Everyone Dies

by Michael McGarrity

  “Yeah, it is. I put pressure on Detective Pino to make a quick arrest and I also made the call to bring in SWAT.”

  “A lot of mistakes in judgment were made, Sal, up and down the line,” Kerney replied.

  “That wouldn’t have happened if I’d thought things through before I reacted. I finish my work week tomorrow. I’ll have my retirement papers on your desk by the end of shift today.”

  “No deal, Lieutenant,” Kerney said.

  Molina shook his head abruptly. “There’s no need for Pino or Cruz Tafoya to take a hit for this.”

  “That’s not my point,” Kerney said. “I can’t have my best investigator walking out on me until this case is completely wrapped up. Then you can retire. We can talk about under what conditions you leave the department when the time comes.”

  “You may not have the luxury of waiting,” Sal said. “There are seventy-five people from a group called the Friends of the Mentally Ill holding a protest vigil outside headquarters right now, and they want blood. The media is covering it big time.”

  “I’m not going to cave into that kind of pressure, Sal,” Kerney said. “Not from a protest group, the DA, the city manager, or the media. If they want a pound of flesh, they’ll have to wait, because I’m not about to lose my major felony case supervisor with three unsolved homicides and four attempted murder investigations under way. Are we clear on that?”

  Molina nodded.

  “Okay, let’s go back to work.”

  Sal drove away and Kerney sat in his unit listening to the radio traffic. The size of the protest vigil had swelled to over a hundred, and people were walking along nearby Cerrillos Road carrying placards that accused the department of discrimination, police brutality, and violating civil rights. He scratched out some notes and called Helen Muiz, his office manager, on his cell phone.

  “Will you be joining the party?” Helen asked. “It’s turning into quite an event. The gay pride people have just showed up to add their voices to the chorus of protest.”

  “I’ll be there in a few,” Kerney said. “Let the media know that I’ll be giving a prepared statement but taking no questions.”

  “Oh, I’m sure that will please them no end.”

  By the time Kerney arrived at headquarters, Helen had arranged for a podium to be set up outside the visitors entrance. He stepped out the door with Larry Otero in tow to find a semicircle of TV cameras facing him, and the parking lot filled with people, with more arriving from lines of cars parked along both sides of the street that paralleled Cerrillos Road.

  Plainclothes officers and some of Andy’s agents were spread throughout the gathering, and uniformed personnel were stationed at the back of the parking lot, eyeing people as they came in. Larry Otero had officers taking photographs from inside the building just in case the perp had decided to join the throng.

  In the front row he spotted a solemn-looking Fletcher Hartley holding a handwritten sign that read JUSTICE FOR ALL. It was the least inflammatory placard among the many that were being thrust up and down in the air by the noisy crowd.

  Kerney walked to the podium, pulled out his notes, paused a minute to let people quiet down, and then made his statement. He spoke about the unfortunate death of Kurt Larsen and Mary Beth Patterson’s suicide, and how the department would improve and strengthen policies and procedures to ensure that no similar tragedy happened again. He mentioned the development of mandatory training that would require all sworn personnel to gain the knowledge and sensitivity needed to deal with emotionally disturbed and mentally ill citizens, and called upon professionals, advocates, and family members to assist in that process.

  Without giving specifics, he talked about the internal affairs investigation and the disciplinary action he’d already taken regarding the SWAT call-out that had resulted in the shooting of Kurt Larsen.

  Finally, he said, “The loss of innocent lives is unacceptable and has deeply affected the men and women of this department. More officers may be held accountable as our probe continues. However, the ultimate responsibility for the conduct of the department is mine alone, and you have every right to expect me to meet my obligations, which I will do. But for now, I ask for your patience as we use all of our time and resources to apprehend the killer. Thank you.”

  Kerney turned away as reporters called out questions at him about the murders and the status of the investigations. “How do you think it went?” he asked Otero, as he pushed open the door to the reception area.

  “Good,” Larry replied. “They listened, didn’t hiss or boo, and best of all, nobody tried to shoot you.”

