Dead or Alive

Chapter Seven

Larson planned on several more giddyups with Ugly Nancy after he’d gotten some sleep. He left her securely tied up before raiding the well-stocked liquor cabinet in the living room and then crashing in the smaller, second bedroom. He slept twelve hours, woke up refreshed, and wrapped himself in a bathrobe before making coffee in the kitchen. While the coffee brewed, he transferred his wet clothes from the washer to the dryer and went to check on Ugly. He found her where he’d left her, spread-eagled on the bed, but lying in a smelly mess of excrement and piss.

Disgusted, Larson untied her, forced her into the shower, and had her scrub down. He marched her dripping wet and naked back to the bedroom and made her strip the blankets and sheets off the bed and put them in the washing machine.

In the light of a new day and with a clear head that wasn’t groggy with lack of sleep, Larson found Ugly Nancy even more nasty and horrid-looking than he’d remembered. Her little titties sagged flat against her skinny chest, there was an unattractive fold of wrinkles across her lower abdomen, her pubic hair looked like a dirty wire scrub pad used to scour pots, and she had unsightly underarm hair.

As she poured laundry detergent into the washing machine, she asked Larson if she could dress and have something to eat and drink.

He looked for any sign of emotion in her face and saw nothing. “You’re a butt-ugly old bitch,” Larson said in response.

Ugly Nancy laughed between clenched teeth. “Don’t you want any more giddyup with me, Mister Killer?”

Larson slapped her hard across the face. “Don’t piss me off, bitch.” He pushed her back into the bedroom and threw her clothes in her face. “Get dressed.”

While Ugly Nancy put her clothes on, Larson considered what to do with her. The idea of more sex with her was repulsive, and if the cops found him and killed him before he could find a better-looking, young woman to play with, Ugly Nancy might wind up being his last piece of nooky. That just wouldn’t do.

“What if I let you go?” he asked.

Ugly Nancy looked at him suspiciously as she sat on the mattress and pulled on her boots. “You’d do that?”

“I’m thinking about it. But I’m keeping your Subaru, so you’ll have to walk back to the ranch.”

“Why not just take my car and leave me here?”

“That’s not what I’m thinking I want to do,” Larson hissed as he pulled her to her feet. He tied her hands behind her back, found some duct tape to cover her mouth, and hobbled her legs with rope. He yanked her to the front door and pushed her outside.

“I figure you’ve got a three-hour walk,” he said. “Get going.”

She stood rooted to the ground, shoulders hunched, glaring at him.

“Want me to make it more interesting? How about I blindfold you and make you go barefoot?”

Slowly she turned and started walking.

Larson watched her for a moment, went inside, picked up the Weatherby Mark V bolt-action rifle he’d taken from the gun cabinet at the ranch headquarters, loaded it, and walked to the open front door, expecting to see Ugly Nancy hobbling along no more than fifty feet from the lodge. Instead she was nowhere in sight.

He cursed, slipped his bare feet into his boots, and went looking for her. He found her hiding behind her Subaru.

“You’re stupid as well as ugly.” Larson kicked her feet out from under her, pulled off her boots, dragged her back to the lodge, and used more duct tape to blindfold her. He spun her around and pushed her in the direction he wanted her to go. “Now get moving,” he ordered.

He watched Ugly Nancy walk gingerly away from the lodge, zigzagging a little but keeping a fairly straight line as she hobbled slowly across the mesa. Larson giggled when she ran into an occasional cholla cactus, stumbled over some gopher mounds, and stubbed her toes on some rocks. He hollered at her to keep moving.

When she was about a hundred yards out, Larson raised the Weatherby, sighted the target through the scope, and squeezed the trigger. Ugly Nancy fell hard and didn’t move. From all appearances, it was a clean kill, and Larson congratulated himself on another fine piece of marksmanship.

He went back inside the lodge, drank some coffee, dressed in his clothes fresh from the dryer, and went to check on good old Ugly. The bullet that entered her back had pierced her heart.

