The Judas judge kk-5

by Michael McGarrity

  "How so?"

  "During the last two years, he made at least five D.W. I traffic stops involving women. He coerced them into having sex and then let them go without making an arrest."

  "Has a victim come forward?"

  Hutch shook his head. "Shockley used his own blank tapes to record the sex acts with his unit's video camera. Duran found them in his apartment."

  "Are you kidding me?"

  "Some of it makes everything but hardcore porno films look pretty tame."

  "I want to see those tapes."

  Hutch pointed to the cassettes on the shelf next to the wall-mounted combination TV and VCR. "They're gonna turn your stomach."

  "Has Andy seen them?"

  "Not yet, but he knows about them."

  "Has Agent Duran run down Shockley's stolen-car ring?"

  "He's working on it. Chief Baca said I'm to manage the division while you take the lead on the homicides."

  "That's correct."

  "With Chief Baca's permission, I'm going to release what we have on Shockley to the media. I don't want anybody in or outside of the department thinking Shockley was anything but a psycho who never should have worn a shield."

  "You don't have to do that for my sake, Hutch."

  Hutch shook his head and stepped toward the door. "I'm not. It's for all of us, Chief. The district attorney wants to meet with you again in an hour."

  "Tell him I'll be there."

  After Hutch left, Kerney watched the videotapes. By the time the last one finished playing, anger flushed his face. Shockley liked to sodomize his victims. In each tape he positioned himself at the front of his unit, bent the women over the hood and held them down with a hand on their necks. Then he'd smile at the camera with a smug, satisfied look on his face. The images made Kerney almost want to shoot Shockley all over again.

  He rewound the last tape, no longer feeling quite so lousy about taking Randy Shockley's life, and thought about Paul Gillespie, the small-town cop who'd been killed by a woman he'd raped. Nita Lassiter had shot Gillespie with his own handgun at the Mountainair Police Department.

  Kerney had solved the case with some lucky breaks and had come out of the investigation convinced that Nita Lassiter had more than an adequate reason to blow Gillespie away.

  Nita's trial had concluded last month, and she'd been found guilty of manslaughter, a third-degree felony. Because of mitigating circumstances, she'd been sentenced to one year minus a day in the county jail, with work-release privileges so she could continue her practice of veterinary medicine.

  A lot of cops and prosecutors around the state were upset when Kerney testified on Nita's behalf at the sentencing hearing. They didn't like the idea that a senior state-police officer could find any thing redeeming about a convicted cop killer, no matter what the justification might be.

  Now that he'd put Randy Shockley down, he wondered how much more character assassination he'd have to face. Maybe he'd go from being known as a turncoat who sided with a cop killer to being called a cop killer himself.

  He rewound the last cassette. With Hutch making sure all of the hard facts about Shockley got out, that might not happen. For the first time in hours, Kerney smiled. It was a damn fine gesture on Hutch's part.

  He checked the time, went back to the desk, and scanned through the field reports before leaving to meet with the DA.

  Kerney spent several uncomfortable but necessary hours with the district attorney, who probed hard to uncover any personal relationship that might have existed between Kerney and Shockley, or any work-related antagonism that might have contributed to Kerney's willingness to use deadly force. Kerney made it clear he'd never met Shockley before the shooting and had never supervised him.

  With that issue set aside, the interview shifted to Kerney's record of deadly force. The DA dug into all prior events, including a gun fight with a street drug dealer who'd blown out Kerney's knee, the shooting of a rogue army intelligence officer during a murder investigation at White Sands Missile Range, the wounding of Nita Lassiter, who had tried to commit suicide to avoid arrest, and a gun battle with assassins hired by a Mexican drug lord to kill Kerney.

  The records showed Kerney had been cleared of any wrongdoing in each incident. But the DA, a burly man with a high-pitched voice who breathed heavily through his nose, quizzed Kerney carefully on each event, looking for anything that might suggest Kerney was a trigger-happy cop.

