Head Wounds Read online

  “What’s the status?” Rodney asked.

  Clayton ran it down. CSI staff was still working the two crime scenes, nothing yet from the MI, and no plausible suspects had been identified. All hotel guests screened so far had come up clean in state and federal crime databases.

  “The night manager left without permission,” he added. “A unit is en route to his house to detain him if he’s there.”

  “Is he a suspect?” Rodney asked.

  “I don’t know, but we need to find out.”

  “How did that happen?” Sheriff Vasquez inquired, gesturing to an empty chair.

  Clayton sat. “A rookie mistake by Deputy Paxton. I counseled him.”

  “Write him up,” Rodney ordered.

  Clayton glanced at Ramon, who said nothing. “I’ve admonished him. That should be enough.”

  “Very well,” Rodney grumbled.

  Vasquez smiled tightly and handed Clayton the file. “This is what we have so far about the victims, faxed to us from the Eagle Pass, Texas, PD.”

  Clayton read quickly. Six months ago, using their aliases, James Goggin and Lucy Nautzile had taken a one-year lease on an apartment in town and paid cash for a late-model Ford Explorer at a local used car lot. According to the manager at the apartment complex, they had no jobs, and no known friends or acquaintances. Neither party had any contact with nor were known to local law enforcement agencies. That was all the information available so far, but Eagle Pass PD would follow up later in the day.

  “It’s a small, understaffed department in a high-intensity drug-trafficking area,” Sheriff Vasquez added. “I’ve spoken to their acting police chief, and he’s agreed to have his criminal division do additional legwork.”

  “As of now, we know nothing of their whereabouts before they arrived in Eagle Pass,” Rodney said. “Once we wrap up here, we’ll have to dig into that.”

  “Affirmative,” Clayton replied.

  Rodney leaned forward in his chair. “I spoke to the special agent in charge of the DEA El Paso Division and asked about Eagle Pass. It borders Piedras Negras, Mexico, across the Rio Grande. It’s a busy international crossing used by the cartels to smuggle drugs, contraband, and illegals into the country. I put in a request to ICE for any intelligence they might have on our victims—frequent border crossings, extended stays in Mexico, any vehicle inspections.”

  “If the killings were tied to the drug cartels or human trafficking, we may have a possible motive,” Clayton replied.

  “There’s a casino on the Texas side of the border, operated by the Kickapoo Tribe, which might also figure into the mix,” Rodney added.

  “Even more interesting,” Clayton replied.

  “But hypothetical,” Vasquez injected. “All we know right now is the victims pissed off somebody, big-time. What do you know about the Kickapoos?”

  Clayton shrugged. “Not much, really. As a child I heard stories that back in the day they were fierce warriors and hated enemies of the Apache people.”

  Vasquez leaned back in his chair and looked at Rodney. “Get started intelligence-gathering. I want to know more about the Kickapoos, Eagle Pass, the casino, and what law enforcement is up to down there, on both sides of the border.”

  “The cartels own the Mexican police,” Clayton remarked, “and they employ their own assassins.”

  Vasquez nodded. “The sicarios.” He glanced at Rodney. “Query the Mexican Feds. Ask them if they have anything on a sicario who likes to scalp his victims. Check with Interpol as well.”

  Rodney scratched a note to himself. “Right away.”

  Clayton’s phone rang. It was the patrol deputy at Cosgrove’s residence. There was no answer at the front door, the place was locked up and secure, and his vehicle was not anywhere inside the trailer park or nearby.

  “Stay put, I’m on my way.” Clayton stood and looked at Vasquez. “Cosgrove was rattled by the murders. He could be planning to harm himself. Forced entry at his residence to check on his welfare might be necessary. Ten-four?”

  “Go ahead,” Sheriff Vasquez replied.

  Rodney nodded in terse agreement

  The trailer park was in a working-class neighborhood not far from downtown off a heavily traveled city street. Clayton joined Deputy Leon Duran in his unit at the far end of the compound, parked next to an older single-wide on concrete blocks with a sagging aluminum screen door.

