The Fall Moon

by Blake Banner

  She was shaking her head, but the sheriff spoke up.

  “I think I might have an answer for you there, Mr. Stone. I really wish you had confided in me at the time, Ingrid. Things might have turned out different all ’round.”

  “I know…” She said it quietly, to the hands in her lap. “I am sorry, Sheriff.”

  I was frowning at him. So was Dehan. I said, “What do you mean?”

  “I am not one hundred percent sure, Detective Stone, but ’round about the time we’re talking about, there was an automobile accident. Car came off 18th Avenue, crashed into the Opossum Creek. I don’t know what it was carrying, but it burst into flames and burned most of the night and day. By the time we was able to get to it and stop the burning, there wasn’t much left.” He gave his head a single shake. “Burned out shell, and what was left, after more than eight hours of burning, of two bodies. ME said most likely a man and a woman.”

  Dehan looked at him like he was crazy. “It burned for more than eight hours, in a creek?”

  He shook his head. “It crashed off the bridge, landed in the creek, but only part of the hood was in the water. Must have exploded and then burned.” He gave a small shrug. “It happened at night and it was a long time before anybody got to it. It did burn an awful long time. I did wonder about that, but there was no crime committed that we could see, and what was more important, no trace of any kind of ID. Obviously no fingerprints, and in the ME’s opinion, the chances of getting a reliable DNA sample were minimal. All we could do was file the report. I have what we were able to recover back at the office, if you want to come and see it.”

  Dehan nodded and stood. I said, “What happened to the car?”

  He looked rueful. “It became part of the landscape. Nobody wanted to claim responsibility for it, nobody owned it and nobody wanted to waste their money on it. Now it’s part of the nature reserve. I’ll run the registration for you, see if it’s the one Amy and Charlie registered.”

  “Thanks. I’d like to go and see it.” I glanced at Dehan. She nodded. “Then we can have a look at the possessions, if that’s OK.”

  He shrugged his big shoulders again. “Anything we can do to help. I’ll tell you where it is, you come and see me in Vinton when you’re done.”

  ELEVEN

  The crash site was ten miles south and east of Ingrid’s house, as the crow flies. By road, it was closer to fifteen, driving through endless miles of flat prairie where, here and there, short lines of tall, silhouetted trees stood like lonely processions of hooded monks under a vast sky.

  I wanted to ask why they would go east and then south. Logic dictated they should go west. If they were trying to leave a false scent, it was enough to tell Ingrid they were going south. They didn’t need to demonstrate it. Nobody was following them. And even if they feared somebody was, why east and then south?

  But I didn’t ask, because I knew Dehan was wondering the same thing, and like me, she was aware it was just one more unanswerable question on the pile of questions that were building up with every partial answer we got.

  We came eventually to 27th Avenue—because here the endless roads that crisscross the entire state, in a vast grid system, were named and numbered like streets and avenues in a city. We turned onto the avenue and after two miles, I slowed and pulled over onto the verge as we approached a bridge. There we climbed out and stood looking down a steep slope at the rusted wreckage of a car, half buried in mud, with its hood sunk in the lazy water of the creek.

  We slipped and slithered down the bank and soon found we were squelching ankle deep through mud, knee high in grass and ferns. We waded up to the burnt out shell and began to examine it. The trunk was still closed, raised a couple of feet in the air. The tires had been burned away, as had the paint. We peered through the windows. Inside, just about everything that hadn’t been consumed by the flames had rotted in the rain, the flooding and the alternating extremes of heat and cold that hit Iowa every year.

  The doors were closed, but they opened with a small tug. I explored the glove compartments and the floor. There was nothing there of interest.

  Dehan said, “What are you hoping to find?”

  Instead of answering her, I said, “It’s an Impala, isn’t it?”

  She nodded. I made my way back to the trunk and tried it. It was locked. Dehan leaned inside the car and after a moment shook her head. “No way. The button’s burned and rusted.”

  “It’s Schrödinger’s cat, Dehan. Until we open the trunk, they are both dead and alive. After we open the trunk, they will be one or the other.”