He grabbed the hobble rope tied around her ankles and dragged her tiny, bony body back to the lodge, where he left it under a cottonwood tree while he fixed breakfast and figured out what to do with her. He decided to walk to the stolen truck he’d left at the edge of the mesa, drive it back, load up Ugly, and take her to an old nearby water tank where coyotes could feast on her when they came to drink. Then, when it was time to leave, he would torch the truck, burn down the lodge, and drive away in the Subaru.

He waited until the cool of evening to fetch the truck and take Ugly to the water tank. He rolled her out of the bed of the truck thinking that what the coyotes didn’t want the vultures and crows would consume. She’d be nothing more than scattered, picked-over bones in a day or two.

Back at the lodge with a bottle of Scotch at his side, Larson sipped single malt and watched TV until the local late night news came on. He was pleased to see that the manhunt for him wasn’t the top story, although after the first commercial break the news anchor did remind viewers that “escaped fugitive Craig Larson is still at large and armed and dangerous.”

He switched channels and found the other local newscasters were also giving the manhunt story less broadcast time. Somewhat reassured that things were quieting down a bit, Larson decided to stay put overnight, but not any longer than that. Although Ugly had told him nobody was due at the ranch for some days, he didn’t know if she’d been lying or not. Best not to take any chances.

In the morning, he’d work out a really good plan, maybe heading north. Since the federal government was building fences and stationing National Guard troops along the Mexican border to keep out the wetbacks, it would probably be far easier and a lot safer to sneak into Canada.

Larson had read stories about escaped convicts who’d lived normal lives for twenty years or more. They’d taken on new identities, held down jobs, and raised families. And he’d heard about guys who’d broken out of prison and never been seen or heard from again.

He had enough money and jewels to get himself set up once he got to Canada and learned his way around. But he didn’t want to make a major move until the manhunt fizzled out a bit more. He needed to find another place to stay where there wasn’t an old biddy caretaker to deal with or any nosy nearby neighbors.

He’d cogitate on it overnight, but the one thing he already knew he needed to do was stop killing people for a while until things calmed down.

He poured another double shot and switched the channel to a late night movie.

It took Grace nagging Clayton for a full day about his foolish pride before he broke down, called Kerney, and gave him the news about his impending departure from the Lincoln County S.O.

“I’m meeting with Andy Baca tomorrow morning to get sworn in as a special investigator with the New Mexico State Police,” Kerney replied without missing a beat. “How would you feel about coming on board to help catch this scumbag?”

“Sara doesn’t mind you coming out of retirement?” Clayton asked.

“Not for this. She said she doesn’t want to see hide nor hair of me until Larson is planted in the ground.”

“She actually said that?”

“When it comes to the people she loves, the woman doesn’t have a mean bone in her body. But if you’re her enemy, watch out. How about you? Will Grace and the kids put up with you being gone for a while?”

“That’s not a problem. She thinks Paul Hewitt should be inducted into a national top cop hall of fame, if one existed.”

“And she’s right. Get yourself up here tonight. You can stay with us. I’m scheduled to meet with Andy early in the morning. I’ll let him know that you’re coming on board.”

“Isn’t that his call to make?”

“Andy will jump at the chance to put a shield in your hand. I’ll even bet you a steak dinner that, before this is over, he’ll offer you a permanent position.”

“We’re not about to move away from the Rez. Not yet, anyway.”

“That’s your call to make,” Kerney replied.

“You haven’t asked for details about what went down at the S.O.”

“I don’t need to. Paul Hewitt called me, told me he’d resigned and was putting in his retirement papers, and mentioned what he thought might happen to you as a result. From what he said about the slacker the county commission appointed as the interim sheriff, I figured you’d turn in your walking papers sooner or later.”

Clayton laughed. “Tell me truthfully, did you call in a favor from Chief Baca to get him to agree to hire me?”

“If that had been necessary, I might have,” Kerney replied. “But you don’t need a leg up; your record speaks for itself. See you tonight.”

The following morning, Kevin Kerney and Clayton Istee arrived in Andy Baca’s spacious office at the Department of Public Safety building on Cerrillos Road.

After greeting his visitors, Andy perched on the edge of his big oak desk, built for a predecessor years ago by convicts at the old penitentiary before it erupted into a murderous riot, and studied his visitors.

Kerney and Clayton sat on the leather couch facing the desk and waited him out.

