Everyone Dies

by Michael McGarrity

  The telephone rang and instinctively Kerney reached for it on the bedside table, his hand grabbing empty air. Groggily, he got up from the couch, hurried to the kitchen, and picked up on the third ring. The stove clock read 4:00 A.M.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  The third-shift dispatcher told him Mary Beth Patterson had been found dead in her psych-unit hospital room.

  “How did it happen?”

  “An apparent suicide, Chief. She cut her veins open with a piece of a venetian blind.”

  “Who’s on it?”

  “Lieutenant Molina and Detective Pino.”

  “Have them call me back when they know something,” Kerney said.

  “Ten-four.”

  Kerney dropped the phone in the cradle. Day two of his vacation had just begun and it had already gone from bad to worse.

  Chapter 5

  In the early morning light, Detective Ramona Pino walked slowly down the street where Jack Potter had been killed. Yesterday’s search by the crime scene techs for the spent bullet had been unsuccessful, and Ramona wanted to look for it on her own before starting her normal shift.

  But more than that, Ramona wanted a break from the biting anguish she felt about the deaths of Larsen and Patterson. If she’d handled the investigation differently both of them would be alive. For the first time in her career as a cop, she had to seriously question her abilities and judgment. She knew Lieutenant Casados was doing the same, and she fully expected that he would drop Patterson’s suicide on her as part of his IA investigation.

  Yesterday’s session with Casados had been grueling enough with only one innocent person’s death to account for. Maybe she should just turn in her shield and walk away from it all.

  She rejected the idea with an unconscious shake of her head. There was important work to do. Chief Kerney and his family were at risk, apparently targeted by a revenge killer, who could easily be someone unknown to the chief with a motive that was equally unclear, which meant finding the link between the perp, the chief, and the two victims might not be an easy task.

  Beyond that, there were aspects of the perp’s MO that didn’t fit the typical pattern of revenge killers. Usually, such homicides were planned blitz attacks against unsuspecting victims that occurred with no forewarning, or were impulsive murders of opportunity that happened in public view, often without any thought given to escape.

  But this perp wasn’t playing by the rules. In the Manning homicide, he’d alerted his victim of his intentions with a dead rat in her driveway and, according to information received overnight from the Taos Police Department, was most likely the unknown subject who had broken into an art gallery a month ago and stolen twelve of Manning’s paintings by cutting them out of their frames.

  He’d followed the same MO with Kerney by first destroying the chief’s horse and then leaving two dead rats at his house. Additionally, his messages, left at the Manning crime scene and tacked to the chief’s front door, made it clear that there were more killings to come, which wasn’t something a revenge killer would ordinarily do.

  In an attempt to confirm part of the killer’s MO, Chief Otero had officers searching Potter’s neighborhood in the hopes of finding the carcass of the missing Border collie. If they came up empty, Ramona still thought it highly probable that the killer had an agenda for the dog.

  Pino ran down two other possible types of multiple killers worth considering. Spree killers didn’t fit because the perp had planned and carried out his attacks methodically. A serial killer didn’t work because there appeared to be no sexual component to the crimes. That left vengeance as the motive, which brought her back to the still unanswered questions, who and why.

  She continued down the street, inspecting anything that might have stopped the bullet. Somehow, without willing it, her mind had erased the image of Patterson’s naked, mutilated body. All that floated through her head was the face of the hysterical psych-unit nurse who’d found Mary Beth lying in a pool of blood on the bathroom floor.

  She stopped to inspect a tree trunk. There was no traffic, no people were out and about, and the only sound came from a singing towhee who ended a long series of clinking sounds with a trill. It cut short a repeat of its refrain, flew out of the high branches above Ramona’s head, and perched on the roof of the elementary school a half-block away.

