Apache Country

by Frederick H. Christian

  “Sure, Doc,” he said, “they’re all yours.”

  They watched silently as Robert Casey’s corpse was zipped into a body bag and lifted on to a gurney. While they had been talking, the boy’s body had been brought down on a stretcher and bagged; it was now also waiting to be lifted into the truck. Easton glanced at the sheriff. His eyes were bleak.

  “Gonna be a goddamn media circus waiting in town,” he said. “I hope Mart Horrell will keep his face shut.”

  Easton didn’t answer. The Sheriff’s Office had no control over Mart Horrell. He could talk to anyone he liked.

  “Got some TV people by the look of it,” he told the sheriff, chin-pointing toward a KBIM satellite van parked outside the perimeter, a young woman and her cameraman sitting on the metal steps, glumly watching them. The reporter stood up expectantly as she saw the officers look at her.

  Apodaca held up a hand. “All right, all right, gimme a minute,” he said, blowing a gusty sigh as the meat wagon moved off. “Steve, what have we got?”

  Steve Jorgensen shrugged his massive shoulders. “Not a hell of a lot, Joe,” he said ruefully. “No sign of a weapon. The slug that killed Casey went right on through and— “

  “Mart Horrell told us all that,” Apodaca said impatiently. “Anything in the

  Lexus?”

  “Casey’s hat, the kid’s school stuff. They’ve dusted for latents,” Jorgensen said.

  “Footprints?”

  “Scuff marks. Nothing we could get a cast off.”

  “Tire tracks?”

  “Only the Lexus.”

  “No other vehicle?” Easton asked sharply “How did the killer get in and out?”

  “Way we figure it, either he was waiting out here, or he came in with Casey and the kid. Whichever it was, looks like he left on foot.”

  Easton frowned. Walking in terrain like this was damned hard going.

  “I don’t buy that,” he said. “It’s what, ten miles to town?”

  Jorgensen shrugged, as much as to say: You don’t like my theory, go figure it out for yourself. Apodaca reacted with a frustrated growl.

  “Think maybe we’ve got a crime of opportunity here, Dave? Some transient car-jacked them?”

  “Could be,” Easton said, although unconvinced. Crimes of opportunity were always tough to get a handle on.

  “Much as I hate to say this,” Joe added, “I think maybe Mart was right. Maybe there was more than one perp.”

  “Yup,” Easton said.

  Apodaca took off his hat, ran his hand through his hair, and put the hat back on.

  “Shit,” he said.

  Chapter Two

  Olin McKittrick, district attorney for the 5th Judicial District – which included Fall and Lee Counties as well as Baca – was about medium height, with a florid face and a pudgy build. His receding hair was sandy blond and his gray-blue eyes always seemed to Easton to have an evasive flicker in them. Although he glad-handed every chance he got – Rotary and Little League and all the right charities – McKittrick was always that shade too slick, that fraction too obvious, and as a result a lot of people wrote him off as a suit walking around with nobody in it.

  Not Easton.

  In his book, McKittrick possessed many of the attributes of a swamp alligator: skin like leather, vengeful nature, always hungry, difficult to like and dangerous to get into the water with.

  McKittrick and his chief deputy Wally Paul were based in Artemisia, forty miles south of Riverside. Which meant they normally left the day to day business of Baca County law enforcement to the Riverside Sheriff’s Office, or SO, as it was universally known.

  SO wasn’t a big outfit: not counting the sheriff it consisted of twelve people in Admin and twenty-two in the investigation division: a chief deputy – Easton – one lieutenant, three sergeants, and eighteen deputies. A slick science center like New York’s Police Plaza it was not: SO operated out of an unimpressive one-and-a-half story block-long building on the corner of Fifth and Virginia, painted white with black wrought ironwork on the windows and glass door.

  To keep the wheels of justice turning relatively smoothly, the County also employed two senior trial prosecutors, Cole Estes and Larry Walker, and a twenty-seven year-old assistant DA, Billy Johnson, just two years out of law school and still wet enough behind the ears to leave puddles wherever he walked.