“We have evidence of one sort or another that links Larson to a whole slew of crime scenes,” Andy finally said. “From the attack on the corrections officer, to a kid on the schoolbus who saw him walking along the highway just north of Gallegos where the pickup truck was stolen from the Dripping Springs Ranch two days ago, we’ve got solid physical evidence, substantial eyewitness accounts, and excellent circumstantial evidence. What we don’t have is a single sighting of Larson or the stolen Dripping Springs vehicle during the last forty-eight hours.”

He picked up two thick case files, brought them to the large coffee table in front of the couch, and plopped them down. “That’s everything we’ve got on Larson, including the crime scene investigations, and all the field interviews and interrogations from every participating law enforcement agency in New Mexico and West Texas. The page count is just slightly less than War and Peace but we’re adding to it every day.”

Kerney lifted one of the bulky files wrapped with thick rubber bands. “Well, by volume it certainly does show a good-faith effort to catch him.”

“And isn’t that just hunky-dory,” Andy replied sarcastically as he sat in an easy chair at the side of the coffee table. “I have over two dozen officers and investigators spread out over the northeastern quadrant of the state, trying to get a line on Larson. As you know, once you get outside of the towns, villages, and settlements, it’s remote, isolated, and largely unpopulated country up there. I could put two hundred officers in the field and it would still take months to cover all the ground. We can’t really be sure that Larson is still even in New Mexico.”

“What do you want us to do?” Clayton asked.

Andy nodded at the case files on the conference table. “First, read the case files and get up to speed. Second, target any gaps in the investigation needed to be filled in, people who need to be interviewed again, and do the necessary follow-up. Talk to the lead investigators on the various cases to see if there are any loose ends that might give us a clue to Larson’s whereabouts. I want you two operating independently from the task force. But coordinate with it as needed and keep me personally informed of your activities.”

“Okay,” Clayton said.

Andy went to his desk, returned with two special investigator shields, and handed one each to Clayton and to Kerney.

Kerney weighed the shield in his hand. “From what I can see, Larson is spiraling more and more out of control with each fresh kill. He’s become totally erratic and unpredictable. I think we need to dig into his personal history to get a handle on him.”

“And completely bypass the existing investigations?” Andy asked.

“Not at all,” Kerney answered. “We’ll analyze both the historical and the current facts.”

“Okay,” Andy said. “What else?”

“If we turn up anything of value,” Clayton said, “I want in on the hunt.”

Kerney nodded in agreement.

Andy looked hard at both men. Because of Larson, he had lost an excellent young officer, Kerney had lost a young friend and partner, and Clayton’s boss, Paul Hewitt, a fine man and a super cop, was now totally dependent upon his wife and caregivers for every aspect of his continued existence. It was ugly all the way around.

“Personal vendettas cloud judgments,” he cautioned.

“Don’t worry about me, Chief Baca,” Clayton replied. “If I find Larson, I promise to bring him back, dead or alive.”

“Me too,” Kerney chimed in.

Andy shook his head in mock dismay. “I’ve never hired a father and son act—I mean team—before. I hope I’m not making a big mistake. Stand up so I can swear you two in.”

Kerney and Clayton got to their feet, raised their hands, and took the oath of office as special investigators with the New Mexico State Police.

At his desk, Andy signed the commission certificates and asked his secretary to send in a lieutenant who would take Kerney and Clayton to have official photo identifications made, get department weapons and equipment issued, have vehicles assigned, and qualify with their weapons at the range.

“I’ll have an empty nearby office set up for your use when you get back,” he added, “and my secretary will make sure you have any and all support and assistance you need.”

“Let’s get started,” Kerney said as a young female lieutenant in a crisp uniform knocked and entered the office.

“Good hunting,” Andy said as the lieutenant ushered Clayton and Kerney out.

Craig Larson woke up lying on a Navajo rug in a pool of vomit. He pushed himself to a sitting position and tried to figure out where he was, but his spinning head and fuzzy vision made it hard to focus. He rolled away from the pool of puke, closed his eyes, and tried to think. All he could concentrate on was a pounding ache in his head that made him want to scream.

