Standoff: A Vin Cooper Novel (4 page)

Liz was about five foot four, in her late twenties. Her hair was wavy, dark and cut shortish, presumably so that she wouldn’t inadvertently dip the ends of it into her work. Her gray eyes were clear and intelligent, her casework yet to etch its lines around them. “Chief, I can confirm that vic 5AF was also sexually assaulted,” she said. “Semen and blood in the mouth and the back of the nose passage.”

“Blood?” Foote asked.

“Yes, Chief. Quite a bit.”

“Hers?”

“No way to know until we test, though preliminary examination hasn’t found any wound.”

“What are you thinking?”

“She bit whoever assaulted her, and she bit him hard.”

“Anything else, Liz?” Matheson asked her.

The question appeared to deflate her. “No, sir.”

“Okay, well …”

It’s fair to say I wasn’t much liking Matheson.

He looked at Gomez and me with a dopey smile and said, “Well, anything you need, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

Subtext:
Goodbye. And don’t come back with any demands
.

“Thank you, Commander,” said Gomez, “For your help and assistance.”

Subtext:
Fuck you.

To Foote, I said, “Thanks, Chief.”

Subtext:
Thanks, Chief.

“Liz,” said Foote, “can you please take these gentlemen to DOA number one?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Liz replied.

Gomez and I followed her outside, into the furnace.

“No one got off a call before they were killed?” I asked.

“No. Maybe someone tried, but whoever hit this place cut the power and took out the cell tower. They knew what they were doing.”

“You mind explaining the number and lettering system?” Gomez asked our guide as we power walked to keep up with her toward the main terminal building.

“Five AF – the fifth victim logged,” she said. “AF for adult female. Your man was victim number one – 1AM. The first victim – an adult male. We found him slumped on the terminal building’s doorstep.”

I’d seen other victims on the overhead photo of the facility with the suffixes “MC” and “FC”, which I could now decipher to mean male child and female child. Jesus …

“Who did the logging?” Gomez asked.

“We did – EPCSO forensics with some help from PD. The woman who runs the café in the terminal building called 911 when she arrived for work and found everyone deceased.” I was about to ask where the woman was so that we could talk to her, ask a few questions, when Liz added, “She’s under sedation.”

We came around the front of the building. A shade tent had been erected over the DOA. A couple of crime scene investigators in their coveralls and booties were standing under the tent, talking quietly, while a photographer, also in CSI gear, changed camera lenses. A bloated fly flew around my face in a big hurry to join a dozen others circling the large bloody morsel curled in a ball on the stoop – Airman First Class Sponson. Numbered tags placed on the ground around him indicated the places where shell casings had landed. I counted nine tags. The photographer casually resumed what the lens change had interrupted – documenting the evidence.

Gomez and I stood in the sun, out of the photographer’s way so as not to interfere or contaminate the evidence.

“Hey, Alice,” Liz called out. “You about done?”

“Almost,” replied one of the CSI twosome. “A few more snaps for the album and we can bag and tag him.”

“Same MO as most of the others?”

“A spray on full auto; in this instance by two perps, we think. Nine millimeter rounds fired at close range – no more than ten feet from the vic. MP-5s, probably; certainly a submachine gun. We dug a slug outta the doorway. The shooters stitched him up pretty good across here and here.” She drew a line with her finger from her shoulder to hip one way and then the other – a cross. From the wide pool of blood around Sponson he hadn’t died fast, despite the amount of lead pumped into him.

A familiar-looking fly crawled into his nose and then out again, rubbed its legs together – possibly with glee – turned and went back in.

“Anything else?” Liz asked.

“Picked up a cigarette butt.
Faros,
a Mexican brand – might be the perp’s, might not. Otherwise,
nada
.”

“Looks like your guy, Vin,” said Gomez, getting down on his haunches to get a better angle on the DOA’s face.

“Uh-huh.” I pulled out the photo I had in my pocket and showed it to Gomez.

“Yep,” he said, coming up. “Might’a come here hoping to fly out under the radar. Head south over the border. Wrong place, wrong time.”

