Dead or Alive

by Michael McGarrity

  It was a far cry from the early education Kerney had received at the elementary school in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, when he was growing up on the west slope of the San Andres Mountains near the White Sands Missile Range boundary. He hoped time would help Patrick adjust to his new school and surroundings.

  Kerney walked home, his thoughts returning to the murder of Riley Burke. Although it wasn’t logical, he felt partially responsible for Riley’s death. If he hadn’t asked him to look after the ranch, the young man might be alive today. Kerney knew it made no sense to feel that way, since their partnership required Riley to be at the ranch routinely to care for, exercise, and train the cutting horses. Still, guilt gnawed at him.

  He needed to get back to Santa Fe as soon as possible, both to pay his respects and to give whatever support he could to Jack and Irene and Riley’s wife, Lynette. But before he could book a flight, he had to let Sara know what had happened, and he had to arrange for a nanny to care for Patrick until Sara returned from southeastern England the day after tomorrow. Fortunately, there was a housing board at the U.S. Embassy that could speedily secure the services of a nanny on short notice.

  Kerney stopped in front of the house the U.S. government had leased for them. He’d been amazed to learn they were not required to pay rent or utilities for the property. Instead, Sara’s housing allowance went into a special government pool used to lease quarters for all U.S. personnel living in the UK.

  The house they’d been assigned was part of a nineteenth-century mansion block that came with its own private communal gardens accessed through a locked gate. A redbrick building with tall casement windows, it had a steep pitched roof, a tall brick chimney, and a completely updated interior on three floors. On the open market, the house would easily rent for much more than what an army colonel could afford under any circumstance.

  In the living room—what the Brits called the lounge—Kerney called Sara’s cell phone, got her voice mail, left a message about Riley Burke’s murder, and started checking the Internet for available flights. It was the height of the tourist season and every outgoing flight to the states was fully booked until tomorrow, and even then only business-class tickets were available.

  He made a reservation on the earliest flight out of Heathrow, and arranged through the embassy for a nanny to take care of Patrick until Sara returned. He was about to call Clayton when Sara called.

  “What terrible news,” she said. “What else do you know about it?”

  “Not much,” Kerney replied. “Clayton said Riley was shot twice in the chest at close range and that the perp was an escaped fugitive. Clayton, Grace, and the kids discovered Riley’s body at our front door.”

  “Wendell and Hannah saw Riley’s body?”

  “Of that I’m not sure.”

  “Grace surely wouldn’t have allowed it. I’ll call her as soon as I can. When are you leaving for Santa Fe?”

  “You know me too well,” he said. He gave Sara his flight information and told her he’d arranged for a nanny until her return to London. “I’m meeting with the nanny early this afternoon. If she’s not suitable, I’ll asked the embassy to refer another.”

  “Have you told Patrick that Riley is dead?” Sara asked.

  “I don’t have the heart to do it.”

  “Best leave it to me. When will you be back?”

  “I don’t know. Sometime soon after the funeral services, I would guess. In a week at the most.”

  “Don’t raise my hopes with false promises,” Sara said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that unless this homicide is solved quickly, I don’t see you walking away from hunting down Riley’s murderer. You don’t have that kind of temperament.”

  “I’m not a law enforcement officer anymore.”

  “I’m sure Andy Baca will gladly correct that minor technicality.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind. Lynette, Jack, and Irene deserve to have Riley’s killer caught—”

  “Dead or alive,” Sara said.

  “My sentiments exactly,” Kerney said.

  “When the funeral services are set, let me know right away. If I can wrangle emergency leave, Patrick and I will fly over. We should all be there to pay our respects.”

  “I’d like that. So would the Burke family.”

  “It’s all about family, Kerney. Give my boy big kisses and hugs for me.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  Before calling Clayton, Kerney spoke first to his old friend Andy Baca at the New Mexico State Police.

  “Have you caught the dirtbag?” he asked when Andy came on the line.

  Andy snorted in disgust. “Not yet. He seems to have gone to ground.”

