Get Busy Dying (Roy Ballard Mysteries)

by Ben Rehder

  I didn’t know what to say. But it was possible this conversation might someday need to be repeated in a courtroom, and I didn’t want either of us to have to lie, so I said, “Could be anything. Won’t know until we check it out.”

  Which was true, technically speaking. If we found what I figured we’d find, the cops could later gripe that we’d contaminated the scene. But I could counterclaim that I didn’t know for certain that it was a crime scene at this point.

  Mia was shaking her head. “We should’ve followed the car. Damn it. Then we’d at least know who was driving.”

  And who might’ve been dragged, I thought.

  “We don’t know what we’re going to find,” I said.

  “We should call it in,” Mia said.

  “These footprints will be gone in minutes,” I said. “We need to follow them while we can.”

  She was torn. I could see that, even in the faint light. Plus, there were some legal nuances she wasn’t aware of, but there wasn’t time to explain it all right now.

  I said, “Mia, look. The tire tracks are already worthless for casting prints. There is no tread pattern. Same with the footprints. They wouldn’t even be able to estimate shoe size. And we don’t know how far they lead. If they get washed away, even if we do call the cops, they might not be able to find anything. We have to—”

  “All right. No more talk. You’re right. Let’s go.”

  I didn’t waste any time. I led the way, following alongside the tracks, but not on top of them. My feet sank about six inches into the mud with each step. We reached the barbed-wire fence and clumsily helped each other climb over.

  “Whatever they were dragging,” I said, “it looks like they slid it under the fence.”

  “Looks like two sets of prints,” Mia said. “So one set going in and one going out?”

  “I imagine so.”

  I shined the beam as far as it would reach. It appeared the footprints and the drag marks went in a fairly straight line as far as we could see. So we followed. Ten yards. Then twenty. Then fifty.

  My poncho hood slipped backward off my head and I didn’t bother putting it back on, because it wasn’t helping that much to begin with. Every thirty seconds or so, lightning would split the night, and we could see the landscape ahead of us. But it was all the same. Flat and muddy. A little grass, but not much. A tree here and there.

  We kept slogging forward, and it was slow going, but after ten minutes we were at least two hundred yards from the road. At one point, I spotted a yellow cylindrical object about the size of a roll of Lifesavers stuck in the mud. Shotgun shell. It did not appear fresh; the metal on the end was rusted.

  “Roy,” Mia said.

  She had aimed her flashlight well ahead, and it was now shining on a large body of water directly in front of us. I waited, and when lightning flashed, I could see that it was about half an acre in size. Either a natural pond or a manmade livestock tank. Didn’t matter, really. What was important—as we discovered when we moved closer—was that the footprints and the drag marks went straight into the water.

  We moved within five feet of the edge of the tank. The rain was hitting so hard on the surface, the water looked like it was boiling.

  “Now do we call?” Mia asked.

  I mulled over our options for a few seconds.

  “Roy?”

  I shook my head and handed Mia my flashlight. “I’m going in,” I said, and I began to remove my poncho.

  “You’re doing what? Oh, hell no. Are you nuts?”

  “That’s debatable.”

  “Roy, come on. You don’t know what’s in there. It could be dangerous.”

  “It’s just water. Standing water. No currents.” I removed my shirt.

  “It could be fifty feet deep.”

  “Most tanks are shallow. Besides, I’m a great swimmer. I swim so well that I sometimes pretend I won a state championship.” I took off my shoes, which were so caked with mud they weighed about five pounds each. Then I pulled my wet socks off.

  “God damn it, Roy.”

  “How is it any more dangerous now than if I came out here for a swim on a sunny afternoon?”

  Of course, right at that moment, there was a tremendous lightning strike that couldn’t have been more than a quarter-mile away.

  “Ignore that,” I said.

  She glared at me. “Don’t go beyond voice distance. And not beyond my flashlight beam.”

  “I won’t.”

