The Survivors Club (2 page)

CHAPTER 2

“So who was this Lucky Looky guy?” Danny asked as they drove back the way they’d come, bumping over the bone-jarring washboard road. They’d finished up at the crime scene late in the day, seen the techs to their cars, and closed up. They’d padlocked the gate to the ghost town, even though the border here was porous and anyone who could crawl through a four-strand fence could get in.

“
Lohrke
,” Tess said. “Not Looky.”

“Who is
he
? Somebody who was lucky, eh?”

“He was a baseball player,” Tess said.

“You like baseball?”

“Nope. I just saw his obit in a magazine.”

“Bet you don’t like soccer, either.”

“You’re batting a thousand today.”

“So let me guess. You remember every detail of this obit, am I right?”

“Yup.”

“Weren’t you, like diagnosed or something? What’s it called? Superautographical—”

“Superautobiographical memory.”

“Yeah, that. If I give you a date you can tell me what day it was and what you were doing.”

“True.”

On May 2, 2009, she’d picked up a
Time
magazine. It was a Monday in Albuquerque, sunny with a few high clouds. She’d stopped at the Coyote Springs Safeway to pick up a few things she’d run out of—milk, bread, toothpaste, and a packet of hairpins. She’d been working a particularly ugly homicide—Yolanda Ochs, beaten, and her throat slit—and was on the way home. As Tess waited in the checkout line, she flipped through the magazine, and that was when she saw it.

Jack “Lucky” Lohrke’s obituary.

“So what made this Lorhke so damn lucky?” Danny asked her.

“In World War II, the two guys on each side of him were shot and killed.”

“So? That doesn’t sound so unusual.”

“Okay. After the war, he was bumped from a transport flight home by a high-ranking officer at the last minute…”

“Just him, right?”

“I dunno. Probably.”

“So let me guess…the plane crashed.”

“Killed everyone aboard. But that wasn’t all.”

“Oh, do tell!” Danny using his Carmen Miranda voice. “Choo don’ mean there’s more, do you?”

“Your accent needs work.”

Danny pulled the sun visor down against the blinding sun—a fiery orange ball low in the sky. “My wife says I do gay perfectly.”

“That’s her problem. You want the rest of the story or not?”

“Oh, yeah, don’t stop now,
chiltepin
.”

Little chili pepper. Jeeze. “Let’s stick with
guera
, okay? Fast-forward to 1946,” Tess said. “Jack Lohrke played Triple A Baseball with the Spokane Indians. That’s good, right? Triple A?”

“Oh, yeah, that’s good. Which you’d know if you liked baseball.”

“So Lohrke got word on the road that he was just traded to the San Diego Padres. They stopped to eat at a diner. He decided right then and there he’d hitch a ride and join up with his new team. So he left them there.”

“This does not bode well.”

“Nope.”

“So what happened?”

“They were about to drive up into the Cascade Mountains. It was snowing up on the Snoqualmie Pass. The team bus went off the road, through a guardrail, and crashed down the mountain. Burst into flames. The manager and nine members of the team were killed. The survivors were in bad shape, too.”

“Holy shit. He really
was
lucky.”

“I’d say so.”

“Like George Hanley,” Danny added. “Except
his
luck ran out.”

The sun was low in the sky by the time they reached Rio Rico, where George Hanley’s daughter and her husband lived. They waited at the door of an older brick ranch in a nice neighborhood. You knew it was a nice neighborhood because there was open space between the houses, and because the houses were on top of a hill for a valley view.

Danny looked at Tess. “How are we gonna do this?”

“Very carefully.”

They’d both said it at once.

Danny said, “That gave me the creeps.”

“Me, too. Let’s not do that again.”

The outdoor light came on.

Tess cleared her throat.

They were both aware of the politics involved. The deceased was an ex-cop. The shooting looked like a cartel hit. Not to mention Hanley’s death could spur widespread fear among the retired people who populated this area.

As they waited, Tess said, “I don’t think we go into the extent of his injuries right now.”

“Yeah,” Dan replied. “Dead’s dead.”

So they played it that way.

The door opened.

The daughter, Pat—she was in her midfifties—took it hard. Her husband, not so much. He seemed more annoyed than anything.

Pat Scofield started weeping, saying she should never have asked her father to move here, it was all her fault, who would do something like that?

