Michael McGarrity - Everyone Dies

With an enrollment of slightly over twelve hundred students, the school was consistently rated as one of the best in the country. Ramona had researched the institute as a college choice before deciding to drop science as a major in favor of criminal justice. Given the very real possibility that her cop career was going down the tubes, maybe she should have stuck with science.

The main drag through town wasn’t much to look at, just the usual conglomeration of local businesses, fast-food joints, gas stations, motels, and a few strip malls. The district state police headquarters was a modern, single-story, sand-colored concrete block building with pale gray stone coping, situated next to the Interstate.

Inside, the duty officer buzzed her through the security door and directed her to a bullpen area, where she spotted Russell Thorpe and two investigators working over some papers.

Thorpe grinned at her as he got to his feet. “Good, you’re here.”

“I’m surprised to see you,” Ramona replied, smiling back and thinking that Thorpe was not bad looking with his boyish face and six-foot, hard-body frame.

“My chief sent me down,” Thorpe said as he picked up a file and put it on the seat of an empty chair.

“What have you got?”

“A possible hard target, named Noel Olsen. We’re trying to track him down. Chief Kerney busted him and two other guys for a rape-murder in Santa Fe. Olsen turned state’s evidence and pled to a second-degree felony on the rape and as an accessory to the murder. The judge made the prison time concurrent on both counts, so Olsen did only four and a half years at the medium-security prison in Las Lunas, and was paroled to Las Cruces after his release. Drake was his P.O. before she got promoted to run the Socorro office.”

“Why is he a target?” Ramona asked.

Thorpe ran it down. Olsen had been a third-year engineering student at New Mexico State when he’d been busted. After he was paroled, he’d finished his degree and taken a master’s in electrical engineering, with a specialty in energetic materials.

“Bombs,” Ramona said.

“Yeah, that and more,” Thorpe replied. “Artillery weapons, ballistic experiments, rocket propulsion systems, explosives, nuclear blast and shock effects, land mines-you name it.”

“The fact that Olsen knows how to make a bomb won’t get an arrest warrant signed,” Ramona said.

“The first of the court trial documents just got faxed to us from the Santa Fe District Attorney’s Office,” Thorpe said with a nod at the file he’d placed on the chair. “Jack Potter prosecuted the case and Dora Manning did the psych evaluation on Olsen.”

“That should do it,” Ramona said, smiling back at Thorpe’s infectious grin. “Where is he?”

Thorpe shook his head. “Don’t know. He’s on vacation from his job at a New Mexico Tech research and testing facility. According to the personnel office, he works as a research tech at an explosives mixing facility on a forty-square-mile field laboratory outside the city.”

Ramona whistled. “Do we know where he lives?”

“Yeah, but he’s not answering his phone. We’ve got a make, model, and license number for his car, and his driver’s license photo is a close match to the police artist sketch. We’re doing a casual patrol in the area, just in case he shows. But we didn’t want to move on a search warrant for his residence until we tied him to the other victims.”

“Are the arrest and search warrant affidavits done?”

“Just about,” Thorpe answered.

“Have you called Chief Kerney?”

“Not yet.”

“I’ll do it, and then we’ll go see a judge.”

A state police SWAT team surrounded Olsen’s house. Uniformed officers blocked off the county road in both directions. Ramona scanned the structure through binoculars. A fixer-upper with a sagging porch roof, it had cracked and broken plaster that exposed the adobe walls, old-fashioned single-pane sash windows, and a rickety screen door that clanked against the door jamb when the wind gusted. To one side stood a weather-beaten shed and the remnants of an old windmill that leaned precariously at an angle.

There was no sign of activity and no vehicle in sight. Ramona waited five minutes and then had SWAT move in. The team quickly cleared the premises, the outbuilding, and a large area of the dusty brown hillside behind the house. With Thorpe and the two state police investigators at her heels, she stepped inside the house and began a visual search.

An hour later, they had compelling evidence that tied Olsen to the explosion in Mescalero and the murders of Victoria Drake and Dora Manning.

By phone, she reported to Lieutenant Molina. “We’ve got a pair of Olsen’s boots that match the shoe prints Deputy Istee found on the trail behind his house, Dora Manning’s cell phone, receipts for the parts Olsen bought to make the triggering and detonation devices, all the raw materials used to make the plastique, the formula for the bomb he left on his computer, two dead Kangaroo Rats we found in a toolshed, plus a partially used container of over-the-counter poison bait.”

“Excellent,” Molina said. “Have you found anything that might tell us where Olsen is?”

“We’re about to start looking,” Ramona said. “What I’ve given you so far is just from a preliminary once-over. But I can give you information on Olsen’s vehicle.”

“Read it off.”

Ramona fed Molina the data. “Looks like our boy isn’t as smart as he thinks he is,” she added. “How did we miss him during our initial records search?”

“He had a clean record in the slammer and as a parolee. He was a model prisoner, made no threats against Kerney or the victims, didn’t violate his parole conditions, and supposedly rehabilitated himself. Besides that, at the time we weren’t looking for a perp who knew how to blow people up. I’ll get an advisory out for Olsen and his car. Keep me informed.”

Ramona disconnected and turned to Thorpe and the two investigators. “Okay,” she said, “let’s tear this place apart.”

“What do you remember about this guy?” Molina asked Kerney, as he put a thick packet containing Noel Olsen’s case file, court trial documents, prison records, and parole officer reports on the chief’s desk and settled into a chair.

“You worked the case with me, Sal,” Kerney said. “He was an upper-middle-class kid who went out drinking and hoping to get laid with two of his college buddies. They picked up a woman, fed her some crap about taking her to a party, drove her out to the boonies and gang-banged her. The fun times went a little too far when they wound up strangling her and burying the body.”

“I don’t mean the case,” Molina said, realizing that Kerney was tired and not tracking very well. “What do you remember about Olsen as a person?”

“He was an only child and a spoiled pretty boy,” Kerney said, “who played the lady’s-man role. The murder probably never would have happened if Olsen hadn’t tried to sodomize the woman. According to his buddies, that’s what caused her to fight back. She bit and scratched him and he slapped her around. The other two kids joined in to beat and strangle her.”

“Did he strike you as cold-blooded?”

“Not really. He started out acting the tough guy during interrogation, but broke down real fast, which is why he got to plead to lesser charges. I thought he was just as guilty as his cohorts, and so did Jack Potter, who cut him a deal in order to get murder-one indictments on his chums. To me, Olsen’s machismo act was a cover for his unresolved homosexuality. Dora Manning didn’t see it that way; she found him to be narcissistic with sociopathic tendencies.”

“Well, Manning may have missed the boat,” Molina said, as he pointed to the files on Kerney’s desk. “According to the prison records, a con made Olsen his bitch less than a month after he entered the general population at Los Lunas.”