Текст книги "The Coyote"

Автор книги: Michael McBride

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

SIXTEEN

After I left Roman sitting in his chair, I made the eighty-minute drive into Tucson to buy a small refrigerated unit that plugged into the cigarette lighter of my car and a full case of Arrowhead water. I was hoping to expense it, but at this point I didn’t care in the slightest. It was odd…two days ago I looked at bottled water as a scam perpetrated by greedy corporations hoping to make money off of a product that was essentially free to them and refused to contribute any of my money to their coffers. On principle. Today, I viewed it as emergency medical intervention, the potential difference between life and death. I also got myself a big, greasy, sloppy burger. That was a luxury I simply couldn’t pass up. Nor was the two hour nap I took in the back seat. I was hoping not to have to use the signal jammer I picked up at Radio Shack, but better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it. By the time I headed back out into the open desert, I felt like a new man. I was refreshed, mind and body, and I had gained something of a new perspective.

I was approaching this case from the wrong angle. I was following the unsub, allowing him to lead me to his ultimate message. Instead, I needed to be proactive. If I was correct in my assumption that his goal—at least his first goal—was to complete the smiley face design, then I already knew his figurative destination. Rather than waiting for him to get there, I needed to head him off at the pass. There was something we had obviously overlooked at the crime scenes. The Coyote had used urine to obfuscate his trail for one simple reason: if we’d been able to follow it, it would have led us directly to him. It was often the most simplistic logic, the kind employed by children, which led to the greatest discoveries. I needed to go back to the beginning and start all over again.

Something my grandfather used to say kept playing over and over in my mind.

Show’em the left and bring the right.

It was a fighting metaphor. Distract your opponent with some left-handed jabs so he doesn’t see the knockout blow you’re about to deliver with your right coming.

I couldn’t help but think that this was exactly what the Coyote was doing with the smiley faces; distracting us with a grand design to prevent us from uncovering his true goal. I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that whatever it was had to be far worse than I could imagine.

I ended up driving through Sells on my way to the crime scene Agent Randall had shown me yesterday morning, the second chronologically. It was a different place in the heat of the day. School must have just let out. There were children kicking a soccer ball in a dirt field, others playing in the parking lot of a nameless restaurant serving what smelled like spiced beef, beans, and tortillas from buckets on folding tables. There were families eating and laughing together, sitting in the beds of their pickups or on the hoods of their cars or at the picnic tables I could barely see through the condensation on the inside of the front window behind the servers. I smiled as I drove past. They were so busy enjoying themselves that no one even looked in my direction.

That wasn’t entirely true.

There was one person toward the side of the lot. His eyes were locked on my car the entire time. The T-shirt under his flannel was brown with dirt and grime. As were his jeans, which had bloody handprints smeared across the thighs. Rattlesnake skins hung from what looked like an artist’s easel beside him, over which they’d been stretched to dry. The innards of the snakes were laid out before him like long sausages or already chopped up in the bucket next to his cutting block.

I nodded to him despite the tinted glass and watched in my rearview mirror as he stared at my car until he vanished from sight.

I had a hunch my newfound cousin Ban wasn’t quite as happy to see me as my uncle was. And based on the way I had left him, I didn’t imagine I would be getting an invitation to the Walker family reunion this year. Or any other.

I sensed overt hostility there that I couldn’t quite rationalize. I won’t pretend I understand anything about reservation life. I get the fact that my father violated some unwritten code. I know that his decision to leave was a betrayal on many levels, but there was something else that no one was telling me. I could see it in their eyes. They were keeping something from me, something that still bothered them, even so many years after my father’s passing. Considering I was a stranger and I couldn’t imagine any of them gave a rat’s ass about my feelings for them or anyone else, I couldn’t think of a single good reason not to just hit me squarely in the face with it. It didn’t help that I was a federal agent either. I must have embodied pretty much everything they hated in a single package that looked just like any of them.

