The crime scene was still mostly fresh. The bombing had happened the night before. Paramedics and police officers were still sorting through the carnage. The men jumped in, searching for survivors. I stared at the scene and wondered how many people could have been in attendance in Palmyra, Missouri that there might still be survivors.
Jeffrey Adams was running around, attempting to look important. The FBI and Homeland Security were both on the scene. Luckily, Malachi didn’t deal with bombings. Instead, there were agents from the St. Louis, Missouri office.
My gaze was drawn to the grandstand. Part of it had collapsed. Blood had dried on the wood and metal heaps. The folder in my hand had informed me that the truck and tractor pull had been in full swing when the bomb went off. It also told me that they had sold roughly 1,200 tickets. There were over 100 dead from the carnival and the grandstands and over 500 injured. The area hospitals were over run and those that could be sent elsewhere, were being sent to Quincy, Illinois and St. Louis, Missouri.
What the manila folder didn’t tell me was the panic and terror involved. A few cars from different rides had hit the back of the grandstand, two of the supports had collapsed. There was stampeding to get away. Injuries caused by fear and horror were more numerous among those in the bleachers than from debris and collapsing rides.
One car, from a ride called The Sizzler, was halfway through a concrete wall. The sign over the door had the universal symbol for male on it. I wasn’t going to enter the men’s restroom. My mind had already conjured an image of blood and gore dried on the concrete floor and splattered on the cinderblock walls.
“Cain!” Gabriel shouted for me. I turned, finding him among the suits. He was the only one in jeans. We were pretty lax on a dress code. My shirt had something snarky about poisons printed on it.
Gabriel handed me a photo. The glossy picture showed a pretty girl with a fake tiara. Her eyes stared at nothing, they looked glazed over. The mouth hung open at a strange angle. A perfectly round hole was directly between her eyes. It had bled very little. The photo didn’t show the back of her head. The thick crown of hair and fake sparkly tiara was covering a huge pool of blood and other things.
“She was shot,” I handed the picture back. “Who blows up a fair and puts a bullet in the brain of a beauty queen?”
“She was the fair queen,” Adams corrected me.
“Fair queen, beauty queen, whatever,” I shrugged. “She was a pageant winner and now she’s missing the back of her head. That doesn’t change the question. Why blow up a carnival and do all this damage, but shoot one person? Is the bomb a distraction so that the killer can assassinate the queen?”
“That sounds very,” Xavier thought for a moment. “Monarchial. Our madman doesn’t have a real king or queen so he shoots a stand in?”
“Have any other fair queens been shot?” Lucas asked.
“No,” Adams said. “But the other fairs, well, the fair queen died in the carnage of the bomb.”
“Who kills teenage girls over pageants at county fairs?” I asked.
“Other teenage girls,” Lucas said.
“And I thought I was cold,” I looked past them.
“You’ve never been in a pageant,” Xavier said.
“That’s true, but I lost the Geography Bee Regional Championships when I was seven,” I told him. “And I lost a school spelling bee in fourth grade. Who uses the word ‘deinstitutionalization’ on a regular basis or reads it?”
“What letter did you miss on that?” Xavier raised an eyebrow.
“None, I just refused to spell it after the teacher giving the bee failed to use it correctly in a sentence,” I told him. “I knew how to spell institutionalization, so it wasn’t like it was a hard word, I just needed to know the person using it understood it. The person before me was given the word ‘vanilla.’ The person before that was given ‘irritated.’ I am still convinced it was rigged.”
“Does that help this case at all?” Adams asked.
“I don’t know. I didn’t go kill the teacher or my opponents,” I told him.
“Good to know even you have your limits,” Gabriel gave me a quick wink. “However, if it doesn’t help, we probably should talk about it at another time.”
“Sure thing Kemosabe,” I gave him a salute and turned back to the decimated fair. There was only so much one could glean from a bombing. Or at least, that I could glean from a bombing. Bombings were impersonal, usually, and those behind them had causes and beliefs and things worth fighting and dying for. The closest I came to any of that was Nyleena and my family. Maybe Malachi when he wasn’t being a jackass, but that was pretty rare.
