Tom Clancy Terminal Velocity

1

Clarkston, Washington

Early June, present day

Mitch Whitcomb closed the screen door carefully and groped his way across his front porch in the dark, his Resistol wide-brim hat perched on his head and his Justin Ropers pinched in his hand. He would have liked to have thrown the porch light on, but that would probably wake Molly, who insisted on sleeping with the curtains pulled back to let the cool night air stream through the windows.

That didn't make much sense to Mitch, the Asotin County sheriff. First of all, even though it was barely four a.m., the temperature was stuck in the mid-seventies. The whole week had been a scorcher, baking the Palouse, a long stretch of high desert plains that dominated the farmlands where Washington, Idaho, and Oregon come together.

For another thing, Mitch had paid good money for a pair of Mitsubishi mini-splits to air-condition their sprawling farmhouse. Having reached his mid-sixties, it was hard enough to get a good night's sleep, and the whole point of the Mitsubishis was to cool the house down to make it feel like October year-round, his favorite month. But Molly had her ways-and thirty-five years of marriage told him the argument wasn't worth it, so here he was, tiptoeing across his porch in the dark like some kid trying not to wake his girlfriend's father.

At the bottom step, he pulled on his boots, then crunched across the gravel to the pole barn, where he parked his John Deere, his '57 T-Bird-tarped to keep the barn swallows from destroying it-and his official Ram police truck.

He fished through his pocket for the key to unlock the tiny office built into the front of the barn, then punched in the numbers to his gun safe. It took him a few minutes to get his police belt on with his Glock 22, and lodge his pump-action 12-gauge into the socket that straddled the Ram's transmission hump.

He settled behind the truck's wheel, angling his elbow to avoid touching the computer rig. Once he stabbed the ignition button, the noisy diesel would sound off, and, again, because Molly had the windows open, probably wake her. But what could he do? Old Tyler Ross, the fire chief, hit him on the emergency pager Mitch slept with, and when he called the chief back from the powder room down the hall, Ross said he was looking at a homicide. That was a mighty rare thing out here in Asotin County.

The Ram bumped along the dirt road that Mitch was always after the county to oil, then turned onto Evans, which passed through town and eventually led to a highway beside the Snake River. "Hey, Dot, are you in the office?" he asked over the truck's Motorola, rolling south.

"Where else would I be?"

Mitch grinned. Dot tended to get a little cranky at the end of her night shift. "I put that address in the GPS. It drew a blank. Help me out, will you?"

"I just relayed the address Chief Ross gave me."

"Well, you can locate his pumpers on the radio grid, can't you? Check in on them and just tell me where they are."

"Roger that, Sheriff. Wait one."

Mitch watched the highway dashes flash in his headlights while he awaited a response. With his windows down, he listened to the night insects buzzing in the wheat fields. Cruising along the Snake at a relaxed thirty-five, he enjoyed the cool air settling along the banks. He had always liked waking up before everyone else, even as a boy. It made him feel like he was getting a head start on the day, and that invigorating feeling surged through him as he caught the scent of the sagebrush. But then he reprimanded himself; it was a homicide that had dragged him out of bed.

"Okay, I got a twenty," Dot said when she returned. "Stay on 129 until you're a mile or so south of Hostetler. Must be an unmarked road or something. The pumpers are near Asotin Creek down there. There's no road registered with the county, so it's gotta be private."

Mitch thought that through. He knew Clarkston like the tops of his scuffed Justins. He tried to picture where a couple of big pumper trucks might access Asotin Creek. South of Hostetler, there was nothing but rolling ranchland, baked yellow after a spring drought.

"Thanks, Dot," he concluded. "I'll find it."

As it turned out, the fire wasn't that hard to locate. Five miles south of town, he saw the two county engines and the fire chief's red pickup with lights blazing across a broad field. Dawn was still an hour off, but stars were winking out, signaling its approach. The sheriff soon spotted the narrow gravel road to access the ranch and roared the Ram across it with his patrol lights flashing.

