A novel by Scott Newton

2013

            Scott Skillet felt like a policeman, following drug dealers up the ladder till he got to one of the top men. He followed a couple of men he knew who took drugs, including a man he went to school with, Matt Scrim, to a man named Rolland Rasch, to a big-time dealer named Chewy Gomez. Scott had done stakeouts in a variety of cars, and had followed people.

            It had taken almost a year, and he recognized at exactly the right time his opportunity. He caught Chewy Gomez with his fine leather bag, sure this is where he kept drugs and money. Chewy was coming out of a house, all by himself, on a dark street in Portland, Oregon. Scott got out of his pickup and walked up to him. He had a .380 caliber Savage semiautomatic pistol. It was an old gun, patented in 1905 and made by the Savage Arms Corp. in Utica, New York. The slide was hard to rack, but he had on leather gloves and knew how to do it.

            Chewy Gomez, with broad shoulders, a slender waist, curly black hair and a scruffy beard, looked immediately alarmed upon seeing Scott Skillet and hearing the handgun being racked. “What do you want?” he said, attempting to pull a gun from his jacket pocket. Chewy was 10 feet away. Scott couldn’t identify the gun; he never saw the gun clearly.

            It was self-defense now. Scott shot him once with the Savage, aiming directly into the heart, and Chewy dropped to the ground and did not respond. Scott picked up the nice leather bag, walked to his car and drove away. When he got home, he opened the bag and found $600,000. There weren’t any drugs in the bag. The money was in many different denominations. It took a while to count and some of it was raggedy, but it would spend.

            Scott thought about his father, 30 years at Alder Pipe and Joint, paying out $800,000 in federal payroll taxes, then receiving $2,100 a month in Social Security income upon retiring. The government, the politicians, they were the real criminals. That was Scott Skillet’s attitude. What kind of return was $2,100 on an investment of $800,000?  

            Some razor blades, a packet of double blades would be fine, should cost $4. Instead a packet of razor blades cost $24; these were the criminals, too. Gillette and all those guys with their bloated, five-blade razors.

            Scott felt he had remained calm during the robbery, but now that he was home he was nervous and his hands shook slightly while he counted the money. He put it back in the nice, leather bag Chewy Gomez used. He opened a beer, but he still wasn’t relaxed. His nerves were on edge and his stomach in a knot, though there wasn’t anything he could change now. He thought it odd, he had been cool during the shooting but nervous for about 60 minutes after.

            The shooting was on the local TV news the next night, but police did not say they had a suspect. Only that Chewy was a suspected drug dealer and was killed with a single shot and not discovered for a few hours.

            Scott reviewed his life for a few days. A dramatic event like finding $600,000 will cause a person to do that. He had graduated from high school, wrestled somewhat successfully, then worked construction for several years. He worked in house construction and liked it, but had quit a few years ago to take care of his father.

            His father Harry was a good man, but he smoked, drank, gambled and ate junk food. Some of these habits didn’t help his heart.

            The last year of life, Harry needed help and Scott stayed home and helped him. Harry had congestive heart failure and was unable to work on the car, perform work in the house like cleaning, shop for groceries. Scott stayed with him in his one-bedroom apartment without complaint. It had been a good year, despite his father’s poor health. Harry told him a number of stories about his parents, grandparents and ex-wife, who had not been heard from in 25 years.

            Scott’s father had once dealt cards for Paul Anton. It had been Antoni in Italy and his friends still called him that because it sounded cool. It was the high-roller game and Harry Skillet once knew all sorts of people in Portland. Politicians, business leaders, athletes, shady guys. But Harry kept a clean profile and when the game broke up, after several years, he began work at Alder Pipe and Joint to provide a stable life, mostly for his son but for himself as well.

            After the death of Harry, and then the stalking of Chewy, which took a year, Scott considered he was starting a new life. He was a different person from his father and he was going to have a different life. He loved his father, but the man spent every paycheck. Scott liked to think he was not judgmental, but he was not going to be a slave to cigarettes. He learned to eat right when he was wrestling and he felt better when he did. At the end of every pay period, Harry gambled away whatever money he had left. Scott could never understand it. If Harry couldn’t get to a casino or a poker game, he’d invest the money in Powerball tickets.

            Well, maybe if one of the Powerball tickets had hit, people would’ve called Harry Skillet one sharp character, a cool old guy, a good gambler, but that never happened. The odds were only like 240 million to one each time Harry bought a Powerball ticket.

            Scott found an industrial building to buy with the money from the Chewy Gomez robbery. It was located next to a shopping mall, and it was zoned industrial but the Portland City Council gave him a conditional use permit as commercial. He cleaned up the building, painted the inside walls, built four kitchen areas, very basic. Plumbing with large sinks, gas stoves, electrical outlets. He bought ping-pong tables and put a simple, basic sign outside: Ping-pong Palace.

            He rented the four kitchen spaces for $700 apiece, and charged $1 an hour for the ping-pong tables. He was surprised and pleased the kitchen spaces were rented right away, and the place drew a crowd almost every day after school let out. The crowd changed about 5 or 6 p.m. as the high school students left and the young adults arrived, men 20 to 30 who would play ping-pond for several hours. Rivalries seemed to develop, the players sorting out amongst themselves the casual players from the really good ones.

            People teased Scott for renting tables, paddles and balls for $1 an hour, but Scott said if people didn’t pay something they wouldn’t respect his property. Yet the low price allowed youngsters to hang around for hours. Scott knew it was the concessions that made the money.

            The homeless were never a problem as Scott adopted a no-tolerance policy. The moment a homeless person entered the building, Scott would start talking to him, trying to find out who he was. But not like he was going to be a friend. If he could smell the person, that was the thing they talked about. Scott was hell on stinky homeless people.

            There were 15 tall fir trees on the back half of the property. Scott thought it made the place look almost like a destination hotel. The area looked nice, so Scott had to keep homeless people from camping there. Scott was surprised he could be so mean. He would tell homeless men they stunk, to take a shower before coming back, that they were not welcome and he would kick the shit out of them.

            When he found someone making a camp in the woods, he destroyed it immediately. He would douse a fire, stomp on breakfast, slice open a tent and swing a baseball bat. The moment the homeless person left, he would put all the homeless person’s belongings in the back of his Toyota Tacoma pickup and haul it to the dump.

            In no time, the homeless avoided Ping-pong Palace. “It turns out, bullying works,” Scott said.

            It was an unusual lot as he could have built another building on the land. If he had the money or wanted to. Or if he wanted to cut down the trees. There was a parking lot in front of the entrance to Ping-pong Palace. It was in good condition.

            It was up to the restaurant owners to get the proper permits from the city. Scott had things to do, manage the place, make little repairs, but it brought in $2,800 a month and that was enough to make expenses and put some money away.

            The restaurants were a taco place, a pizza place and a place called Anonymous Sandwich. Anonymous Sandwich was the least popular of the three. Some would say that made sense as it had the worst name. The owner was a pretty woman named Francesca. The beer and wine bar was marked off by a short railing, and called the Spin Shot. It rains about nine months of the year in Portland, so an inside place to hang out, but not as expensive as a restaurant or tavern, seemed to work. As far as Scott knew, this was the only ping-pong establishment going.

            One day Francesca said to him, “This is a popular place. Who knew so many people grew up with a ping-pong table in the basement. They’re the ones who think they’re hot stuff.” Scott laughed. He liked the business. He was satisfied with the money, and the building and property would always be worth the equity. Francesca was attractive, and there were several other women who hung out at the palace sometimes.

            Scott had a few dates with Francesca, but when he visited her home he learned she kept 11 cats. She vacuumed twice a day. She emptied or cleaned the cat boxes twice a day. Still, the fact of the 11 cats turned him off. He couldn’t date a woman with 11 cats.

            The first sign of trouble at Ping-pong Palace, in Scott’s mind, was when Aldo Anton, grandson of Paul Antoni, began to show up with a group of friends. Scott thought they would sell drugs there, but pretty soon he noticed the best players were being lined up to play each other and the wanna-be wise guys would gather round to watch them. Jeez, Scott thought, these guys are gambling. He had grown up with these guys, knew them, but mostly avoided them except to be polite. The only thing they seemed to accomplish was to remain in the drug trade, low level.

            Scott spent a month opening up, and had run the business a couple of months more. He was pleased the business was working out. One evening, Francesca came over to talk to him. She had become a confidant, though not a girlfriend. She said, “Who would’ve thought people’d gamble on ping-pong?” He laughed, but she was right. It was obvious and it was a problem.

Chapter two   

            One night at closing, Aldo went to Scott and said he wanted to rent the club for an hour. He gave him a $100 bill. Scott had known Aldo for some time, but he was never really friendly with him. Aldo and his friends were into some hustles on their way to maybe becoming gangsters. Scott didn’t want to get a criminal record. Matt Scrim was in Aldo’s circle of friends. Scott considered him bad news. They sold marijuana, but had also moved on to other drugs, cocaine, fentanyl and methamphetamine.

            Still, Scott and Aldo knew about Harry dealing cards for Aldo’s grandfather at the high-roller poker games years ago, so they were polite to each other, even talked about those days sometimes. Harry always called them the good old days because he made a lot of money in tips and sometimes met athletes or saw pretty women. Harry was grateful to old Paul Antoni, who was still around.

             Scott, not seeing a problem with staying open an extra hour for a ping-pong grudge match, said OK. Aldo said Duck Chou and Tom Wolf wanted to play a game without interruption or distraction. Scott figured there was a small bet on the game, maybe $1,000. These idiots couldn’t have fun on less than $1,000.

            Tom Wolf was a hustler. Once a college athlete who washed out, he would buy hookers and blow for college athletes, things they couldn’t afford, and try to get them to fix games. He had some success at one time selling speed, amphetamines, to a college football team. Twice he served short prison sentences, both times for trying to fix basketball games. Once he was identified as a hustler, the FBI followed him around to a half a dozen college campuses before he gave up trying to fix college football and basketball games. It was always easier, of course, to fix basketball games.

            Duck Chou was a computer salesman and repairman. A geeky kid with a ping-pong table in the basement of the family home, he grew up tall and a surprisingly good athlete. He was called Duck because of the way he walked; he was a fat kid. The name stuck. At Ping-pong Palace, he was getting a reputation. He was pretty good, not a pretender.

            Aldo and Scott sat at a table and watched as Tom and Duck played. The restaurant areas were empty. The front door locked.

            “Tom Wolf probably would have been a college receiver had he not been a knucklehead,” Aldo said. Tom Wolf had amazing eye-hand coordination. He could serve forehand or backhand, hitting the ball straight or diagonally with either. He served with his hands level to the table, a step or two back.

            Duck Chou claimed “thousands” of hours of experience. He served well back from the table, and with his hands low. He could serve from either side and hit both corners of the table, and with tremendous spin, which propelled the ball forward at a high speed.

            “Do you play?” Aldo said.

            “I learned from a friend, you know Bobby Jones, who had a ping-pong table. Bobby, Bill White and some others, we used to play for hours. Sometimes we’d drink beer and hold tournaments on a Saturday night,” Scott said. “You know, we were kids.” Scott’s circle of close friends in high school did not include Aldo Antoni, Tom Wolf or Matt Scrim. But they knew each other.

            “I like this place,” Aldo said. “You know, ping-pong’s not like going to the gym and lifting weights, but also it’s not sedentary like playing poker. Also, you know, guys play for a while they get pretty good.”

            Scott nodded. Throughout his life, he’d never quite enjoyed Aldo Antoni’s personality. Did it matter how good people got playing ping-pong?

Chapter three

            Duck had a low, fast game. He had first serve and got off to a 4-1 start. Tom scored three on his first serve and this set a pattern for the game, Duck leading and Tom fighting furiously for some points and staying within range of a victory. With the score 16-10 in Duck’s favor, Tom began waiting out the spin on Duck’s shots, and winning points. It was 20-18 before Duck put him away.

            Aldo appeared agitated with the loss. He got up and said to Tom Wolf, “When you’re playing for me, you win.”

            “We’ll get it back,” Tom said.

            “Hey, fuck you,” Aldo said, and he pulled a Glock, a square, spare kind of gun. Scott knew the gun because it was one of the first made of plastic. People had a weird loyalty to it. One person buried a Glock, dug it up six months later and it still fired, proving its so-called durability. Another fan threw one out of a car onto the pavement at 60 miles an hour, and it still fired after. The Glock was designed to be simple enough for soldiers to work on in the field.

            Scott was never really a fan of the Glock, but it was legend on the internet. Ask anyone, and hear some such crazy story.

            Whatever the testimonials, Scott knew one thing. It worked when Aldo Antoni aimed the Glock .40 millimeter at Tom Wolf’s chest. The gun was loud and filled the industrial building with sound. Aldo headed for the door. Duck stood back, but it seemed Aldo wasn’t thinking about shooting him. Aldo unlocked the door and walked out.

            “Shet, I never saw anyone shot over a game of ping-pong. Never could have even imagined it,” Duck said.

            Scott had a .38 caliber Smith and Wesson, an old revolver once favored by cops, and went into his small office and grabbed it out of the top desk drawer. He went outside expecting Aldo to be to the street by now, either on foot or in a car, but Aldo apparently had been putting himself together. He was standing in front of the building, zipping his jacket against the cold when Scott reached the door. He had a stocking cap pulled down over his head and was wearing heavy, bulky gloves.

            “Why did you shoot Tom Wolf?” Scott said.

            Aldo, seeing Scott with a handgun, unzipped his jacket and was reaching for his Glock, which was in a shoulder holster. It was awkward and took a moment.

            Defense again, Scott thought, and shot him. He opened the gate on his pickup and put Aldo Antoni in. He went and got the gun, the Glock, picked it up by the barrel with his shirt sleeve and tossed it in the back of his pickup. He covered Aldo with a tarp. He looked around and did not see anyone. No street traffic.

            He went back inside. Duck was standing by the ping-pong table. He had his paddle in a little case. Scott thought it was a pussy thing to do. “I heard a gunshot outside,” Duck said.

            “Aldo shot at me, but it wasn’t serious. I think he aimed over the top of the building. He’s gone now,” Scott said.

            “Tom Wolf owes me $10,000,” Duck said. “Somebody does, but I guess I’m not going to ask Aldo for it. Not now for sure. It was Aldo staked Tom Wolf in the game. Aldo was holding the money. He has my $10,000 plus the $10,000 he was putting up for Tom. I saw it before the game.”

            “Get out of here,” Scott said. “Gambling is not allowed here.”

            “There was a murder here. Don’t you want me here to back up your story with the police?”

            “I’m not calling the police. I don’t want bad publicity. You need to keep your mouth shut, too. No one important’s ever going to miss Tom Wolf. He was a felon. I don’t want you to tell anyone about this. I don’t want you to tell anyone you stayed after hours and beat Tom Wolf in a game and the bet didn’t get paid off. I don’t want you to tell anyone Aldo owes you $10,000. I want you to get out of my business, to shut up, and no more gambling. Gambling is not allowed at Ping-pong Palace.”

            “OK,” Duck said. “I don’t see any reason you should be hostile to me.”

            Scott paused, took a breath. “I’m not, but we both have to keep our mouths shut.”

            The gun, the police 38, was still hanging at Scott’s side. Duck decided he’d just get out of there. He didn’t want to talk to the police anyway.

            Once Duck was gone, Scott checked Tom Wolf’s pockets. He had $23 and a Hermes Paris watch. The watch, with white gold and blue stones, was pretty. Scott took Tom out to the back of the pickup. There was a spot of blood on the floor. Scott cleaned a large area around the spot with bleach. Then polished the flat concrete floor.

            He went to the parking lot. There was blood there and he cleaned it with bleach. Then he put a little oil on the spot and threw down some sand.

            Finally, about 3 in the morning, he dug the bullet out of the wall, used some Spackle and repaired it. Scott knew a forensic team could find a little splatter of blood anywhere and come up with all kinds of information, but there was nothing more he could do tonight.

            He looked in the back of his pickup. He’d already looked through Tom Wolf’s pockets. He checked Aldo’s pockets now, expecting to find $20,000. Duck had implied Aldo was holding the money. But instead of $20,000, he found more than $30,000. “Jeez,” he said. Plus, he couldn’t believe he had killed two people. When Chewy Gomez took that one shot to the heart, he died immediately. In some way, it excited Scott.

            Scott drove east of Portland on Interstate 84, next to the Columbia River. He knew the river and it was deep at a rest stop out there. He had to cross over to the west lanes of the freeway to get to it. It was 4 a.m. and no one was there. There were no services there, just a pullout off the freeway right by the river. Scott, on a tiny beach, took a rock, put it in Aldo’s shirt and sunk him. The same with Tom. He threw the Glock 40 in the river, then the police 38. He hated to do it. Being a revolver, it had some features he liked. It was always ready, never jammed. That’s why policemen liked them. He had disliked getting rid of the Savage, too, but a person couldn’t keep a gun around that had been involved in a crime. The police know what they’re doing with those ballistics tests.

            Scott went home, showered, ate breakfast. He went to Ping-pong Palace, put on his paint clothes, and repainted a wall white, the wall he’d dug the bullet out of. He cleaned up and changed into his regular clothes by opening time. The other walls had also recently been painted, so Scott didn’t think anyone would notice any change in the color of the paint. No evidence of a shooting with the hole patched and fresh, clean paint.

