The Judas judge kk-5 Read online

  The Judas judge

  ( Kevin Kerney - 5 )

  Michael Mcgarrity

  Michael McGarrity

  The Judas Judge

  Starting sometime after midnight, six murders had been committed along a stretch of highway in south central New Mexico. Soon after sunrise, Kevin Kerney arrived at the Oliver Lee State Park, where Sgt. Randy Shockley waited for him outside a motor home parked in an area that provided electrical and water hookups to recreational vehicles.

  Westward, across the Tularosa Basin, a band of low clouds mimicked the outline of the distant mountains, creating a mirage of shimmering vague foothills. The October morning was chilly, and a low sun softened the stark landscape, giving the desert a deceptively inviting impression. Raised on the Tularosa until his parents' ranch was taken over by the army and made part of the high security White Sands Missile Range, Kerney knew the clouds would soon burn off and the day would heat up.

  He eyed the motor home. It was an expensive model with a retractable awning, an air-conditioning unit on the roof, and a detachable satellite TV dish mounted on a bracket. Under the awning were a small barbecue grill, a lawn chair, and a folding metal side table. The door into the cabin of the RV was open. Painted on the side of the rig, above the manufacturer's nameplate, a bounding cartoonlike kangaroo floated in midair.

  Sergeant Shockley held the crime scene log in one hand and a pen in the other. Kerney scribbled his name on the log and returned the pen. "Any witnesses?" he asked.

  "No," Shockley replied. He eyed the chief's cowboy boots, jeans, and silver belt buckle, and repressed a smirk. "And nobody heard any shots. A camper discovered the body."

  "Where is he?"

  "Sequestered inside the visitor center with the park manager. I have an officer with them."

  Across the way, a tight group of campers had gathered around a picnic table under a shelter to watch the action. Most were gray-haired, overweight, tanned, and wearing sweats and pullover tops to guard against the early morning chill. "We're holding everybody who stayed overnight until we can take their statements," Sergeant Shockley said. "Some of them aren't happy campers."

  Kerney smiled thinly at the joke. Shockley, a shift commander and the evidence officer for the Alamogordo District Office of the New Mexico State Police, smiled back. With nine years on the force, Shockley still had a cockiness about him that most cops lost after working their rookie season on the streets. He was thirty-two years old, stood five-nine in his stocking feet, and carried a hundred and forty-five pounds on a compact frame.

  Shockley's record was clean. Divorced with no children, he served as an officer survival trainer at the state police academy when recruit classes were in session, and had a reputation as an instructor who enjoyed putting a hurt on cadets during hand-to-hand training.

  Kerney knew about Shockley because the sergeant was the target of an internal affairs investigation. He inclined his head toward the motor home. "Who's been inside?"

  "Me, a paramedic, the man who found the body, and the park ranger. The radio message from Major Hutchinson said you were the primary investigator on this one."

  "Until we get more people here," Kerney said. "Let the park manager and the witness know I'll take their statements as soon as I can."

  "How many dead people do we have, Chief?"

  "This one makes six."

  "Looks like somebody went on a killing spree."

  "So it seems. Where's the body?"

  "In the back of the RV," Shockley said, "on the bed."

  Kerney nodded, went to his unit, and got his gear.

  At two A.M. Kerney; his second-in-command, Nate Hutchinson; and a team of agents had left Santa Fe by helicopter and flown the short hop to the Valley of Fires Recreational Area outside of Carrizozo, the scene of the first homicide. A retired couple from Iowa had been murdered in their sleep and robbed. The team had been working their way south ever since.

  At the Three Rivers Petroglyph Recreation Area, a machinist from California had been killed in his travel trailer by a bullet through the heart, and at a campground near the boundary of the Mescalero Indian Reservation, a retired army master sergeant and his wife had been shot dead.

  Major Hutchinson's team was stretched thin at the three crime scenes, so Kerney had taken the latest call. There was no way of knowing if it would prove to be the last.

