Buddies

by Kip Cassino

  The pharmacist nodded. “Says here you’re both service connected,” he said, staring intently at his monitor. “O.K., I don’t see any problems. All the drugs are in stock. I guess you don’t want them mailed. Have a seat till you see your names on the monitor.”

  The Captain nodded again, and gestured for Pauley to rise. “Thanks, doc,” he said. Both men left the booth and looked for seats to wait for their prescriptions to be filled.

  A monitor mounted on the room’s rear wall continually scrolled names, indicating those whose prescriptions were ready for pick-up. Those listed formed a line in front of an armored glass window, similar to a drive-through teller’s window at a bank. Here they presented their V.A. cards. Their drugs were dispensed to them through a drawer.

  Pauley’s name came up first, because the screen’s scrolling list kept alphabetical order. The Captain stood in line with him. By the time they reached the service window, his name had scrolled by as well. The woman behind the thick glass took the identification she was offered and placed two paper bags in the drawer beside her, along with both men’s cards.

  The Captain carefully placed both bags in his pack, replaced the precious V.A. cards in his wallet, and slapped Pauley lightly on the shoulder. “We’re shut of this place,” he said, grinning. “Come on, Pauley. Let’s get something to eat. Then we’ll get out of here.” Their visit had been quick, only three hours in duration. It pays to get in early, the Captain thought.

  They had sandwiches and soup in the hospital cafeteria, then shouldered their packs and set out to find their way north. Moab was more than four hundred miles away―over two week’s trek, if they had to walk the whole way.

  They didn’t. A white-bearded man wearing a Vietnam service baseball cap stopped beside them as they left the hospital parking lot. “Where you headed?” he asked. As it turned out, he could get them to Williams. The Captain thanked him, and they piled into the back of his pickup for the journey north.

  Their ride left them at the intersection of U.S. Routes 40 and 191. They hefted their packs again and began to walk north. They were now, literally, in Indian country―within the borders of the Hopi Reservation, not far from the Grand Canyon. They walked another four hours, until a setting sun began to brilliantly paint the sky. A collapsing adobe brick ruin lay fifty yards from the road. The men camped in its shadow for the night, sharing a cold can of baked beans to sustain them.

  During the days that followed, the vastness of the west swallowed them as they slowly hiked toward their destination. The villages of Cameron, Moenkopi, and Tonalea fell behind them after another week on the road. Fat-cheeked Hopi children stared at them as they moved through the settlements they came upon. The next day, the pair stopped for food and water at Kayenta and caught a break. A farmer drove them all the way to Mexican Water, taking almost one hundred miles off their trek. From there, a day’s walk got the two into Utah. They stopped at Bluff, burrowing in a culvert to rest for the night. Before two more days had ended, Pauley and the Captain strode into Moab, and spent the night behind a deserted store-front. They’d been travelling for almost two weeks, and had navigated their way through more than four hundred miles of mostly empty land.

  The Captain quickly established that they’d have to move on. Moab didn’t have the veteran’s facilities they’d come to depend upon to fit them into a place. Grand Junction, Colorado would serve their needs much better. The new target was just over ninety miles to the northeast, more than an additional two day’s walk.

  Pauley wasn’t happy. He held his silence, but the Captain could tell by the look in his eyes that he was tired of the road, weary of sleeping beside it. He wanted to be inside. “I’m sorry, Pauley,” he said and meant it. “I misjudged this place. We have to move on.”

  They were back on the road before noon, walking along Route 128. They spent the night in Dewey. The next morning, they were picked up by a pair of Mormon missionaries who took them all the way to Grand Junction, a true blessing. The Captain found them a badly worn mobile home they could afford within a few hours. Depositing Pauley and their packs there, he set off to find them both work. He felt anxiety drain from within him. They had escaped once again. Perhaps here they could find some peace.

