by Eric Meyer
“Sheriff.” The expression was absent of the hostility he’d shown earlier, wiped away by the shock of the brutal homicide.
“What do we have?”
“Not much, and the description so far is worthless. The perp wore a baseball cap that shielded his face from the CCTV cameras. From the little bit we can see it looks like he’s from south of the border.” Neither man said the first thing that came to mind. Narcos, “There’s something else, Sheriff. The camera caught a glimpse of a dressing on his head, like he’d had an operation recently, or maybe a bullet wound. I’ll check with the local hospitals when I get back to the office.”
“You do that.”
He spent time talking to people, sending his men to knock the doors of local business and gas stations. It was the early hours of the morning before he managed to get home, feeling tired and stale. The killer was still on the loose in his city, and that worried him. Seeing that young woman dead on the floor of the mall reminded him of his own dead wife, and he went into the spare room and looked at every scrap of evidence he’d posted up on the wall. With no good reason for what he was doing, for the two events were unconnected. Not that anything made any sense, the dead woman had been a veterinary surgeon, about as likely to have been mixed up with drug traffickers as Sheryl. Yet there was something odd. His own wife had been the random victim of a drug hit. The murder in the mall had been different, a targeted hit. None of it made any sense, and now it had brought her murder back to the forefront of his mind. Befuddled with tiredness and confusion, he walked from room to room, looking at photographs, straightening the pictures on the walls. He’d even left her clothes hanging in the closet, as if one day the door would open, and she’d be there.
“Hi, Kaz, how was your day?”
Her bright smile would light up the house, and they’d settle down for the evening. Maybe talk about the family they were planning.
It wouldn’t happen, but he couldn't bring himself to dispose of the clothes and possessions by passing them on to the local thrift shop. Even her shoes were placed in a neat row, all highly polished, like so many soldiers on parade.
Sheryl, I miss you. I miss you so much. And I miss the kids we’d talked about and never had. The killer took that chance away from us.
Thinking about the kids they wanted so much brought to mind those two small bodies lying in Beechtree Mall.
Two fine looking boys, she'd have been overjoyed to have two sons like that. Except she's dead, and they’re both dead. The mother dead, they’re all dead.
He wondered about the killer and why he’d committed such a heinous crime. Finding a motive would be the key to catching him. So far, nothing made sense. It looked like a professional hit, the way he targeted the family and disappeared so fast. In addition, the choice of weapon, a .22 Beretta, was an assassin’s gun. It all added up to an inescapable conclusion, a pro killing to order.
Why a vet and her two children? I’ll never know. He’ll have left town, which means he’s now someone else's problem. They say lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place. Yet if it weren’t for the total lack of motive or reason, I’d say it just did. What the hell’s going on?
* * *
He’d waited in the shadows outside the parking lot, ready to make his way back to the motel when the heat died down. He watched the ambulance drive away and smiled to himself. It would be on a one-way journey to the mortuary. An hour later the Crime Scene truck left, followed by two more police vehicles. The Sheriff’s cruiser was the last to go. People were still milling in the parking lot, some returning from the places they’d gone to hide when the shooting started. Not more than fifty yards away, on the edge of the lot and outside the spill of light from the stores, an elderly couple was loading groceries into the trunk of their Cadillac.
He’d need a car to get away from the city, and the Cadillac looked ideal. He kept the gun at his side as he walked toward them. He stopped a few feet away and pasted what he thought was a pleasant smile on his face.
“Evening, amigos.”
The two oldies glanced at him, and the reaction wasn’t what he expected. The guy moved fast and pushed his wife away. “Barbara, run!”
She made two paces before his small caliber bullet smacked into her spine, and she fell. He put a bullet in the man’s neck, and he joined his wife on the ground, drowning in his own blood. Rivera walked to the woman. The bullet had paralyzed her. She looked up at him, gasping for air, mouth opening and closing like a goldfish, eyes wide in disbelief. He gave her a gentle smile.
“Die, gringo goldfish.” He put a bullet right between her eyes. They were wide with disbelief when her final breath gasped out of her open mouth.
He had a car. The bodies would alert the cops the vehicle was missing, but he had a simple answer. The Caddie had a huge trunk, and he stuffed them inside. He kicked the rest of their groceries out of the way. He chuckled.
I’m not a thief, why would I take your food?
The flat crack of the tiny pistol had made little noise, not enough to alert anyone, and there was no sign anybody was watching him. Satisfied he was in the clear, Rivera climbed into the driving seat and drove away. The big vehicle was smooth and powerful, and he briefly considered driving it all the way home.
Except…where was home? He couldn’t remember, and he momentarily panicked, before he calmed himself. It’d come to him sooner or later. First, he must get back to the motel. His head was throbbing, a searing agony that almost blinded him with pain. He needed a night’s sleep, and he’d be fine again.
He parked the Cadillac outside his room and went inside. He immediately fell on the sagging bed and tried to sleep, without success. His inability to remember things worried him, and he tried hard to focus on why he was here, and what he was supposed to do. He dimly recalled some shooting, but that could have been innocent fun. Like a night out in Ciudad, shooting was normal, an everyday part of the scene. He decided that was probably it. But he was still worrying about the things hidden in the dark recesses of his mind when he finally fell into a shallow and troubled sleep.
