Strong Cold Dead

by Jon Land

  “He could still make some trouble.”

  Caitlin looked totally unbothered by the prospect. “Maybe Cort Wesley can do something about that.”

  “What about you?”

  “I got somebody waiting downstairs I need to speak with.”

  “Now?”

  “She might know Cray Rawls better than anyone.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The woman he raped in Texas twenty-five years ago, not long after the house belonging to the couple who adopted him burned down, with them in it.”

  Jones held Caitlin’s stare as he ran that through his mind, his mouth puckering. “You want to tell me what else it is you’re holding back?”

  Caitlin managed a smile, feeling the vibration of the cell phone in her pocket. “If I told you, I wouldn’t be holding it back anymore.”

  She answered the call in the hallway, recognizing the number in the caller ID as the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s office. “What have you got for me, Doc?”

  “Where’d you find that bat, exactly?” Frank Whatley asked her.

  “I told you, in a cave rimming the outskirts of the Comanche rez, up in the Balcones.”

  “I know what you told me. I was looking for something else. Like what planet or mad scientist’s lab.”

  “Why?”

  “You sitting down, Ranger?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Then find a chair,” Whatley told her, his voice cracking with fatigue, “because you’re going to need one for what I’ve got to tell you.”

  83

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “He was one sick fuck,” Brandy Darnell said, seated next to Caitlin on the old velvet-colored fabric couch squeezed against the wall in Captain Tepper’s office. “Does that answer your question, Ranger?”

  “In part, ma’am. But I understand the police electing not to charge him wasn’t the end of things.”

  The woman stiffened. “I don’t talk about that. I never talk about that. To anyone,” she said, her voice quieter, the words practically disappearing before they emerged from her mouth.

  Back when she claimed to have been raped by Cray Rawls, twenty-five years before, she went by Brandy Wine. Because she had never disputed that she was a prostitute, the report Brandy filed was never adequately investigated and, as a result, Rawls was never charged. By the time a volunteer legal aid group got involved, Rawls had left the state and returned to his native North Carolina, where he began building his empire with the inheritance from the couple who’d adopted him. In almost all such cases, that would have been the end of things. But not so in Brandy’s case, Caitlin had discerned.

  “How’d you figure it all out?” Brandy continued, when Caitlin remained silent.

  “You used your real name when your injuries brought you to the hospital, ma’am. Same hospital records had you returning a couple times for follow-up visits.” Caitlin paused long enough to hold the woman’s stare. “I noticed you saw a different doctor the last time. It wasn’t hard to add things up from there.”

  Brandy Darnell swallowed so hard that her face looked pained as she gulped the air down. “So what do you want?”

  “Phone records from twenty-five years ago show you made a whole bunch of calls to North Carolina.”

  The woman’s expression grew so still and rigid that Caitlin wondered if she was even breathing. “Son of a bitch was always talking about the way he’d grown up, how much I reminded him of his mother, if you can believe that.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a compliment.”

  “It wasn’t, believe me. His mother was a dirty whore too—that was his point. I think he was screwing her more than me, if that makes any sense.”

  “It makes plenty, ma’am.”

  “A few times we were together he’d actually cry, before he’d start getting rough.”

  Caitlin leaned in closer. “So you’d been with him before the night of the rape.”

  “When the police heard that, they pretty much showed me the door. Asked me what made that night different, since he was paying for it and all.”

  “And what’d you tell them?”

  Brandy tried to swallow again, but didn’t quite finish. “That there wasn’t enough money in the world to pay for what he did to me that night. My insides haven’t been the same since, if you can believe that.”

  “I can, ma’am.”

  Brandy’s eyes turned glassy, her gaze going distant. “I don’t know … Maybe he did me a favor. That was the end for me in that life. I’d outgrown it anyway, ancient by comparison with most of the girls still working the street, at all of twenty-nine.”

