Strong to the Bone--A Caitlin Strong Novel

by Jon Land

  Druce shifted uncomfortably on the couch. “I can’t. I didn’t even know Dunbar was murdered, until you told me. And I’m taking you at your word that Gunther Haut was responsible.”

  “Don’t take my word, take the evidence. Identical means of killing and a trail of clay dirt that stretches between Hearne and Austin.”

  “Clay dirt?”

  “Common in the drier, more desolate areas of the state. Hearne isn’t all that, but it’s enough, and I found traces of the same clay dirt in Dunbar’s hotel room in Austin that I spotted at the prison camp. Which begs the question, Captain, why Haut would kill a man in business to help him.”

  “I have no idea.”

  Earl Strong leaned back and crossed his legs. “I believe you do, sir.”

  “Do you take me for a liar, Ranger?”

  “I didn’t say that. There’s a big difference between a lie and an omission. So I guess I’m calling you an ‘omitter.’”

  “I don’t believe there’s such a word.”

  “Being omitted from the dictionary doesn’t make it so.”

  “In any case, I’ve told you everything I’m able to.”

  “But not everything. I’m going to venture a guess here, so feel free to stop me if I stray too far off base. I think Gunther Haut is what brought you to the United States as part of this Operation Loyton of yours. I think somebody, the late Abner Dunbar probably, got word to him you were headed this way on his trail. That may well have been what spurred his escape.”

  Druce hadn’t stopped him, but neither did he confirm Earl Strong’s suspicions. Just sat there on the couch, looking like he was ready for tea to be served, or whatever it was Brits like him drank.

  “And where do the murders of his three bunkmates fit into your scenario, Ranger?”

  “I think Haut was afraid they’d figured something out about him. He wanted to make sure neither you, nor somebody like me or J. Edgar Hoover himself, had anyone to tell us what that was.”

  “Then why kill Dunbar?”

  Earl crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair, nearly tipping it over. “I’m going to let you take a shot at that one, Captain.”

  “I truly have no bloody idea.”

  “Yes, you do. You’ve got a whole lot of ideas you don’t want to share with me, for whatever reason. I figure you know something about Gunther Haut that explains pretty much everything that’s happened in the past twenty-four hours.”

  “Suspicion isn’t the same thing as knowledge, Ranger.”

  “No, but you’ve got to start somewhere, and it’s suspicion that brought you across the Atlantic, because there’s something more important here to your operation than back home to catch all those important Nazis who otherwise might slip through the cracks, once the war ends.”

  Druce rose stiffly. “Gunther Haut cannot be allowed to slip through the cracks. You need to trust me on that.”

  “You’re not giving me a whole lot of reason to, Captain.”

  “I will as soon as I’m sure, Ranger. You have my word.”

  Earl rose, too, and extended his hand, the two men shaking. “Then it looks like we’ve got ourselves an understanding, and maybe even something of a partnership. I can help you with the lay of the land and keep your presence here secret from J. Edgar Hoover by running a little interference.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” Druce said.

  “But I’d be cautious, if I were you. See, I’ve got to figure Hoover knows the same thing you do, or he wouldn’t have come down here on Haut’s trail, either. And he was already en route to Texas before he could possibly have learned of the murders, which tells me that it’s not a killer Hoover’s after, it’s something else.”

  “Any satisfactory conclusion as to what, Ranger?”

  “No, sir, not yet,” Earl said, shaking the life back into the hand with which he’d shaken Druce’s. “Guess I’ll just wait until you’re ready to tell me. In the meantime, what do you say we search this place to see if we can figure out what this Abner Dunbar was really up to?”

  44

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  Captain Tepper had fired up a fresh Marlboro Red by the time he finished, Caitlin watching it burn down toward the halfway point.

  “My granddad never told me that story,” she said, “not even a part of it.”

  “I’m sure he had his reasons.”

  “You don’t know them, even now?”

