A Fragment Too Far Page 3

  Nine victims total. Four downstairs. One upstairs. It wasn’t possible to tell what they had been doing at the moment of their deaths. But from the shreds of clothing we could see, we were guessing they were all males.

  I pointed toward the back door.

  While it was still fresh on their minds, I wanted to get my colleagues’ quick assessment of the crime scene we’d stumbled through. In my four terms as sheriff, I’d never seen anything like it, or, frankly, ever expected to see anything like it, in Abbot County.

  I told everyone to meet up at the cattle guard.

  Chapter 8

  Angie suggested we confer in her SUV. It was roomier. I got in the front passenger seat and pulled the sun visor down. It had a mirror on the back side. When I flipped the mirror open, I could see the faces in the back seat. At the scene, I’d not bothered to take notes. But I had taken pictures with my phone. Angie had too. We both began flipping through our images.

  Then Angie stopped. “I’ve never seen such extreme efforts to —” She hesitated. “Well, it’s like Buchenwald or something. Like they were deliberately being robbed of their identities as well as their lives.”

  I agreed. “Didn’t see any personal effects. Watches, jewelry, phones. No billfolds or anything in their pockets. Nothing lying around that might tell us who they are.”

  Chief Deputy Tanner was still in a profane mood. “Why all the goddamned house damage?”

  I wanted the benefit of his experience. “What are you thinking?”

  His answer surprised me. “Funny thing, but I got a feeling somebody was being punished. Like they were telling Professor Huntgardner how they really felt.”

  My eyes opened wider. Lordy, is this whole thing about somebody’s sour grapes?

  I wanted to hear from the others. “Real quick, no matter how far-fetched, what could explain this?”

  Detective Coltrane went first. “Drug deal gone bad. Turf war, maybe. Might not even be about Abbot County. U.S. 283 is turning into a back-door route for the Mexican cartels. They’re moving drugs from the border to Nebraska to Chicago via the Nebraska–Iowa interstates.”

  Angie spoke next. “Terrorists.” She was likely piggybacking on her boss’s suggestion. “Not necessarily ISIS or anything like that. Homegrown terrorism. The modern equivalent of a range war, say. Maybe the idea is to frighten people away from living in these parts.” She tacked on an afterthought. “Although I’m not sure any sane person would want to live in these parts.”

  My chief deputy stayed with his idea of personal payback. “Could be all these people are related. A family reunion, you know. Trying to divide up the professor’s property. Turned into a deadly disagreement.”

  I nodded after each person spoke. But I was looking at another photo. I lifted my phone so everyone could see the screen.

  “There was a portable white board lying face up on the living room floor. In its center, at the top, it had an insignia, a logo or brand — I don’t know exactly what to call it. Or what it is. But it’s obvious what the drawing depicts. And the date underneath it is significant.”

  I enlarged the image. “That’s a mushroom cloud from a nuclear blast. And I still remember one of my history professors writing that date on the blackboard. That’s when the world’s first atomic bomb was detonated in the New Mexico desert. He called it an ‘explosion heard around the universe.’”

  July 16, 1945, was the date we were staring at on my phone. At that moment in Special Agent Steele’s SUV, any noise at all would have sounded like a nuclear bomb going off.

  I had no idea what the famous image and date had to do with nine suspicious deaths in a lonely old house in Abbot County’s back country.

  But I wasn’t prepared to accept that it was a coincidence.

  Chapter 9

  On the way back to town, I told Angie more than once she drove like a Hittite charioteer.

  Instead of keeping her eyes on the road, she kept glancing at me. “You don’t quite look like the guy in the campaign photo.”

  I sent a scowl in her direction.

  She would never quit razzing me about the photo I was thinking about using on my next election poster. She hadn’t approved of my wearing the patch over my missing peeper. I’d lost the eye during my first year on the job while trying to subdue a drunk swinging a jack handle. She’d wanted me to wear my plastic eye in the photo and said she’d never understand why the touch-up artist hadn’t removed the deep cleft that splits my snow-plow chin in two.