Slowly he opened his eyes, sat up again, and recognized the hunting lodge living room. There were two empty Scotch bottles on the end table next to the leather couch. The bolt-action Weatherby he’d used to bring down Ugly Nancy sat on the fancy Mexican tile-top coffee table. On the opposite side of the room, the big-screen television had a bullet hole in it. Larson tried to think of what had made him want to kill the TV, but he drew a blank. There must have been something on the tube he really didn’t like.

He got to his feet, went to the kitchen, soaked his head in the sink, and sucked down water from the faucet. Partially revived, he sat at the kitchen table and tried to sort out what he’d done before he started hitting the sauce. As far as he could recollect, he’d walked across the mesa, fetched the truck, driven Ugly’s body to the water tank, dumped it, and returned to the lodge.

Just to make sure he didn’t dream it all up, Larson looked out the kitchen window. The truck was there all right, parked next to the propane tank, baking in the harsh light of a blazing afternoon summer sun. He mixed up a can of frozen orange juice concentrate from the freezer and started a pot of fresh coffee. The stove clock read 1:10.

While the coffee brewed, he slugged down some orange juice, gobbled some aspirin from the bathroom medicine cabinet, brought the clock radio from the bedroom into the kitchen, and plugged it in. With the TV out of commission, he’d have to rely on the radio to stay updated on the manhunt.

He poured hot coffee into a mug, sipped it, fiddled with the dial, and found five AM stations but only static on the FM band. Of the AM stations, three were playing country music, one was broadcasting a canned talk radio show, and one was a pulpit for an evangelical Christian preacher asking for money.

The noise hurt his head. Larson turned off the radio, washed down more aspirin with orange juice, and considered what to do. He’d originally planned to torch the lodge and burn the truck before leaving in Ugly’s Subaru, but smoke from a fire like that would be seen for miles and draw a lot of attention in a big hurry.

As he abandoned that idea, he walked to the bathroom, stripped off his clothes, and stood under a hot shower. He needed to move on before someone came looking for Ugly, and find a place where he could hide out for a couple more days until he was sure the manhunt had fizzled out.

He toweled off. If he recalled correctly, he’d seen a laptop in Ugly’s office at the ranch headquarters. One of the tricks he’d used when he first started running from the law was to research houses for sale on the Internet. Because real estate agents posted so much information about and so many photographs of properties on websites, it was easy to find vacant houses to case and break into for a night. He decided to drive back to the ranch house, surf the Internet, and see what he could turn up.

Larson dressed, went to the kitchen, raided the cupboards for packaged and canned food, and put it all in a pillowcase. He did the same with whiskey from the liquor cabinet and carried everything to the Subaru. He transferred his money and jewelry stash from the truck to the car, went back inside the lodge, unwrapped all the freezer food from the refrigerator, and spread it throughout the house. Then he scattered dry cereal, sugar, crackers, flour, and rice on the floors, topped it off with the contents of several cans of tomato sauce, opened the doors and windows, and removed all the screens.

By nightfall the building would be crawling with all sorts of insects, birds, snakes, and four-legged critters. If and when the police came looking for Ugly, they would find one godawful mess.

Larson put the weapons and ammunition in the Subaru and took off for the ranch house. He stopped on the mesa and did a quick surveillance on foot just to be sure no surprises awaited him below. Satisfied that all looked okay, he drove down, used Ugly’s keys to open the front door, powered up the laptop in her office, and clicked on the Internet icon on the screen. Within minutes he was scrolling down a real estate agency’s website listings for homes, land, and ranches in northeastern New Mexico.

Larson found three properties in the Springer area to his liking, but the one that stood out was a small ranch on the Canadian River east of town, off a country road with no close-by neighbors. Larson knew exactly where the property was located, figured he could get there without getting back onto the pavement, and best of all the pictures on the website showed the property to be vacant.

He shut down the computer and went scavenging through the house, found a top-quality sleeping bag, an inflatable air mattress, a high-powered flashlight, a camp stove, a portable battery-operated radio, and all the other gear he would need to stay comfortable for a few days. He supplemented his foodstuffs from the kitchen cabinets, and from the gun cabinet in the living room he added a .357 Colt pistol and a 9mm Glock autoloader to his arsenal, along with a hundred rounds of ammo for each handgun.

