Michael McGarrity - Everyone Dies

“Yeah,” Dahl said. “I can work up a list of what I think he used to build the device and start calling supply houses and retailers. And if I can find any intact pieces of the wire he used, that might be helpful. But don’t get your hopes up. If he was smart, he bought from a lot of different places, probably off the Internet and by mail order.”

“What else?” Clayton asked.

“I’ll see what the feds have on known bombers with similar MOs. Also, most of these guys like to watch their shows, especially the big blasts, and this one was designed for maximum devastation. You might get lucky in the morning and find a shoe print or some trace evidence on a trail or at the spot where he detonated the explosion.”

An unmarked car pulled up next to Clayton’s unit and two feds got out.

Kerney looked at Clayton’s mud-caked boots. He’d been to the site, of that he was certain. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“If you want to bail out, you can,” Hewitt added.

Clayton shook his head and managed a thin smile. “I’m just pissed off, big time. It sucks to be a victim.”

The two feds approached, flashed their shields, and immediately started asking questions.

Kerney had been unable to contact only one person on his list of those who knew about Clayton, the executor of Erma Fergurson’s estate, a man named Milton Lynch. Lynch was a probate and tax attorney based in Las Cruces, a hundred miles away.

It was Erma’s legacy that had made Kerney a rich man, and Lynch had handled all the paperwork, including the college funds Kerney had set up for Wendell and Hannah.

At dawn, Clayton went into the mountains hoping to cut the perp’s trail. Kerney radioed the chopper pilot and asked him to get clearance to fly to Las Cruces over the restricted airspace of White Sands Missile Range before he sought out Paul Hewitt.

“Will you give me a ride to the chopper?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“Are you going to establish a fund to help Clayton and his family?” Kerney asked as he got in Hewitt’s vehicle.

“You bet, as soon as I get to the office.”

Kerney handed him a folded check. “This is an anonymous contribution.”

“Whatever you say,” Hewitt replied as he slipped the check into a shirt pocket.

“Good,” Kerney replied.

“What’s between you and Clayton is none of my business, Kerney,” Paul said, keeping his eyes on the road.

“I’m proud to be Clayton’s father, Paul,” Kerney said as they coasted to a stop at the tribal offices where the chopper waited. “He’s a good man and a fine police officer. When we have the time, I’ll tell you the story of how we found out about each other. Or maybe Clayton will.”

“I’ll let you know if he does,” Hewitt replied.

“Look after him, Sheriff,” Kerney said as he got out of the car. “He’s due for a letdown from all of this.”

Hewitt replied with a nod. “I know it. You be careful.”

He watched Kerney get into the chopper and take off before opening the folded check. He knew Kerney had inherited a pile of money through the sale of a ranch left to him by an old family friend.

He looked at the amount and whistled. Make that a big pile of money. Kerney’s check would easily cover the cost of buying two new vehicles for the Istee family, free and clear.

It was a pleasant nighttime drive that took Samuel Green from the town of Tularosa, north to Carrizozo, and then west toward San Antonio and Interstate 25. Just past Stallion Gate, a restricted access road on the north boundary of White Sands Missile Range, Green left the highway and followed an unpaved county road that wound through some low hills on the east side of the Rio Grande Valley near the small city of Socorro.

Most of the land was controlled by the Bureau of Land Management, but there were a few private parcels tucked into the barren hills that overlooked the valley farms and the mountains to the west of the city. Green stopped at the gate to a private road, unlocked it, and drove up the hill to a small adobe house once owned by Noel Olsen. But now that Olsen was dead, he didn’t own anything anymore.

Green had created his plan with two main goals in mind. First and foremost were the killings, and they were going well. The failed attempt to blow up the Istee family was a disappointment, but partially successful nonetheless in exacting heavy retribution against Kerney’s family. He would let it go at that for now, and keep his option open to kill them later, perhaps as some sort of epilogue.

Green’s second goal was equally simple, yet complex in its execution. He wanted not only to succeed with his plan but to survive it and enjoy the emotional fruits of his labor. To do that, he’d decided to give the cops a perpetrator to look for and never find. Thus, the recently deceased Noel Olsen.

Green slipped on a pair of plastic gloves, entered the house, and removed Olsen’s hiking boots. Even with two pairs of socks, the oversized boots had been uncomfortable to wear and his feet were sore. He padded into the bedroom, put the boots in the closet, slipped on a pair of Olsen’s running shoes, and turned to the body on the bed.

“You made a lovely bomb,” he said as he pressed Olsen’s thumb and fingers on Dora Manning’s cell phone. He did it several times to make sure there were a number of partial and smudged prints for the police to find, and repeated the process with the radio transmitter used to detonate the plastique.

Green had kept Olsen captive and alive for the two weeks it had taken to order the parts and make the bomb. During the times he was gone, he’d sedated Olsen with a major tranquilizer and left him manacled, handcuffed, gagged, and chained to a fifty-gallon water heater in the utility room.

He left the room and dropped Manning’s cell phone and the radio transmitter on the work table in the small second bedroom where Olsen had played with all his electronic toys and built the bomb. In the corner were the containers of chemicals Olsen had used to make the plastique, and buried under a stack of paper were receipts for some of the components that had been bought to make the hardware. The cops would find additional information on Olsen’s laptop computer, which should also make them happy.

In the utility room, he bundled up the clothes Olsen had worn and fouled during his confinement, packed them in a travel bag along with the restraints, added some of Olsen’s toiletries from the bathroom, and left it near the front door.

Back in the bedroom, he wrapped the body in a sheet and carried it out to the car, carefully staying on the gravel path to avoid leaving footprints that would show the weight he was carrying. He stuffed the body in the trunk, made a second trip for the travel bag, and closed the lid.

He went to the toolshed behind the house and checked on the two Merriam Kangaroo Rats he’d caught that were in a cage on a shelf. Their little eyes blinked rapidly in the glare of his flashlight. He fed them some poisoned bait and watched their contortions as they died. The cops, who got off on finding little details that corroborated their facts, would be pissing in their pants with excitement when they found the rats.

Green checked his watch. He figured it would be a good ten to twelve hours before the cops got here. First, they had to identify the body he’d left in the van, which should be done by now. Then, they had to make the connection to Olsen, which would take some head work and digging, but not that much. After all, the dead woman had at one time been Olsen’s parole officer in Las Cruces.

At the age of twenty, Olsen and two undergraduate buddies from New Mexico State University had been arrested for the rape and murder of a woman in Santa Fe. Because he hadn’t participated in the rape, Olsen had been allowed to plead to a lesser charge in exchange for testifying against his co-defendants. He’d done his time, finished his parole, completed his engineering degree, and had his voting rights restored, which meant he wasn’t going to be hard to find.