Residue: A Kevin Kerney Novel

by Michael McGarrity

  Crowley circled to return to the airport. “Sorry this has been such a washout,” he commented. “We’ve got fuel and time to spare, if you want to widen the search.”

  Sara nodded in approval, and consulted her map. “West of the wilderness is a checkerboard of federal, state, and private land spread out between small ranching communities along the highway to Reserve. Let’s make a pass over the areas closest to the mountains.”

  “Ten-four,” Crowley confirmed, turning the Cessna west, into the sun.

  Sara picked up her binoculars.

  Civilization dotted the landscape as they crossed out of the wilderness. The Gila River twisted through pastures and bosque. A stretch of a two-lane highway weaved through the valley, following the low-lying contours of the land. Sporadic clusters of roadside buildings gave way to ranches, some large, some small, with the pattern repeated farther down the highway. Near the river, dense tree stands cloaked houses and barns. On the ground there would be a helluva lot of places to cover in one of the least-populated areas of the state.

  The enormity of the search made Sara’s throat tighten. Would they ever catch a break?

  On a series of sweeps, Crowley took them out of the valley, following ranch and forest roads deep into the foothills, climbing high to crest the mountains before descending to pursue another route.

  In a sky suddenly filled with fast-moving thunderheads, a microburst hit the Cessna as they topped out over a high ridge. Lightning flashed around the aircraft, and Crowley struggled to keep control. A huge bolt hit them, followed by a deafening thunderclap, and the engine sputtered and died.

  “We’re going down,” Crowley yelled above the roar of the storm.

  Sara couldn’t hear a word, but knew what he was saying. The steel-gray, rain-whipped storm enveloped the Cessna, and she had no idea what they’d hit, only that any chance of survival was slim.

  Preparing for impact, she bent over, covered her head with her hands, and waited.

  Jack Page stood outside watching the storm roll through, clouds racing by like sailing ships on a turbulent ocean of murky gray sky, the thunder and lightning now off in the distance near the Arizona state line.

  He’d seen the small plane come and go a couple of times, once right over the ranch, before losing sight of it. Was somebody spying on them?

  Up in the high country, the sky was clearing fast. He caught sight of a thin plume of smoke whipping above treetop silhouettes. Had a lightning strike started a fire, or had the plane crashed and ignited it?

  The way the wind was blowing it could race down on them. Jack pulled the cell phone out of his pants pocket. He didn’t mind staying here with family and shooting a few lawmen when they came to arrest Earl. Hell, he looked forward to it, wouldn’t have it any other way. But damn if he’d see this place burn.

  He dialed 911 and reported a possible airplane crash and a forest fire.

  CHAPTER 24

  Crowley kept the Cessna right-side up during its rapid descent until it hit belly-first, the fixed landing gear ripping away as the plane dug nose-first into the ground, the sound of the propeller a metallic scream as it shredded into fragments. The right wing buckled against a boulder, the strut twisted into splinters, and the fuselage came to rest at an angle.

  The impact threw Sara into the back of Sid Bonnell’s seat. It felt like a hammer blow to the head, but she didn’t black out. She sat up to find Crowley unconscious and slumped over the flight yoke. Sid was awake and moaning, his head bleeding profusely.

  She opened the door, dropped a few feet to the ground, and stood light-headed, swaying for a second, her eyes closed to regain her balance, then looked around to get oriented. With the towering mountain wilderness to her back, she could see the foothills and the narrow river valley below in a clearing sky. To the west, the thunderheads tumbled on.

  The Cessna rested on a sharply angled ridgeline with scant tree cover. An overwhelming smell of aviation fuel filled the air. She unstrapped Crowley from his seat, removed his headset, and yanked him out of the plane by his upper arms. His body thudded into her and knocked her to the ground. She pushed him off, regained her footing, and pulled him away from the smoldering airplane.

  Sid had managed to get out on his own and was stumbling around blindly, hands to his face, blood streaming down his cheeks.

