The Scent of Murder (A Veronica Shade Thriller Book 2), page 3
Still, Kristin didn’t come alone. She brought with her a man whom she introduced as CSU tech Paulie… who looked all of thirteen years old. Immediately, however, the young man took charge, donning a head-to-toe vinyl outfit and setting up a much larger perimeter than Deputy Lancaster had.
Everyone, including the deputies, was pushed outside the yellow crime scene tape, leaving only Kristin and Sheriff Burns to examine the body.
“You’re right, the bear wounds were inflicted postmortem. That’s why there’s so little blood,” the coroner confirmed.
“And that red line across her throat? Looks like a ligature of some sort. Was that the cause of death?”
Kristin folded back the girl’s hair and scalp and then lifted her right eyelid.
“Petechial hemorrhaging.” She nodded. “Definitely strangulated, likely by a wire of some sort—broken hyoid bone in her throat. Need to get her back to the morgue to confirm.”
“Thanks.”
Steve decided to give Kristin space. There was something strange about this scene, something that he wasn’t seeing.
Someone had strangled this poor woman and left her body here. A bear—which, according to Deputy McVeigh, hadn’t been seen in Bear County in more than two decades—happened by and decided to violently investigate the corpse.
Why was the body dumped in an open section where it was almost guaranteed to be found by a hiker or hunter?
And then there was the strange makeup to consider, the odd clothing. It was difficult to tell exactly how old the girl was, and Steve knew that style wasn’t just an age thing, but it appeared to him as if the victim had been dressed up to look a certain way—younger, perhaps.
But that wasn’t quite right. It was more—
His head suddenly shot up, and he stared at the first person he saw: Deputy Marcus McVeigh.
“A doll,” the sheriff said with conviction. “The bastard killed this woman and then dressed her up to look like a doll.”
Chapter 5
What the City of Greenham PD lost in toxic masculinity following Ken Cameron’s arrest and subsequent plea deal, they gained in anxiety due to the presence of Internal Affairs Officer Cole Batherson. The man was far from abrasive, but having someone constantly watching over your shoulder hoping to God that you did make a mistake was enough to render anyone uncomfortable.
But this was the only way that Captain Peter Shade could keep his job. It hadn’t been his fault—the only person responsible for Ken Cameron’s actions was the man himself. But whenever an underling did something insane, like orchestrating the kidnapping of a city counselor’s daughter, everyone looked up the chain of command to place blame.
Their only saving grace was that Veronica had gotten Betty Dolan back unharmed. Still, the rumors that Peter Shade’s time as captain of the City of Greenham’s Police Department was numbered came as no surprise.
“It’s just like he said,” Freddie Furlow exclaimed. He pointed at his computer monitor. “Two men in masks come in, they smash the glass, Matthew tries to intervene, and they bonk him on the head and leave.”
Aware that Cole was observing them, Veronica moved closer to the screen and spoke in a hushed tone.
“What did they hit him with?”
“Looks to me like an Oyster Perpetual.”
Veronica screwed up her face.
“A what?”
“Rolex,” Freddie clarified. “They brained him with one of his own watches.”
This case was serious, but Veronica started to grin nonetheless, the expression inspired by the irony of the situation. Then she felt Cole’s eyes boring into her back and immediately frowned.
She cleared her throat.
“Can you play that back for me?”
“Sure.”
The incident was as Matthew had described, right up to when his large forehead had been split open by the impromptu weapon.
But something wasn’t quite right.
“Go back to when the perps first come into the jewelry store.”
Freddie rewound the tape.
On-screen, the door to Alfred’s Jewelry opens and two masked men come in, their hands at their sides.
“Their hands are empty,” Veronica stated.
“Yeah… you’re right,” Freddie agreed. “Who robs a jewelry store with their bare hands?”
“Someone who knows the proprietor won’t fight back.”
“Hmm.”
Freddie moved so close to the screen that his eyes were nearly touching it.
“That one—the bigger one—he pulls a bag out of his back pocket. That’s the bulge. I can’t see a gun or even a suspicious lump in the waistband of the other guy. Can you?”
“Nope.”
Freddie rewound the tape several more times.
He was right: neither man appeared to have a weapon. No bat, no gun, Taser, nothing.
The men wore matching outfits—all black tracksuits with ski masks—and yet, they weren’t overly intimidating figures. One appeared to be on the pudgy side and the other the epitome of average.
“What if Matthew had a security guard? Don’t some of these jewelry stores have security guards?” Freddie wondered aloud.
“Some, but clearly not Alfred’s Jewelry.”
“Okay, what if Matthew had a gun?” Freddie continued along this line of thinking. “Does he have a gun?”
“Good question—but let me ask you something: if you owned a jewelry store in Greenham and you didn’t have a security guard, would you have a gun?”
“Does anybody in Oregon not have a gun?”
The question was rhetorical, of course.
If Matthew Cohen had a gun, he made no move to grab it. Instead, he tried to attack the men with his bare hands. The two robbers weren’t intimidating, but compared to Matthew Cohen, who was short, squat, had beady eyes, and while not quite bald, his thin gray hair was on the way out, they were goddamn sasquatches.
