Dead or Alive kk-12 Read online

  As he laid Tami’s body out on the living room floor next to Porky, he decided it would have been more fun to send her out into the cactus patch behind the barn to use as target practice. Blindfolded and barefoot, just like Ugly Nancy, except that he wouldn’t have let Tami put any clothes on. Shooting people was far more enjoyable than drowning them.

  He searched Tami’s purse. She carried a New Mexico voter identification card for the Republican Party and held memberships in the Toastmasters, the Rotary Club, and the Raton Chamber of Commerce. Her business card showed an address on a downtown street of Raton’s so-called historic district near the train tracks and old railroad station. Her home address on her driver’s license didn’t ring any bells, but he’d last been in Raton half a lifetime ago, so who knew what had changed?

  He leafed through Tami’s day planner. The final entry for the day was a notation to meet Carter Marion Pettibone in the lobby of a Raton motel, to tour several ranch properties. The wallet in Porky’s back pocket confirmed he was Pettibone, age sixty-six, of Omaha, Nebraska. It also contained a key card to a room at the motel where Tami had picked him up.

  Larson looked down at the bodies he’d neatly arranged side by side. Tami Phelan and Carter Marion Pettibone. What a pair. He could just imagine them as a Bible-thumping husband-and-wife team, evangelizing the back-road, dusty villages of West Texas door to door and on dinky public access television stations.

  He went to the kitchen, sipped from the bottle of twenty-year-old whiskey he’d taken from the Lazy Z Ranch, and pondered his next move. For sure, staying put wouldn’t work. There was always the chance that Tami, Pettibone, or both had told somebody where they were going.

  Larson retrieved Tami’s cell phone from her purse, found her home number on the speed-dial list, and punched in the number. The phone rang, went unanswered, and switched over to a voice message recorded by Tami. He disconnected, speed-dialed her office number, and got another message from Tami. There was no wedding ring on Tami’s finger and her business card showed her to be the broker who operated the real estate agency. Maybe she lived alone and even worked alone.

  Outside, Larson searched Tami’s GMC Yukon. If Pettibone had a cell phone, he hadn’t brought it with him. Back inside, Larson paged through Tami’s day planner and found a two-week-old entry for Pettibone showing his home address and phone number in Omaha circled in red, with a note that he was interested in ranch land of less than 320 acres.

  Larson dialed the Omaha number on Tami’s cell and a woman answered on the fourth ring.

  “Hello,” she said, in a breathless voice as though she’d run to answer the telephone.

  “I’d like to speak to Mr. Pettibone,” Larson said, trying not to crack up at the absurdity of his request.

  “I’m sorry, my husband’s not here right now. Can I take a message?”

  “When would it be best to call back and speak to him?”

  “He’s out right now, but I can take a message for him.”

  “I’m just passing through town. Do you expect him back anytime soon?”

  “No, he’s away on business.”

  “For how long?”

  “He’ll be back in three days.”

  “Tell him Ted Landry called. He’ll remember who I am.”

  “Ted Landry?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Thank you”

  Larson disconnected and went through Tami’s day planner more carefully. There was nothing in it about picking up the kids from school or meeting the hubby for lunch or drinks. The only names that showed up repeatedly other than clients seemed to be those of a few women friends Tami would meet for dinner or a movie.

  The car keys in Pettibone’s pocket were for a Buick, probably with Nebraska plates, which was most likely in the motel parking lot. If Porky’s wife wasn’t going to start missing him for the next three days, the cops wouldn’t be looking for the Buick anytime soon. Larson decided to ditch the piece-of-shit Subaru on the off chance that what was left of Ugly Nancy had been discovered, drive to Raton in Tami’s GMC Yukon, and use Porky’s Buick as his new set of wheels.

  Back at the Yukon, he removed the magnetic real estate signs from the driver and passenger doors. Tami had a vanity license plate that read “COWGIRL.” Larson discarded it in favor of the Subaru’s plate, thinking that Tami the cowgirl hadn’t even been as good at giddyup as Ugly Nancy. He loaded the Yukon with all the gear he’d carted into the house, figuring that under the cover of darkness he would transfer his stuff to Pettibone’s Buick.