  The allocation of Baca County’s law enforcement duties was simple enough. Any crime that happened inside city limits was the responsibility of RPD, the Riverside Police Department. Everything else – except traffic accidents, which were usually handled by the State Police – belonged to SO, the Sheriff’s Office. Had it been, say, a disappearance, the investigation would have been conducted by RPD. But once the bodies were found at Garcia Flat the case became SO’s, at which point District Attorney McKittrick had stepped in, calling an emergency briefing for late afternoon, everyone not on actual duty to attend.

  The cramped conference room adjoining Joe Apodaca’s office was at best functional. Walls painted Navajo white, fluorescent lights in ceiling panels, brown shell chairs from Walmart, four scarred wooden tables set up to make a T, and a wood-framed wall map of the three counties did nothing to give the room a personality. But, as someone had once said, no doubt at a budget meeting, prettifying the room wouldn’t make anybody’s job any easier.

  McKittrick was sitting at the center of the horizontal arm of the T-shaped table. Next to him on his right was Wally Paul, with Joe Apodaca on the other side. The rest of the SO staff, except for those manning phones, crammed in as best they could: on chairs, on windowsills, or leaning against the walls.

  Sitting at the end of the long table, Easton watched McKittrick psyching himself up to talk to the troops. You didn’t need to be Sigmund Freud to know McKittrick was stressed out, or why. He tended to sweat it even when a case was open and shut, which this one was decidedly not. It was well known that the State police and the FBI in Santa Fe didn’t give much of a damn what happened south of I-40, but with the Casey murders top of the news all over New Mexico, and even making headlines on CNN, McKittrick’s direct line to the State capitol was probably red hot. Rap him hard with a stick and he’d make a noise like a snare drum.

  “All right, people, listen up,” McKittrick said, using his gold-plated Mont Blanc ballpoint pen to tap on the desk for silence. “I want your undivided attention!”

  Although he had lived in New Mexico half his life, his voice still had a trace of flat Ivy League twang, another reason so many people still saw him as what the old timers called an incomer. A polite way of saying, Not one of us.

  “You all know why we’re here,” McKittrick said. “So – as of now, the Casey murders are our number one priority. Everything else goes on hold, and I do mean everything. I don’t care who screams. We’ve got some bad dudes out there and I want them caught, fast. I know you guys are with me on that.”

  There was a little mutter of sure and mmm and yeah, but nobody spoke. Easton glanced over at Lieutenant Tom Cochrane, SO’s senior detective. Cochrane grinned. Another reason McKittrick was unpopular with the troops was he liked to think he talked like a cop. He didn’t.

  “I say again, whatever your caseloads are, this one gets absolute top priority,” McKittrick continued. “If that means we have to work around the clock, we work around the clock. Accordingly, all leave is canceled until further notice. No exceptions – zero, nada, zip!” He dipped his head to glare at them over his glasses. “Anyone got a problem with that?”

  No one voiced a protest, but Easton felt the team’s unspoken indignation. McKittrick knew as well as anyone present how heavy SO’s caseload was. OK, Riverside wasn’t Detroit, but it got its share of violence. They didn’t boast about it in New Mexico Magazine, but the State had a pretty high per capita rate for murder and non-negligent manslaughter. Last time Easton had looked, the top States for getting killed in were Nevada and Texas. California was sixth and New Mexico ninth, one place ahead of New York. Peo
ple tended to think the West wasn’t wild anymore, but they were wrong.

  Everyone knew McKittrick’s harangue wasn’t about serving truth and justice. This was politics, baby. McKittrick was first a politician, second a lawyer, and a human being Somewhere down the line. A quick result would make him look good and Olin was always in the business of looking good.

  “Everyone here knows how important this case is, Olin,” Easton heard Joe Apodaca saying, his expression and his voice neutral. “And you can rely on all of us here giving it one hundred and ten percent.”

  As he finished speaking, Joe Apodaca caught Easton’s eye and he got the unspoken message: your turn.

  Easton stood up. “Okay, I’m going to ask Tom Cochrane to bring everyone here up to speed on where we are right now. Tom?”

  Lt. Tom Cochrane was one of the savviest detectives Easton had ever worked with, reliable, determined and thorough. Been with the department since Adam had acne, as they said in the squad room. The first thing Easton had done on his return from Garcia Flat was to assign Cochrane and his partner, Jack Irving, to head up the investigation. They were SO’s best and most experienced team.

