“You guys looking for Bill?” he says under his breath as we draw near.
“Yeah, we are,” Jimmy says. “Who are you?”
“Mexican Tom,” the man says, extending a friendly hand.
“Mexican Tom?”
“Tommy Peralta,” he clarifies. “But everyone here calls me Mexican Tom to avoid confusion on account of we have two other Toms. There’s Fat Tom on the first floor near the front office”—I glance at Mexican Tom’s stomach and wonder how he dodged that bullet—“and there’s Rodeo Tom across the way over there.” He points to the other side of the complex. “We call him Rodeo Tom ’cause of his hat.”
“So … about Bill?”
“Yeah, APD was out here a couple times a week looking for him, but they stopped coming in June or July. I never said nothing to them ’cause I figured Bill was hiding somewhere, but it’s been too long now. After they moved his stuff into storage it got me to thinking that maybe he was in trouble.”
“Who moved his stuff?” I ask.
“I heard from Cheryl in two-oh-seven that they evicted him for nonpayment. They must’ve called his emergency contact to come get his crap. That’s the best I can figure.” He snaps his finger. “You should talk to Aaron; he’s the manager. He would’ve been the one to make the call.”
“How do we get hold of Aaron?” Jimmy asks.
Stepping around us, Mexican Tom leans out over the railing and points past the empty swimming pool to a room right next to the shuttered and locked front office. “That’s his apartment there: room 101. It’s the nicest one in the complex—least that’s what everyone says. I’ve never been inside it myself.”
We thank Tom and make our way down the stairs.
Aaron doesn’t invite us in when he answers the door. In fact, he seems eager to get us away from his apartment, so eager that he’s wearing nothing more than a pair of boxer shorts, a T-shirt, and some flip-flops as he leads us to the front office, jumbles through a weighty ring of keys, unlocks the door, and flips on the light.
“Bill Blevins,” he mutters to himself. “Bill Blevins.”
The computer is only in sleep mode, so in less than a minute we have the name of Bill’s brother, Donnie Blevins, and his address. No warrant, no schmoozing, just boom: here you go. After writing the name and address on a slip of paper and shoving it into Jimmy’s hand, Aaron practically shoos us away and then watches us from the office door, silhouetted by the light behind him.
We’re almost to the car when a head pops through the door opening to room 101. “Aaron!” the girl calls. “Aaron?”
It’s the prostitute we passed on the stairs. When she sees us, she quickly ducks back inside.
“Rent must be due,” Jimmy says.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Albuquerque, New Mexico—September 14, 8:17 A.M.
“It still doesn’t make any sense,” I say as Jimmy turns off Montgomery onto San Mateo Boulevard, and then starts scanning addresses for Donnie Blevins’s residence. “They don’t give out top-secret security clearances to defective people. How could Isaiah have gone so wrong?”
“Well, first off, you have a top-secret security clearance.”
“What are you saying? That I’m defective?”
“You’re afraid of trees.”
“I’m afraid of forests, not trees. There’s a difference.”
“And Styrofoam.”
“Go ahead, make fun. But just so you know, it’s estimated that a quarter million people in the United States are afraid of Styrofoam.”
“You looked it up?”
“Of course I did. And, for me, it’s not really a phobia; it’s more of an intense dislike. Regardless, it doesn’t answer my question. How does a guy like Isaiah—normal, hardworking, responsible, stable—suddenly turn into a psychopath? How’s that even possible? And if it can happen to him, couldn’t it happen to anyone?”
“Probably,” Jimmy answers, which isn’t reassuring.
“Probably? That’s all you have to say?”
Jimmy shrugs. “All roads run straight … until they don’t.”
I push back in my seat and ponder the words. It’s either the most brilliant answer ever given, or the stupidest thing I’ll hear all day.
I’m undecided.
* * *
The dilapidated house on San Mateo Boulevard sits on a full basement that protrudes out of the ground to such an extent that you have to walk up a four-foot flight of wooden stairs to get to the front door. There’s a raised deck along most of the front of the house, and it wraps around the right side, presumably to a much larger deck in back.