  Finished with his tasks, Larson downed another couple of fingers of whiskey before returning to the living room. What to do with Tami and Porky was nagging him. His druthers were to burn the house down around them, but that would just draw quick attention and bring a slew of volunteer firefighters to the place. He could bury the bodies, but that felt like too much work. Instead, he brought the Subaru from the barn where he’d stashed it, opened the hatchback, folded down the backseats, and manhandled Tami’s body into the car. To get her to fit inside, he had to pull her head up between the front bucket seats and place it on the center armrest. He spread her legs, raised her knees, dropped Porky’s drawers down around his ankles and, grunting under the effort, wrestled him on top of naked Tami. Larson doubted that Pettibone, in life, had ever been on top of such a good-looking piece of tail. That was the downside. In death, however, the upside was that Porky would never know what a bum fuck she was.

  He put the Subaru back in the barn, carefully closed the gate to the property, and drove away in the Yukon, with a low-hanging western sun in his eyes. Tami’s cell phone, which hadn’t rung once, was on the front passenger seat, along with the 9mm Glock, the .357 Ruger, and the .357 pistol. The two hunting rifles, the Weatherby and a Remington 700 Safari that fired a .458 Magnum bullet with great stopping power, were on the backseat, along with the lever-action Winchester 30.06. If the cops found him and wanted to party, the firepower he had at hand would make it possible for him to oblige them greatly.

  Larson turned north toward the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, which rose up to fill the horizon from east to west. It seemed he had a knack for killing people, but so far his victims had been random folks who’d stood in his way. Maybe it was time to get more serious and up the ante.

  Some years back, Larson had been mesmerized by the two snipers who had killed all those people in Maryland and Virginia. He even remembered their names, Muhammad and Malvo. At the time they seemed unstoppable, and he’d paid close attention to the details of the manhunt and their eventual capture.

  He knew they had used a Bushmaster XM15 E2S to take down their targets. Patterned after the M-16, it had a ten-shot magazine and fired .223-caliber rounds. He knew the car they’d driven, a Chevy Caprice, had been checked out by the police seven times before the pair were finally arrested, that they used a stolen laptop to navigate around the D.C. area, and that they took turns as the shooter and the spotter, sometimes firing from the vehicle and sometimes not.

  Supposedly, Malvo and Muhammad had killed for money: some ten million dollars they’d hoped to get from the cops. In truth, Larson knew it had to be all about the blood sport, not the money. He was starting to feel that way about his own killing spree.

  On the interstate heading north toward Raton, a state police car passed him without slowing, and Larson toyed with the idea of assassinating cops. That would be a hell of a lot more entertaining than shooting unarmed housewives at gas stations or in front of grocery stores, like Malvo and Muhammad did. It could also be a lot more challenging too, because cops could shoot back.

  Not that Larson planned to give them the chance. The Weatherby and the Remington would provide plenty of range and give him time enough to disappear, just like Malvo and Muhammad. The more he thought about killing cops, the more it appealed to him. After all, cops gave him the most grief, not Pettibone, Tami, Ugly Nancy, Cuddy the KO’d Kid, or most of the other folks he’d wasted. Those poor suckers had just been in the wrong place at the wro
ng time. But the Lincoln County sheriff, the cop at the roadblock, and the horde of cops looking for him were all trying to bring him down.

  Maybe it was time to stop the cops.

  Larson liked the sound of that. Stop the cops. He said it over and over. If he really went through with it, he would be bigger than Malvo and Muhammad. Way bigger.

  In Raton, along the motel strip, Larson made up his mind to do it. All the cop cars parked outside a budget franchise motel sealed the deal. He passed by slowly, watching a small group of uniformed officers talking as they stood next to a patrol vehicle.

  Larson felt invisible. He was no more than twenty-five feet away from them, driving slowly as he passed by, and the cops ignored him completely. And why shouldn’t they? He was in Tami’s Yukon nobody was looking for, and with his shaved head and new beard he now had a completely different look.

  He was invisible, maybe even invincible.