Chapter Two
He awoke early when sharp pains knifed through his head. His memory was still fuzzy, and he inspected his surroundings, trying to work out if he was lying wounded in an ER room and why it hurt so much. It wasn’t a hospital but a shabby motel room, and he had no idea how he’d got there. He lay still for almost an hour, staring at the ceiling, as if expecting a message to appear in the cracked and stained plaster. When he finally climbed out of bed, nothing had altered. Another jagged flash of pain tore through his head, and he suddenly recalled his boss, the Jefe, Paco Martinez.
Did he send me here?
He'd known Paco since they were kids, kicking a ball around the dusty streets of their hometown, although he couldn’t remember the name of the town. They’d grown up together and now Martinez was his employer, he knew that much. He dimly recalled his last instructions, something about someone he had to kill.
The pieces started to come together, and he recalled the target was a woman with brown hair and two young boys. He was to go to the mall and kill them in a brutal public spectacle, an execution that would send shockwaves through any potential rival to Martinez's narcotics empire. He felt better. He had it now. He would go to the mall, find the woman and her children, and kill them.
He made coffee with the cranky machine in the room, the only appliance that worked. There was no hot water, so he stood beneath the cold shower and felt revived. When he'd toweled himself off, he redressed his head wound, still unsure how it happened. Was it a bullet? He could see the site he got hit, but there was no exit wound. It could have been anything. A blow from a sharpened stake, even a stabbing was possible. If a bullet had struck him, the lead would still be in there, and surely, he'd know about it. There’d be symptoms, although he’d forgotten what they might be.
He dressed, preparing himself for the coming kill. His head turned to stare though the window. There was no sig
n of any cops outside. Good, he’d managed to stay hidden. Although he wasn’t certain of what he was hiding from. Something had happened the day before, a vague memory he couldn’t bring into focus.
He made himself another mug of coffee and sat in the shabby armchair, ignoring the torn upholstery and the spring poking through, while he savored the lukewarm brew. He wasn't hungry. The idea of food repelled him, and that was strange. He was a soldier, of a kind, and he'd always opined it was important to eat good food in order to keep fit enough to carry out his kind of work. Killing people.
He must have dozed off again for when he looked at his watch again it was early afternoon. There was something he needed do at a mall, and he sensed there could be a problem with the cops, so he reminded himself to keep his eyes skinned for trouble.
When he went outside to look for his car, he couldn't remember which car he was driving.
Wasn’t it a Jeep Wrangler?
He thought so, but there was no Jeep Wrangler in the parking lot. In desperation he felt in his pockets and came out with a remote key fob. He’d no idea where it came from, but he pressed the unlock button and saw the lights flash on a Cadillac parked almost outside his room. Excellent, a smart, powerful, and luxurious car like wealthy people drove. It would get him out of trouble fast if needed.
He regarded his clothes, and if there had been any trouble the day before, he decided it would be best to play safe and wear something different. He walked across the street to a surplus store, ignoring the vagrants holding out plastic cups for money. The store was just what he needed, with racks of anonymous, drab clothing. Just like the workmen and even the vagrants wore outside on the street. He bought military surplus camo pants, an olive khaki shirt, a dark red check woolen jacket, and a black woolly hat. When he’d changed into his new purchases, he inspected himself in the mirror and nodded approval. He looked like a repairman or maybe a construction worker. As an afterthought he bought a used toolbox to complete the disguise.
When he left the store with his own clothes hidden inside the toolbox, he was unrecognizable. A Mexican odd-job man, the kind of guy you'd hire to clean the pool, mow the lawn, or shovel dirt for a construction project. Anonymous. He returned to the motel and entered his room, feeling exhausted. The pain had come back in full force, and he sat in the old armchair to rest. When he awoke, to his surprise another hour had passed. It was time to leave and do the job. Then he could go home.
The Jefe, Paco Martinez, would be proud, provided he did everything right. He still couldn't remember the name of the town he called home, or even the name of the town he was in now. He shrugged. It would soon come back to him. What was important was to do the job. It would be dark soon, and that would be the best time to make his move. At night he could slip away into the darkness and they'd never find him. They’d search for him in vain while he made his way home. Wherever that was.
* * *
Sheriff Kaz Walker was uncomfortable when he visited this place. The same way he felt every time he came here to look at a body or attend a postmortem. He was here now for the postmortem of a young woman, and two years ago he’d been there to identify his murdered wife. After all this time the grief still hurt, and he took a few quick breaths to calm down.
He was looking at a woman with dark brown hair, and on adjacent tables, two more bodies, those of her young sons.
He looked at Doc Weatherby. “Why me, Doc? I don’t get it, what did you want to show me? I saw these bodies in the Beechtree Mall, just after they were shot."