“What’s gonna happen to him?” I asked Liz.

“We have to finish doing our thing. The tape won’t come down for another 24 hours at least. Maybe you should go talk to the guy taking the lead, Lieutenant Carlos Cruz. I’ll take you to him. Once we’re done here the deceased will make the trip to the mortuary for autopsy. At that point County Coroner Sue Flores is the person to speak to.”

“Got her phone number on you?” Gomez asked, taking notes.

Liz read it off her phone contacts.

I gazed down on Sponson. He was a big African-American: two-thirty pounds, give or take. I wondered if he hadn’t spent so much time and money supersizing himself whether he might have taken a ride on the back of Whelt’s bike instead of coming here. In which case he’d also have had the opportunity to give us the finger instead of entertaining the flies.

Two AM, 3FC, 4MC and 5AF were under the shade tents Gomez and I had seen when we first arrived: they were the victims near the Learjet and the old Aussie trainer. Milling around the area were more than a half-dozen law enforcement officers, a mixture of CSI, medical examiners, and homicide, the latter distinguished from the rest by the word I
NVESTIGATOR
printed on the backs of their coveralls. One of these, a tall sallow guy, had the words L
IEUTENANT
on his back to avoid confusion.

“What do I get if I guess which one’s Lieutenant Cruz?” Gomez asked.

“A banana smoothie,” I replied.

Liz, our tour guide, caught Cruz’s eye and he came on over. “You pass that information about 5AF to the Chief Deputy?” he asked her.

“Yes, sir.”

He gave a long sigh of frustration. “I’m sure hoping we get a match on the perp’s DNA, ’cause so far we got dick.”

Given the alleged source of that DNA, the detective’s choice of words was a long way from sensitive, but then I’m the last person who should throw stones.

“We sure could use a break,” he continued.

“Sir,” said Liz, “Ranger Gomez and Special Agent Cooper here wanted a word with you.”

“Federal,” he said, instantly on his guard, scowling at me, thinking I therefore had to be FBI.

“OSI,” Gomez informed him.

The Lieutenant visibly relaxed – OSI, unlike the Bureau, not being in the takeover business.

“We were in the area when we got a call,” Gomez continued. “One of Agent Cooper’s deserters turned up here.”

“Yeah, that’s 1AM,” he said, “outside the terminal building.”

“You got no idea what happened here?” I asked, “Other than a bunch of murderers arrived by aircraft and went through the place hunting down folks and killing them?”

Lieutenant Cruz flipped his sunglasses on top of his head and squinted at me. “That’s some interesting speculation you got there, Agent … er …”

“Cooper.”

“Mind telling me what inspires it?”

“Which part?”

“How they arrived.”

“That’s what folks do at airports, Lieutenant. They fly in and they fly out.”

“They could’ve bussed in.”

Yeah, and they could’ve arrived on a herd of dromedaries.

“Look, I know that the killers flying in makes sense. And we have made formal requests for assistance to the FAA and air traffic control at El Paso International. I’m just trying to keep the options open here. We don’t know anything for sure yet.”

Fair enough, but I doubted ATC at the main airport would be able to help. Air traffic control was once my gig back in my Combat Controller days – jumping in behind enemy lines with Special Forces, laying beacons and other nav aids for fighters and bombers. So I was aware that even a cheap on-board GPS had the precision to get an aircraft in and around civilian airspace. A half decent pilot could land a plane just about anywhere these days without tripping any alarms or the suspicions of local ATC, but I said nothing about that. The detective would find it out for himself soon enough, if he did his job.

I gazed at the blankets covering the children and parents murdered there on the ramp. The heat was accelerating the leaking of body fluids, the smell beginning to rise off the asphalt. Forensics was working hard to document the crime scene and get the deceased refrigerated.

“Lieutenant, we’re gonna need some closure here. Your DOA 1AM was trafficking drugs,” said Gomez. “So head office wants us to stick around.”

“Head office” meant Austin – Texas Ranger central. No one argued with Rangers. The business with Whelt and Sponson was my first case with Gomez. He didn’t ask permission, he took it. I liked that. We were gonna work out just fine.

