Текст книги "The Coyote"

Автор книги: Michael McBride

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NINE

Most of the pictures had been clipped from newspapers I immediately recognized. Others were actual photographs snapped from afar.

I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t even seem to remember how to breathe.

All of them were of me. My picture in the Rocky Mountain News when I won the science fair in eighth grade. Another from the Denver Post during my hockey days in high school. My commencement photo. An interview I did for the college paper. And there were snapshots. Everything from my high school to my college to my academy graduation. Pictures of me smiling and laughing with my friends and grandparents, entirely oblivious to the ones who had journeyed all the way from this reservation so as not to miss my special moments.

“Why didn’t they ever say anything to me? I would have—”

“Would have what?”

“I don’t know. I never had the chance to find out.”

“It was a sore spot between my parents. My mother was the one who took the pictures. My father never approved.” I recalled the pictures of my grandparents, of the grandmother whose eyes were alight with joy and the grandfather whose eyes reflected his love for her, but at the same time, a solemn commitment to his duty. And, later, the physical toll their emotions had inflicted upon each other. “He and your daddy didn’t part ways on the best of terms.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because Rafael committed the one sin for which my father couldn’t forgive him.”

I scoffed. My father couldn’t have sinned at gunpoint.

“What could he possibly have done that was so bad?”

“He left.”

Roman shrugged and turned away. I caught a glimpse of the anger and the hurt on his face before he did. Everything may have transpired a lifetime ago for me, but the wounds were still fresh for him.

His boots clomped on the floor as he walked back out into the hallway. I turned to follow him and stopped when I saw the framed pictures sitting on the dresser. They were of a woman who wasn’t in any of the portraits in the hallway. She was a beautiful woman, the kind who maintained her natural beauty as she grew old. Time had aged the portraits but not the woman herself, stranding the colors and the clothing in an era so long ago I couldn’t even recall it.

I looked up when Roman leaned around the doorway.

“Ban’s mother?”

His eyes flared with fire. Quickly. So fast I could have blinked and missed it. And then it was gone as though it had never existed.

“Those aren’t for your eyes,” he said, and ushered me from the bedroom.

I didn’t force the issue. I had seen the woman’s physical expression in Ban. My cousin. He had her mouth and her nose. These people were strangers to me. Whatever might have transpired between Roman and her was none of my concern.

I studied the pictures of the family I’d never known on my way back into the main living area. I tried to commit them to memory, because I wouldn’t be coming back. There was nothing for me here. I took comfort from the fact that despite whatever may have happened, my paternal grandparents had cared for me, if only from a distance. This world might have been a part of my heritage and, to some degree, my past, but it wasn’t my future. We all have our ghosts, and my father had left his here. I had no intention of making them my own.

“Offer you one for the road?” Roman said. He closed the refrigerator door with a single bottle in his hand before I even replied.

“Thanks anyway.”

He popped the cap and started drinking while he walked across the living room toward the front door. It was a room at odds with itself. Aged adobe walls with surround sound speakers mounted to the cracks. A hand-planed mesquite table with a fifty-one inch flat screen on it. A wicker chair with a beaded design next to a leather La-Z-Boy recliner. Frayed woven rugs. A laptop on the end table. A Blu-Ray player balanced on a chipped and faded ceramic pot.

My phone vibrated in the front pocket of my pants. That was never a good sign. Especially not at eleven at night. I kept my thoughts from betraying me on my face.

“Thanks for the hospitality,” I said.

“It was nice to finally meet you. I loved your daddy. I see a lot of him in you.”

I tried to smile, but had to settle for a curt nod.

“I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to talk to Ban. Wish him my best.”

“I’ll tell him you asked after him. He’s night security at the Desert Diamond Casino if you find yourself up that way. He’s not the trusting kind, but he’s got a good heart. Probably do you both some good to have a few words before you leave.”

“We’ll see what the future holds. It wouldn’t surprise me if we ran into each other again.”