  Chapter 3

  Phoenix, Arizona

  Three Weeks after the Tanner Murder

  Jack Prell shrugged into his suit’s jacket as he walked from his office to the nearby conference room. It was a blazing hot summer day outside in Phoenix, but the air conditioning in the F.B.I. field office kept the temperature inside just above seventy. Prell was a tall man, still fit in his mid-thirties. His grey eyes, premature baldness, and pale, long face gave him a professorial appearance, which was misleading. He was a tough field agent who had cut his teeth fighting the Mexican drug cartels, after two combat tours in Afghanistan helped pay for a law degree at Case Western Reserve. He liked action far more than paperwork.

  His AIC (agent in charge) had taken this into consideration when he assigned Prell to meet with the Pima County detectives. This would be a difficult case, involving jurisdictions in several states. It would get Prell away from the border, and involve him in work that was more investigative than paramilitary. If he did well at this one, Prell would advance in the Bureau. If he failed, perhaps I.C.E. or the Marshals would be a better fit for him.

  The detectives from Pima County were already seated at the table in the long, narrow room when Prell joined them. There were two: a big bear-like Latino who introduced himself as Detective Medina, and his partner―a smaller, pale man named Cardiff. They had with them a murder book, and some additional files as well. They slid the stack across the table to him.

  “Thanks for agreeing to meet,” Medina said. “The resident agent in Tucson sent us up. He thought you could help. We had a murder a few weeks back. A guy named Tanner. Not much evidence at the scene. Our research found four very similar crimes in other places. That’s why we’re coming to you.”

  Prell was intrigued. It wasn’t often that local departments went out of their way to seek federal help. Most of the time, they guarded their home turf fiercely. “What are the similarities?” he asked, staring across the conference table at the two detectives.

  “The murders we found happened during the last ten years,” Cardiff said. “They’re all in different jurisdictions, widely separated. In each one the murder weapon was a big knife, a Ka-Bar. There are several other matches. Too many for coincidence. The details are in the files. All the evidence points to a badly scarred man, who may be travelling with a companion. He’s been all over the west and southwest. It looks to us like the track of a serial killer.”

  Prell paged through the files he’d been given. “This is great police work,” he said with genuine admiration. “You guys have done a terrific job.”

  “We have a very good computer tech,” Medina said. “She’s responsible for most of the work.”

  “She deserves a commendation, or a raise,” Prell said. “I don’t suppose this guy Abbott is still in Tucson.”

  “If he is, we can’t find him,” Cardiff said, shaking his head. “We’ve looked all over the county and checked the border crossings as well. Abbott’s gone. We figure he bolted the day of the murder. That’s the last time his landlord saw him.” He looked at his partner, who nodded.

  “Not much I.D.,” Prell said. “Just a name. Any prints?”

  “We lifted some good impressions from the room he rented,” Medina said with a shrug. “Two different people. Maybe one set is from the guy Abbott travels with. No criminal record matching either set that we can find. The prints are in the file.”

  Prell nodded. This might be an interesting case. “Thanks for this,” he said. “I think you’ve hit something here. Give me a little time to see what the Bureau’s resources can add to what you’ve done. Maybe we can end this before someone else gets knifed.”

  After spending
another hour reviewing the details of the Tanner murder, the men stood and shook hands. Prell collected the paperwork and took it back to his office. Now it was time to direct the unblinking eye of the nation’s premier crime solving apparatus to the hunt for Abbott and his possible partner.

  He called in Andy Rhodes, the Phoenix field office’s data expert. “Take a look at what’s been done here, Andy,” he said to the older man. “Then give me a strategy for expanding it. What resources can we bring to bear to open this case up some more?”

  Rhodes, the data technician, had been with the Bureau for more than twenty years. During his career, he had watched its crime-solving tools expand from disparate data sets and paper files to powerful, integrated assets that could draw information from thousands of sources. He took the information Prell had gotten from Sarah Won’t, and began working to enhance it. His first step was to take the latent fingerprints found in Tucson and enter them to IAFIS—the nation’s massive Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System.

