David's father owned a welding shop in Jefferson County, where he made a decent living repairing the farm equipment that invariably broke when stressed beyond its design limits by owners bent on getting their harvesting done in the shortest possible amount of time.

Despite the age difference and their vastly different socioeconomic backgrounds, the two young men were good friends. They had met the previous summer. Henry's skill with guns impressed the older boy, as did his quick, analytical mind. Henry, who had grown up helping his father with woodworking projects, appreciated David's mechanical skills.

Unlike other people who were faced with the reality of a younger companion who was both smarter and of higher social class, David Webb harbored no hostility whatsoever towards Henry Bowman. This was because the older boy himself had a talent unusual in an eighteen-year-old and which Henry greatly admired The country boy with the lopsided grin and the cut-rate education had thick calluses on both his hands, and they weren't there from farm labor. David Webb drove sprint cars, and he was the youngest driver in a four-state region to ever take the checkered flag while piloting one of the twitchy, violent, overpowered dirt-track machines.

Henry and David had met by chance. Walter Bowman had taken his son to one of the local races the year before, after Walter's cancer had been diagnosed. Henry had suggested they try to track down 'Anvil' Jenkins by asking around at midwestern racetracks.

The Bowmans met a few old-timers who remembered Jenkins from prewar racing days, but they never located the man himself. No one had seen him on the racing circuit after the war had ended. The Bowmans did meet David Webb, however, who was something of a racetrack curiousity at age seventeen, and the two young men had hit it off. David lived only four miles from the Collins and Bowman summer property, and the two boys often spent weekends together when David wasn't racing or putting in his hours at the welding shop.

Now the pair were headed for a three-day canoe trip in southern Missouri. Henry relaxed and sipped his soda while David piloted the Olds coupe west on Highway 100, his eyes constantly scanning the road ahead and glancing at the rearview mirror in case anyone were about to overtake them. With a canoe on the roof rack (which David and his father had welded together out of chrome-moly tubing), the young man held the car to 75 MPH. The 327 Chevrolet engine, built out of a sprint car short-block and installed using 1966 Chevelle motor mounts, loafed along at 2600 RPM.

"What we really need on this trip is a couple of girls," David said with a grin.

"They wouldn't fit in the canoe."

"If we had two canoes, it would work. A couple of sisters. Older one about seventeen or eighteen for me, and the younger one for you. One with freckles and real thick glasses, with a whole bunch of books to read, really make your heart do a back flip. Someone just your age. How old are you now, anyway, Einstein?" David demanded. "Twelve? Thirteen?"

Henry couldn't help the grin that surfaced at David's good-natured ribbing. "Yeah, and by the time we got back home, your girl would have the wedding invitations all printed and the baby clothes bought," he shot back. "You and she could make it a triple." Henry was alluding to the fact that each of David's two older brothers had had to get married.

"Not me, boy. Storks bring babies. I like the birds that keep babies away," David said, playing for the standard response.

"Swallows," they said simultaneously, and the two started laughing in earnest.

With the windows rolled down and his arm resting on the top of the door, Henry began to sing one of the unusual songs from his seemingly endless repertoire of obscure works. This one was to the tune of Johnny Horton's "The Battle of New Orleans', and told the tale of boys at summer camp hoping to find girls on the other side of the lake.

"They teach you that song at that school you go to?" his friend asked facetiously when Henry had finished singing. Although Crystal City High did not have choir practice like the private school in St. Louis County that Henry attended, David Webb knew that no prep school in the nation instructed its charges in decadeold tunes recorded by the musical duo Homer & Jethro.

"Sure did. Your school could have a Glee Club and learn great songs too, if they could just get you and your classmates through the course where you learn to eat with knives and forks."

"Don't go making fun of the Barrows family again." Jay Barrows, who had been in the third grade when David Webb was in kindergarten, had ended up in David's graduating class. After being held back three times in grade school and junior high, he still could not quite read whole sentences.

"Why not?" Henry asked. "Is it 'Be Kind to Animals Week'?" David started laughing in spite of himself. His mixed-breed dog often exhibited more intelligence than his hapless schoolmate.

"I'd like to show you how this thing runs since Jonesey milled the heads," David said, changing the subject, "but I'm afraid the canoe'll blow off."