  Duran, an eighteen-year veteran of the department, told him the front and rear doors were locked and the shades were drawn on all the windows.

  “Cosgrove drives a ten-year-old Toyota Corolla,” he added. “I cruised the trailer park coming in. It’s not here. Didn’t see it on any side streets, either. Spoke to his next-door neighbors. Nobody heard him arrive.”

  Duran touched the onboard computer keypad and read off the license plate number for the Corolla. “No lien, everything current, including insurance, no moving violations on his driving record. A BOLO has been issued.”

  “Cover the back door,” Clayton said. “I’ll go in the front.”

  The front door had a keyed lock but no dead bolt. Clayton jimmied it open, announced he was the police, drew his weapon, and went in low. A single table lamp illuminated the semidarkness. The combination living-kitchen area appeared neat and tidy, although the furnishings verged on thrift-store shabby.

  He flipped on the light switch and called out again as he approached the bedroom. Dresser drawers were open, and clothes were piled haphazardly on the unmade bed. The room had a stale, sweaty smell to it, similar to the odor that serious drunks gave off when they were drying out.

  The medicine chest above the sink in the adjoining bathroom had been swept clean of toiletries. A copy of the Alcoholics Anonymous Serenity Prayer was thumbtacked to the wall above the commode. Damp towels filled the bottom of the tub.

  Had Cosgrove returned home directly from the hotel, showered, packed, and left in a hurry? Or had it been staged to look that way? Everything about the case felt decidedly weird.

  Clayton shook off conjecture and cleared the rest of the trailer. In a room used as a home office, a past-due notice from a loan company had been crumpled up and thrown in a wastebasket next to a small desk. In a desk drawer, he found a form letter denying Cosgrove’s application for veteran’s medical benefits, based on his dishonorable discharge from the Navy. He’d served during Operation Desert Shield and separated from the service in 1993.

  Outside, Clayton asked Deputy Duran to stand by until he spoke to the trailer park manager.

  Tom Pearce, the manager, was a short man in his sixties with a sunken chest and a bad cough. His double-wide at the entrance of the two-acre trailer park also served as the office and rental center. Pearce told him Cosgrove rented his trailer three years ago and lived alone. He dug into a file cabinet and retrieved Cosgrove’s rental application and signed lease agreement. It showed his previous employment history, his prior residences, his local bank, and his monthly income at the time of his application.

  If the information was accurate, Cosgrove had lived in Las Cruces for at least nine years and had prior experience as a front-desk clerk or maintenance engineer at three different area hotels.

  “Was this information verified?”

  “Not by me. I just take the information and send copies to the company that owns the park. They’ve never turned anyone down in the five years I’ve been here.”

  At Clayton’s request, Pearce made him a copy of the lease application.

  “Does Cosgrove have any frequent visitors?” he asked.

  “Not that I know of. Keeps to himself. A quiet boozer, I’d say. He drinks a lot of beer and puts the empty cans in our communal recycle bin for pickup.”

  “Have any strangers been around lately asking for him?”

  “Just you.”

  “Did you see him drive in earlier? Or leave?”

  “Nope, sure didn’t.”

  “How about any unfamiliar vehicles last night or this morning?”


  “Haven’t seen any.”

  “A late-model Ford Explorer with Texas plates, perhaps.”

  Pearce laughed and shook his head. “I’d have noticed that. Most people living here drive old clunkers, including me.”

  “Do you know where he worked recently, before he started his job at the new hotel south of town?”

  “He hadn’t been working, as far as I could tell. At least not regular for six months. Did odd jobs here and there. I hired him a couple times to clean up litter around the property, and he did day labor for a landscape company.”

  Clayton thanked Pearce for his time and returned to Deputy Duran outside Cosgrove’s trailer. He had him put out a missing person bulletin on Cosgrove and to stay put until a detective arrived to relieve him.

  “Is this a crime scene?” Duran asked.

  “I’m not sure. It needs a closer look before we call out the techs.”