“Just clear it with the boss,” he said.

“Sure,” Gomez replied.

“So victim 5AF. Why was she singled out for special treatment?” I wondered aloud.

“Her name was Gail Sorwick, married to Barney Sorwick.” He pointed at one of the blankets. “That’s him there – 2AM. From the photos in her purse she had two young children – Ryan and Clare.” His finger moved on, pointing them out on the ground. “The whole family, murdered. The kids were five and seven years of age. Mrs Sorwick was a looker. After she was sexually assaulted, she was shot and subsequently mutilated.”

Lieutenant Cruz stepped over to one of the blankets and lifted a corner. The dead woman was naked from the waist up. Her face was clear and placid and, yes, he was right about Gail Sorwick being a looker. “She fought back.”

The woman had bitten her attacker, drawn blood, cut him down to size.

“She’s lucky that they didn’t mutilate her while she still breathed,” Cruz mumbled, leaning over her, talking to himself.

A police K-9, a big German shepherd, was barking incessantly at something out toward the runway. I looked over in that direction. Nothing.

“Her killer wanted to make a statement,” said Gomez. “Send a message.”

Cruz looked at him.

“Why go to so much effort to murder everyone in the area, being careful not to leave any evidence behind,” Gomez continued, “and then lace a mutilated corpse with your jism. It’s a message. Doesn’t make a lot of sense otherwise.”

I had to agree, it didn’t. “What’s the message?” I asked him.

“Add it to the list of questions.”

Lieutenant Cruz nodded. “Well, we’re rushing to check the DNA profile against our records. But I doubt we’ll get a hit.”

I nodded, the lieutenant’s turn to get some agreement.

The dog was still barking, at ghosts apparently. A black Labrador had joined the chorus, straining at the leash, its handler getting curious.

“What about your sole survivor?” Gomez continued.

“The Learjet pilot? Still in a coma. We’re not expecting him to come around.”

“Where’s the other pilot?” I asked.

The sheriff’s investigator looked at me, licked his sunburned lips and swallowed. “What other pilot?”

“A Lear usually flies with two.”

“We, ah …” Cruz massaged his chin and put a hand on his hip. “Hey, Belle!” he called out. “You found anyone else with an FAA commercial ticket in their wallet?”

Belle, a middle-aged, prematurely gray-haired woman with glasses and lines like trenches through her cheeks, glanced up from her discussion with a crime scene investigator and shook her head. “Nope, just the one.”

The lieutenant turned briefly toward the dogs, distracted by the racket they were making, then turned back. “You said it
usually
flies with two? So it can also fly with one, right? Maybe on this flight, there was only the one pilot.”

“Maybe,” I agreed without commitment because maybe the killers had abducted the other pilot; or maybe the missing pilot had something to do with the slaughter at Horizon Airport; or maybe the Sheriff’s office just hadn’t found him/her yet.

Those dogs were making a hell of a noise. There was something out there in the desert. Their handlers had given in and were walking them over to an opening in the fence, going to investigate nothing. The desert was as empty as my bank account.

I moved toward the edge of the ramp, away from the tents and the bodies, my hand shielding my eyes from the glare of the sun. Sand, rock and low scrub – nothing else out there. The end of the runway shimmered in quicksilver. A couple of birds circled the desert a hundred or so yards away.
Nope, nothing.
I turned away just as a mound of sand appeared to move beneath those birds. I looked back, but I couldn’t place the movement.

“You saw something,” said Gomez coming up behind me, squinting into the distance, also shading his eyes. “Me, too.”

Whatever it was, it moved again.

“There!” he said, pointing.

We both started to run toward it. At first I wasn’t sure what it was, but then it flopped over onto its back. Jesus, it was human.

It was also a woman. Gomez and I were first to reach her. She was filthy, dehydrated, exposed skin burned red by the desert sun. She was barely alive. From the angle of one of her legs I could see that it was badly broken. Gomez began cutting away the pant leg with a small buck knife. A stick of bone appeared. It was covered in coagulated blood. Shredded muscle, dirt and ants erupted from a weeping red crater midway between her knee and ankle. I had no idea where she’d crawled on her hands and knees from, but it had to be a reasonable distance given her state. She was clearly in a lot of pain, drifting in and out of consciousness.