            He was tired but he stayed at work all day. He didn’t see Duck. The next day, he had signs made up that said: “No Gambling.” Then, he announced he would start keeping a standing of ping-pong players. People could challenge a person of higher standing. He got it all organized, ranking 10 players. At the bottom of the standings it said, “No Gambling.”

            He had been thinking of one other thing. He’d shot Aldo right in the heart, a perfect shot. Aldo staggered a moment before dying, but it didn’t take long.

Chapter four

            A woman entered Ping-pong Palace. She was beautiful, maybe 35, and she was noticed. She was wearing cream-colored slacks that were a perfect fit. They were made of some kind of new material designed to provide protection from the sun and to be water repellant. Her jacket was from Columbia Sportswear. She wore new Nike shoes. Her brown hair was mostly pulled back in a ponytail, but with loose, floppy hair breaking out at certain points. Scott felt it gave her an alluring, just out-of-bed look.

            She asked for Scott Skillet. A woman at Tacos for America pointed to the counter at the back of the room where Scott rented ping-pong tables.

            Scott was immediately nervous, even before she started for the counter. Even if she looked ready to hike a trail in the Himalayas, he knew she was a cop. He smiled, took a deep breath.

            “I’m Leanne, a detective for the Portland police department,” she said. “I’m looking for Tom Wolf, and also Aldo Anton. No one’s seen them for a week.”

            There were stools behind the counter. “You can come back here and sit down,” Scott said. “Make yourself comfortable.”

            She smiled, went behind the counter and sat on a stool near Scott. He was wearing jeans and she could see he was muscular, a nice body. “How’s business?”

            “It’s a new business, but it’s going OK I think. The restaurants are selling food. Usually a good crowd. I don’t know what’ll happen when the weather’s nice and everyone goes outdoors.” It was March and was cold outside. He had purchased the building in January and the weather hadn’t been great the entire time.

            “You can move the ping-pong tables outside to the parking lot,” Leanne said.

            Scott laughed. “I hadn’t thought of that. Good idea.”

            “You can have it, for free,” she said. The way she joked made Scott smile.

            “So, Tom Wolf and Aldo Antoni,” Scott said. “I know who they are, grew up knowing Aldo although we’re not really friends, just acquaintances. Matt Scrim hangs with them. Do you know him?”

            “I know of him. He’s shady.”

            “We all went to school together. You know, it’s the small-time drug dealer crowd? Unless they’re bigger than I know. They used to come in here. The last few days, I haven’t seen them.”

            “You haven’t seen them for a week, right?”

            “Yeah, that’s probably right. Any theories?” Scott said. He breathed easier; it was going better than he imagined. His answers seemed normal, maybe natural was the word, and she was joking with him.

            “It’s early, so far just talking to people. Before I leave, if it’s OK with you, I’ll walk around the place.”

            “Sure,” Scott said. “Looking for anything in particular?” He knew that even a tiny sample of DNA, a hair or a thread, could provide evidence. He had cleaned the place up, but enough to fool a forensics team? He wasn’t confident he was that smart.

            “You know,” she said, “You remind me of someone I used to date, a hospice nurse. Same lean but muscular build, nice Irish looks, cool under pressure maybe. He was, I don’t know about you.”

            “What happened to him?

            “We were young, you know. I lived in Manitou Springs.”

            “Well, you know, the Irish crowd in America is a pretty big club. A number of us pale guys look alike, you know like Michael Douglas? My mother’s name was Daly.”

            “I know who your father was,” Leanne said. “The old timers on the police force talk about Paul Antoni. He heads a small gang, owns a body shop, used to bully people out of property, they’ve been into some stuff. Someone could’ve been sending a message, that’s a question we have about Aldo’s disappearance. Anyway, your father dealt cards for Paul at one time? Nobody I talked to thinks your father was into crime.”

            “He died a little more than a year ago, bad ticker. No, he wasn’t into anything illegal, but he did enjoy those days at the high-roller poker game. He said he met Bill Walton once.”

            “He, your father, leave you any money?” Leanne said. “Maybe $600,000?”

            Scott felt his stomach drop. Why did she use that figure unless she knew about Chewy Gomez. “I had some money of my own when he died, from working construction. My father spent every dollar he ever made. He gave me a diamond ring worth $1,000, a ring size too small for my finger, a couple of pieces of nice, wood furniture, a chair and a chest of drawers. No big inheritance.”

            “Are you wondering where I got the $600,000 number?” Leanne said. “This is a nice industrial building, with the potential for a second building on the lot. It cost what, $600,000?”

            “No, not that much,” Scott said, still suspicious of her bringing up the number. How could she possibly link him with Chewy Gomez? She’d practically opened the door for him to ask for a date, but now she made him nervous.

            “You know that nurse I knew, he was deceptively clever when it came to money. He was building a house part time when I knew him. I didn’t think much about it. And one day he sold it and made $100,000. Not a bad day, huh? Maybe you’re like him,” Leanne said.

            Scott didn’t say anything to that. Leanne got up and began walking round the building, first looking at the walls. She looked at the wall where he had patched a bullet hole and painted. He couldn’t tell from her body language whether she was finding anything, but it made him nervous. Then she strolled back and forth looking at the floor. At one time she looked more closely at an area near where Tom Wolf had been. Later, he noticed her pick up a copy of the ranking of the top 10 ping-pong players. She put it in her pocket. She talked to people serving food.

            Even at a distance, Leanne could see that Scott had strong legs and broad shoulders. She mentioned it to Francesca. “He can wear a pair of jeans, no question,” Francesca said. Leanne waved at him and left. Scott was nervous. She seemed to know things.

            The lot was worth $600,000, with the buildable second lot, but Scott had got a bargain purchasing it for $450,000.

            The next day, following Leanne’s visit, Paul Antoni visited. He was a slender man wearing a dress rain coat and matching hat. He walked up to Scott’s counter and said hello. They had seen each other over the years and Scott admired his dapper style.

            “Ah Scott, I’m so heartbroken,” Paul said. “Aldo’s never been a good kid. I gave him some chances to work at the body shop, and in my real estate business, nothing worked out for him.”

            Scott nodded, sympathetic maybe.

            “They were always stoned, Aldo and those guys he hung around with. I talked to your dad about it once. He said he didn’t think you got stoned much, used the marijuana.”

            “I don’t really like the feeling of being stoned,” Scott said.

            “Did Aldo have any drug debts you know about? Between you and me, you got any idea who killed him? Even off the record, you can tell me. I am broken hearted.”

            “I didn’t see Aldo for a long time.” Scott said. “After high school, I kind of got into construction. I enjoyed building, homes and commercial, and kind of got to valuing real estate. I’m not sure I ever saw Aldo during that time. Then dad got sick; he needed a lot of help for about six months there. Then I opened Ping-pong Palace, and Matt Scrim, Tom Wolf and Aldo started coming in.

            “Honestly, it surprised me Aldo seemed to enjoy watching, and playing games himself sometimes. I’m sorry, but we just didn’t talk much. We weren’t that close at school. We talked about the high-roller game sometimes, we had that in common, but not much else. So it’s not like we had a lot of catching up to do.”

            “I remember when you all were young guys going to school. Gosh, it seems like the good old days now, all of a sudden. If you learn anything, would you let an old man know? I surely am heartbroken over all of this.”

            Scott looked at the dapper old man and thought about putting him out of his misery with a single bullet to the heart, Scott’s signature. It surprised Scott how the idea just popped into his head.

Chapter five

            Leanne Shiff began her career as a uniformed police officer in Colorado Springs. She had an easy way with people, both knuckleheads and hardened criminals, the two categories she had for criminals. Other policemen liked her, and management liked her. Small complaints seemed not to bother her or to stick.

            She got her break when she caught the bank robber Mo Kekipo, a runner from Kenya and the brother of world champion George Kekipo.

            George ran a marathon in two hours and 10 minutes and won an Olympic gold medal. For a time, he was the toast of the athletic world, lauded internationally. Loved for his good personality, sense of humor, a family man.

            Mo Kekipo had moved to Colorado Springs eight years earlier, where he trained for a while but was not a top distance runner. He was good but never had the kick his brother had, the ability to run at top speed after running 25 miles. No one cared if Mo was the brother of a future Olympic gold medalist, he struggled in Colorado.

            Mo Kekipo’s English was not great. He was not charming so he was not a good salesman, and he didn’t have any advanced education or special skills. He began working in a restaurant, washing dishes, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, dropping out of the running scene altogether, just trying to make it financially in the United States.

            Victor English was not a good influence on Mo. He gave him weed and cocaine. They picked up women in bars. At times they drank all night, which led to some bad behavior.

            Victor, who was white, worked as a mechanic and had more money than Mo. He was not bad looking, but his smirk could have a mean slant to it. He could frighten people with a look if he wanted. He was aware of this. It helped him when he had to collect large amounts of money for work he had done on cars. Some people with a large bill to pay, even if they had requested the work, wanted to put off paying when the time came.

            Mo, who was black as coal, was modest in demeanor and people generally liked him. Despite his lack of money and poor English, he could make friends. When he first came to the United States, he ran 10-kilometer fun runs and people talked to him. He was popular to a point. Everyone said hello to him, but no one offered him a job.

            Smoking, drinking and a poor diet caused him to gain weight and lose his wind. A runner, even a very fast one, with a pot belly was not a look that inspired people. Mo had quit running altogether for about a year, and he felt bad about himself.

            Victor had the potential to make good money, but he didn’t like to work and he found money spent too easily. Still, he was always ready to pay the way for his friend, Mo. Victor seemed to do better socially with Mo around. Mo was not charming, or educated, but he smiled and people found his African accent endearing. The two of them, together in the taverns, made friends. It was like Mo’s niceness evened Victor out.

            In Victor’s opinion, life was not about slaving away, one job after another, wasting beautiful days working on other people’s cars. Sometimes he was paid to fix up a cool, old car, but he still didn’t like to work. An old Mercedes or an old Porsche, old cars were still pieces of crap. Even if they were very cool when running. Victor imagined everyone was living an easier life than him, except for Mo, of course, and he was an immigrant.

            Victor had a Star 9mm, a semiautomatic made in Spain, a family gun he inherited from his father. It was called the Star Parabellum. In Latin there is a phrase, “If one wants peace, he must prepare for war.” This is what Parabellum meant, prepare for war. Victor thought it an intimidating gun. All black steel.

            “The bank teller, some pretty girl, takes one look down the barrel of this gun, she’ll do anything we ask,” Victor told Mo, who was not sure.

            “I’ve investigated these bank robberies. I know all the pros and cons,” Victor said. “We go in with a stolen car. I’m a mechanic; I can get cars all day long. I hold the gun and you go to every window collecting cash. Loose bills only, no packets of money. That’s where they put the dye pack, in the packets of money. Then you go to the counting room, with one of the tellers, and quickly grab all the cash there. Usually they keep the hundreds in the counting room. We leave. We’ve only been in the bank a few minutes. We wear disguises as we know there will be cameras in the bank.

            “We trade back to our original vehicle, have a couple of routes planned for an escape. Go out of town and have a good time. Often they don’t publish how much money people make in a bank robbery. Sometimes some looser will only make $2,000. But I just saw a TV show, this guy regularly took $10,000, $12,000. The banks and the FBI don’t want you to know that, so they won’t mention it after a robbery, but it’s public record and eventually comes out.”

            “The guy in this show,” Mo said, “was he in prison?”

            “Well, he was out, but yeah, he did eight years.”

Chapter six

            Victor and Mo planned the bank robbery for a couple of weeks. Eventually Victor got three older cars. One they were going to use for the bank robbery. The other two were backups. After the robbery, if there were any problems, they could flee and go on foot to one of the backup cars; they put one car in the parking lot of the Star Movie House. The other backup car was parked at the end of Bear Creek Trail, outside town toward the mountains. Most people followed a well-traveled, circular trail at Bear Creek, but Victor and Mo knew there was also a trail off the loop, to a county road. It was a little used trail. They placed a car there on the county road.

            If the robbery went as planned, they would trade the first car, a dark-blue 1970 Pontiac Bonneville, for Victor’s Ford pickup, in a residential neighborhood, and head out of town.

            They were nervous before the robbery, and had a drink first, though it was only 10 in the morning. The tavern, the Silver Nugget, was dark and they looked at each other nervously. Outside the tavern, Victor drew up two lines of cocaine on the lens of a flashlight. They each snorted one in the parking lot, reviewed the plan while riding in the Pontiac to the bank, and put on disguises before getting out of the car. Victor English wore a cowboy hat and a bandana over his face. Mo Kekipo wore a Hillary Clinton mask, which they thought would be funny because everyone would know the black person was a man. It would be disconcerting and somehow political.

            Mo had been nauseated before, when he had run some big races when he was younger in Kenya. Before the robbery, he found he was unable to control the nausea and stepped out of the car, raised his mask, vomited by the curb at the front of the car. He felt OK after that and pulled his mask down. Victor kept the Star Parabellum under his jacket. Inside the bank, Mo stepped to the first window.

            “No alarms, no packets of money. Only loose bills,” Victor shouted. He waved the Star Parabellum in the air. A man and two women, tellers two, three and four, stepped back a little from their windows.

            The teller at the first window, a woman of about 25, immediately began taking bills out of her drawer. Mo handed her a brown paper bag and she put the money in. She was plain, but not unattractive, and Mo could see she was nervous.

            “You did fine,” Victor said. “Next window. Hurry the fuck up.”

            The first teller kind of opened her eyes wide when Victor used the profanity. It made him feel impolite. The next teller, a man in slacks and a dress shirt, quickly gathered the bills in his drawer and dropped them in the bag.

            “Next, let’s go,” Victor said. Mo stepped up to the window and the woman started crying. She was about 40, nice looking, and she gathered up the bills and put them in the bag as she was crying and boo-hooing. Victor shook his head at Mo. “Never seen that before.”

            The last teller appeared to be about 21 and was pretty, with jet black hair, a good figure and red lipstick. She was all business, scared to death. After she put the bills in the bag, Victor said, “You go with my friend to the cage, give us all the bills in there, and everything will be fine.

            “Don’t miss any hundreds,” he said. He meant it as a joke but no one was smiling. Everyone was taking the bank robbery seriously. His joke would probably end up in some police report, though.

            Victor looked at his watch. Mo was in a little, locked room with a money counting machine; it was where the large bills were kept. Everything was moving quickly along. It had taken only about a minute and a half for the entire robbery. Victor was amazed as it had sure seemed like a long time in there.

            The well-dressed teller at window two had pushed the alarm before stepping back from the counter. The alarm didn’t buzz or light up. There was no way to know, inside the bank, if anyone had sounded the alarm.

            Mo came out of the cage, and Victor and Mo ran out of the bank. They felt good because they didn’t see any police. Victor was first out and running fast, Mo right behind him. Victor stepped off the curb, hit the vomit with his right foot, skidded, changed direction and hit hard on the pavement. In high school, Victor had been a good athlete, and he couldn’t believe he’d tripped. That is what he was thinking before he hit the pavement. The Star Parabellum slammed against the pavement, handle first, fired and the bullet went in Victor’s right thigh and out at the ankle, inside surface.

            Had Victor a manual for the handgun, it would have warned him not to carry the semiautomatic with a cartridge in the chamber. Also Victor could have put the safety on, but he hadn’t.

            Mo had never seen such a thing, a man who shot himself through the entire leg. He could only imagine it was the most painful thing ever, but Victor didn’t feel any pain. “I’m screwed,” he said. In his mind, he imagined being in a prison hospital. He laid down on the pavement.

            Mo jumped in the passenger’s door with the bag of money, slid to the driver’s seat and started the car. He looked back and saw a black and white coming with its sirens blaring. He drove off.

            Officer Jeff Gable was driving the police car. Before even stopping, he announced they were following an old Pontiac, maybe a Chief, dark blue, made in the 1960s or 1970s. His partner took one look at Victor on the ground in front of them and said, “Jesus.” Jeff Gable thought he had better perform first aid on the man even though he wanted to chase the car.

            For a moment, Victor had not felt pain and there wasn’t any blood. In the time it took for the police car to stop in front of Victor, he was screaming and calling out in pain. Blood was pouring out of his wounds, especially his thigh.

            Jeff Gable told his partner to call an ambulance. He had had medical training and immediately began putting a pressure dressing on Victor’s thigh. He wrapped it with gauze and taped it down. He moved to the ankle, sat down, put on another pressure dressing and wrapped it. By this time, there were a half a dozen police there, including some who went in the bank. Jeff was sitting in a pool of blood; he was covered in blood anyway before he sat down to dress the ankle.

            The ambulance pulled up. Jeff stood up. “The bullet went in his thigh and came out his ankle. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

            He was telling this to the Emergency Medical Technician. The EMT looked at the dressings, soaked, and the amount of blood on the ground. “You saved his life,” he said.

            “Just what I always wanted, to save this crumb-bum,” Jeff said.

            Leanne Shiff heard Jeff’s report on the police radio. She was near the bank, drove past the scene as Jeff was dressing the bloody wounds. She followed Colorado Boulevard, looking for the blue Pontiac. She went six blocks, past the Star Movie House, and slowed down on a hunch. She made a quick decision to drive through the parking lot, spotted the blue Pontiac parked beside a large work van. The van blocked the view of the car from the street, but once she drove through the parking lot, she knew she had found the get-away vehicle. Surely there couldn’t be too many old, blue Pontiacs around.

