Once Stalked (A Riley Paige Mystery—Book 9) Read online

  Riley’s interest quickened. This scene was different from the others—and much more informative. She examined the blotch and the smear that spread down below it.

  She said, “It looks like he was leaning against the wall when the bullet hit him. You must have been able to get a much better idea of the bullet’s trajectory than you could for the others.”

  “Much better,” Larson agreed. “But not the precise location.”

  Larson pointed across the field behind the barracks to where hills began to rise.

  “The shooter must have positioned himself somewhere between those two valley oaks,” she said. “But he cleaned up very carefully afterward. We couldn’t find a trace of him in any likely location.”

  Riley saw that the distance between the small trees was about twenty feet. Larson and her team had done good work narrowing the area down that much.

  “What kind of weather was it?” Riley asked.

  “Very clear,” Larson said. “There was a three-quarter moon out almost until dawn.”

  Riley felt a tingle down her back. It was a familiar feeling that she got when she was about to really connect with a crime scene.

  “I’d like to go out and have a look for myself,” she said.

  “Certainly,” Larson said. “I’ll take you there.”

  Riley didn’t know how to tell her that she wanted to go by herself.

  Fortunately, Bill spoke up for her.

  “Let’s let Agent Paige go alone. It’s kind of her thing.”

  Larson nodded appreciatively

  Riley strode out across the field. With every step, that tingling grew stronger.

  Finally, she found herself between the two trees. She could see why Larson’s team hadn’t been able to find the exact spot. The ground was highly irregular with lots of smaller bushes. Just in that area, there were at least a half dozen excellent places to squat or lie and fire a clean shot toward the barracks.

  Riley began to walk back and forth between the trees. She knew that she wasn’t looking for anything that the shooter might have left behind—not even footprints. Larson and her team wouldn’t have missed anything like that.

  She took some slow breaths and imagined herself here in the very early hours in the morning. The stars were just starting to disappear, and the moon still cast shadows all around.

  The feeling grew stronger by the second—a sense of the killer’s presence.

  Riley took a few more deep breaths and prepared to enter the killer’s mind.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Riley began to imagine the killer. What had he felt, thought, and observed when he came here looking for the perfect spot to shoot from? She wanted to become the killer, as nearly as she could, in order to track him down. And she could do that. It was her gift.

  First, she knew, he had to find that spot.

  She searched about, just as he must have searched.

  As she moved around, she felt a mysterious, almost magnetic pull.

  She was drawn to a red willow bush. To one side of the bush, there was a space between its branches and the ground. There was a slightly hollow place in the ground at that very spot.

  Riley stooped down and looked carefully at the ground.

  The soil in that hollow place was neat and smooth.

  Too neat, Riley thought. Too smooth.

  The rest of the soil in this area was rougher, more irregular.

  Riley smiled.

  The killer had gone to such lengths to tidy up after himself that he’d betrayed his exact position.

  Imagining the scene by moonlight, Riley gazed down the slope and across the field toward the back of the barracks.

  She pictured what the killer saw from this place—the distant figure of Sergeant Worthing stepping out of the back door.

  Riley felt a smile form on the killer’s face.

  She could hear him think …

  “Right on schedule!”

  And just as the killer had expected, the sergeant lit a cigarette and leaned against the wall.

  It was time to act—and it had to be quick.

  The sky was starting to brighten where the sun would soon rise.

  As the killer must have done, Riley stretched out prone in the hollow place on the ground. Yes, it was the perfect place, the perfect shape for wielding a high-powered weapon.

  But how did the weapon feel in the killer’s hands?

  Riley had never actually handled an M110 sniper rifle. But some years ago she had trained a little with the weapon’s predecessor, the M24. Fully loaded and assembled, the M24 had weighed about sixteen pounds, and Riley had read that the M110 was scarcely any lighter.

  But the night scope added to that weight, making it a little top heavy.

  Riley imagined the view through the night scope. The image of Sergeant Worthing was mottled and grainy.

  That wasn’t a problem for true marksmanship. For a skilled sniper, the shot would be easy. Even so, Riley sensed that the killer felt vaguely unsatisfied.

  What was it that bothered him?

  What was he thinking?

  Then his thought came to her …

  “I wish I could see the look on his face.”

  Riley felt a jolt of understanding.

  This killing was deeply personal—an act of hatred, or at the very least contempt.

  But he wasn’t going to put it off on account of his dissatisfaction. He could do this just fine without seeing his prey’s expression.

  She felt the resistance from the trigger as she pulled it, then the sharp recoil from the rifle as the bullet was fired.

  The noise of the shot wasn’t very loud. The sound suppressor and the flash hider had muffled the noise and the burst of flame.

  Even so, did the killer worry that someone had heard it?

  Only for a moment, Riley felt sure. He had shot two other men from much the same distance, and no one seemed to have heard the shots. Or if they had heard them, no one had thought them extraordinary.

  But what did the killer do now that he’d fired the shot?

  He kept looking through the scope, Riley realized.

  He followed the body in its slouch against the wall toward an awkward squat.

