You Can’t Stop Me (24 page)

Harrow came down out of the trailer like his hair was on fire, and Laurene and Choi fell in with him.

“Where we going?” Laurene asked.

“To see the sheriff.”

“What for?” Choi asked.

“To ask him about a land deal.”

The trio moved down the middle of a street crowded now with bystanders, reporters, state cops, and God only knew who else. The
Killer TV
teammates were heading toward the house where Harrow had lately confronted a serial killer of record proportions.

Gibbons was holding court in the front yard of the Shelton house, his deputies around him in a semicircle, the stocky sniper Colby Wilson immediately to Gibbons’s right.

Carlos Moreno and the two camera crews were off to one side, taking a brief break, until they saw Harrow coming. Then they all jumped to their feet at once, and the red lights came on, little demon eyes burning in the night.

As he approached the conclave of uniforms, Harrow received a thin-lipped smile from Gibbons, who said, “There’s the man of the hour.”

With Laurene and Choi behind him, Harrow positioned himself a few feet from Gibbons, facing the semicircle of local law enforcement. The camera eyes and microphones moved in, keeping their distance, but—like snipers—with their targets well in view.

“We haven’t really had a chance to talk, Sheriff,” Harrow said pleasantly. “There’ll be some follow-up, of course. My firearm killed a man. You’ll want to take my statement.”

“Of course,” Gibbons said, good-naturedly. “But that can wait till tomorrow, J.C.”

“Sure. There’ll be a lot of do tomorrow. For example, we’ll need to dig into this whole Kahverengi International matter.”

Gibbons flinched at the foreign word, then squinted as if he hadn’t understood. “Afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about, J.C. This is Kansas. We don’t deal with international anything, except maybe Harvester.”

His deputies chuckled.

“You’re being modest, Herm. You have a distinguished local citizen, ex-sheriff Daniel Brown, who does considerable international business, and land development all over the map…including right here in Lebanon.”

“I suppose that’s so. But it doesn’t have anything to do with this tragedy tonight.”

“Well, Gabriel Shelton thought it did. Just the mad ravings of a serial killer, though, right? If we were to take his lunacy seriously, then we’d have to believe Sheriff Brown and his deputies, ten years or so ago…
you
were one, weren’t you, Herm, a deputy of Brown’s? You’d have to believe a crazy story like deputies strong-arming local people into selling out when they didn’t want to, all because the sheriff thought a new highway was coming through, and that land would become valuable…Ridiculous. Crazy on the face of it.”

Gibbons and Wilson, and several other of the deputies, were getting fidgety, glancing at the cameras and boom mikes that were picking this up.

“J.C.,” Gibbons said tightly, “this needs to wait for another day. It’s not the kind of thing to air in public, now, is it? I mean, a person could get in trouble with libel or slander or that kind of thing, with fool talk like this.”

“Oh, but Gabe Shelton’s way past getting sued. Your crack shot, Deputy Wilson, almost killed him, and the attempt put me in a position where I
had
to. So you’ll understand why his words kind of…haunt me. I don’t take them seriously, of course, but we learned by studying his ‘messages’ that there was a method to his madness, as the saying goes.”

“You need to put a lid on this, Harrow. You are on
very
shaky ground….”

“Way I see it, Sheriff? Shelton was a monster, all right, but it took some greedy, violent bastards to turn him into one. Shelton’s family, mine, twenty-some families, all torn to pieces just so some solid citizens could own some land, and maybe make some money, for themselves and their own families.”

Gibbons turned away from Harrow and pushed the air with his hands. “Gonna have to ask you folks from the media to move back now—this is a crime scene.”

“It’s a
crime
scene, all right,” Harrow said. “If Shelton’s to be believed, his wife and children were murdered by three men in black ski masks driving a vehicle that belonged to the local sheriff’s department. He thought deputies had come into his house to threaten his family—maybe things got out of hand, and murder wasn’t the intention. But murder was born that night—murder on a grand scale, because Gabe Shelton…who must have had his problems all along…had something inside him break, and something else inside him trigger. A serial killer was made that night, formed out of other men’s greed and brutality. A damaged soul went out and did terrible things, including murdering my wife and family…committing the crime done to him, again and again, screaming for attention and justice through his twisted deeds.”