  Then I began to unbutton my jeans. “I don’t want to take these off, you understand, but I don’t need the extra weight.” And off they came. Now I was standing in the mud in nothing but my underwear. Soggy, sagging underwear. I’m sure it wasn’t a good look.

  “Well,” Mia said, looking me up and down in an exaggerated fashion, “if you don’t survive, at least I’ll have this lasting memory.”

  “That’s the important thing,” I said. I looked at the tank. This was probably a pretty stupid idea. “All right, then,” I said.

  Mia aimed both flashlight beams at the near surface of the water. I stepped to the edge and began to wade in. The water was cool, but not cold. The bottom of the tank was a layer of mud even thicker than what we had just hiked through, but there were no rocks, sticks, or other debris.

  I pushed farther, my bare feet sinking into the mire with each step, and soon I was in water up to my knees, then my hips, then my nipples, and just as I was getting worried, it leveled out. The rain continued to hammer down, punctuated by an occasional lightning strike nearby. I had to wonder what would happen to me if lightning hit the tank directly. Water conducts electricity, obviously, but how far? Would a strike anywhere on the tank be fatal? I’m glad Mia hadn’t wondered about that.

  “You okay?” she called out. She was keeping both of the flashlights trained on me.

  “Fine,” I said. “But I think I just found Jimmy Hoffa.”

  I was forty feet from shore. I realized that slowly walking around wasn’t going to cut it. This tank was half the size of a football field, but circular, with a diameter of perhaps 150 feet. “I’m gonna go under,” I shouted. “But don’t worry. I’ll come up every ten minutes or so.”

  “Not funny, Roy,” she yelled back.

  “Okay, every thirty seconds. I need to swim along the bottom or we’ll be out here all night.”

  I waited for her to object, and finally she said, “Okay. But be careful.”

  I tried to approach it in some sort of logical manner, so I wouldn’t be covering the same ground twice. My thinking was this: If I were going to discard a body in this tank, I’d probably drag it right out to the center, which was about 75 feet out. That way, if the tank began to dry up during a period without rain, the body would remain covered for as long as possible. So it made sense to start my search in the center and swim in circles that got larger and larger. How long would that take? I had no idea.

  I slipped under the surface, and the darkness was overwhelming and immediate. I could see nothing—not even my hand twelve inches in front of my face. I’ll admit I was a little spooked. I swam toward the center, keeping my hands in front of me, skimming the bottom of the tank as I went. After twenty seconds, I popped to the surface. I couldn’t touch the bottom. The water here was about eight feet deep.

  Mia found me with the flashlights, though the beams were fairly weak at this distance. I waved that everything was okay. Then I took a deep breath and went under again, down to the bottom, and my hands immediately encountered a floating object that was soft and yielding—almost certainly a torso. Despite the fact that I’d known this was a possibility, I wasn’t prepared for it.

  I panicked.

  I recoiled and began flapping and flailing my arms to reverse my course. I came up out of the water backwards, and I’m sure it was a spectacle, like an underwater creature suddenly erupting to the surface.

  “Roy!”

  I had the presence of mind to give another wave that I was okay, but I’m sure it was o
bvious to Mia that something had happened.

  “Don’t worry,” I yelled, and I don’t even know why I chose those words. I was still seriously rattled, treading water, trying to keep my cool. Despite the fact that I don’t believe in ghosts or spirits, zombies or any sort of undead, I just knew a hand was about to reach up and grab my ankle at any moment.

  But I stayed where I was.

  Be rational. Calm down. Get ahold of yourself.

  It might not be a body. Maybe it was a dead fish. But a fish that large in a tank? And don’t dead fish float? I was trying to fool myself. Of course it was a body. But who? Realistically, there were only two likely candidates. Boz or Erin.

  “What is it?” Mia shouted.

  “I don’t know yet. But I found something. Give me a minute.”

  It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but I gathered myself and went back down. Slowly. But in less than five seconds, I found the object again.

