What's Left is Right: Book two of The Detective Bill Ross Crime Series
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What’s Left is Right
By Irving Munro
Copyright © 2015 Irving Munro
All rights reserved.
Ebook formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com
Acknowledgments
Cover design by ebooklaunch.com
Original Austin skyline photograph by imagesoftexas.com
Disclaimer
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One - Whispering Hollow
Chapter Two - The burning cross file
Chapter Three - A strange message
Chapter Four - The Tattoo
Chapter Five - Meet the Governor
Chapter Six - Belhaven beer
Chapter Seven - Needle in a haystack
Chapter Eight - Raul Hernandez
Chapter Nine - Disinformation
Chapter Ten - The SAS connection
Chapter Eleven - Jimmy Rodriquez
Chapter Twelve - Latisha Williams
Chapter Thirteen - The Spirit Riders
Chapter Fourteen - It’s Mike Muguara
Chapter Fifteen - Let’s get our ducks in a row
Chapter Sixteen - Sixt Car Rental
Chapter Seventeen - Geist Reiter GmbH
Chapter Eighteen - Venture Point Holdings
Chapter Nineteen - Heidelberg
Chapter Twenty - Joe Nichol
Chapter Twenty-One - U-Haul storage
Chapter Twenty-Two - A nest of vipers
Chapter Twenty-Three - Last Will and Testament
Chapter Twenty-Four - Pepe Vivar
Chapter Twenty-Five - Antonella Aguilar
Chapter Twenty-Six - Spill the beans
Chapter Twenty-Seven - Turn it off
Chapter Twenty-Eight - Antonella’s story
Chapter Twenty-Nine - Dirty Laundry
Chapter Thirty - The Scottish genius
Chapter Thirty-One - Lake Travis secrets
Chapter Thirty-Two - And they all fall down
Chapter Thirty-Three - Comanche
Chapter Thirty-Four - The FBI
Chapter Thirty-Five - Fish in the net
Chapter Thirty-Six - Gavin McMullen
Chapter Thirty-Seven - Their journey to the other side
Chapter Thirty-Eight - The Parting Glass
Chapter Thirty-Nine - Sheep have feelings
Post Script
Sherlock Holmes:
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth!
Prologue
Raul Hernandez walked across the parking lot adjacent to the Gold’s Gym on Lamar Blvd. in Austin, feeling exhausted. It had been a ninety-minute workout on the treadmill and another twenty on the weights. This was his normal routine at least twice a week. He also ran 20 miles on the weekend. For a 42-year-old he was in great shape and he meant to stay that way.
He had just pressed the remote for the BMW when they hit him from behind and everything went black. When he came to he realized that he was in the trunk of a car, tied up, with a hood over his head.
I guess this is it, he thought. I missed them in the parking lot. How did I miss them?”
It was stifling hot and the smell of gasoline was overpowering. His sweat was soaking the sackcloth of the hood. Raul closed his eyes and slowed his breathing. His military training had taught him not to panic in these types of situations. He was not in any great pain, but his head throbbed and he knew that he had been knocked unconscious. His weapons were in the BMW; he never took them into the gym and he guessed they must have known that.
An hour went by before the car stopped and the trunk flew open. Two men hauled him out, dragged him across a dirt track and yanked the hood off. There were about a dozen of them standing next to several trucks parked off to the side of the road. They were all dressed the same, all in white sheets and hoods. Raul recognized them immediately. The Klan!
“A bit elaborate, boys. If you’re going to kill me just do it. But why don’t you untie me and let’s have a little rock and roll first, or are you not up for that?”
“Who the fuck do you think you are talking to us like that, you piece of shit!”
He recognized the accent. It was the Honduran with the scar.
“You come over the border and take our jobs. We round you up and send you back. And what do you know, you’re right back here again. Well, no more. This will be a lesson to all of your kind.”
Raul quickly processed what he had just heard. This was what the Honduran had told this bunch, that he was muscling in on their turf and going to steal their jobs.
“I’m not here to steal your fucking jobs! I’m not Mexican and not illegal! This lying Honduran has told you a pack of lies! Do I sound like a fucking Mexican to you?”
He could see Rodriguez standing by his limo watching all of this go down.
Raul’s mind raced with anger. Just untie my hands, you fuckers, and before I eventually go down, I’m going to rip your head off, Rodriguez.
For a second he thought the guy behind him was untying the rope around his wrists, but in fact he was securing a second one to a trailer hitch on one of the trucks. The engine roared into life and he was yanked off his feet. He felt his shoulder joints snap. The pain was excruciating as he was dragged across the gravel road and the truck gained speed. His head slammed into a rock and all the pain was gone.
Raul Hernandez died there that cold night in Texas.
He had tried to explain to his killers that he wasn’t Mexican, and that was true. In fact, his name wasn’t Raul Hernandez, but that didn’t matter. Those who had taken his life wouldn’t have cared about the details anyway.
