CHAPTER 1
We don’t have a lot of murder in Lincoln County. The long stretches of open road provide us with more than our share of high-speed vehicular deaths, the images of which can haunt your dreams, but there just isn’t a lot of people killing other people on purpose. When we do encounter it, it’s never like this. This is something from hell.
The crime scene is monstrous. The victim, retired FBI agent Ralph Atterbury, has been skinned, mostly on his arms and thighs, and strips of various lengths and thicknesses lay like lasagna noodles on the floor around the recliner to which his naked seventy-four-year-old corpse is bound by two blue ratchet tie-downs, like the ones people use to secure a new fridge in the bed of a pickup. The straps are as tight as they possibly can be, boa constrictors around tiny mice, feeling every last heartbeat of their prey.
His face, nose, and lips have been blowtorched, his nipples blackened like cinders. His fingers, all broken, are folded back in a horrible, twisted wreckage, and most of his teeth have been pulled and lie floating in a mug of cold coffee next to bloody pliers on a nearby end table. In this entire nightmare painting, it’s the sight of the teeth that sends an icy shudder down my spine. Imagining the pain he endured and the horrific screams that must have followed is a little more than I can handle at the moment, so I will let those things come to me at night when I am alone.
The blood still smells of metal and is plentiful. It’s all dried up now, even the purge that has oozed from what’s left of the victim’s mouth and nose, indicating he has been dead for a few days. He’s also bloating from the gases that have leached out of his dead organs, and the smell of the sulfur in his body is especially overwhelming. The rate of human decomposition is fairly predictable but depends on temperature, moisture, pH, and oxygen. While it’s cold and dry outside, as February tends to be here, the heat in the house is only speeding the rot. I check the thermostat on a nearby wall and see the furnace is on full blast. Jesus, did the killer turn up the heat?
It’s a level of torture I’ve never witnessed, and that includes what I’ve seen the Taliban do. So, I have to ask, “Tuffy, until Mr. Atterbury here, what was our most violent murder?”
My best deputy suddenly drops to one knee, and I silently call on the Gods to keep her from retching again. The first time triggered a chain reaction around the room. Thankfully, she is genuflecting only to get a better angle on ex-agent Atterbury, her camera clicking every few seconds, occasionally firing off a quick flash followed by the little popping noise that invariably follows as it recharges.
Tuffy Scruggs is one of my twelve officers at the sheriff’s department and my lead sexual assault investigator. This looks like the furthest thing from any kind of sex crime, but everyone in the department wears a bunch of hats, and Tuffy is meticulous. She’s built more like Dick Butkus than Dick Tracy, and from the back you would be hard-pressed to guess her gender, especially when she’s in uniform like she is now.
I watch her deep in thought, in her crime scene booties and gloves, her thick, tightly wound sandy curls glistening from the sweat of her perspiring scalp in the overheated house that smells of burnt flesh and murder. Always über-efficient, she had the exterior of the residence taped off before most of the team arrived, not that anyone expects a lot of rubbernecking and foot traffic from the public way out here. Tuffy values good habits, which is the biggest reason I appreciate her.
“It was that domestic in Alamo in 2014,” Wardell Spann finally answers for Tuffy. He’s scanning the living-room carpet with his flashlight for more blood, as if that will somehow provide the clue to solving the case. “April, I believe. Old Mexican shot his wife three times and then hung her.”
Wardell is my only lieutenant in the department, the product of an unhappy marriage of convenience, specifically the consolidation of the City of Caliente police with the county sheriff’s department, a deal finalized last month. I know he feels like the unwanted stepchild in this arrangement, and I don’t really begrudge the man his displeasure. As Caliente police chief, Wardell had ten years on me, a fact he shares with the rest of the county’s electorate whenever he gets the chance.
I say to him, “He was Dominican, not Mexican.” I don’t consider myself particularly woke, as I understand the term, but still, calling someone Mexican just because he’s brown is a bit tiresome. Wardell is a flat-out racist, and out in the high desert of eastern Nevada, where about two black people live at any given time, you might think he would be in good company, but not so much anymore. People here are pretty twenty-first century and generally accepting of others, which explains why Wardell will never be sheriff.
I pretend I don’t notice him staring at me with death ray eyes. “Like there’s a difference,” he mutters, cracking his big knuckles. I let it go, as stepdads sometimes have to.
My attention makes its way back to the decedent. “Either of you know him very well?”
Tuffy shakes her head but doesn’t look up from her work as she gets more close-up shots of the burns. “Met him a few times,” Wardell says. “Thought he was a bit of a weirdo.”
I can’t stand the smell any longer. Bad smells trigger my stomach worse than anything you’d see in a Tarantino movie. “Have we processed the windows yet? We have to vent this place.”
