Death Song

by Michael McGarrity

  “What have you got, Sergeant?” Paul Hewitt called out from behind the crime scene tape.

  Clayton covered the body with the tarp and approached his boss. “I think the killer surveilled the cabin and waited for Riley to show up. There is a partial footprint on the porch which may belong to the perp. I’ve photographed it. I also believe that Riley either knew his attacker or was caught unawares. He had his keys in his hand and was walking toward the cabin just before he was killed. The head shot tells me that this was a deliberate murder carried out by someone who knew what he was doing. I believe he surmised Riley would be wearing body armor. Otherwise he would have aimed for the chest.”

  “A professional?” Hewitt asked.

  “Not necessarily. I think the shooter wanted Riley to see him. A professional would have simply taken his first clean shot.”

  “You’re saying it’s revenge? A grudge? Something personal?”

  “I’m doing a lot of guessing here, Sheriff,” Clayton replied, “but maybe.”

  “You spent most of the week with Riley,” Hewitt said. “Did he mention any personal or family problems?”

  Clayton shook his head. “Nothing like that. Did you or Chief Bolt go anywhere near the cabin?”

  “Negative,” Hewitt answered as he walked Clayton away from Bennie Anaya. “Chief Bolt and I want you to take the lead on this case. We’ll give you whatever you need.”

  “Ten-four.”

  “I don’t even know Riley’s wife’s name,” Hewitt said, sounding peeved at himself.

  “Delores or Diana,” Clayton replied. “Something like that.”

  “I’ll look it up in his file.”

  “It’s Denise,” Clayton said as he pulled the name to the fore-front of his mind. “Are you going to call her?”

  Hewitt shook his head. “Not yet.” He looked over his shoulder at Bennie Anaya. “What was the exchange you had with Anaya all about?”

  “Bennie thought it best to secure Riley’s keys from his lifeless hand so they wouldn’t go missing from the crime scene.”

  Hewitt groaned and rolled his eyes. “Unbelievable. I’ll deal with it. Thankfully, in three more months he retires. I want this cop killer caught, Sergeant.”

  Clayton nodded. “I may be wrong, but I don’t think Riley was in Lincoln County long enough to make any enemies.”

  “Agreed. Unless we come up with a suspect fast, you’re going to need to make inquiries in Santa Fe about Riley’s professional, personal, and family life.”

  Clayton turned toward the sound of an engine drawing near on the street. The mobile state police crime lab from Las Cruces had arrived. “Excuse me, Sheriff. I need to get the lab techs started taking prints.”

  “It’s your show, Sergeant,” Hewitt said as he watched Clayton walk away.

  Years ago, long before he’d returned home to Lincoln County to run for sheriff, Paul Hewitt had seen his best friend and partner get blown away in a narco bust gone bad. He would take that image to his grave along with the sight of Tim Riley’s mangled face.

  Riley had been with the department for only a week, but he’d been killed on Hewitt’s watch. Paul had never lost an officer under his command before, and although he knew it wasn’t so, he felt responsible. Somehow he’d failed Riley. It left an angry feeling in his gut.

  He wondered about a “what if?” What if he got the chance to face down Riley’s murderer? Would he violate every rule of law he was sworn to uphold and kill the son of a bitch himself? Hewitt didn’t have an answer.

  Helen Muiz’s phone call persuaded Kerney there was sufficient reason to call out the troops and start a search for Denise Riley. Because Cañoncito was outside his jurisdiction, he asked dispatch to notify the sheriff’s office and state police and request officers be sent to Helen’s location.

  He hung up and tiptoed into the den, where Sara was sleeping restlessly on the couch. She was twitching and mumbling through a clenched jaw. Kerney figured she was caught up in another Iraq bad dream. They had been plaguing her almost every night since her release last month from the army hospital.

  Frequently over the past few weeks, Kerney had woken up late at night to find Sara in the den, sitting mute, wide-eyed, and shaking, staring into the darkness. He sat quietly with her until the episodes passed and she was ready to return to bed.

