Dead or Alive

Chapter Two

Jeannie Cooper rented a small one-bedroom apartment on a dead-end street in Santa Fe within shouting distance of the state capitol. Larson’s knock at the door went unanswered. From a small enclosed patio at the rear of the apartment, he peered through the kitchen window. There was no movement inside.

Larson figured breaking in to search for the property he’d left with Jeannie would not be wise. He had ditched the SUV and was on foot. Without transportation, making a quick getaway if he had to would be impossible. He settled into an old lawn chair on the patio, out of sight from any nearby nosy neighbors, and waited for Jeannie to come home.

Larson had met Jeannie when he’d been working for Melvin and Viola Bedford as their personal assistant. He’d carefully murdered the elderly couple one at a time over a two-year period while embezzling money from their estate. He’d blown most of it on women and vacations at luxury resorts, and had even spent a few bucks on Jeannie, an employee of the landscape company that maintained the grounds at the Bedford residence. As far as Larson knew, she was still watering flowers, pruning shrubs, and pulling weeds for a living.

She was also manic-depressive, what the shrinks called bipolar. When she was up, she could be great fun. But when her dark moods hit, she became self-destructive and impossible to deal with.

Around dusk, the sound of a vehicle pulling into the parking space at the front of the apartment building brought Larson to his feet. He intercepted Jeannie as she unlocked her front door and turned the doorknob.

She looked at him with wide-eyed surprise. “Craig. I thought you were in jail. That’s what the paper said.”

Larson pushed the door open and put a hand on her back to hurry her inside. “I’m out on bail. I need that strongbox I left with you.”

He turned on the ceiling light and looked around the small, tidy living room. A shipshape apartment meant that Jeannie was probably stabilized on her medication and neither manic nor depressed.

“What strongbox?” Jeannie asked.

“Don’t give me that crap.” Larson pushed her down on the couch. “You know what I’m talking about. I gave you a box of papers to keep for me.”

Jeannie gave him a belligerent look. “I don’t have anything that belongs to you.”

Larson stared at her. When Jeannie got stubborn, she completely shut down, and he didn’t have time to wait her out. Better play nice. He sat next to her, sighed, and said, “Maybe I’m mistaken, but I thought for sure I’d left a strongbox with you for safekeeping.”

Jeannie smiled tentatively. “Not that I remember.”

Larson patted Jeannie’s hand. “I guess my legal problem has my head all screwed up,” he said as an apology. “I still can’t believe I was convicted of a crime I didn’t commit.”

He’d left Jeannie a locked strongbox supposedly containing his important personal and family papers. In fact, it held over two hundred thousand dollars in jewelry Larson had stolen from Viola Bedford after he’d murdered her, a year before he’d killed her husband, Melvin.

He had erased the jewelry from the inventory of property owned by the Bedfords and destroyed the paper trail. Since Melvin and Viola had no living heirs, the jewelry was now clean as a whistle, and Larson had been counting on it to go into deep hiding.

Jeannie relaxed a bit. “After you jumped bail, a cop came to ask if I knew where you were. He said they knew you’d murdered Melvin and Viola but just couldn’t prove it.”

“Those assholes,” Larson said. “They make stuff up all the time to scare people and get them to talk. You don’t believe that crap, do you?”

“I didn’t used to,” Jeannie said, “until you came into my apartment, put your hands on me, and called me a liar.”

“I’m really sorry, Jeannie.” Larson flashed a warm smile. “But like I said, I’ve been through a meat grinder with these trumped-up charges the cops laid on me and the bullshit conviction.” He shook his head sadly. “Now you tell me they’re accusing me of murder. It all makes me a little crazy.”

Jeannie squeezed Larson’s hand. “That’s okay, I forgive you.”

“Thanks. Are you doing okay?”

“Most of the time,” Jeannie replied. “I’ve been taking vitamins, some natural supplements, eating strictly vegetarian, and not drinking alcohol. It’s helping.”

“You look great,” Larson said with conviction. He’d always liked her looks. Jeannie was tall, had a tiny waist, round, inviting hips, perky breasts, and big, blue, slightly wild-looking eyes.

She laughed and looked down at her grimy hands and dirty fingernails. “Yeah, I just bet I do. I’m tired and grubby.”

“Still digging in the dirt for a living?” Larson asked.

Jeannie’s eyes lit up. “Yep, but now I’m working for myself. I started my own landscape business this spring, and I’ve been putting in twelve-hour days ever since.”

“Really?” Larson knew Jeannie had no money. She got by on her hourly wages and the occasional small check from her father, a retired postal worker who lived somewhere back east.

That meant she must have started her new business by dipping into the jewelry he’d left with her. He gave her a hard look.

“What?” Jeannie said, flinching at the meanness in Larson’s gaze.