While the anger in my cousin’s eyes was understandable, I was having a hard time interpreting his facial expression. It was almost as though he wasn’t wearing one at all, as though he had a permanently bland affect, an emotional void. I was going to have to look into that. Not necessarily because I cared about him or about mending fences on my father’s behalf, but because in much the same way as Chief Antone, he was an enigma to me.

I was still pondering the way he had stared at me through the car window, as though he could actually see me through the dark tint, as I picked my way higher along the treacherous path Randall had guided me up for the second time in as many days. I was so lost in thought, in fact, that I didn’t notice I wasn’t alone until I heard the skitter of pebbles.

I suppose a normal person’s response to an unexpected noise is to look up and evaluate the situation. I drew my Beretta and aimed it at the source.

Two men burst from behind a clump of cholla and sprinted away from me.

Blue jeans and cowboy boots. Dirty button-downs with fake pearl snaps. Hair wet with sweat.

Immigrants.

I jerked my finger out of the trigger guard before I shot them both in the back of the knee.

The woman who had been killed here had never stood a chance.

I stepped around the cholla and found myself staring down the sightline of my pistol into three dirty faces, the whites of their wide eyes a stark contrast to their filthy skin. They were just kids. The oldest was a boy who couldn’t have been more than eighteen years old. The girl he cautiously eased behind him and out of the line of fire appeared to be a few years younger. The third was a mop-haired boy who couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen. He started to cry.

“La Migra?” the older boy said. He stared me up and down and then repeated the words. “La Migra?”

I shook my head slowly back and forth and lowered my weapon.

The older boy’s expression metamorphosed from terror to bewilderment to understanding in the span of a heartbeat. I could only continue to stare as they leapt up from the ground where they’d been cowering and ran right past me. I stared down at the bloody needles of the dead cholla clusters on which they’d been kneeling as they raced toward the open desert in the same direction as the older men who had abandoned them to their fates.

I hoped that I hadn’t just done the exact same thing.

I heard the scrabbling sounds of their shoes on the gravel and rock, the clatter of talus as they slid downhill, the scraping of the mesquite branches across their clothing, and then a hollow thump. Then another. And another still.

I turned and looked downhill, to where the loose scree slid down into the yellow weeds at the edge of the mesquites. The branches still swayed where the children had shoved through and into the dry creek bed. I never took my eyes from that spot as I slipped and slid and skidded down. I pushed through the now-still branches and weeds that tangled around my ankles, stomping the ground as I went.

Stomp.

Stomp.

Stomp.

Stomp.

I hopped down into the sandy creek bed and turned around. I could see the signs of their passage. The bent and broken branches. The trampled weeds. The collapsed edge of what was once a rocky bank. I stared at one point that didn’t look quite right for a long moment, then raised my foot and stomped on it.

Thump.

I did it again.

Thump.

I dropped to my knees and brushed at the sand and gravel, but they didn’t move. I could have sworn I smelled a trace of urine. I swept my hands to either side until I found the straight edges of what appeared to be a large square board and fully exposed them. I dug my fingers into the dirt, grabbed one edge with either hand, and lifted it upward. The board came away with minimal resistance. It was only an inch thick and about two feet tall by two and a half feet wide, but it was large enough to conceal the mouth of the tunnel that led down into the earth.

SEVENTEEN

Everyone knows about Pavlovian or Classical Conditioning. Whenever Pavlov fed his dog, he would ring a bell. Eventually his dogs began to salivate at the mere sound of the bell. A specific physiological reaction had been conditioned in response to an external stimulus. Another, lesser know facet of this psychological concept is generalization. You let a boy pet a rabbit and every time he does, you scare the hell out of him by clanging two pipes behind his head. In time, he grows to fear not only the rabbit, but every other furry white animal. Even a fur coat. A specific reaction to a general stimulus. Further down the chart you come to odor generalization, which is an unusual phenomenon wherein your brain conditions itself with a kind of sensory memory. It remembers the worst thing you’ve ever smelled and categorizes it as such so that whenever you smell something really dreadful, your brain interprets that scent to be the classically conditioned odor of memory.