  And again the killer thought …

  “I wish I could see the look on his face.”

  As the killer must have done, Riley got to her feet. She imagined the killer taking a wide brush to the soil to smooth it over, then leaving the way he’d come.

  Riley breathed a sigh of satisfaction. Her attempt to link with the killer’s mind had revealed more than she’d hoped for.

  Or at least she had a hunch that it had.

  She remembered something that Col. Larson had said earlier about whether the killings were acts of Islamic terrorism …

  “These days, that simply has to be our default theory.”

  Riley’s gut told her that that theory was probably wrong. But she wasn’t ready to say so to her colleagues. Under the circumstances, she knew that Larson was right to pursue the possibility of terrorism. It was simply good procedure. Meanwhile, it was best for Riley to keep her hunch to herself—at least until she could back it up with evidence.

  Riley looked at her watch. She realized that she and the others were due at a funeral.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  As Riley watched the six uniformed men carry Sergeant Worthing’s flag-draped casket to the gravesite, she admired the solemn cadence and precision of their actions.

  She was also struck by an eerie contrast between this ceremony and his actual death. The murder of Sergeant Worthing had been abrupt and brutal.

  His funeral was elegance itself.

  The military cemetery was in a lovely place, high on a hill in a remote part of Fort Nash Mowat. Riley could see the Pacific Ocean in the distance.

  Riley, Lucy, and Bill were standing off to one side of the ceremony. She could see Sergeant Worthing’s widow and family seated on folding chairs beside the grave. She could watch the fifty un
iformed young men and women in Worthing’s training platoon standing stiffly at attention.

  She also spotted civilians of an unwelcome sort nearby—a small group of reporters and photographers crowded behind a rope barrier.

  She stifled a groan of discouragement.

  After three murders, there was no longer any way to keep the press away from Fort Mowat. The publicity was certainly going to add to the pressure of solving the case. Riley just hoped that the journalists wouldn’t make too much of a nuisance of themselves.

  Probably too much to hope for, she thought.

  Once the coffin was in place over the grave, the chaplain began to speak.

  “We commend to the almighty God our brother, Sergeant Clifford Jay Worthing, and we commit his body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust …”

  Riley was surprised to feel herself choke up at the chaplain’s words.

  What was it about this funeral that was getting to her?

  Then she realized …

  Daddy.

  As a Marine captain, her father had been eligible for a funeral with honors like this one.

  Had he gotten this kind of funeral? Riley didn’t even know. Not only had she refused to go to his funeral, she’d taken no part in its planning. She’d left all that to her estranged sister, Wendy.

  She’d never grieved over her father’s death. Nevertheless, she felt sad at the thought that he might not have been buried with full military honors. But who would have gone to the funeral, aside from Wendy? Riley’s father had died with no real friends as far as she knew. And Riley and Wendy were all he had left of family.

  Riley remembered something that one of her father’s former buddies recently told her.

  “Riley, your daddy was a good man. But he was a hard man too. He couldn’t help it, ’Nam made him that way.”

  Tears welled up in Riley’s eyes.

  He’d been a terrible father. But he’d been a good soldier. He’d given everything he had to the Marines—including his humanity, his capacity to love.

  As the honor guard lifted the flag and held it taut above the casket, Riley thought …

  He deserved this.

  Riley thought she should have made sure her father had his full honors funeral, even if no one had been there to witness it except Wendy.

  She was jolted out of her sad reverie by the firing of guns. A seven-person squad fired three volleys into the still air. Then the quiet was broken again by the mournful sound of a bugler playing taps.

  The honor guard ceremoniously folded the flag, and an officer presented it to Sergeant Worthing’s widow. The officer whispered something to her—doubtless some word of support of support or solace.

  Then the officer gave the family a slow-motion salute, and the service was over.

  *

  Before Sergeant Worthing’s platoon could leave the cemetery, Col. Dana Larson called them together. She introduced them to Riley, Bill, and Lucy and told them that they were here to investigate the three recent murders.

  Riley scanned their faces, looking for some telltale sign of emotion. She detected nothing—certainly not grief.

  She guessed that many of the recruits had hated Sergeant Worthing’s guts and weren’t sorry that he was gone.

  Riley stepped forward and spoke to the gathered recruits.

  “My colleagues and I are very sorry for your loss. We don’t want to disturb you right now, just after the ceremony. But if any of you has any information that might help us, we hope that you’ll talk to us.”

  Then the platoon was allowed to disperse. Riley, Bill, and Lucy broke up and wandered among them, hoping to draw somebody out. Pretty soon two recruits, a young man and a young woman, approached Riley. They introduced themselves as Privates Elena Ludekens and Maxwell Wilber.

  They seemed to be uneasy and reluctant. Riley thought she understood why. Informing on a fellow recruit couldn’t be easy.

  Riley said, “Look, I get the feeling that Worthing wasn’t the most popular drill sergeant at Fort Mowat.”

  The two recruits nodded and mumbled in agreement.

  Riley continued, “But we’re looking for someone whose animosity was out of the ordinary. If you know anyone like that, please tell me.”