            She saw a car leaving the parking lot. A 1954 Chevy, dented and faded, but the engine ran and the tires were good. Mo felt optimistic. Leanne looked at the 1954 Chevy and thought, “Now that’s a cool, old car.” It was two-tone, and the chrome work in those days was elaborate. She followed it. A person who could get his hands on an old Pontiac could get his hands on an old Chevy.

            On the police radio, she announced, “This is detective Leanne Shiff at the Star Movie House parking lot on Colorado Boulevard. I’m sure I’ve found the blue Pontiac. It’s a 1970 Bonneville, by the way. I’m following a green and white, 1954 Chevy just pulled out. I think the driver is heading to Highway 24 West.”

            Leanne’s father had been a service manager at a car dealership. She knew cars.

            Mo had a good start, but Leanne, in a two-year-old Toyota 4Runner, was on her way. The green-and-white Chevy indeed went west, and about two miles outside of town skidded into a dirt parking lot, the trailhead of Bear Creek. Mo grabbed a 1911-style 9mm semiautomatic and the bag of money, and started running. Leanne was perhaps two minutes behind him. She announced her location on the police radio, locked the car, checked to be sure she had a gun and handcuffs, and took off running. She had on Nike shoes. They were Nike InfinityRN 4 Gore Tex, to be technical about it. It was a road-running shoe with good cushioning. Importantly, for Leanne, it came in a lovely shade of red-pink and matched her outfit.

            Leanne watched the long, graceful strides of Mo Kekipo. Her first thought was that maybe this was going to take a while. A former high school track star, Leanne fell into an easy gait and made sure to study her surroundings. It was possible Mo could hide behind a tree or rock and surprise her. She could also turn a corner and there he’d be, holding a gun on her, although she had not seen that he had a gun.

            On the trail, as she ran along, she would catch glimpses of him ahead of her. Likewise, he would look back from time to time. Leanne kept her easy pace. She thought now that she could eventually catch up to him. She ran about four miles a day, most days, so she was comfortable with the pace. She tried to remain vigilant.

            About three miles on the trail, the elevation gained considerably. Leanne was sweating. Her breathing was heavy and her calves burned, but she could run longer. At the top of the hill, on a plateau, was a wooden bridge over Bear Creek. Mo stood on the bridge, arms on the railing, breathing hard. He held the sack of money with one hand.

            Once she was to the bridge, she stopped and took out her Beretta 9. “Is that bank money, in the bag?” she said.

            Yes,” Mo said. “You caught me.”

            “Put the sack on the ground and hold up your hands,” she said.

            Mo had slipped the gun into his jeans. He dropped the paper bag. He put his hands up in the air. A loose shirt hid the grip of the 1911. Leanne walked toward him.

            “I know a little bit about running,” Mo said. “You did pretty good. You’re a fast lady.”

            “How do you know about running?” she said.

            “I’m Kenyan. As children we run for miles. I was not as fast as my brother or some of his friends. Plus I’m out of shape from smoking too much.”

             “You have a nice, long stride. You looked strong when I first saw you. I was worried about catching you,” she said.

            Mo laughed. “Really?” he said.

            “Yeah, really.”

            Mo drew his gun and was hoping to scare off the lady cop. As the gun was coming up, Leanne shot. One moment Mo was holding the 1911. The next moment it felt hot, and hurt his hand, and by reflex he dropped it.

            Mo looked at her. “Did you shoot me?” he said.

            “I shot the gun,” she said. “Out of all the men on the force, I have the best score in marksmanship. Go figure.” She smiled.

            “I believe it,” he said. He looked at his hand and there wasn’t any blood. On the ground in front of him, the silver 1911 with the bone handle had a gash, partly on the barrel and partly on the side of the handle.

            “Let’s get you handcuffed so maybe you’ll behave,” Leanne said. “Hands up, turn around.” He did as he was told. She handcuffed his hands behind his back.

            She picked up the 1911, put her own gun away, then picked up the paper bag. She looked inside at dozens of bills, a small stack of hundreds and fifties in there. She pulled the slide on the 1911 and dropped the bullet out of the chamber, caught it in the air with her hand and put it in her pocket.

            “You did pretty well,” she said. “There’s a lot of money in the bag. Let’s head on back to the cars. You go first.”

            Walking back, Mo realized it was a beautiful day. The trees were beautiful, the creek gurgled and birds were singing. “It’s pleasant, walking this trail on a nice day,” Mo said.

            “Yeah, police work is often like this. Sometimes all you have to do is walk along a sunny, little trail,” Leanne said.

            Mo laughed. “You are a cool woman,” Mo said.

            “What’s your name?” Leanne said.

            “Mo Kekipo. You mighta heard of my brother. He was an Olympic marathon champion, George Kekipo. I’m his slower, older brother.” They both laughed.

            “Look, Mo, I’m not going to mention you drew on me. You’re already going to get a stiff sentence for the bank robbery. You’ll go to prison. What you do with yourself after that is up to you. I don’t know if you’re a knucklehead or a hardened criminal. I think you fit into the knucklehead category. We’ll find out eventually.”

            “My friend Victor shot himself. It looked bad.”

            “See how things can turn out?”

            “Yeah, I knew it were a stupid idea.”

            They both smiled.

            “But it’s nice, walking with you on this trail on a beautiful day.”

            Leanne was thinking, it’s not a date, Mo, but she didn’t say it.

Chapter seven

            Mo Kekipo was never charged with resisting arrest, but the story of Leanne shooting the gun out of his hand eventually came out. Even on the TV news the evening of the robbery, the story was out that Leanne had run down the brother of an Olympic marathon champion. Leanne never made a big deal out of it. Her first comment, when it was mentioned, was: “I didn’t run down an Olympic marathon runner, only his slower, older brother.”

            It was a good quote and it was broadcast over and over, all over the nation. It was humble and true, and people laughed when she said it. The Colorado Springs police force, looking for more women in management, promoted Leanne to detective. Her reputation established, she later took more money to go to Portland, Oregon, where the city council was also looking for more female police management.

            In Portland, the detectives, males, all wore suits. Leanne ignored the unwritten rule and dressed in outdoor slacks, nice outdoor sports jackets, and Nike shoes or Keen hiking shoes. This was a trend she started in Colorado and she saw no need to imitate the stuffy look of the Portland men.

            Her first day of work in Portland she wore a Columbia Sportswear collared shirt, short sleeve, with sun protection of upf 50. It repelled rain, and came in a nice shade of purple. Her fleece jacket was the same color and Leanne thought the combination worked. Her pants were Summit Valley, with titanium for its high-strength to low-density ratio (strong but light), with the same sun protection. It was water repellent. The fit was perfect.

            All the managers at the Portland police department saw her that day. No one was going to tell her she had to dress any differently.

            Leanne had a degree in psychology from Colorado State University. She had the basic police academy course required in Colorado. She had taken additional classes in law enforcement, including one on investigations. Motive, opportunity and means are questions one should consider to start an investigation. Often simple explanations like a cheating lover, money or revenge come into play.

            She was loaned temporarily to a man investigating a serial killer. The lawman was Mathew Bennett. The man being investigated would rape women and kill them along the I-5 corridor in Oregon. They found him and convicted him for six murders.

            Leanne was impressed with Mathew Bennett. He was an honest and steady lawman, but he could also talk to his staff. Leanne wanted to be a good manager and Mathew was a role model. Also they talked about the horrific nature of the crimes. Mathew assured her that even though there are evil men, one must remain convinced of the goodness of human nature.

            Sometimes, in her mind, she wanted to argue that with him. In the end, she wanted to remain convinced of the goodness of human behavior herself. She considered time on the task force a valuable learning experience.

            One day in Portland, a baby was taken from Legacy Emanuel Medical Center. Leanne went with an investigative team to the hospital. The first moments of the investigation were chaotic. The man, apparently wealthy, said he was sure there would be a ransom note. The wife was crying, saying she was sure the baby was dead. “Hostages always get killed,” she said, crying uncontrollably.

            The hospital had protocols in place to prevent babies from being kidnapped. There is a history of women stealing babies from hospitals, and the president of the hospital kept talking about the protocols he had put in place while the chief detective, Robert Nilson, was trying to gather information on this one case. Leanne could see Robert was frustrated and wanted to shake the president.

            “Robert,” Leanne said, during the first break in the president’s monologue, “let me have Legacy’s best computer guy and I’ll begin a review of patients from the maternity ward.” The president pushed the button on the intercom of his desk and asked for “Weird Science.”

            A slender man with short, spiky hair appeared before her. “I’m Todd,” he said. Todd and Leanne went to his office. Leanne, having studied the pattern of the theft of babies from hospitals, turned to Todd. “I’m looking for a woman who has been here, knows the routine. She’s probably young enough she could get pregnant again. Let’s look at all women between 20 and 40 who have been in the maternity ward the past year.” Todd printed off a long sheet of candidates with a short medical history, addresses and telephone numbers.

            I’ll show you some digital pictures of the baby being taken out of the maternity ward, and another of the same woman stealing an ID,” Todd said.

            “Here’s the thing,” he added, “without an ID, she wouldn’t have made it. But she knew, with an ID you can go anywhere. I told management they should tattoo a bar code on each employee, but they didn’t buy it.” He paused. “No one has a sense of humor here.”

            Leanne laughed, remembering the president rambling on about the great security precautions in the maternity ward while a baby was missing.

            “Todd, I like you. OK, show me what you have on the crime.”

            Todd showed a security camera clip of a black woman stealing a nurse’s ID as the nurse was coming off shift. She pinched the clip of the ID and lifted it out of a pocket as the woman was walking down the hall. The woman was going home and didn’t notice the ID was gone. The black woman went to the maternity ward at shift change, knowing what she was going to do. The nurse found out about the ID when the baby was snatched. Legacy called her at home and told her the ID used to snatch a baby was hers.

            Todd then showed the black woman going into the maternity ward. In the entrance, there is a dressing room. It is shared by men and women, with six-foot screens providing privacy to change from street clothes to scrubs. The germs on everyday clothes are not wanted in a maternity ward, so the nurses wear street clothes to work, change into clean scrubs, and wash hands for two minutes before entering the maternity ward.

            The black woman used the ID to open the dressing room door, left her clothes and put on scrubs, washed her hands. She looked like any other nurse, nurse’s assistant or doctor. Leanne noticed she had a purse, a Gucci with the curved, cane handle. She put the purse in the pocket of her scrub top.

             “Nice purse,” Leanne said. “It’s going to get you caught.” Todd looked at Leanne.

Next on the security camera, the woman went to a crib, picked up a boy in a blue blanket, pulled the blanket snug and went out the one-way door to the hallway.”

            “From there, she walked through the hospital, out the front door and to her car,” Todd said. She wasn’t stopped because she was wearing scrubs and looked like an employee. They didn’t have a picture of the car; she had parked a few blocks from the hospital.

            Leanne looked at the sheet Todd provided. He was prepared to look up anyone she asked about. Leanne read.

            “Sue Rankin, 38, was here with a miscarriage at seven months. Sounds serious. She was here long enough to learn the routine. She’s a native of New York City. That’s where she got the fake Gucci, Canal Street. OK, I’ve got to check this one out.”

            “Can I come?” Todd said. Leanne laughed. “You’re not a policeman, Todd. I totally dig you, but I can’t bend the rules that far.”

            “I was just kidding,” he laughed. “Kinda. But look, I’m dying to know if you’re right, that’s all.”

            Leanne prepared to go to the suspect’s home. She paused. “Why does the president of the hospital call you Weird Science?”

            “The president isn’t computer savvy, so I help him out. Even with his personal stuff at home. So, he likes me and thinks I’ll like it if he calls me a geek name. But let me tell you something I’ve learned from experience, it’s really hard to out-weirdo some of these doctors.”

            Leanne smiled, thinking this guy was funny in a sarcastic way she liked. “You did good work here, Todd. If we get our woman, I’ll buy you a beer sometime.” She paused. “You are 21?”

            “Yes,” Todd said. “I’m 22.”

            He thought the woman detective was one nice, mature quail.

Chapter eight

            Elmer Rankin got off at 4 p.m. after working a shift on the assembly line at Freightliner Trucks. He was in the painting department. He and Sue were buying a house. They were busy at work and so he often earned overtime pay. Sue had suffered a miscarriage a while back, but he thought everything was going OK at home.

            When he walked into the house, he heard a baby babbling. He had noticed Sue wearing oversized clothes recently, but she was not pregnant. He hugged her most every night before going to sleep. He would’ve noticed.

            When he walked into the kitchen, he saw the crib set up and in it was a baby boy. “See your new son?” she said. “Isn’t he handsome?”

            “You weren’t pregnant,” Elmer said.

            “Oh my god, you didn’t see how big I was getting. I was huge.” She smiled.

            Elmer smiled back. He loved his wife, and was kind after the miscarriage as she was sad. But forget all that now, they were in big trouble. Some young parents somewhere were freaking out wondering who kidnapped their baby. Kidnapping, such a serious word.

            “Baby,” Elmer said as nice as could be, “you know we’re black people? You are lighter than me but we’re both black. This is a white baby. You know you didn’t have a white baby?”

            “I’ve been trying to think of a good name for a boy, and you haven’t been a bit of help,” Sue said. “Sit down, it’s time to eat.”

            Sue was a good cook and there was spaghetti and salad on the table. Steam was coming off the spaghetti with meat sauce. “Do you want a beer with dinner?” he said.

            “Yes,” she said, “that will help me bring down my milk.”

            Elmer looked at her funny. He sat down and took a few bites of his food. He took a long drink of his beer. He knew there were people in a panic right now about this baby. “Sue, I have to call the police. You know that.”

            There was a knock on the door. Elmer had the feeling they had already identified his wife. It gave him a nervous feeling. He went to the door. A well-dressed woman, in sportswear, was at the door. She showed her Portland police badge.

            “Come in,” he said. “I know why you’re here. The baby’s in the kitchen.”

            Leanne walked into the kitchen. Sue greeted her warmly.

            “My, a beautiful baby,” Leanne said.

            “Do you have children?” Sue said. “I thought my pregnancy would never end. I was so huge, I felt like an old-time draft horse.” She laughed.

            “Let me just make sure I know who you are,” Leanne said. “Sue and Elmer Rankin. Sue, you’re 38 and had a miscarriage last year. You were born in New York but moved to Portland.

            “Yes,” Sue said, “how do you know that?”

            “I’ve been at Legacy Emanuel…”  Before she could finish, Sue broke in.

            “I love the doctors there,” she said. “They have all those specialists, and take all the dangerous deliveries in Portland. I had so much confidence in the doctors and the nurses.”

            Leanne had a look round the house. It was clean and nicely decorated. The baby was sleeping comfortably in a nice crib. She noticed a bottle of formula on the counter and a clean baby bottle. There were pans where she had been sterilizing bottles and nipples. There was also a Gucci purse with a cane handle.

            “You have a nice home here, Sue. Thank you for inviting me in,” Leanne said.

            “Of course,” Sue said. “We like visitors.”

            “Sue, I caught you because I noticed your purse on the security tapes. I love that little purse, very nice.” Leanne pointed to it. Elmer was watching; he liked how this detective was handling things so far.

            “I saw that purse and I thought, I’ll bet that woman is from New York. The information the hospital gave me said you were born in New York. Now, Sue, I went shopping once on Canal Street, what a scene that was.”

            “Oh yes,” Sue said.

            “Anyway, I’ve always liked the look of that purse,” Leanne said. “When you have a Gucci, are they as nice to own as they look?”

            “Oh, I love that purse,” Sue said. She was quiet. “It’s an imitation Gucci purse. You know, I don’t think it’s a real Gucci purse. I mean, you know I don’t think that? I know it’s a knockoff.”

            “You took a baby from the hospital today, right?” Leanne said.

            “Yes.”

            “I’m a detective. I have to look at the baby,” Leanne said. She picked the baby up out of the crib and unwrapped the blanket. The diaper was dry. There were no bruises or signs of abuse. Leanne wrapped the baby up. He was awake but not crying. He was content.

            “I have to call my boss,” Leanne said.

            “Of course,” Sue said.

            She called Robert Nilson on her cell phone. “I have the baby and everything is OK,” Leanne said. “The are no problems with the baby. The baby is healthy and content. If you’ll send a patrol car with a baby seat, I’ll take him immediately to the parents at the hospital.” She gave the address and told Elmer and Sue her supervisor would be by to interview them. It would be chief detective Robert Nilson.

            Leanne delivered the baby to the natural mother. A day later, she was back at Legacy Emanuel and a nurse told her the doctors and nurses had a party the previous night in the doctor’s lounge. “It’s against policy, but everyone was there and got good and drunk,” said the nurse, Barbara. (The doctors and nurses on duty weren’t drunk.)

            “There is a stereo in the lounge and it became a fun dance party with some of the worst dancing known to mankind. Because doctors famously can’t dance. Food was served, then people began to crash in the doctor’s lounge, which has spare beds and chairs and couches. Epic.” Barbara laughed.

            The baby was only three days old and already cutting quite a swath in the world. That’s what Leanne thought.

Chapter nine

            A door, not property bolted down, flew off while a passenger airliner was in the air. Another day a tire came off a plane. The next day a tire flew off during a landing. Boeing Company’s maintenance records were being examined. It gave Rebecca Donnell an idea.

