Apache Country (2 page)

Loved he was not; his racism, the political
stance he took against illegal immigrants and racial dilution gave
offense to many. Behind his back people called him Count Dreckula;
he was the butt of sour jokes, like the one about him arriving at
one of his waste disposal plants and they wouldn’t let him through
the gate in case he contaminated the shit. And now he was dead and
flies were clustering on what was left of that rat-trap brain.
Wishing he could find a way to feel sorry, the only emotion Easton
could summon up was pity. What a God awful place to die.

“Been out here awhile,” Joe Apodaca said,
breaking in on his reverie.

Easton nodded agreement. Rigor mortis had
come and gone. The grisly bluish postmortem distention of the flesh
that sets in fast in severe heat was already clearly visible. The
skin was tight and shiny, the middle of the body already swollen,
and the dull coppery tang of death hung in the air. There were
flies everywhere, feasting on the rips and tears on Casey’s face,
on one of his arms, and on his right leg where some of the big calf
muscles had been savaged by hungry teeth. Coyotes, he thought. They
don’t wait long.

“Kid’s body’s up there a ways,” Apodaca said,
pointing up the arroyo.

He set off up the arid watercourse, agile as
a mountain goat, and Easton had to hustle to keep up with him
between the rocks and on the shifting, treacherous shale.

“You’re pretty damn spry for an old guy,
Joe,” he panted.

Apodaca made a face. “Never forget it,” he
said.

The sky was huge and empty. The sun burned
his back. It was high-plains silent; Easton could hear his own
breathing. At least with this many people around, there wasn’t much
chance of rattlesnakes, he thought. They were one of the few
creatures on God’s green earth that made him nervous.

Skirting two huge rock outcrops that had
probably been carved by glaciers during the Ice Age, they found
another group of CSI technicians working silently, their focal
point the body of the boy, stretched out face up, left arm
extended, the hand curled. It looked very small and defenseless
inside its plastic tent, a duplicate of the one they’d raised over
Casey. Here, too, there were bugs, flies, beetles, spiders, the
relentless scavengers of the desert, feasting on the reddish-brown
globs of coagulated blood that had sprayed in an arc six or seven
feet from the body, to hang like bizarre berries on the surrounding
scrub.

The deep gash in the boy’s throat looked like
a dark mouth. His white school shirt and gray pants were stiff with
dried blood, and dyed into the uncaring dun earth beneath his body
was a wide dark stain, maybe a foot across. His face and lips were
scored with small cuts and rips, and one eye socket was empty.
These wounds had not bled, indicating they had been inflicted after
death.

Bert Bonnell had mentioned buzzards, Easton
remembered. They didn’t wait long either.

Anger mixed with an indefinable sadness
flooded through him as he stared at the boy’s violated body. What
kind of madness had to be burning through a man’s brain for him to
commit such an atrocity?

He looked up to see Mart Horrell, the county
pathologist who also acted as coroner, coming toward them.
Fifty-something, reedy and thin, with watery blue eyes and an
unconvincing mustache, he looked harassed and irritable, as always.
There was a squad room joke that he’d once asked one of the corpses
in the morgue for a date but she turned him down.

“Well, Mr. Coroner,” Apodaca growled by way
of greeting. “You got a time of death for us yet?”

Mart Horrell took off his wire-rim granny
glasses, polished them, and put them back on again, and Easton saw
the sheriff thinking, as plainly as if the words were printed on
his forehead: Goddamn fusspot. In Apodaca’s book, pathologists were
about one step up from the guys who trimmed lamb chops, and Mart
resented Joe’s scornful attitude toward the work he did.

“Ballpark estimate, I’d say they’ve been out
here ’tween twelve and twenty four hours.”

“You basing that on rectal temperature?”
Easton asked.

“Mostly,” Horrell nodded.

Although it was only a very rough guide,
subtracting the rectal temperature of the body from its norm and
dividing that figure by one-point-five produced what the textbooks
called ‘a very approximate estimate.’ Horrell’s would be all the
more approximate because of the ambient heat of the location,
Easton thought.

“I’ll try to be more precise when I get them
to the morgue,” Horrell said. “Which better be soon,” he added,
sniffing.

“The wagon’s on its way,” Easton told him,
and Horrell nodded approval.

“Sooner the better,” he said.

