him lunch.

“Might as well drop me off at home,” Ana Maria said.

“Thought you wanted to get something to eat?”

She tapped Arn’s phone. “With an invitation from the Ice Lady, you better go. And go alone if you ever expect to make anything of this relationship.”

He had hesitated to accept her lunch invite. Their last dinner date had gone remarkably well, with Sam hanging on Arn’s every word, complimenting subtly more times than she should have. In fact, it had gone so well, red flags waved in front of Arn’s face as he tried analyzing her. A woman many years Arn’s junior who could have her pick of suitors. Even with the single professional men who drooled around her office, she had come on to him. At first, Arn had been flattered as he felt his old mojo returning. Until he remembered he didn’t recall ever having mojo enough to attract a beauty like Samantha Holder.

He had sat and thought about her last night as he soaked in the hot springs, without Danny or Ana Maria telling him just to enjoy her company and see where it goes. Which is just what Sam said when she called him this morning. “It’ll just be at the cafeteria here at the VA,” she told him. “Nothing fancy. Just to get together and visit. See where this is going.”

Was she after something more than a relationship, like information about his investigation? Get a damn handle on your paranoia. Meet with the lady but keep an open door to your gut feelings.

“I can bring you something from the cafeteria.”

Ana Maria smiled. “Not to worry. Drop me off at home and Danny will throw something fabulous together for lunch.”

—

When he passed the Police Office, the door stood open and he stepped inside. “Returning the file,” Arn called out.

“Back room,” Wagner answered.

When Arn stepped into the small, back office with Sims’ military file tucked under his arm, Wagner sat at his desk, one sockless foot propped up on the desktop while her cleaned his toenails with his Buck knife. “Did you find anything in there?”

“Nothing that’ll lead me to his killer.”

“I told you there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot in that file,” Wagner said, “except Sims must have been some kind of investigator the way he went after those black marketers. I was hoping there’d be more in the after-action report I received from the Army archives this morning. If you think there was anything substantial in that, don’t hold your breath.”

Which is just what Arn did, holding his breath as he moved upwind from Wagner’s stinky feet. “Care to let me look at the after action report?”

“Can’t,” Wagner answered, admiring his toes like a model admiring her figure in a full-length mirror prior to runway time. “But I can give you the quick and dirty of what I found.”

“I see the quick and dirty,” Arn pointed to Wagner’s feet, “but tell me what you found out.” He took out his notebook and a pen. “Shoot.”

Wagner started slipping his sock back on when his big toe stuck through a hole in the fabric. “Funny you should use that term,” Wagner said as he extricated hos toe from the hole in the fabric, “because that just what Bo Randall threatened to do to Sims at his court martial—that he was going to drill Captain Sims center-chest as soon as he got released from Leavenworth.”

“I take it he’s no longer in prison?”

“You got it. He got another year tacked on for that little courtroom outburst, but he served his time and was released in 1972. His trail goes cold from there.”

“Did the Army keep track of him?”

Wagner tossed his holey sock in the trash can and put his boot on without one. “Bo served his time. Wasn’t any reason for the Army to keep him on their radar. My guess is he went back to Custer.”

“I have another favor to ask—.”

“Not today,” Wagner said. “And not the day after. Or the day after that. I have enough of my own work to do around here as it is.”

“You wouldn’t want to help solve these crimes?”

“Anderson, there are no regional crimes, at least as far as old vets go. It’s just some old farts keeling over from heart issues.”

“Suit yourself,” Arn said as he closed his notebook. “I’ll get hold of the South Dakota VA officers and ask them for help.”

Wagner laughed. “And just why should they help a pain-in-the-behind civilian with his bogus theory?”

Arn shrugged. “Because when I put it all together—with their help—they’ll be heroes.”

“It’ll take more than that.”

“And they’ll probably get nice promotion. Maybe even a transfer to someplace with more… opportunity for advancement for someone who takes a little initiative in their work.” He started out of the office when Wagner stopped him. “How much work you talking about?”