  “He never said, and I gave up asking, Ranger. He and Captain Henry Druce must’ve come up with something, anyway. I checked Druce out in the years that followed. He took this Operation Loyton to France next, where he and his SAS team were supposed to meet up with leaders of the French Resistance to help find the Nazis he was looking for. But they had the misfortune to parachute into the Vosges Mountains at a time when the German army was reinforcing the area. Most of Druce’s team got captured, and he ended up the hunted instead of the hunter. He died in 2007 at the ripe old age of eighty-six, after winning the Distinguished Service Order for his heroic actions operating behind enemy lines.”

  “Which, apparently, included Texas.”

  “Your granddad never had occasion to tell me what happened next. But I’m going to hunt down the rest of that story, if it kills me, Ranger.”

  Caitlin watched him stamp out his cigarette just past the halfway point in his ashtray that looked the size of a small tire. “It’ll have to get in line, D.W.”

  “Speaking of which,” Tepper said with a frown, but left it here.

  “Speaking of what?”

  “Should I be worried about you?”

  Caitlin eased her boots off the front edge of his desk. “No more than usual.”

  “But there’s nothing usual about this particular case, is there?”

  “You already pulled me off it, Captain.”

  “Even though you were never on it to begin with, so excuse me if I take no solace in whatever you assure me on the matter. I’d tell you this is one you really need to keep your distance on, if I thought you’d listen. So instead I’m going to suggest you have a talk with somebody far better schooled in such things than a moth-eaten log like me.”

  Caitlin stiffened. “And who might that be?”

  “A kind of specialist.”

  “As in a psychiatrist, a shrink?”

  Tepper’s expression remained uncharacteristically flat and noncommittal. “We’ve got one on staff now. What’s the harm?”

  “This an order, D.W.?”

  “Just a suggestion at this point.”

  “At this point,” Caitlin repeated, as if that might make more sense of Tepper’s meaning.

  “I never worry when you go off half-cocked, Ranger, because I know sooner or later you’re going to hit what you’re aiming at and whatever it is deserved to be shot. But this is different. It’s not about insubordination, or living in another century by your own rules, or embracing the notion of the old-style lawman. It’s about a terrible thing that happened to you and never got resolved. The sore’s been festering ever since and now the bandage has been stripped off. That already got one man shot and I don’t want you launching any more harpoons at this white whale of yours that has resurfaced after eighteen years.”

  “But that’s not why Jones warned me off Kelly Ann Beasley, is it?”

  Tepper shook his head. “That had nothing to do with you or the girl, or the assault she suffered at the hands of the same attacker who assaulted you. It’s all about her father.”

  “Her father?”

  “Beasley isn’t Kelly Ann’s real last name. I don’t know what her real last name is, because her father’s a whistle-blower placed in Homeland’s version of witness protection, after he detailed a certain Fortune 500 company’s ties to unsavory Third World governments.”

  “Holy shit,” Caitlin could manage.

  “The man’s got assassins looking for him across the entire planet, and you ran roughshod into his life, threatening to tear the cover off everything.”
>
  “This doesn’t change the fact that Kelly Ann whatever’s rapist is still out there,” Caitlin reminded.

  “And, even if you catch him, the girl’s circumstances make it impossible for her to get involved. Chances are Jones will have the whole family out of Texas once he finds a new place to stash them. Hard to prosecute a case without a victim, Ranger.”

  “There’s another victim, Captain,” Caitlin told him, “in case you’ve forgotten.”

  45

  WACO, TEXAS

  “We really have to wear this shit?” Armand Fisker wondered, squeezing his hands into latex gloves while the surgical mask dangled from his throat.

  David Skoll looked up from the bench where he’d just pulled similarly disposable plastic booties over his shoes. “We can’t risk contamination of any kind to the production line.”