Weatherby, attired in a long green apron, rubber boots, and surgical gloves glanced back at him. He filled the post of Chief Medical Examiner and was a skilled forensic pathologist, so he covered most postmortems. The pathologist adjusted his glasses over his smooth, patrician face that never seemed to age. Tall, slim, and still good-looking, he looked ten years younger than his fifty-five years. He peered back at him through the thick lenses, which Walker thought resembled the bottoms of old-fashioned milk bottles.
Everything about him was old-fashioned, from the tailored English tweed three-piece suit he normally sported when he wasn’t cutting up bodies, to the white Egyptian cotton shirt decorated with a maroon silk bowtie. Complete with polka dots, of course. He looked like what he was. A prosperous and successful medical professional, although people said he’d inherited old money, which made sense.
Walker had visited him at home on occasion, and his house was a smart, classical style antebellum mansion standing in around ten acres of landscaped grounds outside the city. Complete with Greek pillars that adorned the front aspect, he kept and trained horses when he wasn’t busy dissecting corpses. Yet he never seemed to remind people of his wealth. He was most polite, always sympathetic to those who came to view and identify the corpses of their loved ones. Weatherby was a man people liked and trusted.
“Sheriff, I was watching the news, and I heard about an attempted killing across the border in Ciudad.”
“Attempted?”
“The Federales stopped the shooter and he got away.”
“Uh, huh.” He wasn’t really listening, fascinated and appalled by the woman lying on the slab. Just like Sheryl had lain on that same slab, “I still don’t get it.”
“I’m not making myself clear. What got my interest were the intended victims. They displayed a still picture of a woman with dark hair and two young sons just before he opened fire. It’s, well... an attempted hit in a mall, same descriptions of the victims, except this time he got lucky."
The Sheriff finally took notice. "You’re suggesting there’s a serial killer on the loose? A guy who targets women with dark hair accompanied by two young boys, in shopping malls? That’s a bit of a stretch, Doc.”
He looked slightly embarrassed. “Well, no, it just seemed like a coincidence, that’s all.”
“I hear you. Do you have anything else?"
A shrug. “The shooter used a Beretta .22, three bullets, three kills. This guy is good, and I mean really good.”
“It sure sounds like a pro. Why would a pro go around killing people at random? It’s coincidence, is all.”
Weatherby nodded. “I know I’m overreacting. It’s just that I saw plenty of this kind of thing when I worked down in El Paso, families wiped out. Drug hits usually. I did some work across the border in Ciudad as well, but after a while you see too many innocents gunned down. Just going to work makes you sick to the stomach. I saw that woman and her kids, and it was just something that struck a chord.”
“You were in Ciudad Juarez?”
“A few times, when they called me in to advise on a special case, most of the time I worked in El Paso. Same killers, though, they used to come over the border to hit rivals who operated out of Texas. We don’t need this kind of thing here in Lewes, Kaz.” He gave him a weak smile, “Bad for business.”
“You have business interests in the city? I didn’t know that, Doc.”
He gave him a sharp look, and his face wore an unreadable expression. “I didn’t say I had business interests, not in the city or anywhere else.” He looked agitated and took his glasses off, wiped the lenses, and replaced them, “A slip of the tongue. I meant to say it’s bad for the poor folks who end up on my slab, like these poor devils out doing some shopping. And along comes what looks like a professional and guns them down."
"Which confirms he's definitely not a serial killer, and he killed them to order, for some unknown reason. If there was any connection with that business down in Ciudad, the answer is with the narco traffickers, for sure. Although I doubt we’ll ever get any real answers. Call me if you find anything else, Doc."
“I’ll do that.”
He drove back to the crime scene so he could take another look around. Mayor William Bridges was busy giving an interview outside the main doors. TV news presenter Eva McCoy had a microphone pushed into his face as he spoke. Walker had known Eva since before he was married, before he joined the Marines. They’d been at college at the same time,
him studying for an arts degree, and her pursuing computer science at postgraduate level. She’d even helped him out with his computer, which never seemed to work the way it was supposed to, and they’d briefly dated.
“She’s an attractive young woman, bright, plucky, and intelligent, although no competition for Sheryl. Except Sheryl’s dead,” he whispered.
His stomach tightened. He couldn’t even say her name without feeling like the Grim Reaper had tapped him on the shoulder.
* * *
She saw him, abruptly ended the interview, and intercepted him before he entered the office. Kaz Walker, her college squeeze, and although she’d never begrudged him his marriage to Sheryl, neither had she ever stopped wishing she’d been the one the handsome soon-to-be Marine walked down the aisle.
She gave him a warm smile. “Sheriff Walker, do you have anything you can tell us about this killing?"
"I’m sorry, Eva. I’m sure Mayor Bridges has told you everything we know so far."
He tried to push past her, but she nimbly stepped in his way.
No way am I about to let this man get away.
She suddenly realized what she’d been thinking. She’d meant not to let him get away from an interview, although she couldn’t stop herself from hoping for something more. Plenty of men hit on her, and she usually managed to fend them off without giving too much offense. Kaz was different. He was tough, but also compassionate, and he’d never hit on her. He was too easy going, and when he and Sheryl got together, it was as much her pushing that tied the knot.