I stepped down onto the porch. A scorpion skittered away from my shoe. When I looked back, Roman opened his mouth as though about to say something, then closed it and nodded to himself. I smiled and nodded back. I knew all about regret.

He closed the door, sealing off the strip of light that had spilled onto the driveway.

I climbed into the Crown Vic, slid my phone out of my pocket, and checked the number of the missed call. I didn’t immediately recognize it. I had to drive all the way back into town before I was able to hold a signal long enough to check my voicemail.

The call had come in more than forty minutes ago. It must have been just floating out there in the atmosphere, waiting for me to catch a signal long enough to come through. Two more messages had been delivered since.

By the time I finished listening to the first, I had turned right on the main street through town and pinned the gas. Before the second ended, I had the brights on, the speedometer flirting with eighty, and gravel pinging from my undercarriage. I saw the lights on the horizon shortly after finishing the final message.

This wasn’t good news.

This wasn’t good news at all.

DAY 2

tash go:k

me’a

 

 

The Emergency Medical Research Center of the University of Arizona, in an effort to educate the public about the dangers of crossing the Arizona-Sonora border, developed a formula to determine the incidence of heat-related death. At ninety degrees Fahrenheit, there’s a twelve percent probability of death should a walker set out across the desert. At ninety-seven degrees, that risk more than doubles. At a hundred degrees, the chances of individual survival plummet to sixty percent.

 

The average temperature in the Sonoran Desert in July is one hundred and four degrees.

TEN

Baboquivari District

Tohono O’odham Nation

Arizona

September 10th

I arrived at the same time as the dogs. There were two CBP SUVs parked facing the hillside, their headlights illuminating a game trail that wended up into a forest of heavily needled cholla and prickly pears. I parked between them and left my brights on. The top of the rise was crowned with a massive stone formation reminiscent of a medieval fortress. To either side of it, the jagged hills were a serrated blade aligned against the night sky. I could see the flicker of flashlights moving through the brush.

I opened my door and was assaulted by the sound of barking. The canine agent had the rear doors of his truck open and was unlatching the cage doors for a pair of large dogs that looked like a cross between a German shepherd and a wolf. One was jet-black, the other mottled brown and gray. Both had teeth that looked sharp enough to tear through a meaty thigh and jaws strong enough to snap bone. Had I not worked with units like this in the past, I would have been positively terrified by their apparent ferocity, but I knew these dogs were partners with their handlers in the truest sense. They went home with him at night and quite possibly even slept in the same bed. When they were in the field, though…

“Special Agent Walker.”

I flashed my badge at the handler, who didn’t even look at me. He was a wiry man with large ears and a long face. He wore his green CBP ball cap so low over his brow that I couldn’t see his eyes. According to his name badge, my friendly new pal’s name was B. Sykora.

“Stay behind me,” he said. “Keep downwind at all times. Don’t cross the tracks or you’ll confuse the scent. Don’t even think about trying to pet either of them. These dogs are trained to go for the groin or the throat if they sense that I’m threatened in any way, so don’t try to approach me. If I tell you to do something, you do exactly what I say the moment I tell you to do it. Are we clear?”

I smirked and rolled my eyes.

“You had me at ‘trained to go for the groin.’”

He sighed and shoved past me.

“Come on down, Pookie,” I heard him whisper as he lifted down the black one. The other one hopped down on its own. He had them leashed and headed up the path in a matter of seconds. Sykora ran with them like the third dog in the pack. It was everything I could do to keep a visual on them. I don’t know what kind of animal cut this path, but it was definitely thinner than I was. My sleeves kept snagging on the cholla needles and it felt like I had impaled my feet on spikes. I kind of hop-ran sideways through the hellish landscape until the headlights faded behind me and I had to use my penlight and the occasional bark to guide me uphill toward the point where I had seen the flashlights when I arrived. At least that fortress-rock served as a decent landmark.

The very second I exited the field of cacti, I pulled off my shoes and started plucking the needles out of my socks. I had whole chunks of cholla on the bottoms of my shoes where the thick needles had been driven clear through the soles. The pain was fierce, but tolerable. The itching, however, was something else entirely. I felt like I had ants crawling under my skin as I scrabbled up the slick talus to where the path wound back behind a cluster of saguaros and entered a shallow, sloping canyon.