  Caitlin looked at the woman, who was now fifty-four. Her badly colored blond hair was gray at the roots, hanging limp from either a bad perm or too much futile blow-drying. Her face was sunken, pitted with depressions that looked as if someone had taken a chisel to it, and thinking of Cray Rawls made Caitlin wonder if someone had. Brandy Darnell’s skin was dry and flaking, almost like she was peeling from a bad sunburn, though that clearly was not the case; she had the palest skin of any Texan Caitlin could remember. Her cheeks were puffed with fat and her eyes were so bled of life that only their occasional blinking told Caitlin the woman was still alive.

  “I got pregnant,” Brandy said suddenly, confirming what Caitlin had surmised from the information she’d been able to gather. “That bastard left a baby inside me.”

  “That’s why you tried to contact Cray Rawls in North Carolina.”

  Caitlin wasn’t sure whether Brandy Darnell nodded or not. “Tell him I was going to have his kid. I never actually got him on the phone.”

  “You wanted money?”

  “I wanted him to know. I wanted him to know I was going to have the kid just so I could give it up, that he was never going to see it.”

  When the woman started to shake, Caitlin reached out and squeezed her shoulder, rubbing it gently. Brandy’s eyes glowed with life, young and hopeful again for that fleeting moment before the memories came crashing back like a wave, drenching her anew in misery.

  “I got one look at the baby before they took it away,” Brandy managed, her voice cracking. “I went home the next day, but my parents wouldn’t let me in the house. Pretended I wasn’t there, no matter how hard I pounded the door. Eventually a neighbor called the cops. They came and found me on the porch. My parents finally opened the door and told the cops they’d never seen me before.”

  Caitlin looked at the slovenly woman, her misery worn in every gesture.

  “Can I tell you something I’ve never told anyone else?”

  Caitlin nodded.

  “I tried to get rid of it myself. One time, when I got big, I propped a baseball bat against the floor and … and…”

  Caitlin wrapped an arm around Brandy’s bony shoulder and drew her in close. Brandy didn’t respond, just remained frozen.

  “Bastard who did this never did pay for it,” she said, barely above a whisper.

  “I know that, Brandy. And I wish I could do something about that, but I can’t.”

  Brandy stiffened and eased herself away. “Then what am I doing here?”

  “I thought there might be another way you could help me get the man who hurt you.”

  “What’s that?”

  And Caitlin told her.

  84

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “I’m going to tell you the same thing I told Blockhead here,” Cray Rawls said, referring to Jones, as soon as Caitlin had closed the door behind her. “I got nothing to say until my lawyer arrives.”

  “That’s your choice, sir,” Caitlin said, taking the chair next to him. “But it’s not one I recommend.”

  Rawls smirked, shook his head. “Of course you wouldn’t.”

  “To tell you the truth, Mr. Rawls, I’m a bit disappointed. You talk up a good game on the subject of patriotism, but now, when push comes to shove, you run for the hills.”

  “And how’s that exactly, Range
r?”

  Caitlin aimed her gaze briefly at Jones. “It’s like ‘Blockhead’ here undoubtedly told you. We’re looking at a situation we have strong reason to believe involves ISIS and the same Comanche Indian reservation you’ve got a big stake in. And we believe you and ISIS might be after the same thing.”

  “Oil?”

  “You want to lie to my face, Mr. Rawls, go ahead. But please don’t play me for a fool. You wouldn’t be waiting for your lawyer if this were about oil on that land,” Caitlin told him, suppressing a smile over the fact that Cray Rawls’s lawyer had been informed by Cort Wesley, downstairs, that his client had been transferred to the FBI’s regional office in Houston to await questioning. “We’re talking about something else. We’re talking about something that, unbeknownst to you, can be or already has been weaponized.”

  That seemed to stoke Rawls’s curiosity. “What do you mean, weaponized?”

  Caitlin glanced toward Jones again. “You didn’t tell him?”

  “It’s classified,” Jones offered in explanation.

  “You can arrest me later,” Caitlin said to Jones, then looked back toward Rawls. “You heard about what happened in Austin, at that restaurant two days back?”

  Rawls nodded stiffly.

