by Land, Jon
“You seen the crime scene photos local authorities forwarded to us on this yet?” Whatley asked her.
“I didn’t even know there were any.”
“Got transmitted this morning via e-mail. I’d show them to you,” Whatley said, tapping the worn and cracked leather case in which he carried the tools of his trade, “but the ride’s hard enough on the stomach as it is.”
He left things there and Caitlin didn’t press him for more. Instead, she let her mind wander to the times these lands would have been occupied by all manner of bandit and renegade Indian whom the Texas Rangers had battled alone for decades. Before her great-grandfather William Ray Strong had come to Willow Creek, he’d served in the famed Frontier Battalion after the battalion’s glory days were done and the ranks of their enemies had been decimated. The years that followed had been especially hard on the last of the old-school Rangers, what with the appearance of motorcars and organized crime. The Frontier Battalion, she guessed, didn’t know how good they had it compared to twentieth-century Rangers, who were up against as many guns to go with far more sophisticated criminal networks thanks in large part to the drug war Captain George W. Arrington never had to fight. Yet she knew that men like Arrington would have adjusted just fine, because that’s what Rangers did.
Caitlin hadn’t realized Frank Whatley had pulled a manila folder full of pictures and was reviewing what they were about to find in Willow Creek right now.
“Prepare yourself, Ranger,” he warned.
“For what?”
He looked up at her, face ashen, folder trembling in his free hand. “The worst thing you ever saw in your life.”
18
SAN ANTONIO
“Those your sons?” Miguel Asuna asked Cort Wesley, wiping the grease from his hands with an already soiled cloth.
“Dylan and Luke,” Cort Wesley told him, watching a mechanic go over the finer points of a street rod’s engine with the boys, all their heads hidden by the raised hood.
In all probability, of course, the street rod had been stolen. Back when Cort Wesley was working for the Branca crime family, Asuna’s body shop had doubled as a chop shop where stolen cars were brought to be disassembled for parts. He’d once heard Asuna boast he could strip a Mercedes in thirty minutes flat, something confirmed by Miguel’s younger brother, Pablo, who was as close to a best friend as Cort Wesley had until he was tortured and killed by having his face jammed up against a fan belt.
Miguel Asuna was twice the size of his little brother, and by all accounts was still living and working on the fringe of the law. He also maintained great contacts south of the border, since that was where the bulk of his pilfered parts, and entire cars jacked to order, ended up.
As a result, his body shop was filled to the brim, every stall and station taken, with not a single license plate to be seen. The shop smelled heavily of oil, tire rubber, and sandblasted steel. But the floor looked polished clean, shiny with a coat of sealant over the concrete that showed not a single grease stain or even a tire mark. For obvious reasons, Asuna kept the bay doors closed and, with the air-conditioning not switched on, the whole shop had the sauna-like feel of heat lamps switched on to dry paint faster.
“I don’t recall my little bro ever mentioning your kids to me,” Asuna said, still eyeing Dylan and Luke.
“I wasn’t exactly on good terms with them back then—or any terms.”
“So how’s fatherhood treating you?”
Cort Wesley rustled a hand through his hair. “You notice how much more gray I got than the last time you saw me?”
“Welcome to my world, amigo.” Dylan poked his head out from under the hood, drawing Asuna’s stare again. “My daughter’s got pictures of some TV star all over the walls looks just like your oldest there.”
“I can get you his autograph, if you want.”
“Your oldest’s or the TV star’s?”
“You’re funnier than your brother, Miguel, but he wasn’t very funny at all.”
A workman dressed in denim overalls Cort Wesley didn’t recognize from the floor when he first arrived approached Asuna and whispered something in his ear. Asuna nodded, the man taking his leave without regarding Cort Wesley.
“Javier says you’re not alone. He says somebody’s ghosting you.”
“I know.”
“You know?”
“Extra layer of protection.”
“You dragging shit with you into my shop, amigo?”
“Just adding it to your already hefty pile, Miguel.”
Asuna forced a smile. “I let you insult me because of the high regard my little bro held you in, even though helping you is what got him killed.” He tossed the rag aside and folded his arms over a grease-splattered white T-shirt. “I’m having a psychic moment here, you needing this extra layer of protection’s being what brought you through my door today.”
“Can you tell me today’s lottery number?”
“No, but I can help you pick the winning ponies running at Retama Park Racetrack,” Asuna winked.
Cort Wesley noticed Asuna’s eyes looked too small for the rest of his face, the result being to encase them in folds of misplaced skin. “You didn’t ask me why I’d brought my sons with me.”
“Is it important?”
“It’s what brought me here, Miguel.” Now it was Cort Wesley who focused his gaze on Dylan and Luke. “Somebody went after them last night to get back at me. Revenge, something like that.”
Asuna nodded, sending tangles of hair tumbling over his forehead. “And I’m supposed to find out who’s got a hard-on for you, that it?”
“So to speak. Whoever it is has plenty of muscle: they sent ten gunmen, five for each kid.”
