by Glenn Trust
“Sheriff, have another report of a dead body, possible homicide.”
“What?” Dermott stared in disbelief at the radio in his hand. A murder a year in Salvia County would have been an increase in the homicide rate, by a wide margin. Now they had three in a matter of weeks—Lucky Martin, Emmett Brewer, and now … who? He lifted the radio and asked, not sure he wanted to know and asked, “Do you have an ID on the possible homicide?”
“Tom Krieg. The report came from his son Doyle.” Sally the dispatcher’s voice was breathless.
This sort of drama didn’t pop up every day in this backwater county, and now here she sat at her console, smack dab in the middle of it all. Wait until her sister Agnes in Tulsa heard. She’d pee herself.
Dermott stood speechless for a moment. Tom Krieg, the county’s preeminent citizen, a homicide victim? It seemed too incredible to believe.
“I’ll be en-route to the Krieg place,” he said. “What unit is responding?”
“Unit four, Brainerd.”
“Alright, tell Claude I’m on my way and to secure the scene but don’t touch anything.”
He trotted to his vehicle, calling over his shoulder to the three deputies gathering evidence, “Take care of the scene here. I’ll be back.”
His mind whirled. He figured the odds against three people being murdered in such a short period in Salvia County were a million to one, but the plain fact was, they had three homicides. By his estimation, the odds the murders were not connected in some way were about as likely as a meteor crashing through the roof of his truck and crushing his ass—at this exact moment.
He gave a quick glance at the sky and satisfied himself that no meteors were headed in his direction. He gritted his teeth and nodded. No, the murders were related in some way, and by God, he was going to get to the bottom of it.
73.
Plans
Sole pulled his truck all the way around the house to the back door. After checking to make sure no residents of Creosote were out snooping around the yard, he and Isabella helped Sandy and Jacinta into the house.
They sat at the kitchen table behind closed blinds, speaking quietly as the sun sank below the horizon. Sandy was battered, though somewhat better since being freed from the shackles. Jacinta sat beside him holding his hand, not quite as bruised, but still sore from her ordeal.
Isabella sat across from them with Sole seated beside her. If there had been any doubt before, he was part of the family now. Without him, Isabella shuddered to think what might have happened to her son and Jacinta.
“It should have been me,” Sandy said.
“What are you talking about?” Isabella asked.
“I should have been the one to kill the son of a bitch.”
“Don’t say that,” Isabella leaned forward and took his hand. “Don’t ever say that.”
“Why? Because he was my father?” He looked into her eyes and saw the confirmation. It was true.
“I … I should have told you. I wanted to tell you. I just couldn’t find a way.” She shook her head. “So many things I should have done to protect you, and I failed.”
“You didn’t fail.” Sandy shook his head, and his eyes softened. He reached over and squeezed Isabella’s hand. “You were trapped. Krieg was good at trapping people, using them. That’s why I should have done it … killed him to even the score for you.” He put an arm around Jacinta. “And for her … for all the others.”
“No.” Sole shook his head. “It’s an easy thing to say, but not so simple to do. You don’t need to carry that burden for the rest of your life. Trust me. It never gets lighter.”
Sandy didn’t argue, but the fire of hate for the man who had abused his mother and Jacinta burned in his eyes. Sole understood.
“There are plans to make,” Isabella said, smiling to change the subject from murder. “Are you two planning to marry?”
“Well … I … actually … We didn’t really spend any time talking about that.” Sandy sat quietly for a moment. “We were planning to run away, to get away from Krieg. The word married never came up. It was just about being together.” He nodded. “But yes, married is what we should be, I think.” He turned to Jacinta. “Are we planning to marry?”
“Are you asking me to marry you, Reynaldo?” Jacinta smiled and winked at Isabella.
“I … well, yes, I am asking you to marry me. Will you?”
“Yes.” She leaned over to kiss his cheek. “I will, Reynaldo.”
