Everyone Dies

by Michael McGarrity

  He disconnected and started walking through the trees in the direction of the spot where his home had once stood. He forced himself to move at a steady pace and tried to prepare himself for what he was about to see. Ahead, the spotlights and headlights of police cruisers and several fire trucks broke the darkness, illuminating the ruins of his home. Crime scene tape had been strung across his driveway, and officers were posted at strategic locations.

  He approached quietly, not wanting to be seen. They’d lost all the landscape trees at the front of the house as well as a stand of pines on the back of the lot. The charred trunks of the tallest trees rose thirty feet into the sky.

  Where the house had stood there was nothing but rubble. Large, twisted sections of the corrugated metal roof partially covered the few standing walls, and the metal headboard of Wendell’s twin bed jutted through a shattered window frame.

  He moved closer and looked away from the light, letting his night vision adjust. What appeared to be the refrigerator lay on its side next to his two burned-out vehicles, both of them resting on wheel rims over black puddles of melted rubber.

  He saw a flashlight beam at the rear of the house and Dahl came into view, casting his light over the littered concrete pad where the new tool shed had been, then over the remnants of the propane tank scattered under some trees that had been burned halfway up the canopy. If the fire department hadn’t been standing by before the explosion, the whole forest could have gone up in flames.

  The swing set and slide had been taken out by the exploding gas tank, and the vegetable garden was nothing more than a scorched plot enclosed by the post-and-wire fence.

  It was worse than he’d imagined. His hands were shaking, so he stuffed them into his trouser pockets. He started to sweat in the cool night as a lump rose up in his throat and he thought about what might have happened to Grace and the children. He waited for the dizzy feeling of shock to pass. Finally, his heart stopped pounding in his chest and the tremors in his arms and legs lessened.

  He watched Dahl put his dog in his unit and drive away. Quickly, he made his way back toward the Naiches’ house, trying to convince himself that the burning sensation in his eyes came from the lingering smoke and soot in the air. He saw Perry Dahl talking to Kerney and Sheriff Hewitt at the front of Eugene and Jeannie’s house and hurried to join them.

  “What have I missed?” Clayton asked as he reached the men.

  Bits of ash clung to Dahl’s short-cropped hair and speckled his unshaved face. His shoes and trousers were caked with black soot and mud. Clementine, his German shepherd, sat at his feet busily cleaning gobs of muck from her front paws.

  “Not much,” Dahl replied, as he reached down to scratch Clementine’s head. “I just started my briefing. I’m thinking the plastique was homemade, which means there won’t be any detection agent that could lead us back to a manufacturer.”

  Dahl unsnapped Clementine’s leash. “The two charges were shaped to do maximum damage upwards through the floor. I’d say they were a pound each. One was placed next to the gas line that ran under and up into the house from the outside propane tank, which guaranteed a secondary explosion.”

  “Where was the second charge placed?” Clayton asked.

  “Facing the house from here, on the left side,” Dahl replied. He wrapped the leash around his hand and stuck it in his back pocket. “Which I assume is where the bedrooms were located.”

  Clayton nodded and said nothing.

  “What kind of chemical agents were used?” Kerney asked.

  “That will have to wait until we can run some tests,” Dahl answered. “But it could’ve been anything from a potassium or chlorate compound, a phenol derivative, to an antifreeze concoction treated with calcium chloride then filtered to remove the water and the calcium chloride, which is my best guess right now.”

  “Why do you say that?” Hewitt asked.

  “Because it acts like a nitro-gelatin explosive, which means it’s highly flammable, and there was fire almost immediately after the explosion on both sides of the house.”

  “Do you have anything that can help us find the perp?” Kerney asked.

  “The hardware that was used is our best bet,” Dahl said. “Based on what I saw, I’m thinking he built everything from scratch, which means he had to buy the components somewhere. But more than that, I’d also be looking for someone with electronics experience, who is good with his hands, has had some formal training, and has a basic understanding of chemistry.”