He grabbed her neck and squeezed. “You sold my jewelry, didn’t you, bitch?”

Jeannie choked and turned red.

Larson squeezed harder. “Didn’t you?”

Jeannie’s fingers clawed at Larson’s hand.

“Tell me or you’re dead.”

Jeannie’s eyes welled with tears as she nodded.

Larson eased off on the chokehold a little and Jeannie gasped for air.

“I only sold some of it,” she gasped. “Just what I needed to get my business started.”

“Where’s the strongbox?”

“Let go of me and I’ll get it.”

Larson squeezed Jeannie’s neck and lifted her off the couch, until her feet dangled in the air. “Let’s go get it together. Where?”

Jeannie pointed at the small, adjacent galley kitchen.

Larson marched her into the kitchen, released his grip, and pointed the semiautomatic at her. “Get it for me,” he ordered.

She opened the cupboard under the sink, reached in, and pulled out the box. “Here.”

The box had been pried open. Half the jewelry was gone, but his brother’s wallet with his driver’s license was still inside. Larson had stolen it from Kerry two years ago and it was still current.

He didn’t doubt for a minute that Jeannie had looked inside the wallet, and that was bad news for her. He’d planned to make a clean getaway by assuming his brother’s identity, and that meant nobody could know about it, at least not for a day or two.

He put the wallet in his back pocket. “How much did you get for the jewelry you sold?” he asked.

“Twenty thousand.”

“You got ripped off. Now tell me where you keep the prescription meds you hoard for those rainy days when you want to kill yourself.”

“I don’t have any,” Jeannie replied. “I’m not suicidal anymore.”

Larson had heard her rap before and knew she’d overdosed at least twice after proclaiming she was never going to try to kill herself again. “Don’t make me hurt you,” he said.

“I told you I’m using vitamins and natural supplements now.”

He forced the barrel of the handgun into her cheek and twisted it.

Jeannie blinked and started crying.

“Where are the drugs, Jeannie?”

She took a coffee canister out of the pantry and dumped a large stash of barbiturates on the kitchen counter.

Larson smiled. “Time for you to get mellow.”

Jeannie shook her head. “Don’t you do that to me.”

Larson raked the gun barrel across her nose. “Don’t you tell me what to do, bitch.”

He took her into the living room, sat with her on the couch, and started forcing pills down her throat until she was too out of it to care. He kept force-feeding her the pills, slapping her to keep her awake. Finally, she passed out.

Larson stayed with her until breathing slowed and then stopped. He checked for a pulse to make sure she was dead, found a travel bag in the bedroom closet, packed it with the strongbox, the handgun, and the money Kerry had given him, wiped his fingerprints from every surface inside the apartment he’d touched, and let himself out.

Because of the damage he had done to her face, Jeannie’s death probably wouldn’t go down as a suicide, but at this point he didn’t care one way or the other. He had almost ten grand in cash, over a hundred thousand in jewelry he could convert into a sizable amount of money, and the use of his twin brother’s identity. That would give him some running room if he could get out of Santa Fe quietly.

He decided to take the shuttle bus that ran from the downtown Santa Fe hotels to the Albuquerque airport. Once in the city, he’d find a place to crash and figure out his next step.

Lieutenant Clayton Istee of the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office finished his shift and hurried home to pick up Grace and the kids, who were packed and ready to start a ten-day vacation in Santa Fe. At the house, he parked his patrol vehicle and changed into civvies while Grace, Wendell, and Hannah loaded luggage and a picnic dinner Grace had fixed into the family sedan.

They locked up the house and started out from the Mescalero Apache Reservation in high spirits. Wendell told “knock-knock” jokes that made Hannah giggle and Clayton groan, until Grace told him to save the next joke for later. After the children settled down, Grace read out loud from a travel guide about some of the interesting things to do and see in northern New Mexico.

They could afford to vacation in pricey Santa Fe because they were staying at the ranch outside of the city owned by Clayton’s father, Kevin Kerney, who had recently retired as chief of the Santa Fe Police Department. Kerney was now living in London, England, with his wife, Colonel Sara Brannon, who was a military attaché at the U.S. Embassy, and their young son Patrick.

It was a three-year assignment for Sara, who planned to retire from the army at the end of her tour of duty, when the family would return to Santa Fe. Until that time, they hoped to make at least yearly trips back home. In their absence, the ranch was being looked after by Jack and Irene Burke, friends who ranched nearby, and their son, Riley, who was Kerney’s partner in a cutting horse breeding enterprise.

Kerney had given Clayton a set of keys to the ranch with instructions to stay there as much as he liked while the family was overseas. Clayton hadn’t planned on taking Kerney up on the offer so soon, but his boss, Sheriff Paul Hewitt, had assigned him to take a two-day seminar on advanced interrogation techniques at the New Mexico Law Enforcement Academy and ordered him to burn a week of leave before showing his face at work again. So for the first two days of the Istee family vacation, Grace and the kids would be on their own while Clayton attended the seminar.

