“When are you gonna get around to bracing me about the hundred thousand bucks?” Kuchinski asked.
The question, with its let’s-pick-a-fight timbre, startled Rep. It came after forty-five minutes of tramping that had taken them two miles-plus northwest of their camp, and roughly doubled the syllables exchanged between the two of them since sunrise.
“As soon as I figure out how to ask without implying that you’ve been pawing through my insulated undies,” Rep said. He kept his voice jovial, leaving it up to Kuchinski whether to treat his answer as a josh or a challenge.
“Your undies weren’t what interested me, that’s for sure,” Kuchinski said quietly but with unmistakable irritation. “When I pulled into that parking lot Saturday morning I saw you studying a piece of paper like it was a cross between a draft notice and a bar exam. It seemed to leave you with a bad case of curiosity and a hard time getting to the point while we were driving up. I was kind of wondering what was going on.”
“You weren’t exactly chatty yourself.”
They crunched another hundred yards or so, following no trail that Rep could see. Tracks abundantly pocked the snow, criss-crossing and overlapping. Kuchinski sent a half-accusing, half-disappointed look in Rep’s direction as he resumed the conversation, his voice even chillier than the twenty-two-degree temperature.
“I’d feel better if you’d just come to me with any questions you had, instead of having some gumshoe go digging through records two states away.”
“He was a young lawyer, not a gumshoe. I didn’t ask him to peep through any keyholes of yours. I sure wasn’t expecting your name to turn up on that bequest list.”
“Fine. Just seems to me like you were playing ’em a little close to the vest—and this ain’t poker.”
Rep surmised that he had violated some unwritten masculine code, failed some test of intuitive faith. In Kuchinski’s mind, apparently, the bequest list should have made Rep talkative instead of tongue-tied. Rep should have volunteered the information with a hey-isn’t-this-interesting attitude. He should have shrugged off any sinister interpretation, should have known without having to be told that it meant nothing, should have understood and accepted its irrelevance without thinking about it.
But he hadn’t. So Kuchinski had convinced himself that Rep suspected him of complicity in crimes trailing in the vaporous wake of Vance Hayes’ ghost. The silence between them as they covered another fifty yards wasn’t familiar but sullen, like a summer day heavy with approaching rain. Rep knew that he wasn’t going to get another useful word out of Kuchinski about Vance Hayes or anything else unless he reversed Kuchinski’s impression.
Rep stopped. Looking at him with sharp surprise, Kuchinski stopped as well. He opened his mouth but before he could speak Rep raised his right arm in an urgent QUIET! signal. Trying not to ham it up too much, he gazed straight in front of him, head slightly forward, eyes focusing with fierce intensity, the tip of his nose quivering slightly. Glancing at Kuchinski, he pointed at a birch with a divided trunk about eighty yards off. He raised his eyebrows questioningly. Kuchinski nodded with a puzzled expression that Rep interpreted as meaning Yeah, that’s a tree. So what?
Rep set the rifle Kuchinski had lent him butt-first in the snow and leaned the barrel against a tree to his left. He started forward with a careful but steady pace, intended to hide the hollowness in his gut and the tremor in his calves. He didn’t look back. Just moved ahead, offering Kuchinski an unarmed, can’t-miss target. Six or seven Wisconsin hunters would be accidentally killed this deer season. It would be absolutely no trick for Kuchinski to make Rep one of them, except without the accident. Wait for Rep to get about fifty yards off, put a thirty-ought-six sized hole in his skull, remove his blaze orange coat and ditch it somewhere, and chalk it up to just another seasonal mishap. Why the HELL did he shuck that coat? Tenderfoot and all but even so. What was he thinking? Can’t figure it out.
Rep was ten feet from the split-trunk birch when Kuchinski’s rifle-shot split the air behind him.
***
Thirty miles away, Melissa didn’t hear that shot. She’d heard plenty of other rifle fire since breakfast, but the vague uneasiness she felt as she looked out the back window of the cabin came from another source altogether. She’d heard an engine roar—not a car or truck engine, but a full-throated growl that sounded like a motorcycle with muscle. The howl had come from the woods.
