Strong Justice

by Jon Land

  “Did something happen to your cat?”

  The little girl continued to ignore her.

  “Molly?”

  “My mommy killed him.”

  Caitlin looked up at Tate Huffard.

  “His litter box smelled really bad, so my mommy took a broom to him. Kept whacking and whacking, whacking and whacking . . .”

  The little girl’s voice drifted off, her hand gyrating madly now, further spreading the color outside the outlines of Dorothy and the Wicked Witch.

  “Then she stuffed him in a Hefty bag,” Molly resumed again suddenly, “and buried him in the backyard under the elm tree. Later on she told me he ran away.”

  “You tell anybody else this?”

  Molly’s hand had slowed again, but she seemed to have forgotten about the lines entirely. “Nobody asked me.”

  “So your mother doesn’t know you saw her do it.”

  “You’re not gonna tell her, are you?”

  Caitlin slid her hand up the little girl’s back and stroked it gently. “Not if you don’t want me to.”

  “I just wanna go back to school. Can you tell my mommy to let me go back?”

  “You miss your friends?”

  A nod.

  “And your teacher?”

  Another nod. “But I think she’s mad at me.”

  “You love your mother, Molly?”

  “Sure do.”

  “She’d never hurt you, would she?”

  The little girl shook her head vehemently. “I want her to let me play with my friends again.”

  Caitlin stood back, glancing down at the coloring book on the way. Dorothy’s little dog Toto was in the lower right corner, colored totally black.

  “Molly say anything particularly helpful to you?” Blanche Beaumont asked Sheriff Huffard and Caitlin back in the small living room where she’d set up an ironing board in front of the television.

  “She seemed upset about her cat,” Caitlin told her.

  “Mr. Whiskers. Damn thing ran away and flat disappeared.” Blanche Beaumont’s expression grew furtive and tight. “Molly tell you anything different?”

  “Just that he disappeared right before she took a scissors to her teacher’s hand.”

  “You think there’s a connection?”

  Caitlin forced a shrug. “Anything’s possible.”

  55

  ALBION, TEXAS; THE PRESENT

  “Well?” Huffard asked her on the way back to his cruiser.

  “You see a litter box anywhere in that house?”

  “Nope.”

  “Because there isn’t one anymore. Blanche Beaumont knows that cat isn’t coming home.”

  They reached the car, Caitlin climbing in just ahead of him.

  “You wanna tell me what this has to do with a man thinking spiders were invading the world?” Huffard asked, as he closed his door.

  “This all started two weeks ago.”

  “Near as I can figure things. Seven, eight incidents of violence that don’t make no sense.” Huffard frowned and eased the car away from the curb. “It’s getting worse, Ranger. After the spiders, I’m losing sleep wondering what’s coming next.”

  “Where’s your town get its water, Sheriff?” Caitlin asked him.

  He seemed not to be listening. “Huh?”

  “Where does Albion get its water?”

  “Wells, like just about everywhere else in these parts. In dry years, some folks gotta drill down and start a whole new one.”

  “That include the Beaumonts?”

  “Couldn’t say, Ranger.”

  “What about the man from the H.E.B.?”

  Huffard’s hands started to jitter on the steering wheel. “You want me to check?”

  “Yes, I would.”

  “Care to tell me why?”

  “Not ready to yet.”

  Caitlin measured things off in her mind. Albion was twenty miles due west of where Deadman’s Creek had resided until the land had gone bone dry. Now Hollis Tyree had discovered the underground source for the creek that had led to the deaths of twenty-plus settlers in 1881 and unleashed it again, this time in Albion.

  “Something else,” Caitlin resumed, after a pause. “All those people who’ve behaved strangely and violently, I want you to draw blood samples from them.”

  “All of them?”

  She nodded. “As many who oblige, starting with that little girl we just talked to. I’ll be back to pick them up tomorrow. And don’t forget to have a couple of your deputies stop by here and dig around that elm tree in the back.”

