“The week is ruined,” Grace whispered.
“Don’t think that way.” He watched Grace turn the car around and drive down the road before returning to the ranch house. The coyotes had closed in on the body. Clayton chased them off before they could do additional damage, and they snarled in protest.
Chief Baca’s call came as Clayton was about to use the house key Kerney had given him to make a quick tour of the ranch house.
“Dispatch says the dead man is not, I repeat not, Kerney,” Andy said. “Is that true?”
“Affirmative,” Clayton replied, as he noticed that Sara’s SUV was not parked in the driveway. Perhaps it was in the garage or stored in the horse barn. “The deceased is Riley Burke.”
“Damn,” Andy said. “That’s going to make Kerney very angry.”
“I know it,” Clayton said as he jiggled the front doorknob and found it locked. He walked through the enclosed courtyard to the glass patio door to the kitchen and saw that it had been smashed. The pattern of glass fragments on the floor suggested it had been broken from the outside in order to gain entry.
“And you think it’s a homicide?” Andy asked.
“No doubt about it, Chief.” Clayton stepped back from the debris so as not to contaminate evidence at the point of entry. “There’s a broken kitchen patio door that suggests a home invasion. I’m going to go through the front door and take a quick look around.”
“Be careful,” Andy said. “I’m about to leave my house for your twenty. See you when I get there.”
“Roger that, Chief.”
Inside the house Clayton turned on the exterior lights to keep the coyotes at bay. The front room and adjoining library appeared untouched. The television and stereo system hadn’t been taken, nor had any of the art on the wall been removed. In the master bedroom there was no sign of a burglar’s quick search through the dressers for jewelry and other valuables.
The absence of disarray made Clayton question the motive for the break-in. Or had Riley Burke’s arrival kept the killer from looting the house?
He checked the truck with the Lenny’s Auto Body Shop magnetic sign on the door and found it was registered to a Leonard Hampson who resided in Springer. He phoned the information to dispatch and watched the coyotes yip and yap at him for being kept away from the fresh kill while he waited for the state police to arrive.
Sergeant Russell Thorpe, shift commander for New Mexico State Police District One, ran north on I-25 with lights and siren. As a rookie officer, Thorpe had worked with Kerney, who’d been deputy state police chief at the time before taking over as top cop at the Santa Fe Police Department. Several years later, Russell had teamed up with Clayton Istee and Ramona Pino, an SFPD detective, on a case that involved the discovery of a graveyard outside of the town of Socorro where a serial killer had buried his victims.
The unearthing of the crime scene was directly connected to the hunt for another killer who’d plotted the murder of Chief Kerney and his entire family, including Clayton, his wife, and children. Fortunately, Clayton had put the man down for good before he could accomplish his bloodletting.
Russell knew that if Clayton Istee said the dead man at Kerney’s ranch was a homicide victim, you could take it to the bank. He was one hell of a fine investigator.
According to dispatch, Clayton had reported that it wasn’t Kerney lying in the driveway at the ranch. Word had it Kerney was living large in London while his wife pulled a gravy tour as the U.S. Army military attache at the embassy. It was good to know that he hadn’t been killed on a brief visit home.
So who was the dead guy? A caretaker hired to look after the place? A neighbor? Some wandering vagrant? And why had he been killed?
Thorpe knew that about 90 percent of murder victims knew their killers, which meant investigators usually had a good pool of potential suspects to target. The small percentage of random murders, killings by strangers, and murders that occurred during the commission of other crimes could be much more difficult to work because of the absence of any links to the victims.
He wondered if this homicide might have something to do with the bizarre sequence of events that had started earlier in the day when a correctional officer had been brutally attacked by a convicted felon, sent by mistake to the state prison in Springer.
Every cop in the state was on high alert for Craig Larson, who had so far nearly killed the correctional officer, almost suffocated a young family locked inside a Department of Correction van, and left a man to fry in the blistering hot desert grasslands outside of Santa Rosa.
Thorpe’s radio kept him updated as he barreled down Lamy Hill to the ranch road turnoff, and word came to him that one of the vehicles parked at the ranch belonged to Lenny Hampson, the man who been kidnapped by Larson in Springer and dumped in the desert.
Dispatch also reported that two homicide agents were en route about ten minutes behind him, a forensic team was rolling with the same ETA, and of equal interest, Chief Baca was on his way to the crime scene.
On the ranch road, he rolled his front windows down, cut the siren, switched off the emergency lights, and pushed the unit hard through the canyon and up the crest. A waning half moon had just risen, giving just enough light to outline the structure of the horse barn a quarter mile away. The outside lights of the ranch house flooded the porch, courtyard, and parking area in front of the house.
Through the open windows Thorpe could hear horses whinnying and coyotes barking. He flashed his headlights as he approached the house. Clayton Istee stood near a covered form on the ground, waving both hands over his head. Thorpe announced his arrival to dispatch, dismounted his unit, and hurried over to Clayton.
“Look who they sent me,” Clayton said with a smile as he shook Russell’s hand.
“I heard you made lieutenant,” Thorpe replied, grinning back.
Clayton glanced at the three stripes on Russell’s uniform shirt-sleeves. “Yeah, and now you’re a sergeant.”
“How about that? Who’s the victim?”
“Riley Burke.” Clayton flipped off the blanket covering the body.
Thorpe stared down at Riley Burke, took in some air, and let it out slowly through his nose. “I know him slightly, met his wife and his parents on several occasions. They’re Kerney’s neighbors.”
Clayton nodded. “This wasn’t a burglary. A patio door was smashed from the outside to gain entry but nothing inside the house appears to have been taken.”
Thorpe pointed at the truck with the auto body sign. “I’m not surprised. Two hours ago, the registered owner of that truck, Lenny Hampson, stumbled half-dead into a gas station on the outskirts of Santa Rosa and told the local cops that a fugitive named Craig Larson had dumped him in the desert without food or drink.”
Clayton’s eyes widened. Before he’d gone off duty, he’d heard about Larson’s attack on the correctional officer and the theft of the Honda from the young couple with the baby, but the kidnapping was new information.
“That, I didn’t know about,” he said. “Larson may have come here to switch vehicles. There are fresh tire tracks that could be from the SUV Kerney’s wife, Sara Brannon, drives. It’s a red Jeep and it’s not in the garage. I haven’t checked the horse barn.”
“Would you mind staying with the body while I take a peek inside the horse barn?” Thorpe asked.
“Actually I do mind, but I’ll do it anyway because you’re a friend.”
“Don’t you like dead bodies?” Thorpe asked as he started for his unit.
“Not really,” Clayton replied. “By the way, there are six missed calls on Riley’s cell phone, some hours old. I’m guessing his wife and parents are away, otherwise they would have come looking and found him.”
Thorpe stopped in his tracks and turned back to Clayton. “You’re right. Where’s his phone?”
“On the seat of his truck.”
“Will you check Riley’s contact list on the phone against the missed calls while I go look for the Jeep?”
“Not a problem,” Clayton replied.
Thorpe got in his unit and drove toward the horse barn. Clayton retrieved the phone and quickly discovered that the missed calls were indeed from Riley’s wife and parents. He put Riley’s phone on the hood of the truck and used his own phone to call his boss at home and brief him on Riley Burke’s murder and the tie-in to the manhunt for Craig Larson.