  “McKittrick’s probably going to be even more of a pain in the ass than usual,” Easton had warned them before the meeting. “He knows if we don’t get him a result fast he’ll be back chasing ambulances.”

  “Almost an incentive to fail,” Cochrane observed, drawing back his upper lip and showing his teeth in what he fondly thought was a Bogart grin. Slat thin, with mournful eyes and a hangdog expression, Tom Cochrane had a deceptively lethargic air that had lulled a lot of suspects into thinking he wasn’t too bright. The idea of some penny-ante thief so stupid he was a penny-ante thief tagging him as dumb sourly amused him. Careful, cogent and scrupulously fair, Cochrane had only one idiosyncrasy. No matter how hot it got, he always wore a jacket and tie. It was like the heat didn’t affect him.

  “RPD covered all the bases,” he said, looking at McKittrick as he spoke. “Set up an incident room, conducted a pedestrian and vehicle survey near the school. Officers talked to the family, checked Casey’s movements, spoke to everyone and anyone he might have been with.”

  “Try and move this along, please, Lieutenant,” McKittrick said, making a performance of looking at his watch. “I’ve got a TV interview scheduled in twenty minutes.”

  “We hear ya,” Cochrane said.

  Although his face remained impassive, it was clear what he was thinking: what a schmuck. Making it obvious you’d give precedence to some TV show rather than confer with the troops was no way to encourage them to bust their butts for you.

  “Okay, just the headlines,” he said. “Adam’s parents were in Santa Fe attending a convention. Kid was staying with his grandparents while his folks were away. Same deal every day. Casey would take Adam to school in the morning, pick him up in the afternoon. Not everybody loved Casey, but everyone agrees him and Adam were real close.”

  Close didn’t begin to cover it, Easton thought, remembering how the old man would say ‘Like to have you meet my grandson.’ Anyone could see the pride in his eyes when they were together. There wasn’t anything that boy couldn’t have had, just by asking. If Robert Casey had had the slightest idea Adam’s life might be endangered, he would have fought. Like a tiger. Any hurt to himself would have been irrelevant. Whoever killed Adam must have killed Casey first. They would have had to.

  “Casey left the house at about three thirty to pick up Adam from school,” he heard Cochrane saying. “He never came back.”

  “Yes, yes,” McKittrick said impatiently. “We know all that. But no bells rang until around six thirty, when Ellen Casey called RPD and reported her husband missing, right?”

  “Right,” Cochrane replied, deliberately speaking slowly. TV interview or no TV interview, he wasn’t going to let McKittrick stampede him. “Three minutes after the call came in, RPD had a car on the way to the house, another to the school. They retraced Casey’s route, checked all the places he might have gone. His offices, the ranch, his daughter Kit’s place up in Estancia. They didn’t miss a trick.”

  McKittrick half turned to shoot a question at Joe Apodaca. “Anybody contact NCIC?”

  “Not yet, Olin,” Joe said imperturbably. “Forty-eight hour rule, remember?”

  It is a tenet of law enforcement that an adult isn’t officially a missing person until forty-eight hours have elapsed. Only then are the national crime organizations contacted for assistance. Maybe RPD hadn’t been able to officially post Casey and his grandson missing, but everything else they could do they had done. By the book.

  “But you’ll do it now. And VICAP?”

  “Olin,” Joe said patiently, drawing out the ‘O.’.

  He might as well have said what was written on his face: Don’t insult our intelligence, for Chrissake. As if anyone present needed telling it was SOP to contact the National Crime Information Center and the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program in any murder case.

  “Make sure they know how urgent it is,” McKittrick said, skating right past the protest without even noticing it. “Okay – autopsy results?”

  “Right here,” Jack Irving said, tapping a file he was holding. Younger than Cochrane by five years, Irving stood something under five eight in height, with the smooth skin, clear eyes and trim body of an athlete. His laid-back sense of humor made him a perfect foil for Cochrane, whose permanently lugubrious expression was that of an accountant who has just found something wrong with the books.

