Cold Justice: A Judge Willa Carson Mystery (The Hunt for Justice) (7 page)

“Copycat seems the most logical since the ballistics don’t match, doesn’t it?” I was almost shouting to be heard over the blasting fan and the struggling windshield wipers.

“Probably. There are other differences, too.”

“Such as?”

“One thing is the snow sniper has targeted victims from a longer range using a rifle. This one seemed like a rifle shot, but it wasn’t. This murder was very up close and personal. And this is the first victim we’ve found dead in a vehicle. The others were exposed to the shot. One snowmobiler, a cross-country skier, and a woman at a car wash. Fewer logistical issues when the victim isn’t surrounded by a steel enclosure.”

“I take it these details were withheld from the media? Otherwise, how would a copycat think he could make so many changes and get away with them?”

“I’m a cop, not a mind reader.” Kemp might have shrugged, but inside the heavy jacket it was hard to tell. “The good news is that we identified the snow sniper a couple of days ago, but we were still collecting evidence and hadn’t arrested him yet. If he killed Richards, then the bad news is another man is dead and we’re all looking damn stupid right now. The somewhat better news is that the Richards murder gave us the probable cause we needed to get tight warrants. There’s a team on the way to pick him up in Grand Rapids now. So we should know soon enough whether he also owns the Leo Richards murder weapon.”

“But you think the snow sniper didn’t kill Richards. Aside from wishful thinking, got any evidence?”

Kemp said nothing. Neither did I. He’d answer my question or I wouldn’t say another word.

The silence lasted until we finally reached the Pleasant County Courthouse. We’d traveled the three-mile distance in about half an hour, according to the digital clock in the dash. Not bad, considering the road conditions.

When Kemp pulled into the parking lot, I was relieved to see a county snow plow. Kemp slid into a plowed parking space and turned off the ignition, creating an abrupt and unnerving quiet inside the cabin.

Silently, I pried my hands apart, flexed my shoulders and stretched my neck from side to side, trying to return some blood flow to my severely cramped muscles.

After a moment, Kemp said, “Ready to go?”

I said nothing and didn’t move.

He tried to nudge me along. “We’re already late. Judge Trevor will explain everything to you when we get inside.”

“Tell me why you don’t think the snow sniper killed Leo Richards or I’m not going in there. You know the answer. He knows, too. And I don’t. We level that playing field right now.”

“Actually, you know everything Judge Trevor knows. You’re already on that level playing field. Let’s go.”

I didn’t move.

Kemp pulled off his glove and wiped his face with his hand while he thought things through. His research on me must have given him a few examples of exactly how stubborn I can be because as the silence lingered, he took me at my word.

“The murder weapon was a Desert Eagle 50 caliber handgun. Reported stolen last year. It’s a match. No doubt about it. That’s the weapon that killed Leo Richards this morning.”

There was more. I could feel it. “A match to what? And what’s the rest of the story?”

He didn’t say. I didn’t budge.

Kemp sighed. Weary, maybe. Resigned at least. “The weapon was registered to David Mason.”

“That’s your big secret? David Mason, the chef at Eagle Creek Cafe? His stolen gun was the murder weapon?”

“That’s the one. Now let’s go.” Before I could ask any more questions, Kemp left the cruiser, closing me alone inside. I saw him pulling his gloves over his hands.

After snugging up my gloves, I opened the door and stepped into the blizzard again. Why the hell had I ever thought this frozen white stuff was the least bit romantic?

My boots landed onto a layer of new snow over the hard pack. The wind nearly knocked me over. My hair became covered with snowflakes in just a brief moment and the icy flakes pelted my face. I flipped up the parka’s hood and turned my head down in self-defense.

Kemp walked around the back of the vehicle. I could hear his boots crunching on the snow beside me, but I’d have had to turn my entire body to see him with the parka’s hood up. He didn’t lock the cruiser, probably because he was afraid the locks would freeze. Or maybe he figured if any fool was willing to come out in this storm to steal the damn thing, they could have it.

