by Rehder, Ben
“Fine by me,” Marlin said. “I realize we can’t check every nook and cranny on the place, so let’s just see what we can see. Let’s start on the western fence line.”
“Ten-four.”
On the first pass north, they spotted at least a dozen deer, plus a flock of wild turkeys congregated at a feeder. Most of the animals became skittish when the chopper flew over, ducking for cover or, in some cases, simply sprinting away from the thrumming of the rotors. A few deer stood in place, but Marlin could always see them crane their necks to stare at the strange object in the sky.
Coming back south, Daughdril pointed out a pack of coyotes sneaking along the bottom of a ravine. Gazing through his binoculars, Marlin figured it to be a female with five or six juveniles born the previous spring.
They continued cutting swaths up and down the ranch, with each new pass pushing farther to the east. Fortunately, Kyle Dawson’s father had removed most of the scrub cedars and other brush from the ranch years ago; otherwise, surveying the property by air would be, for the most part, a futile effort.
As the survey continued, Marlin asked Daughdril on several occasions to decelerate for a look at a particular deer. Each deer, though, bounded away, disappearing into a distant oak motte or field of tall native grasses.
“What the hell you think he’s doing?” Billy Don asked, staring out the window on the passenger’s side. He and Red were parked on the shoulder of Flat Creek Road, along the southern border of the Macho Bueno Ranch.
Red recognized the helicopter as one belonging to a man named Jacob Daughdril, who lived just south of Round Mountain. Every ten minutes or so, the chopper would approach from the north, reach the road, and turn around. It was obvious that Daughdril was scoping the ranch from one end to the other.
“What you wanna bet he’s trying to rustle up the chupacabra?” Red said, not feeling too happy about the whole situation.
It was damn unfair, a man taking to the air like that. What chance did he and Billy Don have against a chopper? Daughdril could get a good look at the entire ranch that way, whereas Billy Don and Red were limited—legally anyway—to what they could see from the county road. Worse, they couldn’t even check the trap until Daughdril left, because he was the kind of guy who’d raise a ruckus about a trespasser.
When their path took them over Dawson’s house and the horse stable, Marlin asked Daughdril to fly in an expanding circle above the surrounding acreage. Maybe the decoy was stashed nearby, although Marlin was beginning to wonder if there was a decoy at all. Truth be told, he was beginning to lose his ambition for the project, knowing that even if he found the decoy, its evidentiary value would most likely be nil.
They had been in the air for more than an hour now, and their fuel supply was mandating no more than fifteen more minutes over the ranch.
“All right,” Marlin shouted over the noise of the engine, “let’s take a few more passes over the eastern pastures and call it a day.”
Daughdril gave him a thumbs-up.
Duke heard the whoop-whoop-whoop of the chopper and stepped onto the back porch of the Waldrip homestead.
Jesus, what the hell are they up to now?
Duke had been following the news, and he didn’t think the copter was looking for the chupacabra—not after John Marlin’s warning on Saturday night. Most of those idiots had already left town. What a bunch of wackos, thinking an animal like that actually existed. All that uproar over a hyena. Stupid spick who reported it had done Duke a favor, keeping the cops busy with a bunch of bullshit.
So what, then, was that damn chopper doing flying over Kyle’s ranch? According to the reports, the cops were calling Kyle a “person of interest” in the Searcy case—which meant to anyone with half a brain that he was a suspect.
He heard a car door out front. Gus coming back. Duke had finally made the decision: He was sending Gus away for a while. Not up to Alaska or anything that drastic, but maybe over to see a cousin in New Orleans. All in all, it was the smartest thing to do. Keep him tucked away somewhere until the heat was off.
Duke had sent Gus to the bank to get some cash, then began to pack a suitcase for him. Get him on a bus this very afternoon.
Then Duke heard another car door. And another.
What the hell?
He entered the house just as someone pounded firmly on the front door. “Sheriff’s department!”
Duke peeked through the front curtains and saw three patrol cars in the driveway. He quickly turned and went out the back door.
“Hello, Duke.”
Standing to the side of the porch was Bill Tatum, his hand resting on his revolver.