  IAFIS contains within it the biometric measurements of more than fifty-five million sets of fingerprints, including federal and military employees as well as criminals. In the old days, prints would have to be laboriously measured and those measurements converted to readable biometric code. Advances since the turn of the century have automated that time-consuming process. Rhodes expected results to his query within a day or two.

  In the meantime, Prell contacted authorities in El Paso, Elko, Clovis, and Aberdeen, to get copies of their files from the crimes discovered by Pima County’s investigation. He’d tell each department what was being done, and designate contacts in case further liaison or information was required. Often, these procedures did not go smoothly. Some law enforcement authorities resent federal intrusion into their cases―filed and forgotten though they might be.

  A detective from the El Paso Police Department noted Prell’s request, and said he’d “kick it upstairs,” to see who should respond. The assistant chief of Elko, Nevada’s police department was more forthcoming. He remembered the Vogel murder. Its sheer violence still haunted him after eight years. He promised to dig through department files and overnight copies of whatever he found. A lieutenant at the District Nine office of the New Mexico State Police told Prell his request would have to be approved by someone at headquarters in Santa Fe. Finally, the sheriff of Brown County, South Dakota didn’t know where records from that far back were kept. He promised he’d find out and have somebody call Prell back.

  The calls had taken most of Prell’s day. Before he left work he called the FBI field office in Albuquerque, to see if anybody more local could get the State Police to cooperate. “I know a guy over there,” said the agent he contacted, “a major. He’ll get things moving. I’ll have him call you back.”

  Prell hung up his phone and sat back in his chair. His neck hurt, and he was exhausted. It took more energy to talk to these people than it did to lug an M4 on a twenty-mile border foot patrol. He knew the records would show up, eventually. The sheer energy required to cut through so many lines of bureaucracy was maddening, nonetheless. A bachelor, he decided to pamper himself with dinner at a good restaurant. A well-made martini would be the perfect cure for his flagging spirits. He locked his desk and left for the night.

  Two days later, not much more had happened. The Elko file had come in as promised. He’d gotten an email from an El Paso P.D. clerk. She wanted to know which file he wanted copied from 2015: Heraldo (of which there were four), or Hidalgo (of which there were three). He would get back to her. The New Mexico State Police had sent a stack of forms for him to fill out. The Brown County Sheriff had put his best man on the job, he said. Prell could expect results any time.

  Mildly frustrated, Prell called Rhodes to see if there was any progress on identifying the prints from Tucson. No answer. Determined to make some kind of progress, he settled down to attack the forms from New Mexico. They were done and faxed back to Santa Fe by mid-afternoon, when his phone rang.

  “I’ve got good news and good news,” Andy Rhodes announced. A small, wiry African American with an astonishing, tightly curled halo of white hair and an unrelentingly cheerful attitude, close friends called him Sparky. “First of all, we got some action on the fingerprints―one set, anyhow. Second, there are more matches, more cases similar to Tucson. I’ve found three that look very close. Should I come up? Got time?”

  Prell had the time. In minutes, Rhodes was sitting in his office. “We got some action on the prints, like I told you on the phone,” the technician said. “One set might be this guy Abbott. We can’t really tell. They’ve been mutilated.” That fact alone caught Prell’s attention. Criminals, especially drug-related crooks, were known to try masking their fingerprints with acid, cuts, or burns. Some employed surgeons. The painful practice was not new. John Dillinger had attempted it in the nineteen thirties.

  “Think there’s a drug angle?” Prell asked.

  “Could be,” Rhodes said with a shrug. “The other prints are more interesting. They match a guy named Vernon Taws. Thirteen years ago, he was a captain in the North Dakota National Guard. Two tours in the middle east under his belt. Since then, he’s dropped off the face of the earth.”

  “Well, that’s something,” Prell said. “Of course, we don’t know if the two are connected at all. Latent prints aren’t date-stamped. Taws could have rented that room a year ago.”