Chapter 1: Whispering Hollow
“Almost four inches of rain forecast in the next twenty-four hours!” announced Marie Mason as she walked into the Travis County Police Department office in Hudson Bend in Austin.
“Need to look out my wellies!” replied Tommy Ross, referring to the Wellington boots he used to wear growing up in Scotland.
It had been three months since the death of detective Jack Johnson. Jack had been the head of the cold-case unit and had died at the hands of serial killer Luther Fisher. Now Detective Sergeant Tommy Ross was the new head of the unit and Marie was his second in command. They were still trying to get their arms around the enormity of task.
Travis County is part of the Austin-Round Rock Metropolitan area. With a population of close to 1.5 million it’s the fifth most populous county in Texas. The county is named in honor of William Travis, the commander of the Republic of Texas forces at the Battle of the Alamo. The Travis County cold-case unit is a part of the major crimes division; with close to forty murders in the county each year many go unsolved, so Tommy and Marie had their hands full.
“We need to try to get additional budget to get all of these in electronic format,” said Bill Ross, sitting opposite Tommy and buried in the mounds of files, some going back twenty years or more.
Bill Ross was Tommy’s father and, with the approval of Police Chief Bill Dunwoody, had joined the team as a volunteer officer. Bill was a retired Scottish detective, now living in Austin. His nickname in the London Metropolitan Police had been “Sniffer” for his dogged determination and research. He was able to sniff out inconsistencies in evidence and identify where pi
eces didn’t quite fit.
“I’ll talk to Chief Dunwoody about the budget, but right now we need to concentrate on putting the files into some sort of order of priority,” said Tommy.
~
Almost on cue, Bill Dunwoody burst into the room.
“Good morning, everyone,” announced the chief as he strode across the room with a thick folder tucked under his arm.
“Got another one for you and I would like you to give it top priority.” He threw the thick file on Bill Ross’s desk and it perched on top of the other files, threatening to fall and spill its contents all over the floor. Bill Ross grabbed it just in time.
The chief flopped down on the only free chair in the room, leaned back and put his feet up on the desk.
“Ten months ago a body was found laying beside a dirt track in a remote part of the county: Whispering Hollow in Leander. The Leander fire department crew found the body following a call out from local residents. They had seen what looked like a large bonfire down by the lake and, given the county burn ban, they had called 9-1-1. By the time the fire tenders got there it had almost burned itself out but there was no mistaking that it was a wooden cross, and the badly mutilated body of an adult male was laying beside it. The crew was given strict instructions not to discuss what they had found, and up until now they have obeyed those instructions.”
“We can only imagine the effect on the Travis County community if this information got to the press. Tommy, I want your team to take over as the original investigating team has reached a dead end on the investigation of this horrendous crime. I would like that you consider this as a cold case and look at the evidence with a fresh set of eyes. You must not discuss this with anyone, including the original team. I don’t want any of their speculation to influence your work. You can all appreciate that speed is of the essence here. The governor has been briefed and has approved your involvement. So please drop everything else and get to work and keep me updated on progress.” And with that Bill Dunwoody got up from his chair and left the room.
~
They all stared at each other waiting to see who might say something first.
It was Bill Ross. He was staring at the crime scene and autopsy photographs that he had extracted from the file. “It looks like every piece of skin has been flayed from this guy’s body. What a mess!”
Tommy chimed in, now that Bill had broken the ice. “The governor has been briefed,” he parroted the words that Bill Dunwoody had used. “We better get our act together on this one.”
“Let’s take the rest of the day to wrap up the other files we’ve been working on. In the meantime, I’ll go speak with the chief and see if we can get a temporary resource to accelerate transferring them into electronic format while we work on this new case. That will make it easier for us to get back into them when we’re finished with this new assignment.”
“What’s the dead man’s name?” asked Marie.
“They haven’t been able to determine that,” replied Bill.
“Well, we do have a lot of work ahead of us, don’t we,” said Marie with a grin.
Chapter 2: The burning cross file
The following morning Marie and Bill meet in the conference room and spread out the contents of “The Burning-Cross File,” as they had christened it, over the table. Tommy was delayed, as there had been excessive flooding in the Cedar Park area caused by the torrential overnight rain with many roads closed and morning commuters stranded.
As they spread the contents of the file out, they could see other members of the department pass by the room. The floor-to-ceiling glass would have to be blacked out if they were to use this room as their center of operations for the duration of the investigation. Bill Ross could sense the tension in the air. He had experienced this many times in his work in the Met in London. Detectives were fiercely competitive and hated it if another team had to be brought in. This was a high profile case and Chief Dunwoody was briefing the governor regularly, so the members of the original investigative team were doubly agitated. They would have to tread carefully.