  “Why?”

  “To see if you should add the girl’s mother to the list.”

  Caitlin switched her cell phone back on, finding a voice message from Cort Wesley Masters waiting.

  56

  SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT

  “. . . just tell this cop calls himself Bib and his lame ass of a partner to try making me.”

  Caitlin came through the door of the Central Police Substation to find Cort Wesley arguing up a storm with the dispatcher on the other side of the glass. Two officers stood to either side of the dispatcher’s stool, hands cheating close to their sidearms.

  “Sir, your son was assaulting a police officer at the time.”

  “I got a witness says otherwise.”

  “Then you should file a formal complaint.”

  “I prefer to do it with the officers in question.” Cort Wesley gazed over the dispatcher’s shoulder. “Bet the two of them are back there right now, pissing themselves like genuine hard-asses.”

  The dispatcher spotted Caitlin approaching, no idea what to make of her presence.

  She joined Cort Wesley at the counter. “Tell Captain Alonzo I’d like to see her.”

  “Captain’s busy.”

  “You tell her to get her ass out here, or I can place a call to the Department of Public Safety to have it hoisted up the flagpole. You straight on this?”

  The dispatcher sneered at her as he lifted his phone.

  “I’d like the full name of the officer who maced Dylan Torres in the face,” Caitlin told Alonzo from the other side of the glass, as Cort Wesley looked on like a tightly wound spring.

  “That the way you want to play this, Ranger?” Alonzo’s police-issue trousers looked tighter than the pair she’d been wearing the other day, her muscular thighs and butt ready to tear them at the seams. “Because if you do I can put in a call to the administrator in charge of Mr. Masters’s case at social services.”

  “You don’t wanna do that, Captain.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Because I don’t think you want to go on the record about your officers storming into a hotel lobby to arrest two innocent kids and macing one of them in the face.”

  “We only came for the girl, Ranger, who I understand is here illegally. It’s called doing our jobs.”

  “That what you call it, bitch?” Cort Wesley demanded, stopping only when Caitlin squeezed his steel band of a bicep as best she could.

  “Well now,” Alonzo said, half-smiling, “you just bought yourself a ticket out of my station house. How that happens, Mr. Masters, is your call. But I look forward to discussing our conversation with Marianna Silvaro at social services.” She swung toward Caitlin. “I’m having that girl driven back to Mexico to be left with the authorities in Nuevo Laredo. That freak show of a man comes gunning for her again, it’ll be on their dime.”

  Caitlin heard the door behind her rock open and Captain D. W. Tepper enter, accompanied by Rangers Steve Berry and Jim Rollins.

  “Not anymore,” he said, having heard the last of Alonzo’s words. Stetson on the verge of swallowing his increasingly gaunt head, Tepper strolled straight to the counter and slid a crinkled set of pages through the opening. “This here’s a writ signed by the public safety commissioner transferring Maria Lopez in our custody.”

  “Bullshit,” said Alonzo, not bothering to read it.

  “This is our case now, Captain. But we int
end to continue working cooperatively with you,” Tepper followed politely in stark contrast to Alonzo’s tone, flashing a wink that further enraged her.

  “Something change I don’t know about, Captain Tepper?”

  “Forensics report came in on that killing knife recovered from Mr. Masters’s home. Turns out to be a match to the wounds in the body of a Mexican woman Ranger Strong here found near the border in 2003. One of Las Mujeres de Juárez.”

  57

  SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT

  Tepper paused to let his point sink in. “We’ll take Mr. Masters’s son with us at the same time, if you don’t mind.”

  “And what if I do?”

  “I’d remind you he’s a material witness and you’d be giving no choice but to relieve you of your command, put a Ranger in your place.”

  “The hell you think you are?”