  “An amateur couldn’t do it?” Clayton asked, forcing himself to stay focused on the subject. He wanted to find the asshole and kill him.

  “He’d have to be very gifted,” Dahl replied. “No matter what you’ve heard about bomb-making instructions on the Internet, none of this stuff is that easy to do, especially the electronics.”

  “Give us an example,” Hewitt said.

  “A radio detonator was used to trigger the charges placed inside the house,” Dahl replied. “To do that the perp had to accomplish two things to ensure success: first, use a microwave transmitter so the signal would penetrate into the structure, and second, shield the signal so that a random transmission wouldn’t prematurely set off the plastique. That takes a high degree of knowledge and skill.”

  “So we start checking electronic suppliers to see who has been buying what,” Kerney said, “and look for a perp with some formal training or education in the field.”

  “Yeah,” Dahl said. “I can work up a list of what I think he used to build the device and start calling supply houses and retailers. And if I can find any intact pieces of the wire he used, that might be helpful. But don’t get your hopes up. If he was smart, he bought from a lot of different places, probably off the Internet and by mail order.”

  “What else?” Clayton asked.

  “I’ll see what the feds have on known bombers with similar MOs. Also, most of these guys like to watch their shows, especially the big blasts, and this one was designed for maximum devastation. You might get lucky in the morning and find a shoe print or some trace evidence on a trail or at the spot where he detonated the explosion.”

  An unmarked car pulled up next to Clayton’s unit and two feds got out.

  Kerney looked at Clayton’s mud-caked boots. He’d been to the site, of that he was certain. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “If you want to bail out, you can,” Hewitt added.

  Clayton shook his head and managed a thin smile. “I’m just pissed off, big time. It sucks to be a victim.”

  The two feds approached, flashed their shields, and immediately started asking questions.

  Kerney had been unable to contact only one person on his list of those who knew about Clayton, the executor of Erma Fergurson’s estate, a man named Milton Lynch. Lynch was a probate and tax attorney based in Las Cruces, a hundred miles away.

  It was Erma’s legacy that had made Kerney a rich man, and Lynch had handled all the paperwork, including the college funds Kerney had set up for Wendell and Hannah.

  At dawn, Clayton went into the mountains hoping to cut the perp’s trail. Kerney radioed the chopper pilot and asked him to get clearance to fly to Las Cruces over the restricted airspace of White Sands Missile Range before he sought out Paul Hewitt.

  “Will you give me a ride to the chopper?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Are you going to establish a fund to help Clayton and his family?” Kerney asked as he got in Hewitt’s vehicle.

  “You bet, as soon as I get to the office.”

  Kerney handed him a folded check. “This is an anonymous contribution.”

  “Whatever you say,” Hewitt replied as he slipped the check into a shirt pocket.

  “Good,” Kerney replied.

  “What’s between you and Clayton is none of my business, Kerney,” Paul said, keeping his eyes on the road.

  “I’m proud to be Clayton’s father, Paul,” Kerney said as they coasted to a stop at the tribal offices whe
re the chopper waited. “He’s a good man and a fine police officer. When we have the time, I’ll tell you the story of how we found out about each other. Or maybe Clayton will.”

  “I’ll let you know if he does,” Hewitt replied.

  “Look after him, Sheriff,” Kerney said as he got out of the car. “He’s due for a letdown from all of this.”

  Hewitt replied with a nod. “I know it. You be careful.”

  He watched Kerney get into the chopper and take off before opening the folded check. He knew Kerney had inherited a pile of money through the sale of a ranch left to him by an old family friend.

  He looked at the amount and whistled. Make that a big pile of money. Kerney’s check would easily cover the cost of buying two new vehicles for the Istee family, free and clear.

  It was a pleasant nighttime drive that took Samuel Green from the town of Tularosa, north to Carrizozo, and then west toward San Antonio and Interstate 25. Just past Stallion Gate, a restricted access road on the north boundary of White Sands Missile Range, Green left the highway and followed an unpaved county road that wound through some low hills on the east side of the Rio Grande Valley near the small city of Socorro.

