Sound travels around seven hundred fifty miles per hour. The muzzle velocity of a thirty-ought-six has to be more than fifteen hundred feet per second. I heard the shot. Therefore I’m probably still alive.
Rep complimented himself on this elegant syllogism. Then he figured that someone lying face down in the snow with an armed man approaching him should move on to something more useful than self-congratulation very soon. Unfortunately, he couldn’t think of anything in that category.
“Geez, Rep,” he heard Kuchinski say then, “did I startle you?”
“Not at all. I’ve just always wondered what snow looked like really close up.”
“Sorry.” Kuchinski helped him up. “I didn’t have time to warn you.”
“Something come up all of a sudden, did it?”
“Something with a white tail and an impressive rack—and I don’t mean my favorite bunny at the Lake Geneva Playboy Club.”
“Are you saying there was actually a deer out there?”
“Rep,” Kuchinski said reverently, “that was the best shot I’ve ever made in my life. Moving target, two hundred yards off with more timber than Paul Bunyan ever cut in between me and him—and I dropped him with one bullet.”
“So I get credit for flushing a prize buck?”
“You weren’t out there flushing any deer,” Kuchinski said as he handed Rep the rifle Rep had left behind and began leading Rep forward. “That little piece of business about showing me your back and waltzing out there unarmed was you doing the Captain Titleman number, am I right?”
“I was just trying to show you I trusted you.”
“Well, it was a hot dog stunt, but you made your point.”
“Glad to hear it. I’m not sure my firm’s group plan covers hypothermia, and I’d hate to die uninsured without accomplishing anything.”
They hiked in silence for a couple of minutes before Kuchinski came to a respectful halt and pointed straight ahead of them. Twenty yards farther on Rep saw a vivid splotch of blood staining the snow. Smaller spots at irregular intervals led his eyes to a light brown bulge lying at the next tree line.
They closed eagerly on the slain deer. Neither spoke—Kuchinski because he was absorbing the moment, and Rep because he knew when to keep his mouth shut. Over the next fifteen minutes the only words exchanged between them were, “Thirteen points,” and “Yep.”
What happened during those fifteen minutes involved the judicious use of hunting knives, the removal and disposition of entrails, the manifestation of certain biological consequences of sudden death in mammals, and the attachment of Kuchinski’s deer tag to one of the thirteen prongs on the dead buck’s antlers. Then they trussed the buck’s legs with a coil of manilla hemp and began retracing their steps, dragging the animal laboriously behind them.
“How long do you think it’ll take us to get him back to camp?” Rep panted after ten minutes of slogging had taken them about a quarter of a mile.
“I don’t figure on pulling him all the way back to camp,” Kuchinski said. “We’re a little over half a mile from a trail wide enough for the Escalade. I’m thinking we drag him that far, then hike to camp and four-wheel back.”
“Sounds good,” Rep managed. He now felt bathed in sweat, despite the frigid weather. “It’s a good thing you didn’t drive up here in the Riviera.”
“That was subtle.”
“I’m locally famous for subtle segues.”
“Okay,” Kuchinski sighed. “Even Splinters was ragging on me about the Escalade, so I guess I can’t blame you for wondering about it. It is an oh-five, but it’s more than slightly used. Contraband of the flourishing trade in crack cocaine, forfeited to Uncle Sam as an instrumentality of crime. I have some buddies at Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, so I knew about the auction in time to sell my Durango and make a decent bid.”
“You mean you had an SUV even before this one?”
“For at least ten years,” Kuchinski said.
“You just hang onto the Riviera as kind of a nostalgia thing?”
“Oh my word, son, you have a lot to learn about life as a trial lawyer in Milwaukee. You do not let any potential juror see you driving to court in a car that looks like it cost more than his first house. The Escalade and this new rifle are the fruits of a long career promoting the cause of law and justice and judicious friendships with ATF personnel—not a windfall from helping Vance Hayes launch his bark on the dark seas of eternity. That hundred thousand bucks came as a complete surprise—and not a particularly pleasant one.”
“Sounds like a problem I’d like to have,” Rep said.
“Careful what you ask for. The hundred grand had enough strings attached to moor a Lake Superior ore boat. I’m basically an uncompensated trustee. I’m supposed to use that money to help a peppy young court reporter named Sue Key.”