"Poor workmanship and shoddy welding on the homebuilt rack, I suppose." "The rack's okay-it's the screws holding it to the roof I'm worried about, asshole." "Ahhh, show me when we get back home-we got lots of time," Henry said expansively. David Webb nodded his agreement, took a swig of his Coke, and held the Chevy-engined Oldsmobile at an indicated seventy-five.

"Hey, nice job, Einstein. Last time we did this, you 'bout dropped your end. You must be getting stronger. Next thing you know, you'll be old enough to have a girlfriend."

"Just remind me to find one who spends less on makeup than I do on ammo," Henry said with an effort as he muscled the Grumman towards the water.

David set his end of the aluminum canoe down at the edge of the riverbank. "You talkin' about Mona? Yeah, I guess she did paint it on a little thick." His face brightened. "But, hey! It was a sight better-lookin' than what was underneath!" Both boys started laughing at that.

Their tent, one-burner Coleman stove, utensils, fuel, and food were wrapped in plastic and combat-packed into a single folded duffel bag, along with an empty gallon jug for flotation in case the pack went overboard. The duffel and the cooler of sodas went aft of the canoe's center thwart. The sleeping bags went behind them.

Henry wore a Smith & Wesson Model 29 with 8 3/8" barrel in an angled Bohlin crossdraw holster in front of his left hip. He lifted his G.I. .50 caliber ammo can and placed it just behind the bow seat. The steel can was half full of .44 magnum ammo Henry had loaded the week before. He had used once-fired Remington cases and 173-grain 3/4-jacketed bullets Allen Kane had made in Lakeville Arms swaging dies. A braided steel cable with a spring clip was swaged to the wire handle at one end of the can. Henry clipped it to the seat strut. The two boys threw their knee cushions in front of their respective seats, and David went back to move the Oldsmobile.

Henry watched as his friend stowed the car in a clump of trees, lifted the hood, and put the rotor from the distributor in his jeans. David locked the car and trotted back to the canoe. David's car had never been bothered before when they'd left it for a few days, but he wanted to be safe, just in case.

"Okay, hotshot. Think you can hit one of those?" Henry turned and saw David Webb pointing to some crows that were flying off to their right. They looked to be well over a hundred yards distant, to Henry Bowman's practiced eye. He shook his head.

"Too far. For a moving target, anyway." He laid his paddle behind him in the canoe, withdrew the longbarreled revolver from its holster, and hooked his finger under the steel headband he wore which had earplugs attached to each side. Without taking his eyes off the crows, he flexed the spring steel and guided first one plug, then the other, into his ears. He was already wearing his yellow-tinted shooting glasses. "Maybe one of 'em will land in a tree," he said, ready to take aim. He had not fired his revolver yet that day, and it was well past noon.

David and Henry drifted in the canoe, watching the blackbirds. 'As the crow flies', the euphemism for a straight path between two points on the map, is a misapplied phrase. A crow's flight is anything but straight, and Henry Bowman knew it. As he had suspected might happen, two of the birds in the group abruptly changed course. One of them flew on an angle towards them.

Henry extended his arms, and as he cocked the hammer, he drew the big revolver into the two-handed, braced position he favored for longer shots when a rest was unavailable. His right arm was straight, his left one bent at the elbow with the left shoulder forward. His left elbow was locked into his left side, and his left hand pushed firmly on the knuckles of his right. An isosceles triangle was formed from his left forearm, his torso, and his entire right arm. This technique would come to be called the 'Weaver Stance', after a shooter in the 1970's who would popularize it in competition.

"Ears, Stroker," Henry said softly. The crow was about to reach the point in its flight where it would be as close to the canoe as it was going to get. A wooded hillside loomed on the other side of the river, so Henry had a safe backstop for the shot. He was calculating his lead as his finger applied increasing pressure to the trigger. Fifty or sixty yards out-time of flight a tenth of a second... bird's flying maybe fifteen miles per hour, call it twenty-three feet per second...lead it a little over two feet when it hits the perpendicular point...hold a couple inches low since I'm sighted in at a hundred...front sight...

The trigger broke when the pressure exerted by Henry's right finger reached 2 1/4 pounds, and the 50-ounce blued steel revolver rose upwards sharply in recoil. As the muzzle blast echoed off the hillsides, David Webb's jaw dropped involuntarily as he watched the distant crow literally explode in flight.

"Holy shit!" he exclaimed, removing his fingers from his ears and staring at the feathers fluttering in the sky. Henry had replaced the Smith in its holster and was twisted around in the drifting canoe, a smug smile on his face. "That was a lucky shot," Webb said accusingly. Henry shrugged.