“Bert Bonnell said he thought Casey had been
shotgunned,” Joe said, making it a question. Mart shook his head,
buttoning and unbuttoning his shiny alpaca jacket as they set off
back down the arroyo.

“Nah,” he said. “Handgun, for sure.
Heavy-caliber, three-five-seven Magnum, forty-five, something like
that. Probably a hollow-point – there’s bone fragments and brain
tissue all over the place. The entry wound was just above and
behind the left ear. Slug went right on through and kept on going.
I take leave to doubt they’ll ever find it out here.”

“What about the boy?”

Horrell grimaced. “You’ve seen the body.
Killer used something very sharp. Scalpel, knife, maybe a razor.
Deep, deep cut. Severed the larynx, carotid artery and the jugular.
Damn near took his head off. That’s why there’s so much blood
everywhere. Real messy killings, both of them.”

His voice was reproachful, like a housewife
chiding a husband for coming into the house with muddy boots.

“Whoever did it must have had blood all over
him,” Easton said.

“Out here, would it matter?” Apodaca observed
sourly.

“Out here, no,” Easton said. “But if someone
saw him?”

“Could have been more than one person
involved,” Mart Horrell offered. “Maybe

even a car stashed someplace near the
highway.”

Good point, Easton thought, making a mental
note. “Anything else we ought to know?” he asked Horrell.

The pathologist did his routine with the
jacket again, and once again Easton wondered if maybe Mart knew his
fussbudget ways irritated Joe and that was why he did it. If so, it
certainly worked. He saw the sheriff clamp down on his impatience,
like he’d ordered himself not to let Horrell’s nervous tics bug
him. What’s he so uptight about? Easton wondered.

“Best I can do for now,” Mart Horrell said.
“I’ll autopsy tonight. You want to sit in?”

Apodaca grunted something that might have
been acceptance or not. He wasn’t enamored of autopsies. Hell,
Easton thought, who is? There was no way you could watch one and
not think, one day that might be me.

“Here comes the wagon,” Mart said, spotting
the dust cloud as the vehicle bounced up to where the technicians
were starting to pack up their equipment. “Your people done down
here?”

Apodaca shrugged. “Jorgensen’s the I/O.”

“Wagon’s here, Steve,” Mart Horrell called.
“Okay if I put them on ice?”

Jorgensen automatically glanced toward the
sheriff, then quickly away.

Although he was I/O, nobody was in any real
doubt about who was actually in charge. Nothing changed on Joe’s
face, and neither of them spoke, but Jorgensen got a message. He
nodded.

“Sure, Doc,” he said, “they’re all
yours.”

They watched silently as Robert Casey’s
corpse was zipped into a body bag and lifted on to a gurney. While
they had been talking, the boy’s body had been brought down on a
stretcher and bagged; it was now also waiting to be lifted into the
truck. Easton glanced at the sheriff. His eyes were bleak.

“Gonna be a goddamn media circus waiting in
town,” he said. “I hope Mart Horrell will keep his face shut.”

Easton didn’t answer. The Sheriff’s Office
had no control over Mart Horrell. He could talk to anyone he
liked.

“Got some TV people by the look of it,” he
told the sheriff, chin-pointing toward a KBIM satellite van parked
outside the perimeter, a young woman and her cameraman sitting on
the metal steps, glumly watching them. The reporter stood up
expectantly as she saw the officers look at her.

Apodaca held up a hand. “All right, all
right, gimme a minute,” he said, blowing a gusty sigh as the meat
wagon moved off. “Steve, what have we got?”

Steve Jorgensen shrugged his massive
shoulders. “Not a hell of a lot, Joe,” he said ruefully. “No sign
of a weapon. The slug that killed Casey went right on through and—
“

“Mart Horrell told us all that,” Apodaca said
impatiently. “Anything in the

Lexus?”

“Casey’s hat, the kid’s school stuff. They’ve
dusted for latents,” Jorgensen said.

“Footprints?”

“Scuff marks. Nothing we could get a cast
off.”

“Tire tracks?”

“Only the Lexus.”

“No other vehicle?” Easton asked sharply “How
did the killer get in and out?”

“Way we figure it, either he was waiting out
here, or he came in with Casey and the kid. Whichever it was, looks
like he left on foot.”

