Dark Angel (Lassiter/Martinez Case Files #2) Page 3

  “There’s that,” Susan said. “But remember, Adam Graves had asthma. OMI could never prove that O’Neil’s assault of the kid caused his death.”

  “Bull. The assault is what probably brought on the kid’s asthma attack.”

  “I agree, partner. But the wheels of justice and all that.”

  “I recall that O’Neil had somehow talked his way into a scout troop as a volunteer. No one checked his background. He went along on camping trips with the boys. Can you imagine? Talk about inviting a wolf to protect the lambs. I’ll bet there were a lot more assaults than were ever reported.”

  “No bet,” Susan said.

  “Detectives,” a voice blared over the speaker system. “We’re done.”

  “Anything?” Barbara asked.

  The pathologist said, “Nothing really. No fingerprints; nothing under his nails; no body fluids other than those of the victim. No hairs or anything else at the crime scene, other than the victim’s.”

  “What about the tent peg?”

  “Someone hammered a fourteen-inch tent peg into the victim’s chest.”

  “Is that what killed him?” Susan asked.

  “I’m pretty sure he died of a myocardial infarction,” the pathologist said.

  “He had a heart attack?”

  “That’s right.”

  Susan said, “I guess a tent peg inserted in your chest can do that.”

  “I’ll tell you for certain after the lab tests are done. Give us twenty-four hours.”

  Back at the Violent Crimes/Homicide Unit in downtown Albuquerque, Barbara and Susan joined the other four unit detectives in a meeting with their boss, Lieutenant Rudy Salas.

  Barbara glanced at Susan when Salas said, “All right, people, let’s get this show on the road.” That’s how Salas began every meeting. That was irritating enough. But his voice squeaked, his ears were too large for his head, his body was thin to the point of emaciation, and his smiles were like grimaces. The lieutenant had earned the nickname “Sniffles” after the old cartoon character, Sniffles the Mouse. Barbara had always thought that “Gargoyle” would have been a better nickname. But, all in all, she was glad to work for Salas. He was a fair, experienced, gutsy boss who shielded his people from politicians. And he’d been responsible for promoting Susan and her.

  After the meeting ended, the six detectives drifted to their desks. Barbara pulled a wheeled white-board over to her side of the office and wrote across the top, three headings: Date. Crime. Victim.

  “Let’s look more closely at O’Neil’s victims.”

  “You thinking one of his victims killed him?”

  “Or a family member of a victim.”

  “That will only give us the names of local victims,” Susan said. “There may be a whole lot more around New Mexico, even out of state.”

  Barbara nodded. “After we pull what we can from his jacket, we’ll access the Interstate Identification Index in the NCIC system.”

  “We should probably check the National Sex Offenders Database, as well.”

  After an hour, Barbara had written seven entries on the white-board. O’Neil’s earliest arrest was for Indecent Exposure with a Minor fifteen years earlier, when O’Neil was twenty-two years old.

  “You notice something about the date of the offense?” Susan asked.

  Barbara looked at the first line entry on the board. “February 12. What about it?”

  “That’s O’Neil’s birthday.”

  Barbara cleared her throat. “So, he went out and flashed a little boy as a birthday present to himself?”

  “Could be.”

  Barbara scanned down the board. “Notice how his offenses escalated from indecent exposure all the way to murder.”

  “Not an unusual progression. This guy should have been put away for life a long time ago.”

  “Someone just put him away for life.”

  “Yeah, Barb, but how many kids were traumatized in the meantime?”

  “Probably more than show in his jacket. Let’s check the NCIC.”

  Susan accessed the National Crime Information Center database, input Sylvester O’Neil’s name, and exclaimed, “Holy cow.”

  “What?”

  “I got”—she counted out loud—“one, two, three, four . . . fourteen arrests, including the seven in his jacket. He committed seven other crimes outside New Mexico. In three different states.” She hesitated for a moment. “This gets curiouser and curiouser.”

  “How so?”

