by Harvey, JM
Logan flushed. “I—” he began but Victoria wasn’t going to let him get a word in.
“Herby told Sheriff Swisher a different story yesterday,” she pointed out. “He claimed that Rusk was going after me. That Rankin just got in the way. He swore to it. Under oath.”
Logan nodded. “He admitted that he lied. He claims that he was afraid for his life. Afraid of you.”
Victoria was about to offer an angry reply, but Logan raised a hand to preempt her.
“As I said, Lubbock’s a good story teller. Sheriff Swisher sure believed it. He’s talking about arresting you and Jack Birch for first degree homicide.”
“What the hell does this have to do with Jack?” she demanded. It was bad enough that Herby was shoving her under the freight train, but Jack wasn’t even there that morning. “Jack has nothing—”
“A warrant was issued for your husband’s arrest by Judge Pinto. Lieutenant Birch refused to execute it. Birch is meeting with Deputy Chief Ballast down at the Jack Ryan Building right this very moment. I’m betting that when he leaves that meeting, he’ll be leaving his badge behind. Hell, he might be in handcuffs.”
Victoria had heard enough. She abruptly slid to the end of the booth and stood. She needed time to think, to sort this all out. And, until she did, she had nothing more to say to Logan.
The young waitress arrived at that moment with Logan’s burrito plate, but Logan didn’t pay any attention to the girl.
“Where the hell are you going?” he demanded, half rising from his seat.
Victoria had the impulse to tell Logan her theories about the murders of Abby and Axel Rankin being the work of the Sheriff’s Department, but all her years at the prosecutor’s table warned her against it. Once you started talking it was easy to dig a hole you couldn’t climb out of.
“We’re done,” she told Logan as she grabbed her purse and slung it over her shoulder.
“You’re not leaving. If you make me arrest you, I will,” Logan said as the waitress deposited the plate and hurried away, looking anxiously over her shoulder.
Victoria laughed at that. “I don’t think I’ll let you arrest me today, Logan,” she said then turned and headed for the exit.
Logan didn’t try to stop her, but he yelled angrily at her back.
“Tell your husband to turn himself in to me. If he hands over the fifteen million, I’ll do all I can to get him life in prison.”
41
Every second of that night four years ago replayed before Val’s mind’s eye like a bad horror movie as he stood flatfooted in the living room of the decaying house. This time he didn’t fight them. He didn’t turn away.
Val had been driving aimlessly the night of the last Sutton brothers’ homicides. Just cruising, listening to the dispatchers’ chatter, trying to clear his head after sixteen hours spent poring over the Martinson’s Wholesale Gold case file. He was dead tired, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep. Insomnia had plagued him for months. He was living on adrenaline, caffeine and outrage. And he would need all three to get him through that night.
A multiple homicide call came in at 3:14 AM. It was the Sutton brothers again. The dispatcher gave Val an address in the Pleasant Grove neighborhood, but not much more. Jack Birch filled him in when Val arrived on the scene thirty-five minutes later.
The place was crawling with cops, crime scene techs, and the night duty homicide team, detectives Palo and Fanon. Seven members of a Ukrainian mafia crew out of Queens, New York had been butchered inside. The Ukrainians had come to Dallas just two months before with twenty kilos of heroin and enough cocaine to keep the city high for a year. Their reputations as ruthless killers had kept the local dealers at bay and the DPD snitches quiet, but Lamar and Lemuel had gone through them like a buzz-saw.
The Ukrainians had only been dead a few hours, but their bodies had already begun to bloat in the late September heat. The smell was enough to make even Jack Birch go a shade paler as he and Val walked through the small three bedroom bungalow, placing their feet carefully, winding through the activity of fingerprint men, photographers and forensic analysts.
Bullet-riddled bodies littered the living room, the kitchen and the hallway leading back to the home’s three tiny bedrooms. Seven men in all, but it wasn’t the men’s bodies that caught Valentine’s attention - he had seen worse while trailing the Sutton brothers - it was a pair of purses lying on a rumpled bed in the last bedroom on the right.
Two purses and seven dead men…
Val was standing there staring at the cloth bags when Jack called him out to the front yard.
