by Rick Reed
“Shut up, Bigfoot. I don’t need to hear that.”
They rode in silence for a while until Liddell asked, “Well, what are you going to do? You going to pop the question? Have you bought a ring? Where are you going to do it?”
Jack said, “You writing a book? I’m sorry I shared.”
“Can I be your best man?”
“You know it,” Jack said.
“Can we be little Jack’s Godparents?”
“Only if you promise not to eat him,” Jack said.
“Jack?”
“What?”
“I’m proud of you, pod’na. I’m honored to work with you. You’re a good man, and you’ll be one hell of a father, pod’na.”
“Quit it before you make me change my mind,” Jack said.
The GPS on Jack’s phone announced they had arrived at the address given to them by Lt. Sanchez, but the stretch of road they were on was devoid of any connecting roads or driveways or houses.
“The last turn I saw was about half a mile back, Bigfoot. Siri is a lying bitch.”
“I think I see a mailbox up ahead,” Liddell said.
He was right. A quarter mile up the road, a rusty mailbox was wired to a steel pipe directly across from a gravel driveway. The driveway trailed off into the trees and disappeared around a bend.
They’d driven six or seven hundred yards when Liddell said, “I don’t think we’re in Missouri anymore, Toto. There’s nothing back here. Maybe it goes to a hunting cabin. Or maybe it just leads to a field?”
Another five hundred yards and they spotted a rust-colored metal roof over the tree line of dead limbs. They came to a narrow concrete road that turned toward the structure and followed it to a 1950s-style farmhouse, two-story, wood-sided, with padded gray paint and blue trim. A covered porch wrapped around the house.
The concrete drive continued behind the house to a barn. The barn was a new construction with a new coat of red paint and a new corrugated metal roof. A carport was attached to the side of the barn. Under the carport sat a Gator 4-wheeler and a Harley motorcycle.
“Have you got Sanchez’s number?” Jack asked. “This can’t be...”
Lieutenant Sanchez came out of the barn and crossed to the house with a beer can in his hand. He motioned them to come over.
Jack and Liddell walked up to the porch.
“A little early for beer, isn’t it?” Jack asked.
“That’s from last night,” Sanchez answered. “We had a little party and drank all the beer. Sorry.”
“We?” Liddell asked.
A black Lab came trotting from behind the house and nosed Liddell’s hand.
“Meet Cutie,” Sanchez said. “I didn’t name her. My ex did.”
Liddell nudged Jack’s arm. “You should see Jack’s dog. She’s...”
Jack cut him off. “You were drinking with the dog all night before you drove to Evansville and back?”
“Drinking was Cutie’s idea,” Sanchez said. “She’s a lush, but she’s the only thing I kept from my last marriage...my fourth one. The dog loves me more than my ex did anyway.”
“Where are we going to work?” Jack asked.
“You’re looking at it.”
“This house?” Jack said. If I sneeze it’ll fall down.
“We’re working in the barn,” Sanchez said and threw the empty beer can toward the barn. Cutie raced off and snatched it before it hit the ground.
Sanchez opened the barn door, and the stark transformation from barn to modern office/living space was shocking. Cutie trotted to a trash bin and dropped the empty beer can inside.
“Good girl,” Sanchez said, scrubbing the top of the dog’s head. “I’m trying to teach her to pick up after herself.”
The barn’s floor was shiny hardwood. The ceiling was at least twenty feet high and crisscrossed with silver central air and heat ducts and PVC pipes and wiring. At the back of the room was a ladder leading up to a spacious loft. Jack could see a dresser and four-poster bed. The space under the loft was walled off into two rooms. The one on the left had a half-moon carved into the door. Bathroom. The other room was partially walled in. It had the makings of a kitchen, with the oven and cabinets stored along the wall. On that same wall was a full-size freezer/refrigerator.
“Bathroom on the left,” Sanchez said, following Jack’s gaze. “Got a refrigerator with a freezer and ice maker. I’m still working on the kitchen. I don’t really need it because I grill out most of the time. Upstairs is the bedroom. It’s home.”