            Rebecca was the daughter of a rich businessman, now deceased. Rebecca inherited 4,000 acres of timberland and 5 million dollars. Her father had cut down trees, sawed them in his own mills and sold the lumber at his own lumber yards. He made money. He had been influential in Oregon’s history. Rebecca’s belief was that she loved Mother Earth, so she was different from her father in that way.

            Yet there were no environmental groups she believed in. She was not in favor of chasing fishing boats to save whales. The people hurt, in the end, were poor people. She was not in favor of harassing corporations. One can harass them, but the people who get hurt are the workers, never the stockholders. Rebecca was bored with social justice advocates, gender warriors, fossil fuel haters and Occupy Wall Streeters. Rebecca didn’t believe in electric cars (no charging stations), wind turbines (ugly) or solar panels (don’t generate enough power).

She liked to tell people the worst offenders in the environmental movement were the owners of the Toyota Prius. Rebecca liked to think this was quite a funny joke.

            “They, the Prius owners, think they’re saving the world. They think they’re superior because the car gets 53 miles to the gallon, but really they’re just bad drivers clogging up the roads for the rest of us because they’re driving slow,” Rebecca said.

            Mary laughed. She had recently been behind a Prius owner driving 55 miles per hour in the passing lane. She knew that Prius owners were part of a national joke. Rebecca, in Mary’s opinion, had some weird anger, though Mary considered herself to be an environmentalist. What else could one be?

            Mary couldn’t think of anything that would make a difference to the environment, and she didn’t really want to make any sacrifices, either.

            Rebecca’s answer, the thing that would save millions of gallons of fossil fuel, was to discourage people from flying. Rebecca had done her research. A Boeing 777 burns 2,5000 gallons of fuel per hour. A flight from New York to London would cost $33,000 in fuel.

            There was no way to convince people not to fly except by scaring them. Convince the public flying was unsafe. Rebecca began to plot the work of her environmental group, “Air Environmental.” She would fund it with a million dollars. Members of Air Environmental would work in factories and forget to put in bolts. They would make sure a few wires were crossed, ball bearings dropped into engines, moving parts left unlubricated. Movie actors and politicians would drop out of the sky; it was evil, she knew, but also she couldn’t wait.

            Mary was the first person Rebecca told about Air Environmental. Mary was the maid. Mary was 28, pretty with a cute figure. She had a felony theft charge in California and was trying to make a new start in Portland. Fortunately, Rebecca had not found the untruths in her spotty resume.

            Being a maid for Rebecca was a good job. Many times what Rebecca wanted most was company. Rebecca and Mary would sit around smoking weed, and then Mary would cook up a big meal for them. Mary could not help but scheme. She knew right away Rebecca had a lot of money.

            They talked about old boyfriends. Rebecca had an eco-terrorist named Michael on her list. She really liked the guy, although Mary could tell he took advantage of her. He let Rebecca give him money. Michael, according to Rebecca, could have been a character out of “The Monkey Wrench Gang.” Mary had seen the book on the book shelf and knew the story, though she had never read the book herself.

            Michael was a chemist. He would make a wax disc the size of a quarter. He would put a piece of paper on it that started a chemical reaction, and deposit the fake quarter in a parking meter. The chemical on the paper would mix with the chemical on the wax. The heat would melt the wax and gum up the works of the parking meter.

            Another favorite idea of his was to use a rifle, with a good scope for precision shooting, to knock out traffic-monitoring cameras. Rebecca sometimes drove him around for this purpose.

            It was the parking meter scheme that got him in trouble. Often he would feed the traffic meters disguised as someone else, a hobo, a rich gentleman, a woman. Rebecca liked to dress him up in costumes. He would sometimes dress in drag and both thought it quite funny and it would often lead to good sex.

According to The Oregonian newspaper, he damaged several hundred parking meters. The city of Portland said he was responsible for more than $400,000 in losses.

            Michael was successful but sometimes careless. Rebecca said he was so clever he didn’t think he’d ever be caught. A camera mounted outside a bank caught him one night depositing a chemical quarter in a parking meter. His picture was on the TV news. He was quickly identified and a jury trial scheduled. First Rebecca gave him money for a lawyer. Then she gave him money so he could take off.

            Mary had lots of former boyfriends. She was easily prettier than Rebecca. She once told a man she was dating she would sleep with him – for $300. He surprised her and said OK.

            She met a lawyer, a man she would have slept with anyway, and asked him for $1,000. He paid it, and paid it every time they had sex. “Eventually he broke up with me,” Mary told Rebecca. “The whole thing hurt me in a way. It got to where I couldn’t enjoy sex unless I was going to make $1,000.”

            Mary laughed, and then so did Rebecca, although Rebecca didn’t think she could convince anyone to give her $1,000 for some love. Rebecca was 50, and she didn’t draw the boys in like she once had. She had had a great body, and unfortunate average looks. That body had worked for her, but at 50 it wasn’t the same. She hadn’t really fallen for anyone since Michael, and that was 13 years ago.

            The plot they finally thought up, Rebecca’s brainstorm Air Environmental, had Mary traveling to cities where jet airliners were made, and bribing workers to miss tightening some bolts, dropping ball bearings in motor pans.

            “It’s a diabolical plan,” Mary said. “How much should we bribe someone to do such work. And, how can we ever check on them?”

            “I would say $20,000,” Rebecca said. “And, they must agree with the cause, encouraging people not to fly. If you hire a man on the assembly line, and an airplane goes down from the factory he works in, he gets a $50,000 bonus. That will encourage a lot of mischief.”

            When Rebecca said this, Mary broke out in a cold sweat. “Do you really want to do this?” Mary said. “Will you feel guilty every time an airliner goes down?”

            “To save Mother Earth, we have to make sacrifices,” Rebecca said.

            “OK,” Mary said. “I’ll recruit them, but you have to pay me a salary. I need an income and no doubt I won’t be around to clean the house. If I’m going to travel, I want a car. And hotels. I can’t fly around if I’m expected to sabotage airplanes.”

            Rebecca nodded. “You can’t leave any clues, a trail of any kind. No one is to know you, but you’ll know them. Not everyone we bribe will do it, but if some of them do, it will eventually work. I can’t even calculate the amount of fuel we’d save if we destroyed the air-travel industry. We would be the most successful environmental group in history.”

            Mary felt uneasy as she would be taking most of the risk, but she was also going to grab some of the easy money before she got out. She purchased a new KIA Telluride. She liked the car a lot. She was given an $80,000 a year job as Rebecca’s executive secretary. Rebecca would pay payroll taxes and Mary would eventually collect Social Security. In the past, Mary had always worked for cash in the underground economy.

            In a move they considered ironic and funny, they named the non-profit Air Safety Inc. Rebecca was going to hire an attorney to incorporate as a non-profit. She gave Mary, her first employee, a credit card and $150,000 in cash. The cash was to pay off assembly line workers. Then Rebecca decided she wouldn’t incorporate.

She didn’t like the government; why incorporate? But she and Mary did have credit cards made with Air Safety Inc. stamped on them. Rebecca thought that was pretty cool. They joked it would be even more amazing with a burning Boeing 777 dropping from the sky.

            Mary considered running off with the car and the cash right from the start, but then considered that perhaps she could do better. It would be nice to run off with $150,000 but what if she could get closer to the entire one million dollars?

            Mary’s first trip was to Seattle. She began hanging out in a cafe across the street from Boeing’s airplane factory. She met a man, talked to him about working there. He liked his job, liked the pay, liked his wife and new baby. Mary didn’t think him a good candidate.

            In the afternoon, before the evening shift started, she thought she had her candidate. He was a little overweight, with unkempt hair and a scraggly beard. Clothes that he’d worked in a few days without washing. She went up to his table.

            “May I join you?” she said.

            He looked up, paused a minute, then said OK. He said his name was Doug.

            “I was just wondering if this is a good place to work,” she said, nodding to the Boeing plant across the street.

            “I drill holes all day to attach airplane seats. What do you think?”

            She laughed. “Well, I just need a decent job.”

            “I don’t make enough,” Doug said. “I party too much, so I don’t know what job I could get to support that. I make it work. I didn’t like school, either.”

            “Well, maybe you’d like to supplement your income a little.”

            “What do you mean?” He had been eating a hamburger and fries, but stopped for a moment when she sat down. He began eating again as if disregarding her.

            “I work for an environmental group. We pay people to make little mistakes, make it seem as though flying is not as safe as it used to be,” Mary said. “When airlines have little problems, it makes people not want to fly.” He kept eating. There was a long silence.

            “They’re people who check my work,” Doug said. His mouth was full.

            “Yeah, but they can’t catch everything,” Mary said.

            “You wouldn’t want an airplane to go down, would ya?”

            “Well, you know, it’s mostly rich people who are flying. They’re burning millions of gallons of fuel every day.”

            “Yer talking some pretty serious shit, law wise,” he said.

            “That’s why it pays so well. I give you $10,000 in cash, and you do what you can. It’s up to you. If a Boeing plane made in Seattle goes down, I find you and give you $50,000 in cash.”

            Doug looked up, stopped eating and chewing. Mary thought he looked interested. He looked alert for the first time.

            “I have to get your name, address and telephone number,” Mary said. “You can’t tell anyone. Then you do what you can. Maybe in three months, I come back and give you another $10,000. Air Environmental is an underground operation. We don’t want anyone to know what we do.”

            “If I say yes, you’re just going to give me $10,000?” he said.

            She slid an envelope with a hundred $100 bills over the table. “Welcome to the team.”

Chapter 10

            Mary had a new, paid-off car, and now $10,000 in cash. She didn’t plan to tell Rebecca Doug had signed on for $10,000 instead of $20,000. Mary checked into a nice hotel. If she was going to do this work, Rebecca was going to pay the tab. Pay the tab and provide her with a nice life.

            That night, after dinner and several drinks in the hotel restaurant, she went up to her room and tried to watch television. When she went to bed, she was unable to sleep. She was too drunk to think and was considering how much trouble she could get in. But also, since Mary was distributing cash, she could paint a little different picture about what she was doing. She could say she signed up three people, make up two bogus profiles, and pocket $50,000 cash this trip. Two $20,000 bogus profiles plus Doug’s $10,000.

            She still wasn’t asleep and it was 3 in the morning. Doug told her he drilled holes for installing chairs. She decided it was unlikely he was going to kill anyone. Mary slept after that.

            Rebecca texted Mary in the morning.

            Mary texted back that she had done OK. “Remember, we can’t talk or text. There could be ears or eyes on a smart phone.”

            Mary remained in Seattle two more days, then drove back to Portland. She went home, unpacked, and then arrived at Rebecca’s about 1 p.m. She had doctored her notebook. She wrote down three names, addresses and telephone numbers. She wrote short profiles.

            About Doug, she wrote: Contact is five-foot-8, 200 pounds. Shaggy hair and brushy beard, black hair. White male. Vital information: Doug West, 3434 Twinlakes St., Seattle. Phone: 206 555-2080. He appeared hung over although it was 3 in the afternoon. Dislikes his job and was not complimentary about Boeing. Admits to drinking too much and using marijuana and cocaine. Negotiated from $10,000 to $20,000. $50,000 for an airliner gone down from Seattle plant seemed to cinch the deal. Single, no children. Not well dressed.

            Mary had two other names, made up, and phony profiles. If Rebecca tried the telephone numbers, Mary would be found out unless Rebecca happened to call Doug. Mary reminded Rebecca they didn’t want her personal number tied to any of the recruits.

            After reading the three profiles, Rebecca got out some marijuana and they got stoned. Rebecca asked how Mary approached people.

            “Let me tell you, I was nervous, OK? I found a restaurant across from the factory. I talked to 30 people who worked there over five days (she only talked to five people). I’d say I might apply for a job there and could I ask them questions. One of them really liked working for Boeing, so I didn’t tell him the deal. Another had a family and seemed a real straight arrow, so I didn’t discuss what we were doing. The third one came off as a super-patriotic guy. Someone who might even turn me in, so of course he was out.”

            “That is so interesting,” Rebecca said, obviously excited and wishing she could do some recruiting. “It seems like you have to talk to about 10 people to get one recruit.

            “I’ve been thinking about this a lot. You know, I think we’re doing the right thing. Some people may get hurt, but we’ve got to stop people from flying all over the planet, burning billions of gallons of fuel. Your contribution is important.”

            “People are eventually going to get killed,” Mary said.

            “I know,” Rebecca said. “They’ll be martyrs to the cause.”

            “Well, it can be nerve racking to think about, what I’m doing.”

            “Mary, I’ve been working too, while you were gone,” Rebecca said. “I found a company in LA that remodels those jets celebrities fly on, Specialty Aircraft. If a few California politicians or Hollywood stars go down, that won’t be a big loss, will it? But it’ll be bigtime news and anyway it’s not like anybody’s making great movies right now anyway.” They both laughed, because they were stoned and it was a bitchy joke. “Hey, Hollywood big shot, make a frickin decent movie and we’ll let you live,” Rebecca said.

            “It’s not right that a few individuals can burn more fossil fuels in a day than civilization has burned in 1,000 years,” Rebecca added.

             “I’ll try going out again,” Mary said. “I don’t think I’m being paid enough for the risks I’m taking. Just saying.”

            “What if we bumped your salary to $100,000?”

            “That would be better,” she said. “Give me a few days, then I’ll drive to Los Angeles. Specialty Aircrafts, huh?” She noticed Rebecca had hired a new maid. She was not cute and didn’t get to sit around getting stoned with Rebecca. That made Mary happy. Well, maybe. The maid gig had been pretty easy. Easier than the Air Environmental bullshit.

            Once she was in Los Angeles, Mary drove around neighborhoods and wrote down addresses. She made up some phone numbers and profiles. She checked into a nice hotel and ordered room service. She liked the perks of the job, but she was nervous about what she was doing. She feared the consequences of a police investigation but also the possibility of people killed in an airplane accident. That was something Mary might not be able to live with. It wasn’t easy to rationalize. She might be charged with murder, or terrorism; she didn’t know for sure which one.

            The next day, feeling better, Mary decided to try recruiting again for Air Environmental. After all, she’d already convinced one factory worker. The fake profiles were fine, but she knew she had to find at least a few desperados to keep the scam going. She wondered how much of Rebecca’s million dollars she could get before she chickened out at Air Environmental and ditched the whole idea.

            Mary got coffee at a restaurant across from the Specialty Aircraft factory and saw a man, Hispanic, with blurry eyes and a day of stubble growth. Perfect. He was hung over and waiting for the early shift. She approached him. He allowed her to sit with him on the premise she was considering applying for a job.

            “You look like you’ve fallen on hard times,” she said.

            He shrugged his shoulders.

            “It looks like you could benefit from a little easy income.”

            “Who couldn’t?” he said.

            “I represent an environmental group. We pay people to make a few mistakes, not tighten some bolts, stuff like that, to discourage the flying public.”

            The man sat up straight. He’d finished his breakfast and coffee. “Are you insane?” he shouted. “Loosen some bolts, cause an airplane accident? You think I’m a murderer?”
            Mary stood up. “Hold on,” she said, trying to think of a way to settle him down.

            “I sat up with a sick baby last night, didn’t sleep a wink. I have a wife. I like having a good-paying job.”

            Mary knew immediately she’d been wrong about this one. He wasn’t an alcoholic but had had a bad night. Now he stood up, and he was getting warmed up as well.

            “I’m a patriot,” he said in a loud, proud voice. “I’ve taken the citizenship test and they had a ceremony. I can vote. I’m offended you ask me to sabotage an airliner.” People at other tables could hear the man talking.

            “It was a joke,” Mary said, giving him a weak smile. She headed for the door, trying to walk and not run. People in the cafe were looking at them. Mary knew she was in trouble. He paused a moment, thinking, then followed her.

            Once on the sidewalk, she started running, but he ran as well. She jumped in the car and he saw her. Damn. He quickly memorized the car, color and license plate number. Mary went to the hotel, quickly packed a bag and left LA for Portland.

Chapter 11

            The Portland police received a call from the FBI, asking for help to stake out Mary’s home. They wanted police to follow her for a day, figure out who she was working for. They had already determined Mary didn’t have any money herself. Leanne’s boss Robert Nilson said he wasn’t sure how interested the FBI was, but he was interested.

            Chief detective Nilson told Leanne to stake out Mary’s house the next morning. As expected, Mary drove all night and most of the day to get home. She was tired but nervous. After she unpacked, Mary took all the money Rebecca had entrusted her with, $100,000 this time, plus the $50,000 she had already scammed off Rebecca, and went to a bank. She kept $10,000 cash, and put $140,000 in a bank safety deposit box. She drove to Rebecca’s house. It was late afternoon.

            Leanne phoned her boss at the police department. “I’m in front of a very nice house. I suspect this is where the money comes from. The suspect has already been to a bank, maybe to rent a safety deposit box. They’re both in the house at this moment. I can go in and arrest them on suspicion. Wrap it up quick before the rats all scurry,” she said.

            “Do it,” Robert said. “I’m sending patrolmen for backup, and I’ll call the FBI.”

            Leanne was wearing a Title Nine turquoise Speed Racer Tunic Dress, Nike shoes and a Columbia Sportswear charcoal fleece sweater jacket. She went to the door.

            Rebecca, who had not yet heard the report from Mary about the patriot at Specialty Aircraft, opened the door. Mary’s heart sank. “Portland police,” Leanne said, showing her badge.