  Kerney understood the DA's reasoning; compared to most officers he had an extremely high use-of-deadly-force history. At five o'clock he returned to the command center, drained but through the worst of it. The DA had let him go without scheduling another session.

  Sounds of commuter traffic hummed on the street as civilian workers from the air base and White Sands Missile Range made their way up the boulevard to houses in the foothills. At the nearby media staging area, reporters washed in the glare of high-intensity lights were broadcasting live satellite feeds back to stations and networks.

  To the west, diaphanous in a light haze, the far-off tips of the San Andres Mountains towered like silent sentinels over the Tularosa Basin, home of the vast White Sands Missile Range.

  Kerney's personal history was tied to the Tularosa. When he was a young boy, his parents had been forced off the family ranch when the missile range expanded; and less than three years ago Kerney had met his future wife, Sara, while searching for his A.W.O.L. godson, Sammy Yazzi, a soldier stationed at the base.

  Good and bad memories coursed through Kerney's mind. His early years on the ranch had been the best of his life, and meeting Sara Brannon, a strong-willed, beautiful woman, had brought him emotionally back to life in ways he'd never imagined possible. But the loss of the ranch still galled, and the murder of his godson would always remain a sore spot in his mind.

  The teams of agents and uniformed personnel from the crime scenes began trickling in, and Kerney went to meet them. No new killings had been reported, and Kerney figured the chances were good that the spree was over. He listened to their debriefings, which clearly indicated that a quick break in the case was unlikely. The sum total of facts remained unchanged: six people had been robbed and killed by person or persons unknown-probably with the same handgun-within a six-hour period, in a sequence that started at Carrizozo and ended at the Oliver Lee State Park. Vernon Langsford was the only victim to be shot twice with a silenced weapon.

  Why two bullets for Langsford with a silencer?

  In Kerney's mind, Langsford had to be the primary target, which meant that five innocent people had been killed to cover up a premeditated murder.

  Kerney went looking for Lt. Lee Sedillo, the assistant commander of the criminal investigation unit, who'd been gathering background information on Langsford. He found him glued to a computer screen at the front of the command trailer.

  Over twenty years ago, Kerney had started his career with the Santa Fe Police Department about the same time Sedillo had joined the state police. Kerney had worked on a number of joint cases with Lee after both of them had moved into criminal investigations.

  A big-boned, balding man, Sedillo had thick thighs and large buttocks, a legacy of his years as a high-school and college football lineman. He easily carried an extra twenty pounds on an imposing frame, and had a pudgy face.

  "What have we got on Vernon Langsford, Lee?" Kerney asked, as he sat in a chair next to Sedillo.

  "I knew who Langsford was as soon as Hutch asked me to check him out," Sedillo replied, as he positioned the cursor under an icon on the screen and clicked the mouse. "He retired as a district court judge about six years ago, not long after his wife was killed by a letter bomb that was sent to his home. The case was never solved. Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the FBI were brought in. I'm asking for their case files right now."

  "What do we have on the case?"

  "A lot of digging that went nowhere." Sedillo swung his chair around and faced Kerney. "I was still in narcotics when it happened, but it created a
big buzz in the department and among the politicians."

  "Why?"

  "Langsford had just ruled against the Mescalero Apache Tribe's casino operation, and ordered it shut down on a legal technicality. Everybody figured that Langsford was the target of the letter bomb, and the murder was tied to his ruling invalidating the gaming compact with the state. But nothing materialized to prove it."

  "You have our case file?"

  Sedillo nodded and patted a thick folder. "I almost burned up the fax machine getting it, but here it is. That's your copy."

  "Have you talked to the Ruidoso PD?"

  "Yeah, and they don't have much. Langsford kept a low profile. He lived alone and, except for his golf buddies, kept pretty much to himself."

  "Was he under any kind of protection?"

  "Not since before his retirement."