I didn’t know exactly where I was, but I had a general idea. This was the northern portion of the Baboquivari Mountain Range, near the point where it began to taper back into the rolling desert hills. I was roughly twenty miles east-northeast of Sells, ten miles south of I-86, and fifteen miles north of the crime scene Antone had taken me to mere hours ago. The site the CBP agent had shown me this morning was now forty-some miles southwest of here. If there was any significance to the geographical arrangement, I couldn’t see it.

The path led deeper into the canyon, down the eastern slope of the mountain. I could hear the echo of voices, but couldn’t make out the words. Flashlight beams glowed from around the bend.

The dogs started to bark. Hard. Frantic.

The voices became excited and I heard a shout and the clamor of footsteps.

I broke into a sprint and nearly barreled into a CBP agent as I rounded the bend. Had he been faster on the draw, he would have put a peephole in my chest before I shoved my badge into his face. He was jumpy and wired and his eyes stood out from his pale face like there was something pushing on them from behind.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Dogs caught a scent.”

More staccato barking. A crackle of static from the radio on the agent’s hip.

“Just a group of wets.”

I recognized Sykora’s voice.

“Someone else call it in,” a different voice replied. “You keep those dogs moving, Brant.”

“If there’s anything out here, we’ll find it. We just have to start over again.”

I inwardly cursed and blew out a long breath.

“You were the first on the scene?” I said.

The agent nodded.

“Walk me through it, Agent…” I held my light on his name patch. “…Reynolds.”

“I was cruising the Venganza Drag when Oscar seventy-four went off.”

“Oscar seventy-four?”

“Oscars are the buried sensors we plant in the desert. When they detect motion, they send a signal back to the station and dispatch relays the call to the nearest unit. They’re numbered sequentially. I was the closest patrol. Roughly Oscar sixty-seven or so. Since I couldn’t have been the one who set it off, we knew it had to be a bunch of wets.” He glanced up at me. “Undocumenteds, I mean.” A nervous smile. “So I drove out to the Oscar and found their tracks crossing the drag. We call them drags because we drag a grate along them to wipe out all of the tracks.”

“I know what a drag is.”

“Okay, okay. So I found their tracks. They crossed the drag walking backward. I mean, like that would fool anyone. Who in his right mind would leave the ‘States and risk his life crossing the desert to get into Mexico, you know? It didn’t take a genius to know they were going to try to cut across the mountains to get to the Amnesty Trail and I-86—”

“Amnesty Trail?”

“That’s what they call it. They even print maps of it down there. The idea is that if you follow the landmarks all the way up the trail to the highway, there’ll be a lookout posted in the hills to radio one of the drivers who cruise up and down the highway all day to pick them up and take them to a safehouse in Tucson or Phoenix.”

“And you know where this trail is?”

“Everybody does.”

“And you don’t just close it off?”

“We patrol it. We don’t have the manpower to just sit on it. Besides, most of the trail’s on the res and those guys like us on their land even less than the UDAs.”

He totally missed my point, but I didn’t have the time to debate it.

“So you drove up to the lot here to cut them off.”

“Right. They were moving up the eastern side of the mountains, so they wouldn’t be able to see my headlights if I stayed on the western slope. We’ve all used this canyon as a shortcut before. I was just cutting through when I heard something up ahead. Sounded kind of like someone chewing really loud. Kind of anyway. So I got out my light, drew my gun, came around the bend, and bang! Right there in front of me is a mangy old coyote. Just sitting there licking the rocks, totally oblivious to the fact that I’m standing there with a light and a gun pointed right at him. I didn’t want to shout and spook the UDAs. I mean, Lord knows if they’re packing AK-47s. So I kicked a rock at the thing and it turned to face me like I wasn’t even a threat. Its eyes flashed in the light and I saw that its muzzle was red. I took another step and it finally bolted off into the night. Another couple of steps and I turned my light onto these rocks over here…” He led me another five paces and lighted up the canyon wall with his flashlight. “…and this is what he was enjoying the hell out of licking.”

