by Ben Rehder
“You said if I answered your question, you’d take off,” Buerger said.
“I wasn’t entirely honest about that,” I said. “Did Zeke set the fire, Jens?”
“How would I know?”
The woman was getting closer, almost within earshot. It appeared she was conducting inventory with the electronic gizmo.
I said, “You’d know because none of you are smart enough to keep your mouths shut. If Zeke did it, he’d brag about it.”
“I don’t know anything about it—swear to God—and I’m done talking,” Buerger said.
Damn it. First I believed Shane Moyer, and now I believed Jens Buerger.
The woman seemed to have noticed our prolonged conversation, and now she was coming this way.
“Crap,” Buerger muttered under his breath.
“Can I help you with something?” the woman asked, looking back and forth between Buerger and me.
I gave her a big smile. “My fault,” I said. “I tend to ramble on and on, even to total strangers. Can you direct me toward the extra-large condoms?”
Did I really want to drive to San Antonio in an attempt to locate Zeke Cooney and browbeat a confession out of him? No, I did not.
But I drove anyway.
Of the four participants in Jens Buerger’s fraud scheme, Zeke Cooney was the one about whom I had the least information. That was because he had lived a nomadic life across the country for the past two decades, and he was known to use aliases. He had moved to San Antonio from Mississippi less than two years ago. I located his house easily enough on the east side of town, after wading through rush-hour traffic on Loop 410.
Zeke was a construction worker—or that’s what he listed as his profession whenever he was required to fill out any form requesting such information—but you couldn’t tell it from looking at the dump he lived in. It was a rental, but still, you’d think he’d do some basic maintenance. The whole place sagged and needed paint. One window was boarded over. A section of rain gutter had come unmoored and was dangling precariously from the fascia board.
There were no vehicles in the driveway. I parked along the curb and simply sat for a few seconds. He wasn’t home. A guy like Zeke would be driving a huge, battered truck, and he wouldn’t park it in the garage. Plus, just looking at the garage door—the way the bottom edge didn’t rest flush against the concrete—I doubted it was even operable.
So I dialed Zeke’s phone number—the one listed in the file from Heidi. I had a spiel ready. See, someone had accidentally driven through my privacy fence this afternoon, and I needed to get it fixed before a big pool party tomorrow afternoon. We’d be celebrating my daughter’s birthday, and my wife wanted everything perfect. It wasn’t a huge job, but I was willing to pay top dollar to get the repairs done first thing in the morning, which meant I needed someone to give me an estimate tonight. Then I’d give him an address a few miles away—in a nicer neighborhood—and confront him when he arrived.
But he didn’t answer. Even worse, the number was no longer in service. Not a good sign.
It was a waste of time, but I went up to the front door and knocked. No response. So I pounded harder. Nothing.
“Lookin’ fer Zeke?”
I jumped slightly. Don’t know why. The voice came from my right. The neighbor on that side—a pudgy woman in her fifties, wearing a tank top, shorts, and flip-flops—had come out of her open garage and was standing in her driveway. She had a bottled wine cooler in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Have you seen him?”
“Not since this morning,” she said. “He packed up a bunch of shit and took off.”
And that justified the sinking feeling in my gut.
“Any idea where he went?”
“Nope. You a cop?”
“I’m a freelance phlebotomist.”
“Well,” she said. “Didn’t think you was a cop.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I said.
“You do that, honey.” She took a large gulp from her wine cooler.
“My name is Roy,” I said.
“Alma,” she said.
“When you say he packed up a bunch of shit...” I said.
“Suitcases. Cardboard boxes. Bunch of big power tools all roped down. Looked like the Clampitts’ truck when he pulled out of here. I figure we’ve seen the last of Zeke, and good riddance. That’s what I say.”
“You didn’t like him?” I said.
Alma looked at me as if I were crazy for even asking. “You can probably tell I ain’t no high-society snob, but we didn’t need his type around here. That man was trouble from A to Z.”
“How so?”
“Ain’t you ever looked a man in the eye and you could tell he didn’t have no conscious at all?”
She meant “conscience,” but I wasn’t going to quibble.
“Couple of times,” I said.
“That was Zeke,” Alma said. “Something wasn’t quite right in his head.”
“Did he live here alone?” I asked.
“Who would live with him?”
“What’s he drive?” I asked.
“Big ol’ green-and-white GMC truck that must be thirty years old. Got a headache rack and a bunch of toolboxes in the back.”
“Tell you what,” I said. “If he shows up around here again, I’ll pay you a hundred bucks to give me a call.”
I pulled out my wallet and handed her a business card.
“Cash money?” she said.
“On the barrelhead,” I said.
Alma started shaking her head. “Hell, it don’t make no difference anyhow. He’s long gone.”
I thanked her for her time. She raised her wine cooler in my direction and wished me good luck.
Before I drove away, I checked the mailbox and found at least a week’s worth of junk mail and overdue bills addressed to Zeke Cooney and two other names I didn’t recognize. I took all of it.
