by Spencer Kope
“Remember that industrial cutter we’ve been trying to identify?” I whisper to Jimmy. “Well, whatever it is, it’s in that Quonset hut.”
“How do you know?”
“Footprints go in and don’t come out. I see Larry Wilson, Travis Duncan, and Carlos Hernandez.”
This time it’s Jimmy’s turn to say it: “We need to get closer.”
There are no windows on the Quonset hut, so we take risks we normally wouldn’t. With guns drawn, we step lightly across the baked earth until we reach the door to the hut, and then crouch down.
A single voice emanates from within.
Most of the words elude me, a jumble of consonants and vowels distorted by the arched ceiling and muffled by the door.
Jimmy fishes inside Pete’s black bag and withdraws a device that looks similar to a GPS attached to a handgrip. Protruding from the unit is a thin black cable that stretches several feet, at the end of which is a tiny camera.
Moving slowly, Jimmy slips the snake camera through the horizontal slit at the base of the door. Making some adjustments, he points the head in the direction of the voice.
“I see Isaiah,” he whispers a moment later. “He’s near the back, next to a tall … I don’t know … shelf, maybe?” His voice is suddenly more urgent. “I see Paul. He’s tied to a chair.”
“What about Elizabeth?”
Jimmy shakes his head. “I don’t see—No, wait! Oh, Dear God!” He holds the cable steady and hands the viewer to me, saying, “Tell me that’s not what I think it is.”
It takes me a minute to sort the images and recognize what I’m looking at, but then I see it. We should have guessed as much—I should have guessed as much. It’s funny how things make perfect sense once revealed, as if no other option was logical or possible. One more piece of the puzzle just became crystal-clear.
“There’s your surgical cut,” I whisper, handing back the viewer.
“We need to move back and see if the Special Response Team—”
The voice is loud and clear this time, though no longer addressing Paul and Elizabeth. “I said come on in,” Isaiah repeats. “The door’s open.”
Jimmy and I remain frozen in position. Maybe it’s a bluff. Maybe he heard something, or thought he heard something, and is flushing out the culprits.
“I saw you three minutes ago,” Isaiah says loudly. “There’s a camera in the fence post next to the driveway, and another by the rock to your left. There are others, but no sense wasting time on that when Mr. and Mrs. Anderson have been so patient.”
Jimmy’s text is brief: Contact. Move now!
“Who’s the text for?” Isaiah’s voice calls. “Is that your backup? By all means, have them join us.”
“What do we do?” I’m surprised at the calm tone of my voice, especially considering that my insides are hopping around like grease on a skillet. Adrenaline serves a useful purpose, but there are times I wish I could just shut it off.
“We need to stall,” Jimmy whispers. “Stay behind me and pay attention to muzzle discipline. If you have to shoot, do so over my right shoulder, but if it comes to that I’d prefer you just hit the ground and stay down until help arrives.”
“He’s just broken,” I remind Jimmy.
He nods heavily, as if a great weight were suddenly pressed upon his shoulders. “I know, but we save the ones we can. Right now that’s Paul and Elizabeth.” Turning the door handle, he yells, “We’re coming in.”
* * *
The Quonset hut is dimly lit and mostly empty when we enter. In the corner to our right is a stack of four old tires, and halfway up the right wall is a chest freezer. There’s an upright tool chest to the left, along with a workbench, a welder, and some miscellaneous cardboard boxes.
Then there’s the guillotine.
It’s in the center of the floor toward the rear of the building, and I immediately notice that the polished steel blade is raised and locked in place. It’s like every other guillotine I’ve seen in pictures or movies, but where those were built to chop off heads, this one works from the other direction. Even now, two delicate feet are clamped into the bracket, their pale soles facing us,
They’re Elizabeth Anderson’s feet.
Though we can only catch glimpses of her beyond the guillotine’s drop mechanism, she’s strapped to the terrible bench, still in her nightgown. Isaiah stands next to her, a Colt model 1911 .45-caliber semiautomatic in his right hand, which hangs limp at his side. In his left hand he holds the pull cord to the guillotine.