“Not much,” Arn lied. “But the reward could be well worth it. That is, unless you want to sit around bored out of your mind waiting to kick an occasional drunk out of the facility.”

“All right. All right. What the hell you need me to do?”

After Arn explained that he needed Wagner to research each victim’s record to see what doctors they were seeing at their respective VA centers, Arn needed to know if any of the victims served with Bo Randall in Vietnam. “That’s all!” Wagner said. “Do you know how much time it’ll take for me to do that?”

“What else do you have to do all day but sit around picking your toenails?”

—

Arn patted dry wall dust off his bib overalls before taking them off. “Where do you want them?”

“Just drop them by the washer,” Danny said as he swiped at a spot of wet dry wall mud that had dropped onto his shirt front from his dry wall knife. He put one hand on his thin hip. “I swear you make more work for me than a dozen people trying to hang drywall. And you better run a brush through what little hair you have—there’s enough drywall dust and mud there to hang another sheet.”

“I just feel guilty about leaving you with the rest of the room to finish—.”

“Believe me, you’ll be doing me a favor,” Danny said. “If you’re not helping, I’ll go twice as fast with half the mistakes. Now clean up and give that DCI feller a call back.”

Before Arn walked out of the mudroom, he stuck his head under the faucet. He dropped his shirt and bibs on the floor before parading through the house and upstairs to his room. He put on clean jeans and t-shirt before stopping in the kitchen long enough to make a cup of green tea. He hated to admit it, but it was helping his regularity. His blood work came back yesterday and—except for itching where the nurse had wrapped the Kerlix bandage too tight, he felt fine.

He took the cup of tea and a plate of cookies into the sewing room and opened his phone.

“I see you left me a voice mail,” Arn told Agent Kane.

“I did. Figured you’d want to know… the autopsy on that feller in Hot Springs, Charles Boding, is finished, and the lab results are back. I believe he was murdered. Boding died from a cocaine overdose, but he was no user. I talked with his father and he is convinced me his son never used any drugs.”

Arn thought of what Oblanski said before. A lot of cocaine addicts lived a normal life—unlike meth heads—and often the last to know were the person’s family. “Why you figure he was murdered?”

“That syringe we found in the trash,” Kane said. “I fast-tracked the lab tests and the techs found traces of Xlazine. Faint traces.”

Arn let out a breath. Although it gave him no peace to be right about the veterans’ deaths, at least he felt some vindication. And a place to start looking for the killer. “Did you find the injection site?”

“Finally,” Kane answered. “In the event the victim was a user, we looked at the usual places where people shoot themselves up—the veins in the arms and the back of the hands. We even looked between the toes. Nada. But,” rustling of paper on the other end, “the ME saw a tiny red mark under the tongue. Bingo! That was where he was injected with the coke.”

“Just to be absolutely certain,” Arn said, “You are positive he did not inject himself?”

“I am,” Kane said. “I have never run into a user who injects himself under the tongue.”

“And the horse tranquilizer?” Arn asked. “Was that injected under the tongue as well?”

Arn waited so long he thought Kane had hung up.

“It’s the oddest damn thing I ever ran into. At autopsy, there was a pinpoint discoloration on the victim’s thigh—another injection site.”

“He was hit with cocaine twice.”

“He wasn’t,” Kane said. “Testing at the site and blood work showed Boding was injected with Xlazine high on his thigh. We’ll know more after I run the samples to the state lab.”

Arn closed his eyes, processing what Kane told him, and combining it in his mind with the crime scene photographs of Boding’s death, reconstructing the crime in his mind’s eye. The killer would have hit Boding with the horse tranquilizer to get him sedated before the needle was injected under the victim’s tongue. That might work very efficiently with the older veterans who had died.

But Boding wasn’t an old vet. He was a younger, stout man that the killer had to inject with the Xylazine to subdue before injecting with the cocaine

But how did the killer get the upper hand on a young man like Charles Boding?