Halfway into the road trip, late afternoon turned into evening and Clayton pulled off at a roadside picnic table on the lightly traveled two-lane highway. Grace served up a spread of homemade fried chicken, potato salad, and double chocolate brownies, and the family ate dinner in the cool of the gathering darkness without one vehicle passing by the whole time they were there.

Back in the car, the children fell silent and soon nodded off. It was pitch dark by the time they left the highway and rattled over the cattle guard and ruts in the dirt-and-gravel road that led to Kerney’s ranch southeast of the state capital. The motion jarred Wendell and Hannah awake.

“Are we there yet?” Wendell asked in a sleepy voice.

“Almost,” Grace answered.

“I need the bathroom,” Wendell said.

“Can you hold your water for a few minutes?” Clayton asked.

Wendell shook his head. “I need to go really bad.”

“Me too,” Hannah said.

“Okay.”

Clayton slowed to a stop and everyone piled out. Wendell relieved himself at the side of the road while Grace took Hannah in search of some privacy behind a tree. Above, at the lip of the canyon where Kerney’s ranch house sat, a small pack of coyotes screeched, chattered, howled, and snapped. The commotion lasted a long minute.

“Are they hunting something?” Wendell asked his father.

“I think they may have caught their prey.”

“How can you tell?”

“From the sound of it. Now they’re fighting over the kill.”

“Maybe we’ll get to see it,” Wendell said.

“Maybe.”

With everyone back in the car, Clayton drove through the canyon and up the hill.

“Grandfather’s house is just ahead,” Clayton said.

“Can we see Grandfather’s horses?” Hannah asked as the headlights briefly illuminated the horse barn across the wide pasture.

“In the morning,” Grace replied.

Clayton wheeled into the driveway, and the headlights of the sedan froze a pack of coyotes surrounding a form lying on the ground in front of the house. The animals turned toward the sound, their eyes glistening in the reflected light.

“What is that?” Grace asked as she tensed up.

Clayton braked to a stop. “I’m not sure.”

“That’s a body out there,” Grace said.

“We’re too far away to tell what it is.”

“A body?” Wendell asked. He unbuckled his seat belt and hung over the back of the front seat. “Where?”

Clayton backed up quickly, killed the headlights and engine, reached across Grace, and grabbed a flashlight from the glove box. “Everybody stay here.”

“If that’s a body, you have to take us away from here right now,” Grace insisted.

Clayton touched Grace gently on the arm. Her demand was not unreasonable. It was especially important to avoid ghost sickness with children, and doubly important to protect them from being taken by the dead, who often wanted company to travel to the other world.

“I will, but not yet,” he said.

“Now, Clayton.”

“You know I can’t do that.” Clayton got out of the car and looked at Grace through the open window. “Stay here and keep the children with you.”

“Let me go with you, Dad,” Wendell pleaded.

“Stay in the car with your mother.”

Wendell sulked and slumped against the backseat of the sedan.

“Stay put, sweetie,” Clayton said to Hannah.

“Can I sit with Mother?” Hannah asked.

“Go ahead.”

She climbed into the front seat and sat on Grace’s lap.

As Clayton approached the coyotes, he picked up some rocks and started pelting them. The animals, three adults and a juvenile, backed off a few yards and then held their ground. He reached the body lying faceup and looked at it. Not much had been eaten, but the man’s face was a mess, and some feeding had been done where the man’s shirt had been shredded around the chest and two entry bullet wounds were visible.

He knelt down and moved the body just enough to pluck a wallet from a back pocket of the blue jeans. The dead man was Riley Burke, Kerney’s neighbor and partner. He took a quick look around. Three pickup trucks were parked in the driveway. One belonged to Kerney, one probably to Riley Burke, and the third had a magnetic sign on the driver’s door that read “Lenny’s Auto Body Shop,” followed by a phone number.

He returned to the sedan, opened the trunk, and pulled out an old wool blanket he kept there for emergencies.

“Who is it?” Grace asked.

“Not now,” Clayton replied. Wendell was wide-eyed and standing bolt upright in the backseat. Hannah was frozen on Grace’s lap. “I’ll tell you more later.”

He walked back to the body, covered it, and dialed 911 on his cell phone. While he waited for dispatch to pick up, he swung the flashlight beam in an arc to keep the coyotes at bay, their eyes flashing back at him in the night.

Clayton quickly identified himself when dispatch answered, gave his location, reported the dead body, and asked to be put through to New Mexico State Police Chief Andy Baca.

“Please identify yourself again and repeat your location,” the dispatcher said after a brief pause.

