Strong to the Bone--A Caitlin Strong Novel

by Jon Land

  Cort Wesley watched Fisker weighing the situation, the steely bent of his eyes indicating there was only one way this could go, before his mind got the better of him and he motioned to the two gunmen poised before the truck. One moved to the left, the other right, clearing the street.

  Cort Wesley had readied himself to drive on, when Fisker clamped a hand on the hot metal where his forearm had just rested.

  “You and I might’ve once had business together, cowboy, but we got no business together anymore. So once you’re on your way, lose this place in your GPS.”

  Cort Wesley gunned the engine. “That ought to be easy, since my GPS couldn’t find it.”

  He drove off, eyes rotating between his mirrors and the road ahead, one hand on the wheel while the other clutched the Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter pistol he’d tucked between his legs.

  “Well, that went well,” said Leroy Epps, suddenly beside him again with half-finished Hires in hand.

  “Got a feeling we haven’t seen the last of Armand Fisker, champ.”

  Leroy winked a gleaming eye at him. “Nice to see I’m not the only one who can steal glimpses of the future, bubba.”

  29

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “I’ve never seen anything like it before,” Doc Whatley told Caitlin after closing his office door behind him.

  “Last time we had a closed-door meeting, I think you told me somebody was planning to poison chewing gum with the bubonic plague.”

  Whatley was clearly not in the mood to smile. “I completed the autopsies on those two bodies we recovered yesterday, Ranger.”

  “Got a cause of death for me?”

  “Take your pick.”

  “Is this multiple choice, all of a sudden, instead of fill in the blank, Doc?”

  “That’s as good a way of putting it as any, given that all the organs in both subjects failed, each and every one.”

  * * *

  “Cause of death,” Whatley continued, “could be listed as kidney failure, liver failure, acute pancreatitis since the pancreas in both of them has shriveled to what look like supermarket bags. Or how about respiratory failure since their lungs were filled with necrotic tissue it normally takes a lifetime of smoking to generate? And neither of them were smokers. I know that much from their medical records, the same records that confirmed something I noted at the scene.”

  “What’s that, Doc?”

  “They were both recipients of organ donations.”

  * * *

  “Liver and kidney, respectively, both within the past two years.”

  “You drawing a link between that and what killed them?”

  Whatley scratched at the scalp revealed beneath his thinning hair. “What killed them was catastrophic, and virtually simultaneous, organ failure. If there’s a link there, I can’t see it.”

  “Pretty big coincidence otherwise, Doc.”

  “You’re the Texas Ranger. I’ll leave that for you to decide.”

  “Then you know what I’m going to say next.”

  “And I’m already running a check to see if there are any indications that the pattern goes beyond these two. That’s going to take some time.”

  “So we’re ruling out anything pertaining directly to the apartment complex itself.”

  “Three hundred people live there,” Whatley reminded her. “And only two of them died of catastrophic organ failure, both of whom received donated organs. That’s where you’ll find your connection, Ranger.”

  “What about other residents who may have received donated organs?”

  Whatley nodded, picking up on her thinking. “On the chance they might be next, because something environmental in the complex might be to blame, having somehow weakened their already compromised immune systems.”

  “In which case we’d need to warn them and fast.”

  “Already working on it.”

  “And the hospitals where the transplant surgeries took place…”

  “Checking into that, too,” Whatley said, nodding again.

  “And what if what killed them actually has its roots in the donated organs they received? Imagine if the liver and kidney in question came from—”

  “—the same donor,” Whatley finished for her. “One thing I can say for sure is that isn’t the case: the two victims had different blood types.”

  “Looks like you’re ahead of me, Doc.”

  “First time for everything, I suppose.”

  Caitlin started to stand up.

  “By the way,” Whatley continued, “your captain called me yesterday in search of a history lesson.”

  “How’s that, Doc?”

  Whatley scratched at his scalp again. “Well, apparently you got him thinking about your granddad chasing an escaped Nazi prisoner of war across the state back in 1944. He asked me to fill in some details for him.”

  Caitlin sat back down. “Why don’t you fill them in for me first?”

  30

  AUSTIN, TEXAS; 1944

  “Thanks for coming, Ranger,” the manager of the Driskill Hotel said when Earl Strong climbed out of his pickup truck, parked directly before the entrance. “Locals want no part of this one and I’m having trouble keeping a lid on things to avoid spooking the guests.”

  Earl looked up at the marquee of the famed hotel. “As I hear told, this building’s already got its share of blood staining the walls.”

  “Nothing like this,” the manager told him. “You’ll see what I mean as soon as we get upstairs.”

  The manager’s name was Arliss Weatherby and he’d been in the process of anxiously checking his watch when Earl Strong pulled up after the two-hour drive from Hearne, traveling southwest on Route 79. Earl had heard talk that construction would soon be under way on much bigger highways that might stretch as far as four lanes in both directions. He always accepted the information with a shrug, wondering if there was alcohol on the speaker’s breath, given it was hard to picture that much concrete carving up a state as massive as Texas. In Earl’s mind the state was still best traversed by horse, but he hadn’t worked a case on horseback since way back in 1931 when he’d battled all manner of miscreant, along with Al Capone’s Outfit, in Sweetwater. That said, his powder-blue Chevy pickup was the second love of his life after his son, Jim.

