Once Stalked

She felt the resistance from the trigger as she pulled it, then the sharp recoil from the rifle as the bullet was fired.

The noise of the shot wasn’t very loud. The sound suppressor and the flash hider had muffled the noise and the burst of flame.

Even so, did the killer worry that someone had heard it?

Only for a moment, Riley felt sure. He had shot two other men from much the same distance, and no one seemed to have heard the shots. Or if they had heard them, no one had thought them extraordinary.

But what did the killer do now that he’d fired the shot?

He kept looking through the scope, Riley realized.

He followed the body in its slouch against the wall toward an awkward squat.

And again the killer thought …

“I wish I could see the look on his face.”

As the killer must have done, Riley got to her feet. She imagined the killer taking a wide brush to the soil to smooth it over, then leaving the way he’d come.

Riley breathed a sigh of satisfaction. Her attempt to link with the killer’s mind had revealed more than she’d hoped for.

Or at least she had a hunch that it had.

She remembered something that Col. Larson had said earlier about whether the killings were acts of Islamic terrorism …

“These days, that simply has to be our default theory.”

Riley’s gut told her that that theory was probably wrong. But she wasn’t ready to say so to her colleagues. Under the circumstances, she knew that Larson was right to pursue the possibility of terrorism. It was simply good procedure. Meanwhile, it was best for Riley to keep her hunch to herself – at least until she could back it up with evidence.

Riley looked at her watch. She realized that she and the others were due at a funeral.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

As Riley watched the six uniformed men carry Sergeant Worthing’s flag-draped casket to the gravesite, she admired the solemn cadence and precision of their actions.

She was also struck by an eerie contrast between this ceremony and his actual death. The murder of Sergeant Worthing had been abrupt and brutal.

His funeral was elegance itself.

The military cemetery was in a lovely place, high on a hill in a remote part of Fort Nash Mowat. Riley could see the Pacific Ocean in the distance.

Riley, Lucy, and Bill were standing off to one side of the ceremony. She could see Sergeant Worthing’s widow and family seated on folding chairs beside the grave. She could watch the fifty uniformed young men and women in Worthing’s training platoon standing stiffly at attention.

She also spotted civilians of an unwelcome sort nearby – a small group of reporters and photographers crowded behind a rope barrier.

She stifled a groan of discouragement.

After three murders, there was no longer any way to keep the press away from Fort Mowat. The publicity was certainly going to add to the pressure of solving the case. Riley just hoped that the journalists wouldn’t make too much of a nuisance of themselves.

Probably too much to hope for, she thought.

Once the coffin was in place over the grave, the chaplain began to speak.

“We commend to the almighty God our brother, Sergeant Clifford Jay Worthing, and we commit his body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust …”

Riley was surprised to feel herself choke up at the chaplain’s words.

What was it about this funeral that was getting to her?

Then she realized …

Daddy.

As a Marine captain, her father had been eligible for a funeral with honors like this one.

Had he gotten this kind of funeral? Riley didn’t even know. Not only had she refused to go to his funeral, she’d taken no part in its planning. She’d left all that to her estranged sister, Wendy.

She’d never grieved over her father’s death. Nevertheless, she felt sad at the thought that he might not have been buried with full military honors. But who would have gone to the funeral, aside from Wendy? Riley’s father had died with no real friends as far as she knew. And Riley and Wendy were all he had left of family.

Riley remembered something that one of her father’s former buddies recently told her.

“Riley, your daddy was a good man. But he was a hard man too. He couldn’t help it, ’Nam made him that way.”

Tears welled up in Riley’s eyes.

He’d been a terrible father. But he’d been a good soldier. He’d given everything he had to the Marines – including his humanity, his capacity to love.

As the honor guard lifted the flag and held it taut above the casket, Riley thought …

He deserved this.

Riley thought she should have made sure her father had his full honors funeral, even if no one had been there to witness it except Wendy.

She was jolted out of her sad reverie by the firing of guns. A seven-person squad fired three volleys into the still air. Then the quiet was broken again by the mournful sound of a bugler playing taps.

The honor guard ceremoniously folded the flag, and an officer presented it to Sergeant Worthing’s widow. The officer whispered something to her – doubtless some word of support of support or solace.

Then the officer gave the family a slow-motion salute, and the service was over.

*

Before Sergeant Worthing’s platoon could leave the cemetery, Col. Dana Larson called them together. She introduced them to Riley, Bill, and Lucy and told them that they were here to investigate the three recent murders.

Riley scanned their faces, looking for some telltale sign of emotion. She detected nothing – certainly not grief.

She guessed that many of the recruits had hated Sergeant Worthing’s guts and weren’t sorry that he was gone.

Riley stepped forward and spoke to the gathered recruits.