“That sounds like a fishing expedition to me,” Kerney said. “Patterson has a history of serious mental illness. Did anyone stop to consider that when she called Larsen she may have over-dramatized her meeting with Detective Pino and scared him into running?”
“So why did Larsen shoot at our people?” Tafoya asked.
“Perhaps because he’s also not right in the head,” Kerney said through clenched teeth. “What instructions did you give SWAT?”
“To proceed with caution and attempt to apprehend only,” Molina replied. “It was my call, Chief.”
“Were they advised of his mental condition?”
“Yes, sir,” Molina said.
“And told he was wanted for questioning only?”
“Yes, but they never got the chance to talk to him, Chief,” Molina said. “According to the officers on the scene, Larsen spotted them on the trail, took cover, and started squeezing off rounds before they even saw him.”
Kerney turned his attention back to Sergeant Tafoya. “Did you talk to any of Larsen’s clients who saw him today?”
“Three of them, Chief,” Tafoya answered.
“And?”
“The first two said that Larsen seemed okay. He got to his jobs on time, did his work, and left without incident. The third said that Larsen seemed agitated when he told her he needed to take a break and go meet with a prospective client.”
Kerney looked hard at Tafoya. “Did it occur to you that a spooked ex-vet with a mental condition might not react rationally to being the target of a homicide investigation?”
Silence greeted Kerney’s question.
“Or that it might have been smart to just hold back and wait for Larsen to come down out of the mountains on his own when he got tired, hungry, cold, and thirsty?”
Tafoya lowered his head.
Kerney looked at the sky. July was the monsoon month in New Mexico, and thick cumulus clouds were building over the mountains. “Or that maybe the rainstorm that’s coming before nightfall would have driven him out of the forest?”
“What do you want to do, Chief?” Otero asked, in an attempt to buffer Kerney’s displeasure.
“I’m assuming command,” Kerney said. “I want the DA here now. Tell him we’ve got a police shooting that requires his personal attention. I want the crime scene techs rolling and at the shooting site before it starts to rain and destroys or contaminates the evidence. Bring up the mobile command unit. I want it operational in twenty minutes. Have you called for a medical examiner?”
“There’s one on the search-and-rescue team,” Otero said. “Anything else?”
“Hold search and rescue and the detectives back until the crime scene techs arrive. Get the Internal Affairs commander up here pronto. I want an internal investigation started immediately on both the shooting and the SWAT call-out. Get some uniforms to set up a road-block below the house before the news media show up. They’re gonna be on us like flies. I’ll call the city manager and brief him.”
As Molina and Otero reached for their handhelds, Kerney turned on his heel and walked away.
Ramona Pino knew that her affidavit for a search warrant didn’t come close to establishing sufficient probable cause that Larsen had murdered Jack Potter. Barry Foyt, the ADA, approved the affidavit only because Larsen had bolted to elude questioning and had been killed in a shootout by officers attempting to locate and detain him. Likewise, the judge who signed the order had been equally unimpressed with Ramona’s scanty facts, but went along with it because the suspect was dead.
Knowing she’d been cut a break, Ramona left the courthouse with an order in hand that made Larsen a bona fide murder suspect. Whether it would stand up under close scrutiny was another matter.
She made radio contact with Detective Matthew Chacon and asked him to meet her at Larsen’s apartment. It was an ironclad rule to have at least two officers serve a search warrant, one to gather the evidence and the other to inventory seized items and control anyone on the premises, which in Mary Beth Patterson’s case could well turn out to be a handful.
Ramona arrived at the apartment building before Chacon and spoke to Joyce Barbero in the office. She told Barbero about the search warrant, but made no mention of the Larsen shooting.
“Haven’t you upset Mary Beth enough?” Barbero asked disapprovingly as she came to the front of her desk.
Through the open office door, Ramona saw Matt Chacon pull up to the curb in his unit. “I’ll let you know when we’re finished with the search,” she said as she stepped outside.
