Avengers of Blood

by Gae-Lynn Woods

“Junie. We hired her when the media people were here after, well, you know.”

  “She’s not from around here, is she?”

  “Her driver’s license said Tennessee. She’s worked out pretty well.”

  The café’s door opened and Kado, Martinez, and Truman walked in. All three looked as ragged as she felt and Cass struggled to keep her smile at only a quarter-megawatt when she realized that Kado’s bleary grin was meant for her.

  “Hey,” Kado said, putting a copy of the Forney Cater down on the table as Cass refolded the Dallas paper. He scooted into the booth beside Truman.

  Martinez sat beside Cass. “Where’s your gun?”

  “Seems that folks from the medical examiner’s office don’t carry.”

  A thoughtful expression crossed his face. “The image of John Grey and Porky Rivers carrying weapons is disturbing.”

  Junie appeared beside the table, coffee mugs and a full pot in hand. She looked at Cass with wide, dark eyes. “Stan got your order?”

  Cass nodded.

  “Anybody else?”

  The men ordered and Kado unfolded the Forney Cater. “The Franklins and Calvin Whitehead made the front page,” he said. Photographs of Joseph and Martha Franklin were above the fold and smiled out at them. Calvin Whitehead’s death was reported at the bottom of the page, accompanied by an image of The Whitehead Store’s forecourt swathed in crime scene tape.

  “They have any details?” Martinez asked.

  Kado and Truman scanned the articles. “Just speculation.”

  “Good. Hoffner’s back today?”

  “He told Cass he’d be back this afternoon.”

  Martinez twisted in the booth to look at Cass. “What did he say when he found out you’re working for the ME’s office?”

  “He wasn’t a happy bunny. Said he’d deal with me and Grey when he gets back today.”

  “Well, in case he blows a gasket and does something stupid like re-suspend you, we’d better get as much done this morning as possible.” He flicked a glance across the table. “I need Kado out at Whitehead’s store to dust for prints and figure out what to collect as evidence. Are you okay at the Franklin house by yourself?”

  “No problem. Then I’ll go to the station to start looking at Joseph’s criminal records and Moses’ case files to see if there’s a connection from either angle.”

  Kado folded the paper, straightened from his slouched position, and said, “This is too much work for the four of us. Why don’t we call Munk back from vacation?”

  Motion at the table ceased.

  ____________

  CASS GLANCED AT TRUMAN, whose mouth gaped, and at Martinez, who glared at Kado. She placed a hand on Martinez’s arm and said softly, “He doesn’t know.”

  “How can he not know?” Martinez snapped.

  “Carlos. He’s only been here, what? Six or seven weeks? How could he know?”

  “Know what?” Kado asked.

  Martinez slumped against the booth. “You tell him.”

  She drew a deep breath and released it slowly. “Ernie Munk and his wife Gabrielle have a daughter.”

  “They had a daughter,” Martinez muttered.

  “As far as we know, they still do,” Cass retorted. “She was snatched in 2003 while Ernie and Gaby were in Galveston at Gabrielle’s family reunion.”

  Kado covered his mouth with one hand.

  “The Galveston and Houston police responded quickly. They brought in tracker dogs, helicopters, issued an AMBER Alert, and put up road blocks all around the area. Munk and Gaby stayed for almost two months looking for her. Forney County cops joined them on their days off.”

  “Why couldn’t they find her?” Kado asked.

  “She was taken in the middle of a massive Cinco de Mayo celebration. Munk said there were literally thousands of people there, along with a carnival and all the usual beach-side stuff. They were waiting in line for an ice cream cone when his daughter, Angel, disappeared.”

  “My God.”

  “Every year they go back and stay for the two weeks around Cinco de Mayo.”

  “Looking for Angel?”

  “He takes a photo of her at age three, and an age progressed image estimating what she would look like this year. He, Gaby, and her family put up posters all over the area. His sister Evelyn Grove, and her husband and the twins, they go some years, too. Angel’s in the national missing kids database and in Texas’ DNA database.”

  “No sightings?”

  “Nothing that has panned out.”

  Kado sat back as Stan brought their plates to the booth. “I can’t think of anything more terrible for parents to deal with.”