            “Come up to my office,” Rebecca said. Mary followed the two reluctantly. They went up a circular staircase.

            “You have a beautiful home,” Leanne said. She was being friendly and it was a beautiful home. Leanne wondered how cool it would be to have a circular staircase, but her house was not nearly as large as this one.

            Mary wondered if Rebecca had a firearm in the desk drawer. She remembered Rebecca had helped Michael, a member of the Monkey Wrench Gang, shoot traffic-monitoring cameras off street-light poles and wires. Then Mary began to think of ways to escape the office.

            The office was on the second floor. There was a short roof behind a window in the office. Mary had cleaned there, and knew the window opened and the screen could easily be pushed out.

            Rebecca sat at her desk. Leanne and Mary sat in chairs in front of the desk. The window was behind the desk. Rebecca had to hide some marijuana she had laid out to smoke with Mary. She stuck it in a drawer. Leanne saw it but didn’t say anything.

            “The police and the FBI will be here shortly,” Leanne said. “I think you two will be charged with attempted sabotage, an act of terrorism, though I don’t know that for sure.”

            “What evidence do you have? Do you have a search warrant?” Rebecca said.

            “A good citizen at a company called Specialty Aircraft in Los Angeles said he was asked to sabotage planes,” Leanne said. “He reported it to the FBI in LA. I’m here to make sure no one destroys any evidence. We can get a search warrant OK’d today. Any time we want, really. We’ll look at your computer, financial records, maybe that notebook on your desk.”

            The notebook on the desk had the profiles Mary had written. Mary had heard enough. She got up casually, opened the window. “It’s stuffy in here,” she said. Then she pushed open the screen, stepped onto the roof, hung onto the gutter and dropped to the ground. She took off running.

            “Good thing I can run,” Leanne said, making sure her Beretta 9 was in her shoulder holster. “I’m always running on this job it seems.” She smiled. Rebecca had a questioning expression on her face.

            Leanne stepped out the window, crossed the roof, hung on the gutter and dropped to the ground. She looked up at the gutter; it was shiny, pounded copper. “I like that,” Leanne said. “It looks very nice” Leanne headed for the back gate. She looked back. She liked the look polished copper gutters and drains gave the house, though she was sure it was quite expensive.

            Leanne saw Mary running through a path in a vacant lot behind the house. She started running at a good pace. She saw Mary look back. When Mary got to the sidewalk, she turned right. Leanne lost sight of her. Leanne couldn’t see Mary from the sidewalk because of a stand of trees, but soon Leanne arrived at a street intersection.

            Mary saw a man with a car driving down the street and stopped him, waving her thumb at him as if hitchhiking. It was a Prius and Mary laughed. She remembered Rebecca lamenting that Prius owners were the worst, smug because they thought they were saving the world.

            The man in the Prius stopped and Mary stopped running. “I’ll give you $1,000 to drive me away from here,” Mary said.

            The man was young, Mary was good looking and he was interested in getting to know her, ask her out. The circumstances were questionable, though. He saw a dozen cops a block away at a house. Then he saw Leanne, first in the intersection, then running his way. He could see a gun in a holster and assumed she was a cop.

            Leanne was close now. Mary’s lungs burned from running so hard. She was wet with sweat and the muscles in her hips hurt. She was still breathing hard.

            “We have to go right now,” Mary said through the passenger’s window. She stepped into the car without being asked.

            The man didn’t see Leanne as a threat to his safety, but something was going on and the police were all over. He hesitated, not wanting to do the wrong thing.

            Leanne got to the car. She was fresh while Mary was still breathing hard. Leanne ordered Mary out of the car. “Hands on the roof,” she said, frisking her.

            Leanne pulled Mary’s arms back and handcuffed her.

            The man, surprised, stepped out of the car. “Everything OK?” he said.

            “It is now,” Leanne said. She could see police in front of Rebecca’s house less than a block away. She flipped open her badge to show him she was with the police.

            The man said, “I was on my way to work. May I go?”

            “Yes, don’t be late,” she said, smiling at him as he got in the Prius and drove away.

            Leanne walked Mary to the house. Rebecca came out in handcuffs. A man from the FBI, wearing a suit and white shirt, watched. “You’re Leanne Shiff, aren’t you?”

            She nodded. “I’m special agent Merrill Jenkins, FBI. I’ve heard about you. Is her brother an Olympic runner or anything?”

            Leanne laughed. “No. I would’ve run her down in about another hundred yards,” she said. This line would be repeated for some time in law enforcement circle whenever someone talked about Leanne.

Chapter 12

            Gary Bridge, as a young boy, was searching for something. Turns out it wasn’t baseball, model rockets or Risk, the board game where one takes over the world. It was sparrow falcons. He read a story, a small book, about people using falcons to hunt. Then he found an ancient text on the care and training of predatory birds, written in the late 1800s. It met all his boyhood needs.

            He saw a picture in a magazine of a luxury airliner full of hawks and sheiks. Falconry was popular in the Middle East and Europe when he was a boy. He found a falcon’s nest in a woodpecker hole in a pine tree and began looking in on the brood. Hey, he was thinking, this is getting good.

            He went out that next spring and found another falcon nest. The nest was up in a tree, maybe 50 feet, but he climbed the tree despite the fact it was scary. He reached into the nest. The five chicks bit and scratched him, but he wouldn’t use a glove because he didn’t want to hurt the young falcons. He had to know just how much strength to use in snatching a bird from the nest. He put the young bird he selected in his otherwise empty backpack and started down the tree.

            As expected, he was pecked and scratched as he raided the nest. On the way down, the mother and father dive-bombed him. It hurt when they hit. They used their talons as a fist. They shrieked. That doesn’t sound so bad but it was terrifying at the time. It was terrifying when it was happening to you. He was amazed at the strength of the two birds diving on him, and the attack freaked him out, but he didn’t fall out of the tree.

            He took the falcon home, put it in a coop he’d built. It had a perch as well. Then, he began to feed it by hand. He began scouring the Portland suburb where he lived for animals and birds of all kinds, fur or feathers. He lived in rural, undeveloped East Multnomah County. He would cut up birds or rabbits into strips of meat and feed the sparrow falcon. He became diligent in getting the bird food, more responsible than he had ever been in his studies at school.

            He learned to work leather and made a hood, jesses and leashes. He bought a pair of thick, leather gloves. In the day, he would take the falcon out and let it fly on a thin rope. He taught him to hunt following procedures he learned in that old book. He was 11 years old. The sparrow hawk was a quick learner and by summer Gary was taking the bird hunting in fields and woods near where he lived.

            In the late fall, he turned the bird loose. He caught, trained and lived with falcons the next two summers. He camped, built fires and hunted. He was Mother Nature’s child, living outside as much as he could and feeding the predator birds raw meat. School and other responsibilities began to impose on him, but there was always a wildness in him. Gary Bridge was white, spent his last six years of school in Northeast Portland’s primarily black neighborhood, and often had to fight. His friends never knew why he was so fearless in fights, but he was.

            As a young man, he began fixing up houses and selling them. Interestingly he made friends with many of his old adversaries. He did OK in business at first, but then became wildly successful. He was a one-man real estate and construction firm and made many friends. People liked doing business with him; he was honest and built excellent homes.

            His hobby as an adult was target shooting. He had a .45 caliber Kimber LW Shadow and a .44 caliber Glock. If one asked him why he had a 45, he would say, “Because they don’t have a 46.” It was an old joke.

Many of his friends in later life were alarmed at his habit of keeping loaded guns in the house. When children were at his house, he put the guns up, but otherwise one gun sat on the couch and another on the kitchen table. Unbeknownst to even his closest friends, he had loaded guns hidden throughout the house.

            He told people who visited his house if they found a gun, assume it was loaded. When people complained about loaded guns around the house, Gary Bridge reminded him or her if someone broke into the house, he would need the guns immediately. He would not have time to take them out of the safe, and he would not have time to load ammunition magazines.

             Among those who nagged him was a long-time, younger friend Julie Coln. Late in life, when he was in his 80s, he lived by himself in a modest home in a nice neighborhood in east Portland. He was a victim of the snatch-and-run club.

            One summer day in 2013 a group of six friends, involved individually in many home burglaries and jokingly called the snatch-and-run club, decided to go out together, in force. It was a new way to do armed burglary. They thought it would yield greater gains due to the fear factor, the dynamic of sudden, overwhelming force.

            They were all armed, from cheap 22s to well-made 9mm semiautomatics. Deke, a big white guy, stole a white Ford van. They began robbing homes at 2 a.m. First up was the West Hills home of Robert Barnes. The six men, all wearing bandanas over their faces and holding handguns, broke into the house using a sledge hammer.

The secret to most house burglaries is that people’s decorative front door will not hold up to a sledge hammer; the locks are set in flimsy door frames. Members of the gang raced up the stairs to the couple’s bedroom. Mrs. Barnes was quick to give up her jewelry. The children, a boy 12 and a girl 10, were rounded up and were of course terrified. Mr. Barnes yielded up a gold watch and $287.

            Big Curtis, a black man, was certain they had more. He put the semiautomatic he carried on the women’s kneecap and said, “I’ll bet there’s more. I’m going to count to three.”

            “There’s a safe in Bob’s office and that painting over there is a Rembrandt.” She pointed to a black and white drawing on the wall. “That didn’t take long,” Big Curtis said.

            No one in the crew knew what a Rembrandt was, but it must be valuable because the woman mentioned it right away. Danny, a slender black man with a natural smile, and the least aggressive member of the crew, put the painting in a pizza box and took it to the white van. The safe, a wall safe behind a painting in Bob Barnes’s office, yielded a more conventional prize. Three one-kilo gold bars, several thousand dollars in cash and three uncut diamonds. The Barnes family was tied up with duct tape but left unharmed.

            Excited by this early success, the men moved on to the home of Jerry Boylan in the Hollywood district. Jerry Boylan had had a successful career in the construction business. His two adult children were gone from home, and his wife of 51 years had died and left him to live alone. He was able to care for himself, being in good health, and played poker once a week with a group of men. Otherwise he lived a sedate life, walking the dog twice a day, chatting with neighbors, preparing and eating small, nutritious meals.

            The gang busted into his house in the same way, with a sledgehammer and six young men holding handguns, wearing cowboy bandanas and demanding loot. “You can have whatever you find,” Jerry said. He was wearing pajamas and had put on glasses. “My late wife’s jewelry was given to my daughter in California. There’s $400 in the desk, top left drawer.”

            Deke, in jeans and a white t-shirt, found a display of Western guns in Jerry’s office. He took Jerry from his bedroom into the office,

            “What are these worth?” Deke said.

            Jerry, once a hearty man, was not overweight but was not as solid as he had been as a young man. He knew Deke could easily have given him a beat down. He would have to take it if it came.

            “The guns look cool, and they are worth a little money, but not as much as you think,” Jerry said.

            One gun was a Remington pocket revolver with pearl handles and a shiny nickel finish with decorative engraving. A Civil War-era gun with a cartridge cylinder looked interesting. There was a double-action Colt revolver, one of the guns that supposedly had “won the West.”

            “You might get a thousand for each one of these, but the truth is you might get considerably less. That Civil War gun is in good condition, but you can’t prove it was used during the Civil War so it’s not that valuable. The same with the other guns. They’re in good condition, but they aren’t guns you’d take out to the range and there’s no recorded history on them. Say if a gun was used by Jessie James, well, then you’d have something.”

            “You should have some rare guns,” Big Curtis joked. Jerry laughed. Why not?

            “Oh, but we’ll still take them,” Deke said. “Do you have any Rembrandts?”

            Jerry looked at him funny. He knew the men he played poker with were going to get a kick out of that one, if he lived, but he shook his head no.

            Jerry, like the Barnes family before him, was wrapped with duct tape and left. The men were getting sloppy with their bandanas. Also, because they talked to people – they had let their guard down – thus they may not have considered the people they were joking with might someday be a witness at a trial and send them to prison.

            About 4 a.m. the gang hit the home of Rence Penney in the nice neighborhood of Sunnyside, at the top of the hill. The gang found some nice silverware, but it was silver plated, not silver all the way through. Joey Woods, a white man and not considered the smartest of the bunch, was excited. “Hey, silver,” he said.

            “Dumb shit, silver plated,” Deke said.

            Joey took it to the van anyway, not understanding what Deke was saying.

            Dale Dior, a white man, looked at photographs of buffalo in the hallway. They were large photographs in nice frames. Dale was fascinated with the pictures of buffalo in the wild. He asked Rence’s wife, Joyce, if they were valuable.

            “I think they’re really nice photographs,” Joyce said. “But you couldn’t sell them for much.”

            “I like them, anyway,” Dale said. “Say, do you have any Rembrandts?”

            “I like his art,” Joyce said. “We saw several Rembrandts at the Louvre last summer. But no, we don’t have any valuable art.”

            “I should go see them sometime,” Dale said. “What’s the Louvre?”

            Joyce had about $2,000 she called her gambling stash. Joanne Penney, Rence’s daughter, was in the home and she had a computer, in a sturdy case, the boys found compelling. Like the computer a person in the military would use, in a heavy duty case. She also had $200 in cash. Rence had a .380-caliber Beretta they were excited to find. Bennie, a young black man, just 18, found the gun and a box of bullets.

            They wrapped the Penneys up with duct tape. Overall, it was the amount of gold and cash they had found at the Barnes home that made the evening worthwhile.

            “We’ll do one more,” Big Curtis said. It was 5 a.m. Big Curtis pulled out a glass pipe and a baggie of methamphetamine rocks. “This will get us back up,” he said.

            They went back to Portland to an east-side neighborhood. The sun was barely creeping up. The yard in front of Gary Bridge’s house had been mowed the day before. It was a simple house, small but well done. The big, nice grass yard, recently mowed, made it inviting on what might be the cool morning of a hot day. The lawn looked like a cool, inviting carpet. Big Curtis and Deke went to the front door.

            Gary Bridge, 81 and slender, was making coffee in the kitchen. In the summers, since being retired, he slept well enough but always woke up at first light. A natural-gas fire was lit under the water for his coffee. He had ground some coffee beans and put them in a French press, which would produce two fine cups of coffee, all he would need to start his day.

            Gary looked out to the street and saw six men, all with firearms, getting out of a white van in the street in front of his house. He picked up the Kimber 45 off the kitchen table.

            Deke took one look at the front door and knew the sledge hammer was not going to do it. In front of the decorative, wood front door was a locked door with steel bars. The only way to get through that was with a blow torch. “Knock on the door,” Big Curtis said.

              Gary Bridge saw someone walking on the porch with a handgun. He heard the knock on the door. He knew the men out there had guns. He opened the door and they were hiding the guns behind their backs. “Yes?” said Gary.

            The moment the door fully opened he shot both men, one shot each with a bullet to the chest leaving them with rasping, bleeding chest wounds.

            He shut the front door. The security door in front with the steel bars had remained locked; he shot through the bars.

            The man on the porch, only about 10 feet away from the two men laying in front of the door, looked in the window, attempting to see inside and Gary shot him as well. His name was Dale Dior, the dumb kid who had dropped out of high school and didn’t know the Louvre was a museum in Paris. Mrs. Penney later said she thought him likeable because he’d asked about the pictures of buffalo. He dropped a 9mm semiautomatic when he fell on the porch.

            “That’s three without hardly trying,” Gary said, laughing a little.

            Gary Bridge hurried to the kitchen to make sure no one was coming in the back. There wasn’t a steel-barred door in back. He saw Danny. Danny was sent to the back so that no one would escape the house and alert the police. He was considered the least aggressive of the home invaders; he wouldn’t have shot anyone. Gary swung the back door open and shot him. It was about a 20-foot shot and it was obviously a lung shot. Danny was coughing up blood, it seemed, even before he hit the ground.

            A white man ran from behind a tree and Gary took three shots at him, bang, bang, bang. One shot nicked his buttock, the second caught his arm and the third hit the mark. It blew away most of his neck. He might have lived if he had stayed behind the tree, where he was pretty well hidden. His name was Joey Woods.

            Gary went to his living room and picked up the Glock 44 from off the couch. Being prepared had paid off for him. He had killed several armed men who were coming to rob him. He had seven bullets in the Kimber.

Now he had another gun with a full clip, 17 bullets. He looked in front and didn’t see anyone. Three dead men were on the front porch. He went to the kitchen and didn’t see anyone else in the backyard. There was the dead man in his small backyard and the man who had run on the side of his house and was now dead. He was more in the backyard than the side yard.

            Gary Bridge wondered if he was safe. When he was safe, he should call the police, although surely someone had done that already. There had been a lot of shooting and that Kimber 45 was loud. Well, wait till they heard the Glock 44. He smiled to himself.

            Bennie Cooks, a good-looking young black man, stood looking in a side window. The sun was just coming up directly behind him and it was quiet. Bennie found the sound of the shootings quite loud. The quiet was nice. The summer morning was peaceful all of a sudden. The light even and soft.

             He was five-foot-10, well built, and had been popular in school. He hadn’t scouted out everything, but he was pretty sure several of his friends were dead or dying. He was carrying the 380 Berretta they had taken from the Penney home; it was better than his antique 22. His adrenaline had been up for some time, but realizing everything had gone to hell made him suddenly quite sad or depressed or something. Maybe tired, though he had smoked the pipe with Big Curtis and the rest of them.

            Bennie Cooks had liked school. He wondered why he had given up on it. He should jump in the van and go. He realized these were disparate thoughts.