  Most of the land was controlled by the Bureau of Land Management, but there were a few private parcels tucked into the barren hills that overlooked the valley farms and the mountains to the west of the city. Green stopped at the gate to a private road, unlocked it, and drove up the hill to a small adobe house once owned by Noel Olsen. But now that Olsen was dead, he didn’t own anything anymore.

  Green had created his plan with two main goals in mind. First and foremost were the killings, and they were going well. The failed attempt to blow up the Istee family was a disappointment, but partially successful nonetheless in exacting heavy retribution against Kerney’s family. He would let it go at that for now, and keep his option open to kill them later, perhaps as some sort of epilogue.

  Green’s second goal was equally simple, yet complex in its execution. He wanted not only to succeed with his plan but to survive it and enjoy the emotional fruits of his labor. To do that, he’d decided to give the cops a perpetrator to look for and never find. Thus, the recently deceased Noel Olsen.

  Green slipped on a pair of plastic gloves, entered the house, and removed Olsen’s hiking boots. Even with two pairs of socks, the oversized boots had been uncomfortable to wear and his feet were sore. He padded into the bedroom, put the boots in the closet, slipped on a pair of Olsen’s running shoes, and turned to the body on the bed.

  “You made a lovely bomb,” he said as he pressed Olsen’s thumb and fingers on Dora Manning’s cell phone. He did it several times to make sure there were a number of partial and smudged prints for the police to find, and repeated the process with the radio transmitter used to detonate the plastique.

  Green had kept Olsen captive and alive for the two weeks it had taken to order the parts and make the bomb. During the times he was gone, he’d sedated Olsen with a major tranquilizer and left him manacled, handcuffed, gagged, and chained to a fifty-gallon water heater in the utility room.

  He left the room and dropped Manning’s cell phone and the radio transmitter on the work table in the small second bedroom where Olsen had played with all his electronic toys and built the bomb. In the corner were the containers of chemicals Olsen had used to make the plastique, and buried under a stack of paper were receipts for some of the components that had been bought to make the hardware. The cops would find additional information on Olsen’s laptop computer, which should also make them happy.

  In the utility room, he bundled up the clothes Olsen had worn and fouled during his confinement, packed them in a travel bag along with the restraints, added some of Olsen’s toiletries from the bathroom, and left it near the front door.

  Back in the bedroom, he wrapped the body in a sheet and carried it out to the car, carefully staying on the gravel path to avoid leaving footprints that would show the weight he was carrying. He stuffed the body in the trunk, made a second trip for the travel bag, and closed the lid.

  He went to the toolshed behind the house and checked on the two Merriam Kangaroo Rats he’d caught that were in a cage on a shelf. Their little eyes blinked rapidly in the glare of his flashlight. He fed them some poisoned bait and watched their contortions as they died. The cops, who got off on finding little details that corroborated their facts, would be pissing in their pants with excitement when they found the rats.

  Green checked his watch. He figured it would be a good ten to twelve hours before the cops got here. First, they had to identify the body he’d left in the van, which should be done by now. Then, they had to make the connection to Olsen, which would take some head work and digging, but not that much. After all, the dead woman had at one time been Olsen’s parole officer in Las Cruces.

  At the age of twenty, Olsen and two undergraduate buddies from New Mexico State University had been arrested for the rape and murder of a woman in Santa Fe. Because he hadn’t participated in the rape, Olsen had been allowed to plead to a lesser charge in exchange for testifying against his co-defendants. He’d done his time, finished his parole, completed his engineering degree, and had his voting rights restored, which meant he wasn’t going to be hard to find.

  But what made Olsen the perfect suspect was the fact that Kerney had busted him, Potter had prosecuted the case, and Dora Manning had done the psych evaluation for the court. It had taken Green a year’s researching to find the ideal candidate to become the cops’ one and only prime suspect.