“I’m Lieutenant Clayton Istee with the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office,” he repeated forcefully, “and I am at Kevin Kerney’s ranch outside Santa Fe. There is a dead man who appears to have been shot twice in the chest. I need state police officers and a forensic team sent to my twenty right now, and ask Chief Baca to call me on my cell phone immediately. Have you got all that?”

“Affirmative. Did you ID the body?”

“I did and it is not, repeat not, Chief Kerney.”

“Ten-four. I’ll call Chief Baca and have him contact you.”

“Roger that. Do you need directions to my twenty?”

“Negative. I have a sergeant responding and more officers will be on the way shortly. ETA is under twenty minutes.”

“Ten-four.”

Clayton disconnected and heard the beeping sound of another cell phone coming from the pickup truck parked next to Riley Burke’s body. He retrieved it and saw on the screen that Riley had missed six calls, the earliest five hours ago, the latest within the half hour. He wondered why no one had come looking for him, especially with his parents and wife living so close by.

From the driveway came the sound of the sedan’s engine turning over, followed by horn-honking. He put some rocks on the four corners of the blanket covering Riley’s body to keep the coyotes away and walked back to the car. Grace sat behind the wheel.

“I can’t stay here with the children waiting for you,” she said. “We’re leaving. I’ll get a room in town for the night and call you to let you know where we are.”

Clayton nodded. “I may be here for some time.”

“The week is ruined,” Grace whispered.

“Don’t think that way.” He watched Grace turn the car around and drive down the road before returning to the ranch house. The coyotes had closed in on the body. Clayton chased them off before they could do additional damage, and they snarled in protest.

Chief Baca’s call came as Clayton was about to use the house key Kerney had given him to make a quick tour of the ranch house.

“Dispatch says the dead man is not, I repeat not, Kerney,” Andy said. “Is that true?”

“Affirmative,” Clayton replied, as he noticed that Sara’s SUV was not parked in the driveway. Perhaps it was in the garage or stored in the horse barn. “The deceased is Riley Burke.”

“Damn,” Andy said. “That’s going to make Kerney very angry.”

“I know it,” Clayton said as he jiggled the front doorknob and found it locked. He walked through the enclosed courtyard to the glass patio door to the kitchen and saw that it had been smashed. The pattern of glass fragments on the floor suggested it had been broken from the outside in order to gain entry.

“And you think it’s a homicide?” Andy asked.

“No doubt about it, Chief.” Clayton stepped back from the debris so as not to contaminate evidence at the point of entry. “There’s a broken kitchen patio door that suggests a home invasion. I’m going to go through the front door and take a quick look around.”

“Be careful,” Andy said. “I’m about to leave my house for your twenty. See you when I get there.”

“Roger that, Chief.”

Inside the house Clayton turned on the exterior lights to keep the coyotes at bay. The front room and adjoining library appeared untouched. The television and stereo system hadn’t been taken, nor had any of the art on the wall been removed. In the master bedroom there was no sign of a burglar’s quick search through the dressers for jewelry and other valuables.

The absence of disarray made Clayton question the motive for the break-in. Or had Riley Burke’s arrival kept the killer from looting the house?

He checked the truck with the Lenny’s Auto Body Shop magnetic sign on the door and found it was registered to a Leonard Hampson who resided in Springer. He phoned the information to dispatch and watched the coyotes yip and yap at him for being kept away from the fresh kill while he waited for the state police to arrive.

Sergeant Russell Thorpe, shift commander for New Mexico State Police District One, ran north on I-25 with lights and siren. As a rookie officer, Thorpe had worked with Kerney, who’d been deputy state police chief at the time before taking over as top cop at the Santa Fe Police Department. Several years later, Russell had teamed up with Clayton Istee and Ramona Pino, an SFPD detective, on a case that involved the discovery of a graveyard outside of the town of Socorro where a serial killer had buried his victims.

The unearthing of the crime scene was directly connected to the hunt for another killer who’d plotted the murder of Chief Kerney and his entire family, including Clayton, his wife, and children. Fortunately, Clayton had put the man down for good before he could accomplish his bloodletting.

Russell knew that if Clayton Istee said the dead man at Kerney’s ranch was a homicide victim, you could take it to the bank. He was one hell of a fine investigator.

According to dispatch, Clayton had reported that it wasn’t Kerney lying in the driveway at the ranch. Word had it Kerney was living large in London while his wife pulled a gravy tour as the U.S. Army military attaché at the embassy. It was good to know that he hadn’t been killed on a brief visit home.

So who was the dead guy? A caretaker hired to look after the place? A neighbor? Some wandering vagrant? And why had he been killed?

Thorpe knew that about 90 percent of murder victims knew their killers, which meant investigators usually had a good pool of potential suspects to target. The small percentage of random murders, killings by strangers, and murders that occurred during the commission of other crimes could be much more difficult to work because of the absence of any links to the victims.

