Murder Mountain: An Eli Quinn Short Mystery / Prequel Read online

  “Could be coincidence,” I said. “Doesn’t mean it was him.”

  “Could be. So I looked wider.”

  I had my coffee cup up to my lips, holding it with two hands.

  “Found one in Texas that was similar, but ruled it out.”

  “Why?”

  “Rifle.”

  “Could’ve been him,” I said.

  “He’s a pistol guy. Pistol guys stick with pistols.”

  “Exclusively?”

  “Eh. But we’re dealing with hunches and odds here, so for now I’m ruling Texas out. Same with one in Connecticut. MO looks good, but geographically it’s not the most likely, and they perp was thought to be shorter, dark-skinned. That brings us to a couple shootings up on a place they call Murder Mountain in Northern California.”

  “You’re joking,” I said. I put my cup down and sat up straight.

  “Dead serious. It’s in what they call the Emerald Triangle.”

  “Pot country.”

  “Nasty place. Lots of murders. Many of them out in the woods. Little to no evidence, no suspects. It’s so bad the deputies don’t want to go in. Like a war, but they never win.”

  “Sounds like war in general.”

  Beach shrugged, squeezed the rubber ball. “Locals got tired of it last year, banded together and tried to hunt down some mountain man they say killed one of their neighbors who was out hiking. Sheriff up there can’t get any of these vigilantes to admit what they’re doing or finger their friends, so he just kinda lets them go at it.”

  “Description of this guy?”

  “Nobody’s seen him. They just know he’s out there. Then, get this, he shoots one of the vigilantes. Witness said the shot came from nowhere. No sound. Again, ballistics determined it was a pistol.”

  “How?”

  “Pistol bullets are different,” he said. “Usually short and fat. Rifle bullets are long and narrow.”

  “Could the slugs be compared, find out if it DeRouin’s pistol?”

  “Without the gun, no way to know. Each barrel leaves a different pattern on the bullet.”

  “So this pot grower, this mysterious man on Murder Mountain, packs a pistol, uses a silencer,” I said. “Shoots a hiker. Then shoots somebody who is trying to hunt him down.”

  “That’s about it,” Beach said.

  “Sounds like somebody who likes to shoot people,” I said.

  “Does.”

  I shook my head, leaned back and laced my fingers behind my head. “That’s all you got?”

  Beach just laughed at me.

  Chapter 7

  ~ ~ ~

  The trail around the right side of Murder Mountain was almost as good as the one we’d been on moments ago. Lightly travelled, it was mostly hard-packed dirt with a layer of decaying redwood leaves that made it soft like a runner’s track, but not so soft that footsteps sank in. The terrain alternated continuously as we skirted the right side of the mountaintop. Down into gulches, up the other side, long flat stretches, overall generally uphill. But the topo map had shown both trails—left and right—to have similar elevation gains. No obvious advantages or disadvantages on either path. And since they were far apart, each trail on opposite sides of the mountaintop, DeRouin could not see or hear us as we gained on him.

  The fog thinned as we climbed higher. Solo stayed ahead of me, looking back frequently to make sure I was keeping up.

  My breathing was even, strides efficient, elbows in close. Even in the cool fog, I was sweating. I didn’t sweat as heavily as some, but I was working hard. The jeans didn’t help. The 9mm was cutting into my spine, so I pulled it out and switched it from one hand to the other every quarter mile or so.

  I breathed in through my nose, pushed the breaths out quickly through my mouth. At the first steep stretch, my strides became short and choppy, and my brain began to think ahead. Some subconscious part of my mind took control of the running, like autopilot.

  If I beat DeRouin to his campsite, per the plan, we’d find a spot to hide, wait until he was close enough, then shoot him. He wouldn’t be expecting us. I knew it wouldn’t play out that simply. But there was no point in making a complex plan. Keep it simple, improvise as needed.

  The steep part behind us, we were on a gentle uphill slope, curving to the left. Halfway through the chase. A hint of blue sky teased through the mist directly above. I imagined DeRouin at about the same spot on the other side of the mountain. Solo and I had covered a lot more ground on our longer route, and we’d both be about halfway now. Ahead, our journey remained longer than his, but we’d be moving faster.