  As an ex-infantry lieutenant with a Vietnam combat tour under his belt, Kerney knew about flashbacks that made you remember events you wanted to forget, nightmares that woke you up in a cold sweat, panic attacks triggered by nothing more than strange random sounds, and temper tantrums that came out of nowhere. He also knew there wasn’t much he could do ease to Sara’s journey back from the insanity of combat other than be there for her.

  He reached over and turned on the table lamp. Sara sat bolt upright and gave him a fierce look. “What is it?” she demanded, blinking rapidly.

  He explained what he knew about Helen Muiz’s missing kid sister. “According to Helen, who doesn’t overdramatize, it’s completely out of character for Denise. I have sheriff’s deputies and state police on the way, but I told her I’d personally come by.”

  Sara nodded. “Of course, you must go and help out.” Unconsciously she rubbed her right arm where a piece of shrapnel from an improvised explosive device had gouged an inch of muscle from her triceps. The army doctors had done a wonderful job of repairing the damage, but Sara found the scar ugly.

  “I won’t be long,” Kerney said, eyeing the half bottle of wine and the glass on the end table next to the couch. “Will you be okay?”

  Sara followed Kerney’s gaze. “I’m not going to sit here and get drunk while you’re gone, if that’s what you’re worried about,” she snapped.

  “I wasn’t thinking that you would,” Kerney said gently. He tried to kiss her on the lips, but she turned her face away. He gave her a peck on the cheek instead. “I’ll be back soon,” he said.

  Sara nodded and said nothing, her gaze fixed on the black night sky outside the den window.

  In his unmarked police cruiser Kerney’s thoughts remained with Sara as he drove toward Cañoncito. She’d become the first female officer in Iraq to receive the Silver Star for bravery under fire. After being wounded by an IED, Sara had repelled an insurgent attack, single-handedly killing several enemy fighters who were advancing on seriously injured U.S. Army personnel. The wounded soldiers credited Sara with saving their lives.

  Along with the Silver Star, Sara had been decorated with the Purple Heart, given a meritorious promotion to full colonel, and, after her release from the hospital, placed on extended convalescent leave.

  She had been sent to Iraq by her former superior officer, a chickenshit Pentagon one-star general with political connections who was willing to sacrifice Sara’s career, even her life, to advance his own ambitions. Instead, Sara had returned stateside a newly minted full-bird colonel with a citation for valor and a clean slate.

  When her convalescent leave ended in two months, she had orders to ship out as a military attaché to the United States Embassy at the Court of St. James’s, which meant that soon the family would be moving to London. Kerney had willingly signed on for the duration, but their son, Patrick, had been voicing serious reservations about leaving the Santa Fe ranch and his Welsh pony, Pablito.

  Using directions Helen had supplied, Kerney arrived at the Cañoncito double-wide to find a small cluster of police officers surrounding Helen and Ruben on the wooden deck to the house. One of the cops was the Santa Fe County chief deputy, Leonard Jessup, who introduced Kerney to the uniforms when he joined the group.

  “We were just about to start a search of the property,” Jessup said.

  Kerney nodded and smiled at Helen and Ruben, who looked back at him with worried expressions. “Good deal. What else?”

  “One of my deputies will go door-to-door to every house in the area and interview the neighbors,” Jessup answered.

  Kerney nodded again and spoke to Helen. “I know you’ve a
lready checked with the entire family, but do you have a list of Denise’s friends and coworkers we can call?”

  “No,” Helen said. “But I found an address book in her purse.”

  “Great,” Kerney said with a reassuring smile. “Let’s start with that while the officers do the property search.”

  “She could be hurt or dead out there,” Helen said, her voice cracking.

  “Stay calm, Helen,” Kerney said. “Searching is just a precaution. You’re right to be a little concerned about your sister, but this could be nothing more than a false alarm.”

  “I know, I know,” Helen said without conviction, looking beyond the porch light into the black night.

  Kerney gave Ruben a heads-up nod of his chin. “Why don’t the three of us go in the house and start making those calls?”