  “Talking about Ernie Munk’s daughter?” Stan asked.

  Cass nodded.

  “We’d only been here a few years when she disappeared. I’ve never seen a man so utterly destroyed. He must be in Galveston now, right?”

  “He should be back later this week.”

  “Good luck to him,” Stan said, sliding the empty tray under his arm. “Anybody need anything else?”

  They shook their heads and Stan hurried off. Kado slowly picked up a fork. “Does this have anything to do with why Munk isn’t a detective?”

  Martinez answered around a mouthful of pancake. “He’d make an excellent detective, but he won’t even take the test. He’s afraid that if she comes back to Arcadia and he’s not out on the streets, he’ll miss her.”

  “That explains why he won’t consider coming to work with me in forensics, I guess,” Kado said, smearing butter on toast. “I’ve asked him about it a couple of times. He never explained why he wasn’t interested. Just said that he wouldn’t be any good doing forensics full time.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t like you, hombre,” Martinez said.

  “Maybe he isn’t a detective,” Kado countered, “because he doesn’t want to be partnered with you.”

  “Touché, mi amigo,” Martinez responded with a salute of his knife. “Touché.”

  Kado ate a bite of toast. “Back to the Franklins. Has Moses arrested anybody who would want revenge bad enough to kill him?”

  “He’s been involved in several big arrests,” Martinez said. “He stopped that car that was packed with cocaine, remember?”

  Cass chuckled. “That was sheer luck.”

  “Why?” Kado asked.

  “They were Mexicans carrying drugs north. Somebody in the car got the munchies and they went through the Dairy Queen drive-thru off the Loop. Moses got them as they were coming out of the parking lot. One of their headlights was out.”

  “What gave him probable cause to search the vehicle?”

  Martinez choked a laugh around a sip of coffee. “After they got ice cream, they sat in the parking lot toking up. When they rolled down the window, Moses got a beak full of mota.”

  “Pot and ice cream?” Kado shook his head. “Where are they now?”

  “I don’t know, but we’ll find out. Who else?”

  Cass snorted. “There’s Rob Conroy. He’d sure have motive.”

  Truman’s young face lit up. “I remember that.”

  Kado cupped his hands around a mug. His gray eyes were dark as storm clouds this morning, and Cass kicked herself for noticing. “What did he do?” he asked.

  “Drugs again,” Martinez announced, mopping egg yolk with toast. “Conroy has the distinction of being Forney County’s first meth cooker. Unfortunately, he made the mistake of setting up shop in Deadwood Hollow.”

  “Behind the Franklin house?”

  Martinez nodded. “It’s not the most discreet place to cook, but lots of pushers hang out there because the vegetation is so thick and there’s a warren of trails to move around on.”

  “Tell Kado what happened,” Cass prodded.

  A small smile crossed his lips. “Moses worked second shift and went for a run in the Hollow at about two o’clock. Conroy was shakin’ and bakin’.”

  “All the chemicals go in a soda or juice bottle that gets shaken and
then burped until the chemical reaction is complete,” Kado said. “I processed some labs in Oklahoma. Cooking meth is a dangerous business, but shake and bake takes the risk of explosions to a new level.”

  “Conroy got caught because Moses smelled something like ammonia and went to investigate.”

  “Burping fumes?”

  “Yup,” Martinez said. “Conroy was in the middle of a juggling act. He had several soda bottles cooking, and he was hopping from one to the other, trying to keep up with the gas build-up in each.”

  A grin spread across Kado’s face. “What did Moses do?”

  “Pointed his gun at Conroy and told him to keep burping. Moses called for backup and they managed to neutralize the bottles.”

  “No explosions?”

  “Nope,” Martinez confirmed.

  “Why didn’t Rob Conroy run?” Cass asked. “I never understood that. Moses couldn’t chase him. He would’ve had to stay and deal with the bottles or he’d have had multiple explosions on his hands.”

  “Moses snuck up behind him – if you can picture someone that big sneaking – and got close enough to put his gun to Conroy’s head and tell him to keep moving. I think the thought of a big black man with a gun against his head scared the mierda out of Conroy. That’s the way Sheriff Hoffner and Mitch found them. Moses and Conroy moving in a dance from bottle to bottle. Hoffner doubled over laughing from what I heard.”