Veronica knew firsthand that people did strange things when under high stress. There was the fight or flight or freeze reactions, of course, so perhaps Matthew experienced an unprecedented adrenaline dump. As a result, his brain forgot to remind him to get his gun before the sixty-something-year-old man attacked two much younger men in masks.
This theory was plausible, but Veronica had seen people after the fight response took hold: they were exhausted, almost drowsy. Sometimes delirious. But Matthew Cohen, even after suffering a minor head injury, seemed lucid and, if anything, the opposite of sleepy.
She sighed and shook her head.
“Did you manage to pull up the reports from the other robberies? Matthew said something about a Noah and someone… I don’t remember his name.”
Freddie peeled his face away from the monitor and picked up a stack of files from his desk.
“Yeah, was just about to review them. They’re Officer Vasquez’s cases.”
“So, why are we stuck with it then?”
Freddie didn’t justify this with an answer, probably because it was obvious: they wanted to ease Veronica back into action.
As Freddie quickly skimmed the police reports from the other robberies, Veronica asked, “Why didn’t we hear about this sooner? I mean, why weren’t we called in after the second robbery? One is an isolated incident, but two? And now—”
“There are a hundred officers in the City of Gresham Police Department, but only twelve detectives,” a voice answered from behind them. Veronica turned and looked at Cole Batherson. Squinting accusingly at the man hadn’t been intentional, but he took it personally, holding up his hands and raising both dark eyebrows. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to eavesdrop.”
“No, that’s fine. But now that there’ve been three of these well-orchestrated heists, can we spare two of twelve precious detectives before they rob the US Treasury?”
Cole immediately went from defensive to embarrassed, and it dawned on Veronica that perhaps the man wanted to be here as little as they appreciated his company. She wasn’t completely up to speed on exactly what IA Officers did—she thought their role was mostly HR stuff, investigating harassment claims or whatnot—but he was here, and if that meant that her dad got to keep his job, then she was going to put up with him.
“Sorry,” Veronica grumbled.
“That’s alright. Look, I think we got off on the wrong foot here.” Subconsciously, Cole shifted his weight from his right foot to his left foot. Veronica looked at his feet, and the man’s face turned an even darker shade of red. Cole was in his late fifties, but like Sheriff Burns, when he was embarrassed, he looked incredibly childlike. It was endearing. “I don’t want to intrude on your investigations. I just have to make sure that something like Ken Cameron doesn’t happen again.”
Veronica was tempted to ask how the man intended to do that by looking over their shoulders but decided, for once, not to be antagonistic.
“Okay,” she said, and then felt embarrassed herself.
Okay?
Thankfully, Freddie saved her from further discomfort.
“Looks like it’s the same guys. Two men, black masks. Both described as African-American in appearance.” Freddie flipped through the pages. “No mention of weapons and neither Noah nor Gregor were attacked.”
“Any video of those robberies?”
“You bet.”
Veronica waited while Freddie navigated to the digitized case file and pulled up the security footage from the two other jewelry store heists. They were uncannily similar. Two men matching the physical characteristics of those who robbed Alfred’s Jewelry entered the store. They smashed the watch case, grabbed some fancy timepieces, and ran. No weapons, no violence.
Once they realized what was going on, Noah and Gregor ran to the back and locked themselves in apparent safe rooms.
Veronica stretched and then nudged Freddie.
“You coming?”
“Where?”
“To chat with Noah and the other guy. You coming?”
“Sure, wait up.”
But Veronica had no intention of waiting. She wanted to walk as quickly as possible and make Freddie chase her. But then she felt Cole’s eyes on her again.
“Is it okay to make my partner run? Might be down to eleven detectives.”
The man covered his eyes, then his ears and mouth in succession, and Veronica laughed.
Maybe this Cole Batherson guy wasn’t so bad, after all.
But wasn’t that what people thought of Officer Ken Cameron?
Chapter 6
There were two main reasons why Sheriff Steve Burns was dragging his feet when it came to calling in the State Police, which were the acting wardens of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife: 1) the officer would undoubtedly know who he was, and 2) the officer’s presence would incite a media frenzy.
Both facts would negatively affect the investigation.
Steve sighed and wiped sweat from his brow. Despite his perspiration, July was unusually mild, which might be one of the reasons that the bear had come this far east. Typically, Bear County was too dry and arid for black bears—they preferred the more temperate environment west of Portland.
But here they were, and here it was… somewhere.
Of the hundred and twelve deputies that served Bear County, roughly half were stationed at the County Jail. Budget constraints limited the remaining sixty to shift rotations, meaning that at any given time, only about forty or forty-five deputies were on duty.
At present, Sheriff Burns had called in thirty-six sets of eyes to comb the southern end of the Hilltona Forest, where the body had been found. He’d even borrowed three K-9 units from neighboring Nowak County to help with the search.
So far, they’d come up with a whole lot of nothing. No sign of the bear, of the perpetrator, or anything else related to the victim.