  "I want a list of everyone who visited the four campgrounds during the past month," Kerney said.

  "Do you think our killer reconnoitered the campgrounds?"

  "We can't dismiss it as a possibility."

  "Visitors pay on the honor system, Chief, if they pay at all. We'll have to gather the pay envelopes, pull the license plate information, and run motor vehicle checks. We're talking thousands of day and overnight visitors, Chief."

  "I know. Get started on it tonight. Tell the team to pay particular attention to anyone who visited all of the sites on the same day, or in a very short time span."

  "Will do."

  "And keep working the background investigations on the other victims. We can't rule out the possibility that Langsford wasn't the only primary-or even the last-target until we're sure that we haven't missed anything. If Langsford knew any of the other victims casually as the camp host at Oliver Lee State Park, or had a prior personal or professional relationship with any of them, that could be important."

  "Another long day at the office," Sedillo sighed, as he scribbled a note to himself.

  "If any promising connections or motives turn up, get an agent on a plane as soon as possible to check it out."

  "Are we looking at money, revenge, sex, profit, and politics as motives, Chief?" Lee asked dryly.

  "All of that, plus extremists. Using a letter bomb to kill Langsford's wife goes way beyond an ordinary homicide."

  "You got it." Lee paused. "Hutch told me about Shockley, Chief."

  "I'm glad he did."

  "You and I go back a long way. Can I speak freely?"

  "I've never known you to do otherwise, Lee."

  "Every member of the team knows you did what you had to do. If I hear any flak about it, I'm gonna kick some butt."

  Kerney squeezed Sedillo's shoulder and picked up the letter bomb file.

  "Thanks, Lee, but don't waste time on adjusting attitudes. Just keep your people focused on the job."

  Outside the command trailer, Kerney watched the day fade on the western horizon, tinting the San Andres with flecks of amber. The lights along Tenth Street flicked on in a hot pink that gradually turned yellow as the fluorescent filaments powered up. In the morning he would go to the mountain resort community of Ruidoso, an hour away by car, where Vernon Langsford had lived, and start digging. But tonight, he would read the file on the murder of Langsford's wife, catch a couple hours sleep, and then drive the killer's route from Carrizozo to Alamogordo, starting at the time of the first shooting.

  He wanted to experience the conditions encountered by the killer: see the terrain, move through the campgrounds, drive the roads, time his movement along the route, and get a feel for the killer's efficiency.

  His cell phone rang.

  "I got your message that you weren't coming," Sara said lightheartedly. "Does this mean our romance has soured?"

  The sound of Sara's voice made Kerney smile. "That's the last thing I need to have happen."

  "Bad day?"

  "Worse than bad."

  "Want to tell me about it?"

  "Have you got the time?"

  "Now that I have all weekend to work on it, my stunning analysis of military operations in Haiti since its independence from France can wait a few more minutes."

  Kerney walked away from the command trailer. "I killed a cop today, Sara."

  "Was it an accident?"

  "No, I had to shoot him."

  "Tell me what happened."

  Kerney walked to the lawn that bordered the walkway to the district office, stood under a tree that had yet to shed its leaves, and started talking to his wife.

  At first light, Kerney entered the command trailer. The core of the trailer, a rectangular space with built-in workstations, communications equipment, computer terminals, and office machines, was crowded with agents who looked as sleep-deprived as Kerney felt. He found Lee Sedillo in the small office, hand on his chin, staring blankly at some papers.

  The FBI and ATF files had arrived, and Kerney wanted a briefing before starting out for Ruidoso.

  Sedillo filled Kerney in. The letter bomb matched no signature of any other, either before or after the event. Reconstruction experts had determined the device was similar to, but not identical with, several that had been mailed to abortion clinics in the Southwest. Postal inspectors had intercepted those devices before delivery, but no suspects were ever identified. Nothing in Langsford's court docket over a ten-year period showed any rulings that could be connected to an anti-abortion issue.

