Something Coming Through

38. The Shooter

Mangala | 30 July

Skip’s body had been found behind a boxy steel-framed storage shed at the edge of a ploughed field. Red dust scudded over the field, silting between the furrows, drifting across the service road. Long shadows everywhere, the crimson glare of the low sun.

Vic examined the splash of char where Skip’s hire car had been set alight. He hoped that his partner had been dead before he’d been tipped into the boot. It was a lousy way to go any way you cut it.

He said, ‘Where’s the car now?’

‘We store it behind the station,’ Karl said. ‘These electric cars do not burn as badly as those with petrol engines, but there was nothing left for forensics.’

‘Except the body.’

‘Well, yes. Of course.’

‘Any tyre tracks?’

‘The ground is too dry. There has been no rain here for more than ten days. The strange thing is,’ Karl said, ‘your friend was shot twice in the head at close range. We found both casings near the car:.38 Smith and Wesson Special. We also found some.45 ACP casings, and two.45 rounds recovered from the wall of the storage shed. The rounds lacked rifling marks. They were fired from a generic printed gun, perhaps.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘I hear there is a glut of them in Petra. Our local criminals mostly favour hunting rifles.’

Vic knocked that one right back. ‘You’d think someone visiting from the city to do a murder would stand out amongst the righteous farmers around here.’

‘Ordinarily, perhaps. But because of the storm all kinds of people have been passing through.’

‘That’s all you found, 45 ACPs and the two.38s? No nine-millimetre casings?’

Skip had been carrying a police-issue Glock 17, firing nine-millimetre Parabellum recoilless rounds.

Karl said, ‘You think perhaps your friend shot at his attackers? We did a grid search, and Chris swept the area with his metal detector. We found only what I told you. I’m sorry.’

‘Show me where you found these.45 ACPs.’

They walked along the access road to a spot by the ditch between the road and the edge of the field. Vic studied the ground, looked back towards the storage shed squatting under the mad red sky.

He said, ‘You found just the two rounds in the wall?’

‘As I said.’

‘And how many casings?’

‘Thirteen. The shooter fired off a full clip.’

‘I wonder what else he hit, apart from the side of that shed.’

‘I do not know what or who he hit,’ Karl said, ‘but I think someone hit him. We found blood spatter here, and a thin trail of it back towards those greasewood bushes. And someone broke into Doc Demirkan’s on the night your friend was killed.’

‘A medical surgery?’

‘Doc Demirkan is a veterinarian.’

‘Someone wanted to fix themselves up without troubling the medical authorities.’

‘I think so. One other thing you must know,’ Karl said, ‘is that we found a thumbprint on one of the casings. No one local. Or at least, no one local in our records.’

‘Did Skip mention that he was going to meet anyone?’

Karl shook his head. ‘No one called him while he was with me. According to the owner of the café, he ate alone and left alone. That was the last time anyone saw him.’

‘Apart from the bad guys, and this mysterious shooter. Maybe he arranged to meet Skip here, but the bad guys got to Skip first.’

Vic was thinking of John Redway’s friend. David Parsons. He saw Skip waiting in his car, saw him stepping out when another vehicle came along the service road, thinking it was the person he was supposed to meet. But it was the bad guys, shooting him as he came towards their car, then dumping his body in the boot of his car, setting fire to it. And meanwhile the man who had set up the meet, creeping along the ditch to get a view of what was going on, saw the bad guys climb into their vehicle, and raised up and shot at them as they went past…

He said, ‘There’s only one motel in town. It could be that the bad guys were watching it, saw Skip check in and recognised him, and decided they wanted to find out what he was up to.’

‘Or perhaps they were watching me, and saw me meet with your friend,’ Karl said. ‘I confess that I do not like that thought, but we must consider it.’

‘Because they could be watching us now.’

‘Of course.’

‘If they are,’ Vic said, ‘we might have a chance of finding them.’

They drove through town, west along the river to the location of the shootout, at the edge of a flat and empty field, near a copse of spiky white trees. The vehicles involved had been towed away, but Karl walked Vic through the scene. A Suzuki jeep had been badly shot up, windscreen starred and smashed; two RVs burned to charred frames squatting on tyre rims. They had still been burning when Karl and his husband and Winnetou’s volunteer fire team had arrived. Nothing they could do but let them burn out, Karl said.

One of the trees had burned, too. Standing stark black amongst its pale neighbours, shedding skirls of fine black ash into the wind. The river curved beyond the trees. There was a low building about a kilometre away in the other direction, nothing else but fields and patches of native vegetation fading into a brown haze.

‘There are two boats beyond the trees, at the edge of the river,’ Karl said. ‘Someone shot them up.’

‘It sounds like they shot everything up,’ Vic said.

‘Pretty much,’ Karl said. ‘We find nine-millimetre, 38 and.45 casings. And a good deal of 5.56 millimetre casings — at least one person had an assault rifle.’

‘And someone used the ray gun.’

‘Yes. That is what your partner called it. It set fire to one of the trees, and a little later was used to set fire to the RVs. We find four bodies in one,’ Karl said. ‘The fifth man we found later, at the docks.’

‘Is your witness reliable?’

‘Ove Lassen. Yes, of course.’

‘Is that a Swedish name?’

‘Danish. I know him well. A good man.’

‘He owns this place?’

‘He’s a neighbour. The owner and his wife have eight children, all under the age of ten. They drove upriver three days ago, after they harvested their produce. But they keep a few pigs, and Ove stopped by to feed and water them. He saw the vehicles in the fields, heard gunshots, and called it in.’

‘And he saw the ray gun in action.’

‘He said it was like a flash of intense blue light,’ Karl said.

‘Did he see who fired it?’

Karl shook his head. ‘He was about a kilometre away, and did not care to get any closer.’

‘Sensible man.’

Vic looked all around. A bleak, empty place. Someone had set up here, and someone else had got the jump on them. Drury v. McBride. Or McBride v. Drury.

They drove to Karl’s office and Vic fired up his tablet and brought up the image of the fingerprint card for David Parsons. The right thumbprint scored a ten-point match with the print pulled off the cartridge.

‘So this shooter is some kind of spy?’ Karl Schweda said, after Vic had explained about the two so-called businessmen. ‘He followed your friend down here?’

Vic said, ‘Or he followed the bad guys, then spotted Skip.’

They were sitting in the kitchen of the little apartment above the office and the two-cell jail now, eating Karl’s five-alarm chilli.

‘So where do you want to take this, Investigator?’

Vic forked up some chilli. Man it was hot, but in a good way. ‘It looks like we have two ways to go. There’s the shooter, David Parsons. And there are the people who killed my partner. Either they’re amongst the dead you pulled out of those RVs, or they’re long gone.’

‘You think downriver, to this Site 326.’

‘Possibly. Probably. But Parsons, if he’s hurt, might still be around. And it’s possible a couple of the bad guys are still here, too. Waiting to see who else turns up.’ Vic thought of the two women he’d seen boarding up a house, said, ‘How many empty properties are there, in and around town?’

‘Forty, more or less,’ Karl said. ‘Chris has made a list.’

‘Plenty of hiding places,’ Vic said. ‘Maybe you could print out that list. And a map would be good, too.’