by Kip Cassino
“I said almost,” Margie said, looking up. “Almost. I had hoped the strangeness he had when he got back from Iraq would fade, but it didn’t. I knew a year with him gone would hurt the family, and that made me terribly sad. I did love him, you know. I knew we’d have to get by on less, on his military pay. I figured we’d be O,K., as long as nothing major came up.”
“Something major came up?” Prell asked.
Margie nodded. “Not a month after he left,” she said. “Both boys came down with what I thought were bad colds. Doc said it was reaction to mold, and the inspection proved it. Must have been growing in the basement since the flood, back in ’97. Had to be remediated, or the house would be condemned. Insurance wouldn’t cover it, and the bill was way more than we could scrape together.”
“What did Vernon do?”
“Still makes me mad to think about it,” Margie said. “Big fat nothing, that’s what! Said we should live with my folks for a while, maybe rent a place. Said he’d take care of things, once he got back.”
“Is this where Hugh comes into the picture?” Prell asked.
“I didn’t come here to be judged,” Margie said, her brown eyes bright with anger. “This is our home I’m talking about. Vernon’s answer was to stop calling me, and to stop taking my calls. Damn Skype anyway! Look, Hugh and I had been close back in high school. He found out what was going on, offered to help. One thing led to another. He’s a good man, a good husband, and a good father to my children. You think what you want.” She closed her pocketbook, and seemed ready to get up and leave.
Prell realized the interview was over, but didn’t want it to end badly. He might need her help again. “No one can judge you about any of this, Mrs. Prendergast,” he said. “Certainly not me. Please understand that the information you’ve given me today is very important. It may help us end a series of terrible crimes.” He rose and held out his hand. “Thank you for your help,” he said. “You are a remarkable person.”
Margie shook Prell’s hand. “Thanks,” she said. “It’s been a long time since the things we talked about happened, but they still get my blood running. Please do what you can for Vernon. He was a good man once.”
Chapter 11
Seguin, Texas
A Week After the Captain’s Release from Jail
The Green Shutters Motel was far from glamorous, but it was functional―and a great deal better than some of the places Pauley and the Captain had found themselves. The beds were relatively comfortable, there was an A/C, a TV that worked, and the linens and sheets got changed regularly. Plenty of fast food restaurants were within easy walking distance, and no one seemed to be looking for them―not here, anyhow. Not yet.
It had been a hard drive to get here from Colorado―more than a thousand miles in four days. That included the stops to steal and switch license plates, as well as a budget auto paint job the Captain bought in Lubbock. He kept the newly dark blue truck parked in back of the motel, used it sparingly and mostly at night. He took every precaution he could to keep himself and Pauley off law enforcement’s radar, now that he knew he was being sought.
The Captain’s plan had shifted as he drove out of Grand Junction. Originally, he’d thought to disappear in the enormity of the Denver metropolis. That wouldn’t work anymore, he decided as he drove east. The authorities were specifically targeting him now, him more than Pauley. How they had discovered him was unknown and didn’t matter. He had to move his tiny piece of life―his unit―as far from these implacable hunters as possible. He and Pauley would need to mask their identities, if they were ever going to fade invisibly into the nation’s fabric again.
There was a man who might be able to help them―and he would if he could, because the Captain had saved his life. His name was Sixto Jimenez, and he lived in Seguin, a small town near San Antonio. As a Latino, he might know where to get forged documents. It was worth a try. Acting purely on hunch and hope, the Captain turned the truck he drove south and east, toward Texas.
The drive south was boring, grinding―especially for Pauley, who had little to do but nap or look at the monotony of passing scenery. The two men seldom talked much, so the Captain was startled by a question Pauley asked him on the second day of their journey. “Why do … we always have … to leave?” he asked in his drug-slowed stutter. “I liked … some … of the … places … we’ve been. I wish … we could have … stayed.”
The Captain knew that Pauley was not stupid, that his halting speech masked an unexpected intellect. Still, he was surprised. “Pauley,” he asked, “where there places you wanted to stay? Tell me about the ones you liked.”
“I liked … Clovis,” Pauley said. “It was … quiet. The desert … was pretty … sometimes. I liked … Elko. My … job there … was good. You … remember … how much … money we made. I … liked that … place … in Oklahoma. People there … were nice … to me.”
“Don’t you remember the things that happened in those places?” the Captain asked. “The bad things? The things that made us leave?”
Pauley slowly nodded. “I … remember … some of them,” he said, frowning. “They’re like … like dreams … terrible dreams … to me. I’m … never sure … if they really … happened or not. People were … hurt … killed. Did we … do … those things … Captain?”
“Whether we did or not, we’d be blamed,” the Captain said. “They would put you in an asylum and leave you there. I won’t let that happen, Pauley. If we find the man I’m looking for, if he can help us, I’ll take you to a place we’ll never have to leave. What do you think about that, buddy?”
A smile flashed across the undamaged side of Pauley’s face. “That … would be … great, Captain,” he said. “I’d … like that … a lot.” As the drive continued, Pauley daydreamed as he looked out his window. He thought about a gentle place where he and the Captain would be left alone. After two more days of driving, the men arrived at their destination: Seguin, Texas.