In my case, it was the scent of a stagnant warm-water slough in the San Louis Valley marshes. My grandfather took me duck hunting there about twenty years ago and, I kid you not, the smell that belched out of the vile black mud when I slogged through it in hip waders was like burying my face in a fat man’s crack after he ate a ton of chili seasoned with sulfur, and inhaling deeply when he passed damp wind. Ever since, I haven’t been able to smell cabbage soup, a park trash barrel, a gym locker room, or enter a port-o-potty without their rather ordinary scent generalizing into that flatus-bog odor.

Until today.

The horrific stench that came from the dark hole in the earth was worse than anything I had ever encountered. This one was going to be with me for the rest of my life, I was certain. It was how I imagined the asphalt might smell after driving by the same dead dog on the side of the highway every day for an entire sweltering summer, watching the fur rot off and the flesh putrify and the scavenger birds pick at it and the insects dissolve it, hoping someone would come along and scrape it up, and when no one ever did, finally pulling over with a spoon and trying to do it myself. I was going to miss that fat man and his sulfur-chili, because after this, that was going to be a fond childhood memory.

The flies didn’t seem to mind, though. I could hear the echoing drone of their contented buzzing coming from the depths, beyond the range of my penlight.

If this was my reward for not shooting those undocumenteds, I was going to need to have a little chat with the man upstairs about his incentive plan.

I pulled my shirt up over my mouth and nose and bit it to hold it in place. A couple of deep breaths proved that the smell had already invaded my sinuses and there was no way of evicting it now, so I resigned myself to breathing through my mouth. I held out my Beretta and my penlight and slithered into the hole behind them.

The tunnel was barely wide enough to accommodate my shoulders. There was no way I would be able to turn around. If I ran into trouble, I was going to have to back blindly out. Fortunately, whoever had constructed it had put some serious thought into its design. There was rudimentary cribbing made from scrap wood supporting irregular plywood remnants. Based on the texture and the color of the wood, it had been down here for years. At least I knew the sand and rocks weren’t going to collapse on me and bury me alive with this rotten stench.

The dirt floor was scarred with scratches I was now easily able to identify as the thorns of mesquite branches. There were coarse ridges that suggested the tunnel had originally been dug with a collapsible shovel or spade. They hurt my elbows and knees, but at least they provided some traction.

My beam caught up with the black flies, casting shadowy blobs across the rock wall where the tunnel appeared to terminate. They grew larger and larger as I neared. Their buzzing grew louder and louder. I’d been wrong to think the smell couldn’t get any worse. It somehow amplified itself with each wriggling movement I made until the ground vanished beneath my arms and I found myself staring down into a small cave roughly the size of a refrigerator box. At least I could rise to my hands and knees, which made locating the mouth of the tunnel opposite me even easier. I had to swat the bloated flies out of my face as I advanced deeper into the earth. Eventually, this second tunnel opened up into another cave where I found the source of the smell and the flies’ delight. There were broken mesquite branches in the corner, their withered leaves and thorns crusted with blood. Beside them were wadded balls of Saran Wrap that were a sickly shade of black and positively covered with flies.

He had dragged the body in here, removed it from its travois, wrapped it in cellophane to contain the smells of decomposition and putrefaction, and left it down here for some length of time—presumably the duration of the physical investigation—before coming back to retrieve it. That’s why we had lost his trail so easily and had been unable to pick it back up. There hadn’t been one to follow, at least not at that time. And he used the same urine trick to conceal the hidden hatch. For all I knew, he could have been sitting down here in the darkness with it that entire time. Hell, he could still be down here…right…now.

I rose to my feet and turned slowly around. I was in a natural formation roughly the size of a walk-in closet, with smooth stone walls that leaned inward toward each other and met about a foot above my head. Ancient petroglyphs had aged to nearly indistinguishable impressions. There was another tunnel up near where the rocks formed a pinnacled ceiling. I shined my light up into it to make sure the way was clear, and then hauled myself up into the confines. Again, I found myself nearly wedged in there as I squirmed farther into the mountain. I figured I had to be somewhere under the stone wall upon which the second smiley face, chronologically, had been painted.