  “The notes in the file raise the possibility that O’Neil committed dozens more assaults over the years. There’s an entry here that says the FBI assigned a team of agents to investigate child molestation cases. Based on M.O., O’Neil was one of the suspects in those cases. But there was no forensic evidence to ID the perps.”

  “How’d all that information wind up in O’Neil’s file?”

  Susan shrugged. “Maybe we should call the Bureau and ask if they’ll share with us.”

  “Don’t hold your breath.”

  “You have a friend at the Bureau. Why don’t you call her?”

  “I wouldn’t call Sophia Otero-Hansen a friend. She was a little aloof when we worked together at APD. Now that she’s a federal agent, she’ll probably be insufferable.”

  “Worth a try.”

  Barbara nodded. “You know there’s something else we should ask. If there have been any other murdered pedophiles who had tent pegs hammered into their chests.”

  “Or other unusual items stuck in ungodly places.”

  Barbara stood, stretched her back, and walked back and forth in front of the white-board. After a while, she said, “I guess we’ll have to talk to the families of the local victims. They would have the best motive for murdering O’Neil.”

  “Yeah,” Susan said. “Let’s start with the Graves family.”

  DAY 4

  CHAPTER 4

  The nightmare never varied. It recycled itself in Race Thornton’s brain in the same detail, with identical sameness, almost every night. The only nights that were nightmare-free followed bouts of binge drinking capped by an Ambien. But those booze/drug reprieves were few and far between. Race didn’t like the fuzzy feeling that followed in the wake of scotch and sleeping pills.

  He awoke with a start, drenched in sweat, a phantom drummer beating a violent riff against the inside of his skull. Screams seemed to echo off the room walls. That’s how the nightmare wreaked its worst on him. He wiped tears from his eyes and moved to the side of the hotel room bed. Involuntary groans rumbled inside his chest.

  “Damn,” he whispered as he glanced at the bedside clock. It was 5:37 a.m.

  Race moved off the bed and looked out the window at the glare and glitz of pre-dawn Las Vegas. Shadowy figures moved wraith-like on the walkway that extended from the hotel to the Strip. Like prowlers on the hunt for depravity. A taxi crawled slowly up the boulevard, like a shark on the hunt for prey. Even at this hour, there was activity. He considered a run on the street. It was important to stay in shape, in light of his new profession and having crossed the forty-year-old threshold. But a plastic bag that blew past the window on a violent February blast of wind persuaded him that the treadmill in the hotel’s postage stamp-sized exercise room was the preferable option.

  He tried to flex his shoulders as he moved to the bathroom, but the damage done to them no longer allowed the range of motion he’d once had. Not that he needed reminders of the night he lost his family, the night he was nearly beaten to death, but part of his daily ritual was to examine his body and face in the mirror. Each scar reminded him of that night, and the sight of each one rekindled the hate and anger that perpetually simmered within him. Race traced a finger along the scar that seemed to creep out of the middle of his hairline, like a snake crawling from its cover. That one was now more white than pink, to match the color of his hair that had gone from black to white almost overnight. He brought the finger down between his hazel-colored eyes, to his nose and followed the S-
curve that his once-straight nose made. Another scar meandered from his left ear lobe to the top of his cheek bone. He moved his jaw from side to side and felt the tightness that had been there for over three years. Ever since the intruder broke his jaw with a tire iron, laughter, or even a full smile, was no longer easy for him. Not that he had anything to laugh about. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d found anything truly humorous. He stared intently at the scars on his shoulders—zippered reminders of the work the surgeon had done to repair the broken bones and ruptured tendons.

  “I guess I could be called ruggedly handsome,” Race whispered to his reflection in the mirror. But he knew that was a stretch. He looked more like a punch-drunk journeyman boxer than ruggedly handsome. Good looking once; he and Mary had always been the most attractive couple wherever they went. Now his wife’s beauty was a fading memory and he had become damaged goods.