At some point in the distant past it was stained.
Now it’s just weathered.
As we climb the stairs, someone peeks through the dirty white blinds covering the big window to our right and then quickly disappears. Before Jimmy has a chance to knock, there’s a clamor inside, followed by the sound of a sliding glass door slamming open at the rear of the house.
“Runner,” Jimmy calls out, and sprints across the deck and around to the back. An instant later there’s a loud yelp—the sound an animal might make as a steel trap closes on its foot.
“To your left,” I yell at Jimmy, pointing through the sparse trees behind the house.
Donnie Blevins has had better days.
He’s limping badly as he tries to flee through the back of the property, but he’s clearly in no shape to walk, let alone run. Jimmy catches up to him with his gun at the low-ready, while I circle around to the other side.
“Donnie?” Jimmy calls out.
“Yeah,” the big guy answers in a defeated voice. He leans into a tree and tries to hold his left foot off the ground with limited success.
“Why’d you run?”
“You’re here to arrest me, right?”
Jimmy doesn’t answer, but tips his head toward Donnie’s ankle. “How’d you hurt yourself?”
“Jumped from the back deck.”
Jimmy nods. “I took the stairs.”
“Yep. That would’ve been the smart thing to do.”
“Can you lift up your shirt for me, Donnie? Show me you’re not armed?”
He complies, wincing as he loses balance and has to catch himself on the wounded left ankle.
“Now the back,” Jimmy says, circling around. “Okay. That’s good. You’re not going to give us any trouble, are you, Donnie?”
“No,” the big guy groans. He’s sweating profusely now, either from the pain, from the drugs in his system, or from the lack of drugs in his system.
After frisking him, Jimmy says, “I’m going to holster my gun, and then you and I are going to have a little talk.” He slides the Glock semiautomatic back into its holster, and then studies Donnie a moment. “How bad is it?”
“Hurts a lot—feels like stuff is grinding together; I think I broke it.”
“Okay, we better get it looked at.” Jimmy dials 911 and requests an aid unit, then we help Donnie to the ground and prop his foot up. Response time is good, and within a few minutes three emergency medical technicians are huddled around Donnie examining the ankle. One of them comes over to give us the bad news.
“We need to transport,” she says. “It doesn’t look broken, but we need to get it X-rayed just to be sure.”
Jimmy nods. “I guess we’ll meet you at the hospital.”
Donnie hears this and cries out, “Ah, hell, no! If you’re not here to arrest me, what do you want?”
“We’re looking for your brother,” Jimmy shoots back.
“Haven’t seen him.”
“We thought as much. I understand you moved his belongings from his apartment into a storage unit?”
“Yeah, like three months ago—Ow! Easy, there,” he snaps at one of the EMTs.
“Did you find anything unusual or odd? Anything missing?”
“I wouldn’t know. I just took it all as is and threw it in a locker. Figured if he showed up again he could sort it out himself.”
<
br /> “You don’t seem too concerned about his disappearance.”
Donnie just shrugs, and the gesture says it all.
“We’d like to take a look at his stuff,” Jimmy says, “see if we notice anything out of the ordinary. We’re good at that type of thing. Any chance we could do that?”
Donnie digs in his right front pocket and pulls out a ring of keys. Peeling a small padlock key from the ring, he tosses it at Jimmy. “Merch Storage, just up the road,” he says, bobbing his head toward San Mateo Boulevard. “Unit G27.”
Jimmy gives him an appreciative smile. “We’ll mail the key back to you.”
“You can keep it, for all I care.”
We’re up the stairs and making our way around the deck to the front of the house when Donnie suddenly remembers himself and calls after us. I hear “thanks” and “broken ankle,” but the rest of the words are lost in the distance between.
It’s probably for the best.
His tone was anything but thankful.
Merch Storage—September 14, 9:46 A.M.