“Don’t do it, Isaiah,” Jimmy says gently. “There’s a better way.” The muzzle of his Glock is locked on Isaiah’s chest. There’s no waver or shake in the barrel. It’s steady.
Isaiah just laughs.
It’s a genuine laugh, with no fear, no hesitation, no regret. It’s the laugh of someone who’s accepted his fate. “Do you honestly think this is going to end well?” he says with a dead smile.
“Yes,” Jimmy replies immediately. “All you have to do is drop the gun and let go of the cord. No one else has to die.”
“Let go of the cord,” Isaiah muses, looking up at his left hand. “Yeah, that might be a problem.”
In the dim light of the Quonset hut, I missed it when we first entered, but now it stands clear and prominent. A sense of dread sweeps up my body. “His hand is duct-taped to the cord,” I warn Jimmy. It’s a crude version of a dead-man switch, but it’ll get the job done. Isaiah’s determined to pull the cord, even if it takes the weight of his dead body to do so.
“I see it,” Jimmy replies, the words steeped in conflict.
Isaiah looks up and gives the cord a gentle shake. “Eight ounces,” he says. “That’s how much pressure it takes to send the blade on its way; just the smallest of tugs.” When he looks once more at Jimmy, the dead smile is back on his face, frozen, leering.
“Why eight ounces, Isaiah?”
The question takes the killer by surprise. “What makes you think there’s a reason?”
“It seems important to you—why else would you mention it?”
Isaiah is quiet a moment, and then he smiles. “Very good,” he says, nodding approvingly, “very good, indeed. I’d say you’ve earned the answer to that one, wouldn’t you?” He pauses, first looking at his duct-taped left hand, then at the gun in his right hand. “I was going to pat my heart, but it seems both my hands are occupied—and you might mistake my intentions if I raise my gun hand.” He chuckles, and then his voice grows sinister. “That would be a shame, because then Mrs. Anderson would die and you wouldn’t get your answer.”
He pauses a long moment … and the smile returns.
“Eight ounces?” Jimmy presses.
Isaiah’s response is almost lyrical: “Such is the weight of the human heart, with all the tragedies of the world poured therein.”
“The heart?”
“The average adult human heart,” Isaiah confirms, “my heart—just eight ounces. Eight ounces that can sometimes feel like the moon, the stars, and all the heavens are resting upon it, yet the scale still reads eight ounces. How is that possible, I wonder?”
“Life isn’t easy or fair,” Jimmy says, and I hear the echo of my mother in the words. “I’m sorry about your loss, Isaiah. I’m sorry about what happened to Tracy. It’s not right, it’s just life. There are people you can talk to—”
“People I can talk to!” Isaiah rages. “What do they know? Most of them can’t even sort out their own lives, let alone tell me how to deal with mine.”
“Then think about Lisa,” Jimmy insists. “She’s worried about you. She’s lost enough already—your mom, Tracy. You don’t want to do this to her.”
“This isn’t about Lisa,” Isaiah replies coldly. The smile is gone, leaving just a blank canvas where his face used to be. It’s like he flipped a switch and turned everything off: Lisa, Tracy, love, fear, even hate.
For the briefest moment I picture him as the embodiment of the computer code he so loves to write.
It has no passion, no emotion, no will of its own; it’s just a collection of values, variables, and functions culminating in the source code of a singular human app with but one function: make Paul Anderson suffer.
The input is complete.
The output is imminent.
“What’s your name, FBI?”
Jimmy tells him, and in a gesture no doubt meant to win some goodwill from Isaiah, he drops the Glock to a low ready position. Every move he makes, every comment, is about deescalating the situation. Calling Isaiah by name, invoking his sister, his mother, and his wife—all meant to personalize their contact and break through the determined shell in which Isaiah has encased himself.
It’s not working.
Isaiah has dug his own grave and intends to use it. His next words are hollow and lifeless: “Let’s make this easy, Jimmy.”