  “Can you break away from the office, drive to Albuquerque, and pick me up when I arrive?”

  “Of course I can, I’m the chief. Give me the particulars.”

  Kerney read off his flight number and arrival time and Andy said, “I’ll see you then.”

  Kerney’s call to Clayton went unanswered, so he left a message on his voice mail, went upstairs to the master bedroom, and started packing for his flight the next day.

  Although Riley Burke’s murder was more than enough motivation to return to Santa Fe, Kerney knew his eagerness to leave also came from the feeling of being a total outsider in London and among the families of the military officers and enlisted personnel assigned to the embassy. It was a small, tight-knit group, and none of them, including the civilian support staff, knew what to make of the only male spouse in the crowd, not to mention one who was an ex-police chief to boot.

  He was beginning to doubt his ability to be a retired, stay-at-home parent in London over the next thirty-four months and counting, and he felt shitty about his deteriorating attitude. Sara and Patrick deserved better.

  After preschool in the afternoon, Kerney had promised Patrick a boat ride on the Regent’s Canal and then a visit to the London Zoo. Until then he would surf the Internet to see what he could learn about the investigation into Riley Burke’s murder. By now, there had to be news reports about it. He sat at the desk in a small upstairs bedroom that he’d outfitted as a home office and powered up the laptop.

  Among her many duties as the U.S. Army military attaché at the U.S. Embassy to the Court of St. James’s, Sara was responsible for overseeing the activities of forty-plus army personnel detached on special liaison duty with Royal Army units throughout the United Kingdom. For the past two days, she’d been touring bases in the southern part of the country, working her way back toward London. Last night, she’d stayed over at the Winchester Army Training Regiment base in order to make an early morning meeting with a U.S. Army intelligence captain who was briefing the Brits about the latest top-secret version of a battlefield imagery system.

  It was her first out-of-town trip since landing behind her desk at the embassy two months ago, and although she missed Patrick and Kerney, she was enjoying the break from being office-bound or scrambling from one meeting to the next with Ministry of Defence command staff and planners.

  The job demanded long hours to keep up with all that needed her attention. Fortunately, her boss, the senior military attaché, Rear Admiral Thomas Lincoln Foley, had been supportive and helpful.

  Her meeting with the captain went well, and after a tour of the training facilities and the campus, she went back to her quarters, packed, consulted her road map for the next leg of her tour, a briefing at a Royal Armored Corps garrison, and left the post.

  As she drove through the cathedral city of Winchester, she let her thoughts return to the murder of Riley Burke. Her first impulse after hearing the news from Kerney was to hunt down and shoot the murderer herself, and she’d all but told Kerney to do exactly that.

  Sara wondered if Iraq had turned her into one of the walking wounded who’d survived combat but lost their moral compass. Dead or alive. She’d both said it and meant it, especially the dead part.

  In Iraq, she had been shot at and w
ounded, and she had killed and wounded the enemy in return. She had watched young soldiers die in firefights, examined strewn bloody body parts of civilians blown up by suicide bombers, witnessed soldiers burned alive in Humvees, and seen women and children gunned down by errant fire in skirmishes, until she no longer reacted to the carnage.

  She had finished her tour in a cold rage about war, killing, politicians who sacrificed others at no risk to themselves, and the gutless generals who told the politicians whatever they wanted to hear. She came home emotionally numb, disinterested in most of what happened around her, and feeling estranged from a country that seemed untouched by the war. Only Patrick and Kerney truly mattered, and even with them she occasionally shut down.

  Until Iraq, she had always bounced back. Even after her Gulf War One tour, she’d returned home without suffering any long-lasting ill effects. She knew she had post-traumatic stress disorder, and after months of trying and failing to cope with it on her own, she’d finally made an appointment to see a shrink.

  Going into therapy put a stopper on any future advancement in the military. But she’d reached 0-6, bird colonel, before anyone else in her West Point class, had a job that rarely led to stars on the collar, and planned to retire at the end of the three-year embassy tour of duty, so it really didn’t matter.

