“Keto,” I said.
Chapter 12
We drove the way we’d come, south into Bryan, and stopped in a burger joint called Fat Guys. Over a triple bacon cheeseburger, minus bun, I came clean about my diet. Beth didn’t give me too much flack about it, claiming that she had tried it a few years back and lost a few pounds.
“So how much are you down on weight?” Beth asked.
“I lost, like, eight pounds the first week. Only a pound or two since,” I said.
“Still, ten pounds in a couple weeks is pretty good. Which looking at what you’re eating right now, I sure as heck wouldn’t think would be possible. That greasy mess has to be a thousand calories.”
She pointed at the grease dripping from the burger chunk on my fork.
“Nah, only about eight ninety,” I said. My phone, sitting on the surface of our table in the little fast-food joint, buzzed and lit up—a text. I reached for it and saw Beth pulling hers from the pocket of her blazer.
“Ball,” she said.
“Yeah. Me too.” I stared at the screen of my phone, reading the message that said we’d gotten a hit on Earl Harrison’s truck in Waco and had more bodies. There was a phone number and a contact name—Agent Tom Disick from the Waco resident agency. Ball said he’d given Beth’s and my information to the agent as well.
“Did you get the same message?” Beth asked.
“Waco.”
“Yeah. I’m calling,” she said.
Beth dialed and held the phone to her ear. After twenty or so seconds, she left a message and hung up. “Voicemail.”
I shoveled the rest of the burger, cheese, and bacon into my mouth. I tried Ball as we walked to the car in the lot.
“Hey,” he answered.
“Beth left the agent a message to call us. What do we know?”
“I was actually just on the line with him. He’ll probably be calling her back any second. They’ve got four bodies in a gas station in Waco. A gas station that was torched. This was yesterday. The bureau didn’t get the call until a half hour ago. The local PD was going door to door around the gas station this morning, seeing if anyone had video that caught the gas station or nearby crossing streets around the time of the building fire. They got a truck and ran the tag. Earl Harrison’s. The alert said call the bureau’s tip line, but I guess they just reached out to the local office. Waco then called us. That’s about where we’re at.”
“So, right now, we don’t know anything about what went down?” I asked.
“The local guys up there may just be showing to the scene. Either that or meeting with the local PD. I’m not sure to be honest.”
“All right,” I said. “We’re going to head that way. Do you have an address for the gas station, or any kind of contact for the local PD?”
“The address for the gas station, I have. Nothing for the local PD, though.”
“Okay. Text me what you have, and we’ll find who we need to talk to.”
“You got it,” Ball said.
“Appreciate it.” I hung up just as Beth’s phone rang.
“I think this is the agent I just called,” she said.
“Probably. Ball said that he just got off the phone with the guy.”
“Beth Harper,” she answered.
As Beth took the call, the address for the gas station hit my phone. I pulled it up on my phone’s navigation and set a course for it. From the bits and pieces of Beth’s phone call that I was hearing, it sounded like she was in fact talking to the agent.
“How far are we from Waco?” she asked, taking the mouthpiece of her phone from her face.
I turned my phone toward her. She looked, nodded, and returned to the call.
“We’re an hour and forty-five minutes away,” Beth said. “Okay. Yeah, I’ll just do that. Thanks.”
Beth hung up from the call and started the car.
“What did he say?” I asked.
“Four dead in a gas station that was torched. Men dead prior to fire. GSWs, each of them. Earl Harrison’s truck was caught on video down the block. They were just running tags on everything that went past around the time of the fire. Ended up getting a BOLO hit.”
“Same as what I got basically. Any video from inside the gas station prior to the fire?”
“I didn’t get that,” she said. “This Agent Disick said he was on his way to meet with a local detective now. That we should give him a call when we’re about a half hour out and he’ll give us an update on what he found out, as well as tell us where to meet him.”
“Sounds good. Do you know where you’re headed?”
“Take highway six north until we get to Waco,” she said. “Basically, back the way we came.”
“All right.” I ended the route guidance on my phone.
Beth put the car in reverse, backed from the parking spot, and headed out of the lot. We hit the highway and were headed for Waco within a few minutes. After I tried calling Scott and got his voicemail, I tried Bill. He picked up in a few rings.
“I saw you called Scott,” Bill answered. “We were in the middle of an interview. Figured I’d step out and take the call in case we hit on something. What’s up?”
“We’re headed to Waco,” I said.
“What’s in Waco?”
“Another sighting, more bodies.”
“What happened?”
I filled Bill in on the latest or at least what we knew to that point.
“Is this guy going for a high score on bodies or what?” Bill asked.
I took the question as rhetorical. “How are your interviews coming?”
“We may be on to something, but we have to do a little more digging to know for sure.”
“What’s the something you may be on to?”
“Seems that Burr ran with a little motorcycle gang inside.”
“Motorcycle gang?”
“Yeah, a smaller one. Maybe ten or fifteen guys but enough to watch each other’s backs, I guess. We just happened to stumble upon one of them looking to maybe talk for some kind of a deal. We still need to see what he can tell us and what he wants in return, but he said he was friends with Burr. I guess they ate lunch together every day for a couple years. Also had work duties together.”