Bert Scofield had been watching a baseball game and his gaze kept straying to the TV set, which his wife had turned down.

He did look up every now and then to ask a question. Was it someone his father-in-law knew? Was it in his apartment? “When was he killed?”

“We’re not sure. Sometime yesterday,” Danny said.

“At that ghost town, right? Why would he go there?”

“We don’t know.”

“You don’t know much, do you? You say he was shot? I’ve told him he shouldn’t be going out there, you never know who you’re gonna run into. All those drug smugglers, wetbacks, place is riddled with ’em. I hope he was carrying.”

He was, of course—Hanley was a retired cop. He had a snub-nosed .38 on his hip and a knife strapped to his ankle. He didn’t have a chance to draw either.

The commercial was over and the game was on again. Bert stood up—the meeting was at an end. “So what now?”

Tess addressed Pat. “Your father’s body is at the medical examiner’s office. We’ll get in touch with you when he’s released.”

Pat looked up from where she had been sitting, her face slack with shock. “You mean that’s it?”

Tess knew what she meant. Someone comes to your house and tells you your loved one is dead, and that is all there is to it. There’s nothing you can do. You’ve been delivered the bad news that so-and-so’s never coming back, and then the detective leaves and gets into his car and drives away and you close the door and you’re alone. Or with someone as shell-shocked as you are.

“Can’t we come down and identify him?” Pat asked.

This was the tricky part. “It’s okay, ma’am,” Danny said, holding her hands in his. “Your father’s already been identified.”

He didn’t mention that the DL was soaked through with blood and it was hard to be sure. But the empirical evidence, the torched car’s VIN number, what could be seen of the DL, and other pieces of identification, his guns and his knife—everything came back to George Hanley. She said, “Can you let us have a photo? Something recent? People don’t have to go down there in person anymore—”

“But we should go down there, shouldn’t we, Bert? He’s my
father
.”

Bert looked up from the television. “I think we should do what they say, Pat.”

She marched over to him, grabbed the remote, and shot it at the screen. The screen went black. “Goddammit, my
father
has been
killed!
And all you can think about is a
baseball
game? I want to see him. Can’t I go see him?” She started to cry again.

Tess took her hands in her own. She looked into the woman’s eyes, willing her to meet her own gaze. “Pat, honestly, I don’t think you should see him right now. They’ll release him in the next day or two. I’ve seen a lot of people who have lost loved ones, and it never helps.”
Lie
. “You want to be prepared for when you see him.”
Half lie
. “You have to trust me when I tell you that this is only going to hurt. You need time to get used to the idea.”

Pat’s eyes took on a furtive shine. “What are you hiding from me?”

“We’re not—”

“What happened? You said he was shot. Is that true? I just want to see him!”

Tess looked at Danny and Danny looked at Tess.

She’d know sooner or later, anyway.

Tess held Pat’s eyes with her own. “He was shot multiple times. You don’t want to see him like that.”

“Mul-multiple times?”

“Yes.”

“Like before? When he was living in Phoenix?” There was hope in her voice.

Thinking that maybe he survived again.

Tess held her hands steady. Held her eyes. “No, I’m afraid he’s gone. You don’t want to see him right now.”

Tess saw it come home to the woman. The shock turned her face pale. She stared, but could barely move her lips. Her eyes took on a glazed shine.

She bolted for the bathroom, and Tess and Danny looked uncomfortably at Bert as they heard her retch.

But she didn’t insist on going with them.

CHAPTER 3

It was going on eleven p.m. by the time Tess sat down to write her initial report for the George Hanley murder book.

She and Danny Rojas had split up. Danny returned to the scene to supervise the removal of George Hanley’s vehicle, a 2005 Yukon Denali, while Tess worked on the report back at the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office.

Earlier, deputies had been dispatched to secure the possible secondary crime scene—Hanley’s apartment.

One of them—Javits—called to tell her the door to the apartment was locked when they arrived. It had taken them a while to get there because there was a car accident at a nearby intersection and they had stopped to render aid. They’d reached the apartment by 9:47 and saw nothing amiss. He reported that the area around the room—the walkway, the curb, the parking lot—was free of trash. They secured the scene by sealing the door with crime scene tape and extending the tape out to the pillars of the walkway.

“Did you knock on doors?”

“We did, both sides of his apartment and the place above, but nobody answered. It appeared quiet. The lock had not been tampered with.”