“Hello.”
“You got that right, buddy.”
“Why didn’t he just leave the money to her?”
“He figured Nguyen would get his hands on it and run through it,” Kuchinski said. “And he didn’t want to fuss with a formal trust, ’cause then she’d know about it. He left the money to me, without telling her, so that I can help her out when she’s ready to set up her own shop.”
“He did that in memory of his dead brother’s relationship with Key’s mother, right?”
“You’re not wrong,” Kuchinski said, “but it’s a little more complicated than that.”
“Would the complicated part have something to do with the military honors you arranged for his burial?”
“Yep.”
“You gonna tell me about it?”
“I guess that snow-dive you just took in homage to one of my war stories has earned you that much.” Kuchinski took a deep breath and swiveled his head as if to take in the austere surroundings. Then he went on. “There were a dozen ways to avoid the draft in the sixties. Vance chose one of the simplest. He just stayed in school and piled one student deferment on top of another. By the time Congress closed that loophole, Vance was past twenty-six and off the hook. He was probably the only guy in Indianapolis practicing law full time while studying for a master’s degree in American history.”
“Sounds like that could put a pretty big dent in the family college fund.”
“There wasn’t much left for Tim, that’s for sure. He could have scraped his way through a state school, but he got admitted to Notre Dame. The only way he could swing that was ROTC. He got his sheepskin and his gold bars on the same day, shipped out for ’Nam, and came home in a body bag.”
“And Vance spent the rest of his life guilt-tripping himself over Tim dying in his place,” Rep mused as the backs of his thighs began to throb. “That explains some things. But get to the part about the flag-draped coffin.”
“For decades after the war there was a cottage industry over American MIAs not accounted for. Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris built half their careers around it. The rumors were over-the-top. Underground slave-labor camps, Nazi-style human experiments, et cetera.”
“Actually,” Rep said, “some of that stuff sounds more interesting than the average Chuck Norris movie.”
“MIA families naturally held onto some hope that their kids were really alive and might come home some day. Hustlers preyed on these families. They’d place ads in gun magazines and survivalist magazines promising help finding MIAs. Sweat a few hundred bucks out of grandparents in Appalachia and grieving widows in Texas. Do a public records search, make some stuff up. Put together a report that held out some hope and promised more progress for a few more bucks. Bleed it as long as they could.”
“Where did Vance Hayes come in?”
“He went after these creeps like a pit bull with a toothache. He’d represent families for free, threaten to sue these outfits for fraud, breach of contract, unjust enrichment, bad breath, anything he could think of. If he couldn’t get anywhere with a civil action, he’d put together an evidence package for local prosecutors, with the documents all indexed and the witness statements tabbed and highlighted. All for practically no money.”
Rep nodded. The order of proof he’d found made sense if it were a prepackaged case for some prosecutor.
“Wouldn’t he get a percentage of any recovery?”
“There’d almost never be a net recovery. These were fly-by-night, hole-in-the-wall operations. They’d string things out as long as they could, then close up shop and leave town owing rent.”
“And you helped him?”
“Just a little local talent and professional courtesy from time to time, when he had something going in Wisconsin. Carried his briefcase once in a while. He was the hero, not me.”
“Heroic enough to rate a flag-draped coffin.”
“That was my opinion,” Kuchinski said. “Colonel Englehardt saw it the same way after I explained it to him. I don’t know if Hayes went to heaven or hell, but whether he was looking at his burial from above or below I wanted him to see that, as far as I was concerned, he’d made up for Tim taking the bullet he thought was meant for him.”
Rep plodded in silence, tugging his half of the awkward burden for another hundred yards or so, as he thought things over. His thighs were no longer throbbing. Now they were burning.
“Was Hayes still crusading as late as two years ago?”
“I hadn’t heard from him about one of those cases since the mid-nineties. I figured the MIA thing had just run its course. When he called me about setting up Roger Leopold’s deposition, I didn’t flash on MIA scams at all. Figured the deposition was just about the lawsuit.”
“But maybe the lawsuit was about the deposition.”
“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” Kuchinski said. “The more I ponder it, the likelier it seems that Hayes recruited a plaintiff and filed a claim just so he’d have an excuse for a little Q and A with Leopold under oath.”