  Equipped with the latest General Motors V-8 engine, it had automatic overdrive transmission, power steering, power disc brakes, chrome accessories, Flowmasters, Dolphin gauges, tilt steering, a woodgrain Grant wheel, louvered hood, relocated gas tank, lowered suspension, and staggered twenty-inch aluminum KMC Nova wheels. Earl could recite those features as smoothly as the salesman who’d sold him the truck, giving him the military discount, even though Earl had spent the war fighting crime in Texas, instead of the Nazis. The salesman had convinced his boss that being a Texas Ranger more than qualified Earl there.

  In the course of the drive from Hearne, he’d started wondering if the killing he’d been sent to Austin to investigate was as much a ploy to get him out of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s hair as anything. Hoover had a well-earned reputation for not fancying opposition of any kind, and it was clear back on the clay-rich soil of that prison camp that they’d gotten off on the wrong foot.

  Then again, Hoover’s history with the Rangers had been tainted for a while already, dating back to Ranger Frank Hamer’s doggedly successful quest to bring Bonnie and Clyde to justice in 1934, after FBI efforts to do the same had failed at every turn. It had been Governor Miriam “Ma” Ferguson herself, no friend of the Rangers at all, who called Hamer out of retirement to take up the chase, which he promptly did in the company of a band of equally able, retired Ranger lawmen he’d put together himself. In Texas, the bureau would always be playing second fiddle and Earl figured that ate at Hoover’s insides something awful.

  One look at hotel manager Arliss Weatherby was enough to convince Earl that his being summoned here was no ruse. The man was tied tight as baling wire, his nerves a jumble and his embroidered
white handkerchief already sodden with sweat and grime from a constant blotting of his face, so red in the heat of the Texas day that it looked almost purple. Then again, the Driskill was the most well-known hotel in the capital city, and maybe even the entire state, having played host to all manner of events and parties featuring dignitaries and politicians, so Weatherby was certainly facing some pressure here.

  “Housekeeping staff found the body,” the hotel manager related, patting at his shiny face with his handkerchief again. “I gave the maid and her supervisor the rest of the week off.”

  “Mighty kind of you,” Earl noted, wondering what his life would be like if he’d been given a week off for every body he came across, especially if that included the ones he dropped himself. “But I’m more interested in the guest’s identity.”

  Weatherby consulted a leather-trimmed notepad, squinting for want of reading glasses. “Abner Dunbar. His registration lists his profession only as ‘oilman’ and his employer as Standard Oil.”

  “John D. Rockefeller’s old company.”

  “Is that important?”

  “Not particularly,” Earl Strong replied. “Beyond the fact that my grandfather Steeldust Jack Strong had a run-in with him back in the late nineteenth century. Now, how about you show me to the room in question?”

  * * *

  Earl rode the hydraulic elevator upward, trying to remember if there’d ever been another time when he’d been called to investigate two different murder scenes in a single day. Weatherby had posted private uniformed hotel security guards on either side of a door in the middle of the hall. A short, dapper-looking man in a tweed suit and bowler hat stood across from them, balancing his weight on a single leg, the second one folded up behind him, dress shoe heel pressed against the wall.

  “This is Mr. Brimble,” Weatherby said, by way of introduction. “The hotel detective.”

  “Works for you?”

  “The owner.”

  Earl flashed Brimble a look, realizing he had a thin mustache, too. “Then he can report to the owner, after I report to you.”

  “I worked for Scotland Yard,” Brimble said in a thick London accent. “My grandfather investigated Jack the Ripper.”

  “Did he catch him?”

  * * *

  Blood was the first thing Earl noticed once in the room, first by the powerful coppery stench, and then the spray across the bedcovers and walls. Against his better judgment, he let Brimble accompany him inside, curious to see how the famous Scotland Yard operated.

  “Somebody slit his throat,” Brimble said, looking down over the body, which was stripped down to his underwear.

  “You got any observations that are less obvious?”

  “Only Americans kill men in their sleep.”

  “Is that a fact? Then I guess it’s a good thing this man wasn’t sleeping, or even lying down. The way the blood sprayed indicates he was sitting up, likely right here on the edge of the bed. You see that depression in his forehead?”

  Brimble crouched and laid his hands on his knees. “Yes, I do.”

  “Revolver barrel did that. The killer was holding it against his forehead when he cut poor Mr. Dunbar’s throat.”

  “To avoid making a racket, I assume.”

  “Your assumption would be correct, Scotland Yard.”

  Earl moistened a towel in the luxurious bathroom that came complete with one of those toilet-like things for women they called a bidet, and swabbed it across the area of the wound on Abner Dunbar’s throat.

  “Should you be doing that, Ranger?”

  “I trust myself to do it more than I trust anyone else. And…”

  Earl stopped, the wound looking all too familiar. “Well, I’ll be damned…”

  “What is it?” Brimble asked, drawing closer.

  “A coincidence, we can hope, but this isn’t the day for them.”

