Jack Del Rio: Complete Trilogy: Reservations, Betrayals, Endgames

by Richard Paolinelli

  “No, I got lucky when we sunk a well and hit an aquafer right in the middle of a desert. Considering the way I got this land, it didn’t seem right to take advantage. Besides, other than laying the pipe it doesn’t cost me anything to run this setup and folks around here need water.”

  “That they do.”

  “So, Benny, what brings you out this far?”

  “Chief Shirley sent me,” Officer Benny Adakai answered. “We’ve got a body out by Kayenta he’d like you to look at.”

  It was part of the continuing price he paid in exchange for the forty acres of reservation land in his name, allowing the NNPD to call upon his experience from his past life, when he was called Jack Del Rio and not John Rivers. If the department’s top cop had sent for him, it almost had to mean murder was suspected.

  It had been a few months since the last time, he’d begun to hope the quiet streak would extend into years and maybe decades. But human nature being what it was, he knew that had been a fool’s hope.

  “Okay Benny,” Rivers answered, pushing off from the car to turn for his truck. “You lead and I’ll follow.”

  The drive from his home, slightly northeast of Tuba City and near the western edge of the reservation, to Kayenta – nearer the Arizona-Utah border - was well over sixty miles. He could have ridden up with the deputy and saved the gas and wear and tear on the truck. But it would mean someone would have to drive him back and he wanted the freedom to come and go as he wished.

  Even if the deputy could fill him in on some of the details of what awaited, eventually they’d run out of things to talk about and the inevitable questions would naturally follow. Adakai was only in his third year on the force and hadn’t been around when Del Rio brought an end to a serial killer’s spree on the reservation nearly five years back. Adakai only knew him as the enigmatic John Rivers who the old veterans on the force deferred to in major cases, and not the FBI Special Agent he had once been. The kid would start asking questions and Del Rio wouldn’t answer them. The strained silence would be unbearable.

  So Del Rio followed along, his ’64 International easily holding the seventy miles per hour behind the cruiser as they drove up Highway 160. But instead of turning left onto Highway 163 to drive into Kayenta proper, they stayed on the 160 until they were a few miles beyond the small airport on the eastern edge of town.

  Even as they turned south on a bumpy dirt road Del Rio spotted the crime scene. Several NNPD vehicles were parked in a tight grouping and the location of the body was easily determined by where about ten people had gathered in a cluster. The press hadn’t arrived yet, but that was certain to change soon enough. The paper in Gallup had one reporter posted out on the Res and surely others from Farmington, Flagstaff and Winslow would make their way out once word of a possible murder got out.

  Adakai pulled over about a thousand yards short and waved Del Rio ahead. He would take up station here and keep the press at bay when they arrived, far enough away so that any photography or video would be all but useless. Del Rio waved at the officer as he drove the rest of the way to the crime scene.

  Del Rio spotted Terry Shirley as soon as he got out from behind the wheel. The old Navajo was closing in on retirement, looking old enough to have retired at least a decade earlier, but he still had the energy for the job equal to any two men and stayed out in the field as much as he could despite being the Chief of the NNPD. The way he filled out his uniform put some of his younger subordinates to shame.

  “Morning, Jack,” Shirley said, a safe private joke about Del Rio’s alias. “Sorry to bother you but this one seems to be a puzzle.”

  “Happy to help, Terry,” Del Rio said as he followed Shirley to where the body lay. “What do we know so far?”

  “Still working on an ID,” Shirley reported. “No wallet, no jewelry or any personal belongings on the body. Male, mid-to-late twenties, definitely lives on the Res. We can’t seem to figure out cause of death.”

  “Natural causes ruled out?”

  “He’s got a defensive wound on one hand but no other signs of trauma. Seems kind of young to be scared to death and the coroner isn’t seeing any obvious signs of poor health. Says the kid seems to be in perfect health.”

  “Aside from his being deceased, of course,” Del Rio quipped.