  Night’s fall beyond had done nothing about the sordid humidity roasting the air. Fisker had learned the meaning of truly oppressive heat during his own brief stretch in Huntsville before a witness mysteriously recanted his testimony. As luck would have it, his seven-year-old son disappeared after being dropped off at a school bus stop. That night, the man found a jewelry box with a boy’s severed finger inside. Turned out that the finger was clipped off another boy waiting to be embalmed at a local funeral home, but it did the trick by making the appropriate point.

  Fisker nodded grudgingly toward Skoll, and sat down to fit his booties on, too. “Nice of you to finally show me the place, given that I got as much stake in it right now as you do. Hey, I see you already got your teeth fixed. I’d like you to send me the bill. Least I can do for going off on you the way I did. I’ve been dealing with a heavy load of shit, and something happened yesterday that just put me over the edge. I took my shit out on you, and I owe you an apology for that. It won’t happen again.”

  “I appreciate that,” Skoll said.

  Fisker waved a finger at him, half flippantly and the other half in reproach. “As long as you don’t cross me.”

  He left things there, enjoying the fact that Skoll had no idea how to take his comment.

  “Is this where you make the wonder drug?”

  “I’d hardly call it a wonder drug.”

  “It is to me, and right now that’s all that matters.”

  “Yes, it was made here until production was suspended.”

  “Clinical trial, that’s what you called it.”

  Skoll nodded. “Lot U-two-five-seven-F,” he said. “We would’ve marketed it under the name Axiol.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I made it up.”

  “And if this Axiol, Lot whatever, had worked, how much would you have made?”

  “Personally?”

  “Say it any way you want.”

  “A billion dollars over ten years.”

  “In your pocket?”

  “In my pocket. At minimum.”

  Fisker pulled on the elastic of his surgical mask, ready to fit into place. “And how hard would it be to start production up again?”

  * * *

  They walked amid the fully automated machines, spread over nearly four acres of space. Their steady hum pushed a hollow feeling through Fisker’s ears. Made it feel like there was something crawling around in his head that was exacerbated by the thwack of pills being pressed into patches of foil and the smack of the identifier codes being stamped onto hundreds of pills at a time by what looked like alien typewriter keys. There was also the thud of shipping cartons being placed on pallets by automated forklifts, to be righted when necessary by robots towering over both of them that paid neither he, nor Skoll, any heed at all.

  “Looks like we got more in common than I thought, Davey,” Fisker said through his surgical mask.

  “Really?”

  “I use the same kind of pallets for my pills and weed. I’ll show you the whole operation when you come to visit Elk Grove. Every bag I ship through my biker gangs is logged and bar-coded. Anything comes back for reasons like incarceration or damage, I charge a restocking fee, just like Walmart.”

  Fisker watched Skoll pretend to be interested, not giving a shit.

  “Before the good Lord dropped you into my life, Davey, I was getting most of my pills from north of the border, via the Hells Angels. Given that they practically run the nation of Canada, there wasn’t much room for negotiating the bikers’ own particular exchange rate. So I bought a meatpacking company, just so I could hollow out sides of beef and pack them with vacuum-sealed packets of cash. Refrigerated trucks cross the border without anybody looking twice, and come back the same way with pills tucked into the beef, instead of money. Great system, but the deal we got working beats it to hell.”

  Fisker and Skoll kept to the aisles, lined and retrofitted to the specifications of the rolling man-sized machines that needed to negotiate them. Fisker watched another of the humanlike things fixing a machine that was supposed to stack boxes. A malfunction had snagged the line that promptly started up again under his eye, the robot that towered over him rolling past him, on to its next task.

  “And to think, Davey, we got this failed clinical trial of yours to blame for an association between us that’s about to expand big-time. How many people dead so far thanks to this Axiol?”

  “Just under two hundred.”

  That drew a grin from Fisker. “Man oh man, that makes you a mass murderer, a gen-u-ine serial killer. How is it you’re not behind bars already?”

  “It was a double-blind study conducted over the entire country, the test subjects assigned numbers to replace their names. I’m the only one who knows their names. And since they’re scattered over a number of states, it’s not as bad as it seems.”