  He put on a pair of plastic gloves and went inside the motor home. The man in the sleeping nook wore only boxer shorts. Tan lines on his body stopped midway up the arms and formed a V below the neck. His torso and legs were a startling pale white in comparison.

  Somewhere in his seventies, he had a full head of gray hair, good muscle tone, and two bullet holes in his chest. Above a hint of jowls, his features were angular, with thin lips and a long, narrow nose. A large black bloodstain on a neutral gray blanket had dribbled onto the carpet. One round had caught a heart valve, and a blood spray three feet long had smeared the window and wall above the bed.

  It was Friday, and Kerney had planned to fly to Kansas City to spend the weekend with his wife, It. Col. Sara Brannon, who was enrolled in the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. But that wasn't going to happen.

  Under the plastic glove on his left hand Kerney wore a gold wedding band with lapis and turquoise inlaid in a triangular pattern Sara had picked out as part of a matched pair. She had canceled her last trip to Santa Fe due to a mandatory weekend training exercise, and it had been a month since they'd been together. Aside from their honeymoon trip to Ireland in April, the most time they'd been able to spend together was four days in July. Since then, only quick weekend visits back and forth between Santa Fe and Fort Leavenworth every two weeks had been possible.

  Kerney had gone into the marriage knowing it would be a part time long-distance relationship, and so far he hadn't voiced any complaints. But a month was a long time, and Kerney had to shut down a desire to grumble about it. He shook off his ill-humor and got busy.

  He took photographs, did a crime scene sketch, and searched for evidence. He found no spent rounds or sign of forced entry, and went to take statements from the park ranger and the witness who'd discovered the body. Nate Hutchinson arrived just as Kerney finished up.

  Known by his nickname Hutch, Nate ran the day-to-day operations of the criminal investigations, narcotics, intelligence, internal affairs, and alcohol and gaming enforcement bureaus. He had droopy eyelids that gave him a sleepy look often mistaken for boredom by those who didn't know him, close-cut brown hair showing a hint of gray, and the ramrod carriage of a Marine drill instructor.

  "Got anything, Chief?" Hutch asked.

  "The victim's name is Vernon Langsford, a retired lawyer from Ruidoso, age seventy-six. The park ranger said Langsford was a volunteer camp host. He worked three days a week and was on call at night after the park closed. When he wasn't passing out information to tourists and campers, he liked to play golf at the local courses. He was shot twice in the chest at close range."

  Hutchinson cocked his head. "Twice? All the other victims were killed with one round. Why two shots for Langsford?"

  "I don't know. There's no sign of a struggle. His wallet and jewelry were taken, along with a small, portable color television."

  "That matches the MO at the other crime scenes. All the other victims were just tourists traveling through, Chief. Why did our killer take out a camp host?"

  "I haven't a clue. From what I've been told, nobody heard shots at this location."

  "Silencer?"

  "Without a doubt," Kerney said, looking at the travel trailers within shouting distance of the motor home. "Why was Langsford killed quietly and not the others? Besides that, why waste time on this victi
m when there were more accessible targets closer to the access road? I'm almost certain the killer walked from the locked gate to Langsford's RV. It doesn't make any sense."

  "Maybe Langsford's RV was the first one he could get into," Hutch said.

  "Spree murderers don't operate that way," Kerney said. "They get on an emotional high, act indiscriminately, go for easy kills, and then move on."

  "Are you saying Langsford was deliberately killed?"

  "It's possible."

  "That could mean we've got multiple murders to cover up one crime."

  "That's my best guess at this point," Kerney said. "And if no more victims surface, I'll bet the farm on it. Start deep background checks on all the victims. Look for anything that could point to a motive for murder. Pay particular attention to Langsford."

  "You've got it, Chief."

  Kerney glanced at Randy Shockley, who was assisting an agent taking statements from impatient senior citizen campers. "Is Agent Duran at the district office?"

  "He's standing by."