Barbero watched from the doorway as Ramona warned Matt Chacon about Mary Beth’s mental condition and went over the specifics of the warrant.
Thin with bushy brown hair, Chacon chewed on a toothpick as he listened and pulled the forms he needed out of his briefcase. He tapped his shirt pocket for his pen, found it, and uncapped the top.
“Are you gonna tell Patterson about Larsen?” he asked.
“I’m going to have to,” Ramona said. “She’s next of kin.”
“Let’s do it,” Chacon said.
At the apartment, Mary Beth opened up the door and winced at Ramona. “Why are you back here?” she asked in a thin voice as her questioning gaze traveled to Matt Chacon.
“We need to look around your apartment,” Ramona replied.
“I know my rights,” Mary Beth said, her trembling hand toying with the doorknob. “You can’t do that.”
“I have a court order from a judge, Mary Beth,” Ramona said.
“You’re lying. Where’s my Kurt?”
“I need to talk to you about him,” Ramona said.
Her eyes dilated. “Why?”
“Because something bad has happened. Kurt is dead.”
Mary Beth sagged against the door, dropped to her knees, her hand clutching the doorknob, and began rocking slowly back and forth.
Ramona stepped behind her, put both hands under her arms, and pulled her upright. She could feel the hardness of Mary Beth’s breast implants against the palms of her hands. She walked her to the couch and sat her down.
“You have to listen to me, Mary Beth,” Ramona said as she sat beside the woman.
Mute, Mary Beth clasped her arms around her waist and continued rocking, bending her torso back and forth, the movement building into a catatonic rhythm.
Nothing Ramona said broke through Mary Beth’s stupor. Uneasy with the situation, she asked Matt to fetch Joyce Barbero, who came hurrying in, breathless and exasperated. She glanced at Mary Beth and shot Ramona an annoyed look.
“What happened?” Barbero demanded.
Ramona explained that Larsen was dead and Barbero’s expression changed to angry condemnation. She asked Ramona to move aside, knelt down, and spent ten fruitless minutes trying to talk Mary Beth back to reality.
“She has to go to the hospital,” Barbero said, shaking her head as she got to her feet.
Ramona called for an ambulance and then dialed Barry Foyt to ask for guidance on the situation.
“You’re sure the woman isn’t faking it?” Foyt asked.
“Positive.”
“Did you tell her you had a search warrant?” Foyt asked.
“I did.”
“And she’s not a target of the investigation, right?”
“Correct.”
“Do the search and leave copies of the paperwork behind,” Foyt said. “I’ll research case law and see if there’s a precedent. If it gets challenged, we can deal with it later. Find something, Detective Pino. The Larsen shooting doesn’t look good. My boss is in Tesuque now and he’s plenty steamed about what happened.”
Ramona held off on the search until the ambulance took Mary Beth away with Barbero in attendance. She spent the next two hours searching for documents, checking with the phone company to get a record of outgoing calls-none had been made to Jack Potter’s office or home since the service had been connected-and looking through the files and e-mail on a laptop computer on a small table in the bedr
oom.
There was no e-mail to or from Potter, but next to the computer sat an ashtray with a roach clip, a hash pipe, and a closed tin box containing a stash of marijuana.
The only mention of Jack Potter was in Mary Beth’s diary on a bedside table. Several old entries written in a flowery hand expressed Mary Beth’s anger and disappointment with Potter.
Ramona made a final sweep and told Matt to fill out the inventory sheet for the diary, laptop, grass, and drug paraphernalia.
“That’s it?” Chacon asked.
Glumly, Ramona nodded as she surveyed the front room. No matter how meager and dismal, the apartment represented a new life that two emotionally damaged people had attempted to build together. Now, all of that had been destroyed.
As she closed the front door, she wondered-given the mistakes she’d made today-if the same now held true for her career.