  There was nothing left to think about, no more planning to do, so I listened to my breathing, got into the Zen of running that I enjoyed so much under other circumstances, and conserved as much physical and mental energy as possible for the encounter ahead.

  Chapter 8

  ~ ~ ~

  Sam blew through my front door during the drinking hour, which had commenced promptly at five p.m. on this hot summer weeknight, nearly six months after Jess’ death. She’d stopped knocking a few weeks back. I tried not to think about what that meant, if anything. Our friendship had grown into one of the best I’d ever had, second only to the one I had with Jack Beachum.

  Our investigation into the whereabouts of Devin DeRouin had stalled out again—we knew some things, we just didn’t know enough of them—and I was on my third gin and tonic. Alex Trebek had been providing some very difficult answers that I struggled to find questions for. Sometimes I won Jeopardy, but tonight it made me question my education. I was in fourth place.

  Sam was sweating, little beads glistening on the olive-colored skin of her forehead. She greeted Solo first, gave him a good scratch behind the ears. I wondered if my attack dog wasn’t getting soft.

  “Make you a drink?”

  “A little early,” Sam said.

  “You can argue that.”

  “What are you drinking?”

  “Tanqueray and tonic. Twist of lime. Perfect every time.” I raised my glass, toasted her.

  “I’ll pass,” she said. “Listen, Quinn. I’ve got something.” She had a look of urgency, glanced at the TV. I fumbled the remote, picked it up and hit the mute button. She handed me some printouts.

  “What?”

  “I’ve been looking for false-identity reports, just a hunch. Read.” She pointed at the printouts.

  The first page was a short news story from a web site in Alabama, dated about a month ago.

  Alabama resident John Toon was researching his family history on Ancestry.com and found a reference to his cousin, Bart. Bartholomew Toon, originally from Tennessee, had died in 1990 in Iraq, during the first Gulf War. Shot in action, returned and buried in his home state.

  My head cleared a bit. I looked up at Sam. Her eyebrows were arched, hands on her hips.

  I read on. John Toon discovered, much to his surprise, that Bartholomew Toon was alive and well, living in Arcata, California.

  “Arcata,” I said. “That in LA?”

  “Arcadia is in LA,” Sam said. “Arcata is up along the coast, about five hours north of San Francisco.”

  It was my turn to raise eyebrows.

  “Keep going,” she said.

  The next page was another story, this from a web site covering Arcata and the county it was in, Humboldt. Based on the tip from Alabama law enforcement officials, local police went to Bartholomew Toon’s apartment in Arcata. They had a warrant, busted in. He wasn’t there, but they found a stash of marijuana and a collection of small arms. The story was written two days after the Alabama piece.

  “Pistols,” I said.

  “And silencers,” Sam said.

  I read on. “And silencers.” The pages in my hand started to quiver. I set my drink down.

  “Look at the last page,” Sam said.

  Two photos, two young men, similar headshots in their Army uniforms. It confused me. I’d seen the photos before. Or at least I’d seen one of them.


  “Which one’s DeRouin?”

  “Look at the eyes,” Sam said.

  The one on the left had blue eyes, the other brown.

  “Jesus,” I said. “They could be brothers.”

  DeRouin’s face was narrower, his lips thinner. Both had the same strong jaw. Toon was smiling, looked pleased about something. DeRouin’s blue eyes had an icy glare. No smile. Serious.

  I tried to flipped the page but there were no more.

  “That’s it?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Sorry. Sam, this is great. I mean, so…”

  “I’ve got more,” she said. “C’mere.”

  She pulled the laptop out of her bag and set it on the breakfast bar, slid onto a stool. I took the stool next to her. I’d been close to Sam many times while we worked on stories, but never this close. I kept my focus on the laptop, chastised myself for having to even think about it.

  She talked while she woke the laptop and typed her password. “They were in the same Army unit. Bart Toon was twenty-two when he died. DeRouin was twenty at the time.”