  Jesus.

  There was no question now. I was grabbing an arm. And as much as I wished at that moment that the arm was roughly the same size as mine—a man’s arm—it wasn’t. It was thin. Fragile. A woman’s arm. And cold. I forced myself to follow the arm to the torso, and now I knew it was a small woman. Slender. Nude.

  With a chain locked around her midsection.

  I was already running out of oxygen—anxiety will do that—but I followed the chain and it led to a cinderblock resting in the muck at the bottom of the tank.

  I was tempted to pull the body and the cinderblock to the surface, so I could get a look at the face and confirm the identity. But I didn’t do it, because I was worried about destroying evidence. I couldn’t imagine what evidence I might damage by lifting the corpse to the surface, but just because I couldn’t imagine it, that didn’t make it a possibility.

  But there was another way to find out.

  I followed the chain back to the corpse. It seemed like such a violation, but I did it anyway. I ran my hands along her torso, upward, feeling my way by touch. My hands grazed her rib cage, the sides of her breasts, and then followed her arms to her face. With my air running out, I cupped her right cheek.

  Aw, damn.

  The mole was there. Small, but I could feel it.

  Erin.

  I left her where she was, floating in the cool, dark water, while I broke to the surface for air.

  35

  Pay phones are hard to find nowadays, but Mia spotted one in McDade, on the far edge of the parking lot of a closed convenience store. It was five in the morning and I was shivering so bad my teeth were clattering together.

  Earlier, as we’d driven away from the crime scene, after I’d described in detail what I had found and told her why I hadn’t tried to lift the body to the surface, I had explained the precarious legal situation to Mia.

  “The GPS tracker on Erin’s car is illegal,” I reminded her. “That means if we call the cops—tell them what we found and how we found it—none of it will be admissible.”

  “But we’re not cops. Those rules don’t apply to us, do they?” She was, of course, distraught about the situation, but, like me, she had known what we might find out there.

  “In this case, yes,” I said. “They would be discovering evidence based on illegal activity on our part. In Texas, it’s inadmissible—just as much as if they’d used an illegal GPS themselves.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive,” I said.

  It was still raining, but only lightly now, because we were heading west while the storm was continuing east. The worst part was behind us.

  “So if a burglar breaks into a house and finds a dead body...”

  “Well, that’s different,” I said. “I don’t know if I can explain it with legal jargon, but the burglar wasn’t there to collect information on the residents or solve a crime, so what he found would be admissible. Same if a landlord went into a rental property with a legal reason to be there. But if the landlord starts snooping around, like maybe rooting through some desk drawers, and he finds a pound of cocaine, that wouldn’t be admissible.”

  “But if we report it anonymously, it’s admissible?” Mia asked.

  “Yeah, because the cops don’t know we used illegal means to find the body.”

  “God, that is really fucked up,” Mia said.

  I didn’t say anything. It was the law, that’s all. Sometimes the law didn’t make much sense, until you did some research into why the law was written the way it was. Of course, even then, some laws still didn’t make sense. Most did, though, and that was probably as good as it could get.

  “Plus,” Mia said, “by calling it in anonymously, we avoid getting in trouble.”

  “True,” I said, “but if I thought it’d be better to identify ourselves and tell them exactly what happened—if that would help them build a better case—that’s the route I’d want to take. The prosecutor would have to hit me with a class-A misdemeanor for the illegal tracker, and that would probably earn me some probation. I could live with that. But in reality, an anonymous call will put the sheriff on much better ground. He can call the landowner, request permission to search the tank, and go from there.”

  We reached the city limits of McDade.

  “I feel really bad for Erin,” Mia said. “She didn’t deserve to end up... like that.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “But she had to have been a part of the scam,” Mia said. “Or at least she knew what was going on. And Boz killed her.”

  “Probably,” I said.

  “What do you think happened? Why would he do it?”

