A Merciful Fate

FIVE

“I told Lucas not to bother you. It’s nothing. Probably drunk teens.”

Truman took a long look at Bree Ingram, wondering if the woman really believed her statement. When Lucas had asked him to take a look at some vandalism on his mother’s property, Truman hadn’t hesitated. Now he stood in Bree’s small stable, looking at six horse stall doors that had each been spray-painted with a big red X. And that was in addition to the red X on the door of her pickup.

“The symbolism bothers me,” Lucas stated, his arm protectively around his mother’s shoulders. “To me a red X means something is going to be eliminated.”

My thoughts exactly.

“It’s on her fucking truck,” Lucas went on, anger flushing his usually calm face. “On her driver’s door. It feels deliberate. It’s not drunk teens,” Lucas told his mother. “They’d draw dick pics and write curse words.” He tightened his arm on her, and she briefly rested her cheek against his chest. Over her head his glare met Truman’s gaze, transmitting his fury about the situation.

Truman sympathized, understanding that the big man felt powerless against a threat he couldn’t see.

A horse stretched its neck over the stall door toward Truman in curiosity, and Truman held his palm under its nose. Warm air covered his hand as the animal’s nostrils flared, and then its velvety lips nibbled at his hand, the horse oblivious to the threatening X on its door.

I feel as if it’s been selected for slaughter.

“There was a horse in each stall that received an X?” Truman asked.

“Yes.” Bree pointed at two unmarked stall doors, a tremor shaking her hand. “No horses were in those.”

“These horses are like her kids,” Lucas said. “Short of marking an X on my forehead, this is like threatening our family.”

“The mare in the first stall is Sandy’s,” Bree added. “But she’s like one of mine.”

“Sandy boards a horse here?” Truman asked. “Sandy from the bed-and-breakfast in town?”

“Yes,” said Bree. “We do competitive trail riding together.”

“You mean you sucked her into that craziness,” Lucas corrected. “Sandy could barely ride when she moved here, but she hung around with my mom so much, she got horse fever.”

Truman faintly recalled Lucas mentioning his mother’s horse competitions in the past. “Cameras anywhere?” he asked.

Lucas snorted. “No.”

“How much land do you have?” He stroked the horse’s cheek, admiring the trust in its black eyes and wondering if the horse had looked at the vandal in the same way.

“Ten acres,” answered Bree.

“Have you seen any signs that someone has been on your property recently?”

Lucas and Bree exchanged a look. Both shook their heads.

“Any vehicles you don’t recognize hanging around?”

Lucas’s expression darkened. “A few times recently I’ve seen a truck I don’t recognize on her road. Old, faded red Ford. Needs some bodywork. Probably from the early nineties. Even though I don’t live here anymore, usually I recognize most people out here.”

A small chill touched Truman’s spine. Old red Ford?

“Maybe he’s doing work on someone’s property,” Bree suggested. “We can’t recognize everyone.”

Truman met Bree’s gaze. “I don’t know how this would be possible, but have you pissed off anyone lately? Since there is an X on your truck, maybe you accidentally upset someone on the road who figured out where you lived?”

She paled. “I—I—don’t know. Not that I’m aware of.”

“She doesn’t make enemies,” Lucas snapped. His chest expanded, and he seemed to hulk up a size.

“I know that,” Truman said in a calm voice. “But it’d be shortsighted of me not to ask.” The horse jerked its head away and paced a circle in its box stall.

Did it pick up on the increase in Lucas’s tension?

“The chief is doing his job,” Bree stated, covering Lucas’s hand on her shoulder with her own. Her voice was still shaky.

Truman rubbed his chin and smelled horse on his hand. Not a bad scent. “There’s been some vehicle vandalism downtown. Your place is a good two miles outside of town, so I wouldn’t imagine it’s related, but I’ve had multiple vandalism reports in the last two weeks, and before that we’d had none for months.”

Lucas looked at his mom. “It was at Sandy’s place.”

“Sandy told me someone had broken a few guests’ car windows,” Bree said. “She didn’t say anything about spray paint.”

“No paint. Just the vehicle damage.”

“So someone else did mine,” Bree said flatly.