  My brain was putting things together faster than Sam could tell the story.

  I took a guess. “DeRouin came home with Toon’s ID.”

  Sam clicked on a file. A scanned black-and-white image of Bartholomew Toon’s driver’s license came up. “DeRouin used this to get a copy of Toon’s birth certificate in Tennessee. Then he was able to get a social security card. Keep in mind this was 1991. The systems weren’t computerized, so some of the standard cross-referencing that would make this difficult today wasn’t being done.”

  “Murder Mountain,” I said. I’d filled Sam in on all that weeks ago.

  “You’ll go, won’t you.” She didn’t say it as a question. And she sounded sad.

  We stood there looking at each other. Colleagues. Friends. Great friends. For six months I had it in my head that I was chasing down my wife’s killer. It was what kept me going, made sense of my days. Yet I admitted to myself the truth now: It was Sam who gave me the initial push, then pushed and pulled every day since. I was drinking too much. I was moping about, teetering on full-blown depression. But Sam was there, helping me put one foot in front of the other by keeping me focused on something important. And doing most of the work.

  The moment stretched out. We were quiet. It didn’t seem unnatural. I nodded.

  Sam turned away, walked over to the sliding glass doors and looked out into my backyard, her arms folded.

  “Quinn,” she said, not turning around.

  “Yeah.”

  “Be careful.”

  Chapter 9

  ~ ~ ~

  Solo and I made good time on the downhill stretch, back into fog so dense you couldn’t see three trees away. We were a little more than two miles from DeRouin’s camp, closing in on the spot where the trails crossed at a creek. Both trails continued up and along the ridges on either side of the creek for another two miles, ending at his camp.

  My math had us reaching the creek before DeRouin. We’d hide and wait for him to pass, see which trail he took, then take the other one and beat him to the campsite. Or maybe just shoot him as he ran by, depending on how our hiding spot was situated.

  We rounded a bend to find a giant redwood blocking the trail. The tree, maybe a thousand years old, had fallen from the slope above, crashing down onto the trail. A hundred feet of it lay on either side. The tree was ten feet in diameter, which means from our vantage point, it was ten feet tall. Since tree trunks are round, there was no climbing over it.

  A faint path up the hill, to our left, suggested the tree had been blocking the trail for a while and others had gone up and around. To our right, the tree’s top had wedged down into a steep ravine, dense with underbrush.

  Solo stood panting, waiting. I started up the steep, slippery slope, the loose ground hidden by a carpet of soft ferns, and he followed. It took nearly a minute to get to the massive root structure, a broad flat tangle that fanned out in all directions. It was another minute before we hiked around the roots, hopped and slipped our way back down the slope and onto the trail again.

  The detour had carved two minutes out of our roughly three-minute margin of error for the entire route. I took a few extra-deep breaths to saturate my blood with oxygen, then we picked up the pace.

  The creek announced itself before we could see it, water crashing from one pool to another and whooshing through rocks in a deep gully. We came over the ridge and spotted the tumbling brook. The trails crossed at a spot where the water was shallow and wide. DeRouin had either come through or he hadn’t. There was only one way to find out.

  Solo led the way down the trail to the creek. I pointed to the right and gave him the command to pick DeRouin’s scent back up. We headed maybe twenty yards down the trail before Solo stopped, barked once and looked back at me. He had it. Now I had to convince him not to follow it.

  Solo had a reputation for doing things his way. It was why he didn’t pass the final test for the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office K-9 unit. Solo’s official crime-fighting career ended before it began, right around the time Jess was killed. Beach took care of finding someone who could use a good dog.

  My concern was unfounded. One simple command and Solo followed me, even though his training urged him to follow DeRouin’s scent.

  We doubled back, crossed the creek, ankle deep and slippery. We’d lost another minute. There was one last steep stretch, to get out of the gully, then we were on the ridge. The trail was gentle and flat the rest of the way to the campsite. Two miles to go, and DeRouin had an unknown lead. I did mental math, assumed he’d beaten us to the crossing by two minutes and would finish the final two miles in sixteen minutes. That gave me fourteen minutes. Maybe.