Hanley’s keys—and Tess assumed the key to the apartment was included—had been left in the ignition of the burned car.

Her phone chirped—Danny. Tess ended her call with the deputy.

“The Yukon’s on the flatbed on its way to forensics,” Danny said. “Took a long time to winch it up out of that ravine. Burned to a crisp.”

“How far was it from the ghost town?”

“Maybe a half mile, like we thought. The closest place to dump it.”

They would give it a thorough going-over.

“It was torched big-time,” Danny said. “Don’t know what kind of evidence they’ll be able to recover. Still, gotta try.”

“Hopefully there’s something.”

“Yeah, hopefully.” But he sounded gloomy. Or maybe he was just tired.

Tess stared at her monitor and tapped her fingers on her desk. There was one other detective in the room, Derek Little, a guy she didn’t know well. He was at his own desk, which faced away from hers, talking on the phone. Tess got the impression he didn’t like
her, probably because she came in with Bonny, the new undersheriff.

She knew a lot of the Ds she worked with considered her to be a teacher’s pet.

Nothing I can do about that.

Back to George Hanley. So he was a retired cop who came down here from the Phoenix area to be near his daughter. Nothing unusual about that scenario. They hadn’t learned much from Pat and Bert, except that George Hanley led tours of the ghost town, Credo, once or twice a week. His mother had been born in the town, and he had memories of visiting the ghost town as a child.

The only thing she could think of: if he went down there often,
he might have seen something. Something a retired cop might notice.

Border crossers, drug smugglers, and gun runners passed through that area all the time. Even though it was rugged country, the border around there was porous. Where there was opportunity, there was also activity.

Her cell vibrated. She was surprised to see the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, ICE come up on her readout at this hour.

The agent returning her call, Tony Versailles, explained that he’d been on a raid and was too jazzed to sleep. “What do you want to know?”

Tess ran it down for him, asked him if there was anything on George Hanley.

“Offhand, I can’t remember anyone like that,” Versailles said. “It’s kind of unusual.”

“His age, you mean.”

“You’d be surprised at some of the old folks we’ve dealt with. There are old guys involved, sure, but they’re usually the brains of the outfit and stay clear of the day-to-day operation. Some of the prominent community leaders around here are up to their necks in organized crime, but they’re hard to nail down. I call ’em the Godfathers. Let me take a look and I’ll call you back.”

He called her twenty minutes later. “I don’t see anything here. That doesn’t mean there isn’t something. But the guy’s an Anglo. He doesn’t really fit the profile.”

“He’s an ex-cop,” Tess said.

“Yeah. Could be something there. But we haven’t come across him. I’ll keep checking, though.”

“Thanks,” Tess said.

“No problem. Keep me posted—you never know where this could lead.”

She became aware that Derek Little was staring at her from across the room. When she caught his eye, he looked back at his computer monitor. Concentrated on it for a moment.

Then he rolled his chair out from the desk and stood up.

He walked in her direction. Derek was tall and skinny, the way Tess envisioned Ichabod Crane.

He stooped over her.

Cleared his throat.

“I have a question for you.” When he spoke, she got the impression it was like trying to pull a sliver out of his hand with a pair of tweezers.

She looked up at him. Wasn’t about to stand up.

He cleared his throat again. “You remember the Sanchez case?”

“That wasn’t mine.”

“But we were all looking for him, right?”

Yes. Bonny had put his picture up on the projector. He had beaten his wife to death and was on the run.

“I have a photo here, came off a surveillance camera.” He shoved it under her nose. “Is that him?”

She looked at the guy. “Where was this?”

“Outside Appliance City.”

It was blurry. A night photo. Tess said, “Yes, it’s him.”

“Uh. How do you know? It’s blurry and you can see less than half his face.”

“It’s him.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay. Then…thanks.” He remained where he was.

“And?”

He slapped the photo back on the desk. “What kind of car is that? Behind him. See?”

Just the fender. No, just half the fender. Fortunately, it was the part with the headlight.

Tess had seen a car just like it the other day. “It’s a Ford Fusion.”

“Thanks.”

He picked up the photo and walked back to his desk.

The Magic Show was over.

Twenty past midnight, Tess gave it up and headed for home. She had a twenty-mile drive on a winding two-lane road to her place in Patagonia and she was already falling asleep.

Hanley’s apartment was sealed.

It could wait.