  Her eyebrows shot up. “You think they are in the trunk?”

  I shook my head and made my way back to the Jag. “I don’t think so. But I am very curious to see if there is anything in the trunk.”

  I pulled my Colt .45 automatic from the glove compartment and made my way back to the wreck. I stopped and smiled at Dehan, who was frowning at me.

  “What do you think, Dehan? Will we find twenty kilos of cooked coke? Two and a half million baked bucks?”

  I shot out the lock and the rusted metal yielded easily. I heaved up the lid and found a mass of melted plastic that had bonded to the metal floor of the trunk, and nothing else. I slipped the automatic in my waistband and pointed at the hardened black plastic that lay spread all over the floor.

  “Assume there had been luggage, and that the sheriff took out the luggage when the car was cool enough. It would have left deep imprints in the melted plastic, right?”

  “Definitely. What is this plastic anyway?”

  “Plastic gas cans. Stored for a long journey through remote country where they wanted to avoid being seen on security cameras. Perhaps they thought they might go a long time without seeing a service station. That’s why the car burned so long. It was full of gallons of gas.”

  She nodded. “Makes sense.”

  I turned and looked up the track we had scrambled down. “So what made them come off the road? They swerved to avoid another vehicle…?”

  Dehan came up beside me. “They didn’t roll, they didn’t hit the side of the bridge, they just trundled down the bank. They weren’t going very fast either, because they came to a stop with only the front of the hood in the water…”

  We stared at each other, aware we were asking the same question. I put it into words. “What made the car ignite? It rolls down the bank, plops its nose in the water. It was early October, conditions much like this, only slightly cooler, perhaps wetter… They should have just climbed out and walked away. Instead the car ignites and burns for eight hours, and they both burn with it.”

  I walked back to the driver’s door. I heard Dehan’s voice behind me. “Oh, I see where you’re going. Whatever was in the trunk besides the gas was removed before the car burned.” She walked around to the passenger side and yanked open the door, scraping it through the mud. Then she set to scouring the dash and the door, saying, “And now you’re looking for bullet holes.”

  “Mm-hm.” I nodded. “But I don’t see any. Goddammit, Dehan! Everything in this case cancels everything else out! I can see,” I said, “that Charlie was, as you said, an entrepreneur. I can see that he was smart enough to pull one over on Julio. I can see that he and Amy set things up so they could escape to Garrison in the Impala. I see also that they keep their phones switched on long enough to call Ingrid and then switch them off. OK…” I began to pace and squelch.

  Dehan said, “Julio Camacho uses the same technique on them that he used on us. He tracks the GPS on Amy’s phone. Amy keeps it on long enough for Julio to get a general orientation, Midwest, maybe Iowa, but then they go dark. Julio is mad. So he has a couple of teams scouring the area. After two weeks, they switch their phones on again, thinking they are safe. Julio picks up the signal and tracks them down.”

  I nodded. “OK…”

  “His team catches up with them here and they drive them off the road. There are no bullet holes, Stone, because…” She was thinking as she ta
lked. “Because A, the team don’t want to attract attention, and B, they have been told to punish them. So they use knives. They take their dope, or money, or whatever it is from the trunk and burn the car to make it look like an accident.”

  I stuffed my hands in my pockets and shrugged at the same time. “I guess it makes sense.”

  “But you don’t like it.”

  I shook my head. “The box is still closed. What we have, over and over, is plausible explanations for the absence of evidence. So the box is still closed and the cat is still both dead and alive.”

  She punched me on the shoulder. “Hey, at least we found the car!”

  I made a face of skepticism. “Maybe! We don’t even know that for sure yet. Let’s go see Sheriff Happy Face and see what he’s got for us.”

  We took 66th Street west for three miles, then turned north up 24th Avenue and after that, it was a seven mile straight run all the way to the sheriff’s office. Halfway there, Dehan said, “New York is Babylon. The grid system belongs there, but out here, overlaid on nature? It’s wrong.” She looked at me. “We should be wending. Why aren’t we wending?”

