Filed to story: Return of the Reaper Story
Nearly invisible on the other side of a shaft of watery winter sunlight stood a buck, a full twelve-point bull with a barrel chest and powerful legs. His hooves were set firm in the black earth beneath the snow, ready for a leap. Mist drifted from his nostrils as he turned his antlered head from side to side. His head was not fully raised, and his ears were at rest. He had not sensed the presence of hunters.
Merry pulled the mitten from her right hand with her teeth. She wore fingerless woolen gloves beneath. She took in a long breath and letting it out slowly as she tucked the end of the stock firmly into her shoulder. She relaxed her left hand under the fore stock and allowed the heavy rifle to rest on it as she drew back the hammer with her right thumb. Another breath, another exhale, and she fixed the big animal in her sights. The front tang was set on the thickly furred neck just before the shoulder.
“He’s all yours,” her father said in a whisper. “Remember what I told you.”
“Control my breathing. Both eyes open. Squeeze, don’t pull.”
With her index finger firm on the trigger, Merry pressed until she felt the tension in the pull. She blinked and refocused her eyes. The buck turned his head toward her, seeming to look her right in the eyes.
A hammer blow struck close enough to them to send a shower of bark fragments flying off the dead oak. Merry’s reflexes caused her to jerk the trigger home. The fat lead ball went high on a thick cloud of yellow smoke. The thunderous roar of the Hawken filled the air.
She was pulled back by her father’s grip on her collar. She heard the flat echo of an explosion from somewhere far above them. Her father dragged her flat on the snow and lay atop her to shield her.
“Someone else is hunting here?” she said in a hush.
“That shot was at us,” her father said in a hoarse murmur.
“What do we do about it?”
“Nothing. I’m going to get you out of here. When I fire, run like hell back to those pines.”
Her father moved ten feet or so along the length of the dead oak, staying flat to the ground the whole way.
Merry drew her legs under her in a low crouch. She watched her father crane his head sideways to scan the slope above with one eye. He laid that way for the longest minutes of her life. With a single fluid movement, he raised up on one knee and fired the muzzleloader at something up the hill. A thick plume of sulfurous smoke enveloped him. Merry launched herself across the narrow shelf to slide under the pine boughs and out of sight.
A second report rang out on the heels of the whicketing sound of a round tearing through the branches high above.
Isaac dropped alongside Merry. He lay in the concealment of the shadows and swiftly reloaded the Hawken, placing a new percussion cap in place and thumbing the hammer back.
“You expect them to chase us?” Merry said, voice shaking and not from the cold.
“No. I think they were looking to discourage us.” Isaac levered up a branch with the end of his barrel, eyes moving across the ground above them.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
He lowered the hammer back in place against the cap.
“We go home.”
The forensics reportthat came back from the Cedar Creek Motor Lodge was worth jack shit to the GBI agents assigned to the case.
While the room, like any motel room anywhere, was well-populated with DNA samples of all kinds, useful evidence was absent. Every conceivable surface that might have been touched by the room’s most recent guest had been wiped clean. All doorknobs and door edges. The faucets of both the sink and bathtub were spotless, as were the toilet flush handle and lid. The bedside table had been wiped, and the TV remote. Even the room key with its numbered plastic lanyard had been scrubbed of prints.
The murder weapon, presumably a massive quantity of ice, had simply melted and gone down the drain.
The manager on duty that night at the motel said the guy who’d checked into Room Eleven had paid cash. He swore he’d looked at the guy’s driver’s license but couldn’t recall the name. The name scrawled on the motel’s clipboard entry could have been anything, like the driver’s license number. When pressed, the manager said Room Eleven had been let to an “average white guy” of “average height.” Nor did he happen to notice if the guest had made frequent trips to the ice machine just outside the motel office.
Agent Godshall strongly suspected this genius had never looked up from the same game of FreeCell he was playing when the GBI agents came to question him.
Since this was the local cheaters’ motel, there were no surveillance cameras on the parking lot or in the office. One amenity this fleabag could offer its guests was anonymity. That meant the ice machine theory was unprovable. Further confirmation of this was the rich tapestry of fingerprints that remained on Room Eleven’s ice bucket. They sent it off to have the prints cross-checked, but the assumption was the “average white guy” had bought his ice elsewhere.
A fruitless check of local convenience stores in a five-mile radius turned up no suspects that fit even the fuzzy description of “average” making mass purchases of party ice. This despite hours and hours spent by a junior agent running through surveillance footage. The suspect had either bought the ice farther out or brought it from home.
“Somebody did the state a favor,” Cy Godshall said. He was standing outside the building entrance in the rear parking lot of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation center.
Lindsay Dauber nodded. She was standing upwind, arms crossed against the biting cold of a damp Georgia winter. She’d come out to join her senior on one of his twice-daily cigarette breaks, though she did not smoke. It was the only occasion, other than when they were in the field, on which they could speak freely outside the uptight confines of the Bureau. Everyone was so damned touchy these days, scared shitless about saying something that might earn them sensitivity training hours.
“This Krogstad was a piece of shit. Could have been anyone he met who might want to end his sorry life.” Godshall lit his second Marlboro of the day, hands cupped around the lighter against the wind.
“How’d he keep a job as a school teacher with his record?” Lindsay was referring to Alexander Krogstad’s arrest record for solicitation and “sexual knowledge of a minor.”
“I guess it’s who you know. And that was a while back.”
“Fifteen years. But these guys don’t change even after the law puts a scare in them.”
“You think he was up in Pickens sniffing around?”
“He went there to meet someone ,” Lindsay said. The wind shifted in her direction, and she moved away from the stream of tobacco smoke. “Has the week off from teaching. Decides to buy himself a Christmas gift.”
“Boxing Day.”
“Huh?”
“Day after Christmas. They call it Boxing Day in Canada. England too, I think.”
“Well, he wasn’t after anyone’s box.”
“I read that. He likes boys.” Godshall snickered, smoke escaping through his teeth.
“Maybe he met up with a pimp, a handler. Maybe he didn’t like the price. There’s a fight, and-“
“And the pimp decides to deep-freeze him?”
“Yeah. That doesn’t work.”
They stood for a while, looking out across the yellowed grass that led down to the parking lot. Godshall smoked his Marlboro down to the filter and put the butt out on the steel side of an air handler unit. They walked toward the portico that ran across the rear of the building, anxious to return to the steamy warmth of their office.
“We have other cases. Gonna have to let this one go cold.”