  Ruben smiled in agreement, and with Kerney close behind he guided a reluctant Helen by the elbow into the double-wide.

  Late-night telephone calls to the people in Denise’s address book yielded no helpful information about her whereabouts. Kerney quizzed Helen about her sister’s place of employment and learned that until recently Denise had worked as an office manager for an insurance agent. She’d quit her job to prepare for the move to Lincoln County.

  Kerney called the insurance agent at home, on the off chance that he might know where Denise was, and got the man’s voice mail. He left a call-back message, disconnected, and asked Ruben to see if he could access the e-mail accounts on the desktop and laptop computers in a spare bedroom that served as a home office. After a few minutes Ruben returned and reported that both computers were password protected.

  Kerney phoned Detective Matt Chacon at home and woke him up. Over the past two years, Chacon had taken specialized law enforcement training in computer technology and was now the in-house expert on computer crimes for the department. Kerney explained the situation and asked him to come out to Cañoncito. While they waited for his arrival, Kerney had Helen give him some background on her baby sister.

  “Denise was the rebel in the family,” Helen said as she paced across the room. “Always at odds with our parents, especially our father. She left Santa Fe as soon as she graduated high school and didn’t come home for years.”

  Kerney pulled out a chair at the dining room table and invited Helen to sit with him. “What was she doing during those years?” Kerney asked once she had settled into a chair.

  “She worked as a waitress and a bartender and traveled a lot. I would get postcards from her when she moved to a different city. Miami; Honolulu; Brisbane, Australia; Toronto—she even spent six months living in London.”

  “She had a wild streak when she was young,” Ruben said as he joined them at the table. “Especially when it came to boys.”

  Helen shook her head in opposition. “She never deserved that reputation.”

  “How many years was she gone?” Kerney asked.

  “Twelve,” Helen replied. “She left when she was eighteen and didn’t return to Santa Fe until she was thirty.”

  “Not even to visit?” Kerney asked.

  Helen shook her head.

  “She always took the last name of whatever man she happened to be living with,” Ruben added. “We must have gotten postcards and letters from her with at least five or six different surnames.”

  “Boyfriends, not husbands?” Kerney asked.

  “Her marriage to Tim is her first, as far as we know,” Helen said.

  “Did any of those old boyfriends ever come to visit?”

  “Not that I know about,” Helen said.

  “Tell me about Denise’s relationship with Tim.”

  Before Helen could respond, Leonard Jessup stepped through the door.

  Helen jumped to her feet. “Have you found something?”

  “Nothing yet,” he replied, casting a quick look at Kerney. “Can I have a minute of your time, Chief?”

  Kerney nodded and stood.

  “Why do you need to speak privately with Chief Kerney?” Helen demanded as she stepped up to Jessup. “If something is wrong, tell me now.”

  Jessup shot Kerney a questioning look.

  “Tell her,” Kerney said.

  Jessup took a deep breath. “I just got off the phone with the Lincoln County sheriff,” he said. “Tim Riley was killed earlier tonight.”

  Helen gasped and her hand flew to her mouth.

  The news out of Santa Fe that Tim Riley’s wife was missing complicated Clayton’s investigation. The sketchy information he’d received—her purse, wallet, car keys, and vehicle had been found at the family residence—suggested an abduction or worse. But with so few facts available, Clayton didn’t know if Riley’s wife should be considered a potential homicide suspect or a possible double homicide victim.

  The neighborhood canvass was over and nobody interviewed had seen or heard anything until the sound of the shotgun blast had broken the silence of the night. A three-block radius around the crime scene had been searched for any sign left behind by the perpetrator, and nothing had been found. A fresh search would be done in daylight, but Clayton had little hope that any valuable evidence would materialize.