  The last of the old downtown schools, the building had been saved because of community protests to keep it open. Two rows of high, old-style windows, designed to let as much sunlight as possible into the classrooms, ran across the front of the building. A small street-side playground enclosed by a low wall served kindergarten students. It contained new, brightly colored slides and play equipment. Just beyond, steps led up to a formal portico entrance. Jutting out from the rear of the building was what Ramona guessed to be either an assembly hall or the school gym. Behind the gym was a dirt-packed playground for the older children enclosed by a chain-link fence.

  Ramona climbed the low wall and inspected the street-side playground equipment before moving on to the portico, where she stood on the top step trying to remember the good times of her early school days in Albuquerque. But her mind kept going back to the face of the hysterical psych-unit nurse.

  She examined the large square-beam columns and the gray plastered walls for any sign of recent damage. The initial autopsy report indicated the round had clipped Potter’s sternum before passing through his chest cavity and out his back. That could have changed the trajectory of the bullet.

  Ramona also knew from the pathologist’s findings that the muzzle-to-target distance was less than three inches, which meant that the killer had made sure Jack Potter knew he was about to die. Additionally, the diameter of the entry wound suggested that the killer had used a large-caliber handgun.

  She looked both high and low. Finding nothing, she reached the intersection where Griffin Street and Paseo de Peralta met just as the traffic light changed and the DON’T WALK sign started flashing. Part of the glass looked broken. She crossed the empty street, looked up, and saw a small hole at the bottom of the sign with spider-like cracks radiating out in random directions.

  She keyed her handheld and told dispatch to send a tech to her location pronto. Forty minutes later, she had the partially flattened large caliber bullet in hand, secured in an evidence baggie.

  She walked back to her unit wondering if Potter’s sternum had caused an upward deflection of the round, or if the killer had angled his weapon slightly to fire into Potter’s chest. Perhaps both factors had come into play. But just maybe the perp was a couple of inches shorter than Potter, no more than five-seven or five-eight in height.

  The entry and exit wounds had looked to be aligned when Ramona examined Potter’s body on the sidewalk. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t a variation between the two. She would call the pathologist and ask some questions. Depending on his answers, she might have the beginnings of a physical description for the perp. If not, she at least had the first piece of hard physical evidence in the Potter murder. She would drop it off at the state crime lab for analysis before her regular shift started.

  A few minutes before Russell Thorpe left for work Chief Baca called to tell him the horse-shooting incident was now part of a major felony investigation that included, among other things, two homicides and a threat against Kerney’s and his family’s lives. Baca asked for an update, and Russell filled him in on the blue GMC van and his plan to canvass the few ranchers who lived close to Kerney’s property along Highway 285, starting with his nearest neighbor. Baca gave the go-ahead, adding that he wanted an in-person report when Thorpe finished.

  From his apartment in town, Thorpe took the Interstate north and turned off on Highway 285, driving along a ten-mile strip of the rural residential sprawl southeast of Santa Fe. He left the highway just before the Lamy turn-off, where the sweep of the Galisteo Basin stretched to the Ortiz Mountains, closed the ranch gate behind his unit, and drove past the cutoff to Kerney’s ra
nch. Several miles beyond was the headquarters of the Sombrero Ranch, owned by Jack and Irene Burke, the couple who’d sold Kerney his land. The Burkes were first on Thorpe’s list of neighbors he wanted to talk to.

  The ranch house, an old adobe with a screened-in, low-slung front porch, sat in a grove of ancient cottonwood trees at the edge of a wide, sandy arroyo. Beyond the arroyo the tracks of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad crossed a dry creek bed over a long wooden trestle. The place felt like it was a hundred miles from Santa Fe, locked in a time warp of an era long past. Thorpe had seen a lot of late-nineteenth-century ranch houses while stationed in Las Vegas, and the original part of the building was at least that old, if not older.

  A smaller, much more modern residence with a slanted tin roof, probably a foreman’s cottage, stood steps away from a free-standing garage that contained three pickup trucks and a small farm tractor. Behind the garage was a long, rectangular building covered with sheets of tin that served as a shop and equipment shed. On a patch of grass by the walkway to the main house stood a six-foot-high piece of petrified wood that had once been a tree trunk. A mud mat at the front step read WELCOME.