Asuna whistled. “I can ask around, but it could be a pretty long list I come up with. You’ve made a lot of enemies south of the border, amigo, and you can add a bunch more after you got sprung early from that prison the Mexican authorities thought they’d socked you away in forever.”
“Just lucky, I guess.”
Asuna uncrossed his arms, his eyes suddenly filled with a playful glint. “How’s that Texas Ranger you been shacking up with?”
“A better shot than ever.”
“Got you in her bull’s-eye, eh, amigo?”
“She shows up here someday, you better be somewhere else.”
Miguel Asuna took a step toward him, playful glint gone from his gaze. “You ever think all these problems you got now started when you met her? I mean, goddamn, didn’t you used to be the most feared man in San Antonio, maybe the whole state of Texas, which is sure saying something, and nobody’d even dare look at you crossways. Madre de Dios, now you got death squads hunting your kids.”
Cort Wesley could feel the heat radiating up from his pores. The body shop was steamy and smelled strongly of fresh auto paint and lacquer, but the heat he felt came from the inside, bubbling over to the point where he involuntarily hardened his stare.
“Somebody figured killing my boys would be worse than killing me, Miguel. I look forward to you helping me set them straight.”
“Will do, amigo, but you’d better watch your back. Somebody who sends ten hitters to nail a couple kids is sure to do anything it takes to put you in a world of hurt.”
19
WILLOW CREEK, TEXAS
The chopper landed in what had been the center of Willow Creek’s main thoroughfare back when it was still a town, a safe distance from the sheriff’s deputies who’d set up a perimeter in a grove of blue oak trees. Amazing how unforgiving land becomes once it’s abandoned, sucking everything that had once composed a town back into the ground from where it came.
According to D. W. Tepper, sheriff’s deputies from Brewster County had responded to a call from hikers exploring the nearby mesas who’d spotted what looked like bodies, but were chased away by the stench and flocks of carrion birds. Now, as she approached alongside medical examiner Frank Dean Whatley, she saw those deputies standing downwind of the bodies, s
till close enough to mandate them brushing aside a stray from the swarm of flies buzzing about.
The closer she drew, the more Caitlin wished she’d forced herself to at least glimpse Whatley’s folder of crime scene photos to prepare herself. No matter what Captain Tepper had said, or the pictures Whatley’s descriptions had left imprinted in her mind, she knew she wasn’t ready for what awaited her in the afternoon shade of the small grove dwarfed by the mesas stitching a jagged line across the desert. The air this time of day was colored red by a combination of the sun’s reflection off those mesas and the clay dust kicked up from the nearby hillsides. Caitlin could already feel a layer of it coating her skin and sunglasses, and recalled tales of guns jamming from too much caking up in the barrels.
“Oh God,” Whatley muttered to himself, and Caitlin thought of him losing his own son to violence at a young age. He wasn’t wearing sunglasses, so she couldn’t tell whether the tearing in his eyes was due to the dust’s assault or his own sadness over rekindled memories.
Close enough to the grove now for the stench of death to reach her, Caitlin figured Whatley was both right and wrong in the original assessment he had provided. The image of flies, maggots, and carrion birds feasting on the remains of what had been children indeed ranked among the worst things she’d ever seen, filling her with a sense of dread like none she’d ever experienced. If there was someone out there who could do this to children, then where was the hope, what was the use?
The only answer was to find the culprit.
Caitlin couldn’t think, didn’t want to think, of anything else. The mission, the duty, is what drove her and made visits to crime scenes like this a moral imperative; infusing her with the resolve she needed. The monsters had to be caught. Otherwise, they just kept killing, and more children would find themselves the subject of crime scene photos and fodder for the scavengers of the world.
A few years back, Caitlin caught her first glimpse of the work of the serial killer behind hundreds of murders that became known as Las Mujeres de Juárez, the Women of Juárez. She and fellow Ranger Charlie Weeks were looking for drug-running tunnels dug out of the desert floor east of El Paso when they came upon the body of a young woman that had been rolled down the embankment of a two-lane amid stray tires, broken bottles, and fast-food wrappers. She was naked save for a pair of lace-up sandals that must’ve been knotted too tight to remove. A pool of dried blood had painted the ground beneath the body, spreading outward from the woman’s rectum, up which a sharp object later identified as a railroad spike had been wedged to shred her intestines.
It had surely been, Frank Dean Whatley reported, an agonizing death in keeping with the pattern already developed for Las Mujeres de Juárez. Evidence of torture and rape was present in virtually all the murders, Caitlin learned, in spite of which virtually no progress at all had been made on either side of the border. That is, until circumstances placed the serial killer on a collision course with her that ended with his death down in Mexico.
The difference was that the victims of that monster hadn’t been children. The death of a child was bad enough on its own, the murder of a child that much worse. But the mass murder of five children?
Simply unthinkable, even as she and Whatley stopped with the sight plain before them. The whole scene had a surreal aura to it, the impact not quite reaching her through the haze of the dust-filled air. If not for the smell, it could have been a life-sized still shot lifted from a direct-to-DVD movie or an image conjured up by a twisted mind to be projected for all to see.
