Page 5 of Their Wicked Games

“Let me take a look.” Wolfe lifted an eyelid to reveal a one-cent piece. “Well, I’ll be.” He pulled an evidence bag from his kit, removed the coin with tweezers, and examining the second eye, found another. “Two for two.”

After examining the other two bodies, they discovered all had coins under their eyelids. Kane turned to look at Jo, who had been following their progress while sticking to the trees. “This is a calling card. Does anyone come to mind, Jo?”

“Oh yeah, they sure do.” Jo moved a few steps closer. “Are the coins pennies?”

“Yeah.” Wolfe held up an evidence bag. “The same on every victim.”

“It’s the same MO as James Earl Stafford, known as Jimmy Two Cents out of Clear Spring, North Dakota.” Jo walked along the tree line and peered at the bodies. “There is a small problem. James Earl Stafford is currently doing time and his weapon of choice was a knife.”

As she was speaking, Kane was examining the variation in the trajectory of the wounds on the bodies. “We have a copycat, well, a bunch of them. These victims were shot by three different people.” He turned to Wolfe. “I’ll scope out the area. It shouldn’t take too long to discover where each of them was standing at the time.” He pulled out his phone to call Carter and then asked Rowley to come over. “Rowley is our go-to guy for anything to do with archery. He hunts with a crossbow and will be able to give us the optimum distance for the shooters from the targets.”

“How long will you need me to leave the bodies in situ?” Wolfe gave him a concerned stare. “They’re decomposing in front of my eyes. We need to get them back to the morgue ASAP.”

Kane pulled out his hunting knife and removed four branches from the trees around him. He stripped off the side branches to produce four stakes. He dropped two beside the first body and one beside each of the others. “If we measure the height of each victim and point of entry on the stake, we should be able to determine the trajectory of each bolt. One thing I do need to know is the direction of the wounds.”

“That’s easy enough.” Wolfe went through his kit for a tape measure. “All the wounds are in a very slight downward slope.”

“A crossbow shoots in a straight line.” Rowley came out of the trees and stood beside Kane. “The shooters must have been in a slightly elevated position to achieve a wound like that and, as accuracy was necessary, they would have been shooting from approximately thirty yards or less.”

“What have you found?” Jenna stood on the edge of the trail flanked by Rio and Carter.

Kane explained about the coins and the link to Jimmy Two Cents as he prepared the stakes. “The stakes are used as markers to determine the trajectory of each wound.”

“Do you think we are dealing with a copycat killer?” Jenna stared at Jo.

“I doubt it.” Jo shook her head. “The information about the coins was never released.”

When Wolfe’s team had the victims in body bags and on their way to the morgue, Kane set the stakes in the ground and used his sniper rifle scope to determine the trajectory. The shooters had been positioned in an arc and each had chosen a direct line of sight to the trail. He sent Rio and Rowley to the first shooter’s position, using his phone to keep them in the right direction. It didn’t take long before they found the trampled ground where the shooter had waited for his prey. He waited for them to photograph and mark the area, but as with the crime scene, the killers had taken precautions to sanitize the area. After repeating the procedure, they had collected enough data to prove beyond reasonable doubt that three shooters were involved.

“I think we should walk the forest in the general area of the shooters.” Jenna stood hands on hips and looked from one to the other. “People make mistakes, they must have left a partial footprint or something behind. Search the area again. Look for cigarette butts, candy wrappers, the smell of pee. If they were holed up and waiting a time for these kids to walk along the trail, they would have brought something with them to eat and drink.” She looked directly at Kane. “I’m finding it hard to believe this is an opportunistic thrill kill. From what I’m seeing here, it would take recon of the immediate area to discover the few direct lines of sight to the trail.”

Impressed, Kane nodded. “My thoughts exactly.” He swung his attention to Jo. “When we get back to the office, we’ll need to find out more about Jimmy Two Cents.”

They spent the next hour or so searching the forest but didn’t find anything they could use until Jenna let out a shout of triumph and waived a small scrap of material in the air. Kane moved to her side. “What did you find?”

“A piece of army surplus camo and it looks fresh.” Jenna held up an evidence bag. “It was caught on that broken branch back there. Another thing I’ve noticed: indents in the forest floor. Places where my footprints are evident, someone has walked there without leaving a trace. I figure they were wearing something over their boots to disguise their footprints and camouflage gear. They would have been a group of silent assassins. Now we just have to figure out why they killed these kids.”

FIVE

Jenna’s approach to investigations was never the same. She used gut instinct most of the time. Although, she followed procedure by correlating her deputies’ information in a case file and always had a visual on the whiteboard, so that anybody entering the room could see firsthand where the investigation was going. As Carter and Jo had unofficially joined the team, she decided to set up a base in the conference room on the same floor as her office. The room filled with the refreshing smell of freshly brewed coffee, as everyone consumed the takeout from Aunt Betty’s Café. Grabbing bites to eat, she updated the whiteboard with all the information they’d gathered to date. She attached the photographs of the victims and then turned to Rowley. “Do we still have the college and high school yearbooks?”

“Yeah, I’ll go down and get them from the office.” Rowley stuffed the last piece of a pulled-pork roll into his mouth and headed for the door.

She looked at the others all waiting expectantly for her to continue. “The first priority is identifying the victims, and I would imagine, going on the small amount of supplies they carried in their backpacks, they live locally. We have a few copies of the yearbooks from the local schools and college. I think that would be a good place to start.”

“Well, sure as heck, the missing persons calls will be coming into the office soon.” Carter sipped a soda. “Wolfe figures those kids have been there since early this morning. I’m surprised they haven’t been completely consumed by critters. The bodies were only nibbled on. If a mountain lion or bear had wandered by, we wouldn’t have found much more than the backpacks. I’d say they’re likely due home for supper.” He let out a long sigh. “That’s the worst part of this job, having to break it to the parents that their kids aren’t coming home.”

Sorrow washed over Jenna, but she pushed it to one side. It was her job to bring these murderers to justice. This case was so different to the others they had faced. She would have to look at it from every angle and think outside the box. She took her seat beside Kane and nodded. “It sure is.” Her phone chimed a message. She opened it and lifted her head. “That was Wolfe. The autopsy is at ten and as it’s a homicide he doesn’t need permission from the parents to proceed. I hope we’ve discovered their IDs by then.”

“The pennies forced under the eyelids are significant.” Kane looked at Jo. “If this is the trademark for Jimmy Two Cents, as he’s been away for at least ten years, the likelihood of anyone copying his MO would be remote.”

During the long winter Jenna had spent a good deal of her downtime researching old serial killer cases. Discovering the different types of trophies that most of them kept intrigued her. She’d researched the backgrounds of each one in an effort to discover what had triggered them. Over the last four years she had developed an understanding of how a psychopath’s mind worked, and understood that although most of them were born with the condition, not all of them evolved into a killer. Having read everything that Jo Wells had written on the subject, and being beside her during interviews in prison with psychopathic killers, had given her an insight into their behavior. Somehow things didn’t add up with the current case, and she believed that attributing the murders to a psychopath or psychopaths would be an error of judgment.

She looked at Jo. “Would you classify Jimmy Two Cents as a psychopathic serial killer?”

“Yeah, he was unstoppable and had convinced himself he would die in a hail of bullets.” Jo leaned back in her chair, twiddling her pen between her fingers. “It took a SWAT team to take him down, and before you ask, he was living with a woman at the time. She became suspicious and went to the cops. Up to that time, the investigators on the case had little evidence. The coins were the only indication that the cases were linked.”

Intrigued, Jenna leaned forward on the table. “Was it usual for him to kill more than one victim at a time?”

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