“Well, he made the most of it,” Rep said. “He stumbled over something in Leopold’s testimony that someone was willing to pay a lot of money to hush up. But none of us can figure out what it was.”
“True.”
“This is starting to fit together,” Rep said, panting now as much from excitement as exertion. “Gathering information about whatever MIA scam Leopold was involved with explains those trips Hayes took to the Far East a lot better than speculation about sexual tourism. He used the deposition to force the issue with someone who didn’t want that information floating around.”
“The deposition also provided cover for Leopold,” Kuchinski said. “He could come across as a reluctant witness under thumb-screws instead of a venal informer. Although if he needed cover like that, why did he give Hayes the information in the first place?”
“Because Hayes was saving Leopold’s bacon,” Rep, said. “He was defusing a legal claim that threatened to turn an Internet porn business Leopold had sold the mob into a pig in a poke. That’s what got Hayes to the Supreme Court. He was trading legal services for information.”
“If all this is right,” Kuchinski said, “then Leopold looks like the bad guy all the way around. The quick settlement that Hayes got showed Leopold the value of information that Leopold himself had. When he ran a little short of ready cash in Hong Kong, he came back here to take a bite out of the apple for himself. Maybe Hayes got in the way, or maybe Leopold just took him out to cut down on the competition. When it got down to the short strokes, Levitan figured out that he could finger Leopold for Hayes’ murder, so Leopold killed him too. Then he took a shot at you with the same gun to try to frame Dreyfus for the Levitan murder and take him out of the picture at the same time.”
“That was a pretty cheesy excuse for a frame.”
“True,” Kuchinski said, “but it did scare Dreyfus off.”
“You’re saying it was worth a shot, so to speak.”
“You should save that one for Judges’ Night next year.”
“Let me think the whole thing over and see if it parses,” Rep said. “In the meantime, are we anywhere near that trail you thought you remembered?”
“Right up over that rise,” Kuchinski said, pointing slightly ahead.
As rises go, Rep thought with dismay, that looks a lot like a hill. Eighty feet is a long way to haul dead weight up a sixty-five degree grade.
“I know exactly what you’re thinking, and I’ve got you covered,” Kuchinski said. “We can tie my trophy up right here.”
“You’re not thinking of taking the Escalade down that hill through eight inches of snow, are you?”
“No one’s that crazy, not even me. But I’ve got it figured out.”
“If it means we can stop dragging, I’ll cheerfully take your word for it.”
The two of them looped the free end of the rope around a tree branch well off the ground and hoisted the deer high enough to thwart any timber wolves that couldn’t fly. Then, with the pale, late autumn sun high enough to hint that nine a.m. couldn’t be that far off, they began the trek back to deer camp.
“You parsed our theory yet?” Kuchinski asked about fifteen minutes into this leg of the journey. “Think we’ve got it figured out?”
“There are some loose ends we haven’t tied up yet,” Rep said, “but I can’t come up with any alternative that makes as much sense.”
“What clinches it for me is that Leopold is the only one with a motive that anyone could take seriously. Except me, and you’ve cleared me.”
“Let’s think that one through,” Rep said. “How about Nguyen? Family honor and all that?”
“The only thing Vance Hayes did to Nguyen’s family was help it. Based on the Vietnamese ideas about honor that I bumped up against in-country, I’d say it’s whoever killed Hayes that better be worrying about Nguyen.”
“Hard to argue with that,” Rep said.
“I suppose we could confect a motive for Ken Stewart if we really wanted to,” Kuchinski said. “You told me he was the executor for Hayes’ estate. The trustee’s fee would be a nice piece of change every year for quite a while. What if Hayes got irascible and decided to change trustees?”
“Now we’re just making stuff up,” Rep said dismissively. “In the first place, the trustee’s fee for a million-dollar asset base would be pocket change for Ken Stewart. He wouldn’t run a red light to hang onto it, much less commit a murder. And then there’s the detail that Ken has been as much in the crosshairs as I have. Whoever fired at me, Ken was about three feet away when it happened. And he’s had some kind of a stalker on his own grounds.”
“So who else is there besides Leopold, then?”
“I can’t think of anyone,” Rep said. “I’m just glad Melissa and I are up here while Leopold is back in Milwaukee, ducking Detective Washington.”