Michael McGarrity - Everyone Dies

“I’m not talking to you anymore,” Mary Beth said sternly. She stormed out of the bathroom, walked to the front door, and opened it. “Go away.”

“Does Kurt have a cell phone?” Ramona asked as she followed along.

“No, and even if he did he’s much too busy to call me.”

Ramona stepped outside. “Do you know where he’s working?”

“Kurt didn’t kill anyone. Can’t you believe that?”

“I want to believe it,” Ramona said, “but you’re not helping me give Kurt a chance to clear his name.”

Mary Beth responded by slamming the door in Ramona’s face.

Ramona walked to the office thinking that no matter how batty Mary Beth might be, she still did one hell of a job of standing by her man.

Ramona checked in with Barbero, who reported there was no record of Jack Potter visiting the facility. She also confirmed that Mary Beth didn’t drive, never used the city buses, and rarely went out alone.

“Do you know if Larsen owns a gun?” Ramona asked.

Barbero winced at the thought of it. “That’s not allowed.”

Ramona blew past Barbero’s gullibility and asked for Larsen’s business number. She went inside, returned with a piece of paper and handed it to Ramona.

“It’s a cell-phone number,” Barbero said. “Did talking to you upset Mary Beth?”

“You could say that,” Ramona replied.

Barbero gave her a pained look and scurried off to check on Mary Beth’s emotional welfare.

Ramona dialed the number. Surprise, surprise, the line was busy. In her unit, she tried to make radio contact with Sergeant Cruz Tafoya, who had been assigned by Molina to find Larsen, and got no response. She called his cell phone and it rang through to his voice mail. She left a message that Larsen was possibly armed with a gun, then disconnected and asked dispatch for Tafoya’s location. He was at a house in an upscale rural subdivision in the foothills above the village of Tesuque, a few miles outside of town.

“When he calls in, tell him I’m en route to his twenty,” Ramona said. “Ask him to stand by.”

By the time the veterinarian arrived, State Police Officer Russell Thorpe had taken Kerney’s statement and photographed the dead animal, and then completed a field search with the chief around the perimeter of the horse barn looking for evidence. Kerney pointed out some shoe prints and tire marks in front of the corral, in a spot where no vehicle had been parked during construction.

After Kerney, his wife, and the vet went into the barn, Thorpe gathered soil samples, sketched and photographed the impressions, and mixed up a batch of dental plaster to do the castings.

Thorpe had recently transferred to Santa Fe from the Las Vegas district. He’d first met Kerney soon after his graduation from the academy when body parts of a decomposed butchered female had been found on land Kerney had inherited and then later sold to the Nature Conservancy.

At the time, Kerney was deputy chief of the state police. He took charge of the investigation and Russell worked on the homicide with him. In the course of that assignment, Thorpe fell asleep while on surveillance, causing him to lose contact with the murder suspect, who was later caught and convicted. Kerney saved Russell’s budding career by giving him a butt-chewing rather than an official reprimand. Now Thorpe hoped to pay back the favor by doing thorough work and maybe even catching the bad guy.

He cleaned out the loose material from the indentations, sprayed a plastic coating on each, built a form around every impression, and carefully poured the plaster in stages, building each form up as he went to avoid letting the material run off and spoil the casting.

Russell left the forms to dry and walked to the barn. The veterinarian had cut into the hide of the horse, sawed through some ribs, and sliced and pinned back the stomach muscles. Now he was probing for a spent round with a pair of forceps. The concrete pad under his feet ran blood red, and the smell from the exposed guts wasn’t pleasant.

A grim Kerney and his equally unhappy-looking wife stood behind the vet watching. Tug Cheney grunted, gently extracted a slug and dropped it into Kerney’s gloved hand.

He inspected it, marked it, and put it in a plastic bag.

Thorpe asked to see the bullet and Kerney handed him the bag. The tip of the slug was dented, probably from hitting a rib. Other than that, Thorpe wasn’t sure what he was looking at.

“Is it from a handgun?” he asked.

Kerney nodded. “Probably a. 38-caliber revolver.”

“How can you tell?”

“From the diameter of the slug and the fact that a semi-automatic round is usually fully encased in a one-piece metal jacket. The bullet you’re holding doesn’t have a jacket covering the lead core and it shows spiral grooves from the rifling of the barrel. It explains why we didn’t find any spent cartridges.”

Thorpe nodded and handed back the bag. “Anything else?”

“The hair around one of the entry wounds was blistered,” Kerney replied. “That means the shooter fired from close range, no more than two inches. He deliberately gut shot Soldier, then fired two more rounds to finish the job.”

“That sucks,” Thorpe said.

Kerney nodded. Years ago, he’d been gut shot by a drug dealer, so he had a fairly good idea of the pain Soldier had suffered before dying. He wondered if there was a connection between the two events. That was unlikely: Kerney had put the drug dealer down permanently before passing out, so that particular dirtbag couldn’t possibly be a suspect. So, who was?

If the way Soldier was killed wasn’t a coincidence, Kerney thought, then the shooter was telling him that he knew his personal history, what he cared about, where he lived, and how easy it would be to get to him or those he loved.

“What do you want me to do next, Chief?” Thorpe asked.

“Get me a large plastic bag,” Kerney said, noticing for the first time that Soldier was wearing a halter. Yesterday, he’d removed it and put it on a hook inside the stall.

He stepped to the head of the horse, took out a pocket knife, cut through the halter to avoid touching the buckle, and slipped it off. He held it by the edges of his gloved fingertips until Thorpe returned with the bag.

“When you’re finished here, have the lab check for prints and compare them to mine,” he said to Thorpe as he eased it into the bag and zipped it shut.

“Got another one,” Tug said, lifting out the forceps and dropping a bullet into Kerney’s hand. “I think the last one went straight through the stomach cavity. We’ll have to lift him up to see.”

Kerney marked and bagged the round. “We can use the contractor’s backhoe to do that.” He turned to Thorpe. “Have it brought over here, and then check the crew members’ shoes and their vehicle tires against the castings.”

“What about the subcontractors?” Thorpe asked.

“Good point. Trujillo can provide us with names and addresses. I’ll follow up with them later.”

“I can do it,” Thorpe said. “Chief Baca said I’m assigned to the case until you release me.”

“You wouldn’t mind?”

Russell smiled. “I owe you one, Chief.”

“Okay, it’s yours. Take statements, too.”

“Affirmative,” Thorpe said, as he left to get Trujillo.

“What do we do with Soldier?” Sara asked.

“You can either have the carcass shipped to Albuquerque for disposal or you can bury him here on your property,” Tug said.

“We’ll bury him,” Sara said, before Kerney could respond.

Kerney bit his lip and nodded in agreement.

Tug stripped off his gloves and gave Kerney a solemn look. “I’m done here. Sorry for your loss. He was a fine animal. Whoever did this should be shot.”