  Rhodes nodded in agreement. “Let me tell you about the other cases we’ve uncovered,” he said. “Earliest one was in Nampa, Idaho, in 2011. The victim was a man named Robert Staggers, found in a parking lot outside a bar on Franklin Road―sliced open like a Christmas turkey. Witnesses said he tried to pick a fight with the bartender, caused some damage to the place. Kitchen helper could not be located for questioning. The bar’s owner said his name was ‘Pally’ or something like that. He was paid under the table. Bartender remembered he was quiet and had bad scars.”

  “Sounds similar to the other cases the Pima County tech discovered,” Prell said. “Go on.”

  “Next, a murder in Evansville, Wyoming, in 2014,” said Rhodes as he shuffled through his notes. “No witnesses. The corpse of Elbert Diggs was found outside an entrance to the Oregon Trail State Veteran’s Cemetery. Report says he was nearly decapitated by a big knife. Their state crime lab identified the cut pattern as a Ka-Bar.”

  “I’m not sure I buy that one,” Prell said. “Still, the wound and the weapon are close to what was found in Elko and Tucson. Go on.”

  “This final one is from Miami, Oklahoma, a year ago,” Rhodes continued. “Carter Pugh was found in the parking lot a of a Wiener Basket there. He’d been gutted with a big knife and hung over the hood of his pick-up during the night. A kitchen helper named Pauley Abbott is wanted for questioning. He disappeared after his shift that evening.”

  “That fills in a lot of blanks,” Prell said, walking to the white board behind his desk. “Let’s see how this maps out―if all these murders are really connected. The first one we know about happened in South Dakota, in Aberdeen, in 2007. Two years later, a similar murder in Elko, Nevada. Two years after that, the Nampa, Idaho murder. That gets us to 2011.”

  “Could be a pattern forming,” Rhodes said.

  Prell nodded. “It goes on,” he said, continuing to write on the board. “There’s the murder outside a diner in Clovis, New Mexico. That happened in 2013. Then Evansville, Wyoming in 2014. After that, El Paso, Texas in 2015. Then, Miami, Oklahoma, less than a year after that. Now Tucson, a little more than ten months later.” He stepped away from the white board. “If all these really are connected, if the evidence holds up, we definitely have a serial killer on our hands.”

  Rhodes nodded. “Eight murders in ten years,” he said. “It sure looks that way. There’s one thing more.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Based on your timeline, the interval between the murders is sh
rinking,” Rhodes said. “Whoever’s doing them is starting to do them more often.”

  The full magnitude of the crimes hadn’t hit Prell until he’d listed them together on his board. “I’m going to reach out to these other departments, try to get their files,” he said, returning to his desk. “Andy, I need two things from you. Keep working on those mutilated prints. There must be a way we can use them.”

  “O.K.,” said Rhodes, “you got it. What’s the other thing?”

  “Get me everything you can on this guy Taws,” Prell said. “In case he’s involved in these murders, I want to get to know him better.”

  Chapter 4

  Grand Junction, Colorado

  A Month After the Tanner Murder

  The Captain stood, backed out of his cubicle, and walked outside to take a break. Setting up timeshare condo sales as a telemarketer was easy, in some ways. It was inside desk work, for one thing. Many of the leads were supplied by an ever-changing gaggle of young people who intercepted vacationers around town. The rest came from an assortment of lists, a few of which were productive. The downside was shared with all telemarketing jobs. The pace of calls was brutally regulated. A short break every hour was allowed. Once on the phone, no less than ten completed outgoing calls an hour were tolerated, and at least two successful calls a day―outright sales, appointments to see condos, or call-back promises at the very least―were expected.

  At Mountain Orchard Marketing, the current telemarketing straw boss was Del Sweeney― a grossly overweight young man with an annoying, high-pitched voice. He had the unfortunate habit of touching workers in the phone room as he passed behind them, which he did frequently. To the Captain his touch felt greasy, almost slimy. The lights in the long, narrow phone room were kept low, and its acoustics were muffling. Still, Sweeney could be heard through the gloom, exhorting those he monitored with squeaky shouts of praise or venomous critique.