A Fragment Too Far Page 5

  * * *

  Helen was on the phone again. I could hear her telling a caller she’d have the sheriff get back to them. “No, he isn’t dodging you.”

  Helen had been my personal assistant from the get-go. I’d inherited her, in fact, from my father.

  On most days, she wore a pair of oversized earrings, usually silver, either dangles or pendant-style, and a splashy matching necklace, often inlaid with turquoise. She was wearing her beloved accessories again today. The jewelry was competing with a freckled neckline that showed almost too much, but never quite went too far. She was one of the most winsome sixtyish widows in Flagler. And she didn’t tolerate upset in her office, not from me, not from anyone. Certainly not from Clyde Hazelton, managing editor of the local paper.

  She gave me a report. “Clyde says he’s feeling neglected.”

  I suppressed a grimace. “Is he the only one?”

  “Hmm, think not.” She started flipping through her call-back pad. “Let’s see, calls here from the Associated Press, New York Times, CNN, Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle, National Enquirer, and somebody at a blog called Oddliers. They want to run a story called ‘The Mystery of the Ninety Naked Toesies.’”

  This time, I didn’t bother to suppress my disgust. “Cripes, never assume the media’s taste has hit rock bottom.”

  So the news of nine shoeless bodies in Abbot County was out. My guess was that someone had been listening to our radio traffic. Maybe reporters. All you needed to eavesdrop was a police scanner. We didn’t encrypt our calls like a lot of law enforcement people, and our technology was still a bit dated, so it was easy to do.

  Helen was waiting for me to decide. She knew we had to feed the news beast soon or it would devour us. “News conference? Courthouse steps? Five-ish?”

  “Sounds good. Draw up a press release. Get the reporters to come to us.”

  Next I found the number for Pecan Mountain Nursing Home on my phone. The receptionist said she thought Professor Huntgardner was in his room but would check to make sure. Would I wait?

  I would.

  I waited. And waited.

  I was about to hang up and try the call again when I heard her voice. “We’re in a bit of a panic here.”

  No need to tell me why. I’d been tardy in realizing that we’d needed to keep close watch on the professor.

  Huntgardner was not only not to be found at this moment. From what she had understood, he’d not been seen since the bomb threat evacuation. They’d taken the home’s ambulatory residents to a nearby school gymnasium to wait out the bomb squad’s search, and she wasn’t sure he’d been seen there. Again, the truth hit me like the mother of all gas pains.

  Of course not.

  That was the other reason I was kicking myself.

  Until now, I’d not tuned in to the fact that he was the reason for the bomb scare.

  Chapter 14

  The remains of the tenth person were discovered by Chief Deputy Tanner and his helpers as they searched in the mesquite and live oak thickets behind the Huntgardner house.

  “Defleshed,” I’d heard Sawyers say amid the static arriving on my two-way radio.

  For a moment, I wasn’t sure if he was going archaeological on me. The ancients sometimes removed a body’s organs and flesh before burying them. “Defleshed them” was the way scholars sometimes put it.

  But if my chief deputy had been trying to be pedantic with me, he’d more likely have said it like most archaeologists do. “Excarnated them.”

  Sawyers added, “Except for the bones and clothing scraps, very little of the victim is left.”

  Sawyers said the remains were found about a hundred yards north of the house. Judging from the shreds of clothing scattered about, he was guessing this had been a he — we’d have to see what the ME said.

  We could assume this victim had died about the same time as the others. Five days ago. Although this corpse had been lying in the sun and could have deteriorated faster. I suspected the buzzards had still been at work when we’d fired up our “symphony of the sirens.” Like the others, those birds would have lit out for Cheyenne.

  Sawyers believed this victim had been run over. That was based on the damage to the bones. The tibia and fibula on both legs were broken, the pelvis was shattered, the spine looked anything but right, and the skull had multiple fractures.

  My chief deputy wasn’t saying it, but I was sure he was thinking the same thing I was: this person had been killed while trying to flee.

  I asked about shoes. Sawyers said there weren’t any. So we could suspect that this was the owner of the tenth pair of work boots in the house.

  “Tanner, what about —”

  A burst of static cut us off. I waited until the airways soothed themselves. Tried again. “Any other signs of activity?”

  I thought I heard him say something about “entrail ration out here” but knew that couldn’t be right. “Ten-nine, Tanner.”

  He repeated himself. “Grand Central Station out here.”

  “How so?”

  “Lots of pattern evidence. Shoe prints. Tire tracks. Big suckers — dual rear wheel types. Could have been big pickups or rental trucks or maybe transportation vans. It might explain how these poor folks got to the house. The CSI crew’s making casts now.”

  “Can you tell where they originated?”

  “Not where they started, no. But I think I know where they were headed. To the old washout road that leads to the Sweetwater cutoff.”

  “So they were easy to follow?”

  “Like I said, Grand Central Station.”

  I asked if they’d found anything else of interest.

  It sounded like he hawked on hearing my question, but I knew it was the static. I repeated my question. “Anything else of interest, Tanner?”

  “A garbage bag.”

  “Garbage bag?”