            Then, Bennie Cooks saw Gary Bridge pick up the Glock 44 from off the couch. His thought was that the old white man had shot so many bullets he had to get a fresh gun, which was indeed the truth. Bennie saw the white man moving toward the side window, where he was standing. The sun was shining in through the window so Gary likely could not see out the window, or not see out of it completely. But when he got to the window, maybe Gary’d be able to see fine. It would depend on the light and the reflection in the glass.

            Bennie shot several times, instantly regretted it, dropped the gun, ran to the van, heard a police siren and drove off. “Jesus, that was close,” Bennie said. He realized his five friends were likely all dead and now he had committed a murder.

Chapter 13

            Leanne arrived on the scene early, before any of the bodies had been picked up. She saw two men in front of the door, one in front of the window, all on the porch. She went round the back and saw two more, went in the house through the back door and saw Gary Bridge. He had been hit a couple of places, but one bullet was in his forehead, probably the kill shot. The house was nice, the yard well maintained, the old man dapper.

            It was a nice, sunny day. It wasn’t even 6 a.m. The policeman in front was a man she knew, Weather Williams, his real name.

            “Weather, it looks to me like this old, white guy shot five young guys trying to break into his house,” Leanne said.

            “Yes, that was my impression. We’ve been getting reports of other home robberies in the early morning hours,” Weather said. “We don’t know a lot yet, but maybe this wasn’t the only house targeted.”

            “But someone got the old guy, in the end, is that what you’re thinking?” Leanne said.

            Weather nodded. “I guess a guy’s luck can only hold for so long. He was 81, that’s pretty good, gunning down five young men at that age.”

            “Maybe he had 20 years left, then it wasn’t so lucky,” Leanne said.

            “It’s all in the perspective,” Weather said. “All I know for sure is that the last young man is going to be charged with murder instead of armed robbery. He’ll get 30 years if he gets a day. Seeing how young these other guys are, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s young, too.”

            “Easy money, that’s what they always think,” Leanne said.

            It was a busy day for the Portland police. Forensics teams and detectives had to go to four locations. Witness accounts quickly tied all the robberies together. The two dead black men and the three dead white men were identified. The white Ford van was not found, and Bennie Cooks was missing.

            Leanne Shiff was in a meeting of the detectives later that morning. She and chief detective Robert Nilson would investigate the homicide. All local and state police were asked to look for the white Ford van. Early interviews identified five of the young men who participated in the robberies, pending the final, official identification of the bodies by the families.

            Bennie Cooks had been identified, by a process of elimination, as the one likely to have got away according to members of the families of the deceased. Leanne was asked to interview all family members and friends of Bennie Cooks. And find him.

            At that early stage, any information was important, but the police team seemed to put the basics together pretty quickly. That was Leanne’s opinion, being new to management.

            The list of the dead men, as put together by the police:

Deke Karlowski, white, 30, 6-1 220, an all-state high school football player from southern Oregon. He dropped out of college after one semester due to poor grades. Charged with stealing car parts (catalytic converters). Later convicted for stealing cars and served three years in prison.

Curtis Robinson, black, 31, 6-4 260, known for years as Big Curtis. Driving while intoxicated. Domestic violence. Served three years in prison for armed home robberies.

Danny Washington, black, 20, 5-7 130, convicted of marijuana possession with intent to distribute. DUI.

Joey Woods, white, 22, 5-10 180, convicted of cocaine possession with intent to distribute. Served one year in prison.  

Dale Dior, white, 21, 5-8 160. DUI. Drug charges dismissed twice due to insufficient evidence.

            A different detective was assigned to each of the five men. The van was still missing. All the home owners had been interviewed, and now detectives would identify bodies at the coroner’s office with family members. They would find out what they could about the five men from interviews with family and friends, the ones they hadn’t talked to yet.

            Chief detective Robert Nilson was in charge of coordinating all aspects of the robberies, and he wanted Leanne to focus on finding the van, and the Rembrandt which was valued at $1 million, and to bring in Bennie Cooks.

            Leanne’s first interview was with Jo Cooks, Bennie’s mother. Jo was a pretty woman and when Leanne saw the picture of Bennie, a school picture, she was struck by how handsome he was. His mother agreed.

            “I tried to tell him he had all the potential in the world,” Jo said. He was good looking. He was an athlete. He was smart about things he was interested in. I guess that’s true of most people.”

            In the past 10 years, Jo had worked for the city of Portland in sign-code enforcement, investigating and negotiating advertising-sign regulations. Jo made good money and was elevating her style of living. Jo told Leanne it had been hard for a while, though, when Bennie was young. She said the circle of Bennie’s friends was a crew of unbelievably bad influences and non-existent values. She said she knew Big Curtis and he was without redeeming qualities.

            Jo cooperated with the investigation. When Leanne told her about the last robbery and murder, Jo felt her son was doomed. She cried a while before getting it together. She told Leanne about Bennie’s girlfriend, Vivian Deresa, and his rooming with Danny Washington in a small house in Danny’s parents’ yard, originally a rental behind the big but old house. Leanne said police would have to search everyone’s residences, and Jo agreed. The police searched Jo’s house but did not find the white van, the stolen articles, or Bennie.

            Leanne gave Jo one of her business cards. They both worked for the city of Portland, and should be friends, Leanne said. Leanne liked business cards and gave them out all the time when she was on duty. Sometimes she imagined that whenever a scheme was hatched in Portland, someone would give her a call. Because they had a card.

            The interview made Leanne sad. A young, handsome boy had messed up his life. His mother knew it, and her only wish was that he not be shot by a swat team. Leanne wanted to cry once she was alone in the 4Runner. She decided instead to put on her hard face. “When you rob people in their homes, you’re a stupid criminal. Some mistakes can be overcome. Murder’s not one of them.”

            She drove to the apartment of Vivian Deresa. No tears shed.

            Leanne immediately liked Vivian. She was a high school senior, pretty with a cute figure. She seemed to have a lot of energy. “I told Bennie not to hang out with Big Curtis. He is a mean dude, can be a bully. He’s not smart.

            “I hated that snatch-and-run club stuff. It was stupid. Some boys got together to talk about home robbery, began comparing notes and discussing how to do it, and someone came up with the snatch-and-run club. They got the idea to go out together. Greater numbers mean more intimidation, maybe more loot.

            “I’m surprised Bennie would shoot some homeowner, but I have no doubt he was along and waving a gun about. Whatever happened, it’s his tough luck now.”

            Vivian agreed to having her mother’s apartment searched. No items from the robbery were there. Leanne thought about the robberies while they searched Vivian’s mother’s apartment. Six boys in the prime of life, waving guns and wearing bandanas, nothing but fear and problems could come from all that.

            Leanne also had the small rental house Bennie and Danny shared searched. No items from the robbery were found. No clue where Bennie might be. The next day the van was found. It was stolen from a plumbing company and left in an east-side neighborhood.

            Bennie, hiding in a house used as a bed and breakfast at the Oregon coast, was clean and warm. He didn’t turn on any lights, because he had broken the door entering and he didn’t want anyone to notice the house was occupied. Bennie had borrowed a car from a friend, and gave his friend a gold bar in return worth $3,106.

            He found a bathrobe and washed his clothes at the rental house, including underwear and socks. Now he was wearing everything clean. He’d had a shower. He had purchased some sandwiches and ate them. He would only go out at night in the dark because he was afraid of being recognized. He didn’t know anyone in Seaside, a coastal town popular with tourists, and was lonely. The little of life he had lived on the run made it hard to imagine doing it for a lifetime. It didn’t seem possible. He was depressed. He was worried the owner of the rental house would come over and find him.

It was stupid to kill someone when he simply could have run off. After a time, people would forget the robberies.

            Leanne wrote reports on all her conversations. She read other people’s reports. She tried to put the entire thing together. She felt she could trace Bennie’s steps all through the early morning hours, and the shooting, but how to know where to find Bennie now. She was at a dead end.

            She had seen the sign-compliance office sign in the Portland City Building, and stopped by to see if Jo was in the office. She was.

            “You’re here. It’s like an answer to my prayer,” Jo said.

            “What’s going on?” Leanne said.

            “Bennie called me, here at work, just now. He figured the call wouldn’t be traced. He’s in Seaside, broke into a bed and breakfast at 1313 Front Street. He told me he’s OK, just trying to wait till things settle down. He said he loved me and was sorry.”

            “I’ll have to go find him,” Leanne said.

            “Will you do me a favor?” Jo said. “Please don’t shoot him. Even if he’s in prison for 30 years, at least he’d still be alive.”

            “I don’t think I’ll have to shoot your son,” Leanne said.

            She went to Robert Nilson’s office at the police station. He said he would call Seaside police to ask for support. Nilson offered to send in the Oregon State Police swat team, but Leanne said she didn’t think they would be needed.

            She started for Seaside, which took a little more than two hours from downtown Portland. She went to the police station in Seaside. She liked the young police chief and the policemen. She talked to them and asked them not to be too quick off the trigger. She explained the situation and they arrived at the bed and breakfast rental house about 7 p.m. It was beginning to get dark, but there would still be enough light for another hour.

            Leanne told the police if Bennie escapes, she’d like to try to talk him into coming in. When they drove up to the house, from the back, Bennie dashed out the front on the beach side. Only 50 yards away was a concrete basketball court, basket, and about 20 boys and girls playing or watching basketball. Leanne walked through the yard, onto the sand and onto the court. A policeman and police woman shadowed her. Bennie was hiding behind the crowd. He looked at her as she made her way toward him and suddenly made a dash for it.

            Leanne took the basketball from a strong-looking boy standing and watching. She launched it, baseball style. The basketball sailed through the air about 50 feet and dropped on Bennie’s feet, sending him to an awkward landing on the deep, sandy beach. The small crowd cheered.

            “Please don’t run anymore,” Leanne shouted. She was holding a pair of handcuffs as she walked up to him.

            “I know your mother, Jo. I told her I wouldn’t shoot you,” Leanne said when she was close to him. “I don’t know everything that occurred the morning of those robberies, but you can’t hide out thinking it’ll go away.” Other people could hear some of the talk, but Leanne wasn’t concerned about that. “You have to face it and then who knows how everything will turn out. Right? You don’t know how things will turn out.”

            Bennie got up, resigned, dusted sand off his clothes. Leanne and Bennie walked past the basketball court, heading to the bed and breakfast. The people on the basketball court were yelling “Good pass, Leanne.” And, “Give that girl an assist.” Leanne waved at them and laughed. They knew her name because someone had seen her police ID. Even Bennie had to smile. It was like Leanne was a celebrity. And, it was a damn good throw.

            The Seaside police had already called the owner of the bed and breakfast rental house. He allowed a police search and most of the items from the robbery were returned. The three uncut diamonds were valued at more than $8,000. The gold bar traded for a car was recovered. The cash in the safe was $9,000 and Bennie had only managed to spend about $200.

            Bennie was made responsible for a bill from a company called Art Restoration Specialists for $2,000 for cleaning tomato paste from a pizza box off the painting by Rembrandt. The Rembrandt was a topic of conversation throughout the criminal investigation.

            Initially a cop called a supervisor, as he was writing his report, and said there was a painting from Rembrandt. The supervisor said to put the value at a million dollars. This was put in the police report.

            Then, two media members did stories, one on TV and one for The Oregonian, listing the price of a Rembrandt painting possibly as high as $20 million to $40 million. This led to many other stories, all talking about the price of Rembrandts. Plus the Portland City Council was making a fuss about how to estimate the value of a piece of art. The mayor told the city council the police were busy investigating a crime and estimating the value of items stolen could be done later. The city council backed off.

            An art recovery specialist for the FBI finally put the value of the print at $2,000.

            Rembrandt, in the 1600s, painted more than 300 landscapes, portraits and still lifes. He also painted many official portraits, which were less valuable. The one owned by the Barnes family was a black and white portrait of a Dutch judge. There was nothing wrong with it, but it was just a portrait of a man employed locally, and not highly valued.

            Some lawmen, like some generals, look to make a reputation for themselves. Leanne liked to make things fun; the profession was grim enough. Leanne got the local newspaper photographer, a pretty 22-year-old woman, Kris True, to take a picture of the local chief of police holding a Rembrandt in front of a pizza box. The chief of police for Seaside was a 31-year-old, slightly pudgy man, considered young but able. The Associated Press used the photograph throughout the country as the story of the snatch-and-run club was wrapped up in the print media. Of course, many people following the story realized it cost as much to restore the painting as it was worth in the first place.

            Jo and Leanne began meeting once a week for coffee. Bennie was sentenced to 30 years for murder. He earned a GED then began teaching other inmates math and English composition. “I’m a lifer, but maybe if someone gets a good job, I keep them out of the life,” Bennie Cooks told his mother.

            “I don’t tell anyone Bennie tutors,” Jo said to Leanne. “It’s our secret. He was convicted of a murder, so I can’t tell people I’m proud of him. But I can tell you, somehow, I’m hopeful for him again. It’s a small consolation. I’m always sad.”

            Leanne was driving by the house of Gary Bridge when she saw a car in the driveway and the front door open. There was a woman there, Julie Coln, a friend of Gary’s. She was about 60, and pretty.

            Leanne introduced herself. She noted the windows had been repaired, the house cleaned up.

            “I felt Gary had a lot of life left in him, so I don’t like the line of thought that his life was about over anyway. Plus, he had money and was enjoying his life. People tell me it’s no big deal, but I’m greatly saddened by the loss. I’m angry and sad.”

            Leanne nodded.

            “He had like 50 siblings, cousins, nephews and nieces, so the money will be put to good use. Still, I don’t like it,” Julie said.

            “I get it,” Leanne said.

            “I’ll tell you the funny thing,” Julie said. “I used to give him hell for having all those loaded guns lying around the house. It turns out he was the only one who fought back. He was vindicated, wasn’t he?”

Chapter 14

            Scott Skillet didn’t like loose ends. He paid the kitchen people, his renters at Ping-pong Palace, two months’ rent and broke the lease agreements. He sold the industrial building for $700,000. He called Duck Chou and said he found money in Tom Wolf’s pocket and wanted to pay off the bet between Duck and Tom. Of course, the money had been found in Aldo’s pocket but Scott couldn’t admit that.

            Duck went along with the fiction. If he confronted Scott, it would confirm Duck knew Scott had killed Aldo. Still, Scott said he found the $20,000 and Duck wanted it. He had put up $10,000 and won $10,000.

            Scott said he would meet him at a street corner near his office, and get him paid. He said he was selling the industrial building and wanted everyone taken care of. Duck got into Scott’s 2005 Toyota Tacoma pickup uneasily, but Scott immediately gave him the money and Duck relaxed.

            “I’ve got to tell you something,” Duck said. “The night Aldo was shot, I looked out the door and saw you putting him in the bed of your pickup. This cop, Leanne, came and interviewed me a second time. She made me nervous, the way she seemed to know I was holding out. I told her what I saw. The first time, I didn’t say anything, but the second time I told her the entire story. I told her I’d opened the door at Ping-pong Palace, looked out, and you were putting Aldo in the pickup bed.”

            “Don’t worry,” Scott said. “I’ve talked to a lawyer about it. I’ve hired a defense lawyer. Since you told two stories, they’ll probably consider you an unreliable witness. There’s no other evidence, so I should be OK.”

            “I’m glad you’re taking this in a reasonable way,” Duck said. “I can’t believe this is all happening. It was Aldo started the whole thing. I knew he held the money. Thank you for giving it back to me.”

            “It’s your money. I saw you win the ping-pong game,” Scott said. “I just had to take care of some other stuff first. I was always going to pay you. You can tell anyone you want the story of beating Tom Wolf in a ping-pong match and earning $10,000. Pretty cool.” He laughed, but he knew at that moment he was going to kill Duck Chou. It was no great loss. He viewed Duck as kind of a loser, with a half-ass business, a girlfriend with no muscle tone and still living at home with his mom and dad. Plus Duck was a witness. Scott kept driving.

            “You can let me out anywhere,” Duck said.

            “Sure, but first I need to show you something.”

            Duck said OK, felt the packet of money in his pocket. Scott turned onto a freeway entrance ramp and drove the speed limit, 65 miles per hour. Duck had missed his opportunity to jump out of the car. Scott turned off I-84 at the Corbett exit, rolled through a stop sign and followed the Columbia River scenic highway. Even at 10 miles per hour, jumping out of the car seemed risky. Duck realized he was thinking of jumping out of a car; he was scared for his life.

            Scott turned onto an isolated road, near a small stream. Harmony Road, Beaver Creek. Duck felt in his pocket for a credit card. He palmed it in his hand. Scott parked the pickup at a turnout. “I want to show you some property I’m going to buy.”

            Duck didn’t believe him, but he was going to leave evidence he was here. When he stepped out of the pickup, he tossed the credit card under the pickup.

            “I’m going down here,” Scott said, standing in the road but pointing at the rough trail entrance on Duck’s side of the pickup.

            “I’m not going down there,” Duck said.

            Scott pulled a .380-caliber Sig Sauer out of a holster tucked in the back of his jeans. His father had left him a lot of guns. He and his father had liked to shoot at a range. He liked the Sig Sauer. It was black with decorative, polished metal on both sides of the slide. The sight had florescent dots that made it easy to aim. The action of the slide was easy.

            “I’ll recant my story,” Duck said.

