Signature Kill

Indianapolis Police officer Denny Hawkins rolled his cruiser through Northwestway Park shining his prowl light past the dormant playground swings when the beam caught a shape, white and confusing, on the ground just before the tree line. Hawkins tapped the brake, refocused the light, and sat and stared for a long moment. There was
something
familiar about what he saw, but he couldn’t properly make out the featureless pile. He took his foot off the brake and rolled closer.

Flesh
.

The lone word came to Officer Hawkins’s mind. He thumped the cruiser into park and stepped out, one hand wrapped around his six-battery Maglite, the other resting on the butt of his Glock .40 duty weapon. He walked closer, his feet making a slight crunching sound on the grass, crisp with frost. He passed his light over the pile, and what he saw made his mouth go dry. There was a racing in his chest and a sickening drop in his stomach. Sweat popped along his back and crotch as adrenaline hit him hard. It was a woman’s body, or parts of her body, naked in the night. He almost retched, then shined the flashlight around the vicinity. He stood and listened. All was quiet and still. He was alone. Finally his hand came off his weapon and reached for the radio mic on his shoulder and he found his voice.

“Fifty-two thirteen, I’m mobile at Northwestway Park, request assistance at my location. I’ve got a ten-zero …”

“Say again,” dispatch came back.

“I’ve got a body—I think it’s all here. Victim is unidentified white female. Request Homicide Unit and coroner.”

Movement in the pin oak on the hillside caught Frank Behr’s eye. He stood hidden in thick trees on a low rise two hundred fifty yards away, scanning the underbrush above the shallow bowl of a meadow. Gray and stealthy, the whitetails picked their way down toward the good feed, and the horizontal lines of their backs broke the vertical pattern of the trees. Behr felt the nerves along the still-healing left side of his collarbone call out in protest as he slowly raised his Remington 870 Express and used the four-by scope to get a better look. The deer were all doe. Even the controlled movement of his lifting the gun was enough to give them pause. They stopped, three of them, their heads perfectly still, save for their ears, the insides twitching white as they rotated around to capture a telltale sound. Behr stood there, gun steady, watching. After a long moment the deer continued, in serpentine fashion, down toward the edge of the meadow. When his arm started to throb, he lowered the gun.

Over the next half hour several more doe and a pair of forkies came out of the trees and began their evening graze. Behr waited. He’d been doing this a long time, and he was familiar with the habits of whitetail. The cagey big bucks often let the young ones, and the doe, go first. There was no change for several long minutes until, like a gray ghost of the forest, the senior buck of the herd became visible far up the hill. He was out of range and in the shadows of deep cover.

Behr carefully slung his Remington and pulled a pair of old antlers from his belt and began clacking them together. The rut was on, and he hoped to rattle the old boy out into the open looking for a fight. Behr slid a plastic tube up out of his coat and blew a breath into it, causing it to emit a low grunt. He saw the buck look in his direction, but felt the silhouette of his six-and-a-half-foot, two-hundred-forty-plus-pound frame was broken up enough that the buck couldn’t see him. As long as the wind didn’t change, Behr had a chance.

The buck picked his way down to the edge of the meadow, stopping behind a brake of prickly ash. Behr gave a final knock and scrape of the antlers, then tucked them into his belt and raised his Remington again, snugging the butt onto his shoulder. The last rattle had caused the buck to lift his head and scent the wind, and Behr finally got a clear look at the old boy’s rack. He was a ten-pointer with thick beams and a wide spread. Bramble slightly obscured the shot, but Behr was able to put his crosshairs square on the deer’s chest. He held. If the buck continued into the open and quartered broadside it’d be ideal, but this was a good shot, and one Behr had made before. He clicked the safety off and let out a slow breath, closing the valve on the anticipation and the pity and all other emotion in his chest. When hunting, a cold, clean killing edge is best. He was ready. The ideal time came and went. He should have squeezed. But something made him wait. He watched the deer for a long moment. The moment continued as the buck ticked forward a dozen more steps. Behr felt his mind drift.

Trevor. Six months old now, but one day I’ll be standing on a hillside like this with my boy, teaching him the ways of the woods, how to shoot, how to hunt
.

Behr refocused his eye and the reticle. Then he saw the buck flinch, and a millisecond later the boom of another slug gun echoed off the hillside. The deer in the field scattered, and the old boy’s head whipped to the side and he disappeared into the foliage.

The crack of breaking branches and the thick chunking sound of hooves knocking against downed trunks reached Behr in his spot as the buck, hit and hurt, careened heedlessly into the deep timber.
Behr waited a few minutes, until he saw the blaze orange of Lester’s cap, atop a suit of Mossy Oak Break-Up pattern, make its way like a bobbing cork above the bramble, then he started down the hill and across the meadow to where he’d seen the buck plunge into the trees.

Behr reached the deer first and found him in a clearing, rolled up on his left side, face plowed into a carpet of dead leaves. There was a small hole just behind the shoulder that oozed only a trickle of blood. It was a near-perfect shot. Lester made the clearing seconds later, breathing hard.

“Hot damn,” he said over a lip full of Copenhagen when he saw what he’d collected.

“Well done, Les,” Behr said and gave him a whack on the shoulder. In his late sixties, Lester Dollaway was the father of one of Behr’s old college football teammates, Des, a reservist who’d died in Afghanistan five years back. The hunting trips had been a longstanding tradition between the three of them, and Behr hadn’t considered ending them just because his friend was gone. That first year when it was just him and Les pulling permits had been difficult. The pain in the older man’s darting black eyes was almost unbearable. Things had gotten easier with each passing year. A native Iowan, Les lived only an hour away from where they were now, and he knew all the landowners and got permission to scout in the spring and hunt in the early winter season.