"You practice a whole lot, seems like lucky things happen pretty often. Like that last race you won," he added pointedly.

"That gun always do that to birds?" David asked, nodding towards where the crow had been. Henry shook his head.

"Most of the time I shoot cast bullets. You know-ones made out of melted-down tire weights and quenched in a bucket of water." Webb nodded. His friend was always scrounging wheelweights from the tire shops in Jefferson County.

"They don't deform at all, unless you hit a rock or something." He gestured out to where the feathers were drifting through the air. "That was a three-quarter-jacket 'Jugular', 173-grain hollow point designed by Jim Harvey before he shot himself. Made to blow up groundhogs at fifty yards, but Allen Kane says they seem to shoot as well at long range as the big 270-grainers. Longtin up at Smith tightened the barrel-cylinder gap down to two thousandths on this gun for me. Gives me an extra hundred or so feet per second. Gun ties up if it gets real hot, but for slow fire at long range it's great. I loaded up a thousand of the 173's with a ball powder load that's running damn near nineteen hundred feet per second, which was why that crow exploded. I got my sights dead-on at a hundred yards. Tomorrow, I want to do some 500-yard practice when we break for lunch."

"I'd like to see that."

"Great!" Henry exclaimed. "You can run across the valley and check my targets."

David Webb splashed him with his canoe paddle.

"Ready to put in for the night?" David asked from the stern seat of the canoe.

Neither boy wore a watch, but from the fading light it was obviously close to nine o'clock. "Suits me."

Within twenty minutes David and Henry had banked the canoe, removed their gear from it, pitched Henry's mountaineering tent, unfurled their sleeping bags, started a small campfire, and set an open can of beef stew on the Coleman camp stove. The stove was for cooking. The fire was because both boys liked campfires.

"If we had a couple of girls with us, we'd be listenin' to 'em complain about the skeeters, and we pro'ly wouldn't have the tent up or the fire built," David said, in a voice that hinted that he felt that still might be a pretty small price to pay.

"If we had a couple of girls here, you'd a pro'ly got your dick caught in your zipper, fell outa the canoe, an' drowned five hours ago," Henry suggested, unconsciously lapsing into the speech patterns of his older friend.

"I'd'a died happy," David said, laughing. He then began to describe, in animated detail, the things he would like to do with Shelly Moore, who was one of the Crystal City High School cheerleaders. Henry had heard it all before, except the part about the molasses.

"C'mon, admit it, Einstein," David said finally. "You had the choice, right now, between goin' out shooting with that big pistol of yours tomorrow, or curling up with one a them chicks in the gym class for the whole afternoon, you wouldn't study on it too damn long, now would you?"

Henry laughed and tossed a stick into the campfire. "Okay, Stroker," Henry said, using the common racer's nickname which took on an entirely different meaning under the present circumstances. "I admit it. You're right. What I'd like most of all is for us to come across some cute little blonde tomorrow, without any clothes on, who's been waiting all day for me to show up and dazzle her with my talent. That's what I really wish would happen on this trip. You satisfied?" The two boys both broke out laughing.

Henry Bowman had never been one to wish out loud for things. The last time had been when he was seven years old and had told his father he wished one of his classmates would move away. The classmate was a good friend with whom Henry had had an argument. It would not be until the next day of the canoe trip that Henry Bowman would recall what his late father had said to him at the time: Better watch what you wish for, Son. Sometimes wishes come true.

August 3, 1968 "You ready for lunch yet?" David Webb asked as the sun neared its zenith in the sky. Henry stopped paddling and turned around.

"Not exactly," Henry said, "but this looks like maybe a good spot coming up to try out these loads at long range." He gestured off to their right. "Let's put in up there, and I'll take a walk up that valley. See if I can find a good spot up on a hill, with some rocks out four, five hundred yards." David gave a few strong Jstrokes and used his paddle as a rudder to steer the canoe over towards the bank.

The older boy beached the canoe and Henry stepped out of the bow, pulling the craft up on the dirt bank of the river. David looked to make sure he wasn't about to put his foot on any glass or nails, and stepped barefoot into the shallow water.

