A Fragment Too Far Page 2

  Awake, I was. My eye was now seeing better. And my mind was beginning to have a sheriff-like thought or two.

  The hole in the upper left rear fender of his vehicle. I could see it from where I was sitting. The bullet might have come from anywhere.

  I asked.

  My Good Samaritan glanced sideways only once before deciding one bald-faced lie at this point might be one too many. “Scottie’s .22 went off when he jumped back in the truck.”

  “So nobody was shooting at you?”

  “We were the ones shooting.”

  “At the buzzards?”

  There was that sideways glance again. He nodded.

  In Texas, you can be fined $15,000 and go to jail for killing turkey vultures — buzzards. But this wasn’t a good time to have that conversation. The nervous trio standing around my cruiser might know more about my crime scene than I did. I needed to know everything they knew. Everything they’d seen and heard. A few quick questions wouldn’t hurt.

  Putting on a stern face wasn’t difficult. It was the only kind of face I could muster.

  He admitted they had been inside the old Huntgardner place twice already this summer, goofing off.

  Each time they’d raised the same back-bedroom window to get in. And lowered it each time when they left. Never saw anyone else. Both times, the house felt like it had been deserted for a long time. Smelled that way too. The window shades were always down. And it looked lonely, although most of the furniture and the dishes were still there. On the whole, it looked freaky. That was one of the reasons they liked to visit.

  And this time?

  In the big fellow’s words, they’d noticed early on that “something was rotten in Denmark.” They’d detected the horrendous odor as they drove into the backyard but hadn’t started gagging until they had the bedroom window up halfway. That’s when they slammed the window down and sprinted back to their expensive vehicle.

  Scottie’s rifle had gone off when he leaped over the vehicle’s roll bar and into his back-seat riding hole. The bullet had gone into the fender. The buzzards and bodies had been visible in a blur as they sped past the house. The driver’s plan was to call 911 when they reached the gravel road. He couldn’t believe their luck when he saw a sheriff’s car was already parked there.

  I’d been hoping for more. “How’d you get to the house?”

  The huge eyelids narrowed again. He was choosing his words with care. “Dirt road off the Sweetwater cutoff. Used to be the way you got to the ridge.”

  I knew what he was talking about. Two dirt ruts, actually. Riddled with washboards. Bad washouts in a couple of low places. A total no-go when it had been raining. “That’s a good twelve miles of pretty rough traveling.”

  “Good rabbit hunting, though.”

  “You see anybody?”

  The eyes giveth, and the eyes taketh away. This was when he told me a lie. “Saw some dust flying. But couldn’t see if it was somebody.”

  I suppressed the urge to point out the obvious. Dust doesn’t fly on its own. Of course it was somebody. It was going to be essential that we found out who.

  And he’d tell me. By and by. Because the big guy and I had connected on some level. That was always a goal I had when I was interrogating people. But it was also a danger to be guarded against. You never wanted to lose your sense of perspective.

  I had to keep my guard up most while I was dealing with exceptionally smart people, and I sensed that when it came to brains, this guy was in the upper echelon. But he might also be guilty of something. That’s often why people tell lies.

  I needed to go slower here. It wasn’t only my mind that desired a time-out. At the moment, my stomach wasn’t in the mood for hand-to-hand combat with resisting unknowns. But in the back of my mind, I found myself wondering why the giant I was questioning was being so evasive about the encounter his friends and he had obviously had on the road from the Sweetwater cutoff to the house.

  I told him to pull their vehicle on through the cattle guard and park at the side of the road. We’d get back to them.

  The approaching cloud of dust would be my chief deputy, Sawyers Tanner, and Special Agent Steele, plus whoever else was caravanning with them. More of my deputies, likely. And a couple of paramedics in their ambulance. It was time for me to get ready for an argument.

  Angie was going to want me hooked up to an IV bag and carted off to the Flagler General Hospital ED. She was going to resist taking no for an answer. I could expect her to stand straight as a crossing guard to emphasize her authority. Switch to her special agent’s face. Mask her emotions. Thrust her lower lip out and put her hands on her hips as she sized up her quarry-of-the-moment and evaluated her moves.

  A trip to the ED wasn’t in my immediate future.

  I’d guzzle anything they asked me to drink. They could take my blood pressure as many times as they wanted. Listen to my heart if they couldn’t already hear it. Peer at the whites of my eye, look at my tonsils, whatever. But the only place I was going anytime soon was back up that short, weed-covered road to Professor Huntgardner’s unspeakably defiled old house.

  Chapter 5

  Angie opened her car door. Stepped out. Stopped for a moment. Glanced behind her. Then turned back toward me and started walking in my direction.

  Maybe she was anticipating defiance. Or perhaps she was only relieved at seeing me upright and communicating. Her first words suggested she still wasn’t sure of her feelings.

  “You stink.”

  I managed a weak smile. “Can’t argue that.”

  “Your car too.”

  “Not been a premier day for smelling good.”

  She tried to lighten her tone. “Why don’t we send both of you to a car detailer?”

  I managed another weak smile but knew the time had already arrived to make McWhorter’s Last Stand. “Tow my car, please. I’m needed here.”