  "We're going to get heavy media attention on this, Hutch. Get the public information officer down here from Santa Fe ASAP. Have him release a statement saying we're handling the cases as a multiple murder spree. He can fill in the blanks from there. If he has questions, I'll be around."

  "You're not going to Kansas?"

  "Not a chance." He lowered his voice and leaned into Hutch. "Where does Duran stand with his investigation on Shockley?"

  "He's just about got it wrapped," Hutch replied. "Can you backstop him, Chief? I can't spare anybody."

  "Does Shockley know the axe is about to fall?"

  "He doesn't have a clue."

  "Tell Duran I'm on my way."

  Hutchinson left, and Kerney raised his eyes to the sweep of mountains, his gaze settling on Joplin Ridge, high above Dog Canyon. Long before the park existed, he'd come here as a boy on camping trips with his father to explore the freshwater springs and seeps that enabled lush plants and trees to thrive at the edge of a desert filled with yucca and mesquite. Spindly, eight-foot-tall ocotillo shrubs climbed the flanks of the rocky Sacramento Mountains, masking any hint of the existence of the hidden springs.

  Now Dog Canyon was part of the Oliver Lee Memorial State Park. Kerney had grown up hearing stories about Oliver Lee from his grandfather, who ranched on the west side of the Tularosa Basin in the San Andres Mountains back when Lee controlled the water in Dog Canyon and a million acres of free range. To this day, people argued over whether Oliver Lee was a hero or a villain in the range wars that erupted during the late Nineteenth Century. The living descendants on both sides of the feud kept the quarrel going. It had become a peculiar form of entertainment that spilled over into local politics, bar fights, and business dealings.

  Kerney nodded at Sergeant Shockley as he passed by, and thought glumly of needing to call Sara to cancel his visit.

  After leaving a message for Sara and talking by phone with his boss, Andy Baca, chief of the state police, Kerney left the crime scene and drove to the district office. Alamogordo had once been a sleepy desert railroad town, but with the opening of the air base during World War II and the establishment of White Sands Missile Range after the war, all that had changed. Now the community went boom and bust and boom again on annual congressional defense appropriations.

  A major four-lane highway cut through the town along the east side of the Tularosa Basin, and a commercial strip stretched beyond the city in both directions. There was the usual assortment of bars, pawnshops, cut-rate furniture stores, and used-car lots that catered to servicemen mixed in with motels, fast-food franchises, and gas stations that served the highway traffic.

  Thanks to the establishment of a permanent training station for the German Air Force and the consolidation of stealth bomber and fighter squadrons at Holloman Air Force Base, the city was enjoying a comeback from the deep defense budget cuts that had occurred at the end of the Cold War. But in spite of banners on light poles proclaiming local attractions and community events, the main strip still looked seedy.

  The state police district office was in a building that housed several other state agencies on a major street near the old downtown area. Kerney parked in the back lot, rang the bell, and the dispatcher buzzed him inside, where Agent Robert Duran waited for him.

  A small-boned, wiry man, Duran competed in cross-country and marathon races, and had recently transferred from criminal investigations to the Internal Affairs Unit.

  "What did you get from Shockley's ex-wife?" Kerney asked.

  "According to the ex, he was always bringing stuff home after his shift. Booze, office supplies, a nice luggage set, a brand-new chain saw-stuff like that."

  "Weapons?"

  "Oh, yeah. Lots of those. He had a locked closet in the garage where he kept the goodies. When he moved out last year, he took everything with him. She saw him load up at least ten handguns, several long rifles, and a shotgun when he left."

  "Did she give a statement?"

  "In writing, Chief."

  "Did Shockley tell her where he got the weapons?" "He said he traded for them, or bought them used."

  A handgun Shockley had reported as returned to the owner had surfaced in a recent El Paso armed robbery, and Kerney asked if Duran had talked to the owner.

  "Couldn't do it, Chief," Duran said. "He died six weeks before Shockley sent the dated and signed receipt to Santa Fe. Shockley forged the owner's signature on the form."

