now, dealing with news media, all that. He thought you'd appreciate his keeping the media off your backs.”
Lucas wondered if the local sheriff thought there might possibly be a book or movie deal in it for him. “So you're our escort?”
“'Fraid you're stuck with me. But the sheriff'll see you later on.”
“Okay, take us to the vehicle.”
Meredyth asked Harold, “Does the sheriff believe it was the act of local men?”
“He has taken to the theory, yes'm. He knows… well, we all of us know some boys here capable of such if they get swimming in their booze.”
“But you said yourself it'd take a hell of a shot to hit a moving target at seventy miles an hour.”
“We figure those boys just must a come right up on the car, right next to it, passed it a bit, and fired through the windshield, looks like… Looks to us like getting their game man was all they could think of.”
“Their game man?” repeated Meredyth.
Lucas poked a large finger at the deputy and asked, “And you believe that?”
“Well, sir… what else might explain Mr. Little's getting himself killed like this?”
“Did you know Little?” asked Meredyth
“Everybody in these parts knows of Mr. Little.”
Lucas asked, “A lot of people owed him big-time?”
“Yes, sir, they did. Owed him their livelihoods.
Meredyth seized on this. “And owing sometimes breeds contempt, doesn't it, Deputy?”
“That's sometimes so, Doctor, yes.”
“Was there any show of this contempt before now?” she added.
“None beyond the usual palaver, no.”
“Palaver?”
“You know, beer-stool talk. Mostly nonsense, but that nonsense has some men behind bars this mornin', ma'am.”
“Still, your sheriff here thinks there was sufficient animosity toward Little to see him murdered in this brutal a fashion?” Meredyth pressed.
“Well, talk around Medford was he-Mr. Little, that is-was going to close down the plant.”
She shook her head. “I thought there was a planned buyout.”
“Some figured it was one step removed from a shutdown, that the buyout was ASCAN's way to write off tax losses, or so I'm told. That at the very least, they would move the plant elsewhere, to some big industrial park outside Kansas City, I think.”
“Still makes a weak argument for murder, Deputy Lempel.”
“Gotta agree with you, sir, but Sheriff Barnette's got to do what he's got to do, I reckon.”
“Gotcha,” added Lucas, knowing that in the face of publicity doing nothing could be lethal. Lucas again said, “Let's have a look at the car.”
The deputy gestured for them to follow him, and behind his back they had a quick powwow, Lucas saying in a whisper, “Still, if this guy was about to cut off everybody's livelihood…”
“Whataya saying, Lucas? That news of the Houston arrow murderer has spread, and that the killer or killers here-”
“A copycat can't be ruled out. Not on what little we've seen.”
She silently but reluctantly had to agree. “You think Lawrence already knew as much? That he sent us on this wild-goose chase just to get me off his back for a while?”
“Maybe… maybe not.”
“Can't you make up your mind?”
“Can't say… Too little to go on.”
“God, you can be exasperating with that.”
“Caution is a pill you may wish to try yourself, Doctor.”
She only gritted her teeth and continued on, following Deputy Lempel through a pair of double doors, across a parking lot, and to an impound lot.
The clean two-and three-centimeter holes in the windshield looked like large, oversized bullet holes, and they told the whole story. Even safety glass, designed to hold in place like a shaky spider web, was no match for the crossbow arrow when the arrow was traveling at something upwards at 115 miles per hour and the car at seventy, and given the impact that must have occurred. What car manufacturer's test involved steel-shafted arrows at such speeds? If Little was traveling at sixty-five miles an hour, and two arrows: came careening through his front windshield, he was headed: or disaster even had they missed his vital organs.
Lucas's high whistle filled the impound yard where he stood, staring at the damage. 'The crossbow had to be light-powered with a scope to make this kind of hit, and it'd be pulling upwards of two or three hundred pounds, depending on the distance the sharpshooter took. Maybe the killer did come up close on the vehicle.”
“Then perhaps the sheriff was right, that some good of boys drove right up to the vehicle, and in a drunken state, someone fired.”
Lucas and Meredyth considered the possibilities as they looked over the Alamo rental, a once beautiful 1995 Olds Cutlass, midnight-blue with ocean-blue interior now stained with an ugly brown-purple, the sort of hue you got by mixing all the Easter egg colors together, Meredyth thought.
Lucas thought the bloodstains looked like bear paw tracks in the mud.
The passenger-side seat was untouched, but the driver's seat was ripped and bloody, and here one of the two arrows remained embedded in the cushion.
“What do you make of this?” she asked Lucas.
“The man was hit by two arrows.”
“No, only one in his body out on the hood where we found it,” said the deputy. “Damnedest sight I ever seen.”
“The second arrow had to've hit him, too,” countered Lucas.
“How can you tell?” she asked.
“At the speed this second arrow was traveling-to cleanly slide through the glass”-Lucas's partitioned mind thought how carmakers would now have to design tests to ward off crossbow attacks-”this cushion wouldn't be enough to stop its progression into the backseat,” he explained as he climbed about the interior, pointing. “So, it had to be intercepted by something far more substantial than the cushion, most probably Mr. Little's arm, from the look of these blood spatters. See how they fan out in rays in this direction. There on the passenger-side panel and window as well.”
Meredyth shook her head in disbelief and confusion. “But if he was traveling at seventy miles an hour when the damned arrow hit, how could the killer have placed a second one into his heart with the car careening all over the road?”
Stonecoat looked her in the eye. “There were two arrows, fired simultaneously. Now, unless the bowman was using a double crossbow…”
'Two assassins?” She nodded. “My God.”
'There had to be two bows fired at the same instant, and that meant two sharpshooters, two assassins at minimum.” It made them each rethink the Mootry killing while Harold gulped, burped, and exclaimed, “Damn, you think so? That'd fit the sheriff's suspicions.”
'The blood here, I take it, has been determined to be that of the victim?”
“According to tests,” replied Deputy Lempel. “We'll want copies of any and all tests and photos your department has shot, Deputy,” said Meredyth, a sense of gloom invading her heart. “Yes, sir, ma'am, Dr. Sanger.”
“Now, will you take us out to the crime scene?” she asked, trying to quell her nerves.
“Right away, at your service. The Medford Police Department is at your service,” he repeated it like a well- rehearsed line.
Stonecoat whispered in her ear. “You okay? You look a bit pale-faced.”
“I'm fine. Let's get on with it.”