He wondered if this homicide might have something to do with the bizarre sequence of events that had started earlier in the day when a correctional officer had been brutally attacked by a convicted felon, sent by mistake to the state prison in Springer.

Every cop in the state was on high alert for Craig Larson, who had so far nearly killed the correctional officer, almost suffocated a young family locked inside a Department of Correction van, and left a man to fry in the blistering hot desert grasslands outside of Santa Rosa.

Thorpe’s radio kept him updated as he barreled down Lamy Hill to the ranch road turnoff, and word came to him that one of the vehicles parked at the ranch belonged to Lenny Hampson, the man who been kidnapped by Larson in Springer and dumped in the desert.

Dispatch also reported that two homicide agents were en route about ten minutes behind him, a forensic team was rolling with the same ETA, and of equal interest, Chief Baca was on his way to the crime scene.

On the ranch road, he rolled his front windows down, cut the siren, switched off the emergency lights, and pushed the unit hard through the canyon and up the crest. A waning half moon had just risen, giving just enough light to outline the structure of the horse barn a quarter mile away. The outside lights of the ranch house flooded the porch, courtyard, and parking area in front of the house.

Through the open windows Thorpe could hear horses whinnying and coyotes barking. He flashed his headlights as he approached the house. Clayton Istee stood near a covered form on the ground, waving both hands over his head. Thorpe announced his arrival to dispatch, dismounted his unit, and hurried over to Clayton.

“Look who they sent me,” Clayton said with a smile as he shook Russell’s hand.

“I heard you made lieutenant,” Thorpe replied, grinning back.

Clayton glanced at the three stripes on Russell’s uniform shirt-sleeves. “Yeah, and now you’re a sergeant.”

“How about that? Who’s the victim?”

“Riley Burke.” Clayton flipped off the blanket covering the body.

Thorpe stared down at Riley Burke, took in some air, and let it out slowly through his nose. “I know him slightly, met his wife and his parents on several occasions. They’re Kerney’s neighbors.”

Clayton nodded. “This wasn’t a burglary. A patio door was smashed from the outside to gain entry but nothing inside the house appears to have been taken.”

Thorpe pointed at the truck with the auto body sign. “I’m not surprised. Two hours ago, the registered owner of that truck, Lenny Hampson, stumbled half-dead into a gas station on the outskirts of Santa Rosa and told the local cops that a fugitive named Craig Larson had dumped him in the desert without food or drink.”

Clayton’s eyes widened. Before he’d gone off duty, he’d heard about Larson’s attack on the correctional officer and the theft of the Honda from the young couple with the baby, but the kidnapping was new information.

“That, I didn’t know about,” he said. “Larson may have come here to switch vehicles. There are fresh tire tracks that could be from the SUV Kerney’s wife, Sara Brannon, drives. It’s a red Jeep and it’s not in the garage. I haven’t checked the horse barn.”

“Would you mind staying with the body while I take a peek inside the horse barn?” Thorpe asked.

“Actually I do mind, but I’ll do it anyway because you’re a friend.”

“Don’t you like dead bodies?” Thorpe asked as he started for his unit.

“Not really,” Clayton replied. “By the way, there are six missed calls on Riley’s cell phone, some hours old. I’m guessing his wife and parents are away, otherwise they would have come looking and found him.”

Thorpe stopped in his tracks and turned back to Clayton. “You’re right. Where’s his phone?”

“On the seat of his truck.”

“Will you check Riley’s contact list on the phone against the missed calls while I go look for the Jeep?”

“Not a problem,” Clayton replied.

Thorpe got in his unit and drove toward the horse barn. Clayton retrieved the phone and quickly discovered that the missed calls were indeed from Riley’s wife and parents. He put Riley’s phone on the hood of the truck and used his own phone to call his boss at home and brief him on Riley Burke’s murder and the tie-in to the manhunt for Craig Larson.

“Who’s on scene with you?” Sheriff Paul Hewitt asked when Clayton finished.

“A state police sergeant, Russell Thorpe. He’s solid. More personnel are on the way, including Chief Baca.”

“Do you want in on the investigation?”

Clayton hesitated. State law gave blanket statewide jurisdiction both to sheriff’s officers and the New Mexico State Police. Clayton could rightfully work the case if Hewitt gave him the authority to do so.

“Well?” Hewitt asked.

“That’s up to you, Sheriff.”

“And I say no,” Hewitt replied. “I want you to take that academy course I’ve already spent taxpayer money for you to attend and then go on vacation. Understood?”

“Affirmative.”

“Have you talked to Kerney?”

“Not yet,” Clayton replied.

“Better do it soon,” Hewitt advised. “Five will get you ten, once he learns about the murder, he’ll book the next available flight home.”

“I wouldn’t bet against it.”

“Keep me informed.”