  Thorpe knocked on the partially open door, called out, and got no response. About a quarter-mile away, several horses lazed in a corral outside a pitched-roof, slat-wood barn. Back at his unit, Thorpe watched a pickup truck come into view around a low hill. It passed the barn and accelerated when the driver saw Thorpe’s patrol car.

  A man pulled to a stop and looked Thorpe over through the open window of his truck. “What brings the police here?” he asked with a smile. “I thought you guys never left the pavement unless you had to, and I sure as hell didn’t call you.”

  “Jack Burke?” Russell asked with a laugh.

  “That’s right,” Burke replied, as he got out of the truck.

  Through the open door, Thorpe saw a holstered pistol on the passenger seat and a hunting rifle in a roof-mounted rack. “Why all the weapons?” he asked.

  Burke pushed his cowboy hat back on his forehead and frowned. A middle-aged man with graying hair and a thick neck, he had large hands with stubby fingers and thick arms that filled out the sleeves of his cowboy shirt.

  “Because the more people who come to Santa Fe, the more trouble I’ve got,” he said in a disgruntled tone. “People cutting fences so they can drive their ATVs on my land, dumping garbage in arroyos because the county landfill is closed and they don’t want to take it back home, cutting firewood illegally, shooting at my windmills, killing the antelope, and hauling off gravel from an old quarry. I’ve even had to chase off a few folks I’ve caught digging up plants to take home and put in their yards. It doesn’t matter how many no trespassing signs I put up, some people have no respect for private property.”

  “Have you called the police?” Thorpe asked.

  Burke eyed Thorpe as though he was plain crazy. “Why? So they can take a report and file it? I gave up on that a long time ago. All it does is waste my time. Best I can do is catch ’em when I can and scare the be-jesus out of them.”

  “Have you run anyone off recently who was driving an eighty-two or eighty-three blue GMC van with a crumpled driver’s side front fender?”

  “Care to tell me why you’re asking?”

  “Yesterday your neighbor, Chief Kerney, found his horse dead inside the barn, shot three times.”

  Burke’s face flushed with anger. “Anyone who’d do a thing like that needs a dose of his own medicine. That was a damn fine animal, good-natured and well-trained. Had stamina, too. I remember when Kerney bought him at a BLM mustang auction. He turned that animal into a fine cutting horse with good cow sense.”

  “Have you seen a blue van?” Thorpe asked, trying to keep Burke on topic.

  Burke nodded. “When we sold Kerney his land we gave him an easement to use our road so he wouldn’t have to build a new one from the highway. With all the construction going on up at his place, it doesn’t make much sense to keep the gate locked, so I asked Kerney to make sure that the crew working at the site closed the gate when they came and went. The boys have been real good about it, except for one time last week when me and the wife came back from town.”

  “What happened?” Thorpe asked, trying to hurry Burke along.

  “My wife had just closed the gate when this blue van came barreling down on us kicking up a cloud of dust. I went over and asked the driver if he’d left it open. He said he was sorry and wouldn’t do it again. I figured him to be one of the construction crew.”

  “Did you get a good look at him?”

  “You bet, so did my wife. He was no further away than you are to me.”

  Thorpe got the day and time of the incident, and a physical description: a white male in his thirties with long blond hair, no mustache, and no beard.

  “Height?” he asked.

  “He stayed in the van,” Burke said, “so I can’t be sure, but I’d say average.”

  “What’s average to you?”

  “Five-ten, with a skinny build,” Burke replied. “Now that I think of it, his hands were kinda soft-looking.”

  “I’m going to need you and your wife to come to state police headquarters today,” Thorpe said, “so we can work up a composite sketch of the suspect.”

  “Isn’t what I just told you good enough?”

  “The man who shot the horse intends to kill Chief Kerney.”

