Outside the Wire Page 13

  She paused to process his words and then laughed because he had to be joking. The Mounted Unit was part of the elite Metro Division and included thirty-five officers and around forty horses that were assigned to crowd control and demonstrations. It sounded like a great gig for somebody, but she wasn’t sure it was right for her partner.

  “Jason, do you even know how to ride a horse?”

  “I’ve been taking lessons,” he said, his tone defensive. “This woman I know—”

  “You mean this woman I’m dating—”

  “You’re wrong, Davie. She’s my mom’s age. I’ve known her since I was a kid. A couple of months ago, she invited my parents and me out to her ranch for lunch. She put me on a horse and it was so cool. Since then I’ve been riding with her every chance I get.”

  She tried to catch his eye but he was staring out the window, refusing to look at her. “Homicide to horses? Sounds like an odd career choice, Jason.”

  He whipped around and glared at her. “Look, I get you think it’s weird but I like the idea.”

  Davie tensed. She thought about The Limit and wondered if her partner had reached it. In all the time she’d known him he’d always seemed calm, almost casual about life and work. Now she wondered if that had been a cover for how he felt when he was alone at night with his thoughts and memories of all the dead bodies he’d seen.

  She softened her tone. “I’m sorry for laughing, Jason. It’s just you’ve never mentioned horses before.” Then she realized he might have been trying to tell her about his plans that night at the Lucky Duck. “Maybe I wasn’t picking up the right signals.”

  He shrugged and looked at the map. “Chill. It’s no big deal.”

  That’s exactly what she would have said to avoid talking about her feelings. She decided not to settle for that anymore. “Look, Jason. I didn’t mean to shut you down. If the Mounted Unit sounds good, then apply for the transfer. I’ll miss you, but you deserve to be happy.”

  He didn’t speak for the next few miles until they rolled into the parking lot of a small convenience store.

  “I’m not sure how much farther it is to Lunds’s cabin,” she said. “Let’s fill the tank and buy some water.”

  Vaughn nodded and stepped out of the car. He stretched his back and tilted his face toward the sun, breathing in the fresh mountain air. “I’m going to find the can. Get me a Diet Coke and some Cheez-Its. I’ll pay you back.”

  There were no other cars in the parking lot or at the pump. After filling the gas tank, Davie made her way inside the store. A card table held a sampling of potholders, pottery wind chimes, and casserole dishes with quilted covers. All looked homemade and all were for sale.

  She grabbed a bottle of water from a cold case and a Diet Coke for her partner, then searched the junk food aisle for Cheez-Its. No luck finding them. If it was orange and chemically infused that her partner wanted, he’d have to settle for Cheetos.

  As she walked toward the counter, she bumped her head on a wind chime similar to the one on the table. The tinkling conjured a woman in her sixties with a gray ponytail, round horn-rimmed glasses, and a steel-rod posture.

  “Can I help you?”

  Davie set the junk food on the counter. “How much for these?”

  The woman looked at the items. “The Donner Party survived on more food than that. Did I mention this is the only store for fifty miles?”

  Davie didn’t object to contributing to the local economy, so she reached for two homemade oatmeal-raisin cookies wrapped in wax paper, sitting on the counter. “I’ll take these, too.” She hoped the cookies didn’t end up being the best part of the day.

  The woman pointed to the casserole dish, covered with a red quilted fabric and accented with tiny yellow flowers. “Sweet, isn’t it? We’re raising money for our volunteer fire department. Twenty bucks. Hard to find a bargain like that anymore. The cover’s handmade.”

  Davie couldn’t remember ever going to a potluck. Did people do that anymore? Helping firefighters was a good cause, though, if she wasn’t being conned. Even if she was, it was only twenty bucks.

  Davie reached into her purse for some cash and brushed against her Smith & Wesson nesting in the gun pocket. “Sold.”

  The woman totaled the items. “If you want a bag, it’ll cost you twenty cents. That okay?” She didn’t wait for Davie’s reply. “It’s none of my business but I hope you’re with somebody, because it’s not safe for a little thing like you to be out here by herself.”