As the overhead door rattles up, the interior of the twenty-by-fifteen storage unit sees daylight for the first time in months. Stagnant air spills out as a gentle morning breeze pushes its way into the locker, rustling magazines, old mail, and miscellaneous paperwork left loose on an upright kitchen table.
“Is that…”
“Decomp,” Jimmy finishes for me.
“It’s not very strong; not strong enough for a body, right?”
Jimmy shakes his head, but he’s hesitant. “Could just be a rat or squirrel, something that crawled in through a vent in the roof.”
“I don’t see any rolled-up carpets,” I say. It’s meant as a joke, but I’m half serious.
“It’s stronger farther in,” Jimmy says after squeezing past some furniture. “Help me move some of this stuff out.”
The back of the unit is packed tight, but it appears that the closer the movers got to the front of the unit, the less concerned they were about stacking and fitting. Perhaps they realized they would have enough room for the whole load and placing the boxes together like a well-cut puzzle was no longer necessary.
Perhaps they just got tired.
Jimmy and I are able to dig our way well into the unit simply by pulling out a few of the larger furniture pieces, beginning with the small kitchen table, and following up with a bedroom dresser, a recliner, a love seat, miscellaneous boxes of bedding and towels, and three kitchen chairs.
Everything we touch is covered in the dead shine from Blevins’s apartment. The news doesn’t faze Jimmy. “Any sign of IB—” He stops himself, and then says, “Any sign of Isaiah?”
But the ice-blue shine is conspicuously absent.
We shuffle boxes and furniture another fifteen minutes, and find ourselves past the halfway point with an increasingly high and tightly packed wall of boxes, crates, and bins before us.
Pausing for breath, Jimmy takes a seat on a plastic storage bin and wipes the sweat from this brow while I lean back against an upright dresser.
“Keep going or call it quits?” I say.
Jimmy doesn’t answer right away, but sits silently, taking several deep breaths. At first I think he’s winded from moving too many boxes, but then I realize he’s sampling the air. I take a deep breath myself.
The smell of decomp is stronger.
“Can’t be a body,” I say. “We’d be gagging, even after three months. It’s got to be a mouse or a rat.”
“Could be a pair of feet,” Jimmy offers.
Feet.
I hadn’t thought of that.
“So … keep going,” I surmise.
Jimmy nods, and pushes himself up.
“Help me with this,” I say, slapping the top of the upright dresser. I grab the top edge and tip it down and to the side so Jimmy can grab it from the bottom. With cautious half steps we shuffle the heavy piece out of the unit and set it on the asphalt in front.
That’s when I see the trunk.
It was behind the dresser, hidden from view the whole time. It’s an eighty- or ninety-year-old steamer trunk with a small amount of ice-blue shine on the lid and clasp. Instantly a shiver runs down my spine and into my legs. I feel its tingle in my neck, my cheeks, my scalp.
“Jimmy,” I hiss.
My tone tells him what.
My pointing finger tells him where.
Together we pull and yank the old trunk out from under the stacked remnants of Bill Blevins’s unfortunate and destructive life. The job is made more difficult by the extreme weight of the trunk; it’s certainly heavier than a pair of feet, or even a body.
Books, I tell myself. It’s just books. But my inner voice lacks conviction.
“You want to open it?” I ask Jimmy.
“Not really. You?”
“Uh-uh,” I say emphatically. “You’re the special agent; I’m just your minion.”
“You’re the tracker. I thought I was your minion.”
In the end we do it together.
Jimmy frees the locking clasp. We both take a deep breath. He lifts the lid from the right corner, while I lift from the left.
An instant later the lid falls closed with a heavy thud as Jimmy screams and we both scramble away from the trunk and out into the morning light. In hindsight, I suppose I was the one doing the screaming.
“Are you kidding me?” my partner yells into the cavernous mouth of the storage unit. “Are you kidding me?”
“Is that what I thought it was?” I say.