  "Have all the victims' next of kin been notified?" Kerney asked. "All but Langsford's," Lee said. "His only living relatives are a daughter and son. Son's name is Eric, the daughter is Linda Langsford. Eric is single and thirty-two years old. His last known address is in Cloudcroft, twenty miles away. I sent an agent up there last night.

  He moved a month ago with no forwarding address. We're checking with his last employer."

  "And the daughter?"

  "The daughter is thirty-five, divorced, with no children. She practices law in Roswell, specializing in oil and gas leases and litigation. Her law partner said she started a vacation two days ago.

  He doesn't know where she is, exactly. She took off on a road trip to Colorado. I've asked all Colorado law enforcement agencies to keep an eye out for her."

  "Have you found any connection between Langsford and the other victims?"

  "So far, we've struck out, Chief, and it looks like we're not getting anywhere on a motive for any of the other killings."

  "Have the public information officer release all the victims' names, except Langsford's," Kerney said, "and tell him to keep emphasizing the spree-killing theme."

  The fairways at the Ruidoso golf course were still green, and several foursomes were out on the links in spite of the cool morning.

  Langsford's home, a pitched-roof, single-story ranch-style house, was on the back nine with a nice view of the tenth hole and the heavily forested peak behind the course. The house looked closed up and no one answered Kerney's knock at the front door. He walked around the exterior noting the burglary alarm system on the windows and the miniature TV security cameras above the entrances and the garage door.

  A new Ford Explorer pulled into the driveway as Kerney came around the side of the house, and a leggy woman wearing jeans and a lightweight wool turtleneck got out and hurried toward him.

  "Can I help you?" the woman asked.

  Somewhere in her thirties, she had long brown hair and an aura of sexuality that showed in her blue green eyes and the ease of her carriage.

  Kerney showed his shield and introduced himself. "Has there been a break-in?" the woman asked.

  "Nothing like that. Please tell me your name."

  "Kay Murray. I work for Judge Langsford."

  "Can we talk inside?"

  Murray hesitated, then nodded. "Let me get my things."

  Kerney watched as the woman returned to the Explorer, retrieved a large purse, an overnight bag, and a leather-covered day planner, then locked the car. Not tall, she gave the impression of height, and had a very shapely rump. She unlocked the front do
or and turned to Kerney. "Give me a minute to turn off the alarm."

  "Of course."

  Inside, she dropped her bag and purse on the couch and placed the day planner on an end table. The living room, a deep space with a fireplace along one wall and a large picture window with a view of the tenth hole, was decorated in expensive leather furniture accented by bulky dark oak side tables, which held handsome pottery lamps. Two beautifully framed Remington prints were nicely hung on either side of the fireplace, reinforcing the strong masculine feel of the room.

  Kerney looked closer at the prints and decided they were original oils, not reproductions.

  "What is this all about?" Kay Murray asked.

  "Judge Langsford has been murdered."

  Murray pressed a hand against her mouth. "Oh, dear, that can't be."

  "I take it you haven't spoken to the local police."

  "No, I've been in Albuquerque for the last two days. I just got back. What happened?"

  "I can't go into the specifics. I'm trying to contact either his son or his daughter."

  "Vernon has very little to do with either of them. You could say he's estranged from his children. I don't think he's spoken to Eric or seen him since I've been working for him, and about the only communication he has with his daughter is an exchange of cards during the holidays."

  "How long have you worked for him?"

  "Five years."

  "Do you know why he's estranged from his children?"

  "Eric and Linda hold him responsible for the death of their mother."

  "Why would they do that?"

  "You know about the letter bomb?"

  "I do."

  "The only reason Marsha Langsford was killed instead of the judge was because Vernon was supposedly away at a legal convention, while in fact he was spending time with another woman."

  "How did you come to learn this?"

  Murray dropped her gaze from Kerney's face. "Vernon told me. He's never stopped feeling guilty about it."

  "Did his children know about this woman?"