  She led him to Crowley, had him sit, and ran back to the Cessna. She grabbed the fire extinguisher and first-aid kit and sprinted back to the two men just as the fuel tank exploded, knocking her to her knees.

  She checked Crowley’s pulse. He was dead. From the unnatural angle of his head, probably from a broken neck. The gash in Sid’s forehead was long but shallow. She worked quickly to close it using a large sterile bandage covered by absorbent fabric wrapped around his head.

  “Is it bad?” Sid asked.

  “No.” She flushed the blood out of his eyes with an emergency bottle of water from the first-aid kit. “Can you see okay?”

  “Jesus, I ain’t blind,” he said with great relief, his eyes blinking rapidly. He glanced at Crowley. “Is he dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus.”

  Sara pointed at duff that smoldered under a nearby grove of small, scrawny junipers, caused by a slender lick of fuel that had spilled from the wreckage. “Can you stamp that out before it spreads?”

  Sid nodded and stood unsteadily.

  “Are you sure?” Sara asked, propping him up with a hand on his back.

  “I can do it.” He lumbered away, pulling off his shirt to use as a blanket to smother small flames lapping at the base of a juniper.

  She grabbed the fire extinguisher and approached the burning plane. The smoke was thicker now, rising into the clear sky, pushed by gusty winds westward over the foothills into the valley.

  It was lucky they’d crashed on the extreme edge of the wilderness within sight of civilization. The heat scalded her face as she emptied the fire extinguisher on the flames and retreated. Sparks flickered and reignited the blaze in the cabin. Surely someone by now had seen the smoke and called it in.

  Were they close enough to civilization to get a signal? She pulled her phone from her pocket. The screen was shattered and there was no reception. She turned to find Sid facedown and unmoving in the smoldering duff. She yelled and ran to him, lugged him clear, and rolled him on his back. His face and chest were burned, and he wasn’t breathing.

  She started CPR, and kept it up until Sid coughed and started breathing.

  “What happened?” he asked in a broken whisper.

  “Hush. Just stay quiet.” She propped up his head, and gave him ibuprofen from the first-aid kit.

  She glanced at Danny Crowley’s body. During her army career, she’d survived a stateside military helicopter crash that claimed six lives. She’d lost men and women under her command to combat in Iraq, consoled seriously wounded warfighters who’d sacrificed their arms and legs in service to their country, and grieved with families who’d lost loved ones.

  Here she was, grieving again over the loss of another good man, with no help in sight. Which was worse, she wondered, dying or bearing witness to the death of others? At that moment, bearing witness seemed more harmful to her soul.

  Ed Sandoval, manager of the Gila National Forest Aerial Fire Control Base and a decorated former army helicopter pilot, got the call of a small plane crash and fire. He thought about Danny Crowley, who’d left early in the morning for a wilderness flyover with Sid Bonnell and another passenger. He tried radioing Danny several times, only to be greeted by dead air.

  As far as he knew, there were no other small planes in the air on a flight plan across the wilderness. But that didn’t mean much, as general aviation pilots frequently didn’t bother filing on short hops or when logging flight time.

  It was too early to call out a fire suppression team, especially with strict guidance from on high to let wildfires burn in the forest if no lives or structures were in danger. Ed got the general coordinate
s of the sighting provided by 911 dispatch and took off in one of the rescue helicopters.

  He gained altitude quickly, looking for smoke on the distant horizon north and west of Silver City as he overflew the town. Nothing. He topped Goose Lake Ridge on the Pinos Altos Range and caught sight of a faint smoke plume near the western escarpment of the Mogollon Mountains. Sandoval dipped the bird lower, pushed its speed to over a hundred miles per hour, and radioed Crowley, hoping for a response.

  He dropped into the valley, the smoke plume almost invisible. He took the chopper over a saddleback break in the foothills and made a steep ascent to the crest, where sunlight glinted on a shattered cockpit. A hundred yards from a precipitous drop-off, the burned wreckage tilted at an angle, the fire almost out.

