Grimes had gotten the call pretty quickly. It had been relayed from the bar owner to the county sheriff to the state police detachment in Webster Springs to the state police headquarters in Elkins, West Virginia, which was where Grimes was stationed. Cowen was on the fringe of the large area his troop covered, so Grimes had to drive almost two hours to get to Sammy’s bar in the tiny town. Two troopers from Webster Springs had already secured the crime scene. The local sheriff hadn’t even bothered to show up.
Grimes was forty, an eighteen-year veteran of the West Virginia State Police. He’d started as a trooper and worked his way up through the patrol ranks, eventually switching over to the Bureau of Criminal Investigation ten years earlier. He was now a sergeant and an experienced criminal investigator. What he’d seen inside Sammy’s bar was either an anger killing, a revenge killing, or someone was making an example of those boys. They’d been shot all to hell. Sammy had told him who they were and given him some background information on them. Grimes wasn’t really surprised they’d wound up dead. It was the manner in which they’d been killed that bothered him. They’d been executed, pure and simple. Whoever killed them had walked straight up to the booth they were sitting in and just started blasting away. Both of the victims had pistols in their belts, but neither had had a chance to even get a hand on one. It was a killing as cold-blooded as any Grimes had ever witnessed.
Another thing that was bothering him was the story the bar owner, Sammy Raft, was offering. Sammy told Grimes he’d gone into the bathroom around eight o’clock to relieve himself. Donnie Frazier and Tommy Beane, the two victims, had been the only two people in the bar at the time. Sammy said while he was standing at the urinal, all hell broke loose. He said the gunshots were deafening and just kept coming and coming and coming. He couldn’t say for sure, but he guessed ten, maybe as many as eighteen or twenty, shots had been fired.
The thing that bothered Grimes was that there weren’t any windows in the bar. It was just a concrete block building. You came through the door at the front-left side of the building and couldn’t see who was there until you got all the way inside. That meant the killer would have had no way of knowing for sure that Sammy wouldn’t be standing behind the bar. Was this guy that ballsy, that lucky, or was Sammy lying about the way it had really happened? And if he was lying, why?
A sixtysomething man got out of the 1968 Ford LTD Country Squire station wagon. Grimes recognized him immediately but forced himself not to smile. He’d worked with Rogers many times and knew that he’d driven his “baby girl,” which Rogers affectionately called the antique wagon, over from Charleston. Rogers was a gruff, eccentric man, but he was good at what he did. He was small, maybe five feet five inches tall and 130 pounds. He had pale-blue eyes that were always encircled by oval, wire-framed glasses, and the top of his head was bald. The sides and back were covered by long, unruly gray hair, and his chin sported a bushy Vandyke. He covered several counties in West Virginia, just as Grimes did.
“Why ain’t your people here yet?” Rogers said to Grimes as he approached. He didn’t say hello, didn’t offer a hand.
“They’re on the way,” Grimes said. “Had to gather everybody up, load the gear, and then drive from Elkins. Takes a little while.”
“Think this state will ever make it into the twentieth century?” Rogers said.
“I believe this is the twenty-first century, Larry.”
“Exactly.”
Rogers brushed past Grimes and Sammy Raft and entered the bar. He came out a few minutes later and stood with his hands on his hips a few feet from Grimes. Then he loaded his left jaw with a wad of Red Man chewing tobacco.
“Well,” Rogers said as he spit a long stream of tobacco juice into the gravel, “they’re dead.”
“Yes,” Grimes said. “Very astute of you, Larry.”
“My guess is that the cause of death is going to be various trauma caused by a shitload of gunshot wounds.”
“Appreciate that.”
Rogers spit into the gravel again. “Have your boys haul ’em to our lab in Charleston. Got everything I need there for the autopsies. Preliminary report in four, five days. Final in about a month.”
“Okay,” Grimes said. “We’ll bring them up.”
“For what it’s worth, looks to me like a revenge killing. These boys did something to somebody. They got paid back in spades.”
Grimes nodded. “I always respect your opinion.”
“Brownnoser,” he heard Rogers mutter under his breath as he began to amble back toward his wagon. “Only opinion you respect is yours.”
“Quite a guy,” Grimes told Sammy as they watched the station wagon tear out of the lot, throwing gravel in its wake.
“Looks a little crazy to me,” Sammy offered.
“We’re all a little crazy, I suspect,” Grimes said. “Listen, Sammy, I have some more work to do, and the forensics team will be inside the bar for most of the night. So you can go on home now. But I’m going to come pick you up at ten in the morning.”
“Why?”
“Because I want a written statement from you. We’re going to take a ride up to my headquarters in Elkins.”
“Do I have to?”
“It’d be best, Sammy. You don’t want this to go sideways on you. I just want to make sure you’re protected. Go on now. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Will this place be cleaned up?” Sammy asked. “Will your guys get all that blood out of there?”
“Sorry. We’ll take the bodies, but the rest will be up to you.”
CHAPTER 15
“How’d it go?” Big Pappy said into the phone after I’d checked into a hotel off Interstate 64 about thirty miles outside of Lexington, Kentucky. I’d killed Frazier and Beane around eight o’clock and then driven four hours to Lexington. I’d finish the drive into Knoxville the next morning.
“It went,” I said.
“They come out early? I didn’t expect to hear from you for at least another couple of hours.”
“I did it inside the bar. There was nobody else there, and the bartender went to the restroom.”
“And nobody saw you?”
“The bartender, but he isn’t going to say anything.”
“Why not?”
“Because he loved his mother.”
“Loved his mother? What are you talking about, Darren? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“He won’t say anything,” I said. “Trust me. He hated those two guys. They were ruining his business, and when I told him they’d raped my mother, he pretty much gave me the green light to do whatever I wanted.”
“You told him they’d raped your mother?”
“Just to throw the cops off a little.”
“He’s still a witness. You should have killed him.”
“I had no reason to kill him.”
“So how did it go down?”
“The bartender went into the bathroom, and I walked up to their booth and did what I went there to do.”
“Are you sure they’re dead?”
“Positive. I unloaded the whole clip on them, and I shot them both in the head at least three times.”
“Damn, Darren. I can’t believe you really did it. How do you feel about it now that it’s over?”
“I don’t regret it, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“That’s not what I’m asking. How do you feel after taking somebody’s life?”
“Powerful,” I said.
“That’s some pretty heavy stuff, man. It’s the same thing I’ve felt when I’ve killed people.”
“How many have you killed, Pappy?”