  “Yeah, one of those big thirty-gallon plastic bags. Somebody tossed it to the side of the main tire tracks about halfway to the washout road.”

  “Anything in it?”

  “Picnic stuff. Plates, drinking cups, plastic forks — that kind of thing, you know. Closed it back up so CSI could take a fresh look.”

  My mind was seizing any comforting thought that wandered past, no matter how remote. This time, it served up a variation of Neil Armstrong’s bungled pronouncement on the moon. My variation? One small step for a sheriff, one less mystery for mankind.

  “Good work, Chief. If you can get here, we’re having a press conference at five.”

  I’d been facing the end wall of my office as I spoke into my desktop microphone, so I hadn’t realized Detective Moody was back from her sleep break. She was leaning against the door frame, listening.

  I exaggerated surprise. “You ought to be a detective — you’re good at sneaking up on people.”

  She smiled her wide smile and got straight to the point. “So, we’ll be telling the media we’ve got ten victims, not nine.”

  “Bet they already know.”

  I turned to my computer and typed in “tenth body in Abbot County.” Google informed us that two of Flagler’s TV stations, Clyde Hazelton’s paper, the Tribune-Standard, and a British tabloid were already running bulletins.

  She shrugged and turned to leave, so I ended up talking to her back. “I’d like you to join me at the press conference.”

  I thought that she’d return to my office, take a chair, and we’d talk about this. But she didn’t.

  She didn’t turn around. Replied without taking another step. “And say what?”

  “Probably nothing, but it’ll look good.”

  The moment the words left my lips, I realized my comment could be taken more ways than the Manhattan subway. Had I sounded racist? No question, if that’s the way Rashada chose to hear it. Egotistical? That too. Sexist? Glaringly s
o. Self-promoting? That, most of all.

  When my detective did turn to face me, she offered her equivocal look. It wasn’t hard for her to use that on me. The two times we’d had dinner before I met Angie, I’d found her skilled at leaving me flummoxed. Or amused. I’d always wondered what kind of item we might have become had Angie’s transfer to Flagler not intervened.

  “Nothing’s going to leave us looking good on this one.” That was when I knew she’d understood.

  She hammered it home with another comment she flung over her departing shoulder. “The phone’s beginning to ring, so I better help in the ready room instead. You can handle it on your own. Just tell reporters that Flagler’s trying to grow up.”

  Chapter 15

  I ran a quick eye over the motley crowd of reporters, recognizing all but four of them.

  I suspected — correctly, as it turned out — that the four I didn’t know were university journalism students. They looked young. And they sat together apart from the usual culprits: three on-the-scene TV reporters, two local newspaper reporters, four radio station reporters, and a few stringers for the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

  I started by noting that we were asking the media to urge people to call our “800” number if they knew anything. We were especially interested in knowing about anyone in the Flagler area who might be missing.

  Forty minutes after our press conference ended, I checked in with Detective Moody.

  She wasn’t taking the calls herself. Four of our other deputies were doing that. Jotting down information and handing her the call slips. She already had four piles underway on her desk pad. She looked up to make sure I was watching. Then pointed to the first pile. “Missing relatives, neighbors, acquaintances — Texas only.”

  To the next pile. “Missing from outside of Texas.”

  The next one. “Suspicious people spotted in Abbot County.”

  And to a call slip sitting by itself. “This is going to be my ‘Make the Pope’s Horse a Cardinal’ pile.”

  My surprise was real. “Your what?”

  She sounded a little guilty. “Shouldn’t be saying things like that on a day like this.”

  “Make the Pope’s horse a cardinal?”

  She looked around to see if I was the only one in earshot. “Old children’s poem. Pope Leo the tenth was fat, but his horse wasn’t. When he asked for advice on how to fatten up his horse, somebody suggested he make the beast a cardinal.”

  She pointed to the single call slip again. “Let me try again. Offbeat suggestions go in this pile. This caller suggested a psychic we should try.”

  Now that I understood it, I admired her attempt to inject a little humor. I was feeling the weariness. “I’d love for someone offbeat to tell us how to start solving this one.”

  She nodded and took another fistful of call slips from the deputy who had approached.

  Plenty of reasons to be pessimistic.

  But one in particular.

  No matter how many call slips Detective Moody sorted through, or how well she did it, it wasn’t likely to help us anytime soon. At the moment, we had no way of telling who any of our victims might be, even if we got a direct hit.

  I’d have been more morose had I not known Special Agent Steele was due to arrive at my house in an hour or so. Before dawn, she’d been sent to Brownwood, a little over an hour’s drive southeast of Flagler, to help with a drug crackdown. Business completed, she was motoring home. She had requested that I pick up green-chili chicken enchiladas from Casa Mariachi.

  * * *

  I bided my time at the restaurant’s takeout counter. When my turn came, I picked up enchiladas, tortilla chips, salsa, napkins, and plastic tableware in a take-home sack and headed to my car. I didn’t notice anything unusual at the time.

  That may have been because I had been paying more attention to my nose than my eye. What’s Spanish for “ambrosial”?

  ¡Olé!?

  Fragante!?