  “Well, then, let me tell you something you haven’t heard: We’ve identified suspects connected to that Comanche land through a third party I spotted outside the premises myself. We know said third party was skulking around the reservation proper, and we believe he left with whatever killed those folks eating their lunch at Hoover’s Cooking. And we suspect that your construction crew is about to lay the groundwork for pulling whatever it is out of the ground. How am I doing so far?”

  “No comment,” Rawls said, his smirk not able to hide the sudden wave of doubt and uncertainty that had claimed his features.

  “Then allow me to continue. If you don’t help us, you’ll go down as an accessory to whatever ISIS is planning to do. You’ll be aiding and abetting a terrorist organization committed to our destruction, and you would’ve, unwittingly or otherwise, provided the means for them to stage an attack on the homeland. Anything you want to say now, sir?”

  “I didn’t provide them with a goddamn thing.”

  “And who’s going to believe you, given your lack of cooperation, Mr. Rawls?”

  Caitlin backed off a bit, letting Rawls have his space, to provide a false sense of comfort.

  True to form, he seemed to quickly recover his bravado. “Ranger, I know my way around the law well enough to be sure you haven’t got anything on me that’s actionable. So, you want to try shipping me off to Cuba or some other hellhole, have at it, and bear the wrath of my thousand-dollar-an-hour attorneys—a fate worse than death, believe me.”

  Caitlin slid her chair in closer to his. “That may be true, sir. But you’ve got another problem, which I don’t think they’ll be able to help you out with. Something I don’t think you’d want even your high-priced shysters to hear about. Goes back a whole bunch of years, to when you raped that call girl before you fled Texas to return to North Carolina.”

  “Allegedly,” Rawls was quick to point out.

  “I’ve come up against more than my share of men like you, sir,” Caitlin continued. “Men who’ve risen to wealth and power on the backs of others, who feel they have a license to hurt people on account of them being hurt themselves. You’re all like characters out of Shakespeare. In your case, I know your own mother was a working girl herself, until she was killed by one of her johns, and growing up that way is surely call for a man to be angry. But that doesn’t entitle you to pay the world back for your pain by inflicting it on women just like your mother. I even heard that, a few days back, not far from that Wake County courthouse where your verdict came down, a prostitute claimed she was beaten with a sock full of motel soaps by a man she couldn’t identify. Then she disappeared.”

  “What are you getting at, Ranger?” Rawls asked, the slight distance between them suddenly seeming like a dark chasm.

  “It’s like I said, sir. I know the life you came from, that brought you to Texas as a boy, and how you saw fit to pay the world back by beating up call girls, starting with Brandy Darnell. That name ring a bell?”

  “No.”

  “That’s right,” Caitlin remembered, “back then she went by the name Brandy Wine. You fled Texas after you raped her, never responded to any of her letters or messages about leaving her pregnant.”

  Rawls had grown stiffer than the wooden chair in which he was seated. “She was after money, Ranger. She tell you that? And she didn’t even raise the kid herself.”

  “No, sir. But she tracked him down when he turned eighteen, learned everything she could about him. That’s why you’re going to cooperate with us, Mr. Rawls. That’s why you’re going to tell us everything we want to know, without your lawyers present. Save yourself a boatload of money.”

  Rawls looked genuinely befuddled. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Of course you don’t, so let me spell it out for you, sir. That suspect I mentioned goes by the name of Daniel Cross. He’s a brilliant but troubled kid, and a genius when it comes to chemical engineering. Any of this ringing a bell?”

  “No.”

  “Cross was part of the original analytical team retained by Jackson Whole Mineral,” Caitlin explained, a fact that she had discovered during her scrutiny of Sam Bob Jackson’s personnel records, provided by Jones. “He spent six months on that land, trying to pinpoint whatever it was you were looking for, but he found something else entirely, which he decided to put to his own use. That’s what ISIS will soon have in hand, if they don’t already. That’s why somebody put a bullet in Sam Bob’s head this morning and would’ve put one in yours, too, if Cort Wesley Masters hadn’t been there. They’re tying up loose ends, eliminating anybody else who might have knowledge of what’s on that land.”