But it was real, a fact that slowly dawned on Caitlin as she edged closer to the bodies just beyond the coroner.
“They’ve been dead forty-eight hours, give or take,” he said, crouching over his worn black case. “Cause of death on initial view seems pretty clear and identifiable as…” He stopped suddenly. “How much of this do you want to hear, Ranger?”
“Want—none. Need—everything.”
Whatley, continuing to show more emotion than Caitlin had ever seen from him, nodded grudgingly and fit a headpiece with a microphone attached and rigged to a recording device over his balding scalp. “Cause of death will go down as exsanguination from severed carotid arteries. Spacing of the bodies indicates they were killed from left to right, what appears at first glance to be oldest to youngest, with the body lying slightly ahead of the others being the first to go.” Whatley took a deep breath, looking up at Caitlin to give her the option to tell him to stop. “Initial survey unable to determine the order of the disemboweling that preceded the exsanguination in the victims but, er, indications point to the fact that they were still alive and in great agony when their carotid arteries were severed.”
“You can be specific, Doc. Don’t hold back on my account.”
But it was clear that was exactly what Whatley was doing. “I can fill in the blanks later in my report, Ranger.”
Caitlin couldn’t help but recall another young boy’s picture of monsters that had struck Willow Creek nearly a century before in 1919.
“What did this?” she heard herself ask.
“You mean…”
“I mean, as in weapon.”
Whatley eased a few instruments from his black bag and moved to inspect the oldest boy’s wounds. The positioning of his body indicated he had moved forward to defend himself or, perhaps, the other children. Something, some ill-defined sense of the scene, told Caitlin there’d been only one killer, even though Whatley had said nothing to that effect yet. The instruments he laid out looked to Caitlin like sophisticated measuring tools, even before Whatley emerged with an old metric ruler.
“Degree, angle, and jagged nature of wound indicates sharp force trauma consistent with tearing,” Whatley said into the microphone he kept adjusting to make sure the recording would come through clearly. “Consistency of wound depth indicates a person familiar with the blade’s use, but deepening depth of cut similarly indicative of a suspect not used to effects on human anatomy or live creatures in general.”
“What do you mean, Doc?”
Whatley glanced up at her, looking neither perturbed nor impatient with her interruption. “There’s lots of knives, Ranger, and lots of knives can kill, sure, just about all of them. There are slicing knives, paring knives, scaling knives, carving knives. This has the look of something altogether different from the product of any of those.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“Best guess?
“Best guess.”
Whatley went back to studying the jagged wound that had spilled the oldest boy’s insides at his feet. Caitlin tried not to picture the struggle, the screams, the other children frozen in terror. Whatley moved his gaze closer, using a simple magnifying glass now.
“If I had to say, it would be a blade more conducive to skinning or field dressing an animal. Say, either a clip point or a drop point knife, as indicated by the size and distance between serrations. You must know what I’m talking about from hunting.”
“No, sir.”
“You never hunted with your dad or granddad?”
“Not even once, and neither did they. Earl and Jim both believed they saw plenty of blood without spilling any more and hunted more than their share of men. Just not for sport, Doc.”
Whatley turned his weary gaze back on the bodies, limbs strewn over one another in what at first glance looked like a single clump. “Too bad whoever did this didn’t feel the same way, Ranger.”
20
WILLOW CREEK, TEXAS
Caitlin tried to hold her eyes on the bodies but still couldn’t for very long at all, sorting through the meaning of Whatley’s words. “So you’re telling me a first-timer did this?”
“First-timer with a knife, anyway. Otherwise, they would’ve chosen a blade more suited to the task.”
Caitlin thought for a moment. “Can’t see this as anything but premeditated, Doc. That means the killer used whatever knife it was for a specific reason, to make a point maybe.”
“Any idea what that point might have been, Ranger?”
“Not yet, Doc, but I will. I promise you that much.”
“There’s something else. Judging by the wound angle, especially at the entry point here,” Whatley said, indicating a spot on the wound that had dried a purplish black color, “the suspect wasn’t much taller than this victim. The cut is virtually straight in, no downward angle. And I’d also say you’re looking for someone of average strength at best.”
“Another kid maybe?”
Whatley held her gaze for a long moment, as if trying to see beyond her eyes to the depths of her thinking. “You ever meet a kid who could do something like his?”
“I’m just trying to get a handle on things, Doc. Consider all the possibilities. What do you make of the victims’ clothes?”
“School uniforms would be my guess.”
“You mind checking a label for me?”
Whatley peeled back the collar of the oldest boy’s shirt with a hand encased in a plastic glove. “Spanish,” he said, as if that surprised him. “These kids must be Mexican.”
“Somebody takes them out of school and brings them up here to kill.”
“For all the sense that makes.…”
“It’s there. We just can’t see it yet.”
Whatley rose from his crouch, stumbling slightly on the ground overgrown with tree roots that had begun to poke above the surface. “It’s never that simple with you, Ranger.”
“I don’t want us ruling anything out right now, Doc. Maybe a more detailed examination of the wound will tell us something more we can use.”