Jack and a uniformed officer were waiting on the sidewalk with one of the Ukrainians’ neighbors, a guy dressed only in a pair of red sweatpants and a wife-beater T-shirt. He was a truck driver for Mrs. Baird’s Bakery, he explained, just making it in from his evening run when the gunfire started. The guy was worked up, excited, talking a mile a minute, a tight little grin plastered on his face.
“Man, I about crapped myself. Gunfire ain’t nothing new around here, but this was like a war. People were screaming. I called 9-1-1 and hunkered down in the living room. These old houses got good walls. Real bricks.”
“Did you see the perpetrators?” Jack asked. “Can you give us a description?”
The neighbor shrugged. “Two white guys with long hair, one really tall and thin, the other shorter and broader. Looked like bikers. Man, they had machine guns!” he laughed and shook his head. “It was like something out of the movies.”
“Did you see what they were driving?” Jack asked, writing on his spiral pad.
“A Ford pickup. A late ‘90’s model. Orange, I think. Maybe red.”
“Did you get a license plate number?” Jack didn’t look up from the pad.
The guy shook his head. “It was too dar—”
“Did you see two women?” Val cut in.
The guy looked his way. What he saw in Val’s face made him lose the smile.
“Yeah, they had two women with them. Looked like hookers. The big guy was dragging one of them by the hair.”
Val turned abruptly and went back inside the house. He didn’t need to hear more. The women were as good as dead. Or worse. And there wasn’t a damned thing he could do except wait for the bodies to be found.
Val went back to work. It took him, Jack, and the crime scene techs more than ten hours to process the house. Ten hours that Valentine spent thinking about the women. At 2:25 PM, with the bodies removed, evidence collected, and the scene taped off, Val had driven away, but he hadn’t gone home, he had gone back to driving aimlessly, still thinking about the women. Sleep, though he had not closed his eyes in more than thirty-six hours, seemed like a distant need.
It was almost 5:00 PM when he got the phone call on his cell.
“They got them women,” the caller said, “Out in Hudson.” The voice was muffled, barely discernible. “676 Lawther Street. They’re still alive.” The line went dead before Val could ask any questions.
Valentine had wondered how the tipster had gotten his cell phone number, His personal number, not the department issued cell listed on his business card. Only Val’s friends and a dozen or so women had that number. But it didn’t matter; what the tipster told Val had reenergized him - had pumped a hotshot of adrenaline through his veins that burned the fatigue away like jet fuel on a bonfire.
Val punched up Jack’s number. Jack answered halfway through the first ring.
“They’re in a house out in Oak Cliff,” Val said as he raced up the inside shoulder of IH 45 at well over a hundred miles an hour, whipping past slower moving traffic, the lights in the grill of his unmarked car pulsing a warning flash of red and blue, siren wailing. “676 Lawther. They’ve got the women, Jack! They’re still alive! I’m five minutes out!”
“Wait for back up,” Birch replied calmly. “Don’t you go rushing in there, Valentine.”
“They’re still alive, Jack!” Val yelled in reply. “Alive!” Val knew he sounded
hysterical but he didn’t give a damn. For months he had been cleaning up after the Suttons - picking up the pieces, charting blood splatter and bullet trajectories, living with corpses. “They’re alive, Jack!”
“Valentine—” Jack began but Val was done listening. He hung up and pitched the phone onto the passenger seat.
Val hit the exit ramp at ninety miles an hour and blasted though the stop sign without slowing. His phone rang, but he ignored it. He wasn’t waiting for backup. It would take the task force a half hour or longer to mobilize. They’d have to call in the SWAT team and the hostage negotiator, but Val wasn’t interested in negotiating with the Suttons.
“Alive,” he whispered as he stomped the accelerator flat.
42
Victoria sat in her Jeep in the back parking lot of Mama Herrera’s with the engine running, the air conditioner barely cutting through the stuffy heat that had collected inside the vehicle. Her face was beaded with sweat and her teeth were clenched, but she didn’t notice. Her world was spinning out of kilter. In a matter of a few days she had gone from the chief criminal prosecutor in Dallas County to one of the chief suspects in a jailhouse murder.