  Ramona Pino rolled into Socorro, keyed her radio, and asked the state police dispatcher for directions to the district office, which was a few miles outside of town. From a long-ago high school New Mexico history class, Ramona knew some basic information about the city. She knew Socorro in Spanish meant “help” or “assistance,” and that the city had been given the name by conquistadors because of the nearby Pueblo Indians who’d provided them with food. During the middle to late nineteenth-century, the town had been the center of one of the richest mining districts in the southwest. Now it served as a hub for area farms and ranches and was home to New Mexico Tech, a state university. It was also the birthplace of Conrad Hilton, the man who’d started the famous hotel chain.

  With an enrollment of slightly over twelve hundred students, the school was consistently rated as one of the best in the country. Ramona had researched the institute as a college choice before deciding to drop science as a major in favor of criminal justice. Given the very real possibility that her cop career was going down the tubes, maybe she should have stuck with science.

  The main drag through town wasn’t much to look at, just the usual conglomeration of local businesses, fast-food joints, gas stations, motels, and a few strip malls. The district state police headquarters was a modern, single-story, sand-colored concrete block building with pale gray stone coping, situated next to the Interstate.

  Inside, the duty officer buzzed her through the security door and directed her to a bullpen area, where she spotted Russell Thorpe and two investigators working over some papers.

  Thorpe grinned at her as he got to his feet. “Good, you’re here.”

  “I’m surprised to see you,” Ramona replied, smiling back and thinking that Thorpe was not bad looking with his boyish face and six-foot, hard-body frame.

  “My chief sent me down,” Thorpe said as he picked up a file and put it on the seat of an empty chair.

  “What have you got?”

  “A possible hard target, named Noel Olsen. We’re trying to track him down. Chief Kerney busted him and two other guys for a rape-murder in Santa Fe. Olsen turned state’s evidence and pled to a second-degree felony on the rape and as an accessory to the murder. The judge made the prison time concurrent on both counts, so Olsen did only four and a half years at the medium-security prison in Las Lunas, and was paroled to Las Cruces after his release. Drake was his P.O. before she got promoted to run the Socorro office.”

  “Why is he a target?” Ramona asked.

  Thorpe ran it down. Olsen had been a third-year engineering student at New Mexico State when he’d been busted. After he was paroled, he’d finished his degree and taken a master’s in electrical engineering, with a specialty in energetic materials.

  “Bombs,” Ramona said.

  “Yeah, that and more,” Thorpe replied. “Artillery weapons, ballistic experiments, rocket propulsion systems, explosives, nuclear blast and shock effects, land mines—you name it.”

  “The fact that Olsen knows how to make a bomb won’t get an arrest warrant signed,” Ramona said.

  “The first of the court trial documents just got faxed to us from the Santa Fe District Attorney’s Office,” Thorpe said with a nod at the file he’d placed on the chair. “Jack Potter prosecuted the case and Dora Manning did the psych evaluation on Olsen.”

  “That should do it,” Ramona said, smiling back at Thor
pe’s infectious grin. “Where is he?”

  Thorpe shook his head. “Don’t know. He’s on vacation from his job at a New Mexico Tech research and testing facility. According to the personnel office, he works as a research tech at an explosives mixing facility on a forty-square-mile field laboratory outside the city.”

  Ramona whistled. “Do we know where he lives?”

  “Yeah, but he’s not answering his phone. We’ve got a make, model, and license number for his car, and his driver’s license photo is a close match to the police artist sketch. We’re doing a casual patrol in the area, just in case he shows. But we didn’t want to move on a search warrant for his residence until we tied him to the other victims.”

  “Are the arrest and search warrant affidavits done?”

  “Just about,” Thorpe answered.

  “Have you called Chief Kerney?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I’ll do it, and then we’ll go see a judge.”