“The buzzards … the buzzards,” she said, head rolling from side to side like she was having a nightmare, her tongue thick in her mouth. “Black buzzards …”

“Did she just say black buzzards?” Gomez asked.

“Yeah.” I had a small bottle of water in my pocket. Taking off my shirt, I poured water on it and wiped the dirt off her face before drizzling some more water on her tongue and cracked lips.

Lieutenant Cruz arrived, panting, and pulled Gomez and me away from her. “Give us some room.”

The room we gave up allowed a couple of crime scene investigators to swoop down on her. They undid her shirt, examined her quickly for other damage while she looked at them wild-eyed. Behind us, an ambulance came bumping across the desert, taking the shortest route, red lights flashing.

“Black buzzards!” she cried out. “No!”

The ambulance pulled up, the medics jumped out and raced to her side. The CSI backed off and let them through.

“Looks like her lucky day,” I said.

Gomez nodded. “Had a few of those yourself I see.”

He was frowning at my bare skin, my back puckered where bullets had entered, the scar tissue ragged where they’d exited. A swirl of burned skin here, a knife cut there, mementos from various cases gone by. I put my shirt back on, feeling self-conscious.

“So what happened to you?” he asked.

“Life.”

“What about your partners?”

The question made me think of Anna Masters and mostly, unless reminded, I was successful at locking any thoughts of her away in a private vault. And I wanted the door to remain firmly bolted shut. She’d been my former partner in all the roles that counted, killed not so long ago. And no matter what the forensics report said, it was my stupidity that had pulled the trigger and blown a hole in her chest. So much for not thinking about her … History showed that most of the people around me seemed to come off second best, which was why I preferred to work solo, though that wasn’t always possible. Like now. “Do you really want to know?” I asked him.

Gomez thought about it. “You just answered the question.”

The medics lifted the woman onto the gurney and then hoisted it into the back of the ambulance. One of them climbed in with her. The doors closed and the remaining guy ran around to the front and jumped in behind the wheel.

“Who is she?” Gomez wondered as the ambulance moved off.

“The missing piece, maybe,” I said.

Cruz came over with a wallet – the woman’s. He pulled a credit card-like ID from the wallet. “Well, well – FAA license. Your second pilot.”

Gomez looked sideways at me.

I shrugged.

“Wanna go double or nothing?” he asked.

“Hit me.”

“What are those buzzards?”

“Birds,” I said. “Black ones …”

He shook his head.

“I know, you wonder how I do it …”

There was a slight change for the better in the mood, but it wasn’t my banter that had done the trick. We’d found a
survivor.
Life had triumphed. I almost felt light-hearted.

“Hey, Lieutenant. Where you taking her?” I asked.

He was speaking on his cell with his back to me. Holding the phone against his chest he replied over his shoulder, “Thomason Hospital. And we’re gonna give her an armed guard.”

“We’re coming along. Got some questions for her,” Gomez told him.

“You’ll have to stand in line.”

“We’re cutting in,” I said.

The lieutenant nodded, world-weary-style. “Jesus, you Feds are all alike.”

*

“She’s exhausted, in shock and she’s on a morphine drip,” said Doctor Monroe, a thin black woman with heavily lidded eyes and the look of terminal tiredness about her. “I don’t know how much sense you’ll get out of her. Keep it as brief as possible.”

Gomez, Cruz, Matheson, Foote and I all ignored that.

The doctor checked left and right and came in a little closer, something on her mind. Dropping her voice, she said, “Is it true what they’re saying on TV?”

“What are they saying?” Chief Foote asked her.

“There’s been a massacre. They’re saying it might be Mexicans – from across the border. Is that true?”

“We’re not in the rumor business, Doctor,” said Foote, deftly palming off the question.