  Larson grinned as he wheeled into the motel entrance where Porky Pettibone, now lying dead on top of cold and frigid Tami in the back of Ugly’s Subaru, had booked a room.

  He’d seen a television show where the cops found a body carefully arranged on a bed and called it staging. He mulled over a way to kill a whole bunch of cops and stage their bodies in a circle jerk. He laughed out loud at the idea of it.

  He parked next to the Buick with Nebraska plates and let himself into Porky’s room. The bedside telephone message light was blinking. Larson followed the instructions on the placard next to the phone and dialed to retrieve the message. It was from Pettibone’s wife, reporting that a man named Ted Landry had called for him, and asking if he liked the ranch he’d gone to see with the Realtor.

  Larson closed the window curtains and checked the time. It was a good two hours before nightfall, when it would be safe to move his gear to Porky’s car. Until then, he would stay put and do some serious cogitating about ways to kill cops.

  After attending an early morning state police task force meeting, Kerney and Clayton talked privately over coffee in the motel restaurant with Major Frank Vanmeter, the task force commander. Barely in his forties, Vanmeter was a twenty-year veteran of the department. He’d been a lieutenant during Kerney’s brief stint as a deputy chief of the state police.

  Kerney asked him how the psychologist, Dr. John Casados, had made out talking to Larson’s twin brother.

  Vanmeter pursed his thin lips and shook his bald head. “Kerry Larson clammed up. But Casados thinks it likely that he could be deliberately withholding information about his brother’s whereabouts.”

  “What makes Casados think that?” Clayton asked as he spooned some sugar into his coffee cup.

  “Hero worship,” Vanmeter replied. “Kerry Larson idolizes his brother, who in his mind can do no wrong. He’s an identical twin and the spitting image of his brother, Craig, but slow in the head.”

  “Other than the psychologist’s theory, is there any reason to believe that Kerry is protecting or harboring Larson?” Kerney asked.

  “No, but Everett Dorsey, the Springer police chief, thinks Kerry would have a pretty good idea where his brother might go to hide out if he’s still in the area.”

  “That makes sense,” Kerney said.

  “Casados is going to take another crack at Kerry today,” Vanmeter added.

  “We know Larson has no other blood relatives in the area,” Clayton said, “but what about old friends and acquaintances? Would they have any ideas about Larson’s whereabouts?”

  “Dorsey is working a list of locals who knew the Larson brothers before Craig left town. Former friends and folks they went to school with, people they once worked for, old school teachers and coaches. It’s a long shot.”

  Kerney pushed back his chair and dropped some bills on the table to cover the coffees and tip. “But worth pursuing, given the fact that the Lazy Z once belonged to the family of Craig Larson’s teenage girlfriend. His familiarity with the ranch is probably one of the factors that drew him there.”

  He glanced at Clayton. “We need to visit with Chief Dorsey and take a look at the Lazy Z crime scene.”

  “Except for the vermin-infested hunting lodge on top of the mesa, there’s not much left to see,” Vanmeter said as he nodded at a file folder in Kerney’s hand. “The briefing packet I passed out this morning brings you up to speed on what happened there.”

  Kerney stood. “And it does so very nicely, Frank. But I want to take a gander for myself.”

  Vanmeter smiled and shrugged. “According to Chief Baca, you both have carte blanche.”

  “We won’t step on any toes unless we have to,” Clayton said as he got to his feet.

  Vanmeter’s smiled widened. “That’s not the back-channel traffic I heard about what you did when you departed the Lincoln County S.O., Agent Istee.”

  Clayton smiled back at Vanmeter. “Those were bruised egos I left behind, Major, not sore toes.”

  Vanmeter laughed as he followed Kerney and Clayton to the parking lot.

  After dark, Larson had transferred his stuff to Pettibone’s Buick, driven Tami’s SUV to her office, left it in the reserved space at the back of the building, and put the magnetic signs on the doors. He’d forgotten to bring along Tami’s vanity license plate, so he left the Subaru plate on the Yukon and walked back to the motel, where he spent the night in Pettibone’s room. In the morning, he’d risen early, got breakfast at a fast-food drive-through window, and parked the Buick back in the lot at the motel so he could watch what was happening at the nearby budget lodge where all the cops were staying.