I won’t pretend to be a geologist. I know nothing about the different kinds of rocks beyond the fact that sandstone crumbles, granite is hard and gray, and limestone is smooth and subject to the erosive forces of water. Whatever this was, it was red and smooth and had been channeled by forces far older and stronger than man.

The passage wound to my right and then started a steady ascent. I saw occasional smears of bodily dissolution. This was the path he had used to remove the remains.

My pulse thundered in my ears. My erratic breaths echoed back at me from the stone walls. I could barely see my gun ahead of me. I could be wiggling right into some kind of trap and I wouldn’t know it until my spirit was looking back down at my lifeless corpse.

And then, abruptly, the tunnel ended.

I managed to roll over onto my back and directed my penlight upward. A natural stone chute of sorts led straight up. It took some doing, but I worked my way to standing and shined my light over the walls. There were what almost looked like small recessed shelves leading up into the darkness. Perfectly designed for one hand and one foot to either side. I worked my way upward until I ran out of up and shoved another wooden slab out into the fresh air, which, even though it was superheated, felt absolutely divine as it washed over me, filled my lungs, and cleansed my sinuses of the smell of festering death.

I climbed out, blinking, into the blinding light and sat on the edge with my legs dangling back down into the shadows. The wooden slab had been adorned with a stone that made it almost invisible. You would have to know what it was to distinguish it from the surrounding rocks, from the cracks between which all sorts of blossoming cacti grew. Massive red rock formations rose all around me. From where I sat, I could no more see the surrounding desert than anyone out there could see me. I was about to start climbing up the rocks to figure out exactly where I was when I caught the reflection of the sun from something metallic beside me. A thin, coiled wire poked out of the ground at the edge of the hole. I pinched it between my fingers and pulled on it, exposing its length all the way to the base of a prickly pear, where a small radio transmitter had been fitted into a crevice near its roots.

A tiny red light blinked on the face of the black box.

The Coyote knew I was here.

EIGHTEEN

There was no time to pat myself on the back. The moment I triggered that transmitter, I had accelerated my adversary’s timetable. He wouldn’t have equipped a beacon like that unless by finding that cave I was closing in on him. While that in itself was an encouraging thought, I still didn’t have any idea who the Coyote was. The only new knowledge I had added to my woefully sad stockpile were the facts that he knew things about this desert that few, if any, other people did; he’d been planning this for what had to have been years; and his shoulders couldn’t have been much broader than mine. And he was strong. Dragging a body was more difficult than one might think. We were talking about a minimum of a hundred pounds of dead weight, no pun intended. Probably more. And somehow pulling it behind him while he squirmed on his belly, then hauling it up and out of the earthen tube.

I debated calling in a crime scene response team from the Phoenix office to scour the cave and the egresses from it, but I knew they wouldn’t find anything useful. The Coyote had planned this too meticulously to be careless when it mattered most. He had anticipated someone finding his hidey-hole at some point and surely took all of the proper precautions to keep from leaving prints or shedding trace evidence. They wouldn’t have found anything beyond the victim’s unmatchable DNA in the tunnel he had used to exit the warren either. If I was correct and he had dragged the remains down the western face of the rocks, there was nothing in which to leave a footprint and the wind was blowing right across the mountainside, scouring it of even the dust that coated damn near everything else on the reservation. And there wasn’t a track of any kind in the surrounding desert as far as I could see.

I wouldn’t be able to sit on these findings for very long, though. If I didn’t make some significant headway on my own—and soon—I was risking charges of my own for withholding evidence. I refused to let this go out over the open airwaves where the Coyote would be able to track all of our movements as we negotiated every little investigative step with all of the overlapping law enforcement agencies on the reservation. Not yet, anyway.

The Coyote had considered every variable I could think of, at least at the first scene. I was hoping I would have better luck at the others. I couldn’t afford to give him any more time to go back over the crime scenes. After all, if he followed the same pattern, it was a distinct possibility that the third body was still on site, which was why I was streaking across the desert as fast as I could, racing a rooster tail of dust and the Border Patrol agents who would undoubtedly be converging on the site once they found my tracks. The radio frequency jammer was only going to buy me enough of a head start to have a little quality alone time, so I was going to have to make it count. The last thing I wanted was for someone who could be the leak, or even the killer himself, to intrude upon the scene and spoil whatever slim chance I had of discovering something new.

