“There’s one other thing I need to ask you. At any time during the lawsuit, did you get questions about Kip Wells or Racer Moritz? Or did Brink or anyone else mention them?”
Sandra’s face furrowed with concern. “Kip and Racer? No, why? They were killed before the lawsuit ever began.”
“Do you know if they ever worked at the mine?”
“Not while I’ve been there.”
Darrell nodded. “Okay. Thanks for your time, Sandra. Merry Christmas.”
He headed down the driveway. I went to follow him, but Sandra grabbed my elbow before I could walk away. “What’s going on, honey? What does any of this have to do with Kip and Racer?”
“I can’t say.”
“Come on, everyone’s going to know sooner or later. Tell me.”
I still kept quiet, but Sandra was smart enough to make the connection for herself. Her face bloomed with shock as she put the pieces together, and she exhaled a cloud of steam into the cold air. “Son of a bitch. After all these years. He’s back, isn’t he? The Ursulina is back.”
Chapter Seven
I got to work early the next morning, but Darrell beat me there. He had the records from his investigation into the murders of Kip Wells and Racer Moritz spread out on the table in the conference room. This wasn’t the first time he’d done that. We didn’t get many cold cases in Black Wolf County, and Darrell didn’t like unfinished business. So whenever things were slow — which happened a lot — he hauled out the file and insisted on going over the details with me.
Every time Darrell brought out the crime scene photos, they sickened me all over again. Nearly every square inch over every surface inside the mobile home was covered in blood, much as it had been in Gordon Brink’s bedroom. According to Darrell’s theory of the crime, Racer Moritz died first. He was found at the back of the trailer, stabbed so many times that the autopsy couldn’t give an accurate count. The postmortem blood test showed that he’d been drunk and high on weed at the time of his death. There were no signs of a struggle, so Darrell suspected that Racer had been asleep or unconscious when the murder occurred.
Kip Wells had been found just inside the trailer door. Darrell speculated that the killer murdered Racer and then waited for Kip to return before attacking him from behind. All the knife wounds — more than a hundred, the coroner said — were in Kip’s back. The frenzied attack on his body had continued long after he was actually dead.
Then there was the message from the Ursulina, painted on the trailer wall in Kip’s blood.
For as much time as Darrell had spent on the investigation, he didn’t have much to show for it. The trailer where the killings occurred belonged to Norm Foltz, who used it as a campsite when he took hiking trips in the forest. He was an amateur photographer and naturalist, so when he wasn’t in a courtroom, he was usually in the woods. Sometimes he went alone; sometimes his son, Will, went with him. But because of Norm’s extended stay in Stanton for a trial that summer, the trailer had been unused for a few weeks. It was impossible to know exactly when Kip and Racer had begun squatting there.
But why were they dead? And who killed them? Darrell didn’t know. Honestly, in Black Wolf County, nobody cared. Kip and Racer had bullied people around here from the time they were teenage dropouts. If there was a break-in or theft in town, deputies usually knocked on their doors first. Even the 126 had banned them, and it took a lot of bad behavior to get thrown out of the 126. Many of their worst crimes went unreported, out of fear of retaliation. One woman had accused them of rape, and a week later, her house burned down. People got the message to keep their mouths shut. So when the Ursulina ended Kip and Racer’s reign of terror, pretty much everyone was grateful. If anyone knew anything, they didn’t rush to give Darrell evidence to solve the case.
Even the Ursulina hunt, filmed for television by Ben Malloy, turned out to be a bust. Darrell let Ben and his volunteers trample through the forest surrounding the crime scene, because he hoped someone might find evidence of the real murderer while searching the ground for Ursulina tracks and Ursulina poop. But we didn’t find a thing. Kip and Racer’s killer, like the Ursulina, had disappeared from the woods without leaving a trace.
“Question,” Darrell said, as we sat across from each other at the conference table. He liked to use me as his sounding board, as if the process of thinking through the case again would help us unearth something we’d missed.
“Kip, Racer, now Gordon Brink,” he continued. “What are the similarities between the cases?”
“Well, the crime scenes obviously,” I replied. “The Ursulina message. Plus, the extreme violence in how the victims were killed.”
“And the differences?”
“The crimes happened six years apart. The victims back then were two local thugs versus an out-of-town partner at a corporate law firm. There’s nothing to connect them. We’ve got different murder weapons and different locations, one residential, one in the national forest.”
“What about possible motives for Kip and Racer?”
“Take your pick. They had their fingers in a lot of pies, everything from drugs and poaching to theft and assault.”
“And Brink?”
“Presumably the lawsuit.”
Darrell frowned. “So what does your gut tell you? Are we looking at a copycat or at the same killer?”
I reflected on what to say. “Well, everything about the second crime scene feels staged to look like the first. They’re the same, but they’re also different. That sounds like a copycat, doesn’t it?”
I didn’t have time to find out if Darrell agreed. Before I could say anything more, I heard the rustle of paper and the loud crunch of someone eating potato chips. I looked up and saw Ajax in the doorway of the conference room. He listened to us, with his tall body slumped against the doorframe. “You’re both forgetting something, you know.”
“Oh, yeah?” Darrell asked. “What’s that?”
Ajax came into the room and sat down across from me. His long legs stretched out, and I felt him rub my calf with his boot under the table. I pushed my chair sharply backward. He grinned and extended the bag of potato chips to offer me some, but I waved it away.
“There’s someone connected to both crimes,” Ajax said.
“Who?” Darrell asked.
“Norm Foltz. Kip and Racer were in his trailer. He’s the one who found the bodies. And now we’ve got Gordon Brink, who was on the other side of Norm in the mine lawsuit. He has links to all the victims.”
“Norm also has no motive,” Darrell pointed out.
Ajax’s thick eyebrows teased up and down. “Well, it was a monster’s moon. Who knows what happens to Norm after midnight? Maybe he transforms into a werewolf or something.”
“Not funny,” Darrell said.
Ajax shrugged off the reproach. “Okay, well, Norm has no motive that we know of, but that’s different from not actually having one. Like Rebecca says, Kip and Racer were into everything. As for Brink, there could have been something personal between him and Norm that we don’t know about. And I’ll tell you something else. I didn’t see Norm at the movie at the 126 on Sunday night. So where was he?”
Darrell hated to acknowledge that Ajax was right, but in this case, we both knew that somebody needed to ask Norm some questions.
“Okay, go talk to him,” Darrell told Ajax. He looked at me. “Take Rebecca with you.”
My horror must have shown on my face. “Why not do the interview yourself?”
“Sorry,” Darrell replied, shaking his head. “Norm and I are best friends, everybody around here knows that. You guys talk to him first. Find out what he knows.”
Ajax practically hummed with satisfaction at the assignment. He crumpled up his empty bag of chips and hopped to his feet, and he pointed his long finger at me like a gun. “Come on, Rebecca. Chop-chop.”