“Give me a sec, boss,” Tuffy says, setting her camera down.
“Five will get you ten it’s a robbery,” says Wardell. “Addicts most likely.”
I scan the interior of the house, wondering what on earth could possess him to think this is a robbery gone wrong. Yes, there are huge holes in the drywall and every room has been tossed. But the victim has been burned and skinned and … and then I see it. A box on the kitchen counter. About the size of a box of dishwasher detergent. Thallium salts. Very old. Not something you see every day. I flash on a memory from a previous life, gruesome pictures running through my brain.
For anyone else this would be a teaching moment. “That seems unlikely to me, Wardell. This was an ex–FBI agent tortured for what looks like hours. He was a man living on a pension, and while his killer appears to have been looking for something, it wasn’t money. Look around, with all this damage, his guns are still in his cabinet in the corner there, his money and ID still in his wallet. It doesn’t look like anything was actually stolen, does it?”
Wardell surveys the living room, scowling like one of the bad guys that gets killed at the end of every episode of Bonanza or Gunsmoke. “What do you think happened here, professor?” he asks.
I swear I’m looking forward to his retirement as eagerly as a nun getting ready to leave the convent. “Something … else.”
I wander outside to check the exterior of the home. I recall seeing it under construction, wondering who would want a place this far out in the sticks, set in front of the vast Big Rocks Wilderness where the wind has two speeds, hard and harder, your immediate neighbors are rattlesnakes, and boulders the size of multistory office buildings line up like rows of soldiers guarding the high ground. To build out here, you’re seeking one thing. Privacy. Hell, it’s a four-mile dirt road just to get to where I’m standing. The house is completely off the grid. Solar panels on the roof provide the power, and internet and telephone are available only via satellite. There’s no cell service this far off the highway.
The structure itself is nice, single story, Spanish tile roof, smooth stucco finish with a marbled color that blends nicely with the ancient formations behind it like a chameleon camouflaging itself on a branch. There is a little vegetation poking out of the snow, not much, mostly cactus and a few trees, all natural and not requiring any time or love come summer. The windows are intact, and none of the exterior doors have been jimmied or kicked in. A lot of people in this county don’t lock their doors, but I envision a retired G-man to be naturally less trusting of strangers, which means he might have known the killer or decided to let him in for some reason. Who would you let in that might end up torturing you?
Back in the house, I watch as my deputies recover and impound as much evidence as possible, a process that will surely take the rest of the afternoon. My eyes find the many plaques attesting to Atterbury’s days in law enforcement now strewn, broken and bloodstained on the floor. I take another look at his driver’s license, my mind instantly recalling the times and places I’ve seen him. That’s how my noggin works, cataloging faces, even when I don’t want to. I can do it with words, too. Whatever I hear somehow gets logged into my memory banks like old pictures. It’s a skill that served me well in the military but it makes it impossible to forget the details of life’s painful moments, a blessing some days, a curse on others. While I had met Ralph just a couple of times, I had seen him around the county plenty, mostly driving in that forever dust-covered black Sierra of his. What were you up to down here, Agent Atterbury?
I ask New Guy Pete to go out and process Atterbury’s truck. “You need help with that?” Pete was first on scene, the result of a welfare check requested by the dead man’s daughter in Ohio who says she’s been trying to get her dad on the phone since Wednesday. Today is Friday.
“I’m good, Sheriff,” Pete says.
“It’s Beck,” I tell him. “You don’t have to call me sheriff.”
Pete Alexander seems like a decent guy. Ex–military police, early thirties, bright, handsome in that Ken doll sort of way, and the only one of us who hasn’t tossed his lunch yet. I make a mental note: impervious to chain reactions. He has only been on the job about sixty days and is Wardell’s hire, a not-so-subtle middle finger in my face. I had asked him to wait so that we could interview more candidates, but Wardell can be like an old dog with a bone pretending to be hearing impaired.
When my newest deputy exits the house, I remind Wardell that Pete still needs to go to the state academy up north, before he can be a permanent officer.
“Christ,” Wardell grunts. “The guy’s been a cop for ten years.”
“Not here.” I decide not to mention that Wardell is still wearing his Caliente police uniform, an entity that no longer exists. It seems petty when you’re in the company of a mutilated corpse, plus there’s the fact that my preferred uniform is blue jeans and a flannel jacket, a point Wardell would surely raise and I would have to counter by saying something about a sheriff’s prerogative.
Wardell is a man who always has to have the last word, and accordingly walks over to Tuffy. “Addicts, I’m telling you,” he says under his breath before turning those death rays on me again. “Probably Dominicans.”