“I like that name,” Sandy said, looking at his mother and John. “I suppose Krieg didn’t like it … too Mexican for him, even for his illegitimate son. That’s why you called me Sandy, to appease him?”
“That’s why.” Isabella nodded, embarrassed. “Would you like me to call you Reynaldo, instead?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I’m used to Sandy, been called that by everyone I’ve ever known. You’re Mom, and I’m Sandy. Always been that way, and that’s how it should stay.” He squeezed Jacinta’s hand. “But I like it when you call me, Reynaldo. I’m Sandy to everyone else but Reynaldo to you.”
“I’m sorry,” Isabella said, feeling chastened and guilty. “One more thing I kept from you.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Sandy interrupted firmly. “But from now on, no more secrets or hiding who we are.”
“Fair enough.” Isabella put on a smile. “Now let’s plan a wedding.”
“There is something to discuss before the wedding,” John interjected.
The others turned toward him.
“Some loose ends to tie up.” He looked across the table. “Where is your truck, Sandy?”
“In a diner parking lot outside Laredo. That’s where Brainerd nabbed us.”
“Okay. You two will stay here, and your mother and I will drive to Laredo and back during the night. We need to hide the pickup in the shed before the town is awake in the morning.”
Isabella nodded.
“The next loose end is Brainerd. How much does he know?”
“Everything,” Sandy said. “Not who killed Krieg, but he knows we were the last ones with him.”
“I’ll figure out something to do about that.”
“What?” Isabella asked, her brow furrowed, concerned.
“I’ll think about it and let you know.”
Sole avoided her gaze, but she let it go. If whatever he was planning protected Sandy and Jacinta, she had no objections.
“Last,” he continued. “Jacinta’s status in the United States. She’s an illegal immigrant, undocumented. She will need a Green Card to stay here.”
“Won’t marriage solve that?” Isabella asked.
“Probably,” John said. “But the longer we wait, the harder it is to get the approval. Immigration takes a dim view of marriages for the purposes of entering the country. Still, marrying sooner than later and applying for permanent residency will make things easier than waiting. Also, we need a plausible reason that Jacinta crossed the border.”
“I came to be with my uncle in Houston,” she said. “The devil Krieg stopped me.”
“To be with your uncle is a good reason.” Sole nodded. “For the sake of your residency application, we should avoid any reference to what happened with Krieg.”
“You mean what he did does not get investigated?” Sandy asked, surprised, and uneasy with the idea.
“No. It will be investigated. Somebody will find his body, possibly already have, and will start putting things together. The K and Z smuggling operation will be shut down, and everyone involved will be found out. ICE, Border Patrol, Homeland Security … they’re all good at what they do. They will figure things out. For now, let’s get Jacinta on the path to legal residency and citizenship.”
“Agreed,” Isabella said.
“One more thing,” Sole said. “You two stay out of sight and heal up. We don’t want people seeing your condition and asking a lot of questions.”
There was no argument. Heads nodded. Fatigue was settling into their bon
es.
“We have to get on the road to Laredo,” Sole said to Isabella.
“Do we really need to go tonight? I’m dead tired.”
“Yes. Tonight if we want to secure Sandy’s truck before someone reports it abandoned and has it towed. That would leave a paper trail that could blow our story. We’ll bring it back here and hide it in the shed, but we have to get it done before daylight.”
“Alright,” she said, and once again, she wondered about his past and the ease with which he knew how to cover their tracks. “You drive. I’ll sleep on the way.”
Sole stood. “You two get some sleep. Stay out of sight. If anyone comes to the door, stay quiet and don’t answer.” He looked at Isabella. “If we leave now, we can make it back before daylight and grab a couple of hours of sleep for ourselves.”
74.
You’re an Idiot
Claude Brainerd was standing with Doyle Krieg when Sheriff Dermott pulled up beside the barn.
“Where is he?” Dermott asked, walking past them to the barn.
“Inside. There’s a storeroom on the far side.”
“I’ll take a look.” Dermott looked at Doyle. “You stay here.”