"I keep telling you you're crazy to tramp around all the time without any shoes on," Henry said, watching his friend. He himself wore a pair of Vietnam combat boots which had a hinged piece of aluminum built into the sole. Yo u could step on a ten-penny nail sticking straight up out of a piece of plywood without discomfort. The boots had been specifically designed to negate the effects of the 'foot-breakers' the North Vietnamese were so fond of creating: a single round of rifle ammunition sitting on the point of a nail inside a short length of bamboo, with 1/2" of the bullet exposed out the top, all firmly set into the ground in any area where American G.I.s were likely to walk. When the soldier stepped on the nose of the bullet, the primer detonated and the cartridge exploded.

A cartridge outside a rifle chamber, when ignited, acts like a big firecracker. The projectile has no more energy than a piece of gravel lying next to a Silver Salute. Henry had demonstrated this fact to a horrified David Webb on a previous trip by tossing a live round of .44 magnum ammunition into the campfire and calmly waiting for it to explode. In a VC footbreaker, the bamboo tube, though destroyed in the process, offers some containment of the explosion. This is sufficient to channel the explosive force and impart enough velocity to the bullet to break a man's foot. Word had come back to the States of what was happening, and bootmakers with government contracts had quickly responded. Henry owned several pairs, all bought through his ammunition suppliers.

"You've just got tender feet," David said in reply to his young friend's comment. Henry shrugged. David's statement was true. "How long you going to be?" he asked Henry, changing the subject. "Depends on if I find a good spot to shoot from. Want to come along? I'll teach you to hit stuff the size of a five gallon bucket three or four hundred yards away."

"Yeah-but you go on ahead. I got to get some shoes on."

"Want me to help you stow the canoe?"

"Nah, I got that. Go on ahead and scout out a good spot. I'll catch up in a few minutes." Henry nodded. David was five inches taller, with correspondingly longer legs, and was considerably faster hiking through the woods than was Henry.

The younger boy stared up at the wooded hills, trying to decide where the best spot was apt to be. Finally he elected to break a trail in a different direction from the most inviting path. "I'm going to head up this way," he said. "Looks like a lot less traffic has been there. Better chance of no people being around if we find a good spot. I'll leave a few blazes for you, so you won't get lost." David Webb grinned his understanding as Henry turned and headed off towards one of the wooded slopes.

Henry had been walking for the better part of an hour, but the hill had not, as he had hoped, led to a high spot with a good view of distant rock outcroppings. So far, the terrain had been nothing but gently rolling hills, and all he had managed to discover was a small knoll that overlooked more woods. There was absolutely nowhere to do any long range shooting, at least not so far.

Henry Bowman's spirits were undampened, however. He liked walking out in the woods. He liked being on a canoe trip with David Webb. He knew by the time they stashed the canoe for the final time and walked to the nearest road to hitchhike back to get the car, he would be out of ammo, regardless of whether or not he ever found a place to shoot six hundred yards. The weather was slightly less hot and humid than usual for Missouri in August, and heat did not bother the fifteen-year-old the way it did people two or three times his age. All in all, Henry Bowman was having a very good time just as things were. He stopped and sat down on an inviting-looking log, unslung the gas-mask pouch from his shoulder, and stretched.

He looked back the way he had come. There was as yet no sign of his friend. / must be getting a little faster he thought with a smile. Henry had grown four inches in the past year, and now stood almost five foot seven. He reached into his ammo bag and pulled out a piece of beef jerky sealed in plastic, and a can of Seven-Up. His Swiss Army knife provided the opener for the beverage, and Henry commenced the serious business of consuming his snack.

After he had drained the last of his soda and had started occupying himself by calculating drop curves in his head, Henry decided to continue on farther. No use making life too easy on old Stroker he thought with a smile and stood up, donning his ammo pack as he did so. Before continuing his hike he opened his big Case knife and thoughtfully cut a large slash across the log on which he had been sitting. Then he set off again at a brisk walk.

Henry was several miles from the spot on the river where they had stowed the canoe, and it was looking less and less likely that he was going to find a suitable spot for long range revolver practice. Rocks and loose dirt were required at the receiving end of such shooting to allow the shooter to be able to spot his shots with the naked eye and correct his hold accordingly. So far, all Henry had seen was acres and acres of trees, with an occasional open patch of grass.

Bag it? Henry asked himself. Hell, might as well go on a little while yet.

Henry would later reflect on that innocuous choice, and imagine how his life might have been different if instead he had decided Yeah, time to head back.