  Davie bristled at the “little thing” reference. “You worried about four-legged or two-legged trouble?”

  “You’re out in the middle of nowhere, honey. You have to be ready for anything. I have some all-purpose knives on the shelf over there. They’re expensive but people don’t think about how much it costs when they’re facing down an emergency.”

  Davie rolled her eyes. “How much?”

  “Thirty-eight ninety-five,” she said, picking one off the shelf. “I recommend the Leatherman. It has a couple of blades, a scissor, screwdriver, wire cutter, and whatnot. Comes with a genuine leather case.”

  Davie put the money back in her purse and rummaged around for her credit card. “You trying to make some kind of sales quota?”

  She chuckled. “You’ll thank me later.”

  Davie didn’t need a knife. Maybe she’d give it to her partner as a goodbye gift. The tool folded into a slim profile and would easily fit into a pocket of a designer suit—or a saddle. The clerk packed everything in a paper bag and gave Davie directions to the forest service road that led to Dag Lunds’s cabin.

  When Vaughn saw what was in the bag, he chuckled. “A casserole dish? Do you even know how to cook?”

  “I got you Cheetos and cookies. Stop complaining.”

  He continued rummaging inside the bag. “What’s with the Leatherman?”

  “It’s for you—protection in case we run into bears.”

  “Not funny, Davie. They’re dangerous animals, you know.”

  He unwrapped one of the cookies as she pulled the car onto the highway under low billowy clouds.

  22

  Davie maneuvered the car over a series of access roads until she came to a narrow unpaved driveway. About a quarter mile farther was a modest log cabin surrounded by pine, sycamore, willow, and oak trees. Four teak rocking chairs graced the wraparound deck. A Harley-­Davidson Lowrider leaned on its kickstand in the clearing in front of the house.

  Davie rolled the car to a stop and looked at her partner. “You think this is it?”

  “Looks like how his ex described the place. She didn’t mention the Harley but he doesn’t have to tell her everything.” As Davie reached to open the door, he grabbed her arm. “Just a reminder, we have to be careful about Lunds. He might be our killer.”

  “Agreed,” she said. “He’s a suspect until he’s not.”

  A brisk breeze chilled her face as she slid out of the car, grabbed her purse, and slung it over her shoulder. Her boots crunched over the uneven ground as they walked toward the cabin past a cardboard box that had been shoved under the deck. It held numerous liquor bottles. All empty. She remembered Christina telling her Lunds didn’t go to bars because he liked to drink at home. Davie wondered how long it had taken him to consume all that booze.

  Vaughn tipped an imaginary glass to his lips. “Looks like old Dag has an intimate relationship with John Barleycorn.”

  “Or he uses the alcohol to clean bear wounds.”

  Vaughn humored her with a chuckle but scanned the terrain nonetheless.

  Before Davie reached the front door, she heard a man’s voice: “I’m over here.”

  The sound startled her. Her heart pounded as she turned to see a square-jawed man with rugged features standing in the shadows at the side of the cabin.

  He was Zeke Woodrow’s contemporary, so he had to
be in his sixties, but he looked as fit as a twenty-year-old. His hair was gray and cut short. The thermal long-sleeved shirt he wore was tight enough to define the taut muscles of his arms and chest. She guessed his worn denim jeans didn’t look that way because of some manufacturing process. A day’s growth of beard was the only thing that kept him from looking like a model on an AARP recruitment poster.

  Vaughn squinted against the sun. “You must have heard us drive up.”

  Dag Lunds walked toward Davie and extended his hand. Close up, she saw that his face was weathered from the sun, his expression somber. “I’ve got a motion detector. Knew you were here as soon as you turned off the main road.”