In the blurred instant that follows, I see Isaiah’s right arm rise up. Fire belches from the barrel of the .45-caliber handgun. Jimmy instinctively fires back, pulling the trigger three times. The shots echo through the Quonset hut, thunder stumbling upon thunder.
I hear the twang of a bullet piercing the metal siding above our heads.
From his position next to the guillotine, Isaiah spins hard to his left, staggered by the bullet that rips through his chest. Wavering on his feet, he turns his face our way one last time. Already, blood taints his lips and leaks from his mouth … and then he smiles.
In the split second that follows, Jimmy fires again, this time at the execution cord where it connects to the pulley at the top of the bench. One bullet strikes the pulley; another nicks the cord … but it’s not enough.
As Isaiah falls silently to the floor, eight ounces are all the leverage needed to move the world.
The guillotine stirs.
The blade falls.
And from his chair, Paul Anderson screams through the gag stuffed in his mouth. He screams as he watches the blade fall to its utter end … and then he’s joined by his wife. Together they scream … and scream … and scream.
As Jimmy races to Isaiah’s side, I rush over to the guillotine, unstrap Elizabeth, and pull her back from the wet blade. She claws at me—begging for help—and I have to wrench her hands away to free myself. Running to the toolbox, I find a roll of duct tape. Ripping fabric from her nightgown, I wrap the wounds and then bind each stump tightly in four turns using the duct tape. The blood loss slows as I wrap, and then stops altogether.
I have another problem.
Elizabeth’s severed feet lie on the floor.
I need to get them on ice immediately to have any hope of reattaching them. Remembering the chest freezer, I rush over and throw open the lid, praying that it actually works. There’s no ice, but bag upon bag of frozen vegetables litter the inside, along with some meat cuts, and four bags of frozen blueberries. The vegetables will work in place of ice, so I begin to scoop them into my arms … and then I notice the two clear plastic bags in the right corner.
The shape and shine are familiar: they’re Carlos Hernandez’s feet.
I recoil at the sight, staggering back, and as I do, my eyes fall to the stack of three Styrofoam ice boxes resting on the floor next to the freezer. They still have price stickers attached. Composing myself, I pull one loose, throw some frozen peas and carrots inside, and rush back to the guillotine.
By this time the Special Response Team has made entry and I hear the wail of an ambulance siren. It’s an unexpectedly fast response time considering how far we are from town, but it turns out that while Jimmy and I were working our way up to the property, Sergeant Villanueva decided it might be a good idea to have an aid car standing by.
He was right.
I kneel on the floor, and the activity in the Quonset hut takes on a surreal tone as I pick up Elizabeth Anderson’s severed left foot and place it in the ice box. I don’t have gloves, so I’m careful not to touch any blood, which is challenging. As I lift the warm foot I want to scream; I want to drop it and run, but I don’t. I’ll have nightmares about it later, in the long hours of the night, where the horrors of my job collect into a dark pool of unwanted images, but for now I do what must be done.
Packing a half dozen bags of frozen vegetables around the still-warm foot, I repeat the process with the right foot, and then top off the ice chest with more vegetables and the Styrofoam lid.
The EMTs arrive and two of them rush over to Elizabeth, their steps faltering momentarily at the sight of the guillotine and the blood on the floor. I brief them quickly on the feet in the ice chest and the improvised tourniquets, and then turn my attention to Paul Anderson.
His wailing has degenerated into shock, and he slumps to the floor as I free his restraints. I help him to his feet and guide him to Elizabeth’s side, where an EMT checks him out and calls for another gurney.
When I join Jimmy, he’s kneeling next to Isaiah. The .40-caliber round from his Glock punched through Isaiah’s chest an inch left of his heart and he’s fading fast. EMTs work feverishly to stop the bleeding and stabilize him, but the damage from the round is too great.
Jimmy’s eyes are glossy.
He sits at Isaiah’s side, holding his hand, as the unlikely killer’s life drains out on the floor. When his heart begins to give out, the EMTs try to bring him back with the defibrillator, but it’s no use.
Isaiah dies as he intended.
