Cole studied his computer screen and ran his hand through his hair a couple of times. He tended to do that a lot. His lips were pursed and his forehead knotted in concentration. His computer was open to Orvis.com, and he scrolled through the tent sale page of the noted outfitter’s website. Each week Orvis dropped the price of select merchandise until it sold out. He didn’t like paying their retail prices, but he loved the quality of their clothes. The tent sale was a bit of a poker game for him. He had his eye on three items. The signature twill shirt he wanted was supposed to drop today from thirty-four to twenty-seven dollars, which would be a steal. Would have been a steal, that is, because it was sold out. The H.S. Trask loafers had started at one-eighty and were selling for sixty-three today. When he checked on available sizes he saw only sevens and fourteens. No size ten and no new loafers for him. The last item he was following was a salmon-colored sweatshirt that the site trademarked “world’s softest.” If Orvis said it was, it probably was. He learned the hard way that timing the tent sale was like timing the stock market. Nobody could do it with any regularity. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to pay the forty-nine bucks it would cost if he took it to checkout now, or if he should wait a week and see if it was still available in a Large at thirty-nine bucks. He was mulling this over when someone rapped on his closed door.
Cole looked at the clock on the bottom right corner of his screen and saw that it was a little after six-thirty p.m. He hit the power button on his monitor and it went dark, at the same time he raised his voice to say, “Come on in.”
Ty pushed through the door and stepped to Cole’s desk, handing the agent a folder. He looked him straight in the eye and said, “It looks like you were right. The guy in Centralia has a rock-solid alibi. The St. Louis agents tracked him down at his job. They know this case is big and they sat on him hard, but his story checks out. This morning he was punched in and on the job at the Centralia mill by eight. The agents talked to the guy’s supervisor and he saw him punch in. The supervisor also talked to our guy around nine-thirty or ten; discussing a new project they’re going to start work on next week. That means for him to be our shooter, given Dr. Smith was taken down about seven-thirty this morning, he had a total of thirty minutes, give or take, to shoot the doctor outside his Milwaukee clinic, drop his rifle, scramble down from the roof, make his way to his car, and drive to the Centralia plant and clock in. According to MapQuest, it’s a six-and-a-half-hour drive from the Milwaukee clinic to the Centralia mill. Dale Jr. might be able to make it in a little less than half that. Unless he borrowed the Starship Enterprise from Captain Kirk and beamed himself back to Centralia after the shooting, we can’t make him for the murder.”
“Agreed. Even if he had a plane waiting it would take at least a half-hour to get to an airport and get airborne…another two hours of flight time…and another half hour or close to taxi down the runway in Centralia, get to his car, and make it to the mill. No chance. None whatsoever.”
“Any reason we shouldn’t let him go?” Ty asked.
“No. But make sure we know how to get ahold of him. I don’t want to lose any loose threads until we know what this is all about.”
Ty turned to leave, but Cole stopped him short with another question. “Did we learn any more about this guy other than his alibi?”
“It’s all in the file I gave you. The first key point is that he’s a hunter. But there are over one million deer hunters between Wisconsin and Illinois, so that could easily be a coincidence. We also learned the guy owns both a 30-06 deer rifle and a 12 gauge shotgun. No 30/30. He said he was in Wisconsin after Christmas, but he never got to Waukesha or the gun show there. The agents swung by the guy’s house after grabbing him and the guy’s wife backed up all of this separately.
“Where did he go in Wisconsin after Christmas?”
“Prairie du Chien, little town on…”
Cole put up a hand to cut Ty off, with a look that was part smile and part grimace. “I grew up in Prairie, so I’m familiar with the location.”
“Okay. The guy said to get to Prairie he drove through the Quad Cities and up the Iowa side until he got to Dubuque. That route wouldn’t take him within a hundred miles of Waukesha. He said he took the same route home, because it’s the quickest.”
“Did he tell the agents why he went to Prairie?”
“A fishing tournament. That’s the only part of his story they noted didn’t seem plausible. Who would drive six and a half hours each way for a two-day ice fishing tournament?”
Cole laughed out loud. “It doesn’t make sense to you or the St. Louis agents, but they’ve been holding that Ice Fisheree in Prairie for seventy years now. It’s a blast.”
“Okay, we don’t know what to make of it all yet.”
“I can tell you it’s not as easy as it used to be to forge a passable driver’s,” Cole said. “High school and college kids have fooled bartenders with fakes for years, but a few years ago Wisconsin made some changes to cut down on fraud and identity theft. They added ultraviolet ink, raised some of the key letters and numbers on the card, and added a second ghost photo.” He grabbed his wallet and slid out his driver’s license and studied it. “It wouldn’t be that easy to copy for the general public.”
“True. But to save money the state is phasing in the new licenses. You only get a new one when your old one expires, unless you want to pay extra. Most people aren’t doing that.” Ty reached into his jacket and retrieved his wallet. He handed his license over to Cole to examine.
He looked at Ty’s ID and then up at the detective, smiling. “Not the most flattering likeness of you.” He handed the license back.
Ty laughed and said, “I was actually hoping you’d pick up on the fact that it doesn’t have the new identity safeguards, and it’s good for another four years.”
“So, it could have been easy enough to copy a license like yours. Verify it, but our guy from Centralia probably has a similar license.”
“Wait a sec,” Ty said, pulling out his phone to do a quick Google search. He scrolled through a couple articles quickly. “Centralia is in Illinois, and Illinois isn’t making everyone change to new driver’s license technology. They’re only making it available as an option. I’ll confirm, but our Centralia guy almost certainly has an older technology license like mine.”
Cole picked up the file and began reading. “The gun dealer scanned the license he was given. Supposedly the guy he sold the gun to was in a wheelchair. He also remembers him having a scruffy beard and being in a bulky khaki coat. I’d say the whole thing was a disguise,” he said, looking up at Ty. “The beard covered the real shooter’s face. The wheelchair kept the dealer from getting a good idea of his height. The big coat kept the dealer in the dark about the guy’s build. I’m sure the guy made himself look like a handicapped vet to also soften the dealer up. Pretty much anyone would feel a little uneasy about looking too hard at a vet carrying permanent scars from serving his country. So, we learned two things from this. The first is that the license is no doubt a phony. The second is that our shooter is a cunning and devious bastard.”