The Survivors Club

by J. Carson Black

Pat looked up from where she had been sitting, her face slack with shock. “You mean that’s it?”

  Tess knew what she meant. Someone comes to your house and tells you your loved one is dead, and that is all there is to it. There’s nothing you can do. You’ve been delivered the bad news that so-and-so’s never coming back, and then the detective leaves and gets into his car and drives away and you close the door and you’re alone. Or with someone as shell-shocked as you are.

  “Can’t we come down and identify him?” Pat asked.

  This was the tricky part. “It’s okay, ma’am,” Danny said, holding her hands in his. “Your father’s already been identified.”

  He didn’t mention that the DL was soaked through with blood and it was hard to be sure. But the empirical evidence, the torched car’s VIN number, what could be seen of the DL, and other pieces of identification, his guns and his knife—everything came back to George Hanley. She said, “Can you let us have a photo? Something recent? People don’t have to go down there in person anymore—”

  “But we should go down there, shouldn’t we, Bert? He’s my father.”

  Bert looked up from the television. “I think we should do what they say, Pat.”

  She marched over to him, grabbed the remote, and shot it at the screen. The screen went black. “Goddammit, my father has been killed! And all you can think about is a baseball game? I want to see him. Can’t I go see him?” She started to cry again.

  Tess took her hands in her own. She looked into the woman’s eyes, willing her to meet her own gaze. “Pat, honestly, I don’t think you should see him right now. They’ll release him in the next day or two. I’ve seen a lot of people who have lost loved ones, and it never helps.” Lie. “You want to be prepared for when you see him.” Half lie. “You have to trust me when I tell you that this is only going to hurt. You need time to get used to the idea.”

  Pat’s eyes took on a furtive shine. “What are you hiding from me?”

  “We’re not—”

  “What happened? You said he was shot. Is that true? I just want to see him!”

  Tess looked at Danny and Danny looked at Tess.

  She’d know sooner or later, anyway.

  Tess held Pat’s eyes with her own. “He was shot multiple times. You don’t want to see him like that.”

  “Mul-multiple times?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like before? When he was living in Phoenix?” There was hope in her voice.

  Thinking that maybe he survived again.

  Tess held her hands steady. Held her eyes. “No, I’m afraid he’s gone. You don’t want to see him right now.”

  Tess saw it come home to the woman. The shock turned her face pale. She stared, but could barely move her lips. Her eyes took on a glazed shine.

  She bolted for the bathroom, and Tess and Danny looked uncomfortably at Bert as they heard her retch.

  But she didn’t insist on going with them.

  CHAPTER 3

  It was going on eleven p.m. by the time Tess sat down to write her initial report for the George Hanley murder book.

  She and Danny Rojas had split up. Danny returned to the scene to supervise the removal of George Hanley’s vehicle, a 2005 Yukon Denali, while Tess worked on the report back at the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office.

  Earlier, deputies had been dispatched to secure the possible secondary crime scene—Hanley’s apartment.

  One of them—Javits—called to tell her the door to the apartment was locked when they arrived. It had taken them a while to get there because there was a car accident at a nearby intersection and they had stopped to render aid. They’d reached the apartment by 9:47 and saw nothing amiss. He reported that the area around the room—the walkway, the curb, the parking lot—was free of trash. They secured the scene by sealing the door with crime scene tape and extending the tape out to the pillars of the walkway.

  “Did you knock on doors?”

  “We did, both sides of his apartment and the place above, but nobody answered. It appeared quiet. The lock had not been tampered with.”

  Hanley’s keys—and Tess assumed the key to the apartment was included—had been left in the ignition of the burned car.

  Her phone chirped—Danny. Tess ended her call with the deputy.

  “The Yukon’s on the flatbed on its way to forensics,” Danny said. “Took a long time to winch it up out of that ravine. Burned to a crisp.”

  “How far was it from the ghost town?”

  “Maybe a half mile, like we thought. The closest place to dump it.”

  They would give it a thorough going-over.

  “It was torched big-time,” Danny said. “Don’t know what kind of evidence they’ll be able to recover. Still, gotta try.”

  “Hopefully there’s something.”

  “Yeah, hopefully.” But he sounded gloomy. Or maybe he was just tired.

  Tess stared at her monitor and tapped her fingers on her desk. There was one other detective in the room, Derek Little, a guy she didn’t know well. He was at his own desk, which faced away from hers, talking on the phone. Tess got the impression he didn’t like her, probably because she came in with Bonny, the new undersheriff.

  She knew a lot of the Ds she worked with considered her to be a teacher’s pet.

  Nothing I can do about that.

  Back to George Hanley. So he was a retired cop who came down here from the Phoenix area to be near his daughter. Nothing unusual about that scenario. They hadn’t learned much from Pat and Bert, except that George Hanley led tours of the ghost town, Credo, once or twice a week. His mother had been born in the town, and he had memories of visiting the ghost town as a child.

  The only thing she could think of: if he went down there often, he might have seen something. Something a retired cop might notice.

  Border crossers, drug smugglers, and gun runners passed through that area all the time. Even though it was rugged country, the border around there was porous. Where there was opportunity, there was also activity.