  Below, a woman who was sitting on the ground with an arm wrapped around Sid Bonnell waved. Stretched out next to her was Danny Crowley, and he wasn’t moving.

  Sandoval veered to a clearing behind the downed aircraft. As he set the bird down, he called in two survivors, one possible fatality, and scrambled a crew to the crash site.

  As the rotor blades slowly churned to a stop, he ran to the woman. With her help, he wrapped Danny’s body in a tarp and loaded it on the chopper. Once they had Sid strapped into a seat, Sandoval took off.

  “Are you okay?” he asked the woman. Her face was smudged and there was a big welt on her forehead.

  “I’ll make it. It’s Sid who needs the hospital.”

  “We’re on the way.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Forty-eight hours into his hunt for Earl Matson Page, Oliver Muniz remained optimistic. What he knew from Otis Roderick’s phone call, the current status of the cold-case murder investigation, and his personal knowledge of Earl convinced Muniz that Earl was somewhere close at hand, just waiting to be found.

  In Colombia, he’d spent endless hours with Earl on stakeouts and field intelligence operations, sidestepping embassy and headquarters bureaucrats, running confidential informants, dealing with corrupt Colombian officials, and drinking cervezas in some of the trendy Medellín bars and nightclubs frequented by narcos.

  Both had been single at the time, and for two years they spent practically all their waking hours together. As a result, Muniz knew about Earl’s dream to own a ranch that would be the most modern and successful operation in the Southwest, and how he planned to have his father help him run it.

  The ranch had been Earl’s obsession, to the point that whatever free time he had was devoted to learning about state-of-the-art range management and cattle breeding practices. He’d return from stateside with magazines and books about modern ranching methods. There were stacks of them in his small apartment.

  Earl had been recruited by the DEA out of the Houston PD, but he was a New Mexico native, and that was where he wanted his ranch to be. Where, as he put it, you could actually see the horizon, the weather was warm and sunny, and monsoons didn’t last forever.

  A city boy from a low-income Chicago neighborhood, Muniz had his own dreams, which were to stay with the department and move up through the ranks to become a high-echelon boss.

  But he’d signed for the five million dollars Earl disappeared with, screwing him. Because of Earl, he’d never rise higher than his present position.

  Starting out in Deming, Earl’s hometown, Muniz and his two agents had swept west and north, often in the wake of state police investigators and the accused ex-police chief and his family cohorts. They’d concentrated on the larger ranches, trying to pick up any information about Earl and his family that others might have missed. So far the only new tidbit Muniz had uncovered was that during Earl’s time in Colombia, his father and sister were living in Duncan, Arizona. That intelligence came not from knocking on ranch house doors miles off the pavement, but from information on a survivor and beneficiary form Earl had submitted to Human Resources prior to his South American posting.

  Tomorrow they’d go to Duncan, but tonight they were staying over near the hamlet of Glenwood, on the highway to Reserve, in some rustic tourist cabins.

  Muniz’s cell phone rang as he was toweling off after a shower. He sat on the squeaky double bed with the towel wrapped around his waist and listened as his boss, Warren Lee Kelso, DEA operations chief in Washington, read him out over the phone.

  “Did you really think I wouldn’t hear about this?” Kelso snapped. “I swear to God, Oliver, with anybody else I’d be telling them to put in their retirement papers. Send those two agents back to El Paso immediately.”

  Muniz said nothing. Kelso probably thought him nuts. The scope of his search for Earl was mind-boggling. Looking for someone in four New Mexico counties comprising over seventeen thousand square miles with a population approaching sixty-five thousand people was a preposterous undertaking.

  “Are you listening to me?” Kelso demanded.

  “I hear you,” Muniz replied, wondering who had squealed on him. Was Samantha Hodges, his number two, really that eager for his job? It didn’t matter. Cop shops of any shape or size were like sieves when it came to keeping secrets. “You know what this is about, right?”

  Kelso snorted. Back in the day, he’d served briefly in Colombia with Page and Muniz, and knew in detail what had happened. “Of course I do. But you can’t do this on the agency’s time.”

