Alpha Warrior

by Aimée Thurlo

  “Every law enforcement agency in the state is looking for Coyote. The guy we’ve got in custody works for him?”

  “Yeah. I’ll have to call this in to my own people. It’s clear now that there’s a connection between my original investigation and what’s been happening to Drew. She’s in the middle of this somehow. But they went after her before she and I ever met.”

  “There must be another connection between you two, then. You’ve got to figure out what that is,” Travis said.

  Seeing Nick looking to her, she shook her head and shrugged. As far as she was concerned, the most important connection between them was one of the heart.

  “You’re missing something, and eventually, that’s going to get you both killed, unless you can find answers,” Travis said.

  “Our first priority is staying alive. Everything else comes in second,” Nick said, heading to the door.

  Chapter Twenty

  As Drew settled into the passenger seat of the pickup, she gasped. “My laptop’s gone.”

  “This can’t have happened here at the station. And for the suspect to have taken it from the truck means he followed us to Rattlesnake. But I watched for a tail, and there was no one back there. I’d stake my life on it.”

  “You have,” Travis said, softly, from where he stood beside the driver’s door.

  “Bro, there’s only one road leading to Rattlesnake from the east, and you know I would’ve spotted a tail. I’m not one to lower my guard, on-or off-duty.”

  Nick glanced at an indeterminate point ahead, lost in thought. “This may have been the work of another thief altogether—somebody working the Rattlesnake parking lot tonight.”

  “One who left no trace of the theft?” Travis shook his head. “I think the suspect planned all along to take the laptop first, then neutralize both of you later at the dance, making it look like a random attack. I’d bet he was hoping that no one would ever notice the laptop was missing. It sure sounds like the work of the suspect we’ve got in custody—Coyote’s man.”

  Drew suppressed a shudder. “Neutralizing” sounded better than “murdering,” but the fact was that they both came down to the same thing—death. “So, if you’re right, my laptop’s in his car, wherever it is.”

  “Tribal officers are searching for his vehicle, but until the dance is over and the cars and trucks clear out, they may not make any serious progress,” Travis said.

  “But, guys, here’s the real question. Why would anyone want my computer? There’s nothing on it that would be of any interest to anyone.”

  “Since the crime points back to the guy without fingerprints, what have you added recently that might be important to a criminal like Coyote?” Nick asked her.

  “Nothing. I added a few new titles to my list of good reads, but there’s nothing threatening about a librarian recommending books.”

  After Travis left for the Jeep, Nick pulled out of the tribal police parking lot. “There’s a link between you and me, Drew. All the evidence points to it. But I’m out of ideas,” he admitted.

  She started to answer, when Nick’s phone rang.

  Nick put it on speaker and they both heard Detective Nakai’s voice at the other end. “We found the suspect’s car,” he said. “It was parked in a private driveway about a quarter mile from the community center. One of the families walking home from the dance noticed a strange car in their neighbor’s driveway and heard the TV going. The elderly woman who lived there usually went to bed early, so they took a closer look and found the front door open and the resident dead on the living room floor. The crime scene unit was dispatched, and when they checked out the car, they found the laptop with Ms. Simmons’s name. A program erasing all the files was still running, apparently. An officer turned it off.”

  “I’m heading back right now,” Nick said, checking the rearview mirror, then pulling over to the side of the road.

  “I’m en route to that location myself,” Nakai said, giving them directions to the crime scene.

  Nick turned the pickup around and headed back west.

  ON THE DRIVE WEST TO Rattlesnake, they compared the details of their day-to-day routines. After a while, it was clear that, except for the facts that she’d been training for a job at the police station, and he was a detective there, they had nothing else in common. Nick slammed his hand on the wheel. “It’s got to have something to do with the department. That’s our only connection.”

  Ten minutes later, they drove past the deserted-looking community center, now illuminated by a single light over the main entrance. Ahead lay a residential area. The flashing red-and-blue lights from the police vehicles led them to the scene. As they parked, they saw a nondescript gold sedan in a driveway, caught between two arrays of floodlights.

  Detective Nakai came over to greet them. “I’d like both of you to take a look at the vic before they take the body away. I need to know if either of you have met her before.”

  As Drew followed the detective up the drive, she noted that the closest neighbors were on their front steps, watching from at least a hundred yards away.

  Almost as if he’d read her mind, Nick said, “The house will be boarded up, and no one will live here again. It’ll probably be torn down by an Anglo wrecking company. Even our modernists won’t tempt the chindi.”

  “But if they’re modernists, why would they care?”

  “Think of it this way. Most Anglos don’t believe that walking under a ladder is bad luck, but given a choice, they’ll still walk around it.”

  As they approached the front door, they met two men wheeling a body encased in a plastic bag down the sidewalk on a gurney. The men stopped as Detective Nakai signaled them.

  Every muscle in Drew’s body tensed as one of the men opened the zipper several inches so that the floodlights captured the woman’s face.

  Drew studied the face of the elderly Navajo woman. “I don’t know her,” she managed to say, in a strangled voice.

  “I’ve never seen her before either,” Nick said.