Seguin is a pretty town, just a short drive from San Antonio. The Guadalupe River flows through its south side, and the world’s biggest pecan sits in front of the county courthouse. Though companies like Caterpillar have put factories in Seguin, most of the area’s families still rely on farming, cattle, and the many local pecan orchards for their livelihoods.
As they drove through town, Pauley and the Captain chose the Green Shutters strictly on the basis of rates advertised on its large signs. They checked in and hunkered down. During the two days that followed, the Captain spent most of his time husbanding their ever-shrinking resources and trying to contact Sixto Jimenez. Neither activity showed promise. The thirteen hundred dollars in their hands when they left Grand Junction had shrunk by almost half. They’d have to leave the motel and start sleeping in the truck soon. Relentless phone work had not located the Captain’s former truck driver. There were legions of “Jimenez” listings in the Guadalupe County directory. So far, he’d contacted more than fifty, with no results.
His efforts bore fruit on the second night after their arrival in Seguin. Four men dressed in black awaited them in their motel room when they returned from dinner. All were armed and had the casually vicious attitude of people used to intimidating others. The one who seemed to be in charge barked orders to the others in Spanish. Pauley and the Captain were bound with tie-straps and thoroughly searched.
The leader pulled a large pistol from beneath his jacket, cocked it, and pointed it at the Captain’s head. “You want to find Sixto, carbon?” He asked. His companions grinned.
The Captain nodded, but kept silent.
“Why you want to find Sixto, pinche? You and un burro feo here?” As he asked his questions, the man slid his gun up and down the side of the Captain’s face.
“Sixto Jimenez is a friend of mine,” the Captain said, looking into his captor’s eyes. “We were in the army together in Afghanistan.”
“No mames!
” said the thug, gesturing to his partners, laughing. “You and Sixto are compadres! Mira wey! Then how come, cabron, how come you don’t know where to find him?”
“It’s been a long time,” the Captain said. “More than twelve years. He’ll remember me, though. Just tell him Captain Taws needs his help.”
The man threw a cloth sack over the Captain’s head, then tightened its drawstring painfully. He laughed again. “You tell him yourself, pendejo,” he said. “Sixto don’t like people come looking for him.”
Bound and blinded, Pauley and the Captain were shoved from their motel room and pushed down the outside stairway to a waiting truck. They were thrown in the truck’s bed and taken for a half-hour ride over secondary, then dirt roads. The truck stopped, their captors left it, opened what sounded like a nearby door, and trooped noisily inside.
“Pauley,” the Captain whispered. “Pauley, are you O.K.?”
“I … I’m O.K.,” his buddy replied. “Captain … is this … guy … really your … friend?”
“Yeah,” the Captain replied. “I saved his life, back in Afghanistan.”
“I … hope he … remembers,” Pauley said, forcing the words out. “Otherwise … I think … they’ll … kill us.”
A few minutes later, the Captain was pulled from the truck bed and walked through a door―roughly pushed and guided by men holding his arms. They walked a short distance, then he was left to stand by himself, his hands still bound. The sack was jerked from his head. He blinked and looked around.
The Captain saw he was in a large, carpeted room, softly illuminated. Several armed men stood on either side of him. To his front sat a large executive desk. Behind the desk lounged the man he had been trying to find for two days. Sixto Jimenez had gained some weight during the last decade. His hair was much longer now and he wore a flowing mustache. Still, there was no doubt. The man in front of him was the driver he had pulled from a burning truck south of Bagram in 2005.
“Good evening, Sergeant Jimenez,” he said.
Chapter 12
Tucson, Arizona
September, 2017
A Week After Prell’s Trip to Grand Junction
The conference call was over. Jack Prell and Leo Cardiff had been talking with their contacts at the police departments of Evansville, Wyoming and Miami, Oklahoma―trying to get closure on evidence and assistance from both. It had been a frustrating meeting. “There’s nothing solid linking the murder here to the men you’re pursuing,” the detective from Miami said. “It’s all conjecture.” The Evansville lieutenant agreed.
“We’re dead in the water with those guys,” Cardiff said, once the phones were hung up.
“The problem is, they’re right,” said Prell. “All we’ve got is a guy’s nickname and the use of some kind of big knife. We need more than that to make a real connection. We need something that puts those men where the murders took place.”
“Sarah and I have an idea about that,” Andy Rhodes said as he entered the room. “Their landlord said the men got notices from the V.A. while they were in Tucson, and we know Taws was wounded in Afghanistan. If we ask the V.A. hospitals in the area of each murder, they should be able to tell us whether or not either man was a patient there.”
“Would the V.A. give us that information?” Prell asked. “It seems to me there are privacy laws that prevent looking at medical records without a patient’s permission.”
“We’re not asking to see any medical records,” Rhodes said. “We just want to know if they were patients. That shouldn’t be tough.”
“Why don’t we start with the V.A. hospital here?” Cardiff said. “If we can figure out what we need to do in Tucson, we can apply it to the other places.”
“Sarah and I can start on that right away,” Rhodes said. “It’s a pleasure to work with her.”