  “Oh, it’s bad all right,” Fisker told him, “it’s super bad—for these subjects anyway. But for me it’s Christmas come early. It’s fucking Santa Claus leaving a present under my tree that’s sure to keep on giving for a long run of time. And you can manufacture Axiol as a pill, powder, liquid, even an aerosol, right?”

  “The aerosol is a heavier lift,” Skoll told him, sounding stiff and unsure, staying just out of arm’s reach on the chance that Fisker decided to punch him again. “But we can produce the drug in any form you want.”

  “God works in mysterious ways, don’t he, Davey?”

  “You’re not asking God to give you the power to kill millions of people, Arm, you’re asking me.”

  Fisker kind of liked the fact that Skoll was having one of his morally superior moments, a breath’s-length belief that he was the one holding the power. Fisker let him enjoy it just long enough to remind the kid what his life had been like before Fisker had become his de facto business partner. Let him get a sense of the way the world used to work for him, so it would hurt even more when the realization that those days were long gone struck him anew. Fisker liked seeing weakness on people’s faces even more than pain, and weakness looked especially good on those used to wielding strength like a jackhammer.

  “Who says I’m gonna kill anybody, Davey?” Fisker resumed, after he’d let Skoll’s comment linger just long enough. “You just said how God works in mysterious ways. Well, I do, too. And what you accidentally came up with in those research labs of yours can help me along a bit. Man who carries around an unloaded pistol is an idiot. I’d like to know I’ve got some fresh ammo I can load, if I ever need it.”

  “In case you’ve forgotten,” Skoll said, “I just got professionally reamed by a congressional subcommittee that’s laser focused on my business dealings. They even asked about the same clinical trial you’re interested in.”

  “For different reasons, obviously.”

  “I can skirt my way out of all these insider trading and market manipulation charges, Arm. But I won’t be able to skate on a slew of deaths that will inevitably be connected to my wonder drug that’s not so much of a wonder.”

  “It is to me, Davey, it is to me.”

  Skoll said something in response, but Fisker didn’t hear him, too
busy sidestepping to clear a path for one of the automated forklifts. It was lugging boxes, stopped by its sensors when they recorded his presence.

  “We pull this off,” Fisker continued, “and your debt is paid in full. Hell, I’m even gonna cut you in for a percentage of the profits once we’re square. No need to thank me, Davey. What are friends for?”

  46

  ELK GOVE, TEXAS

  Armand Fisker had lost track of time. It was almost nine o’clock when he finally climbed behind the wheel of his truck for the drive back to Elk Grove. The latest spate of good fortune was just what he needed to relieve the pressure he’d been feeling. His father might have been one of the most feared men on the planet at times, but he’d never taken a fist, strap, or belt to his son, not even once.

  Here he was, though, knocking out a business partner’s teeth and pouring gasoline on his own son in less than a single day’s time. He needed to get a handle on his emotions, start holding them in check. His son Ryan and Davey Skoll were different sides of the same coin, entitled and privileged sorts holding onto their respective daddy’s coattails, heritage to blame for any success they had achieved and likely ever would. Fisker didn’t feel bad for giving Skoll a beating that had separated him from a couple teeth, but he hadn’t felt right about what he’d done to his boy, even while he was doing it. The whole thing felt sour, his actions as much to deflect from his own sense of failure at raising his son right. Kid should be by his side, helping to run things by now. Instead he was smoking weed and rousting illegals.

  It was a day, though, for apologies. First, Fisker had come as close as he could to telling Davey Skoll he was sorry for knocking out a couple of his teeth. Now he needed to do similarly with Ryan. Fisker decided on a grand gesture, in search of redemption as well as a relationship. So, reaching the outskirts of Elk Grove, he settled on telling Ryan he was going to have the repairs on his truck taken care of, sparing the boy of the need to slave away at the impossible task for someone unfamiliar with body work.