  “I guess Conroy didn’t know that Moses can barely hit the side of a barn at ten paces,” Cass said.

  “Or that he still had the safety on.”

  “Ouch,” Kado said, grimacing.

  “It all came out at trial when Conroy’s lawyer tried to assert that Moses acted recklessly by holding the gun to Conroy’s head.”

  “Where is Conroy now?”

  “He should be in prison,” Martinez said. “He got convicted on a first-degree felony for manufacturing meth with an intent to distribute, and was sentenced to twenty years plus a $10,000 fine.”

  “He could be out, Carlos,” Cass said. “Moses arrested him about twelve years ago.”

  Martinez sipped his coffee. “That sounds right. Conroy had trouble early on in prison, but I heard he sorted himself out.” He heaved a satisfied sigh. “If he was released, he could be in a residential treatment center, halfway house, or out walking around on parole.”

  “Do you think he’d be mad enough at Moses to try and kill him?” Truman asked.

  Martinez shrugged. “Conroy is a classic blowhard – all hat, no cattle. The way Moses took him down embarrassed him in front of his boys.”

  “He had a distribution network?”

  “He must’ve. There was too much product for him to deliver alone. But there was only one runner we were sure of.”

  Cass started to giggle.

  Martinez tried to muster a stern expression. “It’s not funny.”

  “It’s natural selection,” she protested, giggles dissolving into outright laughter.

  “What happened?” Kado asked.

  “I guess Darwin would be proud,” Martinez conceded. “The morning after Conroy’s arrest, we got a warrant to search his house, but before we could execute it –”

  “The whole thing blew up,” Cass gasped through her laughter.

  Martinez grinned. “Conroy had money, which is part of what makes the whole thing so sad. He inherited the family home on the golf course when his parents were killed in an automobile accident.”

  “Along with a ton of insurance money from the company whose truck flattened them,” Cass said, calmer as she wiped her nose with a napkin.

  “It was a big place, an old one. Two stories, old-fashioned wood frame. Anyway, word got out about Conroy’s arrest and one of his runners, a guy named Eddie Houston, decides to cook off the ingredients they’ve worked so hard to obtain. We’re not sure what went wrong –”

  “Oh, no,” Kado said.

  “Oh, yes,” Cass told him, biting her lip to suppress more laughter.

  “– but the house blew up as we were turning down the drive,” Martinez said.

  “You were there?” Kado asked.

  “You bet. The front corner of the house blew off, windows, walls, front porch, everything, and the house started collapsing in on itself and burning. The fire trucks went out with us – we had all that hazmat gear, too – they managed to keep about a third of it from burning, but the house wasn’t livable.”

  “They must’ve had quite the cooking operation. Did Houston live?”

  “Long enough to tell us what a big honcho he was and that we could all go perform various physically impossible acts on ourselves before he’d give up his friends.”

  “Houston wasn’t one of Arcadia’s favorite sons, nor one of the brightest we’ve produced,” Cass said. “And that, along with his trying to hurry the cooking up, probably caused the explosion.”

  “Conroy couldn’t have been too happy about losing his house,” Kado said.

  Martinez swallowed a bite of pancake. “When Sheriff Hoffner interviewed him the night of the arrest, he kept going off on Moses. He was amped on some of his own product and threatened Moses. It was a lot of hot air and his lawyer told us to let him sleep it off.” Martinez sipped his coffee. “So the sheriff did. The next day Conroy was hurting from withdrawal and couldn’t keep his mouth shut.”

  “Did he threaten Moses again?” Kado asked.

  “And everybody else he had contact with. I think he threatened his lawyer, too.”

  “Did anybody take it seriously?”

  “The guy’s a windbag.”

  “But now that he’s out?”

  Martinez rocked his head from side to side. “I don’t see Conroy changing his personality in jail. Or growing the balls to kill a cop.”

  “Still, that’s a pretty big grudge,” Kado asked.

  “True,” Martinez agreed. “We’ll find out where he is and go from there. Best case, he’s still in the joint.”