“You live out here and not in the house?” Liddell asked.
“The house is a money pit. I keep it because it was my grandparents’ place. At one time, there were three generations of Sanchezes living in that house. Four thousand square feet and a basement that’s little more than a root cellar. I put heat and a/c in the barn, insulated it, and it’s comfortable, so I live out here.”
Jack remembered doing basically the same thing when he and Katie got divorced. She kept the house—which was his childhood home—and he’d moved into his grandfather’s old river cabin. He’d poured money into the cabin to make it livable, added a dock, boat, and a hot tub. He couldn’t put a refrigerator outside because he feared his beer would get stolen.
Sanchez had set four army surplus desks in the middle of the main space, two desks facing two more, office chairs, filing cabinets, a printer, and laptops. On top of two of the desks were thick stacks of manila file folders. A small table in the corner was equipped with a coffee maker and condiments, coffee mugs, and four boxes of donuts. Sanchez had brewed a fresh pot of coffee and pointed to the mugs and donuts.
“Get a coffee, donut, pick a desk, park it, and let’s get to work,” Sanchez said.
Chapter 21
They loaded up on coffee and carried it back to the desks. Lieutenant Sanchez sat at the messier desk with a stack of folders twice as thick as those on the other desks. On top of Sanchez’s desk someone had placed a wooden name plaque that read: C. A. W. A. I. C.
Liddell brought coffee and a box of the donuts, and he pointed at the name plaque. “That some new FBI task force title?”
Sanchez said, “My partner put it there. It stands for Chief Asshole What Am In Charge.”
Liddell got seated. They did what most cops do when meeting another cop they haven’t worked with. They drank coffee, ate donuts, and told stories.
It didn’t matter what kind of case a detective worked, murders included, every detective carried their own interpretation of right and wrong. If you go into battle with a man, you want to know if he’s got grit, if he’s honest, how far he will bend the rules. Most importantly, will he have your back?
Police work was a battle. Jack didn’t write traffic tickets or play basketball with kids in the projects. He was always up against the most vile and dangerous scumbags with one goal, to protect his city. Good versus evil wasn’t just a random headline, and he didn’t really give a shit what the news media said.
Normal people aren’t wired to think in those terms, but Jack was chasing a monster. He had to know who was chasing the monster with him.
They were running out of stories when Liddell asked, “How’d you score that primo SUV you’re driving, Lieutenant?”
“The Denali came from a narcotics seizure. I had to promise not to sleep with the chief’s wife to get it. The land, everything else you see, is mine. This is my war room.” Sanchez turned to Jack. “Your captain told me you had a war room a little nicer than this.”
Jack said, “The captain talks too much.”
“How much land?” Liddell asked.
“Six hundred and thirty acres of woods and farm fields. No one’s worked the land since my father died a long time back. It’ll go to scrub and volunteer trees. If either of you hunt, let me know when you want to come and I’ll give you a map so you don’t s
hoot up the barn. I live here, remember.”
“Is someone else joining us?” Jack asked, indicating the unoccupied desk.
“When my chief assigned me to USOC, I was told I might be working with other detectives. I got to bring my partner in the Homicide Squad on board. She’s busy on a related assignment at present. You’ll meet her today. Kim’s a damn fine detective, but she plays it strictly by the book and can be a pain in the ass sometimes. I think she was a little ticked off that Toomey didn’t send her with me this morning. Truth is, I could have taken her, but she drives like a crazy woman. And before we start, I want you to call me Lou, not Lieutenant.”
“Lou—as in Lieutenant?” Liddell said.
“No. Lou, as in my name. Louis Sanchez. Lou. No more rank stuff, okay?”
“Okay, Lou,” Liddell said.
“Do either of you have any experience with these damn computers? For all I know, they’re expensive paperweights.”
“Jack’s threatened by technology, Lou,” Liddell said. “I know how to turn one on. We usually have our computer guru do the research stuff.”