“Yeah, it’s what you thought.” Jimmy’s already on the phone to Albuquerque dispatch. He relays the address and requests CSI, someone from the ME’s office, a couple uniforms, and a detective or two.
Three minutes pass before we hear the first of the distant sirens. In the meantime, we keep our distance from the trunk.
* * *
The Office of the Medical Investigator, or OMI, is New Mexico’s statewide medical examiner system, with specially trained investigators in every community ready to respond to sudden or unexplained deaths. If the investigation requires an autopsy, the body is transported to the University of New Mexico School of Medicine in Albuquerque, regardless of where the body was found.
Jessica Loomis and Matt Segershaw are the field deputy medical investigators, or FDMIs, dispatched by OMI to investigate the steamer trunk at Merch Storage. They arrive in a white OMI van at 11:32 A.M., by which time APD has the storage facility locked down tight.
Both of the detectives and several of the officers have gloved up and taken turns peeking into the trunk to confirm our findings. You can’t blame their curiosity; it wouldn’t be the first time something was called in that turned out to be a Halloween decoration.
After clearing a space on the asphalt outside and laying down a thick blue tarp, officers and detectives alternate pulling, lifting, and carrying—but mostly pulling—the heavy trunk out of the storage locker and onto the tarp.
Jessica Loomis lifts the lid and folds it all the way open, grimacing at the trunk’s contents as she examines it from several angles. Looking up, her eyes glance around at the various crime scene faces before stopping on me and Jimmy. She waves us over.
“You the FBI?”
“How’d you know?” I reply.
She smiles. “You’re the only faces I don’t recognize.” We make introductions and then she continues. “Can I ask what led you to this storage locker?”
I let Jimmy explain; he tends to be more concise.
“A serial killer?” Jessica says after he finishes. “Seriously?”
Jimmy gives a single, exaggerated nod.
“Well, that’s something,” she says, seemingly amused at the prospect.
“How are you going to handle this?” Jimmy asks.
“We’ll do the extraction here—that’s what the blue tarp is for. The trunk is just too heavy and awkward to load up and take to the lab in its current state.”
“I was hoping you were going t
o say that. Would you mind if Steps and I observe the extraction?”
“Not at all—just don’t touch anything.”
* * *
With the lid of the steamer trunk open and exposed to the full light of the noon sun, the desiccated face is revealed, particularly where the lips have pulled back to reveal the gums and teeth. The mouth is agape, the eye sockets sunken.
The trunk is filled almost to the top with what initially appears to be white sand, but is quickly discovered to be a combination of salt and lime. All that is visible of Bill Blevins’s corpse is the upturned face with its open mouth and the four fingers of his left hand.
The image is horrific: right off the poster of some low-budget horror flick.
As Jessica and Matt begin to remove the salt and lime mix in teaspoon-sized scoops, Matt looks at us and says, “This could take a while. You may want to run and get lunch or something.”
Lunch. Right.
“We’re fine,” Jimmy says.
A half hour later, the chest still looks full and my patience is nearing empty. I ask to borrow the car keys from Jimmy, and tell him I’m going to check out Paul Anderson’s residence on the other side of the river.
My reasoning is simple: with Blevins dead, his defense attorney could be next on the list.
Jimmy argues with me, pointing out that Isaiah has only killed ex-cons. He’s right about that, but he’s forgetting that Paul Anderson is the reason Blevins escaped justice for Tracy’s maiming and ultimate death, at least in Isaiah’s mind.
That, and Isaiah is working up to some grand finale. Until we figure out what it is, we need to cover all bases.
Tic toc.
Jimmy hands over the car keys when I point this out.
Either he sees the logic in my words or he realizes I won’t shut up until he concedes. The result is the same, and I leave the macabre mess at Merch Storage behind—even if it’s only for an hour or two.
* * *
Paul Anderson’s single-story adobe home on Dali Avenue, which he shares with his wife, Elizabeth, is spitting distance from the west bank of the Rio Grande River, which dissects Albuquerque north to south, leaving a majority of the metropolis on the east side of the river.
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