I easily recognized the fortress-rock from miles away and found the turnaround at the base of the field of cholla without much difficulty. The small dirt lot, if it indeed qualified as such, was littered with tire treads and footprints and trash. Identifying any new tracks would be a hopeless proposition. I could only pray the crime scene response team had taken more care higher up.

I killed the bottle I was drinking, tossed it to the floor on the passenger side, and grabbed another from the tiny cooler. I shoved it into the pocket of my windbreaker and stepped out into the afternoon sun. It felt as though there was no distance between the sun and me at all. I had my Beretta in my hand and was sprinting up the winding path, heedless of the needles raking my jacket and the rattling sounds coming from seemingly all around me, before I even formulated a plan.

How much time had elapsed since I triggered the alarm beacon? An hour maybe? Ninety minutes? What could he have accomplished in that amount of time and what agenda had I unwittingly set into motion? I had no backup and no one I could fully trust, and I knew with complete certainty that more blood was going to flow. Soon. I could feel it in my bones.

And I still didn’t have the slightest idea of how to stop it.

I burst from the path, scrambled up the slope, rounded the fortress, and dropped down into the canyon. The smiley face was still exactly how I remembered it. The blood was still clumped in the sand on the trail. A length of police tape hung listlessly between the stone walls. I figured after the CRST finished gathering evidence, all caution would be thrown to the wind. I wasn’t disappointed. There were footprints everywhere. I few Styrofoam coffee cups and plastic water bottles. Cigarette butts. It didn’t matter. I had the advantage of knowing what I was looking for this time, assuming he hadn’t dramatically altered his MO. And I sensed that he hadn’t. With as much time and effort as he had invested into the first, I saw no reason to suspect he hadn’t put even more planning into this one.

If I was right, he had chosen these locations because of whatever underground features already existed or he’d been able to excavate while hidden from view by the canyon walls. After all, each of the murders had taken place in a mountainous location despite the countless miles of open desert, rolling hills, cactus fields, and dry washes with ample hiding places in between. No, the location was every bit as important as the message, and I needed to figure out why.

I stomped straight down the trail through the narrow canyon. I stomped all the way down into the trees. I stomped right up to the point where I had found Sykora laughing himself to tears while holding a handful of piss-dirt. I could still faintly smell the lingering ammonia odor of the coyote urine as I stomped around the spiral pattern and continued upward toward the crest of the same hill upon which I had stood last night until I heard a muffled thump.

I took a step backward and stomped on that point again.

Thump.

The dirt that had blown over the wooden square shivered. I needed to be even more careful this time. A smart man anticipating his impending capture might try to booby trap the lid of the hatch. A brilliant man would play his game right up until the final hand was dealt. I was about to find out what kind of man I was up against.

I brushed the sand away from the edges until I revealed all four sides. Rocks and gravel and even a small cactus had been affixed to the lid of the hatch with some sort of clear epoxy. So much care had been taken in its construction that I could barely discern it from the surrounding ground, even on my hands and knees. I cleared the sand and pebbles from around it, searching for wires or electronic devices of any kind, but found nothing.

For a full minute, I just knelt there staring at it. Finally, I opened the bottle of water, took a long swig, then poured the remainder around the seams of the hatch. No electrical hissing or sparks. Just the sound of water trickling down into the earth.

“No time like the present,” I said out loud.

I hoped no one had heard. That would have made a lousy epitaph.

I lifted the slab slowly and carefully in an effort to detect even the slightest resistance from underneath. Once I had it high enough to peer below the hatch, I was able to confirm that there was nothing attached to it and set it off to my right.

The stench that erupted from the hole in front of me struck me like an uppercut, obliterating the generalization of the previous odor. I guess I should have considered myself fortunate to have found the other one first so I wouldn’t have had to relive this gut-wrenching smell twice. I barely had time to cover my mouth and nose before I lost my lunch. I had greatly enjoyed that burger the first time, but figured I probably wouldn’t so much the second.