She sipped coffee and shrugged. The article she should be working on right this minute nagged at her conscience. She didn’t see how she could accomplish much by standing here gazing at woods where someone might or might not be lurking. She turned away from the window with every intention of getting back to work. As she crossed the room to get to her laptop, however, she noticed the photocopies of Soldier for Hire peeking out of the canvas carry bag where she’d stashed them. She’d gone to the trouble of hauling the things up here so that she’d have them available over the Thanksgiving break, on the off-chance that reviewing them might generate some insight beyond Detective Washington’s coded-blackmail-message theory.
Dropping onto the couch, she pulled out the first issue and began paging through it. Forty minutes later she’d made it through a dozen of the things, for she came across nothing in them that required close reading. The articles, columns, and letters focused with grinding monotony on the short list of recurring subjects she had identified in her discussion with Washington.
The only topic that struck Melissa as something that would interest sensible people was MIAs. The insistent theme was that the United States government was systematically and deliberately suppressing evidence of Americans being held by communists in Vietnam. And not just the articles and columns. In every single issue, the first ad at the beginning of the classified section and the last ad at the end offered the services of WE’RE GOING HOME, INC., which apparently had one specialty: Finding loved ones who had been reported missing in action in South Vietnam.
Melissa put the twelve issues she’d reviewed back in her carry-all and reached for the most recent couple included in the package her colleague had sent her. Maybe a comparison of recent issues with those produced at the beginning of the magazine’s history would tell her something. And if it didn’t, maybe she’d just give up and get to work on her article after all.
The contrast with the earlier issues seemed more cosmetic than substantive. The type struck her as a little cleaner, the pictures a little sharper. References to MIAs had disappeared, but the copy otherwise covered the same gamut she had seen in the first issues she looked at. The only other change she noticed was that the magazine had acquired a professional-looking masthead, running one column wide down the second page inside the cover. She saw with mild interest that it identified a company called WE’RE GOING HOME, INC. as the publisher. In the beginning, in other words, Soldier for Hire’s parent company had also apparently been one of its key advertisers.
Wait a minute. Was that the point? Did the real money at the beginning come from getting people to pay WE’RE GOING HOME to try to find sons or husbands or buddies who’d never made it back from Vietnam? Had the magazine started out as just an elaborate tool for getting a line on people who’d fall for that kind of pitch? Had WE’RE GOING HOME always been the publisher?
A re-check of the first few issues confirmed her recollection that they included no masthead. The early issues went right from the table of contents to the first article, on page five.
She blinked. Huh? Page FIVE? She thumbed again through the first year’s issues. One two-sided page—three on the recto and four on the verso, or the other way around, she couldn’t remember—was missing from each copy. She couldn’t imagine how that had happened.
Well, it would be easy enough to check once she got back to Milwaukee. Telling herself that Washington would probably have Leopold under lock and key and the case wrapped up by then, she tucked the carry-all away and strode with grim determination toward her laptop.
***
Just about the time Melissa managed to boot the computer up, Roger Leopold looked at Nguyen’s prone body, the blood from a gash on the top of his head congealing rapidly in the cold air. Leopold hesitated. His ribs ached, his lip was split, and his teeth throbbed. Even taking Nguyen by surprise and having forty pounds and four inches on him, Leopold had absorbed a beating while he overwhelmed the smaller man. He desperately wanted to kill the little slope, but he couldn’t take that chance. Cops around here had to know more about hunting accidents than he did. He couldn’t count on faking one convincingly.
Then he smiled as inspiration came flooding in. Straddling Nguyen’s body, he removed the deer tag encased in plastic on the back. If Nguyen started wandering around the woods again with his rifle after he woke up, he’d be begging to get arrested. Just to be safe, Leopold removed the clip from Nguyen’s M-14 as well. Then, with his own handgun, he put a bullet through the front tire on Nguyen’s Harley.