  “Yeah, there’s that,” Shirley grunted in assent as he handed Del Rio a pair of blue latex gloves. “We can’t find any reason why or how he wound up dead, figured it was time to call you in from the bullpen.”

  “Alright, coach,” Del Rio said, running with the metaphor as he put the gloves on. “Let’s play ball.”

  He approached the body carefully, looking around for any sign that would help him. He’d helped train the coroner and the deputies on maintaining crime scene integrity and was happy to note that there were very few footprints nearby that bore the tracks of NNPD footwear. At first glance it looked like the only two people who’d been here were the victim and his killer. He knew without asking that those prints had already been photographed along with the body.

  Kneeling beside the body - which was lying face down in the dirt - he checked for signs of injury, spotting the angry slash across the right palm that hadn’t bled much. This wound had been inflicted very shortly before death.

  “We’ve taken a blood sample already to check for poison,” the coroner explained. “But there are no obvious signs of death by poison.”

  “Can we turn the body over?” Del Rio asked after he’d checked the back and the back of the legs. The coroner stepped closer and they gently rolled the victim onto his back.

  He was definitely a young Navajo man, but not one Del Rio had ever run into. If he hadn’t yet been identified that meant he had no record with a mugshot or fingerprints to match to. The NNPD had updated their system, on Del Rio’s recommendation, to have a scanner in the field to run prints through as well as a photo analyzer.

  The young man’s mouth and eyes were wide open and a look of shock was frozen on his face. There were no apparent bruises or wounds, other than the one on the palm, anywhere Del Rio looked. The man’s clothing was intact, there was no sign of sexual activity. He seemed to be in excellent physical condition with no sign of alcohol or drug abuse. Just a dead body that didn’t seem to have a logical reason to be dead.

  As the handful of NNPD officers looked on silently, Del Rio cast his gaze around the body again, convinced that the man walked to this spot under his own power as he had already spotted at least two footprints that matched the soles of his tennis shoes. That meant his killer had also walked around here. But how was the man killed?

  “What are you thinking, Jack?” Shirley asked softly, having walked up from behind.

  “Definitely homicide,” Del Rio replied almost as softly. “But how…”

  His voice trailed off as he focused his attention on the corpse’s face. Something felt wrong about what he was looking at. After a minute, he reached his left hand out toward the coroner.

  “Give me something long and thin,” Del Rio commanded. “A q-tip or a tongue depressor. And Terry, give me a light on this kid’s mouth.”

  “What is it?” Shirley asked as he pulled out a small, but very bright light from his jacket pocket and shined it on the deceased man’s open mouth, lighting up the cavity.

  “I’m not sure,” Del Rio replied as he took possession of a long q-tip from the coroner. Tilting the dead man’s head back, Del Rio pried open the mouth as wide as he could and slipped in the cotton-tipped stick. He probed the roof of the mouth three times before he found what he’d been looking for.

  “I’ll be damned,” Shirley exclaimed, seeing what Del Rio had found from his perch over Del Rio’s shoulder.

  “What did you find?” the coroner asked as he moved to the other side of the body to see for himself.

  “Your cause of death,” Del Rio replied, using the probe to further expose the wound where someone had shoved a thin, but very sharp, blade through the roof of the mouth and into the brain
. “And you might not have found it until you did a full autopsy.”

  “You don’t see that every day,” the coroner exclaimed, taking possession of the probe so he could examine the wound for himself as Del Rio and Shirley stepped away. “That knife must be razor sharp, you can barely make out the cut.”

  “Well, now we have the how,” Del Rio said to the Chief. “And we are well on our way to the why.”

  “We are?”

  “No signs of a struggle and this kid should have been able to put up a hell of a fight, especially against someone with a knife but no gun. He likely knew his attacker and was surprised by the initial attack, the strike to the hand. He’s hurt, surprised and instead of countering, he grabs his injured hand and likely opens his mouth to scream or shout. When he does, his killer drives the fatal blow into the open mouth and into the brain. The kids hits the ground dead and that is the end of the attack.”