“Ten-four.”

Russell Thorpe came back with news that Sara’s SUV was nowhere to be found, and that he’d asked dispatch to issue a BOLO on the missing Jeep.

Clayton told him the missed calls on Burke’s phone were indeed from Riley’s wife and parents.

“Why don’t you break the news to them,” Russell suggested as he searched inside Lenny Hampson’s truck.

“This isn’t my case, Russell.”

“I know that.”

Clayton looked at the phone he’d placed on the hood of Riley’s truck. Riley had been murdered on Kerney’s doorstep, probably because he’d been looking after the place the way a good neighbor should. More than that, Riley was Kerney’s business partner, and his parents had sold Kerney his land at a fair price after turning away other offers from well-heeled easterners who wanted to play cowboy in Santa Fe. The Burkes deserved to hear of the tragedy and their loss from a member of Kerney’s family, which meant Clayton needed to make the calls. Kerney would expect no less. He picked up the phone.

“You haven’t told me what brought you up to Santa Fe,” Russell said, as he held up the Department of Corrections shotgun he’d found under the seat.

“I start a two-day law enforcement academy course tomorrow and then we were planning to stay over at the ranch for a family vacation.”

“Grace and the children came with you?” Thorpe made sure the chamber was empty and the safety was on before putting the shotgun on the hood of Hampson’s truck.

“Yeah. Grace is checking us into a motel for the night.”

“You actually believe you can be a cop and have any kind of normal family life?”

“Silly of me, isn’t it? But I am starting to doubt it.”

Clayton made the calls, first to Riley’s wife and then to his parents, and they took the news hard. After he finished, he told Thorpe that the Burkes had gone down to Roswell to attend a cattle auction and Riley was to have joined them earlier in the evening.

“This sucks,” Russell said.

“Murder usually does,” Clayton replied, watching a string of flashing emergency lights top out on the crest of the canyon. He counted five approaching vehicles.

Russell stepped off to meet the lead car and Clayton’s cell rang with an incoming call from Grace. She told him what motel she’d checked into with the children and asked when he’d be able to join them.

“I don’t know how long I’ll be,” Clayton said, “so don’t wait up for me.”

“Who died?” Grace asked in a whisper.

In the background Clayton could hear the sound of a children’s television show. “Riley Burke, shot twice in the chest.”

“Oh dear.”

The incoming vehicles parked behind Thorpe’s unit. In the darkness Clayton couldn’t make out the people exiting their units. “Gotta go,” he said.

“If you’re not here in the morning,” Grace said, “I’m driving the children back home to Mescalero.”

The line went dead. Clayton was just about to call Grace back when Russell Thorpe approached with Chief Andy Baca of the New Mexico State Police.

“Hello, Lieutenant,” Andy Baca said, offering his hand. “Why don’t you and the sergeant bring me up to speed?”

The report of the suspicious, unattended death of a woman named Jeannie Cooper brought Lieutenant Ramona Pino, commander of the Santa Fe Police Department Violent Crimes Unit, out on a hot and unusually muggy July night. She drove up Cerrillos Road toward the South Capitol neighborhood, listening to the secure channel traffic of the personnel handling the homicide at Kevin Kerney’s ranch and searching for the red Jeep Craig Larson had stolen.

She stopped at a dead-end lane just off Paseo De Peralta, a street that looped around the historic Santa Fe downtown area. At the end of the lane, Officer Dennis Gavin stood in the glare of his squad car’s headlights talking to a chunky older woman wearing a halter top, shorts, and flip-flops.

Pino approached and Gavin interrupted his interview to introduce her to Sally Newcomb, a friend of the victim who’d called the police after discovering the dead woman in her apartment. Newcomb had a blocky jaw and square face that matched her chunky body.

“According to Ms. Newcomb, her friend Jeannie Cooper has a history of suicidal behavior,” Officer Gavin said. “She just finished telling me that she became worried when Jeannie didn’t answer her phone. Ms. Newcomb came over, saw her truck, and knocked on the door. When she didn’t get an answer, she let herself in with a spare house key she knew Ms. Cooper kept hidden under a rock and discovered the body.”

“I see,” Ramona replied. She looked at Newcomb, who appeared genuinely distraught. She glanced up at Gavin to get a read as to whether or not he was buying the woman’s story.

At six-three Gavin towered over Pino. He gave her a slight nod to signal he thought Newcomb was on the level.

Ramona nodded in return, asked Newcomb to continue giving her statement to Officer Gavin, walked toward the open apartment door, and paused to look around before entering. Once a single-family residence, the building sat behind an electrical power substation that fronted Paseo De Peralta, within steps of some of the fanciest and most expensive art galleries in town. But it was a world apart from the high-end condos and multimillion-dollar homes of nearby Garcia Street and Acequia Madre.