Now that he was here, facing the hills beyond Asotin Creek, he recognized the property. It had belonged to Doc Sutton, who eventually got tired of playing gentleman farmer in the blowing cold winters and pulled stakes for Sarasota.

If Mitch recalled correctly, a young guy who'd come up from California bought the place. And because he was a young guy from California, Mitch hadn't paid much attention to the goings on down here. It seemed like two or three fellas like that were moving to this part of the country every week.

The sheriff wasn't sure what the Californian planned to do with this three-hundred-acre property. He didn't see any cattle in his headlights-only the big red pumpers, a gaggle of exhausted firemen, and the charred remains of a barn, its embers still glowing. Smoke drifted over the field as if Mitch were standing on the wrong side of a bonfire.

The sheriff parked the Ram, swiveled out, and hitched up his Wranglers. Tyler Ross, the chief, looked like hell in his yellow Nomex turnout gear. His face was streaked with soot, and the men standing around him gazed at the ground with hangdog expressions.

"What the hell happened here?" the sheriff asked.

Ross rubbed his face with a handkerchief, smearing the soot, then blew his nose. "Ugly. Four deceased. We all went in right before the roof caved. Dog led us to them. Thought someone might still be alive."

"Aw, shit. Any of your people hurt?"

"No," Ross replied. "We're okay. The victims, though . . . Another story."

"You said four people-you mean in the barn? Not in the house?"

"Yeah. They're in the barn. We went for the house first and found it empty."

"And they burned in the barn? Like they got trapped in there?"

"They were shot, Mitch. As soon as we knew it was a crime scene, we put out the fire and did what we could to preserve it."

Whitcomb removed his hat and placed it over his heart as if in prayer. His eyes roamed over the property. A pretty simple scene. The house, fields, and driveway looked fine, except for the pumpers, which would likely ruin the chance of finding a perpetrator's tire print. The barn was partially collapsed, glowing like a heap of hot coals.

"You mentioned a dog, Ty. What dog?"

"That one, over there."

Mitch yanked his Maglite off his belt and aimed it at the home. The two-story farmhouse with a wraparound porch stood to the right of the barn, slightly uphill. An American flag hung at an angle over the steps. The house was dark, but the front door stood open. A black Labrador retriever lay on the porch with its chin on its paws, watching them.

"How's that, Chief?" Mitch asked. "You're saying the dog was in the barn?"

"No. She was trying to get into the barn, scratching like hell at the wood where it hadn't caught fire yet. The roof was burning by then."

The chief clenched his jaw, swallowed, and inclined his head at the ruins. "Whole family in there, Mitch. Looks like two kids and two parents. We never had a chance to save 'em. I think they were probably already dead. Look to me like they were bound first, then shot."

Mitch paled. "Bound . . ." he repeated.

"Yeah. I didn't see any brass casings on the floorboards-that's your department. But they each have signs of bullet wounds to the head. You'll see what I mean."

The sheriff tugged his hat onto his head and swept his flashlight over the smoldering beams. What remained of the charred roof lay at an angle, dripping and steaming from the fire hose water. He shifted the beam to the two-story farmhouse, allowing it to rest on the open front door. "Was the house like that when you arrived?"

"The door? No. We went in the house on arrival to evacuate the family, just in case. Door was unlocked. Place was empty. The dog burst out of the rear laundry room and ran for the barn."

"No sign of struggle in the house?"

"Not that I saw, but I'm no expert. Come on, Mitch, I'll take you into the barn. Put these on. I warn you, it's not for the faint of heart."

After donning a Nomex coat and swapping his hat for a helmet, Mitch ducked under one smoldering beam after another, following the chief. The wood hissed and popped about his ears. Sweat beaded on his forehead and his throat rasped.

"We didn't move 'em," the fireman said. "There you go."

The sheriff raised a handkerchief to his nose when the smell of burnt people reached him. He could see four corpses sitting upright in folding metal chairs that hadn't caught fire. As corpses go, they were oddly preserved, dried and desiccated by the fire, which added to the barn's hideous hell.