  “Which means,” Shirley said, picking up the narrative. “He was taken down by someone strong enough to overpower him and drive the knife through that cleanly. Someone bigger than him or better trained in fighting seems likely.”

  “And someone who is either a family member,” Del Rio finished. “Or possibly a rival for some girl’s attentions. Once you ID this kid, you’re going to have your killer pretty soon after.”

  “Damn, Jack,” Shirley said with a rueful smile. “We’ve been out here for three hours and had nothing. You almost have it solved in ten minutes. You sure you’re not descended from wizards?”

  “Not wizards,” Del Rio replied. “Just too many years exposed to the darker side of humanity.”

  “I hear that,” Shirley replied knowingly. “But I’m glad we have you out here when that side shows up. I think we can take it from here. Thanks for coming out.”

  “No problem,” Del Rio replied, glancing out past Adakai’s checkpoint. “Looks like the non-flying vultures have arrived.”

  Three media vans had pulled up and a half dozen people with cameras of various sizes and types were already trying to get their shots. One, a woman with long blonde hair, had a telephoto lens attached to her camera that almost looked bigger than she was.

  “This road swings around behind that little hill and meets up with the highway back to your home on the other side of town,” Shirley said, pointing the direction with a nod of his head. “You should be able to avoid them that way.”

  “Thanks, Terry,” Del Rio said with a clap of his hand on Shirley’s shoulder. “Good luck running down your perp.”

  The weather-worn dirt road route extended the time it took Del Rio to get home by twenty minutes but he made it back without having encountered any press or unwanted photography.

  Or so he thought.

  THREE

  Killian Dougherty was an old guard member of the IRA. He’d been a teenaged foot soldier back in the 1980s and had never really given up the fight against the Brits, even though many of his contemporaries had over the years. His own brother, Eamon, had walked away and the two hadn’t spoken a word to each other since.

  But Dougherty’s son, Conley, had been a true believer and it was for Conley’s sake that Dougherty had made the eight-hour ferry ride across the Irish Sea from Dublin to Liverpool the night before. Conley Dougherty had been part of a team sent out to assassinate the Queen several years before. All six members of the team had been killed, that much they had found out, but no official acknowledgement of the attempt had ever been made public.

  All these years, Dougherty thought to himself, never knowing what had happened. The damned British had cremated all six bodies and mailed them, mailed them he raged silently, to the next of kin with no explanation. And what could the families do? Publically demand an explanation? The demand itself would be an admission of guilt and bring more grief on the families.

  But today they would have the answers they sought. Dougherty was seated inside a dark Liverpool pub waiting for the person who had contacted him three weeks ago. There had been the promise of full disclosure of what had really happened along with the name of the person who’d killed Conley that day. Dougherty really wanted that name. He wanted something very bad to happen to the person who owned that name and he had nearly six years of anger and rage he’d banked against the day that name became known to unleash upon the person that name belonged to.

  “Mr. Dougherty?”

  The Irishman looked up suddenly, startled by the interruption.

  “And you’d be?”

  “A friend,” the man replied. He had a proper British accent, Dougherty thought as he took stock of his visitor, but this man looked and dressed the part of one of those damned camel jockeys invading the whole of the U.K. “With information you have sought for a very long time.”

  The man took a seat uninvited, ignoring the obvious bigotry displayed on the Irishman’s face. He simply did not care what the man thought of him. He was here to complete a task and nothing more.

  “So you’d be the one that sent me the note,” Dougherty replied. “You say you have some answers for me, but you never mentioned the price.”

  “The price?”

  “No one gives away anything of value for free, lad. What will this information cost me?”

  “Not even a single pence, Mr. Dougherty. The party that employed me to deliver this information asks only that you consider working with my organization toward our mutual goal.”