Henry Bowman was always very conscientious about protecting his ears while shooting, which was why he heard the faint noise. He cocked his head, straining to hear. There was a faint, high-pitched keening noise, carried towards him by the same summer wind that rustled the leaves on the trees, which then drowned it out. Henry frowned, and shook his head. Real high-pitched...scream, I think. Wounded rabbit, maybe he added to himself, realizing that he had no idea what wounded rabbits sounded like, if indeed they made any noise at all. The young boy drew the big revolver out of the Bohlin rig and started carefully walking through the woods.

As Henry Bowman drew closer to where he believed the noise had originated, he began to make out the sound of a man's voice. He could not grasp the individual words, but the tone was that of someone giving brief orders. In another fifty yards, he could tell that there was more than one man. The keening noise continued. Deer poachers? he thought reflexively, then instantly rejected the idea. He didn't think wounded deer made anything like the noise he was now hearing. Henry stopped and turned back towards where he had come from, trying to hear if David Webb was approaching in the distance. Suddenly there was a bark of coarse laughter, and the keening noise intensified and became more frantic sounding. Henry didn't have a clue as to what was going on, but he was beginning to get a very bad feeling about it. He continued on slowly through the foliage.

"Fu'ther back, you two," Lowell Charles 'L.C.' Bivins commanded his brother and the one helping him, as he reached under his sagging belly to stroke himself. "Git her all the way open. Put your shoulders into it- she can't weigh much more'n half a either one a you." Trent Bivins and Gary Cort, both drained from their exertions of the previous twenty minutes, did as Trent's older brother demanded. Cammie Lynn tried to scream out in agony, but her mouth had been stuffed with a dirty shop towel and her entire head below her nose, as well as most of her neck, was bound with over a dozen wraps of black electrician's tape. Only a muffled noise escaped from her mucous-clogged nose. It sounded anything but human.

Henry Bowman stopped and turned his head, frowning. What on earth could have made that sound? He glanced back at his trail, then continued on towards the source of the noise.

The girl was nude, on her back on top of a fallen oak tree. Baling wire bound her wrists underneath the log and bit into the flesh above her hip bones where it had been tightened around the dead oak. A third length of wire was wrapped twice around the log and Cammie Lynn's neck, rendering her head virtually immobile. This one was looser than the other twists of wire, or else the girl would not have still been alive.

The two younger men, each holding one of the girl's ankles, had her legs bent back as far as they could. They had her feet up above her head, and had also pulled them away from each other until her ankles were almost four feet apart. Cammie Lynn, like most girls in junior high school, was very limber, but the strength of the young men and the leverage they possessed tore some of her ligaments and tendons. The baling wire around her abdomen split the skin and disappeared, leaving a bright red valley of oozing blood.

L.C. Bivins watched the wire bury itself in the girl's pale flesh and let out a short bark of laughter. He was fully erect, and now he thrust deeply into Cammie Lynn's body. He stared into the terror-filled eyes of his victim and let his pleasure build towards a climax. Then he stopped for a moment, pulled a knife out of his overalls, and resumed his efforts.

There's that laugh again Henry Bowman said to himself. I'm getting close. He proceeded on more cautiously towards the sound. The oak log was angled towards the direction from which Henry was approaching, with the girl's head nearest him. L.C., who stood straddling the log as he thrust in and out of the girl, directly faced the area of the woods that Henry was now carefully negotiating.

Nat Bivins was the only one of the attackers with nothing to do. He darted back and forth to either side of the victim, hopping over the log, and watching his cousins' efforts with utter fascination. Nat was the youngest of the four males. He was almost seventeen, but because of his slight build and thick glasses, looked younger. That, coupled with the fact that he had yet to pass the written portion of the Missouri driving test and thus did not have a driver's license, accounted for his older cousins' treatment of him. It was Nat who had been assigned the task of keeping track of Cammie Lynn's whereabouts so that his cousins and Gary Cort could snatch her at the proper moment.

"Remember, I get a turn," Nat whined. He had the very reasonable fear that his older cousin was going to change his mind and refuse to let him participate in the rape. It would not be the first time L.C. had excluded him from their activities.

"I ain't done yet," the oldest Bivins panted. He had let his brother and their friend take their turns at the girl first. L.C. had feigned magnanimity with this gesture, but his real motive had been twofold: First, he knew the girl would be dry, and that did not appeal to him. Secondly, he intended to kill her as he reached his climax, to heighten his own pleasure. He had no intention of letting Nat in on their fun, but Trent and Gary had certainly deserved a share.