Some time back at Sara’s urging, Kerney had moved out of his cramped quarters and rented a place on Upper Canyon Road that was more than sufficient to accommodate both of them and the baby while their new home was under construction. It was a furnished guest house on an estate property owned by a mega-rich Wall Street stockbroker who rarely visited Santa Fe. Tucked against a hillside behind high adobe walls, the estate looked down on a small valley that once had been farmland but was now a wealthy residential neighborhood.
On the opposite hillside, trophy homes were perched in full view of the road that circled the valley, so that all who passed by could see the fruits of the owners’ success. Only a very few of the homes on the valley floor were still owned by Hispanics, and those were mostly small and built on tiny plots of land where a half acre could sell for as much as a quarter-million dollars.
On the rear patio of the guest house, Sara waited impatiently for Kerney’s return. He knew damn well she was scheduled to pick up her new car this afternoon from a Santa Fe dealership.
She’d sold her old vehicle at Fort Leavenworth and bought a new one with her own money. Kerney had offered to pay for it. But Sara was unwilling to become dependent on any man, even one she loved and had married. She didn’t make a big salary as a lieutenant colonel, but she’d been raised by frugal ranching parents who’d taught her the value of living debt free. So she’d put aside money every month over the past several years to be able to pay cash when the time came to replace her car.
Kerney, who had also been raised on a ranch, was much the same way about money and had only recently begun, with Sara’s encouragement, to spend some of the wealth he’d inherited from the estate of an old family friend.
Sara thought about the qualities she shared with her husband. Both of them had been raised to value work, thrive on it, take pride in it. That figured into her reluctance to give up her military career for full-time motherhood, just as it kept Kerney unwilling to retire from police work.
Could she really fault him for wanting to continue working at a job he loved? Or for responding to the demands of his job, when she would have done exactly the same thing?
She called for a taxi and within twenty minutes was at the dealership signing the paperwork. The car, a small SUV, was the safest on the market, a perfect size for a small family, and it came with all the bells and whistles. It would serve her well either at the ranch or on the D.C. beltway.
She drove the SUV home, hoping Kerney would be there so she could show it off to him. Instead, she found a dead rat under the portal by the front door. She stepped around it, went inside, and called the part-time estate manager who looked after the property.
“A rat?” the woman said in surprise.
“Yes,” Sara replied. “Does this happen often?”
“No, it’s never happened before. I’ll have it removed.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Sara said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Have there been any workmen or exterminators on the premises today?”
“No one is scheduled to be there.”
“Do you have poisoned bait traps put out?”
“No,” the woman answered. “There’s never been a need for them.”
Sara thanked the woman, hung up, and went back outside to look at the animal more closely. With a small stick she turned the rat over. Its limbs were rigid and splayed out from the torso, the mouth was open, and there were no visible wounds. An experienced military police officer who’d commanded a criminal investigation unit, Sara had seen her share of death, including a few suicides by poison. She had a strong hunch the rat hadn’t crawled onto the front portal to die.
She called Tug Cheney, explained the situation, and asked him to come over.
“Don’t touch it,” Cheney said. “I’ll be there soon. What’s going on? First the horse and now this.”
“I think somebody doesn’t like us very much,” Sara said.
She thought about calling Kerney then dropped the idea, deciding it would be best to wait until Cheney finished his examination.
As a precaution, she locked all the doors and windows and took Kerney’s personal handgun from a box on the bedroom closet shelf. She sat on the living room sofa, checked the rounds in the. 38, and laid the weapon on the end table.
This was no time for someone to be threatening her or her family. Without hesitation, she would blow away anyone who came to do them harm.
She patted her tummy and hummed quietly as she waited for Tug Cheney to arrive.