The tunnel into which I now stared had originally been dug by an animal of some kind. The burrow was rounded and angled down under the rock formation that covered it. It was roughly the size of the previous one, but curved deeper into the hillside mere feet down. I shined my light inside. Shadowed forms scuttled away from the beam. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember if a scorpion’s sting was lethal and really didn’t want to find out, but I was running out of time. I took a deep breath of the relatively clean air, then dove down into the vile darkness and the mud of my own creation, following my light and my pistol past the bend and into a warren approximately the size and shape of the interior of a Volkswagen Beetle.

Above me was the coarse underside of the massive red rock. Several strands of roots trailed from the cracks around it. The walls had been scraped by what appeared to be generations of coyote claws. At least I thought they were coyotes. They could have been medium-size dogs. I mean, without their heads and legs, the half-dozen carcasses could have belonged to just about any sandy-furred canine species. Their remains had been in the process of consumption and decomposition for quite some time. The bones had been picked clean, save for the greasy yellow adipose layer that still clung to the fur draped over the skeletons, which rippled with unseen critters scurrying around beneath. They made clicking and crunching sounds, and I could have sworn I even heard the muffled buzz of a rattle, but I was in no hurry to find out what inhabited the carcasses. At least now I knew where the Coyote had gotten his paintbrush-paws. I had no idea what he had planned for their heads, though. At least, not yet.

I didn’t initially see the opposite egress from the den behind the heap of carcasses. I imagined the Coyote chuckling at the idea of me crawling over the infested remains. I was going to take a little extra pleasure in taking him down for making me.

Crawling over the remains without sticking any of my body parts into the mess or disturbing the creatures inside of them was an almost superhuman feat, but I somehow managed to do it and slithered into the hole behind them. This one featured the same makeshift cribbing as the last, built from scraps and remnants. I assumed the killer had stolen them from various building sites, but I couldn’t prematurely rule out the possibility that he actually worked in construction. The wood here was newer than the last instance, for whatever that was worth. I hadn’t gone twenty feet before the tunnel suddenly ended in a natural rock formation reminiscent of a wide chimney. The faintest hint of light arched down from high above, glittering with motes of dust, while only darkness waited below.

I couldn’t believe I was even thinking about attempting this.

I holstered my pistol, bit the penlight between my teeth, and pulled myself out over the nothingness. Sand and pebbles slid over the rim and clattered to the ground seconds later. I braced my forearms against the smooth rocks to either side, arched my back, and pressed my knees and toes against the far side. Progress was maddeningly slow as I inched downward, turning my head from side to side and up and down in an effort to visualize my surroundings. Ancient petroglyphs shaped like palm prints had been scored into the walls, along with various animals and stylized hybrids I couldn’t see clearly enough to identify. The recurrent native symbology wasn’t lost on me. It could be significant, yet, at the same time, it could also be meant to deliberately mislead.

Just when I thought I would never reach the bottom, my feet touched solid ground and I collapsed to my hands and knees. All of my muscles seemed to be trembling at once and I was confident I’d peeled the skin off of my back, elbows, and knees. I hoped I wasn’t going to have to go back up the same way because I flat out didn’t have it in me. Fortunately, it only took a minute to find the way out. Just enough sunlight leaked through the cracks around a large stone that I could tell it didn’t quite fit perfectly. It also allowed me to see the starburst of blood from where the body had been dropped down the chute. The rocks beside and above the makeshift egress had been braced with wood and epoxy to hold them in place. I rolled the center stone outward and recoiled from the sudden influx of sunlight. I blinked until I could see again, then crawled out into the murderous heat. I hadn’t realized how cool it had been underground until I emerged.

The tripwire sparkled to my right, but it no longer mattered that I had triggered it.

From where I crouched, I could see the point where the east-west drag terminated against the mountain. Right where the Border Patrol agent had parked last night before starting uphill on foot. All someone needed to do was back up to the end of the gravel road, haul the body out, and throw it—