  A state police SWAT team surrounded Olsen’s house. Uniformed officers blocked off the county road in both directions. Ramona scanned the structure through binoculars. A fixer-upper with a sagging porch roof, it had cracked and broken plaster that exposed the adobe walls, old-fashioned single-pane sash windows, and a rickety screen door that clanked against the door jamb when the wind gusted. To one side stood a weather-beaten shed and the remnants of an old windmill that leaned precariously at an angle.

  There was no sign of activity and no vehicle in sight. Ramona waited five minutes and then had SWAT move in. The team quickly cleared the premises, the outbuilding, and a large area of the dusty brown hillside behind the house. With Thorpe and the two state police investigators at her heels, she stepped inside the house and began a visual search.

  An hour later, they had compelling evidence that tied Olsen to the explosion in Mescalero and the murders of Victoria Drake and Dora Manning.

  By phone, she reported to Lieutenant Molina. “We’ve got a pair of Olsen’s boots that match the shoe prints Deputy Istee found on the trail behind his house, Dora Manning’s cell phone, receipts for the parts Olsen bought to make the triggering and detonation devices, all the raw materials used to make the plastique, the formula for the bomb he left on his computer, two dead Kangaroo Rats we found in a toolshed, plus a partially used container of over-the-counter poison bait.”

  “Excellent,” Molina said. “Have you found anything that might tell us where Olsen is?”

  “We’re about to start looking,” Ramona said. “What I’ve given you so far is just from a preliminary once-over. But I can give you information on Olsen’s vehicle.”

  “Read it off.”

  Ramona fed Molina the data. “Looks like our boy isn’t as smart as he thinks he is,” she added. “How did we miss him during our initial records search?”

  “He had a clean record in the slammer and as a parolee. He was a model prisoner, made no threats against Kerney or the victims, didn’t violate his parole conditions, and supposedly rehabilitated himself. Besides that, at the time we weren’t looking for a perp who knew how to blow people up. I’ll get an advisory out for Olsen and his car. Keep me informed.”

  Ramona disconnected and turned to Thorpe and the two investigators. “Okay,” she said, “let’s tear this place apart.”

  “What do you remember about this guy?” Molina asked Kerney, as he put a thick packet containing Noel Olsen’s case file, court trial documents, prison records, and parole officer reports on the chief’s desk and settled into a chair.

  “You worked the case with me, Sal,” Kerney said. “He was an upper-middle-class kid who went out drinking and hoping to get laid with two of his college buddies. They picked up a woman, fed her some crap about taking her to a party, drove her out to the boonies and gang-banged her. The fun times went a little too far when they wound up strangling her and burying the body.”

  “I don’t mean the case,” Molina said, realizing that Kerney was tired and not tracking very well. “What do you remember about Olsen as a person?”

  “He was an only child and a spoiled pretty boy,” Kerney said, “who played the lady’s-man role. The murder probably never would have happened if Olsen hadn’t tried to sodomize the woman. According to his buddies, that’s what caused her to fight back. She bit and scratched him and he slapped her around. The other two kids joined in to beat and strangle her.”

  “Did he strike you as cold-blooded?”

  “Not really. He started out acting the tough guy during interrogation, but broke down real fast, which is why he got to plead to lesser charges. I thought he was just as guilty as his cohorts, and so did Jack Potter, who cut him a deal in order to get murder-one indictments on his chums. To me, Olsen’s machismo act was a cover for his unresolved homosexuality. Dora Manning didn’t see it that way; she found him to be narcissistic with sociopathic tendencies.”

  “Well, Manning may have missed the boat,” Molina said, as he pointed to the files on Kerney’s desk. “According to the prison records, a con made Olsen his bitch less than a month after he entered the general population at Los Lunas.”

  “You got a name?”

  “Yep, Kerry LaPointe, out of Curry County. He’s back in the slammer doing a hard twenty at Santa Fe Max for armed robbery, possession of meth, and assault with intent to kill a police officer. He’s an Aryan brother. Matt Chacon is on his way to interview him now.”

  “Let’s locate Olsen’s parents and talk to them,” Kerney said, “and have Detective Pino do the same with his coworkers and friends in Socorro.”