“Well, shit. I was hoping one of you was a computer geek. Kim requisitioned the laptops from the PD. She’s the one that does all that kind of computer shit for me. Well, I guess we’ll have to find some twelve-year-old.”
Jack said, “Let’s start with why the St. Louis case is stalled.”
“Not stalled exactly,” Sanchez said. “The Homicide Squad thinks they have it solved, ABA.”
“ABA?” Liddell asked. He’d never heard that term in police jargon.
“Yeah. All But Arrested. ABA. You guys don’t use that one? Anyway, we had a witness that claimed she saw the murder. She went through our mug shots and identified a guy. He turned out to be a mental case and in the psych ward when the murders happened. Later on, she was ninety percent sure it was another guy, a gang member who happened to be a suspect in some other murders. Turned out he was in jail in Oklahoma at the time. But one of our detectives still likes him for the killings and is stuck on proving he could have been here and not in the showers with Bubba in Oklahoma.”
Jack sputtered hot coffee back into his mug. “That’s all you’ve got? No offense, Lou, but we’ve got a fresh case on our plate, so what are we doing here picking the bones of an old one. Toomey seemed to think we could help you or you could help us.”
Sanchez was unperturbed. “It wasn’t my idea to bring you here. I know how hopeless this looks. I was brought in three weeks ago and haven’t come up with much of anything, but I’ve made some connections to other cases. You didn’t even know about the cases in Florida, Texas, and Louisiana until I told you.”
Jack said, “Sorry. You’re right.” Jack didn’t want to piss Sanchez off, but this seemed like a waste of time.
Sanchez said, “Sorry. I guess I’m a little touchy right now. I’ve spent the last three weeks bleeding ideas and not much to show for it. Maybe Toomey thought a fresh set of eyes might see something I missed. You’re here. I’ll answer questions, but you should form your own opinions. If you still think we have shit for a case, I’ll buy you dinner and send you home. How about that?”
What Jack thought was that this was typical Fed foot-dragging and he was losing some of his good opinion of Lieutenant Sanchez. But he said, “Okay. Point made. Sorry I went off on you.”
Seeing the fighting was over, Liddell tucked a donut in his mouth.
“The important stuff is in these folders,” Sanchez said. Three sets of identical file folders lay one on each desk. Sanchez opened the top folder and took out several eight-by-ten color photos that were paperclipped together. Jack and Liddell did the same.
The photo on top was an aerial photo taken by a drone of a semitrailer parked close to the loading dock of a large warehouse-type building. The back doors of the trailer were open, and an ambulance was backed in near the doors.
The next photo was the inside of the trailer. Piles of bloated bodies covered the floor. Jack skipped through the remaining photos. He’d already seen his share of decomposition and various stages of death.
Sanchez continued. “Back in August we got a suspicious circumstance call. The suspicious circumstance turned into a semitrailer full of bloated bodies. We don’t have an exact date the trailer was left there, but the coroner put the date of the deaths at about three weeks prior to our guys finding it. That would be the first week of August. The temperatures that month ranged from the high nineties to three digits.
“Forty-seven dead including two baby girls. All of the dead had hot-off-the-press green cards, except for one. He had an Egyptian passport showing he came into the country through JFK airport three weeks ago. He was carrying a Russian-made semi-auto, 7.62-millimeter TT-30 pistol. I’ll tell you why the caliber is important in a minute.
“These aerial shots will give you an idea of the area where the semi and trailer were found, and the condition of the bodies,” Sanchez said.
Liddell said, “The picture is marked Drone #3. You’ve got drones?”
Sanchez asked, “You guys don’t use drones? Huh. The other photos in that set are of the inside of the trailer.” He said to Liddell, “We didn’t need a drone for those.”
Jack said, “I believe our Honduran guy was trying to pry the doors open with the knife. There are MS-13 connections.”
Sanchez said, “There’s evidence that some of ours tried to claw the doors open. The Egyptian never used the gun. You found your driver right away, but the driver in our case wasn’t with the truck. He was found a few days later stabbed to death like your driver.”