I was right. This smiley face appeared to be slightly more complete than the last. The only real difference I immediately noticed was the shape of the nose and the fact that it pointed in the opposite direction.

The blood still glistened where the coyote had been lapping at it. The remainder had dried, but not to the point of flaking. My best estimate placed the time of death at roughly twenty-four hours ago. Two nights following the Border Patrol’s discovery of the previous scene. The night before my arrival. The timing couldn’t be coincidental. Not after such a long gap between the previous two, assuming there weren’t more out there we hadn’t found yet, which at this point, felt like a fairly large assumption. It was possible the unsub was dissociating and the murders were going to start coming faster and faster until we stopped him, but I was inclined to think not. The painting was meticulous, the strokes perfectly controlled, emotionless. Even less blood had been spilled on the path. It was the exact same modus operandi. Clean slice across the neck from behind, right to left, an arterial arc on the opposite wall. Two puddles where the victim had bled out, one from the neck and the other from the abdomen. It was almost surgical in its precision. Minimal suffering. An almost compassionate execution. He painted on the wall, then dragged the body off into the mountains once more on a travois improvised from branches that obliterated his tracks behind him. There was nothing to follow beyond the strokes of the leaves and the thin stripes of the hook-like thorns. He was still in control. At least of himself.

The most pressing problem now was that he’d identified his adversary—the FBI in general, and me specifically—and had decided to raise the stakes and aggressively take me on, head-to-head. This wasn’t a case that was going to drag on indefinitely. He had directly challenged me to stop him. I knew exactly how this would end if I was able to, but the part that scared me was I had no clue what the consequences might be if I didn’t.

I shivered despite the warmth of the night and stared out over the valley to the east. The Amnesty Trail. An endless stream of victims. Infinite places to hide. The American Dream. The Valley of Death.

The killer had announced his presence and declared his intentions. If word traveled as fast as Chief Antone thought, by now the killer already knew I had declared mine.

The blood would flow again.

Soon.

My first order of business had to be figuring out who was the weak link in the chain of information. Who at the CBP had let it slip that the FBI was being called in? Was the killer an agent or just someone who monitored their communications? At this point, it was my only real lead, assuming the unsub hadn’t gotten sloppy and left something for the crime scene unit to discover, and the sooner I started chasing it—

A chaos of barking. Down the wash and to the right.

The crackle of static from Reynolds’s hip.

“They’ve got something,” Sykora said, his words barely decipherable over his frantic dogs. “It’s a clean scent. Go on guys! Get…”

I was at a dead sprint before the communication trailed off behind me, streaking straight toward the source of the barking.

ELEVEN

I passed the group of UDAs the dogs had first found. They seemed content just sitting there, passing around a water bottle one of the agents must have given them, waiting for their eventual arrest and deportation. After several days in the miserable desert heat, I’d imagine I’d be looking forward to an extended stretch in an air conditioned detention center with some warm food, too. Especially if I was about to get a free bus ride back to my family.

I hustled down the path as fast as I could, slipping on the loose gravel, sliding on slickrock, plowing through thorny bushes and dodging cacti. The barking grew louder and I could see the glow of flashlights through the mesquites at the bottom of the first valley. The dogs were going nuts. The agents were shouting. There were at least three distinct voices. Beyond them, about a mile farther down, an Explorer bounded down off of the drag and made its way up to the trail in our direction before the topography forced it to stop. The sound of the car door slamming echoed through the night. I was maybe twenty feet from the line of trees when the barking abruptly stopped.

I drew my Beretta, held my penlight beam parallel to my sightline, and approached in a shooter’s stance. I could still hear the voices, but they were softer, muffled. I pressed through the sharp branches, using my shoulder to shield my face from the thorns. They latched right into the fabric like fishhooks and tore on their way out. I heard spiders the size of my hand scuttling across the detritus away from me.