Just as they were making a final turn over the northeast pasture, Marlin saw it.
“Hey, Jacob, swing back to the left, will ya?”
Down below, something was catching the sunlight, twinkling like a jewel.
“See that thing shining?”
Daughdril veered toward the object, then began to hover overhead.
Marlin sighted through his binoculars.
Was that what he thought it was? He dialed up to maximum zoom. The object came into focus—and sure enough, it was a toaster. An everyday household toaster, lying in a remote field, half a mile from the nearest house. Weird.
“John, we gotta head out,” Daughdril said, tapping the fuel gauge.
Marlin nodded, and Daughdril, eyeing his gauges, banked the craft back to the south.
As the chopper began to ascend, though, something else caught Marlin’s eye. A shape, instantly recognizable by its contours, spilled across a rough caliche flat.
“Jake, stop! We’re gonna have to land.”
“But—”
“I’ll have the deputies bring more fuel, but you gotta set her down!”
What Marlin had seen was a human body.
Bill Tatum calmly took a seat across from Duke Waldrip in the interview room. “Just give us a few minutes here, Duke. We want to set up a video camera.” He gazed at Waldrip, and Waldrip stared back, unblinking.
To Tatum’s surprise, Waldrip hadn’t asked for a lawyer so far or said anything about not answering questions. Tatum had seen it before, though. Sometimes it was ego, or maybe it was stupidity, but guys like Waldrip often decided they could get through the proceedings just fine on their own. Waldrip, even with his criminal background, might not realize the smartest thing he could do was keep his mouth shut. The toughest offender was the type who forced the police to prove their case. More often, though, the break came when a suspect incriminated himself, or said something that inadvertently led to hard evidence against him.
Rachel Cowan entered with the camera, stood it on its tripod, and wordlessly ran a microphone to the table separating the two men. She pressed the RECORD button and said, “Anything else?”
“How about a decaf latte?” Waldrip asked.
Cowan didn’t even look his way.
Tatum smiled. “No, that’ll be it, Officer Cowan. Thanks.”
She closed the door behind her, and Tatum let the silence settle in the room for a moment. Then he recited Waldrip’s rights for the second time. “You understand your rights?”
“This is bullshit.”
“Mr. Waldrip, do you understand your rights?”
“Yeah. Whatever.”
“Thank you.”
Tatum began to thumb through a pile of paperwork on the table in front of him, feigning interest. The truth was, the papers had nothing to do with Duke Waldrip. But Tatum wanted the man to think a great deal of evidence and documentation had been amassed against him. Likewise, the deputies had covered one wall of the room with materials meant to rattle the suspect: an enlarged photo from Waldrip’s driver’s license; a mug shot from his arrest for armed robbery; an aerial photograph of Maggie Mason’s ranch, where Oliver Searcy had been found, and another of Kyle Dawson’s Macho Bueno Ranch. Copies of interviews with Searcy’s friends and family were thumbtacked to the wall, and meaningless notes had been scrawled all over th
em. The intent was intimidation—to make Waldrip think the full force of the Blanco County Sheriff’s Department had been dedicated to bringing him to justice. It wasn’t far from the truth. So far, Tatum had noticed Waldrip’s eyes wandering to that wall on several occasions.
After a full ten minutes, Tatum finally placed the paperwork back on the table. “This is big stuff, Duke. Big stuff.”
Duke shrugged. “I don’t even know what the hell you’re talking about. You still ain’t told me what you arrested me for.”
“You’ll be arraigned tomorrow,” Tatum said. “Meanwhile, I want to give you a chance to tell your side of it. Hell, Kyle’s run off and left you holding the bag. You’re the one we got, so you’re the one that gets charged. But see, that’s not so bad. You can tell us what happened, and Kyle’s not around to say you’re lying.”
Tatum was walking a thin line here. Later, if the videotape was used in court, the questions had to be seen as applying to the illegal animal charge. If Waldrip misinterpreted them, though, and began giving information on the Searcy homicide, that was all fair game.