  “And this is?”

  “The elimination of the criminal British Government for crimes committed against both of our countries for centuries.”

  “You mean coordinate certain… actions?”

  “Indeed. It is the belief of our… benefactor for want of a better term, that we can accomplish great things working together.”

  “This benefactor,” Dougherty asked. “Who is it?”

  “This I am not allowed to say. They prefer to remain in the shadows but stand ready to support our causes when needed.”

  It seemed a little too good to be true to the Irishman, especially as he had not yet seen or heard a shred of this “information” yet. Nor did he trust his companion. There were times he found himself wondering which group was worse, the Brits or this lot from Syria, Afghanistan or whatever pile of sand this one was from. Still, this one had claimed to have something for him and so far he was only out a round trip ticket on a ferry.

  “I suppose we can get back to that later,” Dougherty allowed. “But your note mentioned information about my son’s death. I’ll have that now or we’re done here.”

  “Very well. I have the name of the man who single-handedly foiled the attack and eliminated all six of your operatives,” the man paused, carefully yet casually looking around the near-deserted pub. “It was an American. An FBI Agent named Jack Del Rio.”

  “The same one that…?”

  “The very same man. And the answer to your next question is: No, he did not die as was announced in the American press. He is alive and well and appears to be living on an Indian Reservation in Arizona under the name John Rivers.”

  Dougherty sat back in his chair, his mind already considering how to get to his quarry now that he knew who to hunt for. He himself could not go as he was on every no-fly list in the world.

  “You of course are thinking of striking him in America?”

  “Of course,” Dougherty admitted.

  “There may be a better way. Perhaps even bring him to you if it is handled properly.”

  “And how is that, lad?”

  “Del Rio had a lover when he was here. There is a child.”

  “Who are they and where can I find them?

  “You needn’t look far. They live in Dublin. She works for MI-6 and she infiltrated your organization three months ago.”

  “Maggie Byrne!” Dougherty exclaimed.

  “Her real name is Laura Cassidy. The child’s is Jacquelyn.”

  “They’ll be dead five minutes after I get back to Dublin tonight.”

  “If I may suggest? Perha
ps you should stay your hand?”

  “And why would I be doing that?”

  “Because as we speak our friends at MI-6 are being tipped off that their little infiltrator’s cover has been blown and she is in extreme danger. We anticipate they will extract her and try to take her to the one place they think no one will look for her in.”

  “And that is?”

  “The same place where Del Rio is. Our mutual friend desires this reunion to take place as should you. For when they are reunited that will be the time for you to avenge your son. Agreed?”

  Dougherty thought long and hard about what he’d heard and what was being asked of him.

  “Agreed, lad,” he finally replied, extending a hand out over the table.

  “Excellent,” his companion said as he shook the Irishman’s hand. “Then we have much to discuss, beginning with who we will send to America to dispatch Mr. Del Rio, his bitch and their bastard child, Allah willing.”

  * * * * *

  “No, I don’t want you to stay there and wait for her to come home,” Tom Callum bellowed into the phone. “The woman’s bloody cover’s been blown you nit. Get your arse outside and find her before they do!”

  Callum slammed the phone down into its cradle and stalked his office like a caged tiger.

  “Jesus bloody Christ, Jimmy,” Callum raged, barely a decibel lower than the level of the recently concluded phone conversation. “How the hell did this happen?”

  “We’re still trying to figure it out, boss,” James Castleton, Callum’s assistant at MI-6, said. “All we know is someone tipped off Kamir and he sent someone to arrange a meet with a representative of the New IRA with the intel. That’s all our man inside could get out to us.”

  “So it didn’t originate with the New IRAs or the damn people we think might, might, have you, be connected with ISIS. Which means we’ve got a third player in the game and we don’t know a damn thing about them?”

  “That’s about right where we’re at, boss.”

  “Bloody goddam cock up!”