Four Live Rounds

“That would’ve been just another opportunity for us to leave evidence. Skin cells, sweat, hair, fibers of our clothing, prints. I thought it through, Sue.”

She reached across the table and took his hand, the karat diamond he’d given her twenty-four years ago sending out a thousand slivered facets of candlelight.

“Above all, it was for the girls. Their safety,” she said.

“Yeah. For the girls.”

The scent of a good cigar swept past.

“You’ll be able to go on all right?” Sue asked. “With what…what you had to do?”

Roger was cutting into his steak, and he kept cutting, didn’t meet her eyes as he answered, “I’ve had practice, right?”

It was early October when it occurred to one of the forest rangers of the Pisgah district that the black Buick Regal with a Minnesota license plate, parked near the restrooms of the Big East Fork trailhead, had been there for a long damn time, which was particularly strange considering no one had been reported missing in the area.

Over several days, the sheriff of Haywood County spoke briefly with two estranged, living relatives and an ex-wife in Duluth, none of whom had been in contact with Donald Kennington in over a year, all of whom said he’d been on the downward spiral since his daughter’s death, that it had ruined him in every way imaginable, that he’d probably gone up into the mountains to die.

A deputy found it in the glove box—a handwritten note folded between the vehicle’s owner’s manual and a laminated map of Minnesota.

He read it aloud to the sheriff, the two of them sitting in the front seat as raindrops splattered on a windshield nearly pasted over with the violent red leaves of an oak tree that overhung the parking lot.

My name is Donald Kennington. Please forward this message to Arthur Holland, detective with the St. Paul Police Department.

The death of my daughter, Tabitha Kennington, brings me to these mountains. I am writing this in my car on August 5th, having followed Roger and Susan Cockrell, of Eden Prairie, Minnesota, to Beech Spring Gap. I have taken their photographs with a digital camera, along with pictures of their green Range Rover and license plate. You will find my camera containing these pictures in the trunk of my car.

At this moment, I do not know if Mr. Cockrell was responsible for killing my daughter in a hit-and-run six years ago. I plan to meet the Cockrells tonight and find out. To be clear, I intend no physical harm to Mr. Cockrell or his wife. If Mr. Cockrell is responsible, however, we will see if I’m so lucky. Does a man who runs down a young woman and leaves the scene contain it within him to murder in cold blood in order to hide his crime and his shame?

I suspect he does.

The Cockrells will be thorough in disposing of my body, tent, backpack, etc., which makes this last bit of business a little tricky.

My camp is in a small glade in the rhododendron thicket on the east slope of Shining Rock Mountain, approximately a hundred vertical feet above the meadows of Beech Spring Gap. The glade is twenty yards across, with a large boulder in the middle. Look for a flat, shiny rock in the grass. My tent now stands over it, and I’ve made a tiny rip in the tent floor and dug a small, shallow hole in the ground under the rock.