  “No problem.”

  Clayton returned to the hotel, where satellite TV news trucks now lined the access road. The hotel parking lot was almost empty, signaling guests had been cleared and allowed to depart. A CLOSED FOR THE DAY sign was taped to the hotel’s automatic front doors.

  Clayton had hoped to avoid Captain Rodney by bypassing the mobile command center, only to find him in one of the large conference rooms being debriefed by an investigative team of eight detectives, a CSI supervisor, and Sergeant Perez. Sheriff Vasquez was absent.

  Rodney glanced in Clayton’s direction as he slid into an unoccupied chair. He’d arrived in time to learn that guest interviews had wrapped up with no viable suspects identified, the MI had declared the victims dead, mostly likely by having their throats cut, and CSI was still harvesting evidence at the crime scenes.

  Clayton’s interest jumped a notch when the CSI supervisor reported that several critical components to the CCTV system may have been deliberately damaged.

  Rodney called on Clayton last for an update. He reported that Cosgrove had apparently disappeared and gave a quick summary of what he’d discovered at the trailer park. He suggested the possibility Cosgrove had been an accomplice in the homicides.

  Rodney didn’t challenge the notion. Instead, he announced that he was assuming command of the investigation.

  “Nobody’s being admonished here,” he added with a glance at Clayton. “You’ve all been doing your jobs. Sheriff Vasquez wants that to be perfectly clear.”

  Clayton wasn’t dismayed by the decision. It was a major case that necessitated top brass oversight and coordination. He wasn’t being bounced off the case, just relieved as the primary. Now he’d get to see what kind of chops his new boss had.

  Rodney directed Clayton to focus on the embezzlement at the Mescalero casino and find out about any recent contact the victims might have had with former coworkers and people on the rez.

  “Get me a motive and a suspect soon,” he demanded from everyone before ending the meeting.

  Clayton left a message for his wife, Grace, before wheeling out of the hotel parking lot. He was on the road to Mescalero and would check back later. To hurry along the hundred-mile journey, he’d run a silent code three as soon as he reached the highway.

  No matter the circumstances, Clayton always found returning to Mescalero lifted his heart. Born and raised in the high-forested ancestral mountains of the Apaches, his ties to home were strong and persistent.

  The reservation, a big, splendid slice of mountains, valleys, streams, and rivers, still only lightly touched by the hand of man, overlooked the vast, imposing Tularosa Basin to the west and the edge of the windblown Staked Plains to the east.

  He’d often wondered what Mescalero would have become if the White Eyes had kept it as their own. The trashy sprawl on the fringes of the 720-square-mile Apache homeland suggested it would be something less than glorious.

  Lucy Nautzile’s girls, Angie and Jennie, lived with their grandmother, Blossom Magoosh, in her small house on the outskirts of the Mescalero village, away from the major highway that cut east and west through the rez in the Sacramento Mountains.

  Off a paved secondary road, the house was sheltered by a pine tree grove nestled between two shallow arroyos. It had snowed overnight, a good three inches, and only Angie’s and Jennie’s boot tracks showed in the long driveway. Blossom’s snow-covered old pale green Datsun pickup truck was parked next to the enclosed front porch. Smoke drifted from the rooftop chimney.

  Clayton was glad the girls were at school. He had no desire to tell them that their mother was finished. Better to have Blossom carry the news and alert family to begin the preparations for the rituals and ceremonies to come.

  Blossom answered Clayton’s knock at the front door and ushered him inside to the tiny front room warmed by a woodstove.

  Searching his face, she said, “Clayton Istee, why do you wish to see this old woman?”

  No more than five feet tall, her face carved with wrinkles, Blossom was a traditional Apache healer, frequently sought for her remedies to cure sicknesses of mind and body.

  “I have come to speak of your daughter who once was,” Clayton replied respectfully. It was taboo to say aloud the name of a newly dead.

  “Ah,” Blossom said, her expression unchanged. “She is finished?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the man?”

  “Also finished.”

  Blossom gestured at an armless side chair. “Sit.”