“The entrance is this way, Judge.” He steadied me by a tight grip on my arm and we made our way cautiously around the building. Kemp pulled hard on the handle of the glass door, sweeping a foot of snow off the entranceway as the door’s rubber flashing scraped the concrete and it pivoted open.

I rushed inside and he followed.

After we stamped and dusted off, without another word Kemp led the way down a corridor to our left. We passed two large dark wood doors over which the words “Courtroom A” were posted in brass letters.

The next doorway had white opaque glass on the top half and wood on the bottom half. The kind of doors you see in old movies from the 1940s. Black letters stood out boldly on the white opaque glass.
Judge Randy Trevor, Pleasant County Circuit Judge.

Kemp rang a small doorbell to the right. A female voice spoke through the intercom above the button.

“Yes?”

“Trooper Justin Kemp to see Judge Trevor.”

A buzzer sounded and Kemp ushered me through another door.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

We entered into a roomy reception area. The woman who had answered the buzzer sat behind an antique wood desk. Although the building and the office furnishings were old-fashioned, her desk held a thoroughly modern telephone system and better computer equipment than I’d had in Tampa’s old federal courthouse before I was allowed to move into newer quarters.

Judge Trevor’s secretary, though, could have come from central casting for the same 1940s movie that furnished the office. She looked as if she had been sitting at this very desk since the building was constructed. She was probably sixty years old, but she looked ninety.

She had blue-gray hair, worn in a style that required a once weekly visit to the salon for a shampoo and set. Glasses so old-fashioned they were trendy framed her eyes, giving her the look of a startled cat. Her white cardigan was held around her shoulders by a sweater clip of plastic pearls. She wore a floral perfume that was vaguely familiar but I couldn’t name because my sense of smell was now frozen.

The entire effect was surreal, as if I’d stepped back in time when I crossed that last threshold. I almost expected an old film star to come out of the door to the Judge’s chambers any second.

“Hello, Sue,” Kemp said in a sweeter tone than I’d heard him utilize until now. “This is Judge Wilhelmina Carson, from Florida. She’s staying over at Marc Clayton’s guest cottage. We need to see Judge Trevor.” Why it was necessary to share all of this information with Sue was beyond me, but I was the guest here.

Sue Evans didn’t greet me cheerfully or kindly or in any other way. I might have been invisible for all of the attention she paid to me.

“He’s on the phone. Have a seat,” she said, barely taking her gaze from the computer screen. I stood near enough to her desk to see she was reading newspaper accounts of the snow sniper’s kills. I read over her shoulder, glad that she had enlarged the print about two-hundred percent.

The headline was “Snow Sniper Kills Third Victim at Bayside Carwash.” The photographs were winter scenes. Both were exterior views of a do-it-yourself wash stall. A silver mini-van was parked just outside the stall, doors and hatch open, near the coin-operated vacuum cleaner. The vacuum hose rested inside the mini-van’s open back hatch. Something dark had stained the carpet, probably blood.

The victim’s picture was a grainy formal portrait probably made by an old camera using film. I couldn’t read the screen as well as I needed to, but I made out that the victim was shot by a rifle and died instantly. Her identity was withheld pending notification to the family.

One shell casing had been located, but police weren’t sure whether the casing was relevant at the time.

Two other shootings were rapidly summarized at the end. One victim was a man sitting on a snowmobile in a parking lot of a convenience store. The other was a woman who had been cross-country skiing. Her body hadn’t been discovered for several hours because of her remote location.

Sue must have felt me leaning behind her because she turned and glared at me before she picked up the phone receiver and said, “Trooper Kemp and Judge Carson are here to see you.”

A booming, disembodied male voice I recognized even after all these years responded, “Send them in.”

Sue inclined her head toward a wooden door on the other side of a latched wood gate. A long buzzer sounded as Trooper Kemp took my elbow again and guided me through. I was beginning to feel like I’d fallen into another world, somehow. A place too quiet, too old, with too many secrets.