            “You won’t have to; I told you, you’ll be an unreliable witness. Anyway, the lawyer is handling everything.”

            “Then why pull a gun on me?”
            “I want you to see this cool place I’m going to buy.”

            “Another time,” Duck said.

            “It’s a nice day. I want you to see it.”

            Duck picked up a large rock and threw it at Scott, but it was heavier than he thought and hit the windshield and damaged it beyond repair. The glass was caved in at one place, and cracks radiated throughout the windshield. It seemed to wake Duck up. He suddenly realized this was serious, life and death, and Scott was lying to him to get him down by the stream. Duck felt a charge of energy run through his body.

            Scott didn’t want to shoot Duck this far from the stream. If he did, he’d have to drag the bloody body maybe a hundred yards, leaving a wide trail of blood. Duck, now encouraged by the thrown rock, picked up a large stick. He stayed on his side of the pickup.

            Scott walked around the back of the pickup toward Duck’s side. Duck, moving to the front of the pickup, smashed the right headlight and turn signal with the big stick. Scott put the Sig Sauer in the holster on his lower back. He began to chase Duck around the pickup. Duck smashed the driver’s side door window before Scott got to him. Scott grabbed the stick and tossed it behind him. He put Duck in a headlock and began walking him toward the stream.

            Duck hit him in the stomach, then in the balls, but Scott kept muscling him down toward the stream. Scott was stronger – Duck was thinking much stronger – and Duck was having a hard time breathing.

            As the bank got steeper, toward the stream, Scott shoved him and Duck didn’t have a choice except to run downhill. Duck had been bullied when he was a child. He was overweight and never played sports. He had no experience in wrestling, tackling, even fighting for position under a backboard. His fists had bounced off Scott without seeming to have done any damage. He had been dragged more than 50 yards by the neck. Duck thought it was odd: He was about to die and he regretted never having been in a physical altercation before.

            Duck could hear the creek gurgling and splashing. It sounded beautiful. He wanted to fight but Scott was standing 10 feet uphill. Scott aimed the semiautomatic at his heart.

            “You don’t have to do this,” Duck said. He was in a panic. “I’ve got money. I’ll go away for a while.”

            Scott shot him in the heart. A squirt of blood shot out about five feet.

            In high school biology, Scott learned where the human heart was. Almost all his adult life, when he looked at a person, he imagined where the heart was. Midline and a little left, just below the nipple line. The blood squirted out another four times. This was the first time Scott had seen this and it surprised him.

            Duck was dead, and the crime scene was a bloody mess. Scott carefully walked behind Duck and took the money out of his jacket. He pulled him into the stream without getting too much blood on him. He went in a deep area under some trees, took a rock and put it on Duck’s chest. Scott had lots of experience in rivers. He had spent time looking at water and trying to figure out where the fish might be. He could spot a deep channel without trying. Now Scott felt tired, let down from the fight, and once he was out of Beaver Creek, the adrenaline spent, he sat down.

            In a few minutes, his energy renewed, he considered cleaning up the blood and brushing out footprints, but it was useless. There was blood and footprints all over. A heavy rain wouldn’t help him. Five feet of snow might not erase all this frickin evidence. He walked up the hill. His hope was that no one would go down to the stream at this location for a while. Just as he got to the road, a Ford pickup drove by. Scott didn’t think the driver saw him, but he knew he had to get out of there.

            Driving to Portland on I-84, he relaxed as he formulated a plan. He went to a friend’s garage and asked him to fix the windshield, turn signal, headlight and driver’s side window. His friend gave him a loaner car, a 1964 Ford Falcon. He went home and got his money, a few clothes, and a Russian-made .380 caliber, called the Star. He had yet to get rid of the Sig Sauer.

            He stopped at a grocery store. He knew of a vacated cabin in Corbett, or at least he hoped it was still there. He stopped and threw the Sig Sauer in the Columbia River. It was the same place he had dumped Tom and Aldo’s bodies. Damn, there was a lot to keep track of.

            As a boy, Scott and Bill White used to fish in the area, often by themselves. Bill’s parents owned the little cabin but in recent years had not used it much. Bill’s parents were older, and Bill and his brother were both away in the military. Scott had to break the door jam to get in. Just a thin piece of wood held the lock in place. Scott could even fix it before he left if he could find the right tools.

            The car, the Ford Falcon, was parked in back, out of view from the road. He plugged in the refrigerator but there wasn’t any electricity. Well, he had roughed it before. He thought he might head out of the area, make a run for it. But he had a borrowed car. He didn’t know if the police knew about Duck Chou. He needed to think a little.

Chapter 15

            A tree farmer reported the suspicious Toyota pickup with the broken glass to the sheriff’s office. He provided a license-plate number. A Multnomah County sheriff’s deputy went out to investigate and took Leanne along, knowing she was working on a murder investigation looking into the actions of Scott Skillet. Scott’s name came up when they ran the license plate.

            The deputy, Rodney Tiller, immediately found Duck Chou’s credit card. Rodney and Leanne walked down the trail to the creek. It didn’t take them five minutes to find Duck Chou’s body. Before long, an entire team of police forensics technicians were combing the area, collecting more evidence than would ever be needed. Leanne talked to Duck’s parents, who didn’t know he was missing.

            Now Leanne was interviewing Duck Chou’s girlfriend. Sue Kearns lived in a two-bedroom apartment, only a little furniture, but neat enough. Sue herself was kind of mousy.

            “I think he was kidnapped before he was killed,” Sue said. “After you called, I went down and checked his repair shop. When Duck was done for the day, he turned over the closed sign and turned out the lights. If he just went for coffee, he left the sign on open and left the lights on, just locked the door. When I was there, the lights were on and the sign was turned to open. Only the door was locked, so he hadn’t planned to be gone long.”

            Sue was a small person who appeared soft, though she was not fat. It looked as if she would jiggle from head to toe if a person thumped her belly. She was wearing baggy, unflattering brown slacks and an oversized sweatshirt. Her long, brown hair could’ve used a trim. It had an amazing lack of shine. Leanne wondered if she was trying to be unattractive.

            “What do you do for a living?” Leanne said.

            “I teach junior high math,” she said. “I’m not like the most popular teacher, you know.”

            “Oh, but it’s important to have good math teachers,” Leanne said.

            “Yeah, I guess. Duck treated me like the students treat me. He came over if he wanted company, or was horny, but didn’t want to marry me. He was lazy, too. He was smart, could have been a good computer guy at some big company, but didn’t like to work much.”

            “Yeah, some guys,” Leanne said.

            “I’ll still miss him though, isn’t that funny?”

            “No, I don’t think so. I’m sure you had some good times together.”

            “He told me some stuff that might help you,” Sue Kearns said.

            “Oh really,” Leanne said. “You would be a good friend to Duck if you helped solve the murder.”

            “Duck told me about how he won a bet for $10,000 by winning a ping-pong game against Tom Wolf. See, that’s what I mean about Duck. He wasn’t serious about business. He just used me for sex because I was there. But when Ping-pong Palace opened, he spent hours there. He really cared about ping-pong. Isn’t that stupid?”

            “Go on about the bet,” Leanne said.

            “Well, you know Tom Wolf and Duck had this epic battle, that’s how Duck described it. Aldo Antoni was holding the money. He was the one who made the bet with Duck. Duck won 21 to 18, and Aldo shot Tom inside the building. Duck lied to you about it; I know about that.

            “Duck felt guilty and I told him not to be an idiot, to tell the truth to the police. So, when you interviewed him the second time, that’s when he told about Scott Skillet going outside and shooting Aldo. How he opened the door while Scott was putting Aldo’s body in the back of his pickup.

            “Then, when I heard Duck got killed in Corbett, it really weirded me out. Scott and Bill White used to go fishing in Corbett all the time. Duck grew up with those guys. I remember him telling me. They were always the cool guys, Scott and Bill, who could catch fish. Bill White’s dad had a place up there.”

            “I think you’ve helped me,” Leanne said, thinking for a moment. She nodded to acknowledge Sue had the time line right.

            “I’m sorry for your loss, but if we can sort this out it will be huge. Duck told me about the bet earlier, but this is new information about the cabin in Corbett. Thank you, thank you.”

            “It’s OK,” Sue said. “I keep wondering if I’m gonna cry or feel sorry for myself, ever, but so far I haven’t. You know, Duck was a goof, but he didn’t deserve to die.”

            Leanne gave Sue a hug. That’s when Sue started to cry.

Chapter 16

            The cabin was a modest place, but Scott decided he’d become soft. There wasn’t any electricity, so there wasn’t any hot water for a shower. He considered going to a hotel. He considered running out completely, find a new place to live, maybe eventually get a new identity. Also, he was still waiting to see what his lawyer could do.

At first, there hadn’t been much evidence, but now it was piling up. His pickup was damaged and if the witness in the Ford truck said anything, they would find Duck’s body.

            A person could go crazy wondering what the police knew. Leanne seemed to know about Chewy Gomez, even though that was impossible; it was a completely perfect crime. Now she knew he had killed Aldo, although the only witness was dead. But dead and gone forever, that was the question.

            Scott had about $130,000 in cash, stupidly kept in the nice leather bag that had been Chewy’s. He had a watch that had been Tom Wolf’s. He knew he should get rid of it, but it was a beautiful watch. He had been wondering where Tom got such a fine watch. Finally, Scott was unable to carry a smart phone because that would allow the police to track his movements. No shower, no phone, throwing perfectly good handguns into the river.

            However, he had $700,000 in the bank from the sale of the industrial building, and enough cash to lam it for a while. He had paid the lawyer $20,000, so he would work on the case even if Scott disappeared for a while. All things considered, he was doing pretty well. The only issue, for the moment, was to stop feeling sorry for himself and decide whether to hide out in this cabin or hit the road, roam around in the Wild West for a while. He liked the cabin, considered it perfectly safe. But, it belonged to a friend. He liked the Ford Falcon well enough, but it wasn’t his either. He was going to think on it a day.

            The moment he settled down, figured things out temporarily, he heard a knock on the door. Scott peaked out a thin gap in the window shade and jumped. Jesus. Leanne was there!

            He didn’t even know how that was possible, but he grabbed the Russian Star 380 and snuck out the back door. He could hear Leanne banging on the door in front as he went out the back. He walked around the small cabin. Leanne was on the porch, wearing the nice charcoal fleece sweater jacket, a favorite, and Keen hiking shoes. He raised the gun. “Hi Leanne.”

            “I like it up here in the Gorge,” she said. “You don’t have to hold a gun on me. I’m not going to shoot you.” She smiled.

            He held the gun in place.

            “The water, the trees, the mountains, everything is so extreme up here. Abundant water, tall trees, rugged mountains. And extremely beautiful. I grew up in Colorado. It’s beautiful, but not the same. Colorado is a desert. This place is alive. I’ll bet the fish are game, too.”

            “Do you have handcuffs on you?” Scott said.

            “In the car.” She drove a Toyota 4Runner.

            “Let’s get them,” he said. He took her Beretta 9.

            The cabin had four rooms. A bathroom, a bedroom, a living room and a kitchen. Scott had her sitting in the living room, on a couch wearing handcuffs. He was going to have a cup of coffee, and offered her one. She accepted. He made the coffee on a small, pellet-fuel stove.

“I was thinking of the story about the woman with 11 cats, how you wouldn’t date her. You were very funny, you know. What I didn’t have a chance to tell you is that I once had a first date with a man who had four dogs. He asked me for a second date and I said no. He asked me why and I said four dogs was just too many.” She laughed, and then Scott laughed.

            “Gross. Four dogs,” he said. He completely understood.

            “I’ve been thinking about if there was anything else that would turn me off,” Leanne said.

            “Did you come up with anything?”

            “Yes. One snake. I’d look at that cage and think there must be a way out of there. Then I’d get out of the house and never go back. I’d never date a guy who kept a snake. I’d think of it escaping and me stepping on it in the middle of the night when I got up to go to the bathroom.”

            “Everyone who has ever had a snake tells a story about how the snake escaped the cage at one time,” Scott said.

            Leanne’s coffee was about the right temperature and she took a drink. She laughed. Scott laughed. He liked her laugh; he remembered that from the first time he met her.

            “I get that. You’re easy to make conversation with,” Scott said. “You’re a police detective. I might be a suspect. But here we are, chatting away.”

            “Let’s don’t have a misunderstanding,” Leanne said. “You are a suspect in two murders. That doesn’t mean I don’t like you. You seem smart, ambitious, aware, something. So why should I be a jerk? We’re in the here and now. Maybe later you’ll shoot me, but until then I’m going to try to enjoy my time in a positive way.

            “And then again, maybe your plan is to run off with me.” She smiled.

            “It has been a while since I had a girlfriend,” Scott said, “but I’m afraid if I took those handcuffs off, you’d beat me to the draw, or escape in some clever way, run away, something.”

            “If you want to take off, I’ll wait 24 hours before contacting the police,” she said. “No need to kill me. I promise I’d let you get away.”

            “Don’t talk that way,” Scott said. “Anyway, I think you’re clever and the moment I left you’d be on the police radio. Unfortunately for you, you’ll have to spend a day with me. Tomorrow, early, we’re going for a hike.”

            “Where?” she said.

            “You’ll see.”

            “Well, it’s no burden spending a day with you. You’re an interesting guy. And about the hike, well, my time would be well spent if you’d tell me about the local hiking trails. I like it out here in the Columbia River Gorge.”

            “I’m glad we’re friends,” Scott said, maybe with a little skepticism. “I’ll tell you about the area. Why not? First thing, in this part of the gorge, there are black bears. I’ve hiked all through this country carrying a 9mm semiautomatic rifle. A friend of mine, Bill White, and I took turns carrying it. We also carried fishing poles, matches and lunch. It was a great time. I always enjoyed being outdoors.

            “I only saw a bear up close once. We ran into it on a trail. It looked at us for a moment, then we went around it and it didn’t seem interested in bothering us.

            “As for the hiking, this is some of the steepest terrain in the United States. Bill and I would hike up and down all day every day in the summer. It felt great to feel so fit. Our dads smoked cigarettes, and couldn’t do it, so we felt sorry for them.

            “Anyway, the marked trails are used by a fair number of people, so the chance of seeing a bear is diminished. Too much foot traffic. One summer, Mark and I put up a hand-made sign that said, ‘Cute bear cub on trail.’ We even carried a hammer so it would be easy to drive a stake into the ground for the sign. Then, as we passed people, as we were coming down from Dog Mountain, they’d ask if we had seen the cub.

“Some people were afraid there was an angry momma bear up ahead looking for her cub. We got a lot of laughs out of that for a while, did it a couple of times.”

            Leanne smiled. She liked that kind of joke.

            Scott said, “The Pacific Coast Trail comes through here. There are a number of off-the-beaten-track hiking trails. The fishing is excellent. Fresh salmon is delicious. There’s a lot of weather here, wind and cold. Some people can’t hack the winters.”

            “Where might you go next?”

             “You tell me where I should go,” Scott said.

            “Canada and Mexico are out, unless you have a passport. If you murder me, and the police find out, your passport would be worthless because they’ll put you on the watch list. Los Angeles has warm weather and lots of people. You might blend in. Montana’s nice. Many people overlook how far out Utah is; far out as in “This place is far out.” There are some nice places there. Three mountain ranges in one state.”

             Scott nodded. Finished his coffee. He went out to the garage and found a chain. He brought it into the house and chained Leanne to the wood stove. He went outside and chopped firewood. He came back in, started a fire in the wood stove and began fixing supper.

            Leanne was thinking about the serial killer case she had worked on. A man had raped and killed six women. The investigation was thorough, professional, and they found the killer. Leanne always found it interesting that some men liked killing, but she knew it was true. There are many examples.

            At one point in that investigation, the serial killer knew police were watching, but the desire was strong and he kidnapped and killed two more women. They knew he had killed the last women in the camper on his pickup, and pulled him over while the body was still there. After that, the investigation was easy. At his home, he had kept a memento from each of the women he had killed.

            Now she was thinking Scott Skillet was a serial killer. The evidence he killed Chewy Gomez was thin, but he came up with $600,000 somewhere. An informant had told the police that’s the amount of money Chewy had on him the day he was killed.

            Scott kills Chewy, a well-planned operation. He likes it and kills Aldo for almost no reason. Things are getting sloppy. He kills Duck but makes a mess of it. Now, he is going to kill her. The realization gave her a funny feeling, like she was just now facing facts.

            Leanne felt sick to the stomach, although she liked Scott she always had a feeling about him. Something in her brain said beware, although this was the first time the feeling had been so strong. Maybe she had been kidding herself.

            Well, she was going to stay alive every minute she could. It was not much of a plan, but then she had always been lucky with hikes. She laughed out loud.

            Scott looked at her. He liked her. When she laughed, it made him smile. “What’s so funny?” he said.

            “I have a little secret,” she said. “But I can’t tell you. It might save my life.”

            “OK, well, good,” he said.

            Scott fixed a steak, baked potato and salad, and gave her a cold beer out of a cooler. “I used to cook for my dad. He mostly ate junk food, but if I fixed something, he’d eat with me. I was wrestling, trying to maintain 167 pounds, so I wouldn’t eat empty calories. There’s a lot to know about eating well, you know.”

            “Do you miss your dad?” Leanne said. They were eating. He had taken her handcuffs off, but the chain was still around her ankle.