“Herby Lubbock.” she said aloud.
Herby was setting her up. Her and Jack. And his motivation wasn’t hard to figure: Herby was involved in the assassination of Axel Rankin, she felt absolutely sure of it now. He’d say anything to deflect suspicion from himself. And accusing a Dallas County Attorney and a senior DPD officer of murder and conspiracy was a pretty good way to do just that. Especially with the US Attorney’s Office involved. Local government corruption was their stock in trade.
But why had Herby involved himself? That was even easier to figure out when she considered Axel Rankin and Herby’s confrontation outside visitation room three. Axel had implied that Herby was working for Garland Sutton - and Garland was looking for his dead sons’ horde of cash and gold coins. A share of fifteen million in stolen cash might just have been enough to turn Herby.
And Abby had accused Val of stealing the Suttons’ stash after gunning them down…
Abby…
Logan seemed certain that Val had killed the girl. And she couldn’t blame him for that assumption. If you believed Valentine, you had to believe that his service weapon, the gun that had supposedly crippled Abby, had been sold to Gus Perdido then stolen or sold again only to end up being the gun that finally killed her. What were the odds of that? A few billion to one? Maybe more? It stretched coincidence to the breaking point. It only made sense if Val had never sold the gun to begin with. If he had murdered Abby Sutton and then firebombed old man Perdido to cover his tracks.
Victoria shuddered. That wasn’t possible. She knew it in her heart. And if the ballistic report on Val’s service weapon hadn’t gone missing she could prove it. Someone had screwed up or been paid to screw up. To frame Valentine. Just one more link in a chain of conspiracy that began with the Sheriff’s Department’s killing of Willy Henderson, she felt almost certain.
But she needed to prove it…
It didn’t take her long to figure out where to start. The Medical Examiner for the County of Dallas, Eustace Canton, was an old friend.
As two women in prominent roles within the County, Eustace and Victoria had formed a quick friendship and an enduring alliance. In a male dominated environment like the court system, a little sisterhood went a long way toward cutting through the pissing contests men seemed to enjoy so much.
Victoria threw the Jeep into gear and headed across town. She considered calling ahead and setting up an appointment with Eustace, but decided against it. She would rather catch the ME cold; see her reactions face to face. Victoria liked Eustace, but at this point everyone was suspect.
Even Valentine, God help her.
43
Valentine had made a wild drive through open farm land to the Suttons’ hideout, barreling down narrow asphalt roads, skidding his unmarked Ford Taurus through the turns, throwing gravel and dirt up from the unpaved shoulders, his thoughts blurred by a murderous rage - a rage that had reached the border of insanity and leapt across to the dark side.
Val knew that Lamar and Lemuel were not going to surrender, not when they were staring at multiple death sentences. They had nothing to lose; he was going to have to kill them. And he was fine with that.
Better than fine.
Val cut the siren and slowed to sixty when he hit the small cluster of suburban streets that formed the rundown, almost abandoned Hudson Housing Addition. At the corner of Lawther, he skidded the car to a stop, bouncing over the curb and up onto the sidewalk. He exited the car on the run and sprinted down the gutter, his feet slapping the pavement, a harsh counterpoint to the frenzy of his own heartbeat. He raced up the street and past the Honduran laborers’ house without slowing. A group of a dozen men were in the front yard barbecuing on a grill made from a fifty-five gallon barrel. The men stared silently at the crazy guy running down the street, teeth bared, face slicked with sweat, a 9mm pistol in his fist.
“Policia!” Val yelled as he crossed the far corner of their yard, his voice a hoarse bark that penetrated the sounds of meat crackling over the fire and the music coming from a portable radio. “Entrada la casa!” he added in his pidgin Spanish, but he didn’t pause to see if they complied, he sprinted across the Suttons’ yard and up the porch steps.
That’s when he heard the roar of a chainsaw. And then a woman screamed, the shrill sound climbing above the wail of the saw. Val’s blood turned to ice and his thoughts splintered into fragments. He didn’t hesitate and he didn’t yell ‘Police!’ - he kicked the front door off its hinges, charged into the squalid living room, dodged left and dropped into a crouch, his back against the living room wall, the 9mm locked in front of him in a two-handed shooter’s grip, tracking the movement of his eyes.