After closing all the curtains and drapes, Larson locked up the house and left the ranch feeling upbeat. The place where he was going was remote, but not too far away from several working ranches. After settling in, he would reconnoiter the neighbors to see if he could locate a vehicle to replace Ugly’s car when it was time to move on.

Two more days of hiding out should do it, Larson thought with a smile as he fiddled with the car radio and found a country station playing an old Marty Robbins tune. Larson hummed along until he remembered he’d forgotten to chase down Ugly’s mare, unsaddle her, and put her in the stable. He slowed the Subaru to turn around but then decided to blow it off. Whoever found the mare and went looking for Ugly Nancy was in for a big surprise.

Since the day Craig Larson escaped from custody and started his rampage, Everett Dorsey, chief of the Springer Police Department, had gotten very little sleep. Along with his three officers, Dorsey had been putting in eighteen-hour days trying to turn up any shred of information from Larson’s hometown friends and acquaintances that might help get a fix on the fugitive’s whereabouts. An eyewitness had sighted Larson in and near the settlement of Gallegos, less than seventy miles from Springer as the crow flies, which had convinced Dorsey that Larson had been heading home to familiar turf to lie low for a while. But where?

Dorsey had redoubled his efforts to find out where Larson might be hiding by concentrating his attention on the twin brother, Kerry. After three intensive interview sessions he had started to break through when his efforts had been sabotaged by a contract psychologist with the state police sent up from Santa Fe to draw information out of Kerry. But what the shrink didn’t know was that while Kerry looked as normal as the next person, he had a few loose screws, wasn’t very bright, didn’t relate well to strangers, and was as stubborn as a mule when it came to protecting his brother.

Blown off by the psychologist, Dorsey had complained to the major in charge of the state police task force, but to no avail. Condescendingly, the major had advised Dorsey to leave the head stuff to the shrink.

Dorsey eased into his desk chair and rubbed his tired eyes. Housed in a separate three-office suite of the town hall building one block off the main north-south drag, the Springer Police Department headquarters was a dismal place to spend any time. Battered old desks, ancient filing cabinets, and frayed miscellaneous office furniture filled the small rooms. Clutter added to the mess.

Dorsey liked it that way; the cramped, unattractive quarters kept him and his officers from hanging out there, which meant they spent most of their time on the streets actually policing.

Dorsey opened his eyes. If the reports of his officers were to be believed—and there was no reason to doubt them—nobody in the town of Springer had heard, seen, or had any form of contact with Craig Larson since the last sighting. On a much wider scale, the sheriff’s offices in eight counties, the district state police office, area game and fish officers, the local livestock inspector, and the special state police task force out of Santa Fe were reporting the same results.

All of this meant it was possible that Larson hadn’t come home to roost, but had just passed through Colfax County on the way to his next crime. But there had been no new reports of murder or mayhem.

Dorsey’s stomach grumbled from lack of food, but he knew if he stopped to eat, the food combined with lack of sleep would put him into a stupor for the next twelve hours. He was about to go back out and talk again to all of Craig Larson’s high school classmates who still lived in the area when the telephone rang.

Dorsey picked up and a woman with what he guessed to be a German accent asked to speak to the officer in charge.

“This is Everett Dorsey, the police chief, ma’am,” he replied. “How can I help you?”

The woman explained that she was calling from Frankfurt, Germany, that she was the executive assistant to the CEO of the multinational company that owned the Lazy Z, and that she’d been trying to reach the ranch caretaker without success over the last forty-eight hours.

“A group of our corporate executives are due to arrive at the ranch from Hong Kong in three days, and various arrangements needed for their accommodations must be made,” the woman added. “It’s not like Ms. Trimble to be away or unavailable for several days without giving advance notice. I’ve left a message with the Colfax County sheriff and have not yet heard back.”

“Ms. Trimble is the ranch caretaker?” Dorsey reached for a pen and a writing tablet on his disorderly desk.

“Yes, Nancy Trimble. Could you please send an officer to see if she’s ill or has had an accident?”