  There’d been no touch-up artist.

  I’d asked my photographer to do his best to make his subject look like a law enforcement legend. Rugged. Vigilant. Virile. I’d used those kinds of words. I wanted a campaign poster that didn’t leave me looking like a mollycoddled, indoor dandy who had been groomed to be a preacher.

  The truth was that if I was clean-shaven and wearing my usual white shirt and white Stetson with the narrow slotted black and white hat band, I stood a middling chance of being noticed at the grocery store. The fact that I stood a few millimeters under six-foot-two helped. But right now, I felt like I’d lost about six inches. “A shower would feel real good. And clean clothes. And a bowl of soup.”

  She squeezed my leg, but her hand didn’t linger. She wanted us both to focus. This was one of those cases that can make or break a career. Especially if you are an elected law officer, and I was up for reelection next year.

  Angie knew I liked to listen to myself talk aloud about a case. She knew this was one of the ways I problem-solved. Or at least, problem-surveyed.

  I could depend on her to seed my thought processes. This time, she did it with a trick question. “Did you see the shoes the victims were wearing?”

  The victims hadn’t been wearing any shoes. No socks either. None of them. All were in bare feet. Nine unshod adults, nine dead ones. In a house surrounded by goathead sticker patches and prickly pear cactuses. What had been the point? Had there been a point?

  “That’s the key.” I kept a poker face. “Find the shoes, find the killer.” After what we’d been through in the past two hours, we were both entitled to a moment of levity.

  Angie gave me her can-opener look. She wasn’t in the mood for wit. I got serious again. “We may need Quantico’s help with the identification.”

  She frowned. “The bureau’s forensics people are the best. But they work fastest if they have fingerprints. Or even whole fingers. But I don’t think your medical examiner can do that. The buzzards have eaten their fingers. The few that are left are so bloated they look like modeling balloons.”

  We both said the word “teeth” at the same time. Then realized that, again, to make comparisons, we’d need something we didn’t have. Dental records.

  We talked about DNA. The forensic people would be able to take samples. But, again, for identification purposes, we’d need something to match their patterns to before any identifications could be made.

  I had something else on my mind. “What we do have are somebody’s husband, father, brother, colleague, employee. Nine ‘somebodies.’ People have got to be missing these folks. Or are going to start missing them soon. Obviously, they’ve been lying in the house for days.” I glanced at Angie again. “Can the bureau’s missing persons program help?”

  I could see Angie biting her cheek. “Maybe. But if no one has reported missing our victims, they aren’t going to be in the program’s files or on its website.” She reflected for a moment. “Or on NamUs.”

  The National Institute of Justice’s National Missing and Unidentified Persons System could be searched online by anybody. But again, you couldn’t find anyone on it who wasn’t there.

  For the next mile or two, neither of us spoke. But it wasn’t quiet. The road still roared. The car engine hummed, along with the AC. Rocks dislodged by the vehicle’s churning tires kept thudding into its undercarriage. The reality of wha
t we were leaving behind settled in. So much we didn’t know. Where do we start looking?

  At the edge of town, I realized that we could be at the Abbot County Courthouse in another ten minutes. My department offices were there. But I wasn’t going straight to the office. Before I faced my office manager or anyone else in the department, I wanted a shower and a shave. And a chance to change into something that didn’t reek of death or vomit. I asked Special Agent Steele to take me home. That would add another fifteen minutes to our drive. Then I had things to do that weren’t going to brook any further delay.

  I’d thought the motherly side of this comely creature I was riding with would insist on a better plan. Maybe suggest letting her warm me up some chicken broth. Rub my shoulders. And tuck me in bed so I could get the rest my body craved. Point out that my associates would be more than capable of carrying the ball for a few hours in my absence.