I moved to the patient’s bed. I’d already learned, with as much digging as the intervening hour would permit, that the Learjet pilot’s name was Roberta E. Macey of Venice Beach. She was forty-four, married to a civil engineer and had three kids, two of whom had left home. She was the senior pilot at California Executive Jet and a US Marine KC-130 aerial tanker driver before that. I also knew that, having survived at least five hours under the sun with no water or shelter and the temperature for most of it hovering around 110 degrees Fahrenheit, all while enduring a compound fracture of her tibia and fibula, she was no cream puff.

Monroe loitered.

The Chief glared at her. “If you don’t mind, doctor,” she said, “Police business.”

The doctor returned a look as if she’d just been told she had unseemly body odor. “Five minutes, no more,” the women said, her nose a little in the air. “I’ll be just outside.”

With a glass against the door.

Macey was propped up in bed, the veins in her wrists attached by lines to various bags held aloft from a stand. A monitor with a sensor clipped to her index finger beeped away quietly to one side. She appeared to be asleep, though she was frowning. Her face had been cleaned up but it was badly sunburned and there was a deep gash across a cheek now covered by a gauze bandage. Anti-bacterial wash gave her an all-over orange pallor. Her broken leg was in a temporary cast and raised above the bed, held there in a sling suspended from an overhead pole.

“Ms Macey?” said the Chief Deputy, leaning over the bed. “Roberta?”

The patient groaned, swallowed drily and opened her eyes. She appeared a little disoriented, unsure of the surroundings and the people in her face.

“Ms Macey, we’re the police. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“What happened?” she asked dreamily.

“We were hoping you’d be able to tell us,” said Foote.

“You might let her in on what we know,” I suggested. “Give her some context. Might help.” And might not. Being told what had happened could just as easily push her over the edge, if she was close to it.

“There was some kind of a raid on the airport this morning,” said Cruz. “A lot of people have been killed.”

Macey closed her eyes slowly and then reopened them. “I heard it. The gunfire. Like Iraq.” She closed her eyes again briefly. “Who?”

“We don’t know,” said Foote. “Do you remember anything?”

Gomez chipped in. “When we found you, you said something about black buzzards.”

“I said that? Don’t remember. They were King Airs; painted black. Two of them. Looked like buzzards. Maybe that’s what I meant. They came in low from the south – real low – avoiding radar.” Macey again swallowed with some difficulty, her lips cracked, swollen, burned. Foote took the glass of water with a straw in it off the breakfast tray pushed back against the wall. She held the straw to Macey’s lips and the patient took a few sips, after which her head fell exhausted back onto the pillows. “I heard the shooting,” she repeated, tears growing in the corners of her eyes.

Foote rested a hand on her shoulder. “Did you see anyone?”

“No. Heard the gunfire and started running.”

“Away from it?” Matheson asked.

“Toward it.”

I was pretty sure I knew which direction Matheson would’ve headed.

“What were you doing way out there?” Cruz asked.

“Had some time before the charter arrived. Went for a walk … wanted to look at the stars.” Macey scowled, a sudden thought occurring to her. “Gartner, Rick Gartner. Is he … ?”

“He’s alive,” said Foote.

He was, yes, at least technically. But I agreed with the Chief’s half-truth. Knowing your partner’s dead – or close to it – doesn’t help all that much when you’re alive and kicking, relatively speaking, and aren’t sure if you have the right to be.

“We were going to Disneyland, taking a young family.”

Macey must have read something in Chief Foote’s face. “Did they kill the family?”

“The Sorwicks?” said Foote.

Macey nodded.

“Yes, they did.”

The pilot’s forehead became a brace of deep, parallel lines. Her eyes closed and the lines disappeared and she appeared to drift off to sleep. But then she said, as if from a rapidly increasing distance, “How many people did they kill?”

“‘They’ – you keep saying ‘they’,” Cruz said. “Who’s they?” The lieutenant was hoping to coax something more from the only potential witness we had, but the Learjet pilot was snuggled up to the poppy.

“Ms Macey?” Foote prompted. She gave the pilot’s shoulder a gentle shake, but got nothing in return.

Doc Monroe arrived. She opened the door to the room and held it open, leaning against it, her body language saying, “Okay, everyone out.”