“I’ll surely do that, ma’am,” Dorsey said, “but first I need to ask you some questions.”

“By all means.”

The executive assistant, Ms. Hannelore Schmidt, told Dorsey that Nancy Trimble was a divorced, older woman in her sixties who lived full-time at the Lazy Z. Schmidt didn’t know what kind of vehicle Trimble owned but said the company kept a silver Hummer on the premises. Dorsey also learned Trimble was the only employee and that no corporate executives or their guests were currently staying at the ranch. Schmidt supplied Dorsey with the name and phone number of a neighboring rancher who boarded the Lazy Z horses when the Lazy Z wasn’t in use.

Dorsey asked Schmidt how he could reach her and she rattled off a string of numbers. He wrote them down, realizing he’d never made an international telephone call before.

“I just dial these numbers you gave me to get through to you?” he asked, feeling like a total hick.

“You must dial your international access code first,” Schmidt replied.

“Okay, thanks.” Dorsey wasn’t about to ask if she knew his international access code. “I’ll call you back.”

“Thank you, Chief Dorsey,” Schmidt said. “But before you ring off, let me give you the key pad code to the ranch road gate.”

Dorsey wrote down the code, said good-bye, hung up, and headed for his unit, not even thinking about contacting the sheriff’s office, which as far as he was concerned had dropped the ball. He’d spent nine years with the Colfax County S.O. before becoming the Springer police chief, he held a cross-deputy commission that gave him full law enforcement powers outside the city limits, and he was a good half hour closer to the Lazy Z than any deputy. Besides, if there was the slightest chance that Trimble’s disappearance was in any way connected with Craig Larson, Dorsey sure as hell wanted to be in on it.

He called Ed Seward, the rancher who boarded the Lazy Z stock, and asked if he’d recently seen or talked to Nancy Trimble.

“Not since last week,” Seward answered. “We stopped and visited in town for a few minutes. Is there a problem?”

“Don’t know. I got a call from the ranch owner’s assistant asking me to make contact with Trimble. Said she couldn’t get in touch with her. Did Trimble seem like her normal self when you saw her?”

Seward laughed. “Nancy keeps to herself, so it’s hard to say what’s normal with her.”

“What kind of car does she drive?”

“A dinged-up green Subaru. One of those hatchback models.”

“What do you know about her?” Everett Dorsey asked.

“Not much. She has a grown son who lives back east. South Carolina, I think. I can go over there and check on her, if you’d like.”

“I appreciate the offer, Ed,” Dorsey replied, “but it’s best if I do that.”

“You’re the law, Everett,” Seward said. “Let me know if I can help out.”

“Will do.” Dorsey disconnected and made radio contact with one of his officers, Rick Mares, and Mitch Lowe, a local state police officer.

“I need backup on a welfare check at a ranch,” he said to both men. “Care to join me?”

“You got something, Everett?” Mitch asked.

“Yeah, a cautious nature,” Dorsey replied.

Mitch laughed. “Give us a ten-eighty-seven.”

Dorsey told the officers where to meet up.

Larson’s new hideout was perfect. The setting was remote, the unlocked barn was less than one hundred steps from the house, and the old pitched-roof house sat on a knoll that gave him excellent views in all four directions. He parked the Subaru in the barn just in case someone came wandering up the ranch road, broke into the house through a side window, and took a look around. The rooms were empty, the curtains and shades closed, and the house was spic-and-span clean. According to the real estate sales brochure he’d found on a kitchen counter, the walls had been freshly painted, the hardwood floors sanded and resealed, a new forced-air propane-fired furnace had been installed, and the one-year-old roof was still under a full warranty. Total cost for the property, which consisted of the house, barn, and shed on eighty acres, was less than the cost of a manufactured double-wide on a postage stamp-size lot in a Santa Fe trailer park.

Larson checked to see if the utilities were working. The kitchen wall phone had no dial tone, there was no juice to the ceiling lights, and the stove and furnace had been turned off. Fortunately he had water, probably from a gravity-fed well.

Larson opened the propane tank valve on his way to the barn, where he unloaded his arsenal, supplies, and gear from the Subaru. It took three trips to get everything into the house.