When we entered his chambers, Judge Randy Trevor was moving from behind his desk, making his way toward us.

“Willa! It’s so good to see you!” Instead of offering to shake hands, he leaned in for a big hug and a tight squeeze that I could barely feel through the parka. He greeted me as if I was a long-lost best friend, when we had only been co-workers a long time ago. I’d never received a warmer greeting from a colleague, including him, even back when we actually knew each other. All of which made me feel suspicious instead of welcomed. What was going on here?

The amenities dispensed with, seated behind his desk with Kemp and me across from him, Judge Trevor got right to the point. “Thanks for coming, Willa. When I saw Justin this afternoon, and he told me you were here, I asked him to see you.”

“So he said,” I replied.

Kemp had removed his big brimmed hat. Close-cropped red hair and pink scalp, a small nose, freckles across the bridge, a good smile and a pleasant demeanor emerged from the brim’s shadow. He seemed wholesome. Under better circumstances, I thought I’d like Justin Kemp quite a lot.

Randy Trevor sat with both elbows on the arms of his chair, his hands clasped together, looking down as if he were praying. Maybe he was. If my jurisdiction was beset by such a killer, I would’ve been.

“What do you make of all of this Willa?” he asked. “You were always good at figuring things out. Justin tells me you discovered the body this morning. What did you see that we might have missed? What’s going on here in my sleepy little town?”

Everyone in Pleasant Harbor knew everyone else. Odds were that the killer was not a stranger to anyone, either. Which meant that Trevor could be involved in all of this somehow. Kemp and Sue Evans, too. My experience and my gut said so, even if the evidence didn’t. Yet.

Trevor’s professional involvement was fine, albeit premature. No one had been arrested yet and until a suspect was in custody, his role was not official.

Maybe he was curious. Dedicated, perhaps. After all, I had no official role here, either. And yet here I sat. Because Trevor made it so. No one in Tampa would have had that kind of power over me or anyone on our police force. Yet Trevor and others believed he had that power here. Good to know.

I shrugged. “I’m a visitor, Randy. All I know is that you have some pretty bizarre stuff going on in this ‘sleepy little town.’” I mimicked his inflection on the last three words. He probably thought I was being snide. I probably was.

Trevor considered something for a few seconds and seemed to make a decision of his own. “Would you mind waiting for us outside, Justin?” Kemp nodded, doing Trevor’s bidding once again. How far could Kemp be trusted? I heard the door close behind me.

Judge Trevor leaned forward, placing both forearms on his desk, and refolded his hands into the prayer position. He looked at me with the earnest expression I could remember so clearly it felt like a flashback to an earlier time. A time before snow snipers and murder victims and blizzards and my missing husband. A time when I had nothing to fear from Randy Trevor and he had nothing to fear from me. A lifetime ago.

“Pleasant Harbor
was
a sleepy little town when I moved here ten years ago,” he said, ignoring my snide remark. “We’ve grown a lot since then. Our population, year-round, is low five digits but that’s misleading. We get tourists now, winter and summer, sufficient to swell the number of folks to at least ten thousand every weekend.”

He raised his water glass and took a sip, then settled more comfortably in his chair. I thought he might actually put his feet on the desk like he regularly did when we were associates, but he didn’t.

“What’s your point?” I said.

He glared a bit. I was getting under his skin. Good. He might make a mistake I could exploit if he wasn’t too comfortable. “Now we have all the problems any other big city has. I get the
New York Times
delivered to my house every day. My wife wears couture clothes and carries expensive handbags when we go to dinner. And we’ve got so much crime these days that we’re building a big new jail and courthouse complex to deal with it all.”

I shrugged. Whatever he thought would impress me in that speech had missed the mark. “My jurisdiction covers several big cities, Randy. But even in Tampa we don’t let snipers get away with murder and go on their merry way until the next unlucky motorist happens past.”