  I settled into a six-minute pace, my limit on the slight downhill slope in wet shoes and jeans. Solo was at my heel.

  Chapter 10

  ~ ~ ~

  The flight to Arcata was two short hops, a stopover in San Francisco. I’d lost a day arranging it so Solo could come with, but we’d made it in the mid-afternoon. I rented a Jeep at the tiny airport and headed off to visit some addresses Beach had dug up for me. Fog hugged the town, hid the surrounding mountains, drizzled like a light rain. I kept the Jeep top up. Solo insisted I roll his window down. He had his head out, tongue flapping.

  My interview tactics proved ineffectual. I led with my desire to learn about the murders on the mountain and their roles as vigilantes. The first two doors were slammed in my face. The third man was polite but said he didn’t know anything, thank you very much.

  I had two more addresses. Darkness was falling when I pulled up to a small, one-story house on a one-lane road well outside town, along the base of the mountain. A four-foot cyclone fence surrounded the front yard. Vegetables thrived in the side yard. Redwood trees soared into the fog behind a small, green pasture in the back.

  A bull of a man opened the front door. My height, probably thirty pounds heavier, mostly muscle with a little extra padding for warmth. Red flannel shirt, jeans, work boots and a thick black beard, short hair mostly hidden under a 49ers cap.

  “Hey,” he said, looking first at Solo, then me.

  “Daryl Winston?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Eli Quinn.” I extended my hand. He just looked at it. I tried a new tactic.

  “My wife was killed by the same man you’ve been looking for,” I said. “Not asking you to get involved. I just need somebody to point me in the right direction, and I’m going to find him, kill him. I won’t tell anyone I was here, I won’t ask you for anything else.”

  He stared at me. He folded his arms. Thinking.

  “Six months ago,” I said. “Down in Phoenix. Shot her with a handgun and silencer. I’ve tracked him down. Same guy you’ve been trying to get rid of.”

  “And you think you can.”

  “I will.”

  “You look like a city boy,” he said.

  “Don’t be fooled.�
��

  Daryl Winston squinted, looked left and right. He didn’t invite me in. But he described what he knew about the man on the mountain, which wasn’t much. Pot farm and campsite, two different locations, nobody was sure exactly where. Rumors. And he gave me a name of a dreadlocked pot smoker who he thought could help.

  ***

  The next morning Solo and I found Markus Simper sitting on a bench in the town square at the center of downtown Arcata. Simper appeared stoned, his dreads lolling side to side with some music that must’ve been in his head, a joint pinched between his fingers. I wondered if Daryl Winston had led me on a fool’s errand.

  I sat next to Markus. Solo sat in front of me, his eyes on Markus, who took a toke, didn’t acknowledge us. I waited a minute.

  “Cold out,” I said.

  He handed me the joint.

  “No thanks,” I said. He lifted a lazy eyebrow, smoked some more.

  “Looking for Bart Toon.”

  He stopped mid-toke, blew the smoke out prematurely, then put the joint back to his mouth and resumed.

  “I know you’ve been up there. Need you to tell me how to find him.”

  “Dude.” He looked at me. Glanced at Solo. Inhaled again. I waited. “You don’t want to go there. He’s a mean motherfucker.”

  “All the more reason,” I said.

  Markus shook his head. “He’d fuckin’ kill me. He knows I know. Only a few of us do. Wow, man. I already said too much.” He pretended to zip his lips.

  I stretched out, put my arm on the bench behind Markus, casually grabbed the bundle of nerves, muscles and tendons between his shoulder and neck and squeezed hard. It was my best effort at a Vulcan nerve pinch, and it let Markus know I was serious. He tried to slip away but that didn’t happen.

  “We can do this here,” I said. “Or we can go somewhere. Either way, you’re going to help me find Toon. Do it the easy way, I’ll play nice. Solo too.” I nodded toward the dog. Not sure if it was the tone of my voice, or if Solo saw me squeezing Markus, or if it was Markus’ reaction, but he gave a nice little growl for punctuation.