'Are you kidding me?'
'Some of it makes everything but hardcore porno films look pretty tame.'
'I want to see those tapes.'
Hutch pointed to the cassettes on the shelf next to the wall-mounted combination TV and VCR. 'They're gonna turn your stomach.'
'Has Andy seen them?'
'Not yet, but he knows about them.'
'Has Agent Duran run down Shockley's stolen-car ring?'
'He's working on it. Chief Baca said I'm to manage the division while you take the lead on the homicides.'
'That's correct.'
'With Chief Baca's permission, I'm going to release what we have on Shockley to the media. I don't want anybody in or outside of the department thinking Shockley was anything but a psycho who never should have worn a shield.'
'You don't have to do that for my sake, Hutch.'
Hutch shook his head and stepped toward the door. 'I'm not. It's for all of us, Chief. The district attorney wants to meet with you again in an hour.'
'Tell him I'll be there.'
After Hutch left, Kerney watched the videotapes. By the time the last one finished playing, anger flushed his face. Shockley liked to sodomize his victims. In each tape he positioned himself at the front of his unit, bent the women over the hood and held them down with a hand on their necks. Then he'd smile at the camera with a smug, satisfied look on his face. The images made Kerney almost want to shoot Shockley all over again.
He rewound the last tape, no longer feeling quite so lousy about taking Randy Shockley's life, and thought about Paul Gillespie, the small-town cop who'd been killed by a woman he'd raped. Nita Lassiter had shot Gillespie with his own handgun at the Mountainair Police Department.
Kerney had solved the case with some lucky breaks and had come out of the investigation convinced that Nita Lassiter had more than an adequate reason to blow Gillespie away.
Nita's trial had concluded last month, and she'd been found guilty of manslaughter, a third-degree felony. Because of mitigating circumstances, she'd been sentenced to one year minus a day in the county jail, with work- release privileges so she could continue her practice of veterinary medicine.
A lot of cops and prosecutors around the state were upset when Kerney testified on Nita's behalf at the sentencing hearing. They didn't like the idea that a senior state-police officer could find any thing redeeming about a convicted cop killer, no matter what the justification might be.
Now that he'd put Randy Shockley down, he wondered how much more character assassination he'd have to face. Maybe he'd go from being known as a turncoat who sided with a cop killer to being called a cop killer himself.
He rewound the last cassette. With Hutch making sure all of the hard facts about Shockley got out, that might not happen. For the first time in hours, Kerney smiled. It was a damn fine gesture on Hutch's part.
He checked the time, went back to the desk, and scanned through the field reports before leaving to meet with the DA.
Kerney spent several uncomfortable but necessary hours with the district attorney, who probed hard to uncover any personal relationship that might have existed between Kerney and Shockley, or any work-related antagonism that might have contributed to Kerney's willingness to use deadly force. Kerney made it clear he'd never met Shockley before the shooting and had never supervised him.
With that issue set aside, the interview shifted to Kerney's record of deadly force. The DA dug into all prior events, including a gun fight with a street drug dealer who'd blown out Kerney's knee, the shooting of a rogue army intelligence officer during a murder investigation at White Sands Missile Range, the wounding of Nita Lassiter, who had tried to commit suicide to avoid arrest, and a gun battle with assassins hired by a Mexican drug lord to kill Kerney.
The records showed Kerney had been cleared of any wrongdoing in each incident. But the DA, a burly man with a high-pitched voice who breathed heavily through his nose, quizzed Kerney carefully on each event, looking for anything that might suggest Kerney was a trigger-happy cop.
Kerney understood the DA's reasoning; compared to most officers he had an extremely high use-of-deadly- force history. At five o'clock he returned to the command center, drained but through the worst of it. The DA had let him go without scheduling another session.
Sounds of commuter traffic hummed on the street as civilian workers from the air base and White Sands Missile Range made their way up the boulevard to houses in the foothills. At the nearby media staging area, reporters washed in the glare of high-intensity lights were broadcasting live satellite feeds back to stations and networks.
To the west, diaphanous in a light haze, the far-off tips of the San Andres Mountains towered like silent sentinels over the Tularosa Basin, home of the vast White Sands Missile Range.
Kerney's personal history was tied to the Tularosa. When he was a young boy, his parents had been forced off the family ranch when the missile range expanded; and less than three years ago Kerney had met his future wife, Sara, while searching for his A.W.O.L. godson, Sammy Yazzi, a soldier stationed at the base.
Good and bad memories coursed through Kerney's mind. His early years on the ranch had been the best of his life, and meeting Sara Brannon, a strong-willed, beautiful woman, had brought him emotionally back to life in ways he'd never imagined possible. But the loss of the ranch still galled, and the murder of his godson would always remain a sore spot in his mind.
The teams of agents and uniformed personnel from the crime scenes began trickling in, and Kerney went to meet them. No new killings had been reported, and Kerney figured the chances were good that the spree was over. He listened to their debriefings, which clearly indicated that a quick break in the case was unlikely. The sum total of facts remained unchanged: six people had been robbed and killed by person or persons unknown-probably with the same handgun-within a six-hour period, in a sequence that started at Carrizozo and ended at the Oliver Lee State Park. Vernon Langsford was the only victim to be shot twice with a silenced weapon.
Why two bullets for Langsford with a silencer?
In Kerney's mind, Langsford had to be the primary target, which meant that five innocent people had been killed to cover up a premeditated murder.
Kerney went looking for Lt. Lee Sedillo, the assistant commander of the criminal investigation unit, who'd been gathering background information on Langsford. He found him glued to a computer screen at the front of the command trailer.
Over twenty years ago, Kerney had started his career with the Santa Fe Police Department about the same time Sedillo had joined the state police. Kerney had worked on a number of joint cases with Lee after both of them had moved into criminal investigations.
A big-boned, balding man, Sedillo had thick thighs and large buttocks, a legacy of his years as a high-school and college football lineman. He easily carried an extra twenty pounds on an imposing frame, and had a pudgy face.
'What have we got on Vernon Langsford, Lee?' Kerney asked, as he sat in a chair next to Sedillo.
'I knew who Langsford was as soon as Hutch asked me to check him out,' Sedillo replied, as he positioned the cursor under an icon on the screen and clicked the mouse. 'He retired as a district court judge about six years ago, not long after his wife was killed by a letter bomb that was sent to his home. The case was never solved. Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the FBI were brought in. I'm asking for their case files right now.'
'What do we have on the case?'
'A lot of digging that went nowhere.' Sedillo swung his chair around and faced Kerney. 'I was still in narcotics