“No cameras out here,” a voice said from behind him. The sheriff turned and stared at Deputy McVeigh. “At Mr. Bellinger’s ranch, I mean. The next house, belonging to a Mr. Marshall-Moore or something like that, is about ten miles down the road.” McVeigh hesitated as his eyes drifted from the sheriff to the forest.
“What is it?”
“I was thinking… are there wildlife cameras out there? In Hilltona, I mean? The ODFW sometimes puts cameras to track migrating deer and what not.”
Steve shrugged.
“I doubt it—we would have found them already. I have almost every deputy out there searching. Plus, the dogs.”
“I dunno, they hide those things pretty good, not wanting to disrupt migratory patterns or whatever. The Staties will know. Hell, maybe they have a tracker in the bear that attacked our victim.”
Steve frowned.
Bringing in another department would further complicate things, add a bureaucratic layer of red tape to the investigation.
And it was the fucking State Police.
“You used to be Statie, right? Before becoming sheriff?”
Sheriff Burns closed his eyes for a moment. As usual, images of his past life flashed in his mind.
Uncomfortable images, images of things he’d done everything he could to try and forget.
“Yeah,” he relented at last. “All right, give them a call.”
Despite his apprehension, Steve had a job to do. And, dead or not, the poor girl who had been strangled and then posed was more important than his discomfort.
As Deputy McVeigh placed the call, Steve tried to take in the scene one last time while it remained relatively calm and unmolested.
Somebody had staged the victim in the woods across from Mr. Bellinger’s cattle ranch, maybe eighty meters in from the road. Not exactly in the open, but whoever did this wanted the girl to be found—hence the staging. And yet, Steve could think of a dozen places that offered more seclusion during the night but had much more foot traffic during the day, guaranteeing that the body would be discovered. Anything by the west edge of Hilltona, which was framed by the Casnet River, would fit the bill. If a bear sighting hadn’t taken place just a few miles from here, who knows when the body would have been found?
This insight inspired more questions than answers.
Did this location hold significance to the killer?
Steve pictured the girl’s thin torso and her small, smooth hands. The victim, whoever she was, was no farm girl, that’s for sure. And this was no opportunity killing—nobody wandered around here. You came here to farm, or to head to Idaho. That was it.
No, this was deliberate. This was planned.
His eyes fell to his feet. The road was heavily compacted from years of tractor use. It was so hard that the idea of getting a tire tread casing was laughable. But if the victim had driven here, where the hell is her car?
Sheriff Burns scratched the back of his neck and let his gaze naturally drift to the Bellinger ranch on the other side of the road. There was nothing unique about it and, if you continued east on the dirt road, you’d come across one just like it every five or ten miles. Eventually, the road would widen and meet up with Highway Four, and before long, you’d find yourself in Idaho.
The closest town west of Hilltona Forest was East Argham, but that was small and undeveloped. EA was rife with crime, but these incidents were almost exclusively drug related.
So, why here?
He shook his head.
Sheriff Burns wasn’t familiar with the most recent census, but he overheard one of his deputies griping about how there were more than thirty cattle ranches, and twice as many corn farms, between here and the Idaho border.
That was a lot of ground to cover—ten or maybe fifteen thousand acres of land. And that didn’t count the actual forest where the body had been discovered.
Corn and cows… the latter could listen, they had ears after all, but so far as he knew, cattle couldn’t talk.
Maybe they did need State help on this one. Maybe—
Steve’s train of thought was cut off by the sight of a man coming toward him. He was thin, with a cigarette dangling from his hard mouth, and he was wearing a red checkered vest over top of a long sleeve T-shirt.
But it wasn’t his appearance that had Sheriff Steve Burns reaching for his gun.
It was the rifle that the man with the icy blue eyes held in both hands that made him do that.
Chapter 7
“Watches,” Noah Seidel stated. “They stole all the good watches. Rolex, Tag, you name it, they took it.”
Detective Veronica Shade looked over the man’s shoulder and into his shop. It was slightly larger and more well-lit than Alfred’s Jewelry, but it looked as if it carried the same quality of items.
“And the men who robbed you, they had no weapons?”
Unlike Matthew Cohen, Noah Seidel was a large man. He had a long orange beard and hard eyes. Even though she’d just met him, Veronica got the impression that Noah was an untrusting and bitter man.
“That’s what’s in the report. Why are you even back here? Unless, of course, you found my watches.”
Case and point.
“We haven’t,” Freddie admitted, drawing the man’s eyes.
“And you don’t think that’s strange?” Veronica said quickly, unwilling to let her partner diffuse the mounting tension.
“Do I think what is strange? That you haven’t found the watches?”
Veronica ignored the barb.
“You look like an able-bodied man, Mr. Seidel. I’m just wondering why two men thought that you were such an easy target that they could break in here and walk off with thousands of dollars’ worth of watches without a weapon.”
Noah crossed his arms over his chest. His biceps were thick and when he puffed up his chest, as he was doing now, he looked like a formidable opponent.
“Tens of thousands,” he corrected.
“Right. Tens of thousands of dollars, sure. Even better. So, why do you think—”
“Let me ask you something, detective—”
“Shade.”
“Let me ask you something, detective: why would I risk my life protecting jewelry that’s insured?”
“They didn’t have weapons, so—”