"God help us," Mitch muttered. He looked away, closed his eyes, and breathed through his handkerchief. It was a struggle to get back to examining the crime scene-but such was the job.

Their arms had been pulled back and bound to the chairs. The sheriff squatted and inspected their wrists with the flashlight. Their flesh had puffed out, biting into copper wire used as binding. He wanted to vomit. His breath caught. Despite his professional duty, he needed a few seconds. He stood and looked away.

"I know," the chief sympathized with a thick-gloved hand on the sheriff's shoulder. "Killer wanted to bind them with something that wouldn't melt or burn."

Mitch steeled himself and took a knee to examine the smoking remains of the male, presumably the father. His face was stained in dark blood that had oozed from a hole near his right temple. Some vile, hateful bastard had shot the man where he sat. The wife and kids had suffered the same fate. As a detective, Mitch had seen all kinds of twisted, grisly mayhem-nothing as bad as this.

"How'd the fire report come in?" Mitch asked, standing, his voice low.

"The neighbor up the creek, George Butters, called it in. He was up caring for a colicky horse when he smelled the smoke. He drove out and saw the fire."

"I'll talk to George," Mitch remarked. "You know anything else about these people?"

"I pulled records while waiting for you. Property's owned by a fella named Cole Hunt. He bought it off Doc Sutton last year. According to George, the wife is Marla. Kids are Maddie and Robbie, fourteen and twelve. Sadly, I think that's who we're lookin' at here."

"My dear Lord."


By the time the sun crested the rolling brown hills, Mitch had three of his five deputies roping off the house and the barn remnants with yellow crime scene tape. The sheriff had never handled one that ran across a whole property, but that’s what he was looking at. There were no signs of forcible entry into the house and, sadly, much of the usable evidence was likely consumed by fire in the barn.

Disgusted by what transpired here, the first responders refused to leave. While the chief looked for the primer the arsonist used for ignition, the rest of his crew assisted the sheriff and surveyed the property. Mitch asked them to inspect the dirt driveway's perimeter for tire treads that differed from the relatively new F-250 Super Duty they discovered in the garage. It wasn't much, but it was a start.

The Asotin County Sheriff's Office wasn't large. However, Mitch's experience as a detective in Spokane, two hours to the north, had made him the primary investigator for three municipal departments and two counties. Whether he liked it or not, he'd be the lead detective on this murder case. He and his deputies would gather the bodies and evidence for transport to the crime lab in Spokane, operated by the Washington State Patrol. That's when the main forensic work would begin.

But first, he needed to secure the scene. The dog sniffed at his boots and nudged his knees. The sheriff lifted her into the Ram's back seat and stroked her ears, wondering what living nightmare the poor creature had witnessed.

Perhaps there was one good thing that could emerge from this. He and Molly hadn't had a dog since the last of the kids moved out five years ago. Molly said it was so they could travel, but they never did, really, except to visit her good friend in Seattle, six hours to the west. If no one claimed this handsome Lab after the notice went out, then Mitch intended to keep her. The name on her collar read luna.

Intending to begin the investigation from his truck's computer, he suddenly recalled some beef jerky in the seat console and offered it to her. "Hey there, Luna. Chew on this."

She sniffed it, but showed no interest in eating, choosing instead to rest her chin on her paws as though she'd been in the back of this truck a thousand times.

Under Luna's watchful amber eyes, Mitch got to work on the keyboard of his dash-mounted computer. He quickly confirmed what the fire chief had said. According to the Asotin County Assessor's Office, the property owner was Cole Hunt. A previous mailing address indicated that the family had moved from Coronado, near San Diego. Maddie and Robbie were students at the local public schools.

As Mitch waited for his deputies to report in, he rubbed Luna's ears and sipped the coffee that Dot had brought from the station. Next, he double-clicked on Mr. Cole Hunt, the property owner.

A credit report showed Hunt paid his bills on time. The property tax records said the same. The man had no criminal history, no file of any kind. Mitch thumbed through the mail his deputy had pulled from the box along the road. The usual stuff-junk credit card offers and an insurance bill.