  Burke’s expression darkened. “I don’t like the sound of that at all. Kerney’s a good man. I’ve been looking forward to having him as a neighbor. Wouldn’t want anything to change that. My wife’s at her sister’s house. I can pick her up and be there whenever you want us.”

  Thorpe checked his watch and said he would meet Burke at headquarters in two hours. That would give him time to brief Chief Baca and do his paperwork.

  “I’ll see you then,” Burke said.

  Russell nodded and drove off. Before returning to Santa Fe, he made a quick stop at the construction site, and spoke to Bobby Trujillo, Kerney’s general contractor. As expected, nobody matching Burke’s description of the driver of the blue van was or had been working on the job.

  Awake and up before Kerney, Sara stepped out of the shower, toweled herself dry, and stood in front of the mirror, examining her body. Her face was just a tiny bit fuller, her breasts had gotten huge, but her belly looked enormous. At least her legs hadn’t changed during pregnancy, and her arms were still firm. It was a small consolation; she was retaining fluids and felt like a bloated cow. She wondered how long it would take to lose the extra weight she’d gained after the baby was born.

  Kerney knocked on the bathroom door and opened it a crack when she answered. His hair stood up in a cowlick on the back of his head and his blue eyes were ringed with dark circles.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, peeking inside.

  “You’ve got to stop asking me that,” she replied. “I’m fine. The baby will let me know when it’s time to go to the hospital.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about the baby,” Kerney replied.

  In the background, Sara could hear the voice of an early morning local televison news anchor reporting the breaking story of the Manning homicide. “Stop staring at me,” she said, wrapping the towel around her body.

  “I think you look beautiful,” Kerney said.

  “Thank you. But as far as I’m concerned, the beauty of impending motherhood is nothing more than a male myth.”

  “Meaning?”

  “How would you like it if, within a matter of months, your face puffed up, you grew a pot belly, and your chest looked like milk-cow teats?”

  “I thought being pregnant was supposed to be a sensual experience for women.”

  “I’m still waiting for that to happen. Can I have a few minutes alone in the bathroom?”

  Kerney nodded sheepishly and closed the door. Sara put on a loose-fitting short-sleeved summer dress that accented her legs and softened the roundness of her stomach. She applied a bit of
mascara, a touch of lipstick, ran a comb through her short, strawberry blond hair, and decided maybe she didn’t look so bad after all. At least, not when she was fully clothed.

  In the kitchen, Kerney served her breakfast, a heaping concoction of scrambled eggs, melted cheese, and bits of ham, onions, and green peppers. He seemed very pleased with himself, so she thanked him with as much enthusiasm as she could muster, wondering where men got the idea that a pregnant woman needed to eat meals fit for a starving stevedore.

  She took a bite and chewed slowly, nodding her head. “Very good.”

  Kerney accepted the compliment with a smile.

  “After the baby is born, and I feel normal again, I want you to take me out dancing. Now that you have a new knee, there’s no excuse not to.”

  “I think I can do that,” Kerney said. He started to say something more and stopped, and his smile vanished, replaced by a preoccupied look.

  “Have you gone quiet because you want to preserve an illusion of normalcy before we start talking about who’s trying to kill us?” Sara asked.

  “Something like that. Mary Beth Patterson committed suicide in her hospital room late last night. I got a call from Sal Molina confirming it while you were in the shower.”

  Sara reacted to the news without emotion. Since last night, her only focus had become survival for her family. That wasn’t about to change until the problem got solved.

  “You’re going in to work, I take it,” she said.

  “I have to,” Kerney said apologetically.

  “I wouldn’t expect you to do anything less,” Sara said. “What happened after you sent me home last night?”

  Kerney told her about setting into motion a records search for the killer, and the mysterious disappearance of Jack Potter’s dog.

  Sara shrugged off the tidbit about the dog as she pushed food around the plate with her fork. It fit the killer’s already established pattern, but added nothing of substance to the investigation. “Assigning only two detectives to do a records search seems a bit skimpy on the resources to me.”