I found the agents at the bottom of a dry creek bed, where presumably water had once flowed but now only creosotes grew from the rocky soil. One of them was down on a knee, shining his light on a flat river rock with what was definitely a small spatter of blood on it. Not much really. Maybe a drop the size of a dime smeared across the length of the stone. Without the dogs there was no way we ever would have found it. I heard them thrashing through the shrubs about thirty feet to my right.

The agent rose and openly appraised me. He looked like I imagined Wilford Brimley must have in his early fifties, with the kind of mustache that appeared to wear him as an accoutrement rather than the other way around. He inclined his head and grunted. I’d dealt with enough grizzled veterans to know that his expression meant that I had been reluctantly accepted as long as I was helpful and didn’t step on any toes. I hoped my return nod purveyed the message that as long as he stayed out of my way, I wouldn’t be forced to shoot him. I figured he got the gist when he glanced at my Beretta.

The other agent was off to the side, talking into his two-way with his back to me, whispering so that he couldn’t be overheard by either of us. I tapped him on the shoulder and relived him of his radio when he turned around.

“This is Special Agent Lukas Walker,” I said into the microphone. “I need you to check and see if there was any unexplained Oscar activity last night.”

“I can’t do that without a direct order from my supervisory agent,” a woman’s voice said.

I glanced back at the man from whom I had borrowed the two-way, read his face, and peeked at his left hand where it rested on the hilt of the club tucked into his belt.

“The killer could be out here with me and your husband right now.”

A long pause.

“Give me just a second,” she finally said.

I don’t think it even took that long.

“No unusual or unexplained activity last night. Only confirmed patrol vehicles on established routes.”

“And there were no long or unnecessary delays from one Oscar to the next?”

“Not without documented arrests. Is that what you documentaries needed?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I needed to know.”

That wasn’t at all what I wanted to hear, though.

I passed the radio back to the agent and slowly turned in a circle.

The unsub knew this area. Knew it like the back of his hand. Knew it so well, in fact, that he knew exactly where all of the Oscars were and how to circumvent them without setting them off. He knew how to beat the east-west drag system. He knew not only how to remove the body from the scene of the crime, but how to get it to a vehicle of some kind and out of the area without leaving a single telltale track. He knew everything that I didn’t.  Fortunately for me, that narrowed the list of potential suspects down to a much more manageable number. I was going to have to be exceptionally careful how I approached it, though. The unsub was definitely wired into the system.

The barking stopped.

All three of us turned in unison and looked to the south.

I bolted straight toward where I had last heard the dogs, charging headlong through shrubs that tore at my clothing and dodging others that would have done serious damage to me at that speed. I couldn’t hear a blasted thing over my own ruckus, save for the distant hoot of an owl and what I could have sworn was the howl of a coyote. I burst from the mesquite thicket with the majority of my skin still attached to my bones, stumbled up a short rise, then skidded down a slick slope lined with scree. I barely stopped in time to keep from impaling myself on a flowering nopales cactus the size of a tree with pads like dinner plates. I skirted it and heard a sound so incongruous with the situation that I couldn’t initially place it. It was the sound of…laughter?

On the other side of the nopales, the dogs were running in wild circles, first one way, then the other. Noses to the ground, tails in the air, they wheeled around the small clearing, sniffing creosotes and sage and cacti and the ground, nearly colliding with each other while their handler sat on the ground between them. Sykora was laughing so hard he was crying. There was dirt on the tip of his nose. He looked up and saw me and started to say something, but ended up laughing even harder. He held up a handful of damp earth. Whatever the overture was supposed to mean, I obviously didn’t get it. The expression on his face didn’t fit with the laughter. It was one of both frustration and…admiration?

Sykora wiped the tears from his cheeks with the backs of his hands and managed to climb to his feet. The dogs continued to run aimlessly around him until he steadied them with a single gesture of his hand. One sat to either side of him as he held out the dirt again. I stared at him blankly, waiting for an explanation. Frankly, I had been starting to wonder if he’d found himself a button of peyote when he sniffed the pile in his hand and offered it to me again. His laughter trailed off. I realized I was undoubtedly looking at him with the same befuddled expression as the dogs.

