Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [134]
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
SIX HOURS LATER, Hackberry Holland sat numbly in his office chair, his forehead propped on his fingers, and listened to the sheriff of Brewster County read from the notes he had made at the crime scene. As in all crime-scene reports, the factual nature of the language served only to further depersonalize and degrade the humanity of the victims: The bodies had been discovered by the friends of the missing dirt biker; Ethan Riser was DOA; Riser’s companion on the trail, Caleb Fry, was in a coma and barely alive; the dirt biker had died of either a broken neck or massive head trauma; the wounds to Ethan Riser indicated that he had been shot many times after mortality had occurred, to the degree that he had to be identified by his possessions.
“Are there any witnesses at all?” Hackberry asked. “Did anyone see Collins in the vicinity?”
“No, we’ve got no visuals on anything,” the sheriff in Brewster County said.
“Have you talked to the other bikers?”
“Yeah, they say their bud saw somebody flashing something at them from the rocks. Their bud was a lone wolf and liked to get into it with other people. By the way, we found his vest not far from where the agent died. Collins is here, isn’t he? In my county?”
“That’d be my guess. Is the FBI there yet?”
“Like flies on shit. There’s another detail I ought to pass on. There was a melted cell phone in the ashes of the fire. I suspect it was the FBI agent’s. It was too deep inside the burn ring to have fallen there. Why would the shooter throw the guy’s cell phone in the fire?”
“Fingerprints?”
“Maybe, but he didn’t bother to pick up the brass.”
“The day you understand Jack Collins is the day you check yourself in to rehab for the rest of your life,” Hackberry said.
“Where do you think he’s hid out?”
“The Unabomber lived in Lincoln, Montana, for ten years. He had no plumbing or electricity in his cabin. Forest Service personnel think he shot at their planes. The locals considered him a regular guy. Maybe Collins isn’t hiding. Maybe he’s out there in full view. It’s a sign of the times. The standards for normalcy find a new low with each passing day.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Who said it was?”
After Hackberry hung up, he called R. C. Bevins and Pam Tibbs into his office and told them of the conversation he’d just had.
“I’m sorry, Hack,” Pam said.
“There is nothing for us to feel sorry about. We honor Ethan’s memory by nailing the bastard who killed him,” Hackberry said. “R.C., I want you to go up to Brewster and get a topography map and look up the land records of every piece of property within five miles of the crime scene.”
“What am I looking for?” R.C. asked.
“Collins likes to take on the personae of obscure writers. Google the names on the land titles and see what pops up. Pam, you and I need to do something about Josef Sholokoff. For two years his name has been coming up in our investigation of Collins’s background. Sholokoff used Collins as a hit man, and he was also the business partner of Temple Dowling. Plus, Anton Ling says Sholokoff was mixed up with shipping arms to the Contras in the 1980s. He’s gotten a free pass for over twenty years, I think in part because he was a useful tool for some guys in the government.”
“What do you want to do about him?” she asked.
“He’s a Russian criminal. Maybe he needs a reminder of what life in Russia can be like,” Hackberry said.
After Pam and R.C. had left his office, he felt no better for his rhetoric and could not rid himself of the words the sheriff in Brewster had used to describe the wounds to Ethan Riser’s body. What had Ethan said to Collins that had filled him with such animus? Collins had always been cold-blooded and methodical when he killed, not driven by emotion or impetuosity. Before dying, Ethan had gotten to him. A remark about his mother? Maybe, but not likely. Collins had no illusions about the woman who had raised him. It was something else. Something that had to do with his image of himself. What greater bane