  He got in Olsen’s car and drove away. By the time the cops arrived, Olsen’s body would be at the bottom of a lava tube in the El Malpais National Monument, his car would be at a chop shop across the border in Juarez, and Green would be on his way back to Santa Fe ready to implement the final phase of his plan.

  Chapter 9

  Last night, Kerney had spoken by phone with Milton Lynch’s wife, who’d told him that her husband would be returning from Albuquerque to Las Cruces early in the morning to prepare for an afternoon court appearance. She assured him that Lynch would be at his office by eight o’clock.

  As he flew over the Tularosa Basin above the highway that cut through the missile range, Kerney could see sections of the land that had once belonged to his family. The sun lit up the alkali flats and washed over the tips of the Hardscabble Mountains, part of the San Andres Range, south of Rhodes Canyon. In his mind’s eye, he could picture the ranch house and the old road that snaked down the hills to the broad swales of tall grama grass that, in the wet years, spread out across the range.

  Silently, Kerney studied the vast, empty reaches of the basin, broken only by some military roads and clusters of high-security testing facilities. This was the land he’d been born to, only to have the family ranch taken away by the government when he was a child. This was the land where his godson, Sammy Yazzi, a soldier stationed at the missile range, had been murdered. He looked over his shoulder at Sierra Blanca Mountain on the eastern fringe of the basin that defined the Mescalero homeland, now forever embedded in his memory as the place where Clayton and his family had seen their home destroyed.

  The early morning light softened the black lava flows far to the north, made the pure white gypsum sand dunes sparkle, blunted the squat Jarilla Mountains west of Orogrande, and bleached the dry salt flats of Lake Lucero. It was a land of wind-blown drought, cactus and rattlesnakes, thorny mesquite, and boulder-strewn foothill canyons at the base of the mountains. Despite the harsh vastness, there was an intense, wild, undeniable beauty to the Tularosa.

  The land held good memories, too. It was here, under the watchful eye of his father, that he’d been taught to cowboy and ranch. It was here that his lifelong friendship with Dale Jennings had begun. And it was here, just a few short years ago, that he’d first met Sara during her tour of duty at the missile range.

  The chopper traveled through the San Agustin Pass and dropped down to the desert where the city of Las Cruces spread
out before them. New residential subdivisions peppered the hills and stretched along the Interstate. Strip malls, business parks, and commercial buildings lined the highway that had once been a two-lane road into town.

  The second-largest and fastest-growing city in New Mexico, Las Cruces was no longer the sleepy little ranching, farming, and college town of Kerney’s childhood. But even with all the exploding growth, most of it fueled by the defense industry and migrating retirees, the green of the pecan orchards and farms along the Rio Grande River valley and the magnificent spire-shaped peaks of the Organ Mountains still gave the city a certain natural charm that the man-made sprawl had yet to diminish.

  The chopper pilot had radioed ahead to have the parking lot at the district state police headquarters cleared for their landing. Motorists along University Boulevard and the nearby Interstate slowed to watch the chopper’s descent.

  As Kerney left the helicopter and went into the building, he checked the time. It was too early to expect Lynch to be in his office, so he would call Sara and then buy the pilot breakfast.

  Sal Molina sat behind a mechanic’s desk at the city maintenance yard garage and watched as the crime scene techs continued working on the blue van. The place smelled—not unpleasantly—of grease and motor oil, rubber and cold metal. It had taken several hours to complete the search for evidence on and in the van, and not one fingerprint had been found. Every surface had been wiped clean, and, according to the techs, the perp had even vacuumed the carpet and floor mats before he’d loaded up the body and parked it at the municipal court building.

  Along with a plant biologist who’d just shown up, the techs were now working on the undercarriage of the vehicle, which had been raised on a hydraulic rack, looking for trace elements that could possibly tell Molina where the van had been. They were prying pebbles out of the tire treads, picking small strands of vegetation off the grease on the rear axle with tweezers, and looking for seeds and other plant matter that might be caught in the U-joints, springs, or clinging to various parts of the chassis.