“Go on,” he said. “Take a whiff. Tell me that’s not absolute genius.”

I leaned forward and was hardly within a foot of it when I smelled a foul stench and quickly recoiled.

“For the love of God! What the hell is that? It smells like piss!”

Sykora started laughing again, but stopped abruptly when he saw my face. That was one of the great things about being able to interpret facial expressions; I could also deliver them with the kind of precision that made them impossible to misread, even for someone who spent the majority of his time with animals. Even the dogs must have recognized the expression that suggested thrusting urine into the face of a man with a semi-automatic pistol dramatically shortened one’s life expectancy into the range of…oh…seconds.

“That’s exactly what it is,” Sykora said. “Coyote urine to be exact.”

“You can tell the species of animal by the smell of its pee?”

“I train tracking and rescue dogs for a living. I have whole shelves in my garage lined with bottles of urine. Tell me you wouldn’t find little details like that important if you knew you could end up off on your own and about to stumble blindly into a mountain lion’s den?”

I couldn’t fault his logic.

“What did you mean by genius?”

“Don’t you see?” He held up the handful of earth again and shook it. I think we’d reached the point in the conversation where we both recognized that he’d been holding the dirt-urine longer than absolutely necessary. He hurled it off into the shrubs. “He had the urine with him. He knew we’d have a canine unit. Not only did he cover his tracks, he confused his scent trail. The urine is so concentrated that the dogs can’t smell anything else over it. We’re going to have to go back, find his scent again, then try to pick it up out there in the open desert. That’s if we’re lucky. Between all of us and the arrival of the crime scene unit, we’ve undoubtedly destroyed whatever scent trail was once there. This guy knows exactly what he’s doing. He even sprayed the urine in what looks like a spiral pattern to get the dogs running in circles. Chasing their own tails. Get it?”

I shook my head.

“Then go back and start again. We need any lead we can possibly get.”

“Do you really think someone smart enough to think of using coyote urine to fool the dogs would be careless enough to leave anything resembling a trail leaving this clearing?”

I shot him a look that said he had about three seconds before I shot him with something else. Whatever else he might have been, Sykora was not a stupid man. He and his dogs vanished back in the same direction from which we had come at about the same time the other agents finally arrived. The younger version of Wilford Brimley crinkled his nose.

“Coyote bitch,” he said.

Apparently you could also tell the sex of an animal by the smell of its piss. There was a whole world of urine intricacies out there to explore. I was totally missing out on all of the fun.

It wasn’t until that moment that I realized just how out of my element I truly was. I was going to have to modify my approach if I had any hope of catching the unsub. He wanted us to catch him, but not yet. Not until he’d completed his grand design and delivered his message. And he wanted to have a little bit of fun at our expense in the process, namely by demonstrating his superiority by outthinking and outmaneuvering us. He knew the established law enforcement protocols, both federal and tribal, and had spent much time planning clever ways to subvert them.

I walked away from the other agents and crested the adjacent ridge. The Sonoran Desert stretched away from me into the darkness, past where the agent was picking his way uphill with his flashlight, past his car with its headlights staring blankly in our direction, and all the way to the unmarred eastern horizon.

He was out there right now.

I could feel it.

Coyote is the master of deception. If anyone knew his tricks, he would undoubtedly find his paw in a snare.

The King of Lies.

You mock me, but you don’t know the desert. Coyote is the most mischievous trickster of all, and it’s thanks to the ineptitude of your policies that we have so many coyotes running amok out here.

The Killer.

I had a Beretta Px4 Storm .40 caliber under my left arm, there was a sawed-off twelve gauge Remington bolted to the console between us, and Antone had a Smith & Wesson M&P .357 magnum semiautomatic in a holster under his right.

The Coyote.

Somewhere in the distance, an animal I was beginning to revile yipped and howled at the moon, its voice echoing off into eternity.