  “Got a peak at your jacket, Captain Alonzo,” Tepper said, instead of answering. “Real sorry to hear about those pending complaints. You ask me, they’re singling you out just for being a woman. And while I put no stock whatsoever in these rumors about your sexual preferences, others might. I was you, I wouldn’t haul off giving them more against you than they already got.”

  The officers brought Maria out first, her eyes wide with fear and resignation marking the flatness of her expression. Dylan came through another door a few moments later. His face was red and irritated from the mace, his eyes bloodshot and still tearing. He kept sniffling as the officers led him forward, his hair damp with patches of it stuck to his forehead. His freyed jean bottoms curled under the bottoms of the boots Caitlin had bought him, dragging across the floor. His skin seemed to glow.

  Caitlin could feel the suppressed tension uncoiling in Cort Wesley as he watched the boy approach. Dylan emerged and froze before his father, their stares locking wordlessly, neither knowing what they were supposed to say.

  “Let’s go,” Cort Wesley said, leaving it at that.

  “Can I have a word with you?” Captain Alonzo said, emerging through the security door when Caitlin was halfway out the exit.

  Caitlin stopped and turned back around to face her

  “I cut you slack I shouldn’t have the other day. Now I regret it.”

  “Ma’am, there’s never sufficient call for a man to take a can of mace to a boy. Doesn’t say much for him and even less for whoever might be holding his ticket.”

  “Guess we’re just lousy paid bureaucrats here. The Ranger code doesn’t apply.”

  “Then maybe it should.”

  “Kid with a wild streak throws himself on you, you gonna take him out for ice cream?”

  “Guess not,” Caitlin conceded. “But my mace can would stay clipped to my belt, I can tell you that much.”

  Something changed in Alonzo’s expression, the anger and prideful distress over being one-upped by higher powers bleeding away. “Word is you bussed a bunch of kidnapped Mexican girls across the border.”

  “That what you heard?”

  “Is it true?”

  Caitlin held her gaze, not responding.

  “Maybe I got you all wrong, Ranger, but more likely I haven’t got you at all and I’m beginning to think nobody does.”

  “That’s the first thing you’ve said I agree with, Captain.”

  58

  SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT

  Outside, Dylan’s gaze stayed locked with Maria’s until D. W. Tepper’s truck pulled away with her sandwiched between Rangers Berry and Rollins in the backseat. Caitlin and Cort Wesley had both parked their vehicles in an area labeled AUTHORIZED PARKING ONLY, and she could see Cort Wesley’s younger son Luke peering up from a video game in the front passenger seat of his truck.

  “You want to explain yourself?” Cort Wesley snapped at Dylan suddenly.

  “What was I supposed to do?”

  “Anything that didn’t land you in jail for the second time in less than a week for starters.”

  “You would’ve done the same thing and you know it.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “No, guess you’re right,” the boy said thoughtfully. “You would’ve done more, and the cop who did the macing be in considerably worse condition right now.”

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  In that moment, Cort Wesley saw himself as Marianna Silvaro must have: totally out of place as a parent and role model. He wanted to break something over his knee, anything to give the stress building up in him a vent.

  He watched Dylan climb into the backseat, not bothering to rouse his younger brother from the front. The clock in Cort Wesley’s head started ticking down from twenty-four hours, the time he had left before Marianna Silvaro came to take the two of them away. He wondered what Silvaro would make of the scene inside the substation. She’d probably have Dylan and Luke placed as far from him as possible, in another state if not planet.

  . . .

  Caitlin was ready to drive off when she saw Cort Wesley and Dylan arguing up a storm. Distance kept her from making out any of their words, but she could see Dylan leaning up over the truck’s bench seat and his father pouring out so much heated breath with his words that the windshield was beginning to fog up.

  Caitlin tried to focus on Macerio and the neat line of blood he’d left spilled along the border with Mexico. Somewhere in that line lay the point behind all the killings, the bizarre pattern taking the randomness out of Las Mujeres de Juárez and accounting for how one man could be responsible for so much death. More than four hundred murders committed over nearly fourteen years now. Macerio making his point, whatever that was, for a long time.