  “From the angle of the head at the scene, and the relative absence of bruises, I’d guess that her neck was broken,” Nakai said. “It was a quick death. She probably never knew what hit her.”

  “But she didn’t deserve this,” Drew whispered.

  “No, she did not. But I’m betting that we already have her killer behind bars, and that’s where he’s going to stay,” Nakai said. “The booking officer has given him a nickname based on the fact that he has no fingerprints. Until we get a real ID, we’re calling him Slick.”

  Nick nodded. “Fits.”

  As the body was taken away, Nakai led them up the drive. “When we opened the trunk of the sedan we found some firearms, including an M-16 assault rifle. We’re hoping to match bullets from that weapon to the ones used to kill the Las Cruces police officer. There were burglary tools in there, too, including a set of special keys and a small rubber mallet, the kind burglars use for bumping locks.”

  “He’s probably the same guy who broke into Ms. Simmons’s apartment and a Three Rivers bakery the other night,” Nick said. “Did you find anything else?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. There’s a GPS locator attached to the console,” he said, taking them over to the sedan. “You mentioned something about suspecting a tail?” Nick nodded. “We can switch it on and see if anything on you is giving away your position.”

  “That’s a real good idea, detective.”

  As the locator switch came on, their current address popped up on the screen. “Move around. Let’s eliminate your clothing,” Nakai suggested.

  Nick and Drew walked away from each other, but nothing changed on the locator’s screen.

  “It can’t be our wheels,” Nick said. “That’s my brother’s pickup. The sender has to be keying on something else.”

  “It can’t be my laptop either. He had it with him,” Drew said.

  “If it isn’t the truck, maybe it’s something inside it, something you’ve been
carrying around. A jacket, maybe? Or a purse?” Nakai suggested.

  It took about ten minutes, but by a meticulous process of elimination, they were finally able to narrow the signal emitter down to one object.

  Drew shook her head. “That can’t be right. That’s a reference manual from the police department’s library. The information is primarily for the clerical staff.”

  Nick took the cloth-bound book from her and studied it. There didn’t seem to be anything particularly noteworthy about it, and the pages appeared to be intact.

  “There aren’t any bumps on the front and back covers,” Nakai said, also studying it, “and you flipped through the pages. Nobody cut a hole in there for a transmitter.”

  “That leaves the spine,” Drew said.

  Nick twisted the front and back of the book and tore the pages away from the spine. A slender green-and-silver circuit board suddenly fell out, but Drew caught it before it hit the ground.

  Drew stared at the device resting in the palm of her hand, then Detective Nakai picked it up with glove-encased fingers and dropped it into an evidence bag.

  “This doesn’t make any sense,” Drew said, watching as Nakai wrote the required information on the bag’s label.

  “Who gave you this particular book?” Nick asked.

  “Beth Michaels. It was the same one she used when she was learning the new database system.”

  “Did Beth need anyone’s permission to take the book?” Nick asked.

  “I have no idea. And I don’t know where it was kept before that. She loaned it to me, and I accepted it gratefully. It’s what I’ve been using to practice.”

  “Hold that thought.” Nick turned to Nakai. “Were there any serial numbers on the weapons you found?”

  “They’d been filed down, but our tech said he’ll probably be able to restore them. We have a new process that works really well.”

  “All right. You have my cell number. Give me a call if you get a hit on any of the numbers, or if you get an ID on Slick.”

  “No problem,” Nakai said.

  “Do you have any idea when I’ll be able to get my computer back?” Drew asked Nakai.

  “It may be a while. Our computer tech is in Window Rock for the next few days, and we need him to try to restore your hard drive. If nothing’s been overwritten, most of the files can be restored. Maybe then we can find out why Slick erased everything you had.”

  “If I can get the proper software, I can restore those files a lot sooner than that. Detective Blacksheep would be right there with me, too, so if he saw something he thought you’d find useful, he’d be able to transmit the information to you right away.”

  Nakai looked at Blacksheep. “I’ll have to get permission, and you’d have to sign for it.”

  “Do it,” Nick said.

  LESS THAN FIVE MINUTES LATER, they were on their way, Nick at the wheel.

  The laptop sat on the floorboards, between Drew’s feet.

  “You and I have to talk with Beth,” Nick said.

  “At this hour?” She glanced at her watch. “It’s two in the morning.”

  “We’ll catch her at breakfast before she goes into work.”

  “Beth’s a fine, honest woman, Nick. There’s no way I’m going to believe that she’s involved in anything illegal.”

  “Medical bills can leave you in the hole, even with the city’s health insurance plan. That could make her more susceptible to corruption.”

  “If you think she took a bribe and sold us out, you’re nuts. Beth and Slick working for the same person? No way, not now, not ever.”

  Nick called the Three River’s station next, making sure that the information they had on crimes that may have involved Slick was sent to Detective Nakai’s office.

  “What bothers me most are the little things I can’t make sense of, like why my Web page was hacked and deleted,” Drew said. “Hacked…well, that’s something that happens to a lot of people, and it’s usually used to embarrass a person or take it over for something illegal or disgusting. But to delete it entirely, what’s the point?”