“It’s hard to say . . . The close timing of the incidents makes me wonder,” Truman said. “Or you are correct, and two different people started vandalizing at the same time. I have to keep both in consideration.” Truman snapped some pictures of the marred doors. “Let’s look at the truck again.” He followed Lucas and Bree out of the barn and down the short gravel road to the vehicles parked in front of the home.

He inhaled, missing the barn’s comforting scent of alfalfa and horse but appreciating the crisp, clean air. The sky was a perfect blue, but Truman was glad for his coat. The weather of the high desert was fickle in the spring. He could wear a short-sleeved T-shirt for a warm walk at lunch and then learn there was snow in the overnight forecast. He loved both elements and enjoyed the unexpected twists in the weather.

“I’m surprised they didn’t do more to the truck,” said Lucas.

“Maybe they got scared off before they could,” Truman suggested. He hated the idea that Bree had been targeted as much as Lucas did.

“I want to read Gamble’s old interviews again now that I’ve met him face-to-face,” Mercy told Eddie as they dug through the decades-old Gamble-Helmet files in her office. The files were very neat, and Mercy noticed most of the perfectly printed handwritten entries were initialed “AJ.” Art Juergen.

She’d worked with Art in the Portland office. His retirement party over a year ago had been epic, according to the people who’d gone. Mercy hadn’t been into huge social events. Still wasn’t.

He’d asked her out one time, not long after she’d started at the Portland office, and against her better judgment, she’d agreed. But when it came time for a second date, she’d turned him down, citing the “better as friends” excuse. She had liked Art, just not in that way.

Truthfully, she couldn’t get past the age difference. Art was almost twenty-five years older.

She’d kept that reason to herself, but he had to suspect . . .

Yesterday the retired FBI agent had replied with his usual cheeriness to her email asking for help, making her feel as if no time had passed. He planned to arrive in Bend the next day, and she was upbeat at the thought of catching up with him.

Going over Art’s reports, Mercy was impressed with his meticulous work. She was still missing a few boxes of files, but they would arrive soon. She couldn’t wait to pick Juergen’s brain about the case. He’d been obsessed with it for decades.

“What was Shane Gamble like?” Eddie pushed his glasses up on his nose, and then his hair flopped in his face as he bent over a box.

Mercy resisted the urge to tell him he needed a haircut. Eddie always seemed younger than his thirty-some years, and she wasn’t his mom, but he was her favorite person to work with, and they formed a good team. His attitude was always positive, and his mind spotted possible investigative paths that hers missed. He also loved talking with people, which complemented Mercy’s avoidance of small talk. Eddie could pop into the bank and come out knowing the names of the teller’s three kids and that her mother-in-law had been ill for two weeks.

“Gamble was interesting,” Mercy said as she flipped through pages. “He loves mind games and must be very bored in prison. He immediately tried to ruffle my feathers, but I was expecting it. He did manage to make me defensive at the end, and I essentially got nothing helpful from him, so he’s talented with words. The guard told me his favorite form of entertainment is to mentally mess with his fellow inmates and get them in trouble.”

“Well, that corresponds with this high school teacher’s note on Gamble,” Eddie said. “Sounds like he hasn’t changed in thirty years.”

The four known robbers had attended a Portland high school together and then moved on to the same local community college. They’d just started their second year at the school when the robbery occurred. Mercy wondered if Gamble had been so bored in college that he decided to dream up the perfect armored car robbery.

“Let me see.” Mercy leaned over Eddie’s shoulder to study the page.

The high school teacher appeared to have known the four young men quite well. He stated that Shane Gamble was the leader of the group, and that both Ellis Mull and Nathan May were quiet and focused on sports instead of schoolwork. Trevor Whipple was the fast talker, the charmer, and he flirted with the girls. The four were popular, but their grades were never more than average. This teacher said he’d suspected Gamble could easily get better grades but simply didn’t care. Gamble seemed more interested in embracing a variety of life experiences than in planning for the future with a solid education. The teacher was convinced Gamble had dragged the other students into the robbery.

What does Gamble think of his life experiences over the last thirty years?

Mercy tried to wrap her brain around the concept of people who didn’t prepare for the future. It was like a foreign language to her ears. How could a person not plan ahead? She studied the high school photos in the file, knowing that the men had been barely older than they were in these photos when they’d committed the crime. Not even old enough to drink.