  Things were quiet at first, but soon officers started coming out the front entrance and driving away in their patrol vehicles. Along with cops in civvies, there were cops in at least five or six different kinds of uniforms.

  Between bites of his breakfast egg-and-bacon sandwich, Larson used his finger as a handgun and pretended he was blowing them away as they hurried to their patrol cars. He figured with a real gun, he could’ve taken down three, maybe four of them, before drawing any fire.

  Overnight, his plan to assassinate cops had changed from an absolute thing he was going to do to a definite maybe. The plan hadn’t lost its appeal; he just needed to do more head work before taking that first shot.

  A bald-headed cop in a state police uniform and two men in blue jeans and cowboy boots with semiautomatics strapped to their belts came out the sliding glass motel doors just as Larson was about to drive away. There was something familiar about the taller of the two men wearing civvies. Larson checked him out carefully as he walked toward an unmarked Ford Crown Victoria. Damned if it wasn’t the cop who’d been the police chief in Santa Fe when he had first been busted. What was his name?

  He’d never seen the other plainclothes cop who was getting into his own unmarked car. He was younger, a few inches shorter, and definitely Indian looking, with dark hair that covered his ears. Larson didn’t recognize him.

  He watched the two unmarked cars enter traffic and turn toward the interstate on-ramps. Just for the hell of it, he decided to follow them for a while to see where they were going. Watching how they operated might give him some good ideas on how he should kill them.

  Ever since Tami’s husband had walked out on her late last year for a twenty-five-year-old bimbo barmaid who lived just across the state line in Trinidad, Colorado, Claudia Tobin had talked to her daughter on the telephone every day. Tami would mostly call in the evenings from home, but sometimes she’d call from her office or from the car on her cell phone when she was out and about.

  When Tami didn’t call, which happened very rarely, Claudia, a widow who now lived in Albuquerque and worked as a part-time home health aide to supplement her Social Security check, always called her. Last night, she’d tried repeatedly to reach Tami without success, and she’d gone to bed worried about her daughter.

  Very early in the morning Claudia again called Tami’s home, work, and cell phone numbers. After getting no response other than voice mail and answering m
achines, she called the Raton Police Department and reported her daughter as missing.

  A polite-sounding officer gathered some basic information about Tami and, upon learning of the recent dissolution of her marriage, suggested it might be possible that Tami had gone out of town on a mini vacation or business trip, or might have spent the night with a friend.

  In no uncertain terms, Claudia told him that she had a very close relationship with her only child and would have known if Tami had decided to do any of those things.

  The officer promised to send a patrol vehicle to Tami’s house and place of employment for a welfare check and advised Claudia not to get too worried. He told Claudia that people sometimes act out of character or impulsively after a major upheaval in their personal lives, and that Tami was probably perfectly all right. Before disconnecting, he took Claudia’s phone number, said they would have Tami call her once they made contact, and once again told her not to worry.

  Claudia wasn’t having any of it. She called in sick, showered and dressed quickly, got into her ten-year-old imported subcompact coupe, and started the two-hundred-mile road trip on Interstate 25 to Raton.

  While serving as the Santa Fe police chief, Kerney had met Everett Dorsey several times during legislative hearings on a concealed-carry bill that eventually passed and was signed into law. Kerney had opposed the bill along with the vast majority of top cops in the state. Dorsey had spoken in favor of it.

  A brief conversation with Dorsey had left Kerney with the clear impression that the man was marking time as the Springer police chief until he could retire and pull a full pension.

  He slowed to a stop in front of the Springer municipal building and in the rearview mirror watched Clayton glide in behind him. The building was a single-story structure with a brick façade, on a residential street just up from a house that had been converted into the town library. The town hall was sandwiched between the police and fire stations. A lone cop car was parked in front of a walkway that led to a windowless steel door with a “Springer Police Department” sign above it. With Clayton at his side, Kerney tried the door, found it locked, pushed the doorbell, and waited.