“It’s my father. You can’t tell me to …”
“Stay here,” Dermott said and turned away. “Come with me, Claude.”
They entered the barn and stopped. Dermott stood by the walk-through door, scanning the scene from one end to the other. He took out his phone and snapped a few images of the interior.
As they approached the storeroom, he stopped and took more pictures of the blood on the floor. It had soaked in, staining the concrete a rusty brown color.
The storeroom door was open. Dermott stood in the entry surveying the crime scene. Tom Krieg was on his back, one knee up, three neat holes in the front of his skull.
“What’s Doyle got to say?” Dermott turned to his deputy.
“Came home. Couldn’t find his father. Looked everywhere. The storeroom in the barn was one of the last places he thought to search.”
“He have any idea who might have done it?”
“No, none at all.”
“That’s bullshit!” Doyle shouted from behind Brainerd.
Dermott whirled. “Told you to wait outside, Doyle. This is a crime scene.”
“I know who did it!”
“What?” Dermott shot Brainerd a hard look. “Who did it?”
“That half-breed did it. I know it!”
“Be more specific.” Dermott reached for the note pad in his pocket.
“Palmeras … Sandy Palmeras. He had to be the one.”
“Why is that?” Dermott’s eyes narrowed. “What’s going on here, Doyle?”
Behind him, Brainerd scowled at Doyle, mouthing the words, “Shut the fuck up.”
“Going on?” Doyle mumbled, his feeble brain beginning to comprehend that he may have said too much. He struggled for a way to explain why Sandy would kill his father without saying that Tom Krieg liked to keep young girls around and rape them.
“Well, I didn’t say anything was going on exactly,” he said lamely.
“You said Sandy Palmeras murdered your father. I asked what’s going on. Well?”
“It’s just that he always hated us. We had a fight out on the road outside Creosote a while back.”
“Yeah.” Dermott nodded. “Heard he handed your ass to you. Why would he want to come here and do this to Tom?”
“Well … like I said, he always has had it in for us. Jealous, that’s what he is. Because we got money and he don’t … lives in that piece of shit house in that shit hole of a town with his mother, and he won’t never have nothing better.”
“Jealous?” Dermott shook his head. “That doesn’t sound like Sandy Palmeras.”
“It’s true, goddammit!”
Doyle had played his card and had run out of meaningful things to say. Dumb as he was, he knew he couldn’t mention the girl and Sandy’s promise to take her away. If he did, there would be more questions, ones he didn’t want to answer. Some he couldn’t answer since his father kept him on the ranch and away from the real money-making aspects of his affairs.
He was smart enough to understand that if he opened the door to everything his father was doing, he could lose it all. Visions of his family fortune floating off into space sobered him. The ranch, the trucking company, and everything of any value confiscated by the law.
“It’s true,” he repeated, feebly.
“That’s not much to go on.” Dermott motioned to Brainerd to come forward.
Brainerd stood behind Dermott staring into Doyle’s eyes, trying to send a message for him to shut up before they all went to jail.
“Take Doyle outside and get a statement in full. Not likely that financial jealousy was a motive here, but there might be something else.” Dermott knelt by the bloodstains on the barn floor. “I’ll get an evidence kit and see if I can get a sample of this blood. Might take a while, but DNA may be able to tell us who was here with Krieg. Doesn’t look like he was dragged into the storeroom after he was killed, so this could be another victim, or the perpetrator.”
“Yes, sir,” Brainerd said and motioned to Doyle to follow him outside.
With three deputies handling Emmett Brewer’s murder, he and Brainerd were the only other on-duty law enforcement officers available to work the Krieg case. Pulling bodies from the river was one thing, but Dermott wasn’t about to let Claude Brainerd within fifty feet of a real investigation.
He worked the crime scene alone, taking images of every inch of the barn and of Krieg’s body from every conceivable angle. He dampened sterile pads from his evidence kit with distilled water and used them to soak up blood samples from the stains drying into the concrete. Then he took samples of Krieg’s still wet blood from around his body and off the wall of the storeroom and recovered two of the bullets that had passed through Krieg’s skull.