They were children. It was a game to them.

The realizations ricocheted through her skull and combined with Eddie’s comment that Gamble hadn’t changed over the years. Gamble’s emotional growth had essentially stopped when he was incarcerated.

He still played games. Mind games.

She knew an FBI forensic psychologist who would love to pick apart Gamble’s words and actions.

Looking at the high school photos, she saw that Gamble, May, and Whipple sported big smiles, but Ellis Mull looked stern. He’d played football all through high school but wasn’t good enough to get a scholarship. He had the thick neck of someone who spent excess time in the weight room.

Did he feel lost when football was no longer part of his life?

Whipple had the hairstyle of a guy who paid close attention to his looks and grooming. Even from a photo, Mercy felt the flirtation from his eyes. He had that something that made a girl take a second look. And he knew it.

Nathan May ran cross-country and did track. He was lean and looked relaxed and confident in his picture.

The unknown fifth robber left a big void in the file. No one was certain his real name was Jerry. Previous investigators had looked into friends associated with the four, searching for that mystery person—high school friends, coworkers, college associates. No one else had disappeared like Whipple, May, and Mull after the robbery. The FBI had kept a careful watch on friends they believed most likely to have been the fifth man, but the suspicions had faded away as the men went on with normal lives.

“I can’t believe they split and never contacted their families again,” Eddie commented. “Mull had four sisters. How do you walk away from that?”

Mercy eyed Mull’s stern gaze in the photo. “Maybe they weren’t close. Two million dollars is a big reason to go silent.”

“Forever?” Eddie muttered. “My sister would kill me if I didn’t check in every few months.”

Or they all died right after the robbery.

Shane Gamble still looked like his high school photo. The hair was different, and he had a few lines on his face, but it was clearly the man she’d met that morning. In a way he’d been caught in some sort of time warp. Nearly thirty years behind bars with limited sun exposure must have preserved him.

“Do you look like your high school photo?” she asked Eddie.

He raised a brow at the random question. “You be the judge.” He tapped on his phone a few times and pulled up a photo from a Facebook page.

“We’re not supposed to have social media accounts.”

“It’s my sister’s page. She doesn’t use my name, and my senior picture is the most recent photo I’ve allowed her to post.”

“Holy crap,” Mercy exclaimed as she took the phone. “You haven’t changed at all. I look nothing like mine.”

“I look totally different now,” he protested.

Mercy studied him. “No. Those glasses don’t age you like you think they do. You’re still eighteen behind them.”

“Shit.” He snatched his phone back.

“Ask Melissa’s opinion. She’ll agree with me.”

“I’m busy working,” he stated, giving Mercy a side-eye. “Not reliving high school. Now . . . here are the interviews with their college professors.”

Mercy took the obvious hint to refocus. She scanned the short statements and scowled. “How can these teachers not know their students? Only one instructor says he remembers Mull, because he stood out in his weight lifting class.”

“College classes are often larger. You don’t spend the one-on-one time like you might with your teachers in high school.”

“True,” Mercy admitted. “And it’s possible that they rarely went to class. These statements are completely different from the high school teacher who gave his opinion. He knew them.”

“Average grades again in college,” Eddie added. “Maybe nothing made them stand out.” He opened a thick envelope of black-and-white robbery photos pulled from video. He shuffled through them and stopped on one. “This is Mull. He’s the beefiest guy of the four.”

“And I can tell from the long legs that the man to his right is Gamble,” Mercy said. “He’s tall. Even sitting across the table from him, I knew he would tower over me.”

“Whipple is definitely the smallest one. Nathan May must be the last.”

“What if Gamble hadn’t been shot at the last moment by the guard?” Mercy wondered out loud. “Would they all have escaped?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me. Whatever their plan was for after the robbery sure worked out for the other four.”

“Except for the man whose remains Dr. Lockhart is examining.”

“If he’s even part of this robbery,” Eddie reminded her. “I know she was getting results on the dental comparisons today. Hopefully it’s one of them.”

Mercy couldn’t pull her gaze away from Whipple’s cheery grin in his senior photo. “What if they’re all dead? Maybe that’s why they’ve never been found. Dead men don’t talk.”

“One would still be alive. The one who killed the others.”

Eddie is right.