  “You’re needed a lot of places.” She pointed to an approaching vehicle with its red lights flashing. “Right now, in the back of that ambulance.”

  Sometimes it was like that with Angie. It may have been why the bureau had assigned her to an outpost in the middle of fifteen of West Central Texas’s most deserted counties. It was a savvy choice. The Wide Sky Country, as the chamber of commerce types liked to call it, was a good place for free-spirited folks. Maybe hard-spurring women most of all.

  Our encounter might have been more heated had my good-natured chief deputy not repeated Angie’s mistake.

  Chief Deputy Tanner meant well. He’d taken one look at me and concluded, like Angie, that a seasoned hand in reasonable health needed to take charge. Three more of my deputies were walking up. I noticed that they were all dressed more for city duty than for traipsing through brambles and cactus patches. They were detectives. All my regular deputies must have been out on patrol.

  My chief deputy watched them approach. “Listen up, Abbot County sheriff people —”

  “Sawyers, stand down!” I shouted.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised that he had started giving orders the moment he arrived. That was one of the qualities I’d liked most about him when I’d hired him right out of college. His self-confidence. And the fact that he displayed a level of judgment in his decision-making that was unusual in someone so young. He was still only twenty-seven.

  He was used to me skipping the niceties in our field conversations, but this time, the sharpness in my tone snapped his head around. The others, Angie included, also gave their hands and feet “freeze in place” orders and slowly turned to look in my direction. I was a bit surprised myself at the strength of my outburst.

  Angie looked over at the youngsters sitting in their big-wheeled off-roader. “Got any names?”

  I gave a slight shrug. “I don’t. Too busy puking, passing out, and drinking stuff to ask them.”

  “The bi
g one looks like he’s ready for the NFL.”

  “The big one’s my guardian angel.”

  “Think they’re involved?”

  “Don’t think so. They seemed to be looking for rabbits, not Armageddon.”

  “You believe them?”

  “They looked as pale as I felt when they drove up.”

  Her eyes studied my face, and she seemed to reach a conclusion.

  She asked about the scene at the house.

  I leaned against my car and thought for a moment about how best to sum it up. “Don’t know how many dead we’ve got. I’ve seen two, and it looked like there were a few more outside. Every buzzard in this part of Texas is feeding on those poor folks. More victims in the house, I’m thinking. In the yard, the birds are keeling over too. Or falling out of the air.”

  Talking about all this was proving harder than I’d anticipated. I swallowed rough. An extra breath helped. “Don’t know how to describe the smell. Catfish stink bait cranked sky-high, maybe. It’s going to grab you, stick to you, penetrate anything you’re wearing or carrying. So, I suggest anyone going to the house, get out of your regular stuff and into disposable clothing. Don’t wear anything underneath or take anything unnecessary with you if you want to keep it.”

  I issued assignments.

  My chief deputy would come with me. Or rather I’d go with him. I was going to need a car.

  I had another assignment for Detective Matt Salazar. “Matt, you got a notepad?” I didn’t wait for him to answer. He always had a notepad. With a hand-tooled alligator cover. He kept it in a rear pocket of his hand-pressed, custom-made jeans.

  We needed to get personal info and written statements from the teenagers. I was pretty sure they’d find young Detective Salazar simpatico.

  Detective Tobias Coltrane was a gravel-voiced retired military policeman. His graying burr haircut was as flat on top as the deck of an aircraft carrier, and his waistline was as trim as a ballet dancer’s. He would be following Chief Deputy Tanner’s car to the crime scene about a hundred and fifty yards up the road.

  That left Detective Rashada Moody. She was the department’s only woman deputy, only African-American deputy, only left-handed deputy, and the only one who had once competed for Miss Abbot County. Her sense of humor was smart and infectious. In fact, she had been the one to suggest calling her “Deputy Only.” I could see her running for sheriff someday. And I couldn’t imagine anyone more qualified to manage any crowd that might show up.

  “Detective Moody, you stay at the cattle guard. You’ll interface between us and the outside world.” I patted my car fender. “And tell Dispatch to have this thing towed to the county garage. It stinks.”

  I issued one more order. “Nobody crosses the cattle guard without a respirator on. Activated charcoal is going to be the only thing between you and being useless at the house. Guaranteed.”

  The only decision still to be made wasn’t mine. The FBI special agent had to decide what her role was going to be.

  She told me as soon as she got off her mobile phone. “I’ve told D.C. where I’m at. They’d like me to tag along.”

  I nodded.

  Moving to my car, I opened the trunk and found my protective overalls, a respirator, a pair of shoe covers, my blue latex gloves, and a small wipe dispenser.

  The paramedics let us change in the back of the ambulance. I went first. They gave me two plastic garbage bags, one for my stinky clothes and another for my personal items.

  The respirator went around my neck. I’d planned to let it dangle in place until I needed it. The feet masks and gloves went into my left rear pocket, and the narrow box of wipes went into the other rear pocket.

  I was about to walk away from the muscular rig when one of paramedics asked me to wait. She stepped into the gurney bay. Opened a cabinet door. And extracted a couple of gifts for me.