  “Yes, and?” McKittrick said, looking at his watch again.

  “Doc Horrell estimates death occurred between three p.m. Thursday and nightfall, best guess around five in the afternoon. Casey was shot with a heavy caliber weapon but he can’t give us much more than that because no slug was recovered. He found powder grains imbedded in the scalp, carbon monoxide in the brain tissue, indicating the shot was fired at very close range. No bruises on the body, no signs of a struggle. Which suggests the killer was someone the victim knew, someone who could just step up behind him and blow his brains out. Moving on to Adam’s injuries—”

  “Spare us that,” McKittrick said stiffly. “We’ve all seen the photographs. Did forensics get anything at the scene, footprints, tire tracks?”

  Jack shook his head. “You know what it’s like out there,” he said. “Get a little rain, you can sometimes get a halfway decent impression. No rain, nada. And this has been one of the driest summers on record – ground’s as hard as rock. CSI checked anyway – a quarter mile radius from the bodies, and every inch of the track from where they were found to the highway. There were some indentations that might or might not have been footprints, but nothing meaningful. No tire tracks, either.”

  “What about inside the car?”

  “We got some latents,” Cochrane said. “It’ll take a while to get elimination prints. Forensics are working on that now.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Casey’s wallet was missing,” Irving said. “Credit cards, driver license. His wife thought he had about two hundred dollars cash on him.”

  “His watch was gone, too,” Cochrane added. “A gold Omega Seamaster. It’s all on the hotline.”

  He took out a pack of cigarettes and put one between his lips. He knew perfectly well SO had a no-smoking policy, and everyone present knew he wasn’t going to light it anyway. He was trying to quit. Once in a while the other deputies would make bets on how many minutes before he went outside and lit up.

  “So we’re saying what?” McKittrick asked, as if it were an intelligent question.

  “We’re saying we’ve got diddlysquat, Olin,” Joe Apodaca said harshly. “Excellent,” McKittrick said icily. “Wonderful. And you want me to go down there and tell that to the media, right?”

  Joe remained silent. But again, what he wanted to say was written clearly on his face. For my money, you and the media can take a flying fuck at the Goodyear blimp.

  “Tom?” McKittrick said, his
voice almost plaintive. “Jack? Can’t you guys give me something? Anything?”

  Cochrane took the cigarette out of his mouth, put it carefully back into the pack, and put the pack in his pocket before speaking. Keeping his temper under control, Easton thought.

  “Here’s what we know, Olin,” Cochrane said patiently. “Casey goes to the school, picks up his grandson a little after three-thirty. Several people saw him there. And before you ask, no, he didn’t give anyone a ride.”

  Jack Irving took over. “University Middle School is over on Alameda at Parkview. From there to where the Caseys live it’s what, sixteen blocks east to Main, twenty three blocks north, then half a mile east on Country Club. He drove the same route every day. Never varied. So we have to ask ourselves, did he pick someone up, was he car-jacked, just how and why on this particular day does Robert Casey wind up dead on Garcia Flat?”

  “And what do we answer?” McKittrick asked sarcastically.

  Irving drew in a deep breath, let it out slowly. “We’re working with the probability he picked someone up.”

  “Someone he knew?”

  “Not necessarily. Maybe the guy just stepped in at a traffic light, stuck a gun in his ribs.”

  “Why? What would be his motive?”

  “On the evidence, robbery.”

  “Pretty damned far-fetched,” McKittrick said, not troubling to conceal his scorn. “He tells Casey to drive to Garcia Flat, makes him get out of the car, hand over his wallet. Then he kills him? Why?”

  “Dead men tell no tales?”

  “Then why doesn’t he shoot the kid too? Why the knife?”

  McKittrick’s questions had too much gotcha in them and Cochrane lost it.

  “Look, as soon as we find out, I’ll tell you, okay?” he snapped.

  It was insubordination and McKittrick reacted predictably. “Then the quicker you get your ass out on the street the better, Lieutenant,” he snarled, emphasizing the last word. “And that goes for everyone else here. Beat the bushes, you people, get the word out, talk to your snitches. If you want help, ask, I’ll assign extra manpower. But for Chrissake get me something better than a bunch of goddamn maybes.”