“All right,” I said. “Sounds like it could be promising.”
“Could be. This guy is only a few years into a twenty-year stretch for a home invasion with a deadly weapon. He’s got an aggravated assault and a couple other things sprinkled in there as well.”
“He’s the only iron in the fire?”
“In here, yeah. Everyone else is stonewalling us. When we ask them about Burr, a couple of these guys used the term ‘just another con,’ so I’m assuming they all got together and their little leader, a Leland Walters, probably coached them all on what to say.”
“What’s this Leland’s deal?” I asked.
“Guy in his later fifties. In for running meth. Some gun charges and some more drug charges in his past. About all we have on him, really. We were going to try to lean on the guy a bit, but his attorney showed up for some meeting or something. He didn’t show up due to us, so it must have been scheduled.”
“Okay. Well, keep me updated if anything develops there.”
“Will do.”
“Were you guys still trying to get over to that house you wanted to go through? Where the dead inmates were found?” I asked.
“Steve Howard’s. Yeah. We spoke with his son and are meeting him there tonight at five thirty.”
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll give you a buzz when we figure out just what the hell is going on up here in Waco.”
“Sounds good,” Bill said. “Talk soon.”
I clicked off from the call and told Beth what Bill had said.
Chapter 13
Chuck had been handcuffed and placed in a blue-painted cinder block room. It had no windows and just the single door that was dead bolted from the outside. The door was steel, and it pushed inward—trying to kick
it down would be a wasted effort. A bucket had been tossed in the corner of the room in the event he had to use the restroom. With no means to tell time and no view of the outside world, Chuck couldn’t tell how long he’d been locked in the room. His best guess was twelve hours, but he really had no means to even guess that. It was simply a number that came to him.
The door rattled, and the dead bolt clacked open. Chuck debated trying to shoulder block whoever appeared in the door—and run. He stopped cold when he saw a man aiming a shotgun at his face.
“What the hell is going on?” Chuck asked.
“Shut up,” the guy holding the shotgun said.
Chuck recognized him as one of the guys who had been playing pool.
“Let me talk to Jerry,” Chuck said.
The guy holding the shotgun glanced over his shoulder. “Hurry up,” he said.
A second later, another of the guys who had been playing pool appeared in the doorway. He kicked a milk crate toward Chuck.
Chuck glanced down at it to see some bottles of water, chips, and what looked like a bag of beef jerky inside. He looked up just in time to see the door close and hear it lock.
Chuck rushed to the door and slammed his cuffed hands against it. “Hey! Let me talk to Jerry!”
There was no response. The only sound was his own banging on the door and the echo of his voice off the walls of his makeshift holding cell.
Chapter 14
Just before two o’clock, we turned in to the back lot of the police department on Fourth Street in Waco. Beth found a spot in the parking lot, which was filled with patrol cars. We left our rental car and walked to the two-toned, two-story rectangular brown building with the flat roof. Beneath an awning, I held the entrance door for Beth then followed her inside. The interior, like the exterior of the building, was various shades of brown and carried a heavy 1980s vibe. Beth led us to the counter, where she asked the man behind the glass to see a Barry Maddox, the detective that we were there to meet along with the Waco agent.
Both the detective and Agent Disick met us in the lobby of the police station. Detective Maddox, balding and smelling fresh off finishing a cigarette, led our group through the station, past the bullpen, and into one of the department’s meeting rooms. I grabbed a rolling chair at the conference room table—Beth did the same beside me. A couple of files were already lying open on the table. I figured Agent Disick and Detective Maddox had been going through things in the room prior to our arrival. Disick, about six foot five and on the heavier side, grunted as he took his chair across from Beth and me. The detective took a seat at the head of the table, just off my right shoulder.
“Here is a copy of the file that we put together so far. Some photos of the truck in there, who we think the victims are. A couple other things.” Agent Disick slid a file across the table toward Beth and me. I pulled it closer and flipped it open. The first few pages were of the truck. I took them from the file and spread them out before us. The three photos looked like they had been taken in progression as the truck passed a driveway. In the third photo, we could see the license plate. The fourth photo had the license plate zoomed in.
“This was from someone’s house?” Beth asked.
“A camera on someone’s garage about a half block away from the gas station,” Detective Maddox said.
“Did we catch it on camera anywhere else?” I asked.
“That’s it,” Maddox said. “He had to have come from the opposite direction, because we didn’t have the truck on this person’s cameras earlier than this.”
The “where he came from” wasn’t as important as the “where he went after.”
“We have him headed away from the gas station,” I said. “How far away in this direction did we knock on doors?”
Detective Maddox pulled another paper from his file. “It should be the next page there.”
I looked down at the next page in the file—a printout of a street map with some areas circled.
“You can see where the gas station is on there, or was, I should say. There’s a circle on the house we got the video from as well as the direction that the truck was traveling in.”