  Her cell vibrated. She was surprised to see the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, ICE come up on her readout at this hour.

  The agent returning her call, Tony Versailles, explained that he’d been on a raid and was too jazzed to sleep. “What do you want to know?”

  Tess ran it down for him, asked him if there was anything on George Hanley.

  “Offhand, I can’t remember anyone like that,” Versailles said. “It’s kind of unusual.”

  “His age, you mean.”

  “You’d be surprised at some of the old folks we’ve dealt with. There are old guys involved, sure, but they’re usually the brains of the outfit and stay clear of the day-to-day operation. Some of the prominent community leaders around here are up to their necks in organized crime, but they’re hard to nail down. I call ’em the Godfathers. Let me take a look and I’ll call you back.”

  He called her twenty minutes later. “I don’t see anything here. That doesn’t mean there isn’t something. But the guy’s an Anglo. He doesn’t really fit the profile.”

  “He’s an ex-cop,” Tess said.

  “Yeah. Could be something there. But we haven’t come across him. I’ll keep checking, though.”

  “Thanks,” Tess said.

  “No problem. Keep me posted—you never know where this could lead.”

  She became aware that Derek Little was staring at her from across the room. When she caught his eye, he looked back at his computer monitor. Concentrated on it for a moment.

  Then he rolled his chair out from the desk and stood up.

  He walked in her direction. Derek was tall and skinny, the way Tess envisioned Ichabod Crane.

  He stooped over her.

  Cleared his throat.

  “I have a question for you.” When he spoke, she got the impression it was like trying to pull a sliver out of his hand with a pair of tweezers.

  She looked up at him. Wasn’t about to stand up.

 
He cleared his throat again. “You remember the Sanchez case?”

  “That wasn’t mine.”

  “But we were all looking for him, right?”

  Yes. Bonny had put his picture up on the projector. He had beaten his wife to death and was on the run.

  “I have a photo here, came off a surveillance camera.” He shoved it under her nose. “Is that him?”

  She looked at the guy. “Where was this?”

  “Outside Appliance City.”

  It was blurry. A night photo. Tess said, “Yes, it’s him.”

  “Uh. How do you know? It’s blurry and you can see less than half his face.”

  “It’s him.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Okay. Then…thanks.” He remained where he was.

  “And?”

  He slapped the photo back on the desk. “What kind of car is that? Behind him. See?”

  Just the fender. No, just half the fender. Fortunately, it was the part with the headlight.

  Tess had seen a car just like it the other day. “It’s a Ford Fusion.”

  “Thanks.”

  He picked up the photo and walked back to his desk.

  The Magic Show was over.

  Twenty past midnight, Tess gave it up and headed for home. She had a twenty-mile drive on a winding two-lane road to her place in Patagonia and she was already falling asleep.

  Hanley’s apartment was sealed.

  It could wait.

  CHAPTER 4

  Orchard Apartments near Rio Rico was a two-story tan stucco, faded with age. The only landscaping was two spindly agaves ringed with cement blocks. The blacktop edged up to the wild yellow grassland that seemed to take over everything in sight. A large banner had been tied across part of the second story with the legend: MOVE-IN SPECIAL $499 A MONTH - FURNISHED. Across the road was a convenience store, and beyond that, a Motel 6.

  Tess met Danny there midmorning. He’d already been up in the Atascosas, driving around talking to potential witnesses.

  “You canvassed the whole area?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How’d it go?”

  “I made it back to the car alive, so I’d have to say it was a success.”

  Danny liked to joke but this time he was serious.

  “That bad?”

  “It’s like Blade Runner out there.” He added, “If you’re going to Credo, check them out—I wanna know what you think.”

  He looked at the apartments and grimaced. “What’s a retired cop who won the lottery doing living in a dump like this?”

  “He gave most of the money to the Humane Society,” Tess reminded him.

  “Bet his daughter liked that.”

  They’d had to wait for a warrant, so it was midmorning by the time they reached the apartments. Danny rousted the apartment manager from her desk and followed her as she scuttled down the walkway to his door. She’d taken note of their badges and Tess could tell she wanted to ask questions, but Danny just thanked her and closed the door behind them.

  They gloved up and started looking around. At first, Tess folded her arms under her armpits and looked at everything without touching.

  George Hanley was a neat man. A bachelor’s two-cup coffeemaker sat on the counter, lined up with the toaster. Issues of gun and fishing magazines were stacked neatly on the veneered-oak side table by the chair. Everything in the bathroom was lined up on shelves with military precision. Clean towels, spotless floors.

  Tess noticed this because she did the same thing.

  Danny took the kitchen while Tess took the bedroom. Again, she looked at everything, taking mental snapshots of the room layout and contents.

  Next, she checked the desk by the sliding-glass door in his bedroom. The sun poured in, throwing a lozenge of light on the carpet. The desk top was completely clean, except for a jar of pens and pencils. She went through the desk drawers and found the usual stuff—from Post-its to a stapler to erasers and other detritus that didn’t warrant being seen in the open.

  A MacBook Pro laptop sat on the bedside table. Tess called out to Danny. He came in.