  “Well, then, by all means thank Mr. Masters for me,” Rawls said, his tone laced with enough smarmy sanctimony to turn Caitlin’s stomach. “But none of that, in any way, shape, or form, links me directly to this Daniel Cross or makes me somehow culpable for this potential attack ISIS may be about to launch. You have any more shit you want to throw at the wall to see if it sticks, Ranger?”

  “Just this: Daniel Cross is your son, Mr. Rawls.”

  85

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  Rawls didn’t respond, didn’t speak. The air in the cramped office, which was overstuffed with storage boxes, felt thick, the way air outside did when foreshadowing a thunderstorm. Soupy, heavy, moist—all of it seemed to radiate off Cray Rawls, whose expression was that of a man who had just relived the last twenty-five years of his life in slow motion.

  Jones dropped a file folder into the man’s lap, fanning the still air a bit. “Everything we’ve got on Daniel Cross. I was going to share it with you for different reasons entirely,” he added, eyes straying to Caitlin, “until the Ranger here shocked the shit out of both of us.”

  Rawls started to open the folder, then stopped. He looked up to find Caitlin staring at him, her face utterly blank.

  “I met your boy myself, when he was fourteen,” she said, “a gangly, bullied freshman who’d threatened on MySpace to blow up his high school. I couldn’t help but feel bad for him, the kid being so smart and all, and being tortured by bullies. I got him out of that scrape, gave him a second chance, thought I could make a difference in his life. But then things took a bad turn for me. I left the Rangers for a time and lost track of him, and for the past few days I’ve been blaming myself for his involvement in all this. But now that I know he’s got your blood pumping through his veins, I guess nothing I did would’ve mattered, would it, Mr. Rawls? I never had a chance, and neither did he.”

  Rawls clutched the folder in his lap tighter.

  “Here’s what’s going to happen, sir,” Caitlin said, rising from her chair and standing over him. “You’re going to tell us everything you know ab
out that land. You’re not going to wait for your lawyer, you’re not going to pass Go and collect two hundred dollars, you’re going to talk. And if you don’t, the whole world is going to find out that you fathered a child who’s planning a terrorist attack that’ll make nine eleven look like a drill. Have I got your attention?”

  Rawls looked up at Caitlin in painfully deliberate fashion, as if he had to wait for some puppet master to pull on his strings. “That’s blackmail.”

  “No, sir, it’s the truth.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  Caitlin leaned forward and grasped the arms of Rawls’s chair, forcing him to twist himself tight and small, further exaggerating her advantage. “Then make me understand.”

  “Tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars … That’s what it’s worth.”

  “What what’s worth?”

  Rawls looked as if bile had just kicked up his throat. “The cure for cancer.” He paused, and then continued. “Not just a cure. A vaccine that can stop the disease at the genetic level. The data was anecdotal, but still convincing enough.”

  “What data?” Caitlin managed to ask, the air seeming to thicken even more, to the point that she wondered if that was thunder she heard in her suddenly throbbing head.

  “About this particular tribe of Comanche, dating all the way back to your great-great-grandfather’s time. They’ve got so many other health issues of note—alcoholism, liver failure, malnutrition, breathing problems from smoking, drugs, diabetes, heart disease—that nobody paid attention to the fact that the tribe enjoys a cancer occurrence on the order of a thousand times less than the overall population.”

  “Keep talking.” Caitlin nodded.

  “I get this data, the question I ask myself is why.”

  “What made you look in the first place?”

  “The belief that the truest medical miracles can be found in nature.”

  “Most valuable, you mean.”

  “That too, yes, Ranger. I admit it. I’m a greedy son of a bitch who looks back on his youth like somebody took a sandblaster to it. What do you think I’m thinking of when I’m hitting the heavy bag, like you saw me doing? I’m thinking about all those nights my mother brought men home. When I hid in the corner, in the dark, until they left. You know what? I can’t remember what a single one of them looked like, but they all smelled the same. And that’s what I smell when I’m pounding the bag, and I keep pounding until the smell goes away.”