Outside, Claude Brainerd stood beside his county pickup with Doyle Krieg, staring intently at the barn from which he had been banished.
“Why don’t you go in there and do something,” Doyle snarled. “Isn’t that what my father pays you for?”
“Do something like what?”
“Hell, you’re the fucking deputy. Make the sheriff leave. Tell him you’ll handle things. Find that half-breed son of a bitch, and we’ll drag him down to the river and put a bullet in his head like he done to my father.”
Brainerd looked at Doyle, eyebrows raised in disbelief. “You’re an idiot, Doyle.”
75.
Very Unfair
He wouldn’t do it here. Or would he? Pepe Lopez tried to reassure himself as he walked into Alejandro Garza’s hotel in Monterrey.
He wouldn’t kill me here. If he wanted to do that, it would have been much simpler out on the road where the ambush had taken place, he reasoned. After all, there were already so many bodies there. What would one more matter?
No, he wouldn’t do it here, Lopez decided. There would be too many witnesses. They would leave too much evidence behind.
He stepped into the lobby elevator, feeling a little calmer. He pressed the button for the fifth floor and looked up to smile broadly into the security camera. Hopefully, the equipment was functioning correctly and recording, so there would be a record that he had come to visit a friend who was expecting him.
The elevator stopped, chiming softly that he had arrived at his destination. He took a breath and stepped into the plush hallway of the five-star hotel. No hail of gunfire greeted him, no men with knives to slit his throat. So far so good.
The door to Alejandro Garza’s room was easy to spot. One of his scowling security guards stood in the hallway watching him approach.
“Here to see Señor Garza, as instructed,” Lopez said, smiling and trying to appear confident, hoping that the man did not notice the nervous tic in his left eye.
The bodyguard tapped on the door, and the second one opened it. He motioned Lopez into the room then roug
hly pushed him against the entryway wall and patted him down.
“I would not bring a weapon here,” Lopez said, feigning indignation. “I am among friends, no?”
The bodyguard ignored him. When he had completed the search, he escorted Lopez down the hall into the sitting room of an expansive suite. Alejandro Garza sat in an overstuffed chair, legs crossed, scrolling through screens on his phone. A bottle of Gran Patron tequila sat on the table beside him. There was only one glass.
The bodyguard positioned Lopez in the center of the room, facing Garza, like a director placing an actor on his mark on the stage. Lopez waited, eying the tequila. The thought of speaking did not enter his mind.
Now and again, Garza stopped scrolling to type an email or text and send it, then continued his perusal of the messages he had received during the day. After several minutes passed, Lopez began to feel lightheaded. Standing ramrod straight with his knees locked, he began to sway and worried that he might lose consciousness and topple to the floor.
Keenly aware of the two security men observing him from opposite sides of the room, he wondered what would happen to him if he passed out. That thought cleared his head. He didn’t want to find out.
Finally, Garza looked up. He spoke without inviting Lopez to sit.
“Do you understand why you’re here?”
“Yes, I think so. I said I may know the location of the gringo, this John Sole you are searching for. You said to come here so we could make a plan.”
“This is the last plan we will make together.” Garza nodded, his gaze piercing through Pepe’s chest like a hand grabbing his heart and squeezing. “Do you understand this?”
“Yes,” Lopez managed to squeak out of his constricting throat.
“Tell me how you know where this man is.”
“There was a man who worked for Krieg and Zabala. His name was Martin. He …”
“I don’t care about his name,” Garza interrupted impatiently. “Give me the facts.”
“Yes, yes, of course.” Lopez swallowed several times rapidly. “The man, John Sole, beat him and took his rifle away. It was a topic of conversation among all the drivers and men who work for Krieg and Zabala. They laughed about it because no one liked Martin.” Lopez paled and mentally cursed himself—you tonto, fool—for mentioning the name again. “I mean the man who was beaten.”