  I had no answer for her and three minutes later, we pulled up outside the forbidding concrete and brick mass which was the sheriff’s office. We climbed out into the warm afternoon sunshine and stood staring at the windowless hulk. Dehan shook her head. “I feel like we stepped into a Steven King movie. Where are the wooden swing doors, the cowboy boots and the ‘Howdy, ma’am’?”

  “Maybe they went a-wending.”

  We crossed the road and pushed through the steel and glass door, as we had before. The sheriff was leaning on the reception desk, talking to his deputy. He didn’t greet us as we came in. He just raised his chin and said, “Follow me.”

  We followed him down a passage, through a door and down some steps into a basement. There we went through double security doors into a storage area, with steel shelves crowded with boxes.

  “This is the evidence room.”

  He led us down a long aisle, and at the end I could see a table against the far wall. On it there was a cardboard box, and next to that there was what looked like a giant Tupperware container, maybe five feet by three, and a couple of feet deep.

  He laid his hand on it and said, “Here’s your stuff.” He leaned his hip against the table and crossed his arms. “You find the car OK?”

  Dehan was opening the carton. I nodded. “Yeah. Did you open the trunk at the time?”

  He shook his head. “Nope. Didn’t see the point, tell you the truth. Anything that was in there was cooked.”

  I opened the giant Tupperware. There were two skulls and several bits of bone: thigh, tibia, a few ribs, all badly charred. I glanced at Dehan. “We need to send these to the ME’s office. They might get enough DNA, check the dental records. It’s unlikely they’ll get anything, but it’s worth a try.”

  I was holding one of the skulls in my hand, turning it around, examining it. A chip on the left eye socket caught my attention.

  “You got a flashlight?”

  The sheriff pulled a pencil-light from his pocket and handed it to me. I played the light on the chip, then on the inside of the skull. Dehan had abandoned her examination of the box and was watching me. I could see a pattern of hairline fractures inside. Then I found what I was looking for.

  “How thoroughly did the ME examine these bodies?”

  There was something hostile in O’Brien’s eyes when he said, “Not much. Why would he?”

  I handed him the flashlight, then held the skull at an angle so he could see inside, near the base. “See that dark stain?” He frowned and nodded. “Two gets you twenty, Sheriff, that is lead, melted in the fire as the brain cooked away, leaving a coating on the bone.”

  “Son of a gun.”

  I examined the second skull and found the same thing.

  “Suddenly we have a double homicide. They have both been shot. There are no entry wounds, except maybe this chip on the eye socket. So we can conclude they were shot through the eye. But there is no exit wound, either. If you look inside, you see hair fractures along the bone, where the velocity of the bullet has caused the brain to expand, but not enough for the bullet to exit. So we’re looking at either a shot from some distance, where the bullet has lost velocity, which we can rule out because it was night and the vehicle was moving, or most likely a small caliber slug, possibly from a suppressed weapon.”

  I looked at Dehan and handed her the skull. “They’ve been run off the road. Then the killer, or killers, have come down and shot them in the eye, probably with a suppressed .22. They have removed the contents of the trunk, whatever it was they were looking for, and then they have burned the car, and the occupants. That,” I said, “is the most likely explanation.” I turned to the sheriff. “Are you going to dispute our jurisdiction? The way I see it, this is originally a crime that was committed in New York. It’s either ours or the feds’.”

  He shook his head. “I ain’t got the resources or the inclination. You or the feds take it off my hands, I ain’t gonna complain.”

  Dehan put down the skull and pulled her cell from her jacket.

  “Sir? Dehan here… Yeah, we’re pretty sure we found the Impala and what is very likely the remains of Amy and Charlie… Yes, sir, in Iowa.” She held my eye while she listened. “No, sir, the sheriff is happy to recognize our jurisdiction or the feds’. What we need is to have the remains of the car towed back to the Bronx, and I am going to send the remains and personal effects sent to the ME.” After a moment, she hung up and looked at the sheriff. “He’s going to call you.”