Gibbons swivelled and pointed a finger at Harrow, obviously wishing it could be a gun. “Now this talk is going to stop—
right now
. It’s inappropriate, and you are embarrassing yourself, Harrow. You need to pull it together and—”

“You don’t understand, Sheriff. I’m a TV personality. I just want to interview the lead investigator into the deaths of Cathy and Mark Shelton—and that’s
you
, right? And my first question is—why didn’t you mention that pertinent fact to us, Herm? Why did I have to find out for myself?”

Gibbons came up very close to Harrow. “You need to go, Harrow. Now. Or I will take you into custody for disturbing the peace.”

“Like you did Gabe Shelton?” Harrow whispered; this was for Gibbons, not the microphones or cameras. “That unmarked car he saw was real. The men in the masks were real. I wonder if
you
were one of them?”

The sheriff’s eyes popped; his mouth twitched, and he backed away. Then he said to his deputies, “Let’s cordon off this crime scene and get these media types out of here! We have work to do!”

The deputies flew into their jobs, and the sheriff came back over to Harrow.

“J.C., you are wrong about this. You are embarrassing yourself. This ended tonight. You killed the man responsible for taking your family away from you. You need to be grateful.”

Harrow, calmly, coldly, said, “I wonder if I’m
looking
at the man responsible for taking my family away? Certainly one of them.”

Gibbons swallowed, and turned his back to Harrow and went about loudly supervising his deputies as they worked the yellow crime scene tape and batted the media back.

Suddenly Harrow sensed someone at his side: Jenny Blake. She handed him a slip of paper. He read it.

Then Harrow made an announcement in a voice loud enough to freeze the deputies in their motion, and to bring the various cameras and microphones his way again.

“
Excuse me!
I have important information related to the aftermath of this case!”

Pin-drop silence.

“Former Lebanon sheriff Daniel Brown has left the country. His passport was okayed by Homeland Security tonight. He’s flying to South America.”

Across the yard, the sheriff turned toward Harrow with the look of a wet hound. “That son of a
bitch
…”

“Looks like he left you holding the bag, Herm,” Harrow said genially. “Who knows? Maybe you can get immunity.”

Harrow was having a smoke outside the semi when Deputy Colby Wilson, with the hangdog expression of all time, came tentatively over. The heel of a hand was on his holstered revolver.

“Can I talk to you a second, Mr. Harrow?”

“What do you want, Colby? I’ve said my piece.”

“I, uh…haven’t said mine. What you said about immunity…you think that’s a possibility?”

“I do, for the first conspirator who comes forward and comes clean.”

He laughed, but it was humorless, more a cough. “Is that what I come to after all these years? Being a conspirator? Who do I go to, Mr. Harrow? Who do I talk to?”

“I’ll get someone from the state police,” he said, and did.

Because of his knowledge about the case, Harrow was asked by the state police not only to sit in on the interview, but to conduct it. It was irregular, but there was a moment that needed to be seized: right now, Colby Wilson wanted to talk, and he didn’t ask for a lawyer to be present.

The interview was held in the
Crime Seen!
lab, since the state police did not under the circumstances wish to borrow facilities from the local authorities.

Colby Wilson said, “I was one of the guys in the car that night—Gibbons knew about it, but he wasn’t there.”

Harrow asked, “Who else
was
there?”

Wilson gave him three more names, all current Smith County deputies.

“Why kill Cathy Shelton and her boy? Doesn’t make sense, Colby.”

“We didn’t mean to.” He wasn’t able to look at Harrow. “It was an accident. We went there to scare them. Put the fear of God in ’em, or anyway the fear of Sheriff Brown. We shook her and slapped her around, broke some knickknacks, even some furniture…but she had this gun she got to, that we didn’t know about. When she aimed that thing at us, we didn’t have any choice. It was sort of like…self-defense.”

Sort of like
, Harrow thought.

“And the kid had seen us…” The beefy deputy shrugged. “Things got out of hand.”

Harrow said nothing.

“At night, I close my eyes, and I see that kid,” Wilson said. “I didn’t shoot him myself! I didn’t do that! But I’ll never get past that.”

“Some things,” Harrow said, “you never do get past.”

The north-south highway turned out to be no rumor—the I-80–I-70 connector was due to start construction next year, and would be completed in less than three years, making the land Brown and his cronies owned worth tens of millions. Brown and his partners had also bought land in and between every small town along the route of the new highway. A major indoor mall and the United States museum in Lebanon were part of the master plan.