Sanchez continued. “Nothing out of the ordinary inside the truck’s cab, but we did find a gas receipt. Someone, maybe the driver, gassed up in Fort Worth exactly three weeks before the truck was found. We didn’t find any food or water in the trailer, and no signs there had ever been any. They were using the floor as a toilet.
“If he came up from Mexico, he would have had to gas up around Fort Worth. That would take him to Oklahoma City, where he could get on I-44 and straight into St. Louis. No blood or signs of a struggle, so we figured he just parked and walked away or got a ride. We thought the bastard just left them to cook, and he may have done just that.”
“Maybe he was delivering them to St. Louis and was getting paid?” Liddell suggested.
Sanchez’s hands clenched into fists. “Anyway, we found that asshole’s body in a little wash this side of the Mississippi River. He was a mile north of the Queen Casino. The next set of photos shows the body in relation to the truck location.”
This view was from higher up. The body was circled in red, and the location of the truck was circled in blue.
Liddell asked, “Do you think your driver knew his killer or thought he knew him and left voluntarily?”
“Whatever, it still comes out the same. There has to be a reason the doors were left locked,” Jack said. “The doors were locked in our case as well. We found the key to the padlock hidden in the driver’s shoe.”
“I put the photos of the driver’s wounds in the next folder.”
Jack and Liddell opened the manila folder marked “Driver” and immediately saw the connection between the St. Louis and Evansville cases. The wounds were cruciform in shape and in the same area of the body in each death. Jack focused on one of the wounds of the St. Louis driver. “Have you got a magnifying glass?”
“You saw the same thing I did,” Sanchez said. “Our coroner said it was a bolster mark, and our forensics confirmed it.” A bolster is a collar where the blade meets the handle of a knife. Its purpose is to keep the hand from slipping down the handle onto the blade. That’s particularly helpful if the hand is slick with blood.
“Open the next folder,” Sanchez told them.
Jack and Liddell opened the next folder marked “Weapon.” Inside were photos of a bayonet laid out next to a tape measure. The
handle was short, wooden, four inches in length. The blade measured eleven inches. The bolster was designed with a hole bored into the metal at the top.
“Just a minute,” Sanchez said and went to a filing cabinet, reaching behind it. He came back holding a rifle with a bayonet folded back against the side of the wooden stock. “Check this out,” he said and unfolded the bayonet. It clicked into place alongside the barrel, and he laid it on the desk.
“That’s it,” Liddell said.
“Our forensic guy says he’s ninety percent sure this is like the weapon that was used. It’s an old bayonet of Russian design made specifically for a Mosin-Nagant M44 7.62mm Russian rifle. The blade is twenty-two inches of hardened steel. It’s been in use since WWI and is still in use some places. And believe it or not, this isn’t a rare bayonet. My forensic guy found this one online. I bought this rifle and bayonet off the internet for three hundred dollars.”
Sanchez used a screwdriver, removed the bayonet from the rifle barrel, and handed it to Jack. Jack balanced it in his hand. It was heavy. The cruciform blade was dull.
Sanchez said, “The coroner said the edges of the blade were razor sharp. This one is shit, as you can see. This guy must keep it sharp. Remember I told you about the Russian-made semi-auto 7.62 millimeter pistol the Egyptian was carrying? It was made in the ’30s like the rifle. Maybe a coincidence? Anyway, our Homicide Unit is all over this. They’re running down everything they can related to Russian-made weapons, but I think they are concentrating mostly in the area around St. Louis. And I think they aren’t giving up on their main suspect, who was in jail in another state at the time. I gave Anna Whiteside a copy of all this. She’s checking.”
“What do you make of the Egyptian passport?” Jack asked.
“Whiteside says the passport is forged,” Sanchez answered. “She’s running pictures of the Egyptian and all the others through her database and the Interpol database.”
“Any luck identifying your driver?” Jack asked. “So far we’ve got nothing on ours.”