“I need backup on a welfare check at a ranch,” he said to both men. “Care to join me?”
“You got something, Everett?” Mitch asked.
“Yeah, a cautious nature,” Dorsey replied.
Mitch laughed. “Give us a ten-eighty-seven.”
Dorsey told the officers where to meet up.
Larson’s new hideout was perfect. The setting was remote, the unlocked barn was less than one hundred steps from the house, and the old pitched-roof house sat on a knoll that gave him excellent views in all four directions. He parked the Subaru in the barn just in case someone came wandering up the ranch road, broke into the house through a side window, and took a look around. The rooms were empty, the curtains and shades closed, and the house was spic-and-span clean. According to the real estate sales brochure he’d found on a kitchen counter, the walls had been freshly painted, the hardwood floors sanded and resealed, a new forced-air propane- fired furnace had been installed, and the one-year-old roof was still under a full warranty. Total cost for the property, which consisted of the house, barn, and shed on eighty acres, was less than the cost of a manufactured double-wide on a postage stamp-size lot in a Santa Fe trailer park.
Larson checked to see if the utilities were working. The kitchen wall phone had no dial tone, there was no juice to the ceiling lights, and the stove and furnace had been turned off. Fortunately he had water, probably from a gravity-fed well.
Larson opened the propane tank valve on his way to the barn, where he unloaded his arsenal, supplies, and gear from the Subaru. It took three trips to get everything into the house.
He set up housekeeping in the living room and kitchen, lit the stove and water heater pilot lights, and turned on the portable radio just in time for a top-of-the-hour local news summary from a station broadcasting from nearby Raton, the county seat and largest community in the far northeast corner of the state. He was still a hot topic on the news, but not the headline story. That honor went to a Raton man who had shot and killed his estranged wife at her place of employment.
The house was hot and stuffy, and Larson was about to open all the doors and windows when he heard the sound of an approaching vehicle. He took a peek though a living room window and saw a late model GMC SUV roll to a stop at the closed but unlocked gate. A portly, older man got out of the passenger side of the Jimmy, opened the gate for the driver, and climbed back in. As the SUV drew near, Larson read the magnetic sign on the driver’s door that read:
TAMI PHELAN
YOUR HOMETEAM REALTOR
RATON, NM
Larson shook his head in disbelief at such shitty luck, picked up the 9mm Glock, and waited for his uninvited guests to arrive. But when a leggy blonde in jeans with big hair and a stacked pair opened the driver’s-side door and climbed out, Larson grinned and changed his mind about his bad luck. He watched Blondie fast-talk the old dude as he climbed the porch steps and waited for her to unlock the front door. He was another porky like Bertie Roach, the man from Tulsa Larson had offed in the Albuquerque motel, and Lenny Hampson, the bigmouth friend of Kerry’s he’d left in the desert.
“The property is in excellent condition,” Blondie said as she swung the door open and moved aside for Porky to enter first. “There are thirty acres under irrigation. It would make an excellent horse ranch.”
Larson shot Porky in the chest as he stepped over the threshold. Grunting, the man crumpled to his knees and fell face forward. Before Blondie could react, Larson grabbed a handful of her big, curly hair and yanked her inside.
“What did you do?” Blondie screamed, her hand flying to her mouth as she stared at the body on the floor. She had bright red fingernails.
Blood from Porky’s chest wound seeped across the newly refinished, once pristine hardwood floor, which was no longer a strong selling point for the property.
“What did you do?” she screeched again, her gaze locked on Larson’s face.
“Three’s a crowd,” Larson explained with a smile as he wrapped his hand around her neck. “You must be Tami.”
Tami averted her eyes. “Please don’t hurt me.”
“Hurt you?” Larson replied softly, feigning indignation. He dug the barrel of the Glock into Tami’s neck and forced her to raise her pretty head so he could take a closer look at her. “Why, when I’m finished with you, sweetie, you’ll be calling me your daddy and begging me for more.”
He cocked the Glock for dramatic effect and ripped open Tami’s blouse. She was indeed stacked.
Everett Dorsey met Officers Lowe and Mares at the entrance to the Lazy Z. The two men stood with Dorsey in front of his unit while he filled them in on his conversation with Hannelore Schmidt of Frankfurt, Germany.
“Nancy Trimble is in her sixties and lives alone at the ranch,” he added, “so it’s possible she might not be missing at all. She could have taken a bad fall or dropped dead.”
Officer Mitch Lowe consulted his paperwork. In his late twenties, he had just completed his seventh year with the state police. A frown crossed his boyish face. “The locked gate was reported by the officer assigned to contact residents in this area. He left a phone message, but there’s been no follow-up since then.”
Rick Mares, Dorsey’s senior officer, a thin and wiry man in his forties, shrugged a shoulder. “It’s been frustrating as hell to make contact with everybody, and a bitch to track people down. There are folks who are out of town, people on vacation or sick in the hospital, people who live somewhere else and have a second home or a getaway place out in the boonies. Hell, we’ve even got some Texas ranchers who own outfits just for summer grazing and there’s not a soul to be found on any of those spreads.”
“It hasn’t been easy,” Lowe concurred.
“Let’s hope Nancy Trimble is alive and well,” Dorsey said as he stepped over to the electronic keypad of the solar-powered gate and punched in the code. “But with Larson on the loose, we go in prepared for anything.”
The gate swung open and the three officers convoyed their units slowly down the ranch road, scanning the landscape for anything that looked out of the ordinary. They arrived at the ranch headquarters to be greeted by a saddled horse that cantered over from a nearby open field, the reins of its bridle falling loose to the ground.
“Could be that Trimble did have an accident,” Mitch Lowe said as he reached out and caught the horse’s reins. He wiped a hand across the dusty saddle. “Nobody has been astride this animal for at least a day, maybe more.”
Dorsey unholstered his sidearm. “Let’s check the house before we get ahead of ourselves.” He knocked on the locked front door while Lowe and Mares inspected the exterior for any sign of forced entry.
“Anything?” he asked when they returned.
Rick Mares shook his head. “It’s locked up tight and the window shades and curtains are drawn.”
“Do we break in?” Mitch Lowe asked.
Dorsey didn’t hesitate. “Kick in the door.”
Inside, they did a quick plain-view search and found evidence that the house had been ransacked.
“Do we call in forensics?” Rick Mares asked as they returned to the front porch.
Dorsey scanned the grounds. “Let’s do a sweep of all the other structures first.”
They forced their way into the two guest houses, walked through the barn, the stables, the tack room, and the horse arena, looked inside the fenced paddocks and the silver Hummer, and did a field search of the immediate surrounding area. There was no sign of Trimble, her body, or her green Subaru.
Mitch unsaddled the horse, put it in a paddock, and fed it some oats. In the late afternoon light, Dorsey stood with the two officers in front of the main ranch house looking up at the mesa.
“Trimble is missing, her car is gone, the ranch house has been tossed. The gun cabinet was left unlocked, so we can presume some weapons are missing along with other items,” Dorsey said. “I’m thinking there’s a good