  He whistled. “Could be a goldmine,” he said.

  “If we get it to forensics soon—”

  “It’ll probably be a week before they get to it. They’re backed up, what with Guzman.”

  The Guzman case was a big one. Several members of a prominent Nogales family had been gunned down during a wedding. The patriarch, Alejandro Guzman, owned several legitimate businesses and was a household name in Nogales for thirty years. But it was widely known that he played both sides of the street. He’d been careful to keep his illicit operations separate from his sweet old grandfather image. But he’d laundered money for the Alacrán.

  It had caught up with him in March, when he was shot once through the eye and once through the heart as he toasted his daughter’s wedding.

  “They just confiscated about a dozen racehorses,” Danny said. “They’re gonna be busy for a while.”

  “Probably,” Tess said. Welcome to the Arizona-Mexico border. She looked at the laptop. She was gloved. The laptop was exactly like her own. She could open the lid, fire it up, and take a look.

  Danny hung back in the doorway. They looked at each other.

  “I guess we bag it and hope for the best,” Tess said.

  “Probably has a password.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Crap.”

  “Double crap with a cherry on top.”

  “A fucking crap flambé.”

  They both laughed at that.

  “I’m gonna go back to his pantry,” Danny said. “Guy must have bought out Costco.”

  Hanley had a four-drawer file cabinet. Folders were neatly marked with his credit card bills—one Visa and one American Express card—and several folders holding information on what appeared to be old crimes. Newspaper clippings and printouts, mostly, some of him at homicide scenes. Hanley was meticulous in his filing system. Tess also noticed he held no balance on his credit cards, paying in full every month. She found his rental agreement and a number of other business records. Tess photographed them all in situ and then stacked them and put them in the evidence box she’d brought.

  George Hanley was a deliberate man.

  She looked through the wall calendar and saw a few notations.

  “Danny, check this out.”

  Danny ducked his head in. “What?”

  She motioned to the calendar. “Nice handwriting. What is that? The Palmer Method? My dad wrote like that.”

  One on April 8, with the notation: “finance adv.”

  “Financial advisor?” Danny said.

  Another notation at the end of April: “SABEL.”

  “What’s that?” Danny asked.

  Tess typed the letters into her phone and got the answer. “Southern Arizona Buffelgrass Eradication League. Says here it’s a group ‘dedicated to ridding southern Arizona of a highly flammable invasive species of grass.’”

  “Jesus. That’s a mouthful.”

  “He must have belonged to the group.” Tess photographed the calendar and then took it down. They went through each month, Danny peering over her shoulder.

  There were several notations. In January, there was a line across three days and the word “Conference.” In May, another line through three days, and the notation, “LA.” And under that, “look at wading pool.”

  “Wading pool?” Danny looked at Tess. “You think…?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Hey, I know he’s old, but they say that never goes away. You think he was hanging out around the city wading pool trolling for kids?”

  “It could mean anything. Maybe he has grandkids, and he was planning on buying them a wading pool for Christmas.”

  “Do Pat and Bert have kids?”

  Something else to ask them.

  Their search went downhill from there. They switched rooms. Now Tess took the living room and kitchen and Danny too
k the bedroom, bathroom, and linen closet.

  The first thing Tess saw was a dog’s water bowl and dish, both empty and sitting in the kitchen sink. “He had a dog?” she called to Danny.

  “Looks like it. He’s not here now.”

  Tess called the Scofield residence and Bert answered.

  “Your father-in-law has a dog.”

  “Adele. I took her to the pound this morning.”

  “This morning?”

  “I picked her up last night.”

  Before the crime scene tape went up. “That was quick.”

  “I couldn’t leave her there. She was my responsibility.”

  “And you took her to the pound today?” Tess was hardly ever surprised at the things people did. Still, this was cold.

  Bert must have sensed her disapproval, because he said, “Pat’s allergic to dogs. I don’t know what you think we should have done.”

  Then he disconnected.

  Tess looked at the bowls sitting in the sink, and thought how fortune can change at a moment’s notice. One minute the dog had an owner who apparently adored her. The next, she was in the dog pound, facing death.

  Tess hadn’t liked the Scofields before. Now she disliked them even more.

  Danny was in the hallway. “What was that?”

  “Bert took Hanley’s dog to the pound.”

  “Oh? That was quick.”

  It wasn’t her job to like the survivors of a homicide. Her job was to serve justice.

  Her job was to get the bad guys. As she stepped out onto the walkway for some air, a cool breeze hit. Down at the far end of the building, she saw a young man holding a bag of trash coming down the steps. He headed out across the parking lot to the Dumpster.

  Nobody heard or saw anything. Some people had known Hanley to say “hi” to, but he was so recent to the apartments that he had made little, if any, impression.

  Tess stared out at the freeway, trying to figure out what an old man like George Hanley would have to do with drug runners or coyotes.

  Thirty rounds fired from a rifle—probably an AK-47, the weapon of choice for all of them—Sinaloa, Alacrán, Zetas, the Javelinas—and he’d been shot from five feet away.

  Why use so much firepower on an old man?

  “So, what you think, guera?”