I understood shooting the pageant queen. Jealousy, hatred, and rivalry were all good motives for that. The bullet hole hadn’t been darkened by gunpowder, so the shot had been fired from a distance. Our shooter probably used a rifle, perfect for assassinations. The target through the scope would appear to be so close he could reach out and touch her. Maybe he thought about caressing her face before the life drained from it.
If it was a teen girl, she had some damn fine shooting skills. Skills that would be honed over time, perfected until she could take a shot at two-thousand yards and adjust for wind and drag and take down her prey with the single bullet. Definitely not a novice around guns, she probably grew up hunting and things. Her cold, calculating manner might be noticed at school or it might not, depending on the school and her ability to hide the demon that lurked beneath the surface.
A psychopath would have probably enjoyed the kill. She’d probably have stood next to the body for a few seconds, watching as the blood drained from the back of the head. She probably would have blended in.
A sociopath would have enjoyed the kill through the scope. No need to go gawk at the dead, the trophy was stored in the mind. Sure they craved acclaim and praise, but they weren’t smug enough to stand next to a dead body and hope no one noticed. They too would have blended with the crowd.
I pulled my thoughts away from the psychobabble mumbo jumbo that accompanied parts of my job. Earlier in my career, I would have wondered if I had been channeling Lucas. Now though, I understood it was what made me good at my job. I didn’t think like a person, I thought like a predator. If I had been behind the scope, I would have watched her fall. I would have watched her bleed. I would have done it all from the safety and comfort of my sniper’s nest. No one would have looked at me because no one would have been around.
“Where was the body?” I asked Adams.
“Between some cars,” Adams pointed.
A grassy field was still full of stranded vehicles. The entire area was a crime scene, cars included. Besides, what happened if there was a car bomb set to go off when people left? More chaos, more panic, more death would have occurred. I’m sure some people had tried to leave in their cars, but the police; county, city and state troopers, would have stopped them.
Personally, I wouldn’t have planted a random car bomb. I would have put one on the buses housed at the local bus barn. They would have had timers or location sensitive detonators and would have exploded when they reached the chain link fence that enclosed the fairgrounds. Obviously, that hadn’t been the case with our bomber.
“Where, exactly?” I pressed.
“It’s marked,” Adams sounded irritated.
“By what?” I continued.
“Crime scene tape,” Adams huffed.
“There is crime scene tape all over the place. If you don’t want to be helpful, that’s fine, but just tell me that you don’t want to be helpful,” I snipped at him. I found a very tall man wearing a state trooper uniform and hat. “Excuse me, do you know where they found the body of the fair queen?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” he said. “I’ll take you there.”
“Thank you,” I didn’t gripe about the “ma’am,” although it was my first instinct. Behind me, I could hear Gabriel trying to soothe the ego of the Homeland Security Agent that was very unhelpful and sort of a jackass. He joined my mental list, just above Malachi’s name.
“Here you are,” the trooper pointed to the ground. There was a single piece of crime scene tape hanging from a car antenna. I raised an eyebrow and flipped the bird to Agent Adams, hoping he saw it.
“Everything all right?” The trooper asked.
“Fine, I just hate dealing with unhelpful people,” I smiled, but knew it didn’t look real.
“Anything else?” He asked.
“Have they calculated the trajectory of the shot? Or found the shooter’s location?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he pointed towards the back of the field. I saw a truck with a ribbon of tape hanging from the antenna.
“Thanks and it’s Marshal Cain, not ma’am,” I started towards it.
“Marshal,” the trooper kept up with me. “What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know yet,” I told him. “A reason to shoot a fair queen.”
“I understand,” the trooper said as he continued to accompany me to the truck.
The truck was red, but about half the trucks in the field were red. It had a blue light on the dash.
“Do we know who it is registered to?” I asked.
“Yes,” the trooper answered. “Dale Turner, he was a volunteer fireman in Marion County. His body was among those found when the grandstands were cleared.”
“So, he probably wasn’t the shooter,” I cocked my head to the side.
With a little effort, I climbed into the bed of the truck. My joints were still stiff from the flight. I drew my gun, using the roof of the cab, I rested my arms to steady myself. From here, I had a perfect view of the field of cars. Finding my target in a stampeding crowd would be a little harder, but it could be done.
“Ace!” Xavier shouted. “What are you doing?”
“Checking out the shooter’s view. Guess what, I could have killed you at least a hundred yards ago,” I told him.
“Comforting,” Xavier shook his head.