            “He kept life interesting, anyway. Sometimes he’d win money gambling. Sometimes he’d buy a Powerball ticket and we’d spend time talking about what we’d do with all that money. If we ever won. I was never really into gambling, though.

            “The thing is, he took a job at Alder Pipe and Joint to support my mother and I. He smoked, drank some beer, got fat. He had a boring job. He could be a boring guy. My mother was slim and pretty, and she took off. I don’t blame her but she broke the poor guy’s heart. My dad kind of gave up then, no brakes on his smoking, drinking, eating.

            “But, and this is the main point, he was always good to me. He went to teacher conferences and wrestling matches and supported me in the most normal way possible. After high school, I worked construction a while. Then, when his heart was really bad, I took care of him. I lived with him that last year.”

            “How long did you have to follow Chewy Gomez?” Leanne said.

            “Why does that name keep coming up?”

            “Don’t worry. We can’t convict you of that one. There’s no evidence you killed Chewy Gomez. It’s just I’m pretty sure you did and I’m curious how that kind of thing works. You know, did you follow him and other people around. We’re going hiking tomorrow. I think you’re going to kill me. Why not tell me how you worked it?”

            “Stop talking about killing people,” Scott said. “I’m eating. Are you trying to ruin my stomach?”

            “What did Aldo do that upset you?”

            “He was gambling in my place of business,” Scott said.

            “That doesn’t make sense. Your father was a gambler,” Leanne said. “Why did Aldo shoot Tom Wolf?”

            Scott kept eating. They sat in silence for a while. “I’m sensitive,” Scott said, smiling to show it was a joke. Talking about murders wasn’t going to ruin his stomach. After he finished eating, Scott went in the bedroom and got Tom Wolf’s watch.

            “I found this on Tom Wolf. Now, he was a hustler. He once fixed college basketball games. He started by giving these guys cocaine and girls. Finally he said he could give them some money if they fixed games. At first, he justified it. You know, your team doesn’t have to lose, just beat the point spread. Then the players got greedy and didn’t care anyway.

            “Regardless, the FBI put Tom Wolf in prison for a while. When he got out, he tried to get back into rigging games, but the FBI kept following him. So he had to quit hanging out on college campuses and came back to Portland, doing some low-level drug dealing. When Aldo shot him, I found this on him.”

            He handed a Hermes Paris white gold watch to Leanne. It had tiny diamonds all over, what the company called “invisible diamonds,” and a lunar scene in blue sapphires. There were 451 diamonds and 87 blue sapphires with a black alligator wrist strap.

            “My god, it’s beautiful,” Leanne said. She put in on her wrist.

            “I looked it up. Retails for $87,300. How does Tom Wolf end up with a watch like that?”

            “He must have had a lucky day sometime,” Leanne said. She left the watch on her wrist.

            “It’s a men’s watch,” Scott said, “but it sure looks good on you. Another mystery to figure out.”

            Scott gave Leanne a sleeping bag and pillow. She had handcuffs on now, in front of her, and a chain fixed round her right ankle. She had to sleep on her back, but she was tired, and comfortable enough.

            She remembered a conversation with Rodney Tiller, the sheriff’s deputy, and Robert Nilson, chief detective and her boss. They were wondering why Scott allowed Duck Chou to damage his pickup. Rodney said Scott probably wanted to get Duck down to the stream before he shot him, so he wouldn’t have to drag his bloody body. All that blood would be evidence. Robert seemed to think this made sense.

            Leanne trusted Robert Nilson’s judgment. He had been a uniformed cop, but was made detective at a young age. A bit of a workaholic, he had been involved in many investigations over the years. He still liked to keep up on every case being investigated. It was his job, of course, but Leanne liked the way he continually got people to brief him. Asking questions if appropriate, knowing when something was dead-ended.

            Now, Scott Skillet was taking Leanne hiking in a canyon with steep walls. Scott wouldn’t want to shoot her. If she fell and died, no one could prove it was murder. She just fell. Leanne could imagine walking with Scott on a trail, and suddenly he grabs her and throws her off a ledge.

            She was tired and about to fall asleep, but she was still thinking. “That guy is not going to push me into some canyon. Not if I can help it,” she said to herself.

            Scott built up the fire in the wood stove, organized the house and the car outside, a little, and slept on the couch. He had an old fashion wind-up alarm and it rang at 4 a.m. He didn’t have his smart phone because he knew it kept track of his movements.

            Scott and Leanne had a cup of coffee, waking up and trying to stay warm, and then Scott took the chain off Leanne’s foot and took her to the car.

            “This is riding is style,” she said. “What is this, a 1964 Ford Falcon?”

            “It’s a loaner,” Scott said. “No talking for a while.”

            They drove to Eagle Creek state park, filled out a form with the car tag number and state of registration, and paid the $5 fee. Had they not paid the fee, it would have drawn attention to them.

            Scott took the handcuffs off Leanne and put them in the glove box. He had the Russian Star 380 in a holster hidden under a light jacket. Leanne had on her same clothes for a second day. Her Keen hiking shoes were appropriate. The late-fall weather was cool, and the charcoal fleece sweater jacket she had on was warm enough.

            It was still dark as they started up the trail. There had been some options as to which trail to hike at first, but Scott stayed on the Eagle Creek Trail and they went up and up and followed the river. No side trails to run off on now, which is what she was hoping for. The river was on one side and steep hills on the other. Forested hills that seemed to go straight up. It was beautiful, but it wasn’t helping her escape.

            Leanne picked up a hiking stick. It was just a stick about one inch in diameter that someone had left beside the trail.

            “You don’t need a hiking stick,” Scott said, and she dropped it.

            Almost immediately the trail went by some steep cliffs that went straight down to the water. Leanne was in front, and tried to stay alert, but also the incline made the climbing just a little difficult and she tried to breathe easy and use good form. The trail was no problem for Scott; it was obvious he was comfortable here.

            Finally the light came up through the river canyon and it was beautiful. Leanne kept looking for places to run off to, but the trail provided limited possibilities. Plus Scott had a gun and had proved in the past he didn’t mind shooting people.

            So Leanne kept climbing. She was nervous, and tried to stay alert. The trail, her footsteps, the sound of the river, kept trying to hypnotize her. Leanne could tell there was no one else on the trail at this time. Scott told her the trail would be busier later on, when the sun was up and it was warmer.

            “What’s the plan?” Leanne said.

            “I’m taking you to a cabin I keep up here.”

            “I’ve already found your hidden cabin. Took about a five-minute conversation with the register of deeds office, any property up there in Corbett belonging to the White family?”

            “We’ll hide out a while in this remote cabin.”

            “You aren’t carrying a backpack,” Leanne said. “You don’t have any sleeping bags or food or equipment to cook with. You’re bringing me up here to kill me.”

            “Our camp’s already set up. Don’t worry.”

            “I can see the future,” Leanne said. “You try to go away, but you’re always looking over your shoulder. Always worried someone’s going to find out you’re Scott Skillet. Retired lawmen will request your closed file, and they’ll re-interview people and check out every lead and eventually find you. Kill a policeman and people will haunt you forever. You know that much, don’t you?

            “God, those old lawmen are so tenacious. They’ll capitalize on your smallest mistake. People love them because they’re characters and they’re proven tough guys. Scott, you’ll never have another good night’s sleep if you kill me.”

            “OK now, that’s enough,” Scott said.

            There wasn’t any more laughing or joking. Just footsteps and the sound of the river.

            Some people would rest along a hiking trail, but Scott did not stop and kept up a fast pace. Leanne was trying to always stay a couple of steps ahead. If he grabbed at her, tried to fling her off the high canyon wall into the river, she would fight. That’s all she knew; it did not seem like much of a plan now.

            They passed two bridges. They reached the third bridge in about three hours. Leanne still had on the Hermes Paris lunar watch. It was 8:30 a.m. and no one was there.   The trail went on, but Scott paused a moment just past the third bridge. Leanne didn’t know it at the time, but it was called the High Bridge. The river turned and the spot they walked to, just a few steps, was relatively private.

            The canyon was steep and beautiful and Leanne was looking at the view when she perceived movement. Scott grabbed her right wrist. He had a grip like a vise, and pushed the right arm up behind her. The pain was intense. She was sure the shoulder was injured. Her main concern was the cliff wall in front of her. She could tell Scott was getting lower to push her and she put her right foot in front of her. When he pushed she resisted his weight. It took all her strength. He backed up and pushed again and she remained firmly on the edge of the cliff, which was a victory. And scary.

            She turned quickly to the right, and with some authority, into his body, a 180-degree turn, which allowed her to straighten out her arm and free it. She was facing him. Leanne put her right leg between his legs, pulled his shirt or jacket; she wasn’t sure what she had grabbed. She pulled him past her. He went over the edge, but caught with his right arm and elbow, hanging onto the edge. He tried to pull himself up with the left hand. There was nothing for his feet to grab onto, although Leanne didn’t know that at the time.

            He looked up at her with a surprised look, but she didn’t comment. She was thinking about what to do and realized what it was. She kicked his right arm and elbow, hard.

            As he fell back, she saw the underneath side of his right arm. It was scraped, blood red. He fell about halfway down the cliff wall and hit a protruding rock. He was propelled out about a three-quarter turn of his body, and fell into the river. The river was wide at this place and shallow, and he was on rocks and in water and did not move. He had fallen 100 yards. It was the High Bridge, indeed.

            He was face down. Leanne heard a noise and looked back. There was a man on the upper trail and it appeared he had seen everything.

Chapter 17

            Leanne hiked back down the trail with the man who had witnessed the fight. He was an older man and one could easily tell he was experienced in the outdoors. She passed a few people on the way down. At the trailhead, she saw a couple with friends in a Mercedes van, turned into a camper. She explained who she was and asked for help. A woman let her use a cell phone and Leanne talked to Robert Nilson, and the small crowd of people heard at least part of the conversation. They knew there was a dead body up the river, and a group of forensic technicians was coming.

            The outdoorsman told the story of the fight on the edge of the cliff to the others. Leanne explained the man in the river was being investigated for some murders at the time he kidnapped her.

            While the recovery team and the techs were heading up Eagle Creek, more than an hour later, she went to breakfast with Robert Nilson, chief detective. Then they went to the cabin and Robert called for a second group of forensic investigators. Leanne recovered her badge and Beretta 9 at the Corbett cabin. She went back up the Eagle Creek Trail with Robert. He had never hiked the trail and wanted to see how steep the canyon walls were.

            It was a long day before they got back to the office in Portland. It was a Thursday evening and Robert had already told her she did a good job and to take off work until Tuesday morning. Robert was going to write the report so Leanne was happy she didn’t have to do paperwork.

            Sitting at her desk, in her small office in Portland, she felt she finally relaxed. She was going to have a drink once she got home. She didn’t have anything at the office. In the old days, they would’ve, but nowadays it was frowned upon to keep a bottle of Scotch in the file cabinet under “S.”

            She looked at her wrist and she still had the watch on. Robert Nilson came in and sat in the chair across from her. He was about 10 years older than she was. He could be a strict boss, but also he was one of the team and always shared the work load. He always listened to what the detectives were doing and only commented when he thought he could add to a subject.

            “I’ve got a friend, a nurse, and I’m going to drink Scotch, prepare good food, and listen to music all weekend. But I’ll be ready to start over, go to work, on Tuesday,” Leanne said.

            “Maybe I should grab a friend and come over,” Robert said.

            “It’s a male nurse, Bob Tintente. Seems as though our relationship is coming right along.”

            “Oh, another male nurse?” Robert said.

            “I seem to have a weakness for them,” she said.

            “Detaching, decompressing, it’s an important part of the job. I’m glad you have a boyfriend.”

            Leanne held up her left wrist. “I still have on this expensive watch.”

            “Keep it,” Robert said. “I think it’s a good luck charm.”

            “Thank you, Robert. You’ve been a good friend today,” Leanne said. “I’m glad you took charge because frankly, I’ve felt numb all day.

            “I like the watch. I do feel like it was a good-luck charm, but I’m a public servant. I don’t have any business with an $87,000 watch.”

            Robert Nilson smiled. He knew she had been through an ordeal and was maybe feeling bad about having killed a man. “You knew more about this case than anyone on the team,” Robert said. “Now that it’s over, what do you think about Scott Skillet?”

            “I used to have two categories for criminals, knuckleheads and hardened criminals. But this was a new one. Motivated by money almost like a businessman, but charming to talk to. Smarter than your average criminal.”

            Robert smiled. He took the watch and put it in with the money and other items to take to the evidence room.

            “I’m thinking,” Leanne said, but Robert was no longer paying attention.

Chapter 18

            About a week later Scott Skillet’s lawyer and a woman about 65, slender and good looking with a nice hair style, came to the police station and asked to see Leanne. She introduced herself as Scott’s mother, Doris.

            “I wanted to see you in person. My, you’re a pretty woman,” Doris said.

            Leanne nodded. “I’m sorry about your son.”

            “I left them, Scott and Harry, a long time ago and had an entirely different kind of life in Arizona. It worked out for me. Harry was mad at me. Scott always seemed to understand. I didn’t think Scott would turn out like he did. I’m sorry he gave you a hard time.”

            “It’s not your fault,” Leanne said. “I can only imagine your grief.”

            “I always wondered what it would be like to have a child who committed a heinous crime. Now I know. It feels miserable.”

            Leanne nodded. “He was a handsome boy, and charming.”

            “Yes, I suppose I’ll be thinking about that for the rest of my life,” Doris said.

“A handsome boy, and charming. The hiker told quite a story about the struggle on the edge of the canyon. Was it true?”

            “Yes, it was dramatic but he had his information right. I was in shock so I suppose his version was better than the one I could’ve come up with. I was just reacting, not really thinking of a plan.”

            “I suppose the outdoorsman made you a bit of a local hero. Scott turned my situation from comfortable to crossing into the millionaire territory. My late husband left me $400,000 and a house. It’s weird to me, that $700,000 inheritance probably makes me a millionaire. See, I have all these different thoughts. I feel guilty about leaving Scott with his father, but I couldn’t live with Harry. I wasn’t in love.

            “I feel terrible that Scott killed three people. Then I’ll have a good feeling, like I’m a millionaire, but the next thought is I don’t want to feel good about it.”

            She was quiet and Leanne waited with her. It was odd, knowing a murderer; it would be like knowing Billy the Kid or something. Someone famous but she didn’t like him. He killed people. She’d heard Mo Kekipo was a bit of a local celebrity in Canyon City, in prison, because he was a bank robber and was arrested by a pretty woman. But Leanne knew there was nothing remarkable about Mo Kekipo. Nothing at all except he robbed a bank, so the celebrity part of it she never understood.

            “Well, I’m going to bury him,” Doris said. “Perhaps I can meet some of his friends and feel better about his life.”

            “Maybe so,” Leanne said, not committing herself to it. Doubting it.

            “One last thing,” Doris said. “I’d like you to have the Hermes Paris lunar watch as a gift from me.”

            She handed the watch to Leanne, but Leanne refused it.

            “To tell you the truth, the watch shouldn’t have been in with things from Scott. The watch should probably go to Tom Wolf’s mother, the closest heir.”

            Leanne took the watch and said she would return it to Tom Wolf’s mother.

            “That’s a shame,” Doris said. “It looks good on you.”

            Leanne smiled, but she wasn’t going to profit on the backs of a bunch of killers.

            “Leanne, would you go to the funeral?” Doris said. “It may just be the lawyer, a chaplain, you and me, but I know you spent some time with him. I’d feel better if you were there.”

            “Of course I’ll go,” Leanne said.

            The funeral turned out to be about 30 media people and a couple of hundred curious on-lookers, no one that Leanne had seen before. Every one of them seemed to have a cell-phone camera and had no qualms about using them. Leanne noticed no one went up to console Doris. The lawyer walked her through the service and escorted her back to the hotel. The funeral was a big circus.

            Robert Nilson and Leanne waited at the cemetery for a few minutes as the crowd thinned out. It was overcast but not cold or rainy, a pleasant enough fall day. Robert in a grey suit and Leanne in colorful, comfortable, practical sports gear. They watched as the last of the crowd, joking and playful now, walked away. A girl wrestled with a boy, like she was trying to throw him off a cliff. They laughed joyfully.

            “Sad, the way it turned out,” Robert said.

            Leanne nodded.

            “You know, a man tried to throw you off a cliff and you defended yourself,” Robert said. “That watch was a good luck charm.” It was in the evidence room, not on Leanne’s wrist any longer.

            “The watch didn’t have anything to do with it,” Leanne said. “He was a clumsy wrestler. I was a college basketball player with excellent foot work. Whoever did you think would win such matchup?”

            Robert laughed. “I see you’ve got your confidence back. You’ll be ready to go back to work.”

            She looked at the stone grave marker. Scott was buried next to his father. Leanne was thinking she had kind of fallen for Scott Skillet when she first met him. She would have gone on a date with him. She liked that he was good with money; at least that’s what she originally thought. It turned out he had a brain twisted by, at the very least, murder. She looked at Robert Nilson.

            “You asked me what I thought of Scott Skillet. When I was new to law enforcement, I used to think there were two categories for criminals, knuckleheads and hardened criminals. Now I know there’s a third category.”

            “What’s that,” Robert said, expressionless but interested.

            “Dangerous,” she said. “Extremely dangerous is the category. I was a uniformed cop for a while, then a detective. Now I’ve learned my hard lesson, huh?”