The room was empty, the décor classic junkie: a pair of greasy sofas, a trash-littered green shag carpet and a crooked floor lamp with a nicotine-colored shade. A battered coffee table was littered with scraps of aluminum foil charred black at the center. Lamar and Lemuel had been smoking methamphetamine. Cranking it up. That meant the chance of taking them alive had just dropped to less than zero.
The noise of the chainsaw rose to a shriek then fell off to a stuttering snarl. The smell of burning gasoline hung in the air, clogging Val’s nasal passages. He shoved himself off the wall and followed the smell and the sound down a narrow hallway.
The noise was coming through a closed door on his left. He stopped and brought his ear close. He heard cackling laughter then the chainsaw’s rumble rose to an over-revved screech that blotted it out. Val backed off a step and kicked the door down. The door was old and dry-rotted. The hinges sprung free and the thin wood panel tumbled down the cellar steps to the dirt floor below. Val was right behind it, moving fast, his pistol leading the way, hammer cocked over a live round, but the horror of what he saw stopped him in his tracks halfway down the steps.
In the yellow glare of a kerosene lantern hanging from the rafters, Lamar and Lemuel were hovering over a pair of bloody forms staked to the floor with tent pegs. Val’s eyes skidded over the two bodies, registering that they were what was left of two naked females. The women looked dead. Sweet God, he hoped they were. The Suttons had disassembled them like department store mannequins.
Lamar was the first to notice Valentine; Lemuel was too busy dipping the chainsaw toward the bodies of the women. Blood and gore sprayed from the spinning chain. Both brothers were covered in the stuff. The air was thick with the smell of blood, feces and the animal funk of sweat and testosterone.
Lamar reacted instantly. He turned, crossed the room in three long strides and charged up the steps, a bloody axe in his hands.
Val didn’t hesitate; he fired three times point blank into Lamar’s chest as fast as he could work the trigger, but the shots didn’t slow Lamar down. The bloody biker kept coming, his boots pounding up the steps, the axe rising over his right shoulder, blood sp
ooling off a blade that gleamed wetly in the dim lantern light - a blade that came arcing down toward Val’s skull at a hundred miles an hour.
Body armor, Val realized too late, Lamar was wearing body armor! Val didn’t have time to go for a head shot; he had to dodge the axe. He ducked and lunged to the right, a move that sent him tumbling over the rickety railing and off the steps toward the dirt floor below.
That fall saved his life. The axe missed his skull, but clipped his left shoulder, slicing meat from the bone like a butcher carving Sunday ham. Pain exploded his vision as he tumbled through the air, gripping the 9mm like a drowning man holding onto a lifeline. He hit the floor hard on his side, his head bouncing off the packed soil, the breath knocked from his lungs. For a moment he couldn’t move; the pain was just too much.
Lamar leaned out over the drop and grinned down at Val. “That’ll put the hitch in your giddy-up,” he said. “You stay right there, now, you hear?” He turned and started down the steps unhurriedly, swinging the axe at his side like a cane, his eyes pinched to pinpoints by methamphetamine. But Valentine didn’t have time to worry about Lamar. At the first sound of gunfire, Lemuel had spun away from the bodies of the two young women. It took him a moment to register what was happening and then he rushed at Val, the blood-clotted chainsaw thrust out before him, its wail rising to a furious scream.
Val had no time to aim; he started firing as he lifted the pistol in Lemuel’s direction. The first round kicked dirt up five feet in front of Lemuel, the second punched a hole through the toe of Lemuel’s right boot, the third blasted right through his kneecap. Lemuel screamed and fell forward, directly atop the chainsaw’s spinning blade.
Lemuel bucked and heaved as the blade chewed into his gut, his screams drowning out the noise of the saw. The chainsaw sputtered out in a matter of seconds, but it was seconds too late for Lemuel. The blade had ripped him open from groin to breastbone. He flopped off the saw, onto his back and kept screaming, one continuous, raw-throated cry, as his intestines spilled out of his ruined torso and blood pooled around him in a flood.