  After he washed his face, he dressed for a workout. He’d put in an hour on a treadmill, another hour on free weights. After his exercise routine, he’d clean up, dress, and meet Eric Matus at a diner. If things went well, he’d be on the road by tomorrow.

  At 7 a.m., Eric Matus reconnoitered the exterior of the Shrine-Most Holy Redeemer Church on Reno Drive. There were only two cars in the lot behind the building. Then he went inside and sat in the last pew. He observed an elderly man and woman seated halfway toward the front, in the middle of a pew on the left side of the aisle. A very old woman sat in a wheelchair in the aisle at the front, also on the left side of the center aisle. A young woman sat in the pew next to her. Satisfied with what he saw, Matus walked the street to his Toyota Land Cruiser and dialed a number.

  “Yeah, this is Salvatore Puccini.”

  Puccini’s telephone voice was soft, but a bit shrill. That wasn’t what Eric Matus had expected. He’d seen a photo of the man on the Internet. Big, beefy guy with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair and hands like catchers’ mitts.

  “Right on time,” Puccini said. “That’s good. Shows respect.”

  “Respect is important,” Matus said.

  “So, you say you’re dependable.”

  “No one better.”

  “Why do you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Kill for money.”

  “You mean kill assholes for money.”

  “Yeah. But why?”

  “Justice.”

  “Bullshit. There’s got to be more to it than that.”

  “Do you really care?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  Matus hesitated for a few seconds. “Personal reasons.”

  “What sort of personal reasons?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  Puccini paused as though considering Matus’s question. “I understand personal. This is very personal to me. But I don’t want some guy working for me who likes to kill; some psychopath. I want to hire a guy who feels what I feel. Who doesn’t take an assignment just for the dough. Who wants to get rid of scum.”

  Matus cringed at Puccini’s use of the word “psychopath.” What else would you call someone who murders people? He shook his head as though to rid it of the unwanted thought. He didn’t like where this conversation had headed. “I assure you—”

  “Just answer my question and I’ll deliver the package. Why do you do it? Something happen to you? You don’t answer, I walk.”

  Matus sat silently for a full ten seconds. He knew he would break trust with Race if he told Puccini anything personal about either of them. But Puccini’s job was a threefer—three targets; sixty thousand dollars.

  “I was Joe Citizen. Never even had a parking ticket.” He took a deep breath and waited a long beat. “Came home one night from work and found a cop on my doorstep. He told me my wife and son had been killed in a crash with a drunk driver. The guy had thirty DUIs before he killed my family.”

  “What did they do to the guy?”

  “His license was suspended and he got off on probation.”

  “What did you do about that?”

  Matus’s throat seemed to constrict. He swallowed, and said, “I killed him.”

  Puccini said, “You’re the man for me. You’ll have the package in fifteen minutes.”

  Matus watched a black Cadillac sedan pull up in front of the church fifteen minutes later. He recognized Salvatore Puccini when he exited the Cadillac. He admired the way the man carried himself as he walked into the church—erect, proud, in command. Despite the events that had occurred over the past year, Puccini seemed to have survived emotionally and physically. But, Matus thought, you can never know what goes on inside a man’s brain, especially after what happened to Puccini’s granddaughter. He could relate. Any memory of the smiling, beautiful faces of his own wife and son was a throat-tightening, heart-wrenching experience. All he needed to do was think for an instant about them and the face of the bastard who had murdered them that day in Salt Lake City would fill his mind’s eye. Venomous hate would overwhelm him, and he would once again regret that he hadn’t avenged his wife and son’s deaths himself, instead of Race doing it for him.