  Perched on the edge of the chair, Clayton asked if Blossom had recently seen or heard from her daughter.

  Blossom slowly sat down on a small sofa. “Two days ago she came here with the man. She gave me a thousand dollars for the girls and said she’d soon have much more to fix my roof and buy a new kitchen stove.”

  “Did she say where she got the money?”

  “No, only that once she had settled, she would come for the girls and they would live with her.”

  “Did she see the girls?”

  “Yes, but only for a few minutes. The man waited outside and kept beeping the horn to make her hurry up.”

  Clayton asked about the man and the car. Blossom confirmed the man had been James Goggin but could only recall that the vehicle had been black in color and not a truck. She didn’t remember seeing a license plate.

  “When did you last see her before this visit?”

  “The day she ran away with that man and left the girls with me. Once in a while, she’d send money for them, or call to talk. But she never said where she was living or what she was doing.”

  Clayton asked about postmarks on the envelopes. Some had come from Texas, others from Mexico, but Blossom couldn’t say where. The notes came with money. The girls had tacked them to a bulletin board in their shared bedroom. Most simply read, “Mommy loves and misses you.”

  In the front room, Blossom reached for her coat hung on a wall rack near the door. “I must go now and get the girls from school.”

  He helped her with her coat, put his business card on the lamp table next to the chair, and asked her to call if she remembered anything else.

  Blossom nodded. “When will her body come home?”

  To keep the living cleansed and any possible death sickness away, Apaches dealt with death swiftly. “I’ll ask to have it brought here as soon as possible.”

  “Thank you.”

  He followed Blossom outside and watched her rattle her way down the driveway in the old Datsun before calling his mother. His family was related to Blossom’s family, cousins going back generations. Arranging for the journey She Who Could Not Be Named must soon make from The Shadow World to The Real World would require prompt action on the part of many.

  “I’m at Blossom’s house,” he said when Isabel answered. “There’s bad news. Her daughter is finished. Blossom has gone to bring the girls home from school.”

  “What happened?”

  “It’s been on the TV.”

  “The hotel killings?”

  Clayton didn’t respond.

  Isabel sig
hed. “How terrible. I’ll come right over. I wish you’d taken the tribal conservation job.”

  “The offer came too late. You know that.”

  “I do.”

  “We’ll talk again soon,” Clayton said. He disconnected and checked the time on his phone. His cousin Selena Kazhe, a senior executive with the tribal casino enterprise, would be his next stop. From her he hoped to get more details about the embezzlement Lucy and Goggin had pulled off. Maybe it had some connection to their gruesome deaths.

  CHAPTER 2

  Long before the resort and casino existed, there had been no lake or golf course, just a beautiful high-country valley watered by a perennial stream tucked away in an old-growth pine forest. In the summer, Apache families camped with their livestock until fall when the cattle and horses were gathered and sold, often to ranchers off the reservation. Now the valley embraced a four-star resort in its second iteration. It was a year-round destination for high rollers, outdoor enthusiasts, sportsmen, and well-heeled vacationers. The only livestock remaining were the horses that guests rented for an hour-long guided trail ride around the man-made lake, weather permitting.

  Selena Kazhe was on the telephone when Clayton knocked on the open door to her office. She blew him a kiss, waved at an empty chair, and kept on talking. Clayton settled in and caught snatches of the one-sided conversation, which had to do with problems recruiting qualified indigenous applicants for several mid-level management positions.

  Above average in height and full-bodied, Selena had an infectious laugh, a natural ability to show genuine interest in everyone she met, and a tough negotiator’s attitude when it came to tribal business. The few personal items that adorned her office included an arrangement of three old Apache baskets on the sideboard, a large, framed reproduction of the original map of the Mescalero Reservation on the wall, and a silver presentation bowl on her desk from the Mescalero Apache Cattle Growers, which she kept filled with candy.

  She finished the call, dropped the handset in the cradle, settled back in her chair, and smiled. “You’re not here to brighten my day, are you, cousin?”