Jimmy’s quiet when he walks by me and out the front door. I leave him be. He’ll disappear behind the Quonset hut or wander out and around the other outbuildings, clearing his head, coming to grips with the fact that he just took a life. Contrary to what we see on TV, it’s no easy thing to kill someone. Nor should it be.
Suddenly the hut seems stuffy, claustrophobic. I need air and light and the warming heat of a New Mexico morning on my face.
As I approach the door, I glance up, looking for the bullet hole from Isaiah’s high shot. It’s easy to find. There’s a perfectly round hole two feet above the door with a stream of pure light flowing through it.
It’s not just a wild shot.
The hole punches through a large piece of recently hung paper. Isaiah’s shine is on the paper at all four corners where he taped it to the wall, and the bullet hole is almost dead center. It’s a paper target, and the hole in the center is the result of an expert marksman, someone who doesn’t miss his target except on purpose.
It’s a final message from Isaiah: he had no intention of harming us.
I point out the poster to Pete so he can photograph it and document it for his report. I hurry him along by removing the poster and helping him bag it for evidence; I ask him not to mention it to Jimmy.
He doesn’t need to know.
What purpose would it serve?
* * *
Every case, no matter how it starts and ends, must be closed out. That means paperwork, statements, interviews, observations, and the army of minutiae that gather throughout the investigation, waiting for explanation and clarification.
Over time, the details collect like dust and dander on the floor, and by days and hours we sweep them together into piles and gather them up. Some are relevant, others are not. In most cases, the comprehensive report that is the end product of such a case must be flawless and ready for its day in court.
This is not such a case.
There is no one left to convict.
The shooting death of Isaiah Webster will be investigated; that’s standard procedure. It will rip open wounds best left undisturbed, but it can’t be helped. Aside from that, there are no loose ends.
The inches-thick case report on the Ice Box Killer will close out active cases in El Paso, Tucson, Albuquerque, Deming, Baton Rouge, and Fort Stockton. A hard copy will be sent to each jurisdiction, where it will be placed on a shelf. Eventually, it will find its way into an archives building, unneeded and forgotten.
* * *
Elizabeth Anderson was airlifted to Albuquerque and by three P.M. we receive word that the operation to reattach her
feet is going well. She won’t have full use of them, but she’ll never have to wear prosthetics like Tracy Webster.
Despite their cocky demeanor and Marty’s assurances that runway takeoff lengths are only suggestions, Les and Marty don’t want me and Jimmy on the Gulfstream when they try taking off from the runway at Deming Municipal.
“It’s just a precaution,” Marty says with a stupid grin.
As it is, they use up every bit of the runway getting Betsy back into the air, and somehow avoid calamity. With our ride airborne and northbound, Pete offers to drive us to Albuquerque, even though it’s a seven-hour round trip for him.
He’s a good man; a good cop.
We meet his kind on every case, in every big city and small town across the country. The media may relish news of bad cops, of which there are a rare few, but it’s the Pete Villanuevas and the Tony Alvarados that they should find hope in.
I do.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Bellingham—September 15, 9:57 P.M.
Four figures wait for us at Hangar 7.
As Les noses Betsy through the wide door, the wing lights illuminate their faces momentarily and set them apart as they stand motionless to the side. The jet slowly maneuvers to its place and then stops, engines winding down.
Jimmy was quiet the whole way back. I talked about everything imaginable, slowly burning up the time between Albuquerque and Bellingham, and doing my best to keep him from dwelling on Isaiah and the fatal shot.
I talked about the future of DNA, including the idea that one day we’ll be able to reconstruct a suspect’s face from nothing more than his DNA profile, right down to his hair and eye color. Composite sketches will be a thing of the past.
I talked about Jimmy’s desire to get Petey a pet of some type, most likely a dog. I argued that cats are a better option. People have miniature goats and miniature horses, I told him, but cats are like miniature lions. Who wants a dog when you can have a miniature lion?
I talked about natural law, and Benjamin Franklin’s assertion that only a virtuous people are capable of sustaining freedom.
I talked too much.