Thunder woke me at three in the morning, followed by a hard and insistent downpour, and it wasn’t long before my mind was back on Zeke Cooney.
Just because he had hightailed it, that didn’t mean he’d started the fire at Mia’s house. Maybe he was running because of the collapse of the fraud scheme. Maybe he was worried that charges were forthcoming. An investigation might force the cops to sort out Zeke’s past and fill in any missing holes in his criminal pedigree. How many aliases did he have? Were there any active arrest warrants in other states? Maybe Zeke ran because an avalanche was heading his way.
The entire apartment building shook from an enormous lightning strike that couldn’t have been more than a hundred yards away.
I was also fully aware that I was putting more effort into the arson at Mia’s house than I would have if I’d been the victim myself. I’d always been that way—protective of my friends and family, sometimes to a fault. When I was a teenager, an insult directed at me might have rolled off my back, whereas the same insult at a friend could very well have led me into a fistfight, whether my friend wanted me involved or not. I’d had to learn how to temper that tendency over the years.
Now, though, it was the circumstances alone that were forcing me to say uncle—both on the Boz Gentry case and on Mia’s arson. We’d hit dead ends on both.
But I wasn’t totally discouraged yet, because there are times when a case proceeds of its own accord. You’re ready to call it quits, and suddenly you learn something, quite by chance, that puts you back in the chase. It is always an enormous relief. Wish for that sort of break and it won’t happen. But out of the blue? Unexpected?
Like, say, from a phone call in the middle of the night during a ferocious storm?
The rain was coming down so hard, I almost didn’t hear the music. Then I sat up. Yep. I could hear the strains of “Brick House.” After what Mia had been through, my first thoughts went toward some sort of emergency. I grabbed the phone off the nightstand and answered by saying, “Everything okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Mia said, sounding excited. “The storm woke me, so I was on the computer, and I saw an alert on Erin Gentry’s car. It left her house an hour and a half ago and is now about 45 miles east of town.”
“Where, exactly?”
“Just the other side of McDade, but from what I can tell, she’s on a little county road, pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Looks like she got a good start before the rain hit. Right now, the car hasn’t moved in about twenty minutes.”
The obvious question was: Why was Erin Gentry driving around at three in the morning during a massive storm?
Lightning struck again nearby, and the pane of glass in my bedroom window vibrated so loudly I was surprised it didn’t shatter.
“Well, hell,” I said. “You know what we have to do.”
“Now?” she said.
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“You want to take the SUV or the van?”
33
She pulled up outside my apartment building in 15 minutes. Even though I used an umbrella when I made the dash to the SUV, I was drenched by the time I hopped inside. The rain was coming down at an angle.
“Holy moly,” I said. “Maybe this isn’t such a great idea.”
“I’ll go slow,” Mia said. “We’ve got four-wheel drive and anti-lock brakes.”
“And Danica Patrick at the wheel,” I said.
As she pulled away—with the windshield wipers furiously trying to keep up with the rain—I removed my laptop from its waterproof case. “I kept tabs on Erin while you were driving over. About two minutes ago, her car started moving again.”
Mia didn’t reply. There was no need to, and she was busy concentrating on the road.
I checked the tracking software. “She’s heading this way,” I said. “Coming back the same way she went.”
“There’s nothing out there, Roy,” Mia said. “Where she parked. No houses or other buildings. Nothing.”
“Yeah, I noticed that.”
The physiography east of Austin was dramatically different than in the opposite direction. Night and day, really.
To the west—to Dripping Springs, and out Bee Caves Road where Erin lived—was the rugged Hill Country, covered with cedars, oaks, yucca, and prickly pear, and layered with thin, inhospitable soil atop limestone or granite bedrock.
To the east was a thin swath of blackland prairie—flat to gently rolling grasslands with rich, deep soil that was much more suited to crop production. And easy digging.
“Which way?” Mia asked a few minutes later. She almost had to shout because of the rain pounding on the glass.
“Same way Erin went,” I said. “Interstate 35 to 290.”
We had been on the road for about ten minutes and I hadn’t seen another moving vehicle. I could hardly see the traffic signals. Mia hadn’t yet reached a speed above thirty. I realized I was shivering from my wet clothes.
“Is it handling okay?” I asked. “Do we need to pull over until this passes?”
“No, we’re good. Just can’t go very fast.”
“Go as slow as you need to.”
On the interstate, we began to see a handful of vehicles creeping along. When we went east on Highway 290, it was the same—light traffic—but the road here had shoulders, and the majority of vehicles had pulled over to wait until the rain let up. I glanced at the speedometer. We were going eighteen miles per hour, and even that felt a bit reckless.
But we kept going. And I kept silent, so Mia could focus. In the meantime, Erin Gentry’s vehicle was roughly three miles away and closing. I watched her progress on my laptop, and I realized we had a decision to make soon.
Mia had been thinking the same thing, because she said, “Follow Erin or keep going?”
Meaning, should we go investigate the area where she had parked? She had obviously gone out there for a reason, and this rain might make it harder for us to figure that reason out. Evidence could be washed away. Evidence? Of what? I was letting my imagination run away with the situation.