My eyes followed the street in front of the home. Aside from the gas station and the house that the video had come from, there were only two other houses until the road ran into the entrances for I-35 north and south.
“Did we check anything after the freeway here?” I asked after seeing that the road continued.
“Yeah. There’s a couple restaurants right on the corner after the freeway,” the detective said. “We used the time stamp from the video we had and checked out what the restaurants caught passing on the street. No signs of the truck. The thinking is he got on the interstate.”
“What do we have on 35 for cameras?” Beth asked.
“There’s a traffic camera north where Marlin Highway crosses,” Agent Disick said. “We’re working on getting access to it. It actually belongs to a local news station.”
“And south?” I asked.
“Nothing that I know of. Maybe we can take a ride south and see if we find anything,” Disick said.
“What actually went down at this gas station?” Beth asked. “Do we know anything more on that front?”
“A 911 call of a fire at the address came in at about five thirty p.m. yesterday from a passing motorist,” Detective Maddox said. “Actually, there was another call prior to that, but no one spoke. Records show it was from the store employee—a Tyler Genner. We believe he was one of the victims. By the time there was a police and fire response, which was just minutes, the fire had engulfed the building. The pumps didn’t catch, thankfully, but the building was ablaze. After they fought it back and finally got it under control, one of the responders claimed that they’d spotted bodies inside. With a truck still at the pumps and no accounting for any store employee, it made sense at first glance, but then logic kind of kicks in and you wonder how they got trapped inside of the gas station in a fire. You’d think that if a fire broke out, someone would try to use a fire extinguisher, and if that didn’t work, they’d get the hell out of there.”
“Right,” I said.
“Well, when they finally got in, they spotted four bodies. All burned beyond recognition. All in the main area of the store. No body behind where the counter area was. No fire extinguisher near any of the bodies. It didn’t really make sense. The fire department quickly chalked it up as arson. Medical examiner got on the bodies right away.”
“Let me guess, no smoke inhalation,” Beth said.
The detective shook his head. “The word this morning was not a one of them had any. What they did have, however, were bullet wounds.”
“Any rounds retrieved?” I asked.
“A few, still with the medical examiner,” Maddox said.
“Do we have IDs on anyone?” Beth asked.
Detective Maddox shook his head. “No positives, but we have a good idea. We’ll probably have to go the dental-record route for any confirmation. No wallets found on any of them. We’ve got a couple of burned phones, but those will have to be looked at by someone, I guess. There are printouts about who we think they are in the file there.” Maddox flicked his finger in the air at the file before Beth and me.
“How did we get the info on who we think these guys are?” Beth asked.
“Two vehicles on scene, a truck at the gas pumps and a little sedan that was at the back of the building. We ran the plates on each and sent our cars to the registered addresses. The sedan belonged to the store employee, Tyler Genner. He’s currently unaccounted for. No answer on his phone and was supposed to be at work at the time the fire occurred. Then the truck outside at the gas pumps belongs to a—” The detective looked into the file sitting in front of him. “Rodrigo Campos. Then we have a Kevin Soler and an Adrian Brozek. All the men work together, drive to and from work together, and are all also unaccounted for. They work for a lawn service. The truck had a trailer with a mower and equipment.”
&n
bsp; “Okay.” Beth pulled the papers from the file that had copies of the victims’ driver’s licenses and went through them.
I looked at Disick. “Who handles your forensics stuff? Do you guys ship it up to Dallas?” I knew that the Waco office was a resident agency just like the one in Bryan. Forensics would go to whichever field office was closest.
“Dallas, yeah,” he said.
“All right. We’ll need to contact someone there and get them working with everyone else,” I said.
“For sure. I’ll make sure you get their contact info,” Disick said.
“How big is the resident agency here?” Beth asked. “How many guys do we have at our disposal if needed?”
“Our office parties are pretty small,” Disick said. “SSA Jordan Sajak, ASAC John Arquette, myself—the office’s Special Agent in Charge—and four field agents. A couple of administrative people as well.
“So just the four field agents,” Beth said.
“Yeah, and right now, it’s just three,” Disick said. “One of our guys is on medical leave. Just had a shoulder surgery.”
“All right. I just wanted to know what we had available.” Beth paged through a couple of papers in the file. “Did we make contact with whoever owns the gas station itself?”
“It’s listed as belonging to a Dallas company called Skypoint Properties,” Maddox said. “I pulled up their website and called the number listed—a couple of times last night and then again this morning. The number just rings and then beeps like a voicemail. No message, no nothing. I left my name and number, asking for a callback, but I haven’t heard anything. Looked around for another number for them this morning but just found out-of-state listings. I’d been past the gas station who knows how many times. I don’t think they did a ton of business, and I’ve seen it change names more than once. The more I think about it, the more I lean toward this Skypoint is probably just leasing the building out.”
“Okay. Getting some kind of contact for whoever owned or leased this gas station needs to be at the top of our list,” I said. “They could have had cameras that were cloud-based. We may have video somewhere of just what the hell actually happened inside.”
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