  “Have you been able to recall precisely what you had on it? Anything that may have slandered or embarrassed anyone, for instance?”

  “There was nothing like that on it,” she said, firmly. “I have a few hours of computer work ahead of me, trying to restore my hard drive, and while I’m doing that, I’ll also try to remember some of the missing details that were part of my original web page. Once I’ve got everything back up and running, you can take a look and judge for yourself.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Drew sat alone in Nick’s living room, working on her laptop. Obviously, something about her Web page had threatened whoever was after her, but she had no idea why. Her blog had held her dreams and plans for the future, as well as insights into her current life juggling two jobs. It was the kind of thing that might interest friends, but certainly not anything that would create a controversy of any kind.

  Nick walked in moments later. “I just got off the phone with Nakai. The tribal police managed to recover two sets of serial numbers. They match weapons that were confiscated by our department and logged into evidence months ago.”

  Drew stared at him in shock. “But those stay behind lock and key in the station’s evidence room. How did they find their way back out into the street? Aren’t weapons that can’t be traced back to legitimate owners, or are no longer part of an investigation, eventually destroyed?”

  “Yes, especially automatic assault rifles like the M-16. Every two years, the chief takes the weapons to Albuquerque and the county bomb squad blows them to pieces. But obviously, that’s not what happened with these guns. Somehow, they leaked out of the system and into the hands of dirt bags like Slick. My guess is that Coyote’s behind this operation.”

  “So someone’s been smuggling arms out of the evidence room, filing down their serial numbers, then reselling them to the bad guys,” she said. “That same person—Coyote, or his department-connected thief—could have been the one responsible for putting the transmitter in my reference book. But here’s something I don’t get. Shouldn’t the evidence room clerk have noticed that guns were missing?”

  “Anyone with access to the evidence is suspect, but once the tribal police’s report is out, whoever stole those weapons is going to scramble to cover things up and remove any damning evidence.”

  “Is there any way to slow down the release of that report and buy some time?”

  He nodded. “I’m already on that. My brother has a high-placed friend in the tribal PD, and he’s agreed to hold off filing the report for another twenty-four hours. But that’s all the time we’ve got.”

  “I wonder if that’s the reason I became a target—they assumed, or maybe were told, that I’d eventually be overseeing the evidence room records.”

  Nick shook his head. “To go after you solely on the assumption that you might figure things out someday doesn’t add up. These people are too good at covering their tracks,” he said. “Our best shot at catching them is to set a trap. Once we have a suspect in custody, we’ll get our answers.”

  “Like how I fit into this,” Drew said, with a nod. “So what now?”

  “We need to put the kind of weapon in the evidence room that’s bound to be high on Coyote’s shopping list.” Nick sat back and rubbed his chin. “I have just the thing, too. A deployed buddy of mine somehow managed to ship home a disassembled AK-47 he ‘liberated’. It’s illegal, fully automatic, and virtually untraceable. After he got married, his wife refused to have the weapon in the house, so he brought it to me and asked me to destroy it.”

  “He knew it was illegal, so he took it to a cop?” she asked, surprised.

  “It was during one of those amnesty periods. And remember, he brought it to me, not to the station.”

  “But you kept it?” she asked, still trying to understand.

  “It hasn’t been that long.”

  “Okay, so we use that as b
ait. But how do we get it into the evidence room?”

  “I’ll need to fill out some paperwork, but that’s easy enough. Then I’ll have Koval take it in.”

  “Do you think he’ll do things your way?”

  “In most cases, he’d rather set himself on fire,” Nick joked, “but when there’s evidence that a cop’s gone bad, everyone’s perspective changes. We all want to nail him—or her.”

  TIRED, BUT EXCITED BY the prospect of finally being able to identify her tormentor, Drew only managed a few hours sleep on Nick’s couch. Hearing a clinking sound, she stirred awake and sat up. Nick was seated on the floor across the room, assembling the Russian-designed assault rifle.

  “Get some rest?” he asked.

  “Some. What time is it?”

  “Time to get going. We’ll grab breakfast, make one quick stop, and be in town by seven. That’s assuming I get the right response from Koval,” Nick said, standing. He’d been wearing evidence gloves while working, careful not to leave a fingerprint of his own.

  “I’m going to call Koval now,” he said, reaching for his cell phone. “Get ready to leave while I talk to him.”

  Less than ten minutes later, they were on the road. The AK-47, one of the most effective military firearms on the planet, was wrapped in a bath towel, behind the seat of the truck.

  “How are we going to know when someone takes the bait and tries to remove this gun from evidence?”

  “I’ve got that covered. I made a call before you woke up, and arranged to meet with someone who can provide me with a tracking device that’s not department issue. The guy is a private detective who runs his own business.”

  A short time later, they arrived at an upscale home on the mesa, just outside Three Rivers.

  “Hey, buddy.” The tall Anglo man greeted them at the door, then immediately glanced at Drew, giving her a quick once-over.

  Nick introduced them. “Drew Simmons, this is Dennis Fields.”