~
When Tommy eventually arrived in the office, having navigated the street closures, Bill and Marie had blacked out the conference room windows and had arranged the contents of the file into manageable sections.
They began with the photographs. They were horrific. As Bill had previously stated, it was as if every inch of skin had been removed. Both hands had been severed and there were no signs of them at the scene. The face was unrecognizable and it looked like someone had taken a baseball bat and set about the head. The bottom section of the jaw was missing and had not been found at the scene. All the teeth on the top section of the mouth were gone.
Marie was first to voice an opinion on what she saw laying on the table.
“I think I’ve seen something similar to this a few years back. It was the James Byrd case in 1998. He was an African-American who had been dragged behind a truck. The murder had been committed by three white supremacists. Their ringleader, Laurence Brewer, was executed by lethal injection and one of the others, Shawn Berry, was sentenced to life imprisonment. The third man, John King, still sits on death row today. In that case the poor man had been decapitated, but the rest of the body was in a condition like this.”
“Then this could be another white supremacist killing?” voiced Tommy.
“The photos sure suggest that. Then of course there’s the burning cross,” replied Marie.
Bill had not offered an opinion but just stared down at the gruesome record of the death of this man. “Marie, do you remember in the James Byrd case, was there a burning cross found at the scene?”
“Not that I recall, but I can find out,” replied Marie.
“Seems like we might be being deliberately led in the direction of Klan-type lynching,” speculated Bill as he rubbed his chin vigorously.
“Being from over the pond, I didn’t live through that terrible time in U.S. history, but we might want to check when last there was a burning cross seen anywhere in the U.S. If memory serves, most of the Klan lynching cases ended with the lynching subject being hanged from a tree. At least that’s what I remember. We should also check out if James Byrd’s hands were severed. These photos tend to suggest the hands were deliberately cut off, not ripped off as a result of the dragging, if that’s what happened here.”
“Great stuff, Dad!” said Tommy with a note of pride in his voice. “Is this your Sherlock Homes phase?” They all had a brief chuckle at Tommy’s reference to the Baker Street sleuth.
“Why would someone cut off a person’s hands and take a baseball bat to the head and mouth?” said Bill.
“To make it almost impossible for us to find out who this poor guy was,” responded Marie.
“Right!”
“And the over-embellishment with the burning cross to try to send us off in the wrong direction right from the start,” said Tommy.
“There’s something else here,” said Bill, bent over the photographs with his nose almost touching one of them. “I’ll be right back,” and he left the conference room. He returned a couple of minutes later with a huge magnifying glass.
“Now you’re taking this Sherlock Homes thing a bit far, Dad,” quipped Tommy.
“No, Tommy, look at this,” said Bill. “What do you see right there?”
“I don’t see anything,” replied Tommy, peering through the lens of the magnifying glass at the photograph below.
“You take a look, Marie,” said Bill.
“There is something,” replied Marie. “Is it a small tattoo?”
“I thing that’s what it is, Marie.”
“Why would someone have a tattoo the size of a dime under their armpit?”
They had been at it for a couple of hours and Tommy suggested that they take a break.
“We need to take a timeout, grab a coffee and get on the Internet and see if we can get any clues to the answers to the questions we have at this stage,” said Tommy.
~
An hour later they were back in the conference room. Marie went first with what she had found about burning crosses.
“I found the following on Wikipedia,” began Marie.
In 2006, Neal Chapman Coombs, of Hastings, Florida, was charged with knowingly and willfully intimidating and interfering with the right to fair housing by threat of force and the use of fire, and pleaded guilty to a racially motivated civil rights crime involving a cross burning, in his own front yard, to prevent the purchase of a house by an African-American family. Coombs was sentenced to 14 months in prison in January 2007.
On November 6, 2008, a Hardwick Township, New Jersey, family who supported U.S. President Barak Obama’s campaign found a charred wooden cross on their lawn, near burnt remnants of a "President Obama - Victory '08" banner that had been stolen from their yard.
In February 2010, an interracial Nova Scotia couple living in Hants County discovered a cross burning on their lawn, along with a noose. Two brothers were later convicted of inciting racial hatred.
“There is nothing on the Internet about recent burning crosses as part of a lynching. The last known record I could find related to the lynching of Michael Donald, who was murdered by the Klan in Mobile, Alabama, in 1981. I think you’re probably right, Bill, that we are being made to think that this is a Klan lynching.
“In addition, I found the various reports on the details of the James Byrd death. He was dragged by a pickup truck and the rope was secured around his feet so his upper torso and head took most of the trauma. The body smashed into a culvert and he was decapitated and his left arm was torn off. When they found the body the other arm was still intact, as was his hand. There had been no attempt to cut off the hand.”
“Good work, Marie,” said Tommy. “What did you find on the little ace-of-spades tattoo, Dad?”