Foote, Matheson and Cruz held an impromptu meeting in the hospital parking lot, Gomez and I spectating.

“We’re going to have to go public,” said Foote.

“I agree,” Matheson agreed, happy to let the Chief Deputy take the lead now, and any career bullets later.

“I think we should wait until we have some idea about who did this and why,” said Cruz.

“You heard the doctor, Carlos,” Foote reminded him. “There are rumors. If we don’t fill the vacuum someone else will. It’s already a media circus.” She put a hand to her forehead and smoothed the hair back from her temples. “Look, more than anything, we need to make some progress. If you’ve got any ideas, Matt, let’s hear ’em. We need to claw something back here, and fast.”

Matt
Matheson? Even the guy’s name lacked imagination. I felt sorry for the Chief. She was doing her best, but it was like watching someone attempting to start a car with a dead battery on a cold morning.

Matheson stroked his chin, said nothing, no current in the wires.

“So what do we know?” Foote asked, looking at everyone in turn, including Gomez and me. “An unknown number of assailants flew in to Horizon Airport before dawn this morning, and killed everyone they could find. Only two people are known to have survived. Automatic and semi-automatic weapons were used …”

“We’ve collected DNA evidence and we’re talking to the FAA about identifying the aircraft,” said Cruz.

“That’s something – a start,” said Foote. “What else? Anyone got any theories? Right about now, I’ll listen to
anything
.”

Crickets.

I had a question. “Why two aircraft?”

The corners of Foote’s mouth sank like they were supported by quicksand.

“The attack wasn’t random,” Gomez said. “Lieutenant, you said you thought it was carefully planned and executed. I agree.”

Cruz nodded, grateful for the support.

“And for some reason the plan called for
two
aircraft.”

Gomez looked at me. “How many passengers can you put in a King Air?”

I’d worked with several variants in the past. “Depends on the configuration,” I replied. “Ten or more?”

“Lieutenant, you got an estimate of how many killers you believe were running around the airport?”

I sensed that Gomez had maybe sniffed something out.

Cruz held his forehead in his fingertips and massaged it. “Nothing definitive, no, but given the area, the number of deaths, the spread of the casings and the variations in striations on them – best guess so far is up to maybe fifteen.”

“Around fifteen people arriving in relative comfort, split between two aircraft … Why not twenty or more killers, fill the planes up with them and do the job in half the time with twice the numbers?”

“Maybe all the assailants were squeezed into one plane,” I said, headed to the same place Gomez was going. “Because there was something else in the other aircraft.”

Gomez scratched his chin. “This is about drugs. The hit squad in one aircraft came along to ensure there were no witnesses to the cargo brought in on the other.”

No one had anything to say. The air was tense, all of us testing the theory internally, looking for holes. That is with the possible exception of Matheson, who was maybe thinking about what music he was gonna put on for the evening’s floor class.

“Would’ve been a big load,” said Foote, climbing on board.

“Does El Paso still get a lot of drugs coming across the border?” Gomez asked.

“Yes, but nothing like Laredo.”

“Didn’t you make a big bust here not so long ago? A thirty-million-dollar haul?”

Foote, Matheson and Cruz all nodded.

“Maybe this time, whoever made this shipment – maybe they wanted the delivery assured,” I said.

“Jesus,” said Foote.

Gomez turned to me. “What’s the cargo payload of a King Air?”

I was paid to know these things. I took a guess at it. “Over a ton.”

“They land, the hit squad deplanes, disburses, kills all possible witnesses to the offload and flies away.”

“What do they offload into?” Foote asked.

“A truck, or perhaps several vehicles,” Cruz suggested. “Y’know, split up the load. One or two get caught but the others sneak through. Your standard decoy run.”

“That makes sense,” said Foote.

“We got evidence that any of this is anything other than guesswork?” asked Matheson.

“
Educated
guesswork,” Cruz corrected him.

I wondered whether Matheson might need the word educated spelled out. “What’s a thousand kees of cocaine worth on the street?” I asked. “A hundred million?”