  Still a little uneasy driving on the left side of the road, Sara entered the motorway traffic, got up to speed quickly, and zipped along with the insane English motorists who seemed to enjoy playing their own version of Formula 1 and World Rally drivers on public roadways.

  She looked down at her hands gripping the steering wheel and realized they were shaking, and that it didn’t have a thing to do with driving on the left side of the road with the crazy Brits on the motorway.

  After a long, hard sleep, Craig Larson woke up refreshed, turned on the motel room television, and surfed through the early morning news broadcasts. His photograph and the Crime Stoppers toll-free number were being shown on every channel. One station had a camera crew at Jeannie’s house, another had a team at the rest stop where he’d taken the young family’s SUV and locked them in the Department of Corrections van, and a third was interviewing Lenny Hampson with “Exclusive Breaking News” scrolling across the bottom of the screen. They were all playing up his brutality big-time and repeating a warning that “Escaped fugitive Craig Larson is armed and dangerous.”

  Larson found it interesting that Lenny Hampson had walked out of the desert, the young couple and their baby hadn’t died from heat exhaustion, and the Department of Corrections screw had survived, although he was in intensive care. That meant out of seven people, he’d only killed two: Jeannie and the young cowboy at the ranch, whose names hadn’t been released to the press. That didn’t seem an unreasonable number. He could have easily killed them all.

  He wondered why TV news wasn’t showing the crime scene at the ranch where he’d shot the cowboy. Probably the rich owner didn’t want the publicity.

  With his photograph on the television and probably in every newspaper statewide, his plans to have a big breakfast at a nearby diner, study the paper to find a car to buy from a private party, and use his twin brother’s identity would have to be changed.

  He opened the window curtains and scanned the half dozen parked cars within his line of sight for out-of-state license plates. There was a blue Chevrolet from Oklahoma parked on the left, two spaces down from his room.

  He tucked the semiautomatic in his waistband, concealed it with his shirttail, and stepped outside. The motel was an L-shaped building with the office close to the street, under a big neon sign. There were no maid carts on the walkway that bordered the rooms and nobody going to or from the vehicles in the lot.

  He walked down to the room where the Chevy with the Okie plates was parked, and knocked on the door.

  “What is it?” a man’s voice asked.

  Larson smiled at the peephole. “Management. We’ve got a report of a gas leak in one of the rooms, so we’re doing a safety check of all the wall heaters. It’s probably nothing.”

  “There’s no gas smell in here.”

  Larson widened his smile and shrugged his shoulders. “Like I said, it’s probably nothing, but I’ve got to check. Fire marshal rules, you know.”

  “Okay. Give me a minute.”

  The man who opened the door was in his fifties, with rounded shoulders, a gut that hung over his belt, and a puffy face.

  Larson nodded politely as he stepped inside the room. “Hope I’m not disturbing the missus.”

  “There is no missus,” the man replied. “Hurry it up, will ya.”

  “Sure thing.” Larson walked to the wall heater, took off the vent plate, and pretended to inspect it. “Just passing through?” he asked over his shoulder as he twisted the gas valve a couple of times for effect.

  “Heading home to Tulsa,” the man replied as he moved toward Larson.

  “Nice town, I hear,” Larson said as he turned and coldcocked the man with the butt of the semiautomatic.

  The man hit the floor facedown with a thud.

  With his finger on the trigger, Larson stood over the unconscious man debating whether to shoot him in the back of the head or not. If he hadn’t let all those other people live yesterday, maybe the cops wouldn’t be so hot on his trail and his face all over the television.

  He decided not to shoot him. The motel walls were paper thin, and even if he used a pillow to muffle the sound, a gunshot could still attract unwanted attention. He straddled the man’s body, bent down, and with both hands, broke his neck. The snap sounded good.

  Larson pulled a wallet from the dead man’s pocket and took the credit cards, three hundred and twenty-two dollars in cash, and a driver’s license issued to Bertram Roach. Larson wondered if people had called him Bertie.