He set up housekeeping in the living room and kitchen, lit the stove and water heater pilot lights, and turned on the portable radio just in time for a top-of-the-hour local news summary from a station broadcasting from nearby Raton, the county seat and largest community in the far northeast corner of the state. He was still a hot topic on the news, but not the headline story. That honor went to a Raton man who had shot and killed his estranged wife at her place of employment.

The house was hot and stuffy, and Larson was about to open all the doors and windows when he heard the sound of an approaching vehicle. He took a peek though a living room window and saw a late model GMC SUV roll to a stop at the closed but unlocked gate. A portly, older man got out of the passenger side of the Jimmy, opened the gate for the driver, and climbed back in. As the SUV drew near, Larson read the magnetic sign on the driver’s door that read:

TAMI PHELAN

YOUR HOMETEAM REALTOR

RATON, NM

Larson shook his head in disbelief at such shitty luck, picked up the 9mm Glock, and waited for his uninvited guests to arrive. But when a leggy blonde in jeans with big hair and a stacked pair opened the driver’s-side door and climbed out, Larson grinned and changed his mind about his bad luck. He watched Blondie fast-talk the old dude as he climbed the porch steps and waited for her to unlock the front door. He was another porky like Bertie Roach, the man from Tulsa Larson had offed in the Albuquerque motel, and Lenny Hampson, the bigmouth friend of Kerry’s he’d left in the desert.

“The property is in excellent condition,” Blondie said as she swung the door open and moved aside for Porky to enter first. “There are thirty acres under irrigation. It would make an excellent horse ranch.”

Larson shot Porky in the chest as he stepped over the threshold. Grunting, the man crumpled to his knees and fell face forward. Before Blondie could react, Larson grabbed a handful of her big, curly hair and yanked her inside.

“What did you do?” Blondie screamed, her hand flying to her mouth as she stared at the body on the floor. She had bright red fingernails.

Blood from Porky’s chest wound seeped across the newly refinished, once pristine hardwood floor, which was no longer a strong selling point for the property.

“What did you do?” she screeched again, her gaze locked on Larson’s face.

“Three’s a crowd,” Larson explained with a smile as he wrapped his hand around her neck. “You must be Tami.”

Tami averted her eyes. “Please don’t hurt me.”

“Hurt you?” Larson replied softly, feigning indignation. He dug the barrel of the Glock into Tami’s neck and forced her to raise her pretty head so he could take a closer look at her. “Why, when I’m finished with you, sweetie, you’ll be calling me your daddy and begging me for more.”

He cocked the Glock for dramatic effect and ripped open Tami’s blouse. She was indeed stacked.

Everett Dorsey met Officers Lowe and Mares at the entrance to the Lazy Z. The two men stood with Dorsey in front of his unit while he filled them in on his conversation with Hannelore Schmidt of Frankfurt, Germany.

“Nancy Trimble is in her sixties and lives alone at the ranch,” he added, “so it’s possible she might not be missing at all. She could have taken a bad fall or dropped dead.”

Officer Mitch Lowe consulted his paperwork. In his late twenties, he had just completed his seventh year with the state police. A frown crossed his boyish face. “The locked gate was reported by the officer assigned to contact residents in this area. He left a phone message, but there’s been no follow-up since then.”

Rick Mares, Dorsey’s senior officer, a thin and wiry man in his forties, shrugged a shoulder. “It’s been frustrating as hell to make contact with everybody, and a bitch to track people down. There are folks who are out of town, people on vacation or sick in the hospital, people who live somewhere else and have a second home or a getaway place out in the boonies. Hell, we’ve even got some Texas ranchers who own outfits just for summer grazing and there’s not a soul to be found on any of those spreads.”

“It hasn’t been easy,” Lowe concurred.

“Let’s hope Nancy Trimble is alive and well,” Dorsey said as he stepped over to the electronic keypad of the solar-powered gate and punched in the code. “But with Larson on the loose, we go in prepared for anything.”

The gate swung open and the three officers convoyed their units slowly down the ranch road, scanning the landscape for anything that looked out of the ordinary. They arrived at the ranch headquarters to be greeted by a saddled horse that cantered over from a nearby open field, the reins of its bridle falling loose to the ground.