  “Worst case,” said Cass, “he’s learned a whole new skill set from his fellow inmates.”

  Martinez took in the empty breakfast dishes and rubbed his hands together. “Okay people, ándale. Let’s get these cases solved before Hoffner gets back and throws a monkey-wrench in the gears.”

  CHAPTER 23

  THE TOMATO JUICE JUMPED in its plastic cup as the airplane shuddered through an area of turbulence. Sheriff Bill Hoffner dabbed a blood-red drop from the seatback tray, then drained the cup and placed it precisely in the middle of the small table. He folded the napkin to hide the stain and arranged it so that its edges neatly aligned with the tray’s corners.

  Leaning out of his seat and into the aisle, he glanced down the narrow passage toward the cockpit. The door was closed and although the logical part of his brain knew that this was a security measure, the part of him that needed control grumbled at his inability to see what was happening.

  Of the many activities that Bill Hoffner hated, flying was up there at the top of the list. The thought that human beings could actually leave the ground, go hurtling through the air in a metal tube at some absurd speed, and return safely to the earth was sheer arrogance. This fear, based in a fundamental lack of logic in the whole process, had never kept him from flying. But no matter how many times he got on an airplane, at take-off and landing his fingers still dug into the arm rests separating him from his coach class neighbors, leaving neat little fingernail crescents in the cushioned material.

  He shifted his long frame, searching for a comfortable position in the seat. The damn things were built for anorexic dwarfs, not for men over six feet tall and approaching one hundred and eighty pounds. Thankfully, the airplane was quiet, travelers drowsy despite the occasional bounce. The chatty stranger in the middle seat was dozing, her head nearing her shoulder, a clear strand of drool snaking from the corner of her mouth. The rambunctious child seated behind him had finally stopped kicking his seat when Hoffner turned around after take-off and stared. The little boy grew still in
the heat of the older man’s gaze and hadn’t moved a muscle since. Another job well done.

  It was satisfying, this ability to shut another human being down with just a look. Long before he reached his current age of fifty-eight, Hoffner had mastered the art of the glare. But it might have been the sheriff’s appearance that caused the toddler’s enthusiasm to wane. Bill Hoffner was a vulture of a man, eyes set close to a long, hooked nose, his snowy hair cropped short, Adam’s apple hung high in a long neck. His thin lips were perpetually pursed and his bushy eyebrows drawn together, making him look as if he had tasted something foul. His icy blue eyes were bloodshot this morning, his features worn from sleeplessness. Since the call to Tom Kado’s phone last night, Hoffner’s mind had been alive, struggling to comprehend what three deaths in the span of one night would mean. Not for the victims or their families. Not for the little town of Arcadia or Forney County. But for himself, especially once the press showed up and latched on to him with its gnashing rows of pointed little teeth. And he had even bigger problems than the Franklin and Whitehead murders.

  Alone and somewhat settled at 30,000 feet, Hoffner turned inward and thought. His youngest detective, Cass Elliot, had side-stepped her suspension and was working for the Medical Examiner’s office. The moment he had received her application to join the department, he knew she would cause trouble. But he hired her for the sake of public relations and in a moment of weakness he attributed to his past with her mother. And having another woman officer on the force did demonstrate openness. She’d dogged him persistently for eighteen months until, with Detective Mitch Stone’s encouragement, Hoffner finally promoted her to detective as Stone’s partner.

  Despite his initial assumptions about the cult shooting all those weeks ago, Cass’s description of events had tied exactly to the evidence Kado collected at the scene. The debrief and subsequent Firearm Discharge Board review had gone without a hitch, concluding that Cass’s actions demonstrated levelheadedness and sound judgment, surprising Hoffner. She saw a psychologist as required by department policy, and the shrink cleared her to return to work.

  Sheriff Hoffner could have signed her back to work after receiving the psychologist’s report, but one thing after another seemed to keep him from finalizing her file. Thanks to John Grey’s actions last night, Hoffner had no choice but to put his John Hancock on the form that would return Cass to active duty. But he would drag the formality out as long as possible, ensuring that Grey and Elliot felt his wrath.