With the information Bobby Trujillo had provided, Patrol Officer Russell Thorpe found it relatively easy to locate the subcontractors who’d worked on Kerney’s new house. By the end of his shift, he’d interviewed everybody who’d been involved with site preparation, earth moving, concrete pouring, and the rough-in plumbing and electrical work. He’d also checked every possible vehicle for a tread mark match. The sum total of his efforts resulted in excluding everybody he’d interviewed as a likely suspect in the case, which wasn’t a bad thing.
At state police headquarters, Thorpe dropped off the evidence at the lab for analysis. On his way out the door the thought occurred to him that it might be wise to talk to the building suppliers. He called Trujillo on his cell phone, got the names and addresses of the companies that had delivered materials to the site, and set out to make the rounds.
A bachelor with no one waiting for him at home, Thorpe didn’t mind putting out the extra effort. He wanted to show initiative and make an arrest in the case. Besides pleasing Kerney, it would earn him some points with Chief Baca, which might help when he had enough time on the job to apply for a transfer to criminal investigations.
The suppliers consisted of an adobe manufacturer, a lumber company, and a ready-mix concrete outfit. The ready-mix plant and the lumberyard were nearby, so Thorpe checked there first and talked to the drivers, both of whom reported seeing no traffic on the ranch road or any suspicious activity at the job site. The adobe works was run by a tribal outfit on a pueblo outside of Espanola, a small city north of Santa Fe.
The drive to the pueblo took Thorpe along a busy highway that eventually ran north to Taos and then on to Colorado. He passed by two Indian casinos, through some badlands where the roadside businesses looked junky and languishing, and got caught in stop-and-go traffic as the road funneled down to the main drag in Espanola, which seemed to offer nothing more than a combination of strip malls, gas stations, fast-food restaurants, and mom-and-pop businesses housed in dilapidated buildings.
On the other hand, the pueblo outside of town had some charm. Located along the river in thick bosque with ancient cottonwoods lining the roadway, the main village was virtually hidden from the outside world.
In a large fenced clearing away from the village, Thorpe found the yard where the adobes were made. It consisted of a metal building and long rows of freshly made mud and straw adobe bricks that were drying in the sun. Bales of straw and mounds of clay were strategically located next to several large, motor-driven mixing tanks used to stir the ingredients to the right consistency. Hundreds of empty woode
n forms were lined up ready to be used in the next production run, and a fully loaded flatbed truck was parked in front of the office.
Inside the building he introduced himself to a middle-aged man who didn’t look happy to see a state cop in uniform on tribal land.
“What do you want?” the man asked suspiciously. His face was covered in a film of adobe dust and his large hands were calloused and rough looking.
“I’m investigating a crime in Santa Fe County,” Thorpe said, “and I need to talk to your driver.”
“I’m the manager and the driver,” the man said. “What crime?”
“You delivered to a construction site where a horse was killed sometime yesterday.” Thorpe gave him the location and the contractor’s name.
“I wasn’t at that site yesterday. Trujillo’s next order isn’t due for another week.”
“When were you out there?” Thorpe asked.
“Five, maybe six days ago.”
“Did you see anything out of the ordinary?”
The man shrugged. “Not really.”
“What did you see?” Thorpe asked.
“I had three deliveries to make that day so I got out there real early. A vehicle passed me coming down the ranch road. I figured it was one of the crew off to get something he needed for the job. But when I got to the site there wasn’t anybody around. I unloaded where Trujillo wanted the bricks and left before Bobby and his crew showed up. That’s all I saw.”
“What kind of car was it?”
“A van. One of those big, older models, maybe an eighty-two or eighty-three. A blue GMC with a crumpled front fender on the driver’s side. I got a good look at it because he had to slow way down to get past me on the road.”
Thorpe was impressed. The man had a good eye. “Did you see any passengers?”
The man shook his head. “Nope, at least not in the front. The rear windows had curtains.”
“Who was driving?” Thorpe asked.
“A man.”
“Anglo? Hispanic?”
“I didn’t pay any attention to his face.”
“Can you give me the exact date you were there?”
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