  In Roach’s luggage, he found five hundred dollars in traveler’s checks in a side pocket, and a loaded, nickel-plated .38-caliber pistol under two sets of clean clothes. He set aside the fresh shirts, dumped the remaining contents on the bed, pawed through them, and didn’t find anything else useful.

  The keys to Roach’s blue Chevy were on the nightstand. He scooped them up, got Roach’s toilet kit from the bathroom, put it into the empty suitcase along with the clean shirts and the pistol, hung a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the doorknob, and went back to his room. He packed quickly, paused for a moment at the window to make sure the coast was clear, hurried to the Chevy, and drove away.

  Checkout time at the motel was noon, so Larson figured he had a good four hours before anyone would be looking for Bertie Roach from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Bertie Roach. Bertie Cockroach. La cucaracha. Larson hummed a few bars of the melody.

  On the visor was a pair of sunglasses. Larson put them on, feeling pretty good about the start of his day. He now had wheels that would get him out of the city without drawing any attention, and the rest of the morning to head down the road before the cops started looking for the cucaracha’s vehicle.

  Larson’s stomach grumbled as he cruised up Central Avenue searching for a fast-food joint with a drive-through window.

  In his early fifties, born and raised in the town of Carrizozo, the Lincoln County seat, Paul Hewitt had been in law enforcement for slightly over thirty years. He’d started out as a patrol officer in Roswell and worked there for five years before transferring to the Alamogordo PD, where he rose to the rank of captain before retiring. After returning to Carrizozo, Hewitt ran for sheriff, got elected in a close race, ran for reelection four years later, and won by a wide margin. Limited to two consecutive terms, he was stepping down in January. This time he’d promised his wife, Linda, his retirement would be permanent.

  Both of them were longtime horse owners who loved camping, trail riding, fly-fishing, and backpacking. With two children raised and launched, they planned to spend a good deal of time fishing in New Mexico’s mountain lakes and streams, riding the high country, and hiking the wilderness while they were still fit and young enou
gh to enjoy it.

  But that was next year, after winter had passed and they’d returned from two weeks at a Mexican beach resort where they would celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Today, Paul Hewitt was filling in on patrol while Clayton Istee was away at training and taking annual leave for the rest of the week.

  A small department, the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office had only a few sworn personnel to patrol a county larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined and then some. When first elected, Hewitt had pledged to the voters that his department would provide round-the-clock coverage. Although at times he was stretched thin by officer vacancies, family emergencies, and mandatory training and annual leave requirements, he’d managed to keep that promise, mostly by going out and pulling patrol shifts himself.

  Hewitt actually enjoyed working patrol when the occasion arose. It got him back in touch with the rigors of the day-to-day grind his deputies faced and the law enforcement issues and needs that mattered most to his constituents. It also gave him an opportunity to connect with the residents of some of the smaller settlements and villages scattered throughout the county, which often got overlooked until something bad happened.

  With three decades of policing under his belt, Hewitt was alert and watchful by second nature as he cruised the county roads in and around the settlements of Tinnie, Hondo, San Patricio, and Glencoe. It had been a quiet morning. He’d stopped several tourists on state highways for speeding, and because he was driving an unmarked, slick-top unit, he issued verbal warnings to them instead of tickets. He’d helped a young woman on her way to work change a flat tire, made a close patrol of several neighborhoods in the fast-growing residential community of Alto, outside of Ruidoso, where some recent burglaries had occurred, and taken a coffee break at a roadside diner owned by a buddy who’d once been a fellow officer in the Alamogordo PD.

  Back in his vehicle, which had everything but official police markings and an emergency light bar on the roof, Hewitt drove a long loop that took him from Lincoln to Fort Stanton and on to Capitan, before heading back toward Carrizozo. Traffic had been light all morning, with an occasional big rig on the main east-west, north-south roadways, a few recreational vehicles slowly navigating the climb through the hills to the mesa behind Fort Stanton, and some of the rural folks on their way to town.