“The big question is,” Tatum said, “was Kyle even involved? Right now, to be honest, Duke, everything’s pointing at you. Maybe there are mitigating circumstances, though, or maybe the evidence isn’t showing things the way they really were. All of us want to be fair here, and nobody wants to charge you with something you didn’t do. That’s why it’s so important to tell us what happened.”
Tatum did his best to present a cool demeanor, but inside, his heart was firing like a piston. The bluff came down to this moment. If Waldrip was going to give them any kind of toehold on this case, it would be now.
Waldrip looked up at the wall, his eyes roaming over every scrap of paper, and then back at Tatum. “You ain’t got shit, do ya?”
Never in a million years, Tatum thought, would an innocent person ask that question. It renewed Tatum’s feeling that the investigation was on the right track. In his experience, innocent men didn’t taunt. But he kept a poker face and didn’t answer. Clearly, this approach wasn’t working as well as he had hoped. Waldrip didn’t seemed cowed in the least.
The door opened again, and this time it was Ernie Turpin. Something showed on his face—urgency maybe—as he stepped into the room and handed Tatum a note.
Tatum unfolded it and read Turpin’s scrawl: “Marlin just found Kyle Dawson’s body.”
30
FOUR HOURS LATER, Tatum and Marlin stood back and watched the Bobcat operator tear at the soil. Marlin was impressed by how quickly Tatum’s team had responded to his radio call. Within thirty minutes, Tatum and his deputies had arrived, along with the medical examiner, Lem Tucker, and the forensics technician, Henry Jameson.
A cluster of county vehicles was parked thirty yards from the site of the body, with a KHIL news van looming behind the yellow tape that had been stretched in a wide arc around the crime scene.
So far, the deputies had bagged the following evidence: the toaster, what appeared to be the remains of a swimsuit that had been torn from Dawson’s body, and an extension cord found inside the hole that had obviously served as Dawson’s tomb.
But Tatum wasn’t content with merely peering into the hole or having a deputy crawl inside. He wanted every last scrap of evidence possible, so he was having the hole slowly excavated by the Bobcat, a small tractor equipped with a backhoe.
Meanwhile, Ernie Turpin was back at the office, typing affidavits for a search of Duke Waldrip’s office, his home on Flat Creek Road, and his truck. “Yesterday,” Tatum had said earlier, frustration in his voice, “Hilton didn’t think we had probable cause on Waldrip. Now I’d say we do. I’d say he and Kyle teamed up on Searcy, and then their little partnership went south. Hell, we got Waldrip’s fingerprints on the deer mount, calls from Searcy to Waldrip … and now somebody offed Kyle. Am I crazy, or is that probable cause?”
They were all hoping the judge would see it the same way. Just after three o’clock, they received the news they were waiting for. Ernie Turpin came over the radio to Tatum: “On that matter with Judge Hilton, we’re a go. Repeat, we are a go.”
“Ten-four,” Tatum replied. “First things first, Ernie. Let’s get his truck towed to the lab.”
“I’m on it.”
Tatum turned to Marlin. “I’ve got two locations to work, and I need every warm body I can get.”
“Tell me where you want me,” Marlin said.
Duke stretched out on the cot and waited.
Weak bullshit, that’s all this was. A lame attempt to unnerve him. The county jail cell was easy time compared to Huntsville. If they were trying to scare Duke, they’d have to do a lot better than that.
And all those photos and documents on the wall of the interview room—what a goddamn joke. Then that deputy coming in, making a big production of handing Tatum some mysterious note. Fucking Barney Fife could come up with a better plan.
They were desperate, grasping at straws, because they didn’t have a single piece of physical evidence, the kind that really mattered. Duke knew all about that stuff from his trip to the joint. He’d heard story after story about some poor slob getting tripped up by a carpet fiber or a single drop of blood. That’s why he had taken care of everything.
Searcy’s gun, the screwdriver, the bolt cutters—they were all at the bottom of Pedernales Reservoir. The plastic dropcloth and the clothes Duke had been wearing were now ashes in a barrel in his backyard. He’d tossed his boots in a trash bin at a roadside park on Highway 290. He’d even gone back and mopped the floor of his office three damn times with bleach, sponging away any last trace of Searcy’s blood that might have remained.