“I think we have to keep going, don’t you?” I said.
I could see Mia’s face in the glow of the dashboard lights. “I really don’t know. This is very weird.”
“No argument there. But based on our current speeds, we have about five minutes to make up our minds.”
“Geez,” Mia said. “What was she doing out there?”
“I don’t know, but if she got out of the car to do whatever it was that she did, there will be tracks. But not for long. Hold on a sec.” I jumped over to a weather radar website. “Looks like it’s been raining there lightly for awhile, but this big stuff that’s right on top of us is headed that way.”
“Maybe there’s nothing to find,” Mia said. “Maybe she was driving to Houston, had second thoughts, pulled over to think for a minute, then turned around.”
“Just randomly driving to Houston? At three in the morning? With a storm bearing down?”
“You got a better idea?”
“I rarely do. But say you’re right and she was driving to Houston and there’s nothing to find where she parked on that little county road. That would also mean there’s no reason to follow her, right? What would be the point?”
Mia didn’t reply. We were well outside the city limits now—between Austin and the little town of Elgin—and the darkness was overwhelming.
“Not to rush you, but she’s about a mile away.”
“We have to let her go,” Mia said after a moment.
“Agreed.”
“Right?”
“Absolutely. And if we don’t find anything, remember—it was all your idea.”
“And if we do find something,” Mia said, “it was all yours.”
“Exactly.”
We waited. Then, far away on the horizon, headlights appeared. Dim as hell, but they were definitely headlights.
“Erin,” Mia said.
“Yep.”
The lights got closer. And closer. And then the vehicle was passing us on the other side of the divided highway. I couldn’t even see the vehicle well, much less get a look at the driver.
“Maybe we should follow her,” I said.
“Goddammit, Roy, we—”
“I was kidding! Sheesh.”
“Not a great time to kid.”
After ten more minutes, we reached Elgin, known as the Sausage Capital of Texas, for reasons most people can deduce without a lot of trouble. Texans like their sausage.
Even at our slow speeds, we were moving faster than the storm, so the rain was coming down a little more lightly. But it was right behind us, following the same route. Mia was able to goose it up to about forty-five, so, in less than fifteen minutes, we reached McDade, home of the annual McDade Watermelon Festival. Texans like their watermelon, too.
“I have a rough idea where we’re going,” Mia said, “but I need you to navigate.”
“Just a little further up here and you’ll turn left on Marlin Street.”
She did, and we passed McDade Junior High, plus a bunch of small frame houses on flat lots, and then Marlin Street turned into County Road 142 as we left town. We followed that for maybe half a mile, turned right on Paint Creek Road, then left on Stockade Ranch Road.
Thanks to our slower speeds, the hard rain would catch up to us again soon. I directed Mia through a couple more turns, and eventually the pavement ended and we were on a gravel road.
Mia said, “As the saying goes, we’re not at the end of the world, but you can see it from here.”
“We’re almost there,” I said. “One more turn.”
The lightning and thunder just a few miles away had once again grown so forceful that you could feel the rumbling in your bones. The storm was catching up to us.
“There are absolutely no lights out there,” Mia said, and she was right. If there were any homes or buildings, they were set well off the road.
“Another hundred yards or so,” I said. I checked Google Maps, which showed property lines
if you zoomed in tight enough. “There are large tracts on either side of the road. We’re talking several hundred acres each. Doesn’t look like either tract has any buildings on it. We’re almost there.”
She began to slow.
The gravel road wouldn’t show evidence of recent traffic, but the grass on the shoulder would.
“Right there,” Mia said.
There was an obvious place where a vehicle had pulled over, creating deep, muddy trenches.
“Just park in the road,” I said. “We don’t want to make any tire tracks of our own. Leave the flashers on.”
The chances of anyone else coming down this road at four in the morning we’re almost zilch, and there was room to go around the SUV if necessary.
We always keep cheap rain ponchos in all of our vehicles, so we each quickly slipped on one, complete with the little hood over our head. Better than nothing. I grabbed a couple of powerful flashlights and handed one to Mia. We left all electronics—phones and laptop—in the SUV.
After we stepped out into the road, we used our flashlight beams to inspect the area where the car had parked. The shoulder was sparsely covered with grass, but the majority of the terrain was just dirt—now mud.
“Footprints,” Mia said. “That’s about where the driver’s door would have been.”
The prints were not well defined, and the mud was soft enough that it was hard to determine just how big—or small—the shoes were that left the prints.
I used my light to follow the prints toward where the trunk of the car would have been, and then from the trunk toward the fence and the fallow pastureland beyond it. “You see that?” I said.
“Yep.”
“What do you see?” I didn’t want to influence her opinion.
“Drag marks.”
34
The rain began to come down noticeably harder. My jeans and shoes were already soaked.
“This is probably a crime scene, Roy,” Mia said.
“We don’t know that.”
“Oh, come on. You want to explain those marks? Somebody dragged a body.”