  "Did the perp who used the gun identify Shockley as his supplier?"

  "He never met Shockley, but he gave me the name of the Juarez gunrunner who sold him the pistol. I had a nice long chat with the guy. Once he understood that I wasn't going to put the Juarez cops onto him, he fingered Shockley as one of his illegal weapons suppliers."

  "How many weapons did Shockley sell him?"

  Duran consulted his notebook. "During the last two years, Shockley sold him approximately sixty weapons: mostly handguns, all in cherry condition. The dealer paid him an average of four hundred dollars for each gun, sometimes more."

  "Did you recover any of them?"

  "No, but I got a partial list of makes and models from the guy-as much as he could remember. I compared it to Shockley's evidence reports. What Shockley said he'd returned to the rightful owners, he was mostly selling."

  Duran closed his notebook. "The Juarez buyer isn't willing to cross the border and testify, if and when we go to trial, Chief. In fact, I had the distinct feeling he would disappear as soon as I left. I tape-recorded his statement."

  "You've got enough to make your case without him."

  "I've got more we may be able to use. There's been a spike in the number of stolen cars reported by the district over the last three years, beginning right about the time Shockley got his sergeant stripes. I asked the intelligence unit to do an analysis. Most of the cars were stolen on Shockley's swing and graveyard shifts. When he worked days, nighttime auto thefts dropped dramatically."

  "Do you have anything connecting Shockley to the auto thefts?"

  "Not yet."

  "What about the money trail?"

  "That, I've got. Shockley plays the market. He has four separate Internet brokerage accounts. His total investment over the past three years exceeds one hundred twenty thousand dollars. He sure hasn't been investing that kind of cash with his take-home pay."

  "Inheritance?" Kerney asked, thinking of Erma Fergurson, his mother's old friend who had left him a 6,400-acre ranch, which was about to be sold to the Nature Conservancy. Even after all the taxes were paid when probate closed next month, Kerney would still have more money than he'd ever dreamed possible. Considerably more than Shockley's low six-figure market accounts.

  "That's unlikely, Chief. Both parents live in Carlsbad. His father works as an auto mechanic, and his mother at a day care center.

  There's no family money that Shockley could tap into. Additionally, the ex-wife didn't know anything about Shockley's adventures in t
he stock market."

  "Do you need more time?"

  "I'd rather not wait, Chief. I can always bring additional charges later. I did a quick inventory of the evidence room this morning. Two handguns that should be there are missing. I think a search of his unit and his apartment will turn them up."

  "Did you get a warrant for his apartment?" Kerney asked. "Signed by a judge this morning," Duran said.

  Kerney knew Duran's presence at the district office wouldn't go unnoticed for long. The back channel network could have already passed on the information. "You'd better move."

  "I'll pull him in now," Duran said. "Will you do the house search for me, Chief?" He held out the warrant.

  Kerney nodded and took the paperwork.

  "Thanks."

  "Don't talk to Shockley without backup."

  "There isn't anybody I can use. Every available agent is working the homicides."

  "Bring in a uniform to assist you."

  Duran thought about it for a minute. "Pete Bustamante. We worked patrol together in District Seven. He's solid."

  "You're sure?"

  "Yeah."

  "Okay. Under my orders, have dispatch instruct Shockley and Bustamante to report here immediately for a special assignment."

  Randy Shockley pulled onto the state highway and checked his rearview mirror. Pete Bustamante was on his tail, following him to the district headquarters. Shockley knew Chief Kerney's orders were bogus. The dispatcher had called him by cellular phone to report that Agent Duran had been snooping around in the evidence room and looking through his paperwork. The dispatcher had no further information, but Shockley knew what was up: Internal Affairs had uncovered his weapons scam.

  There could be no other reason for Duran's search.

  Maybe the auto theft scheme hadn't been detected. He flipped open his cell phone and called Jake's Towing Service. "Has anybody been coming around asking questions?" he asked, when Jake answered.

  "Anyone like who?"