  His handshake was warm but firm. Since neither of them knew much about his state of mind, Vaughn hung back, watching. Lunds noticed and didn’t repeat the hand-shaking courtesy with her partner. Instead, he gestured for them to follow him toward the back of the house. They passed two Adirondack chairs sitting on a weedy, rock-strewn clearing and continued down a small slope to the edge of the river. Lunds stopped next to an upside-down wood canoe that was resting on two sawhorses. An array of tools and paint supplies were laid out on a nearby rock.

  He pointed toward several large boulders littering the bank. “Have a seat.”

  Davie picked a flat spot on one of the rocks and set her purse on the ground. Vaughn remained standing a few feet away.

  The river was swollen with fast-moving white water from an early spring runoff. The roar threatened to drown out their conversation, though it didn’t appear there was anyone within miles who could hear them even if they shouted. On the opposite bank was a dense area of trees and brush growing in the shadow of a steep rock outcropping. To Davie, the scene formed a picturesque tableau—a perfect place to go when the real world became too real.

  Lunds picked up a square of sandpaper, folded it onto a block, and ran it along the underside of the boat. “Can I get you anything to drink? Coffee? Water?”

  “We’ve come a long way to talk to you,” Vaughn said in a tone that was crisp and professional.

  Davie noted her partner’s guarded expression and changed direction. “We know Christina told you about Zeke Woodrow’s murder, but she didn’t know that Juno Karst and Harlan Cormack are also dead.”

  Lunds flinched at the sound of their names. His eyes squinted into slits and something dark and dangerous past over his face, like a steel door closing off any vestige of emotion or compassion. She’d seen that sort of look hundreds of times on the faces of fellow cops. She felt a chill because she had a similar steel door that closed every time she put on her badge. The shrink had told her there was a price to pay for stoicism. Maybe he was right.

  “How?” Lunds said.

  “They were all killed within the last week,” she said. “Each shot in the head with a single bullet. We think their deaths are related and we’re worried you may be in danger, too. We need to know about any common enemies you had or anything you did together that might have given somebody a reason to target you.”

  He resumed sanding, but his jaw twitched with tension. “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything,” Vaughn said.

  Lunds glanced at her partner and then returned his gaze to her. “The four of us have been together since Vietnam. That covers a lot of time.”

  “Just start from the beginning,” she said.

  He laid his hand reverently on the canoe and closed his eyes, like he was summoning memories he’d prefer to forget. “I met Zeke and the others not long after I got to basic training in Fort Benning. We were all in the same infantry unit. After basic, the four of us signed up for Ranger school. Training was intense. When we finished, about a hundred of us left for Alaska and then on to Vietnam. When we landed, they loaded our flak jackets, M-16s, and M50 machine guns onto school buses with bars on the windows and drove us through small villages to our base. We were there for about six weeks.”

  He pulled a chip brush from his back pocket and swept the sanding dust from the canoe’s hull. A ray of sun had muscled through the cloud cover. The light illuminated particles from the wood that floated around his head like a halo. Davie didn’t speak because she didn’t want to interrupt his story with formal interview questions. Not just yet.

  Lunds left the silence hanging in the air before he went on. “The local women would sleep with you for a pack of cigarettes. People listened to Jimi Hendrix and smoked opium joints—OJs—that kept you stoned all night. They cut holes in cardboard boxes and blew smoke inside to bump up the effect. There were other narcotics. Some guys took them all, and why not? They made you feel invincible.”

  “Did you use drugs?” Vaughn said.

  Lunds met her partner’s stare. “I came from a family of straight-laced Swedes. All four of us had similar backgrounds. We smoked some weed, but once we went into the jungle, the war got real. We quit smoking dope because once you got outside the wire, you had to stay alert if you wanted to stay alive.”

  Davie leaned forward and rested her elbows on her knees. “Outside the wire?”

  “Once we left the safety of base camp.”

  His story was interesting but Davie wasn’t sure what all this had to do with Zeke Woodrow’s murder. Still, she wanted to keep him talking. “So all four of you stayed together?”

  Lunds’s brow furrowed with tension as he worked the sanding block. The sound reminded Davie of a brush sweeping across a snare drum. “We saw things we couldn’t unsee, knew things we could never talk about. We thought and worked with one mind. That made us closer to each other than you can imagine. The Army liked that bond and the secrecy, so they kept us together.”

