Mars knew as soon as he heard Gordon Ball’s voice that bad news was next.
“You couldn’t find Junior?” Mars said.
Ball’s words were slow and pained. “Worse than that. We found Junior. Just like you said, in the Airstream. We’re asking him about his whereabouts on the three dates we’ve got for hangings, and Junior says, ‘I need to take a crap.’ I checked the can out myself, Mars. Thinking maybe he was gonna go for a gun or try and get out a window. There were no weapons, and the only window was this horizontal vent just below the ceiling. No way he was getting out through that. So we let him go. Something else. I mean, this guy was ready for us. He had a tape recorder running in the bathroom. His voice, saying stuff like, ‘I’ll be right there. Give me a minute.’ Five minutes go by, and when we open the door, he’s gone …”
“Geez, Gordon, you didn’t make him keep the door open …”
“You ever been in an Airstream can? Especially the little Airstreams? If the door had been open, Junior wouldn’t have been able to sit on the john. And we heard him talking—the tape recorder. He’s been expecting something like this to happen.”
“Sorry, Gordon. No doubt about it, he was waiting for somebody to show up. Made his day. I was just—”
“I know. Believe me, I know. When we went in, the whole fucking floor was up. The kid had made a trapdoor out of the entire floor. He’d put struts in a tunnel under the floor that supported the shower and the can. The tunnel—if you can believe this—was more than five hundred feet long. It came out in the woods behind the trailer. By the time we got into the bathroom—which was no easy trick, because when he lifted the floor it propped up against the door—he was long gone. And I don’t need to tell you what it’s like trying to hunt down a fugitive in the Appalachian woods. We’ve got a serious problem.”
“Be sure to have your guys look for a place in the woods where a vehicle may be parked … and, Gordon? Do we have surveillance on Ruth Macintosh’s house yet? If they were in this together—and I still believe someone else had to be involved—he may try to make contact with Ruth. Go for a wiretap, if you can. How we doing on a search warrant for the trailer and his sister’s house?”
“Forthcoming. We’ll do the search before we leave here. And we haven’t said anything to the sister yet about what’s goin’ on. So hopefully she isn’t in there flushin’ stuff down the crapper. Mars—there’s one other thing. And it’s problematic. When we were talking with Junior, asking him about his whereabouts on the three dates. The June third hanging date …”
“Yeah?”
“He laughed at us. Said he was in the county jail for breaking in to the Esso station in Green Springs.”
Which, Mars thought, explained why the old guy had always been more than willing to tell Mars anything he wanted to know about Junior.
“I don’t think that’s much of a problem, Gordon. I’ve never thought Junior was actually doing the killings. My guess, he uses his computer to locate the victims, maybe does some surveillance—I think his biggest role is to be a link between Hec and Ruth. I think he’s the conduit for getting money from Ruth to Hec. I just can’t figure how that
works. Let’s hope the surveillance on Ruth’s house tells us something. If Junior’s on the run, he may need to be in touch with her.”
Ball said, “One thing I’m worried about. Junior making contact with Hec. Letting him know that we’re onto him. I’ve been thinking about what you said—about Hec going kind of wild if he thinks there’s a chance we’ll catch him before he finishes the job.”
Mars stared at nothing in particular before he said, “My thoughts are running on the same line—the one thing we’ve got going for us is that you didn’t know about Hec when you were at Junior’s. There isn’t any way you could have said anything that tipped Junior to that.”
“That’s true,” Ball said, still sounding worried.
Mars didn’t feel much better about it. He updated Ball on what they knew about the target dates and the task force meeting Keegan had asked Minneapolis to host.
“We’re trying to get it scheduled ASAP—but it can’t happen until we complete the target victim identifications. So, you’ll be hearing from us.”
The next call from Gordon Ball confirmed Junior’s involvement in the murders, even if it didn’t resolve how far Junior’s involvement went or a connection to Hec Macintosh.
The search warrant had yielded fabric samples from Darlene Jessup’s house—Junior’s sister—that visually matched the fabric used in the nooses, and Ball’s people had taken dried berries from the house. They’d not yet had time to complete an analysis of Junior’s computer files, but just looking at cache files on the computer, they’d identified a number of sites where Junior could have traced descendents of the surviving First Minnesota Volunteers. Of particular interest was a book on knot tying that Ball had found on Junior’s bookshelves.
“I glanced at his books,” Mars said. “But I didn’t notice that one.”
“Real easy to miss,” Ball said. “The book on knots was on the shelf backwards. Pages out, spine back. Looked like a blank spine until you took it off the shelf.”
Mars shook his head. “This kid can think. What’s the chance his sister is involved in this—beyond doing the sewing for Junior?”
“Ohhh, I suppose that’s possible. But not likely. She was genuinely upset by our going through the house—but not defensive. Not like she thought we were gonna find anything. Her big concern was somebody paying her for the stuff we took out. Particularly the fabric. Said it was real expensive and she’d paid for it and Junior owed her. We’re checking out her husband—but that doesn’t look real promising. He’s not around much. Has a job over in one of the coal companies about seventy miles from Green Springs, comes home every other weekend. Sounds like a pretty straight arrow.”