  Ludekens and Wilber looked at each other.

  The young woman said, “The sarge really rode one of us especially hard.”

  “His name’s Stanley Pope,” the young man added.

  “Tell me about him,” Riley said.

  The young man said, “He’s got a real mouth and a bad attitude. The sarge busted him for it.”

  Riley felt a surge of interest.

  “Busted him?” she said. “Explain that to me.”

  The young woman said, “Almost all of us in the platoon are PV1—private E-1. Just ‘fuzzies,’ they call us, because of this.”

  She pointed to a blank Velcro patch on her shoulder.

  The young man said, “When we get through basic training, we’ll get our ‘mosquito wings’—chevrons—to show that we’ve become second-class privates. But Pope had his mosquito wings already when he came to Fort Mowat.”

  “How?” Riley asked.

  The young man shrugged.

  “You can come in as a second-class private if you have an associate’s degree. Or if you’ve got a Boy Scout Eagle badge. That’s how Pope got his.”

  “But he talked back to the sarge once too often,” the young woman said. “So the sarge busted him, took away his chevron, demoted him to PV1—a fuzzy just like the rest of us. He didn’t take it too well.”

  Riley’s curiosity was rising by the second.

  “Where can I find him?” she asked.

  Private Wilber pointed to the gravesite.

  “He’s right over there,” he said.

  A young man was standing alone beside the grave, looking down at the casket with his arms on his hips.

  Riley thanked Privates Ludekens and Wilber, who wandered off. Riley saw that Bill and Lucy had each found some recruits to talk to.

  Riley walked toward the private who was standing beside the grave. He was a lanky young man with an intense, brooding expression on his face.

  What’s on his mind? she wondered.

  She planned to find out.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  As Riley approached Private Pope, she decided not to let on that that she knew anything about him—certainly not that he’d been demoted by Sergeant Worthing. She thought it would be best to see what the young soldier would be willing to reveal.

  She stepped right beside him, but he didn’t seem to notice her presence. His bitter expression remained unchanged and his eyes stayed fixed on the grave.

  Finally, she asked, “Taking the sarge’s death kind of hard?”

  He turned his head and looked at her and then his expression shifted for a moment. He regarded her with obvious distaste, but he didn’t reply to her question. Then he turned and stared down into the grave again, brooding as before.

  “Not everyone seemed to like him,” Riley said. “Did you?”

  Private Pope still said nothing.

  Riley said, “It’s probably a hard thing to talk about. But I think maybe I understand. I lost my dad recently—and he was a Marine, a captain who served in Vietnam. Folks didn’t like him much either.”

  Then she added with a lie …

  “Still, I miss him.”

  Pope didn’t look up from the grave.

  “You don’t know anything about it,” Pope said. “How could you? You’re not one of us.”

  His resentment of Riley was practically radiating off of him.

  “I might surprise you,” Riley said. “I know a thing or two about comradeship. There’s a deep bond among FBI agents. And I’ve lost colleagues in the line of work. I know it’s hard.”

  He didn’t reply at all.

  “Come on,” Riley said. “Let’s take a little walk.”

  Riley turned and walked away. Pope didn’t move at
first. Riley wondered if maybe he wasn’t going to come with her. But then she heard his footsteps behind her, and then he was walking at her side. He kept looking at the ground as he walked.

  “Tell me about the sergeant,” she said.

  “What’s there to tell?” Pope said. “He was a hard-ass.”

  “Did you ever have any special trouble with him?”

  “Everybody had trouble with him. That was his job.”

  Riley noticed the evasion. Whatever bitterness he may have felt toward Sergeant Worthing, he didn’t want to talk to her about it. She’d have to coax it out of him.

  She led the way along a paved path at the edge of the cemetery. As she followed the walkway over a rise, Riley found herself looking down on the Pacific Ocean. It wasn’t far away. She could actually hear the surf.

  Occasional benches indicated that the path had been designed as a restful place to contemplate the view. It didn’t feel restful to her right now.

  And she sensed that it didn’t feel restful to Private Pope either.

  At the moment, she figured the trick was simply to get him talking.

  Riley asked, “So how far are you along in basic training? You’re in the White Phase, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “How long have you got left? Including the Blue Phase, I mean?”

  “Five weeks and three days,” Pope said. “Nine more days of white, twenty-eight more of blue.”

  Riley found his precision to be revealing. She remembered what Private Wilber had said about Pope.

  “He’s got a real mouth and a bad attitude.”

  Riley had no doubt that that was true. But she also sensed that serving in the Army was important to him—perhaps the most important thing he could ever hope to do. To get him to open up, Riley needed to dig at his pride.

  “I’ll bet you’re looking forward to getting your mosquito wings,” she said. “You won’t be a fuzzy anymore. How will it feel, to have those chevrons on your shoulders?”

  Pope didn’t reply. She glanced at him and saw a sharp grimace cross his lips.

  Of course she knew that Pope had had those chevrons until Sergeant Worthing had taken them away. The recruits she’d talked to had told her. But Pope had no way of knowing that, and it gave her an advantage over him.