“We’re lucky to have her,” Cardiff agreed.
Rhodes turned toward the door, then paused. “I think we have some more good news,” he said, “about the mutilated prints.”
Have you found a way to read them?” Prell asked.
“Maybe,” Rhodes said. “There are places where the prints are not obscured―on the edges of the burned areas. If we can match those places, it will be almost as good as having the whole print. If we can find records of the fingerprints before they were mutilated, we may be able to match those as well.”
“It’s great to hear some good news for a change,” Prell said. “The two of you need to keep at it.”
Sarah Won’t spent most of the next day trying to find the right person to talk to about getting patient information from the local V.A. hospital. She spent periods as long as forty minutes on hold, and had her connection abruptly severed twice. Finally, in mid-afternoon, she was connected to someone in the “information release” section of the big hospital’s administration department.
Her contact wasn’t very helpful. “We can’t just give out patient records, even to the police or the F.B.I.,” he told Sarah. “It’s against the law.”
“I don’t want any patient information,” Sarah said patiently. “I don’t want to see any medical records at all.”
“Then what do you want?” the man asked, whining with frustration. “Why are you calling me?”
“I need one piece of information,” Sarah said. “I need to know if a person whose name I will give you was a patient at your V.A. hospital during a certain period. That’s all.”
“I can’t make that decision,” the man said. “You’ll have to speak to the person in charge, my manager.”
“What’s his extension?” Sarah asked. “Can you connect me?”
“Her extension is 58855,” the harried bureaucrat said. “Hold on, I’ll try the line.” Naturally, the line was busy, and Sarah was shunted to voice mail. Still, she had the extension. After a half-hour wait, she called back and got through on the second ring.
“You’ll have to get a court order, and fill out the appropriate forms,” Sarah was finally told. “We take patient privacy rights very seriously here.”
“When we get the order, should we present it to you?” Sarah asked.
“I’m the one you start with,” she was told. Sarah immediately called Jack Prell in Phoenix to give him the news.
The next morning, Prell met with his agent in charge.
“I keep meaning to ask you how your investigation’s going,” the AIC told the younger man, motioning him to a seat by his desk. “I hear you’ve formed a task force, made some progress.”
“Yes sir, we’ve made some progress,” Prell said. “I’d like to make more, and do it quickly. We don’t want any more of these murders, and the time between them is getting shorter. I need your help.”
“What do you need, Jack?”
“In order to prove whether or not our primary suspects are really involved in some or all of these murders, we need to know for sure that they were in the places where the crimes occurred at the times when they happened,” Prell said. “A lot of what we have now is hearsay and conjecture. We need more solid fact.”
“Fingerprints, DNA evidence?”
“We’ve got some of that, but not enough,” Prell said. “Remember, these murders have been going on for over a decade now, and most of them occurred in small towns―places without a lot of forensic capability. No one had tied any of them together until Tucson, mostly due to the work of a remarkably capable computer tech.”
“How can I help?” the AIC asked. He was beginning to wonder whether this case could be cracked after all.
“We know Taws is a veteran and we believe Abbott is as well,” Prell said. “We think they use the local V.A. hospitals wherever they go. If we can verify that these men used V.A. facilities local to the crimes during the times the murders were committed, then we’ll have solid evidence of their presence in those areas.”
The AIC nodded. “
How many V.A. facilities are we talking about here?” he asked.
“Eight,” Prell said. “I see two ways we may have to go on this. If the Bureau can talk directly to the V.A. brass, maybe we can get all the information we need at once. Otherwise, we’ll have to generate a separate court order for each facility. That will take longer.”
“I’ll make some calls,” the AIC said. “If we have to get the orders one at a time, can they all be from here? Or do we have to through the local districts?”
“There’s no reason we can’t generate all of them from here,” Prell said. “It would be a bureaucratic pain in the ass, but I think it’s worth the trouble―if it comes to that.”
It came to that. Several days were required to generate the mountain of paperwork necessary, but it paid off. Two weeks later, all of the court orders were prepared and served to the eight V.A. facilities involved―five community clinics and three medical centers in eight states. According to the answers grudgingly received from them, Paul Abbott and Vernon Taws had been patients at each when the murders being investigated were committed. Strong suspicion was finally getting the support of solid evidence.
Progress continued on other fronts as well. Identification of Paul Abbott’s social security number from the V.A. verifications allowed inspection of his military records, as well as his fingerprints. According to the Marine Corps, Abbott enlisted in 2000, at the age of eighteen, soon after graduation from high school. He listed his residence as Cotton Plant, Arkansas, and his next of kin as his father―Caleb Abbott. The young man completed his boot camp in San Diego and was sent to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where he trained as a fire support Marine (0861). When he was badly wounded in Helmand Province, Afghanistan in 2004, he held the rank of lance corporal. He was discharged from the Marine Corps that same year, due to his medical condition. His last known address was in West Memphis, Arkansas, where he lived with his mother. Abbott’s records described a tall, slim man (six feet two inches, one hundred seventy-one pounds) with brown hair and blue eyes. His I.D. photo presented an even-featured youth with slightly curly hair who stared into the camera with large, hopeful eyes.