That would be a long shot. Yes, the drug problem in Lincoln County has been booming over the last few years, mostly heroin and other opioids, as they’re cheap and easy to get, even in cow counties like mine. And it is an incredibly violent world. But when I look down at poor ex-agent Atterbury again, I’m certain his death is not a product of that world. Addicts would have taken something. Televisions, computers, something they could turn into quick money on the street. And those wounds were delivered with a steady hand, probably not what you’d find on a junkie looking to score. This was the work of someone with a purpose.
I say to Tuffy, “Best call down to the Vegas FBI office and let them know one of their retirees has been murdered. Maybe they want to send someone up here. And loop in our friends at Metro.”
“Sure, Beck.”
It’s what everyone calls me. Nobody but my family and my signature uses my first name, which is Porter.
I ask, “Who’s working next of kin?”
“Let’s have Pete do it,” Tuffy says. “He took the daughter’s call.”
“Good. Neighbor canvass?”
Collecting dried flecks of blood off the carpet and scraping them into a sterile container, Wardell grunts again but with more disdain this time. “Well, I don’t hear anyone volunteering, so I guess that’s me.” He drops the container into an evidence bag.
“Excellent. Thanks, Wardell.” When we use the term neighbors here, nobody means a two-block radius. People are spread out. By area, Lincoln County is the seventh largest county in the nation, roughly the size of Maryland, and neighbors are anyone living within twenty miles. And out here at the base of Big Rocks Wilderness, it might be forty miles.
That box on the kitchen island turns my head again. I walk back in and take a longer look at it. Thallium. “And Tuffy, make sure we recover this and process it for prints.” When I give instructions like this, it sounds like I really know my crime scene stuff. It’s not so much from my experience as sheriff. As I mentioned, we just don’t see crimes up here like this. But I’ve been around the darker side of the world. And I remember it all.
She’s bagging the decedent’s hands to preserve any possible trace evidence. “Will do.”
“And let’s ask the coroner’s office to get some swabs of Mr. Atterbury’s mouth and throat.”
“Yes, boss.”
Please be wrong, I think. Please be wrong.
CHAPTER 2
I’m deep in thought, staring down at the pictures of the tortured body of Ralph Atterbury, and don’t see her walk into my office, which is not exactly expansive. Her words don’t register either, and I can understand why that might set someone off. I’m just lost in my own world sometimes.
“I’m sorry. Are you not Sheriff Beck?”
The question finally reaches the hamster in my brain—currently on a smoke break apparently—in charge of processing incoming messages, causing my head to lift slowly from the desk. “Why do you say it that way?”
She is striking. Mid-thirties, by my almost-always-accurate age calculator. Long black hair parted in the center of a perfect Middle Eastern head. Dark eyes to go with her olive skin, an annoyed look on her slightly red lips. “Pardon?” she asks.
“You said, ‘Are you not Sheriff Beck?’” I’m still examining her, making mental notes, certain she knows I’m contemplating where our wedding should take place. She’s in a tan leather jacket that stops at her waist, too light for this weather—so she is definitely from out of state. Gray scarf draped around her long neck that falls nicely onto her white T-shirt, beneath which I can see the product of a lot of core training and hot yoga. She’s several inches shorter than me, about five foot eight and maybe all of a hundred and twenty-five pounds with her clothes on. Zero body fat, a BMI built for a BMW. Right off a New York runway if she were so inclined. Yes, the results are in, she’s a good match for me.
The lady ignores the question and pulls out her ID, her badge bright and shiny just like she is, sticking it in my face. “Sana Locke, FBI. How do you do?”
Sana. The name falls like a little steel ball through my mental pachinko machine. Arabic, meaning mountaintop, splendid, brilliant. Yes, I agree. Her mountaintop is truly splendid and brilliant. I detect a trace of East Coast upper crust in her voice, maybe Brown University, possibly Wellesley. “Good meeting you, Sana. I was kind of expecting someone from the Bureau yesterday. Did you walk up here from Vegas?”
When she responds with only a muscle twitch in her jaw, I feel compelled to restart the conversation minus any snide editorials. “Uh, I was just reviewing some of the crime scene photos.”
She nods. “I’d like to see it, please.”
“The photos?”
Her eyes close, her exhalation controlled, like she is just finishing a meditation session and has pushed every thought of backwater law enforcement types out of her serene mind. “The crime scene, Sheriff. The crime scene.”
I start to wonder if I am losing my touch. My contacts with the fairer sex are somewhat limited out here, like Robinson Crusoe if I’m being bitterly honest, and I don’t get a lot of practice. Oh well, namaste anyway. “Sure,” I say, retrieving my Glock .40 from the desk drawer. “It’s a bit of a drive, I’m afraid.”
Copyright © 2023 by Bruce Borgos