The stucco was cracked and the wooden frames of the old-fashioned casement windows needed a coat of paint. The porch sagged beneath a rusted tin roof that covered the four doors to the separate apartments.

A row of mailboxes stood at the front of a gravel walkway that led to the apartments, and the front yard was packed dirt used as parking spaces that butted up to the porch. Cooper’s apartment, an end unit, had a privacy fence that enclosed a small patio at the back. Using her flashlight, Ramona checked the patio, the front door, and the exterior windows for any visible signs of forced entry and found none.

Inside the apartment, Jeannie Cooper’s body was sprawled on the couch, eyes closed, mouth open, one arm dangling over the side of the couch, the other positioned on the armrest above her head. Ramona looked at the fresh bruises and marks on the face, the red strangulation marks around the neck, and the discoloration at the corners of the mouth that suggested the woman’s mouth had been forced open. She bent over and gently opened the mouth and saw several pills at the back of the throat.

She stepped back, keyed her handheld radio, advised the shift captain on duty of the ten-zero-one—her fifth homicide of the year—and called out the crime scene unit, her two on-duty detectives, and the medical investigator.

Back outside, Officer Gavin waited at his unit with Sally Newcomb. He gave Ramona the microcassette containing Newcomb’s tape-recorded witness statement.

Ramona pocketed the cassette and asked Newcomb to stay with Officer Gavin until the detectives arrived and they could ask her about Jeannie Cooper’s personal life.

Newcomb’s expression turned somber. “Do you think she was murdered?”

“We have to look at all the possibilities.”

“I saw the marks on her face, but I just thought that Jeannie had mutilated herself again,” Newcomb said. “She always does that when she gets depressed. And besides, as far as a personal life goes she hasn’t had one since she started her own landscaping company in the spring.”

Ramona smiled. “That’s exactly the kind of information that could be very helpful to us.”

Radio traffic on her handheld told Ramona that the detectives and crime scene unit were five minutes out. She used the time to start questioning the residents in the other apartments. Two hours later, she had a homicide with no witnesses, no apparent motive, and no suspects. She huddled with her two detectives, Beatty and Olivas, while the MI and crime scene techs finished up inside the apartment.

“We could expand the canvass,” Beatty said, “but I don’t think it would do any good.”

“Agreed,” Ramona said, “although I think come morning we should talk to the business owners in the neighborhood to find out if they saw anyone hanging around in the late afternoon.”

“I’ll do it,” Olivas said, sounding dour, which was more his prevailing outlook on life than an attitude in need of adjustment.

“Okay.” Ramona handed Beatty a notebook she’d found in Cooper’s truck. “There’s a list of her clients and jobs in there. Make some calls and talk to the people she has been working for.”

Beatty, a thick-set, middle-aged man who suffered from serious allergies, sniffled and nodded. “Sally Newcomb told me who Cooper used to work for.” He consulted his notes. “His name is Daniel Peck. Owns a company called Milagro Landscaping. I found his home phone number and address in the telephone directory.”

“I’ll talk to him,” Ramona said.

Beatty rattled off Peck’s phone number and address.

Ramona wrote them on her notepad. “Did Newcomb know if Cooper was seeing anyone six months to a year ago?”

Beatty put his finger to his nose and sniffled. “She doesn’t think there was anybody special, and she couldn’t give me any names of who Cooper had seen in the past. But then, I got the feeling from Newcomb that she may have been interested in reeling Cooper in for herself.”

“Interesting,” Ramona said. “Note that in your narrative, so we can follow up on it if need be.” She nodded toward the apartment. “This homicide has some wrinkles, but by the way the murder was committed, I don’t think jealousy or lust was the motive. The perp forced the pills down Cooper’s throat, which suggests he was angry at her for some reason.”

“Are you thinking the perp is male?” Beatty asked.

“The bruise marks on Cooper’s neck suggest that,” Ramona replied.

“For a female, Newcomb has large hands,” Beatty noted.

“I’m not ruling her out,” Ramona said. “The sloppy attempt made to mask the killing as a suicide tells me that the killer knew the victim. I’d like both of you to take another look inside the apartment. Find me something that will link the victim to a suspect—a romantic entanglement, an illicit relationship, a conflict with a neighbor, former colleague, or ex-lover—whatever. You know the routine.”

“Maybe we’ll find some love letters or a diary containing revealing and damaging tidbits,” Olivas said as he started toward the apartment.

“You really think so?” Beatty asked with sarcastic enthusiasm as he caught up with his partner.

“Nah,” Olivas grumbled. “Nothing is that easy.”

Pino flipped open her cell phone, dialed Daniel Peck’s number, and got his answering machine. She left a message, went to her unit, and drove to Peck’s residence, a post-World War Two pueblo-style house in the Casa Solana neighborhood, which had been the site of a Japanese-American internment camp during the war.