  The state police crime scene techs had collected at least a dozen different fingerprints from the exterior and interior surfaces of Riley’s cabin, which quite probably belonged to Riley and everyone else who had rented the place as a vacation retreat over the last six months. Although there were no signs of a forced entry, Clayton had the techs bag and tag every piece of personal property belonging to Riley, along with the bedding, bathroom towels, and the dishes in the sink that were supplied to renters by the owner of the cabin. When that was accomplished, he had the techs vacuum the floors before turning them loose on Riley’s police vehicle. It was a scatter-gun approach to evidence collection, but Clayton knew that every homicide left a trace, and if one blot, smudge, stain, scratch, fiber, or speck was overlooked, the killer could get away with murder.

  Dawn came with a stiff wind that blew dust, tumbleweeds, and brown, brittle cottonwood leaves across streets, sidewalks, and lawns. Clayton assembled a group of officers, including Sheriff Hewitt and Chief Bolt, and carried out another three-block search for evidence. Every piece of loose trash and litter that hadn’t been blown away by the wind was bagged and tagged, every tire track and skid mark was photographed, and every parked vehicle was inspected and run through Motor Vehicles.

  When the officers returned to the cabin, EMTs were rolling Riley’s body on a gurney to an ambulance that would transport his remains to Albuquerque for an autopsy to determine the cause of death, which in this case would be a formality. All night long Clayton had wondered what had become of the rifled shotgun slug that had taken Tim Riley’s life.

  He stood facing the cabin about six feet from where Tim Riley’s body had fallen. The slug had caught Riley in the head straight on, but from the position of the body on the ground it was impossible to tell if Tim’s head had been turned or if he’d faced his killer squarely.

  If Riley had faced his killer straight on, the slug would have missed the front of the cabin by a good ten feet. If the killer had fired from a slight angle to the right, the spent slug should be lodged somewhere in the front of the cabin. It wasn’t. If the killer had fired from the left, the slug could be buried in a tree trunk or the back porch of a neighboring house. It wasn’t.

  Clayton scanned the cabin, wondering where the spent slug might be. Because he didn’t have the murder weapon, didn’t know the gauge of the shotgun, and could only estimate how close the shooter had been to the victim, it was mostly guesswork.

  “What are you studying, Sergeant?” Paul Hewitt asked as he walked up.

  Clayton looked at the sheriff. “Angles.” He shuffled through the Polaroid photographs he’d taken of Tim’s body. The entry wound at the front of Riley’s head looked slightly lower than the exit wound at the back of his skull. Clayton noted the difference to Hewitt. “I think the killer may have been shorter than Riley. Either th
at, or he just raised his weapon at an angle and fired from the hip.”

  “Wouldn’t that make it a lucky shot?” Hewitt asked.

  “Not from such a close distance,” Clayton replied, returning the photographs to his shirt pocket. “A typical shotgun has a twenty-four-to twenty-eight-inch barrel. If you’re firing a long-barreled weapon from a distance of four to six feet, muzzle end to target, it would be pretty hard to miss what you’re shooting at. And there might not be any powder residue on the victim. Personally, I think the killer deliberately took the head shot. Riley was my height, five feet ten. I make his killer to be two, maybe tree inches shorter. I wonder how tall Riley’s wife is.”

  “You think she’s the shooter?”

  “I don’t know enough about this crime to exclude her as a suspect.”

  Hewitt looked at the cottonwood tree, at the cabin, at the neighboring house, and then at Clayton. “So where’s the spent slug?” Hewitt asked.

  “Maybe it’s lodged in the cabin roof.”

  Hewitt scanned the roof. It was a pitched, shingled roof with a protruding metal woodstove flue. “I went over Riley’s radio traffic with dispatch,” he said. “Except for the brawl at the Carrizozo bar and a fifteen-minute coffee break with Craig Bolt, Riley made no contact with anyone else after he left the crash scene.”

  “We can’t be completely sure of that,” Clayton said.

  “I know,” Hewitt replied. “But if Riley did encounter someone unofficially without notifying dispatch, it happened toward the end of his shift.”

  Clayton nodded and said nothing. It wasn’t unusual for the sheriff to cruise the county at odd hours without notifying dispatch that he was on duty. It was a good way to stay on top of what the troops were doing in the field. He wondered if Hewitt had shadowed Riley during the early part of his shift.