One of the workers pressed a button on a control panel to my left, and a 200-horsepower diesel engine growled to life. The shrill whine of the now-spinning blade filled the air. Then the saw blade slid to the side, the conveyor belt carried the log forward, and then the blade swung back into place, biting into the wood.
For a moment it reminded me of one of the Edgar Allan Poe stories Tessa had convinced me to read- The Pit and the Pendulum.
A blade swinging.
Slicing toward a victim tied to a table.
He escaped just in time.
I watched the saw blade chew through the log, then I surveyed the rest of the mill, keeping an eye out for anything unusual. Unfortunately, my unfamiliarity with the site made that challenging, so, rather than try to pick up specific clues, I tried to get a sense of the place, a spatial understanding of the sawmill where Donnie Pickron, the main suspect in a double homicide, had worked until two hours before his family was slaughtered and he disappeared.
Different workstations were positioned throughout the mill. Five men and two women sorted boards into piles, graded lumber, or removed warped and knotted timber, then sent the unusable pieces to the far end of the mill on a second conveyor belt to be ground into pulp for easier transport to the paper mills.
The wood shredder for grinding the logs into pulp was like nothing I’d ever seen before. The reticulated gears spun at an astonishing speed, powering through the boards and logs in seconds.
Hardly anything was left after the logs were shredded.
Hardly anything was left.
Donnie disappeared.
Unlikely, but not impossible, not out of A hand on my arm caught my attention, and Windwalker motioned toward the door. I took one more look around the sawmill and then we dropped off our hearing protectors by the door and he led me toward the admin building.
A rush of snowflakes slanted around us.
“Can you tell me about Donnie’s job?” I asked.
“Transported the logs. Piled ’em here in the yard, sometimes drove ’em to Hayward.”
“Was he hourly or on salary?”
“Hourly.”
“And yesterday?”
“He was on a run. Left at noon. That’s all I know.”
“I need to see his time cards and a record of his arrival times.”
“Time cards are just inside.” His voice was curt. It was clear he was not enthusiastic about helping me here today.
We entered the building and found a receptionist’s office. He mentioned briefly that he had “let the girl go” recently, and I could see that he’d taken over the office himself.
The room was arranged haphazardly with used, mismatched furniture, two old filing cabinets, a desk strewn with invoices and a decade-old computer. A small bookcase filled with three-ring maintenance and construction binders sat in the corner. A photo of Windwalker standing beside a waterfall with a man I had not yet met was propped on the corner of the desk. The window on the south wall overlooked the yard.
My phone vibrated and I took a call from Jake. He informed me that the Lab’s handwriting analysts had confirmed “with a high degree of certainty” that Donnie Pickron had written the name on the helmet. Also, an unidentifiable set of prints were found on Ardis Pickron’s cell. “They’re not hers. Nothing came up in AFIS.”
“Thanks,” I told him.
“Press conference went well,” he said, reiterating what I’d gathered from our earlier conversation.
“I’m sure it did.”
“I’m still hoping to make it by 2:30.”
“All right.”
End call.
As it turned out, the time punch cards weren’t in the office but down the hall in a makeshift employee break room.
When Windwalker and I entered, I was surprised to see a set of old gym lockers rather than the open-faced shelves I’d expected. It explained why most of the guys had left their helmets on their snowmobiles outside even though it was snowing-there wouldn’t have been room for them in the narrow lockers. Just beyond the last one, a stairway led down to a basement.
Each locker was labeled with a strip of white tape containing the handwritten name of an employee.
Donnie Pickron’s locker sat on the far right and had a padlock hanging from it.
“I have no idea what the combo is,” Windwalker told me.
Even though I had my lock pick set with me, it wouldn’t do me a whole lot of good with a combination lock. “Could you dig up a hacksaw or some bolt cutters for me?”
“Yeah, sure,” he said grudgingly.
“I’ll wait here.”
The tracking signal in the bag that Alexei had left with the Eco-Tech activists disappeared.
He was driving on Highway K when it happened, and he slowed to a stop by the side of the road to check his equipment for a malfunction.
Moments later he’d assured himself that there was nothing wrong with his GPS tracking device.
Someone must have found the transmitter and disabled it, but with the thread-sized wires and a nearly untraceable signal it seemed remarkable that any of the amateurs he had met would have located it.
But maybe they were not all amateurs.
Alexei pulled out his phone.
Now that he’d delivered the money and the access codes, a status call to Valkyrie would be in order. A few strategic questions could give him the answers he needed, but as Alexei was tapping in this assignment’s alphanumeric pass code for Valkyrie-Queen 27:21:9-he noticed movement in his rearview mirror.
A state trooper’s cruiser had turned onto the road and flipped on its blue lights.
Alexei stopped his call.
There were any number of reasons for the lights, but he had a feeling he knew what the real reason was.
Someone who was not an amateur.
You left the knife there, left your prints with them.
But had enough time passed for that to make a difference?
Well, whether it was the prints or not, something was up.
They turned you in.
Maybe.
Probably.
The car rolled up behind him, kept its overheads on. Parked.
Alexei set down his cell. He would call Valkyrie after he’d taken care of this situation.
In his rearview mirror he watched the officer talking into his radio. Alexei gauged what he would need to do but then had another thought. He pulled up a GPS lock on his car and searched for any nearby businesses or parking lots where he could acquire a different vehicle.
Using the bolt cutters Windwalker had retrieved, I managed to cut through the combination lock and clicked open Donnie Pickron’s locker.
Inside, I found a change of clothes, photos of Donnie’s wife and daughter, an extra pair of brown leather gloves, a pair of the same type of headphone-style hearing protectors I’d used to protect my hearing from the grind of the motors and saw blades. All to be expected.
I was feeling the pockets of his Carhartt work pants when I found what I did not expect: a federally issued biometric ID card.
Windwalker was lurking behind me. I held up the card. “Any idea what this might open?”
He shook his head.
“Could you bring me Donnie’s personnel file?”
A slight pause. “Yeah, sure.”
I searched the locker more thoroughly but didn’t come up with anything else.
I studied the ID card.
It’d been issued by the Navy. Above top secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) access. I saw that he was a commissioned officer, a lieutenant commander. And he was most certainly not retired.
I had no idea what the card might have given him access to. As far as I knew there were no military bases nearby.
Windwalker returned with Donnie’s personnel files. I collected the time punch cards I’d come in the room to retrieve. “Is there a place I could look these over?”
He gestured down the hall. “You can use the office. Long as you don’t disturb anything.”
The trooper still had not left the vehicle.