Now all he had to do was keep quiet and he was home free.
Marlin had never seen a team of officers more dedicated to searching every square inch of a structure—and he was more than happy to take part.
They started with the Waldrip house on Flat Creek Road. Henry Jameson went in first, because the deputies didn’t want to contaminate any trace evidence by walking through the home. His job was to scour the house for any possible forensic evidence and collect a broad sample of available hairs and fibers, on the chance they might be able to link it to Searcy later. If they could prove Searcy had been to the house, they’d be catching Duke Waldrip in a lie. When Henry was finished, he took three additional items with him for testing: screwdrivers he’d found in a desk drawer. He left the scene and moved on to Waldrip’s office next to the feed store, where a reserve deputy was standing guard. Meanwhile, Marlin, Bill Tatum, Rachel Cowan, and Ernie Turpin began a methodical search of the contents of the house.
“Every last shred of paper, every photograph, under every stick of furniture,” Tatum called out, “I want every last thing checked out. And if you find a pair of bolt cutters, I’ll personally buy you a steak dinner.”
It was slow, painstaking work, and they bagged any items of interest as they went. A list of phone numbers. Photos from hunting expeditions. Bank statements. They’d have to explore all of these more closely later. For now, if any item had any possible value in the case, they took it with them. They searched the small attic and the crawl space under the house, they checked for loose floorboards, and they even removed air-conditioning registers and peered into the ventilation ducts. Five hours later, however, they had found nothing that was blatantly incriminating. Marlin sensed the mood of the officers sinking. Tatum, especially, was looking more grim-faced by the minute.
They loaded the bagged items in the trunks of two cruisers, then proceeded over to Waldrip’s office.
When they arrived, Henry was down on his knees in the back room. “Been waiting on you,” he said.
“Find something?” Tatum asked.
“Just one thing, right here on this chair leg. A small streak of what looks like blood.”
The deputies moved in for a closer look, and Marlin could feel their hopes rising. Jameson placed a numbered placard on the floor next to the chair leg, then swab
bed the blood carefully as Rachel Cowan photographed the process.
Bill Tatum said what they were all thinking: “He’s a hunting guide. Could be deer blood.”
What Bill Tatum had been hoping for was direct evidence linking Duke Waldrip to the murder of Oliver Searcy, or even to the death of Kyle Dawson, which couldn’t be ruled a homicide until Lem Tucker had done an autopsy. Wild pigs had worked the body over pretty well, and nobody knew yet whether Lem would be able to discern the cause of death.
When they were finished with the searches, at six o’clock in the morning, he was afraid they had come up short. They had bagged a wide variety of items from both locations, but Tatum’s intuition told him they were chasing red herrings. The blood evidence might lead somewhere—but then again, it might not.
Tatum, the other deputies, and John Marlin gathered around their cruisers outside Waldrip’s office. Cowan reached into her car for a thermos of coffee and some paper cups. “Anybody?”
Turpin took a cup, but Tatum shook his head. His hands were trembling from the amount of coffee he’d already consumed.
“We’ll get right on this stuff,” Ernie Turpin said, gesturing toward the trunks full of Waldrip’s possessions.
Tatum nodded. “I really appreciate all of you working so hard. Y’all have busted your asses on this case, and we’ve made some good headway. But the truth is … we’re hitting a dead end.”
Tatum could tell each member of the group knew what he was saying. It was time to ask the Rangers for assistance. Turpin slouched against his cruiser. Cowan stared at the pavement.
“I know it ain’t easy,” Tatum said. “But we’re all beat, we’ve been working nonstop, and we need a fresh set of eyes on this one. I’ve already talked to Bobby about it, and he thinks it’s a good idea.”
“We’ve got the blood,” Turpin offered.
“I know it, Ernie, but let’s face it—Waldrip probably has blood on his boots or pants every time he steps into this place. Besides, it’s gonna take weeks to get the DNA results. I hate it as much as you do, but we can’t afford the time.”