  “I’m not following you, Ranger.”

  “I came here straight from the German POW camp in Hearne where one of the prisoners escaped, after cutting the throat of his three bunkmates. Near as I can tell, those wounds were identical to this one. Same general circumference, made by the same or similar straight-edged tool sharpened to an edge, as opposed to something more serrated.”

  “Same killer?”

  “That would be my initial evaluation,” Earl said, moving his eyes away from the body and the blood, and sweeping them about the room furnished with handmade wood furniture and real oil paintings hanging from the walls.

  Then his gaze edged downward. “Don’t move,” Earl said to Brimble.

  “Why?”

  “There’s clay dust on your shoes.”

  Brimble looked down, shook his head. “And I just had them shined in the lobby.”

  “When?”

  “Oh, a few hours ago maybe.”

  “Step back.”

  Brimble did.

  “Holy shit,” said Earl.

  * * *

  Earl used an old toothbrush he always carried to push as much of the clay dust as he could into one of several plastic bags he always kept tucked in his pocket. The thick nap of the carpeting must have pulled it from the soles of the killer’s shoes. He still had a sizeable portion left to go when he heard a commotion in the hall just ahead of the room door opening all the way.

  “You again,” said J. Edgar Hoover, entering in the company of the same suited figures Earl recalled from Hearne. “Doesn’t Texas have any other Rangers?”

  Earl rose from his crouch. “One or two, Mr. Hoover. They happened not to be in the area at the time.”

  “My lucky day,” the first and only director of the FBI said, shaking his head.

  “Not his, unfortunately,” Earl said, bending his gaze down toward Abner Dunbar.

  “We’ll take things from here,” Hoover told him.

  “Didn’t you say almost the same thing to me at the POW camp?”

  Hoover didn’t bother nodding. “It was true then, and it’s just as true now.”

  “Fact that the director of the FBI is a long way from home at a second murder scene tells me you suspect a connection with that triple homicide committed by Gunther Haut in Hearne. Does that sound about right, Director?”

  J. Edgar Hoover gave the body a closer look. “You’re not an educated man, are you, Ranger?” he asked, the condescension in his voice as palpable as the smell of blood in the air.

  Earl watched Hoover’s lackeys ease forward to stand between him and their boss. “I never went to college, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I also mean schooled in the basic tenets of criminology and modern forensics.”

  Earl didn’t feel much like getting into a pissing contest right then. “Rangers tend to work scenes where the nearest medical examiner might as well be on Mars and the local elected law never faced a criminal in his life. Under those circumstances, folks tend not to ask for diplomas.”

  “But these are different circumstances, aren’t they?”

  “I’m still waiting to hear why that is exactly, Mr. Hoover.”

  “You’re way out of your league, Ranger.”

  Earl sidestepped to hide the presence of the clay dust sprinkled over the carpeting, and tucked the plastic bag into which he’d sifted samples into his pocket. “Being this is Texas, sir, I was about to say the same thing to you.”

  31

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “That clay dust,” Caitlin said. “My granddad must’ve recognized it from the prison camp in Hearne.”

  “Can you believe Earl Strong talked to J. Edgar Hoover that way?” Whatley asked her, instead of responding to her comment.

  “My granddad was never one to mince words with anyone. And it sounds like he suspected something fishy about the director of the FBI’s presence in Texas right from the get-go. With good reason, too,” Caitlin added, “starting with the fact that Abner Dunbar being in Texas at the same time Gunther Haut escaped couldn’t have been a coincidence. Dunbar must’ve been waiting for Haut to sho
w up at the Driskill Hotel. This was something big for sure.”

  Whatley drummed his fingers on his desktop, choosing his next words carefully. “Should I ask how it went in Austin?”

  “Like stepping out of a time machine,” Caitlin told him. “I promised myself I’d never feel that helpless again and, there I was, reliving the whole experience through the eyes of a fellow victim.”

  Whatley again looked hesitant to continue. “Was she helpful at all?”

  “She believes her attacker was a woman.”

  “Say that again?”

  “That was my reaction, too, Doc.”

  “Doesn’t exactly jibe with your own recollection.”

  “Except I really don’t have any. I’m thinking about getting a sketch artist to put something together on the guy who gave me the spiked drink. See if we can age it eighteen years and see if it jogs Kelly Ann Beasley’s memory.”

  “Except she doesn’t believe her attacker was a man in the first place.”

  “I don’t need to tell you that those date-rape drugs tend to play hell with whatever memory you’ve got left when you wake up.” Caitlin hesitated, trying to figure out how to best phrase her next question. “Any chance Austin’s lab findings were wrong on this, Doc?”

  Whatley shook his head, looking as sad as the rare times he opened up about losing his family. “I double-checked them myself, Ranger.”

  Caitlin shook her head. “All those years apart, two different cities, same MO … If there’s any sense to be found there, maybe someone else needs to find it.”

  “When it … happened, we all tried not to think what Jim Strong would do to your attacker if he ever found him.”

  “Spare the ghost of my granddad the trouble.”

  “You believe in them?”

  “What?”

  “Ghosts, Ranger.”