Lights were on inside the house, so Ramona parked and rang the bell. A deeply tanned man in his early fifties with short-cut gray hair answered. He wore a short-sleeved V-neck undershirt that revealed a Marine Corps tattoo on his left forearm. He had pleasant features and crinkly blue eyes.

Ramona flashed her shield and ID. “Daniel Peck?”

“That’s right.”

“I’m Lieutenant Pino and I need to ask you some questions about Jeannie Cooper.”

“I haven’t seen her since she quit working for me to start her own business. Did she overdose and get taken to the emergency room again?”

“No, she’s dead.”

Peck looked stunned. “She finally went and did it.”

“No, she was murdered.”

“Murdered?”

“It appears that way.”

“Poor Jeannie,” Peck said with a sigh. “She was such a gentle, lost soul, except when she got too manic or too down in the dumps. Then you must be looking for Craig Larson, right?”

“Why do you say that?” Pino asked.

“Because I’ve been watching the TV news story about his escape today from that prison guard he almost killed. My company did landscape and garden maintenance at the Bedford estate. Jeannie and Larson had a thing going right up to the time he went to trial for embezzling all that money.”

“You know that for a fact?”

Peck nodded. “I saw it with my own eyes, and Jeannie told me all about it.”

“What reason would he have to kill Jeannie?”

“You’ve got me,” Peck answered.

There was no way Peck could know about the murder of Riley Burke at Kevin Kerney’s ranch or the discovery of the abandoned pickup truck Larson had used to abduct Lenny Hampson from his Springer auto body repair shop. Ramona doubted he was deflecting suspicion from himself. Still, she needed to rule him out as a suspect.

“Can you account for your time since about four this afternoon, Mr. Peck?” she asked.

“You bet I can, Lieutenant. I kept a six-man crew working at a landscaping installation job until six-thirty and then went directly from there to a chapter meeting of Veterans for Peace.”

“I’ll probably want to talk to you again.”

“Maybe we can have that talk over a drink, Lieutenant.” Peck took out his wallet and gave Ramona a business card. “Once you’ve cleared me as a suspect, that is. I’ve been told that I clean up nicely. Best to call me on my cell phone.”

“I’ll do that, Mr. Peck,” Ramona said stiffly.

She headed back to the Cooper crime scene. If Peck’s hunch about Craig Larson was right, he might still be in the city. By radio, Ramona put the word out to intensify the search for Larson.

Russell Thorpe immediately responded to her advisory and asked for a back-channel update. Ramona filled him in on the connection between Larson and her murder victim.

“My, my, he’s been a busy boy today,” Russell said.

“It’s not confirmed that he’s the perp.”

“Did you find the red Jeep?”

“Negative,” Pino replied.

“Is your victim’s vehicle missing?” Thorpe asked.

“Negative.”

“Interesting,” Thorpe said. “Let’s debrief when you wrap up your preliminary.”

“Ten-four, your place or mine?”

“At Chief Baca’s ten-nineteen.”

“Affirmative.”

It was going to be a long night, and although Ramona stayed focused on the tasks ahead, she couldn’t help wonder if Daniel Peck’s unexpected come-on had been sincere or just a ration of BS.

Craig Larson spent a nervous couple of hours waiting for the last shuttle of the night to the Albuquerque airport. He killed the time in the small Santa Fe River Park that paralleled East Alameda, where he could keep an eye out for the arrival of the bus at the hotel across the street. When it showed up, he hurried across Old Santa Fe Trail and joined the half dozen tourists waiting to board. Once on board, he found a seat away from the rest of the passengers and pretended to sleep.

At the Albuquerque airport, Larson went inside, used the lavatory, went back outside, and took a courtesy bus to the airport parking lot on Yale Boulevard. After getting off at a row in the back of the lot, he waited until the driver left on another run to the terminal before slipping through the entrance gate when the attendant wasn’t looking.

He hoofed it along Yale Boulevard to Central Avenue, a good two-mile walk, tensing up when spurts of traffic passed him on the roadway, thinking for sure some gung-ho cop would stop and want to question him about walking along the street late at night. He made it to Central Avenue, where Yale dead-ended. At a nearby all-night drugstore, he bought a local paper, some snack food, and a drink, and walked up Central to the next city bus stop. A sign posted at the bus stop told him he’d arrived ten minutes before the last run of the night.

While he waited, he chewed on the snacks, washed them down with soda, and thought about what he would do after he checked into a cheap motel on East Central where nobody would remember his face or care what name he used as long as he paid cash and didn’t cause any trouble. First, take a hot shower to wash the grime off; second, get some sleep; third, find a good greasy spoon in the morning for a big breakfast; and finally, look in the newspaper for a car to buy from a private party.

That was as far as Larson wanted to take it for the night. It had been an exhausting day.