  “How long were you in Vietnam?” she said.

  “Until the war ended. Back then you could only extend your deployment for six months. After that, they forced you to see a shrink before you went back. Some guys never wanted to go home. They loved the drugs and the women and the killing. We did our jobs because we loved our country, the Army, and each other—and not particularly in that order.”

  Davie’s leg was tingling from sitting on the rock. She shifted her position to relieve the stress. “Zeke’s ex-wife told us he was addicted to Dexadrine when he got home.”

  Lunds picked up a rag, doused it with alcohol, and proceeded to wipe down the hull of the canoe. “We were all addicted to some degree. The Army passed it out like candy—enough to keep you awake until you came home upright or in a body bag. I preferred the French version—Maxitone Forte. I bought it on the street. My pockets were full of it, one hundred milligrams of dextroamphetamine liquid. It came in a glass vial about half the size of your finger. I’d snap off the top and inject it. It kept me awake for twenty-four hours at a time. The right dose made me paranoid and that’s exactly what I needed to stay alive. I stopped using when I found out guys were getting hepatitis C from the needles. Withdrawal was intense.”

  “What exactly did you do in Vietnam?” Vaughn said.

  Lunds glanced at her partner. “You ever hear the term LRRPs?” He pronounced it lurps, which sounded like a dog drinking water. “It stands for long-range reconnaissance patrols. Early in the war, the enemy got good at ambushing our guys, so the Army dropped teams—four to six men—into the jungle and left them there to search for Viet Cong and destroy them. They stopped calling it that before we were in country, but they didn’t stop sending men into the jungle. We were out there alone for months at a time without rules, support, or accountability. All we had was each other. Our training turned us into killing machines, but that mission turned us into animals. We learned to do whatever we had to do to stay alive.”

  The thought of being trapped in the jungle triggered feelings of unease. Davie made a mental list of the people she would trust on a mission like that and came up with Bear, Vaughn, Detective Giordano, Grammy, and maybe one or two others. It was ridiculous to think of an elderly woman crawling thr
ough the jungle with an M-16 slung over her back, but her grandmother had the heart of a warrior and Davie knew Grammy would sacrifice her life for her. Davie’s breath caught, remembering the murder suspect she’d killed to save her grandmother’s life.

  She forced out the next question. “I know it was a long time ago, but did anything happen back then that might explain the murder of your friends?”

  He appeared reflective, taking a few moments to catalog his memories. “A lot of bad things happened back then. Murder was common and casual. Some guys were afraid to go home. Afraid of what they might do to the people they loved.”

  Vaughn pushed rocks aside with his feet. “How did you all end up working for TidePool?”

  Lunds popped the lid on a jar of varnish, poured some into a tuna can, and dipped the brush into the thick liquid. “A former Ranger started the company. He recruited me after I retired from the Army, and I brought in the others. We all still work there except for Harlan. They pushed him out after he got hurt. Claimed he was too broken to bother with.”

  Vaughn crossed his arms. “What did you do for TidePool?”

  “At first we worked security details,” he said, “for oil companies, embassies, corporate interests, anybody who needed protecting. Later, we trained younger people to do the physical work.”

  “Zeke came back from an assignment in Hong Kong a few days before he was killed,” Davie said. “Something may have happened on that trip that upset him. Did he give you any hint what that might have been?”

  “Zeke called me Sunday night, but I wasn’t home. I tried to reach him but we never connected. His message wasn’t specific. I’m not sure what he wanted.”

  Zeke had called his daughter Sunday as well, but he never showed up at her condo as promised. Davie was certain he had something important to tell the people he trusted but he was killed before he got the chance.

  “How often did the four of you work together on TidePool assignments?” Vaughn said.

  “Almost never. I can only remember two jobs—one was guarding the Turkish ambassador on a trip to L.A. The other was in Istanbul but the details are classified.”