  Molina nodded. “Did Olsen ever threaten to get even with you?”

  “No. In fact, he apologized to the victim’s family at the sentencing hearing.”

  “Do you think he’s our guy?” Sal asked.

  “Although the evidence is compelling, I have trouble understanding his motive,” Kerney said. “Potter cut him a really sweet deal compared to his two pals. What about that list of possible suspects I gave you?”

  “We’ve tracked all of them down except two,” Molina replied, “and those we’ve talked to have tight alibis. We’re still looking for the others.”

  “Okay, Olsen looks promising,” Kerney said, “but I want all the pieces to fit together, Sal. Olsen’s college pals should still be doing time for felony murder and aggravated rape. Have Chacon talk to them while he’s at the prison. Have him find out if prison made Olsen vengeful.”

  Molina pushed his chair back from the table. “If it did, he’s waited a hell of a long time to act on it.”

  Samuel Green had trained himself to sleep an hour or two at a time and wake up refreshed. He dressed in his jogging outfit, drove to the church at the lower end of Upper Canyon Road, parked, and took off at a fast pace up the street where Kerney lived, past the expensive adobe houses and estates that overlooked the dry Santa Fe River.

  Aside from the workout it provided, running cleared Samuel Green’s mind. He liked the random thoughts he had when he ran, the ideas that came to him, the things and people he saw. Except for a wave from one pedestrian walking a dog, and a car that slowed as it passed him by, nobody paid any attention to him as he pounded out an eight-minute mile along the fairly steep grade of Upper Canyon Road. He was just another anonymous jogger getting some exercise.

  Yesterday, he’d run past a female state police officer stationed in front of Kerney’s house. Today, the cop was gone. He stopped in front of the driveway, put his hands on his knees as if he was catching his breath, and glanced at the guest house. The new vehicle Kerney’s wife had bought was parked next to the pickup truck, but the unmarked police car Kerney drove was gone.

  He stretched his right leg and rubbed his calf so that anyone who might be watching would think he had a cramp. All the curtains at the front of the house were drawn, but that didn’t mean anything. It was the cop’s absence that told him Kerney had moved his wife.

  Green smiled, straightened up, and ran on. He liked the fact that Kerney was no dumm
y. It made things all the more interesting.

  Detective Matt Chacon stopped at the guard station at the state pen a few miles outside Santa Fe on Highway 14 and waited while the correctional officer cleared him to enter.

  After an infamous riot in 1980 that had resulted in the death of several guards and the murder of some thirty inmates, most of whom were found in bits and pieces spread throughout the facility, the state had embarked on a massive new prison construction program. High-tech penitentiaries were built around the state, including the super max for men here at Santa Fe. The old facility had been closed but left standing, and was now rented out to Hollywood film companies shooting on location. A short distance down the road were the Correction Department training academy for guards and the central administration offices. Across the highway stood the county detention center and a brand-new county public safety building that housed the sheriff’s department, the county fire chief’s office, and the regional emergency communication center.

  The guard finally waved him through. Inside the prison he was handed a phone message from Molina asking him to also interview Charles Stewart and Archie Schroder, Olsen’s partners in crime. It took twenty minutes for his first subject, Kerry LaPointe, to be brought to the interview room.

  No more than five-six, LaPointe had light-brown hair, an acne-scarred face, a pumped-up frame, and an Aryan Brotherhood swastika and Nazi SS lightning bolt tattooed on his forearm.

  Chacon asked him about Olsen.

  “He was a pussy,” LaPointe said with a smug smile. “I made him my bitch as soon as he hit the general population at Lunas. Wish I had him here with me now. Why are you looking for him?”

  “Multiple murder counts,” Chacon replied.

  LaPointe laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “He did it once before,” Chacon said.

  “Yeah, but he’s no stone-cold killer,” LaPointe replied. “Icing that slut with Stewart and Schroder was just a gang-bang that went bad. He tried to put on a hard-case act when he came out of reception and classification, but nobody bought it.”