  One was a pill, accompanied by a cup of water. According to the labeling on the bottle, the medication was called ondansetron. She said it was an antiemetic that would take about thirty minutes to kick in.

  The other item was a barf bag.

  Chapter 6

  I couldn’t imagine a more Hitchcockian tableau. It was every bit as stomach-assaulting as when I’d seen it the first time. With one difference.

  Entrails were now spilling from both sides of what remained of the bowel cavity of the victim on the sidewalk. From where we sat, it looked like the mess a toddler might make trying to eat spaghetti and tomato sauce for the first time.

  Most of the movements we could see away from the victims were like a Kabuki performance.

  A buzzard would spread its wings, flap, fuss, fly a few feet, land, preen, wait. Necks around this bird would crane, heads would pivot, and beady eyes would drink in the new development. After that, not much. Stillness returned and remained until the next bit of buzzard choreography erupted, repeating the movements of the first one.

  Other times, a relocating bird crashed into a stationary one. This could start a whole throng of buzzards strutting herky-jerky around the yard, bumping buddies as they went. But stillness and silence soon returned.

  There was occasional movement on the porch roof and up on the house’s main roof. The beigey-black-tinted asphalt shingles on both surfaces were streaked with white. Buzzard toilets with a view.

  Special Agent Steele and Detective Coltrane remained in their cars. They were waiting to see how we dealt with the birds.

  My chief deputy was waiting to see too. “What now?”

  “I know what the game wardens would do.”

  “Shoot the bastards.”

  I’d already considered that. “Well, they might use their twelve gauges to fire off a shell cracker. But they’ve got other stuff. Whistler cannons, rocket bombs. These creatures don’t like loud noises. Especially if they don’t know where they’re coming from.”

  I reached up and tapped his siren switch. “This is what we’re going to use. Give me a minute to tell everybody why it’s about to sound like the Marines have landed.”

  I’d seen bats swarm out of caves. What happened next was kind of like that. Only our “bats” had wingspans up to six feet. And they had much less experience with mass exodus.

  The birds in the yard and on the roofs had unimpeded egress. Once they got clear of each other, they were airborne and gone. All in a matter of seconds.

  Not so, the others.

  The birds under the porch overhang forgot which way was up. It was a survival-of-the-fittest donnybrook. Feathers flew. We could sense their rage and panic even if we couldn’t hear their cries over our siren. It took about a minute for them to clear.

  The buzzards inside the house had the hardest time of it. The door opening was only so wide and so high. And there was only one way out. Their instinct was to spread their wings. Six feet of bone, cartilage, and feathers fanning at the air. Like they were ice skating for the first time. Stagger, veer, and shove.

  Their evacuation came in spurts. A torrent, then a trickle, then nothing. Until it started over again.

  The parade of terrified birds kept coming. This meant only one thing.

  There were more victims in the house than I’d feared.

  Chapter 7

  It was a surprise when the pump on Professor Huntgardner’s water well fired up. We could not have been more shocked if a gunny sack of enraged rattlesnakes had been dropped on our heads. It sounded a little like that.

  I hadn’t wanted us to step over the corpse lying across the front-door threshold, so we’d come around to the back door, walking single file. Me first. Then Angie. Then Sawyers. Then Tobias.

  We huddled at the back door, wearing our respirators. The breathing devices our department used didn’t allow us to talk, so I’d brought a small wire-bound notebook and a ballpoint pen.

  I extracted them from my overalls pocket, but C
hief Deputy Tanner was the first to react. He grabbed the pad and pen out of my hands. Scribbled something. Turned the pad so we could all read it.

  “What the hell?!”

  We gave him a collective shrug.

  I’d assumed the utilities at the house were off. No water, no electricity. But water was clearly running somewhere. And it seemed inconceivable that anyone could be alive in the house. Not after the bizarre exodus of buzzards we’d just witnessed.

  Now, all those assumptions were vacated.

  I took back my pen and pad. Wrote my own message. Waved everyone close to read it. “(1) Are we alone? (2) Where’s water running?”

  I issued assignments by pointing, first to a person, then to a part of the house. Each of us got a section. My responsibility would be the west end of the second story.

  But what we saw a few steps into the kitchen brought us all to an abrupt halt. Angie and I exchanged a quick glance. The interior of the house had been trashed.

  Destroyed.

  Jagged holes had been ripped in the sheet rock of every wall we could see. Most of the ceilings were torn open or tugged down. The floors were awash in debris. The kitchen cabinets had been cleaned out, and not gently.

  We proceeded with careful steps. Busy eyes. Super-cautious ears. We didn’t have any choice. Every square inch of the house had become an obstacle course of rubble.

  Our excessive caution wasn’t necessary. One by one, our chief questions got answered with dispatch.

  We soon realized that the reason the pump was running continuously on the house’s water well was because the water was running in the upstairs bathroom toilet. I lifted the lid off the water tank and jiggled the float. The flow into the toilet bowl stopped. I was guessing the loss of water had been slow and steady. But it was enough to keep the pump out back cycling on and off, probably for days.

  Like the bodies visible out front on the porch, the five additional human corpses we found in the house had been desecrated by the vultures. For the most part, down to the bone.