  Caitlin turned her engine on, then off again, and climbed out of her SUV. She walked toward Cort Wesley’s truck through the cooling air and wind rattling the posted parking signs, foretelling the approach of yet another spring storm, and rapped on his closed window. He slid it downward, as Dylan slumped in the backseat to avoid her gaze.

  “Something I’m missing here,” she said to Cort Wesley.

  “Say what?”

  “About Macerio and Las Mujeres de Juárez. How’s a man get away with killing that many people over so long a period of time?”

  “What, you figure I’m an expert on the subject?”

  “Just want to hear what you think.”

  Cort Wesley resisted the temptation to swing back toward Dylan and continue their argument. “A man kills that long in the same area, it’s because he’s got no fear of getting caught. Understandable under the circumstances, I suppose.”

  “Is it?”

  “What are you getting at here, Ranger?”

  “Goes back to what you said, ’cause everybody’s got fear of being caught. Macerio—doesn’t for another reason entirely.”

  “You suggesting he’s protected somehow?”

  Caitlin tried to hold fast to her thinking against the seeming implausibility of it. “Plenty say Jack the Ripper being British royalty explains how he got away with his murders.”

  “That’s quite a leap, even for you, Caitlin.”

  “I’m just thinking out loud here.”

  Cort Wesley opened the truck’s door and climbed out.

  “Dad,” Dylan protested from the back.

  “Shut your mouth son. I’m not done with you yet either.”

  “We need to talk about Frankie Branca,” Cort Wesley told Caitlin after they slid away from his truck. “The buy’s set for tomorrow. Whatever Junior found out about Hollis Tyree’s land in Tunga County is stuffed inside a briefcase he’s selling. Maybe we just raid his hotel suite now.”

  “Raid’s a good idea, but not until the buyer’s present.”

  “I was thinking about handling it myself.”

  “Past tense, since you just came clean to me.”

  “Remember I told you I wanted to be a Texas Ranger when I was a kid?”

  “Sure do.”

  “This’ll probably be as close as I get.”

  59

 
; SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT

  Back in her SUV, Caitlin called Thomason Hospital in El Paso. It took several minutes for authorities to get Fernando Lozano Sandoval, commander with the Chihuahua State Investigations Agency, on the line.

  “It’s nice to speak to you again, Ranger,” Sandoval greeted.

  “I’m glad to hear you’re doing better, sir.”

  “They’ve closed off half a floor here to keep me safe. I think I’d rather have you.”

  “I appreciate the thought.”

  “You saved my life.”

  “Just doing my job, sir.”

  “Is that why you’re calling me now?”

  “Truth is, when we last spoke you said something I just can’t get clear of.”

  “You recall what?”

  “Not the words, just the look in your eyes when you spoke them. You probably don’t even remember what I’m talking about.”

  A long pause followed, Caitlin listening to Sandoval’s deep breathing the whole time before he finally spoke. “Have you ever heard of Colonel Renaldo Montoya?”

  “Can’t say that I have.”

  “Montoya used to be commander of the Zetas, the Mexican army’s Special Forces.”

  “Used to be,” Caitlin repeated.

  “A year ago he was stripped of his command and his rank for suspected complicity in the murder of several American tourists at the hands of his men. We were moving to arrest him when he disappeared.”

  “Montoya’s the man who set up the assassination attempt on you,” Caitlin realized.

  “Sí. And we believe he’s used the Zetas still loyal to him to take over our nation’s drug cartels and the smuggling rings.”

  “Smuggling, sir?”

  “Of young women, like the ones you rescued in Nuevo Laredo, Ranger.”

  “Guess you heard about that.”

  “We believe Montoya’s hiding somewhere in the jungle. Hundreds of his former commandos have disappeared. For a time, we feared a coup, financed by the money he’s making running drugs and girls. Now I’m not so sure.”