  “I’ll send them home, but I’m staying. Make it official, Warren, and reopen the case. Let me catch this bastard.”

  “Not a chance,” Kelso replied. “The agency buried this embarrassment long ago and doesn’t want it exhumed. Page died in the jungle, killed by drug lords while on an undercover mission, and his body was never recovered. He died a hero. End of story. Take annual leave, you’ve got over half a year accumulated, for chrissake.”

  “Okay.”

  “And if you find him, don’t kill him. I’ll make him disappear from my end.”

  “I can’t promise you that, Warren,” Muniz replied.

  “Do as I say,” Kelso replied heatedly. “And don’t make me call you again. You’ve got a week, and either you’re back at your desk or you’re retired.”

  The phone went dead. Muniz got up and looked out the window. At the diner across the road, the two agents were waiting on him. Should he tell them before or after they ate? He decided to buy them dinner and then send them home.

  His cabin had a small analog color television with a digital convertor and rabbit-ears antenna sitting on top of a 1950s dresser decorated with a row of carved cowboy lariats on each of the legs. The TV received only three over-the-air broadcast channels, two of them grainy and fuzzy. The local news was on, reporting the breaking story of a downed civilian airplane in the Gila National Forest. Muniz turned up the volume. The pilot, Danny Crowley, was dead. Two surviving passengers, Sara Brannon and Sid Bonnell, were being treated at the local hospital.

  Wasn’t it the ex—police chief’s wife who’d contacted Roderick about the search for Earl Page? Apparently she was still looking, despite lying to Roderick about it.

  Had she been looking for Earl when the crash occurred? Muniz consulted a map. According to the news report, the plane had gone down in nearby mountains, close to a large swath of privately owned land that stretched northward through the valley. Had she found Page? Before he got excited about the prospect, he needed to know exactly what ground she’d covered.

  With the Mexican border so close, and the high-security White Sands Missile Range less than a hundred air miles to the east, it was possible some federal agency had tracked the flight. His best hopes were the Border Patrol, the U.S. Army at White Sands, and maybe even NSA.

  He made some calls requesting information, got dressed, and, feeling slightly more chipper than before, crossed the empty highway to the diner. He decided he’d try the T-bone steak dinner.

  As soon as the news broke about the state police using a civilian to search Kerney’s residence, Deputy Chief Serrano quickly disbanded the Las Cruces—based murder investigation team, officially censured Agent Paul Av
ery, and assumed personal oversight of the case, using headquarters personnel to do the fieldwork. According to what Avery had heard, the new team had accomplished nothing more than a paper review of the investigation since day one.

  Serrano also assigned a newly promoted lieutenant as acting deputy commander of the Southern Zone Investigation Unit with orders to clean up the “Las Cruces mess.”

  For Avery, tucked away in a cubicle with boxes of evidence from closed cases to sort through for possible destruction, it meant Siberian desk duty, and a very cold shoulder from most of the district civilian and sworn personnel, James Garcia excluded.

  When Garcia told him about the airplane crash in the Gila, Avery nodded and sat silent, mesmerized by the news. Ever since the Barranco Canyon shoot-out and Clayton’s search of the property, he’d been convinced that the locus for finding Loretta Page was somewhere around the Gila. If that’s where Clayton and Brannon had zeroed in, that’s where he wanted to be.

  He spent a long several minutes working out a plan that would make that happen before appearing at Luis Mondragon’s open office door.

  “No, you don’t,” Mondragon cautioned, waving a finger at Avery as he stepped inside. “Talk to your lieutenant.”

  “Come on, Cap,” Avery pleaded. “Hear me out.”

  Mondragon scratched his almost bald head and rubbed a sore shoulder from an overzealous morning workout. “Two minutes.”

  Avery stepped in front of Mondragon’s desk. “I fucked up, and I know it. Serrano was right to slap me down. Put that aside for a minute. Ever since Kerney appeared in our crosshairs as the prime suspect, this case has been all balled up, and why?”