  He felt swamped with guilt about the story he’d told Puccini. At least the part about who killed the drunk who’d murdered his family. But he couldn’t come up with another way to relate the tale. He didn’t want anyone to know that another person was involved with him. That could only expose Race, who had as much motivation to kill scumbags as he had. Matus thought again about what had happened to Race. How he came home from work one night and came face-to-face with a guy in his kitchen. The guy beat him with a tire iron. Nearly killed him. When he came to in the hospital, he’d learned his wife and two teenage daughters had been tortured and brutally murdered. DNA and fingerprints at the scene showed there had been three men involved, but all that could be determined from the DNA was that two of the men were white and one was black. The authorities couldn’t connect the DNA and fingerprints to anyone. Apparently, none of them had ever been arrested or worked for the government.

  Matus’s mind leaped back to the present when Puccini left the church less than a minute after he entered, returned to the sedan, and drove away.

  Matus watched the church for an hour after Puccini left. Then he crossed the street and went inside. He moved to the fifth pew from the rear, on the left side of the nave, and sat down by the aisle. He knelt, reached under the pew in front of him, grasped the envelope taped there, pulled it free, and slipped it under his sport jacket. He looked at his watch as he left the church and noted that he had fifteen minutes to meet Race.

  Back in his SUV, Matus removed the sixty thousand dollars in cash from Puccini’s envelope and stuffed it into the glove compartment.

  Parked across the street from the diner, Race watched from his blue Chevrolet Impala as Eric Matus left his Toyota SUV in the parking lot and climbed three steps to the diner door. He took a seat in a corner of the aluminum-clad building. Race continued to observe the diner and surrounding area. After ten minutes, confident no one suspicious was around, he left the Impala, walked to the front door of the building, and joined Matus in the booth.

  “Everything okay?” Race asked.

  Eric gave him a nervous smile. “Everything’s fine.” He pushed a large envelope across the table. “Big job this time.”

  “Why’s that?” Race asked.

  Eric looked around, leaned forward and, in a lowered voice, said, “Multiple bad guys.”

  Race waited.

  “It’s all in there. Client’s eighteen-year-old granddaughter was raped by three college football players at a frat party. All rich kids. Parents politically connected. Claimed it was consensual. Can you believe that? Judge here in Vegas gave them all suspended sentences because the girl couldn’t testify. She’s been institutionalized ever since the attack.”

  Race felt his blood boil. He passed a throwaway phone to Eric. “As usual, it’s already programmed with the number you should call next time. Make sure you destroy the phone after you call me.”


  “Come on, Race. How many times have we done this? I know what to do.”

  Race slid from the booth and went outside. He drove to his hotel and studied the file in his room. Then he walked across the street to a bank and accessed the safety deposit box he’d opened there two years earlier under one of his aliases. He’d provided the bank with a social security number and address he’d bought off the Dark Net, an overlay network that could only be accessed with specific software, configurations, or authorization, and paid for the box five years in advance. After the clerk left him alone, he removed ten thousand of the five hundred thousand dollars he’d originally placed in the box. The key to the box then went back into his wallet to accompany the keys to the safety deposit boxes he’d rented in Albuquerque, Newport Beach, El Paso, and Denver.

  The wind had subsided since he’d left the hotel earlier that morning, and the temperature had climbed to a comfortable sixty-two degrees. Race drove to the neighborhoods where the three rapists lived—two in The Ridges Community, the third in Spanish Trails. The communities were gated. Access would be a problem.

  He picked up the file with the boys’ photos and found the name and number of the attorney who had represented the three at trial: Samuel Jacobson. He used a burner phone to call the lawyer’s number.

  “Samuel Jacobson’s office; Maria speaking.”

  “Hello. My name is Walter Reidy. I’ve just moved to Las Vegas and want to hire an attorney who can represent me on a business deal.”

  “I’m sure Mr. Jacobson can assist you, Mr. Reidy. Let me check his calendar.”

  When Maria came back on the line, she said, “Mr. Jacobson has some time available next Monday. He could—”

  “I’m interested in buying a casino hotel in Las Vegas. This is a matter of some urgency, so I need to immediately retain an attorney. I guess I’ll have to call someone else. Thank you for—”

  “Well, if it’s urgent . . . .”

  “I can meet with Mr. Jacobson this evening, say about 6:30?”