  Olores maravillosos!?

  As I made my way back to my place, the odor wafting through my car confirmed Angie’s good judgment, not to mention good taste, in requesting Casa Mariachi’s green-chili enchiladas for dinner.

  I wasn’t in my Charger. The supervisor at the county garage said they were still cleaning it and airing it out. I was driving an almost new gray Ford Taurus we’d outfitted as an undercover unit.

  Flagler straddled the eastern hills of the O’Mahony Ridge range. I’d bought a house in a subdivision that spread out over the top of one of those hills.

  From downtown, I always got to my place by taking a winding four-lane street called Bison’s Cut Drive and turning into my neighborhood after a couple of miles. I noticed the vehicle behind me not long after I started up the hill. A white pickup. Looked like a late model. Had heavy window tints. That’s all I could tell.

  I changed lanes. A couple of blocks behind me, this vehicle did likewise. I activated my turn signal and changed lanes again. So did the pickup. Looked like I was being tailed.

  The hills of the O’Mahony Ridge aren’t easy places to build houses. My subdivision, Wild Deer Estates, had a street layout like a spider chrysanthemum bloom. Only one way in, and once you were in, you had a choice of going all the way to the roundabout six blocks away and coming back out or taking one of the “petals,” the petals being streets.

  Only taking a petal didn’t get you very far. The streets weren’t very long. And they all had the same thing at the end. A cul-de-sac.

  The limited navigation possibilities were one of the reasons I’d bought a house there. I thought it would be a good place for a sheriff to enjoy privacy in his off-hours.

  I’d never had to chase anyone or flee from anyone in Wild Deer Estates, but of course, I’d thought about how I’d do it. Wouldn’t chase or flee at all. Would bait a trap. Then spring it and let everything come to me.

  I could do that because every two “petals” shared an alley. They had culs-de-sac at the end too. Some of them were curved. The one closest to the entrance to the subdivision was almost a dogleg. If I jammed on my brakes, backed into this alley like a stunt driver, and killed the lights in time, I had a good chance of going unobserved by anyone following me or chasing me. At least, going unseen until I wanted to be seen. Then I could dart behind my quarry as he attempted to exit.

  Everything went as planned until the exit part.

  The white pickup sped past, headed into the subdivision. A late-model Ford F-350. Big sucker. Dual rear wheels. The window tint was probably legal, but I couldn’t see inside. Or, in the fading light, read the license plate. They could have been Texas tags. I’d know as soon as the truck reappeared.

  I waited.

  Two minutes. Three minutes. Four minutes.

  Nothing.

  I continued to watch the digital clock numbers tick by on my car’s audio system. Five minutes, six minutes.

  Nothing.

  The smell of Mexican food was soaking up the oxygen in my car.

  I wanted to go home.

  Be off-duty. Have a tasty meal. Share news, strategies, doubts, fears and hugs with a wonderful woman I was hoping to be with for a long time. Feel safe and sheltered and protected from purveyors of mayhem and death, if only for the night. In my own house, my own bed. Was it too much to ask?

  After nine minutes passed, I wasn’t sure.

  Had I been too clever by half? Too cocksure about my abilities to take advantage of my neighborhood’s weird Google Maps signature?

  I wasn’t sure.

  Could this have been one of my neighbors driving a new F-350? Someone visiting who had one? Or had I allowed some of the evil that had invaded Abbot County in the past two days to pass unchallenged a few feet in front of me and disappear into my own subdivision without confronting it?

  Where had it gone?

 
I wasn’t sure.

  I could ask for deputies to respond and help me search. As a resident of Flagler, I was entitled to that.

  My department also provided police services to Flagler. It was one of those city-county “metro” arrangements our voters had approved in the late 1990s. There weren’t many of them. Las Vegas and Clark County, Nevada, had them. But at the moment, my deputies were like me — overextended. Exhausted. And I really didn’t have anything concrete to tell them. Only suspicions about some weird behavior on the part of a driver. Or not. He — or she — could have been nothing more than a kid with a rich dad, a new driver’s license and the bangle of all bangles.

  Or I could start searching the subdivision myself.

  I’d already put my car in gear when my phone went off. I knew the ringtone. It was Angie’s.

  She said she had gotten in earlier than expected. She was already at my house. If I didn’t get there soon with the enchiladas, she was going to call in another order, go get them herself, and start eating alone.

  “Where’re ya at?” she asked.

  “Just down the street.”

  “Then you’ll be home in a jiffy.”

  “In a jiffy.”

  “I’ve parked in your driveway. You won’t recognize the car. Mine’s in the shop. This is a rental.”

  “What color?”

  “Gray.”

  “What kind is it?”

  “A Taurus.”

  “How new is it?”

  “This year’s, I think.”

  I told her to stay out of her car. Draw the drapes. Make sure the doors were locked. And keep her gun handy.

  Her reply was vintage Angie sass. “Well, here’s loving you too, Mister Luke.”

  But given how we both made our living, we had agreed on another rule. Prudence until you know it’s safe.

  She’d do what I asked.

  Chapter 16

  I’d had a relationship this serious once before.