  But Angie had a knack for sensing my mood changes and managing them adroitly. I caught her looking over at me, but she wasn’t going to ask what was going on in my mind unless I let too much time pass without offering to share my thoughts.

  I did so as we were driving past the entrance to Flagler Memorial Gardens, the city’s main cemetery. We’d buried my mother there. Then my father.

  Seeing the well-watered Bermuda grass lawns and acres of tombstones had triggered memory of a conversation. A conversation with my dad. We’d been discussing his friends, and one of the people we’d talked about was Professor Thaddeus Huntgardner. He’d said that he’d always found Professor Huntgardner a strange one. Those were his exact words. I’d asked him why, and it was his answer that loomed large in my mind as we approached the city limits.

  My dad had said the professor had secrets. If anything came of them, Flagler stood a good chance of being transfigured.

  I’d repeated the word back to him. “He actually said ‘transfigured’?”

  Sheriff John had assured me this was the word Huntgardner had used. The next day, back at my office, I looked the word up. I wanted to remind myself of its exact meaning. As I recalled, Merriam-Webster said it meant “transformed into something more beautiful or elevated.”

  The only way to render Flagler’s rocky, sparsely treed red-dirt prairie hills beautiful at all would be to move them to the fabled Texas Hill Country and redecorate them. The Hill Country started a hundred miles south of Flagler. And our little city was already perched atop some of the only high points in our part of West Central Texas. It would be hard to elevate it more.

  I hadn’t thought of my father’s comment in nearly a decade, and wouldn’t have now if he hadn’t called out to me from his grave.

  Professor Huntgardner was still alive. And nine people had just died frightful deaths in his house. Nine mystery personages who might have slipped into Abbot County like wraiths with bare feet. If this wasn’t a transfiguring development of some kind, we needed to start looking for a real one.

  I wanted to see how good the professor’s memory was. See if he could still carry on a conversation, about transfiguration or anything else.

  Chapter 10

  At my house, Angie opened a can of chicken noodle and sent me to the shower. Two of my deputies were bringing me another car. I ate soup and saltines while speaking on the phone to the receptionist at Pecan Mountain Nursing Home. She said visiting hours ended at seven. If I hurried, I might be able to spend a few minutes with the resident in room twenty-eight.

  But she warned me not to get my expectations up. “His Alzheimer’s is fairly advanced. He’ll probably forget who you are or mistake you for someone else. Or just sit there and ignore you. Unfortunately, he’s off in la-la land a lot.”

  I already knew a little bit about what went on at the nursing home because of my chief deputy. Sawyers occasionally used his knowledge of the county’s streets and roads to earn a few extra bucks doing deliveries for the nursing home’s catering service in his off-hours. But I’d not been to Pecan Mountain before, nor had I ever met its developer. You’d need to be a hermit not to be aware of Garrick Drasher in Flagler. His primary claim to fame? A novel idea for making nursing homes more financially viable. His idea, as I understood it, was to turn them into 24/7 cash registers.

  They had to have a kitchen, right? A big one.

  Well, his idea was to make it even bigger. That explained Pecan Mountain Catering. It provided eatables for parties and banquets where food was ordered by the tableful, not the takeout-boxful.

  And every nursing home needs vans to haul its people around. Why not use the vehicles when the old folks didn’t need them for something else? That was the origin of Pecan Mountain Super Shuttle.

  But the innovation that seemed to bring the spotlight to Drasher most often was his Oasis on the Prairie Café. Instead of a drab dining room for his residents, he’d built them a restaurant. By Flagler’s standards, a classy one.

  I’d been told the seating area was under a giant skylight. Every few tables had their own mini palm tree. There was a fountain with a pool for dropping pennies. And Drasher had imported a head chef from Dallas. His “Out West Gastronomics” menu had already drawn several national restaurant critics to town. For local trendsetters, eating at the nursing home’s dining room was becoming de rigueur.