  The sheriff nodded and left us with the bones, and while he and the deputy inspector sorted the red tape, Dehan called DHL to come and collect what was left of Amy and Charlie and take them back to New York.

  After she hung up, we stood for a while with our asses leaning against the table, staring down the dark, steel and concrete aisles of evidence boxes, with the plastic box of charred bones behind us, and the small cardboard box of charred things that had once been important enough to take away while fleeing for her life. Now they were nothing more than tenuous bits of half-burned evidence that once upon a time had been two people called Amy and Charlie.

  Dehan took a deep breath and let it go slowly but noisily. “So they didn’t make it, Stone. I’d kind of hoped they had.”

  I nodded for a while. “There is still a lot we don’t know.”

  She thought about that for a moment, then arched her eyebrows and gave a couple of slow nods. “Like—just about everything: who killed them, for a start, and what they did exactly to piss the Camachos off…”

  “Where they were going and how whoever killed them knew they were going there…”

  “The GPS…”

  “All of that is speculation, Dehan. We need something, just one thing, to tie Julio or Feliciano to the bodies. One thing to prove that the Camachos, or at least the Chupacabras, had motive, means and opportunity to kill Amy and Charlie. So far, we have squat.”

  She punched my shoulder again. “Come on, don’t be negative. We’re making progress. However, I am exhausted and I do not plan on driving sixteen hours tonight, so I am going to write my report, and then I suggest we go to the Ron De Voo, which stays open till two. See what I did there? I made it rhyme.”

  “You’re a poet and we didn’t know it.”

  “We eat Mexican and we let off some steam.”

  “What does that mean, letting off steam?”

  “Now you’re doing it.”

  “Am I going to have to bail you out of the county jail in the morning?”

  She smiled and slapped the shoulder she had punched moments before. “Don’t be silly, Stone. Of course not. You’ll be in the slammer with me. C’mon, stop being a sissy. I need a shower and a siesta.”

  We carried the stuff up to the sheriff’s office and left it on his desk, telling him DHL would be there to collect it within the hour. We shook hands with him and
told him we’d be out of town by sunrise, which made him almost smile. Then we stepped out, one last time, through the steel and glass doors, into the lengthening shadows of the late afternoon.

  By the car, I stood a moment to look back at the bizarre fortress that housed the sheriff’s office. It didn’t belong in remote Iowa. It didn’t belong in Vinton. It belonged in Washington—or Moscow.

  Dehan opened the passenger door and paused to wait for me. I shook my head, still gazing at the ugly behemoth. “You know how many people have been murdered in Vinton in the last ten years?”

  I turned to look at her. She shook her head. I looked back at the fortress.

  “None.”

  I climbed in the car and we drove back to the Cobblestone Hotel, there to shower, write our reports and prepare for Dehan to let off steam.

  TWELVE

  The Ron-De-Voo was more of a lounge bar than a restaurant. It had bare brick walls and it was dark, friendly and cozy, with country music playing softly in the background. We grabbed a table by the wall and ordered a couple of beers from a bright-eyed waitress who gave us a menu. When she came back with the drinks, Dehan ordered a Mexican potato and I ordered three pieces of broasted chicken.

  We both sat and looked around for a bit. Finally, she said, “OK, you going to say it, or am I?”

  I smiled. “You’re the boss, you say it.”

  “I’m the boss now?”

  “It’s your case, Dehan. You know it as well as I do.”

  She leaned back and stretched out her long legs under the table so that one of her boots was resting against my chair. For a moment, I wondered what it was we were supposed to be saying. She picked up her glass and took a pull, leaving herself with a Santa Claus moustache. She saw me smile again and wiped it away with the back of her hand.

  “We can’t close this case.”

  I thought of the odd bits and pieces in the box, things that had once been a part of Amy’s and Charlie’s lives, had somehow identified them. I thought of their bones, and their skulls, sitting in that banal, sterile plastic. I thought of their desperate dash for salvation, six years ago, how they almost made it. I felt a twist of regret and anger in my belly.