  “Maybe she’d had enough and was threatening to tell the truth. At this point, I’m starting to doubt we’ll ever know for sure what really happened—unless Boz gets caught and confesses. Which brings us back, yet again, to the fact that—”

  “— we don’t have to figure it out,” Mia said.

  “Right.”

  “But I have to be honest,” she said. “Now I want to figure it out. I want to nail the person who killed Erin.”

  “Yeah, I know. So do I.”

  That’s when Mia saw the payphone and said, “There?”

  “Looks good.”

  “What if the store has surveillance cameras?”

  “Park at that vacant lot next door,” I said. “I’ll wear a hat and keep my head down.”

  So she did.

  I had my phone out and was doing some surfing. “Here’s the deal,” I said. “I’m not going to call 9-1-1, because I don’t want to speak to a live person. Instead...” I trailed off for a moment as I searched the website for the Lee County Sheriff’s Office. “Perfect,” I said. “I’m going to call the sheriff’s secretary’s number and leave a voicemail. It’ll be waiting when she gets to work in a couple of hours.”

  “Aren’t you worried about them having a recording of your voice?”

  “I’ll disguise it,” I said.

  “How?”

  I grinned. “I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but... there’s an app for that.”

  And there was. Since I wasn’t using my phone to make the call, I had to record the message on my phone, then play it into the mouthpiece of the pay phone. One extra step. No big deal. I chose the mode that made my voice sound like a robot. Tinny. Mechanical. A monotone. But very easy to understand.

  “Four miles east of McDade, on Stockade Ranch Road, about one mile north of Paint Creek Road, there is a pasture on the right-hand side that has a barbed-wire fence with red T-posts. Look for an orange piece of surveyor’s tape tied around the top strand. Roughly two hundred yards east of that tape is a livestock tank, and approximately in the center of that tank you will find a woman’s body, held down by a chain around a cinderblock. The body was placed there at about three-thirty this morning by an unidentified person driving a car owned by Erin Gentry of Travis County. Her husband is Boz Gentry. If you don’t recall that name, Google it or talk to Detective Ruelas at the Travis County Sheriff’s
Office. There were track marks indicating that a single individual dragged the body from the car, parked on the shoulder, to the tank.”

  As we continued driving, something occurred to me. I said, “We have to remove the tracker from Erin’s car. Soon. Right now might even be best.”

  Mia didn’t say anything.

  “You hear me?” I said.

  “I did, yeah. I’m thinking about something else.”

  I waited.

  Finally Mia said, “Will Ruelas be able to get a search warrant for the Gentry house now?”

  She had a mischievous expression on her face. Odd, because Mia isn’t generally mischievous. Playful, sure, but not mischievous, because “mischievous” implies a willingness to do things one shouldn’t do, and that’s not Mia’s style. She’s smart. Grounded. Determined. But she stays within the lines. She is usually the voice of reason calling me back from the edge. Maybe this case had pushed her beyond her normal limits.

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  “How quickly?” she asked. We were entering the Austin city limits. It was still dark out, but the eastern sky behind us was now clear of storm clouds and starting to lighten with the coming sunrise.

  “That will be their next step,” I said.

  “Will they search it today?”

  I tilted my head back and forth, thinking. “I’d say tomorrow is much more likely. We’ve got three different counties working on this—Lee, Hays, and Travis. It’ll take them awhile to share all of their information. Plus, Ruelas won’t rush it, because it’s such a high-profile case. He’ll want to put together a very thorough and well organized search—one that no defense attorney can pick apart later. So he’ll do it first thing tomorrow morning. He’ll write the affidavit today, get it signed, then search tomorrow. Why? What are you getting at?”

  “What if,” she said slowly, “we search the house first?”

  I let out a snort of disbelief. “Uh... pardon me?”

  “You heard me,” she said.

  “Yes, I did, and it’s taking me a second to process it.”

  “I’ll wait. But if we’re ever going to figure this mess out, the evidence—if there is any—will be in the Gentry house.”