  Copies of the menu were lying on the receptionist’s counter. I helped myself to one and glanced it over. One of Angie’s perennial complaints about Flagler was its lack of good places to eat out. But I had neither the time nor appetite for trying BBQ pork belly pot stickers or chicken paillard with spaghetti frites on this trip. I asked to be escorted to room twenty-eight.

  Dr. Huntgardner gave no sign of remembering me, but I’d have recognized him anywhere.

  He was in his trademark packable sun hat. I couldn’t tell how much hair he had left, but his plunging white sideburns suggested it might be substantial.

  The lines in his face were remarkable. Deep, commanding, mesmerizing. Like an artist had designed them, and a gravestone engraver had etched them. His cowcatcher mustache had been shaved into two parts in perfect symmetry with his nose. His eyes were silver agates. I’d always thought it was the kind of face an Andrew Wyeth or Andrew Salgado would have killed to be able to paint. Whatever the state of his mind, he was a photogenic old gent.

  He was slouched in a tan overstuffed antique wing chair with wild paisley designs, watching people walk past his room door. For a moment, I felt a surge of hope.

  It lasted about as long as it takes to order a burger at McDonald’s.

  “I’m Sheriff McWhorter, Professor. You might remember me and my dad.”

  His smile was so wide, it scrunched the skin above his bushy eyebrows together like an accordion’s bellows. “Oh, you want my son. He’s the professor. Comes every . . . every . . . every while.”

  I changed the subject. “Well, how about we talk about your house?”

  He was staring again at people passing in the hall, and I wondered if he was going to answer. When he did, he seemed surprised that I was there. “Gone. Burned. Everything but the chimney.” He shoved his glasses higher on his nose with his thumb. “What did you say your name was?” The impish grin reemerged like he’d said something brilliant.

  My audience with the demented oldster lasted about five minutes. It was clear that there would be no transfiguring in this life for Professor Thaddeus Huntgardner.

  As I was leaving, the receptionist waved me over. “Sometimes, Dr. Huntgardner remembers better. You might come back when Mr. Drasher is here. He and the professor talk a lot.”

  “Any idea what they talk about?”

  “Mr. Drasher says hidden things.”

  Once again, I was staring at a grin from someone who thought they had said something clever. This one might be right.

  Chapter 11

  Angie sometimes stayed over, but she hadn’t this time because she needed to get an early start. I
was ten leagues beyond exhaustion when I crawled into bed, as tired as I could ever remember. Sleep had descended in an instant. So, I was lying there dead to the world when a flashing blue light started up somewhere in the front part of my house.

  The flashes alternating with the darkness brought me awake. And the short, piercing screech of metal against something solid — floor tile or hardwood, maybe — caused me to stir on my pillow. I had a burglar.

  My mind wasn’t at its sharpest, but it was still happy to serve up a word for this: Phantasmagoric.

  Well, think about it.

  My patrol car was parked in front of the house, as it was on most nights. A billboard saying, “A cop lives here!” wouldn’t have been any more obvious. So, this person was either brain-damaged, drunk, or foolhardy. Or else someone who had wanted entry into the home of the local sheriff in the worst way.

  I don’t sleep with a gun under my pillow. Two words explain why: trigger discipline. Anytime my finger touches the trigger of a gun, I want my mind awake. Sentient. Focused. Under my full conscious awareness and command.

  To come awake, my brain needs at least about as much time as my Dodge Charger to go from zero to sixty: five seconds. Absent that, the odds that I’d shoot myself in the head as I move about in restless slumber are every bit as good as the next person’s.

  That’s why I keep my Glock 22 in a gun safe that doubles as my nightstand. My reading lamp and my digital clock sit on top.

  As my feet hit the floor, I noticed the LED display on my clock. It read 2:16 a.m.

  I noticed other things too.

  I noticed that I was pumped so full of adrenaline that it felt like I had never been to bed at all.

  I noticed how easy it was to extract the Glock from my gun safe in the dark.