“Could be that Trimble did have an accident,” Mitch Lowe said as he reached out and caught the horse’s reins. He wiped a hand across the dusty saddle. “Nobody has been astride this animal for at least a day, maybe more.”

Dorsey unholstered his sidearm. “Let’s check the house before we get ahead of ourselves.” He knocked on the locked front door while Lowe and Mares inspected the exterior for any sign of forced entry.

“Anything?” he asked when they returned.

Rick Mares shook his head. “It’s locked up tight and the window shades and curtains are drawn.”

“Do we break in?” Mitch Lowe asked.

Dorsey didn’t hesitate. “Kick in the door.”

Inside, they did a quick plain-view search and found evidence that the house had been ransacked.

“Do we call in forensics?” Rick Mares asked as they returned to the front porch.

Dorsey scanned the grounds. “Let’s do a sweep of all the other structures first.”

They forced their way into the two guest houses, walked through the barn, the stables, the tack room, and the horse arena, looked inside the fenced paddocks and the silver Hummer, and did a field search of the immediate surrounding area. There was no sign of Trimble, her body, or her green Subaru.

Mitch unsaddled the horse, put it in a paddock, and fed it some oats. In the late afternoon light, Dorsey stood with the two officers in front of the main ranch house looking up at the mesa.

“Trimble is missing, her car is gone, the ranch house has been tossed. The gun cabinet was left unlocked, so we can presume some weapons are missing along with other items,” Dorsey said. “I’m thinking there’s a good chance Larson has been here. We’ll call in forensics and keep looking.”

He pointed to the ranch road that snaked up the mesa. “Let’s see where that road goes.”

The road, with fresh vehicle tracks, took them to a hunting lodge on the mesa top where they found the truck Larson had stolen from the Dripping Springs Ranch. Mitch Lowe called it in and they took a quick look inside the lodge and found it occupied by vermin, spiders, some squawking crows perched on the back of a leather couch, several flighty robins, and a coiled rattlesnake. There were bird droppings, rat shit, and coyote scat in every room, along with about a million or more red fireants.

Outside, they followed the stolen truck’s tire tracks to a water tank and found a partially eaten woman’s body, which was most likely all that remained of Nancy Trimble. Almost all of her clothing had been ripped off by the coyotes that had obviously feasted on the internal organs. Rope had been used to tie her hands, she’d been hobbled around the ankles, the bottoms of her bloody, bare feet were pincushions of imbedded cactus spines, and there were shreds of gray duct tape at the corners of her empty eye sockets. The entry wound told Dorsey she’d been shot in the back by a high-powered rifle, and signs of recent bruising on her buttocks convinced him that she’d been raped.

Dorsey pictured Trimble panicked, violated, hobbled, blindfolded, and barefoot stumbling across the mesa, knowing she was about to die, and his stomach turned at the thought it. He’d seen his share of human perversion, evil, and ugliness, but this was a new, all-time low.

“Somebody needs to put a bullet in Craig Larson’s head,” Dorsey said as he covered the body with a tarp.

Springer had one motel and a small, ten-room hotel. The state police task force hunting for Craig Larson had filled them up and spilled over to a budget motel on the outskirts of Raton, some forty miles distant. Just after nine at night Kerney drove past the Raton motel, with its “No Vacancy” sign and parking lot filled with cop cars, and pulled in next door at a slightly more expensive lodging establishment. Clayton parked behind him and they registered for separate but adjoining rooms. When they finished stowing their gear, Kerney used his cell phone to call Frank Vanmeter, the state police major in charge of the manhunt, and advise him of their arrival.

Just as Kerney disconnected, Clayton popped into the room and asked if there were any new developments.

“Nope,” Kerney replied. “No fresh kills since the caretaker at the Lazy Z and no sightings of Larson.”

Clayton nodded, turned as if to leave, hesitated, and gave Kerney a questioning glace.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I keep hoping Larson won’t get caught until I find him. I haven’t even being thinking about the innocent people he’s been murdering while he’s on the loose. Is that perverse or what?”

“No, it’s human,” Kerney replied with a grim smile. “I want a piece of Larson just as much as you do.”