The show on the eighteenth had gone well, particularly a crowd-pleasing segment of Harrow and Laurene Chase on hand when a certain South American government, led by a president who “never missed”
Crime Seen!
, turned over a morose Daniel Brown to Interpol.

Jenny Blake had been surprised by how normal Brown looked—seventyish with a white beard and long hair, like somebody’s grandfather, not a monster at all. In profile, a little pudgy, he’d have made a good Santa Claus.

Now, on Monday afternoon, driving back to LA on the
Crime Seen!
bus, gliding across I-70 westbound, Jenny was with Pall, Anderson, Choi, and Carmen, watching satellite TV as Harrow did yet another in an endless parade of interviews.

If he’d gained national attention saving the President (and losing his family) and had become a reluctant star by getting his own crime-busting show, J.C. Harrow was in a galaxy of his own now. Many bad guys had been shot on national TV, but rarely a real one, by a real hero.

A backlash from gun control advocates was already well under way, and fringe types proclaimed (mostly online) that Shelton was either a hero or a victim.
Not a hero certainly
, Jenny thought,
but a victim
. Also a monster—as her friend Carmen could attest.

Valerie Jenkins, the missing bartender with the stray license plate, turned up in Omaha, Nebraska, with a new life that included another bartender gig and a trucker boyfriend she’d followed there.

But other loose ends would be much harder to tie up—twenty-some family killings that would challenge and bedevil law enforcement agencies all over the killer’s target-defaced map for months and even years to come.

On the screen, Carlos Moreno held the UBC microphone toward Harrow’s rugged movie-star features. Jenny wondered if Carmen wouldn’t rather be doing the interview herself; on the other hand, the reporter had declined a plane and requested that she ride back with the team.

Maybe we make her feel safe
, Jenny thought.

Anyway, after her ordeal, Carmen could use a little downtime.

Moreno was asking Harrow, “How does it feel, getting an early pickup for a third season?”

“Gratifying,” Harrow said. “The team’s worked hard so far this season, but we never expected to wrap up our first case in three weeks. Still, we’ll have something special ready for November sweeps.”

Jenny shook her head. What could they possibly do to top their first three shows?

“You’d be considered a hero just for stopping Gabriel Shelton,” Moreno said. “Yet you’ve kept digging, working to put away the men who wronged the killer of your own family. Why would you do such a thing?”

Harrow paused. Then: “Shelton’s family were the first innocent victims. They deserved justice too. Also…he said something odd to me, that’s stayed with me—he said I’d ‘come to his rescue.’ Maybe in a way I did.”

Chris Anderson came up the aisle and plopped into the seat next to Jenny. They hadn’t dated or anything, but Carmen and Laurene might be right—Chris
did
seem to like her. He took her hand.

She shook free from him and said, “Not yet.”

“What?” Chris said in his lazy way. “I was just bein’ friendly.”

Out the windshield, Jenny saw what she’d been looking for since they left Lebanon—a sign that said
WELCOME TO COLORADO
.

Sitting back, smiling, Jenny took Chris’s hand in hers.

“
Now
it’s okay?” he asked, clearly bewildered.

“Sure.” Her smile widened. “We’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Thanks to crime scene analyst Chris Kauffman, CLPE, retired lieutenant of the Bettendorf (Iowa) Police Department, who has been so much help to the authors in the past. Thanks also to computer forensics investigator Paul Van Steenhuyse, retired lieutenant, Scott County (Iowa) Sheriff’s Office.

Insights were also provided by profiler Steven R. Conlon, retired Assistant Director, Division of Criminal Investigation for the State of Iowa Department of Public Safety; and Matthew T. Schwarz, CLPE, Identification Bureau manager, Davenport (Iowa) Police Department. For behind-the-scenes TV production matters, we were helped by our longtime film and video collaborator, Phillip W. Dingeldein.

Among books consulted were:
Practical Homicide Investigation
(1996), Vernon J. Geberth;
The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers
(2000), Michael Newton;
Mind-hunter
(1995), John Douglas and Mark Olshaker;
In the Minds of Murderers
(2007), Paul Roland; and
Profile of a Criminal Mind
(2003), Brian Innes.

Special thanks are due the following: our editor, Michaela Hamilton, who was enthusiastic from the start and supportive throughout; agent Dominick Abel, for his friendship and professionalism; and our wives, Barb and Pam, in-house editors and support systems.