Easton frowned. Walking in terrain like this
was damned hard going.

“I don’t buy that,” he said. “It’s what, ten
miles to town?”

Jorgensen shrugged, as much as to say: You
don’t like my theory, go figure it out for yourself. Apodaca
reacted with a frustrated growl.

“Think maybe we’ve got a crime of opportunity
here, Dave? Some transient car-jacked them?”

“Could be,” Easton said, although
unconvinced. Crimes of opportunity were always tough to get a
handle on.

“Much as I hate to say this,” Joe added, “I
think maybe Mart was right. Maybe there was more than one
perp.”

“Yup,” Easton said.

Apodaca took off his hat, ran his hand
through his hair, and put the hat back on.

“Shit,” he said.

Olin McKittrick, district attorney for the
5th Judicial District – which included Fall and Lee Counties as
well as Baca – was about medium height, with a florid face and a
pudgy build. His receding hair was sandy blond and his gray-blue
eyes always seemed to Easton to have an evasive flicker in them.
Although he glad-handed every chance he got – Rotary and Little
League and all the right charities – McKittrick was always that
shade too slick, that fraction too obvious, and as a result a lot
of people wrote him off as a suit walking around with nobody in
it.

Not Easton.

In his book, McKittrick possessed many of the
attributes of a swamp alligator: skin like leather, vengeful
nature, always hungry, difficult to like and dangerous to get into
the water with.

McKittrick and his chief deputy Wally Paul
were based in Artemisia, forty miles south of Riverside. Which
meant they normally left the day to day business of Baca County law
enforcement to the Riverside Sheriff’s Office, or SO, as it was
universally known.

SO wasn’t a big outfit: not counting the
sheriff it consisted of twelve people in Admin and twenty-two in
the investigation division: a chief deputy – Easton – one
lieutenant, three sergeants, and eighteen deputies. A slick science
center like New York’s Police Plaza it was not: SO operated out of
an unimpressive one-and-a-half story block-long building on the
corner of Fifth and Virginia, painted white with black wrought
ironwork on the windows and glass door.

To keep the wheels of justice turning
relatively smoothly, the County also employed two senior trial
prosecutors, Cole Estes and Larry Walker, and a twenty-seven
year-old assistant DA, Billy Johnson, just two years out of law
school and still wet enough behind the ears to leave puddles
wherever he walked.

The allocation of Baca County’s law
enforcement duties was simple enough. Any crime that happened
inside city limits was the responsibility of RPD, the Riverside
Police Department. Everything else – except traffic accidents,
which were usually handled by the State Police – belonged to SO,
the Sheriff’s Office. Had it been, say, a disappearance, the
investigation would have been conducted by RPD. But once the bodies
were found at Garcia Flat the case became SO’s, at which point
District Attorney McKittrick had stepped in, calling an emergency
briefing for late afternoon, everyone not on actual duty to
attend.

The cramped conference room adjoining Joe
Apodaca’s office was at best functional. Walls painted Navajo
white, fluorescent lights in ceiling panels, brown shell chairs
from Walmart, four scarred wooden tables set up to make a T, and a
wood-framed wall map of the three counties did nothing to give the
room a personality. But, as someone had once said, no doubt at a
budget meeting, prettifying the room wouldn’t make anybody’s job
any easier.

McKittrick was sitting at the center of the
horizontal arm of the T-shaped table. Next to him on his right was
Wally Paul, with Joe Apodaca on the other side. The rest of the SO
staff, except for those manning phones, crammed in as best they
could: on chairs, on windowsills, or leaning against the walls.

Sitting at the end of the long table, Easton
watched McKittrick psyching himself up to talk to the troops. You
didn’t need to be Sigmund Freud to know McKittrick was stressed
out, or why. He tended to sweat it even when a case was open and
shut, which this one was decidedly not. It was well known that the
State police and the FBI in Santa Fe didn’t give much of a damn
what happened south of I-40, but with the Casey murders top of the
news all over New Mexico, and even making headlines on CNN,
McKittrick’s direct line to the State capitol was probably red hot.
Rap him hard with a stick and he’d make a noise like a snare
drum.

“All right, people, listen up,” McKittrick
said, using his gold-plated Mont Blanc ballpoint pen to tap on the
desk for silence. “I want your undivided attention!”