Dead or Alive (21 page)

Outside, they followed the stolen truck's tire tracks to a water tank and found a partially eaten woman's body, which was most likely all that remained of Nancy Trimble. Almost all of her clothing had been ripped off by the coyotes that had obviously feasted on the internal organs. Rope had been used to tie her hands, she'd been hobbled around the ankles, the bottoms of her bloody, bare feet were pincushions of imbedded cactus spines, and there were shreds of gray duct tape at the corners of her empty eye sockets. The entry wound told Dorsey she'd been shot in the back by a high-powered rifle, and signs of recent bruising on her buttocks convinced him that she'd been raped.

Dorsey pictured Trimble panicked, violated, hobbled, blindfolded, and barefoot stumbling across the mesa, knowing she was about to die, and his stomach turned at the thought it. He'd seen his share of human perversion, evil, and ugliness, but this was a new, all-time low.

“Somebody needs to put a bullet in Craig Larson's head,” Dorsey said as he covered the body with a tarp.

 

 

Springer had one motel and a small, ten-room hotel. The state police task force hunting for Craig Larson had filled them up and spilled over to a budget motel on the outskirts of Raton, some forty miles distant. Just after nine at night Kerney drove past the Raton motel, with its “No Vacancy” sign and parking lot filled with cop cars, and pulled in next door at a slightly more expensive lodging establishment. Clayton parked behind him and they registered for separate but adjoining rooms. When they finished stowing their gear, Kerney used his cell phone to call Frank Vanmeter, the state police major in charge of the manhunt, and advise him of their arrival.

Just as Kerney disconnected, Clayton popped into the room and asked if there were any new developments.

“Nope,” Kerney replied. “No fresh kills since the caretaker at the Lazy Z and no sightings of Larson.”

Clayton nodded, turned as if to leave, hesitated, and gave Kerney a questioning glace.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I keep hoping Larson won't get caught until I find him. I haven't even being thinking about the innocent people he's been murdering while he's on the loose. Is that perverse or what?”

“No, it's human,” Kerney replied with a grim smile. “I want a piece of Larson just as much as you do.”

Chapter Eight

In spite of her good looks, sex with Tami was a real bummer. Larson figured her to be a frigid, hysterical bitch. The only hole that worked on her was her mouth. He finished quickly, zipped up his pants, and slapped her hard repeatedly to get her to quit begging for her life. When she wouldn't quiet down, he stuck her head in the toilet and held her under until she went limp.

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 wrong 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.”