“What did you do?” Blondie screamed, her hand flying to her mouth as she stared at the body on the floor. She had bright red fingernails.
Blood from Porky’s chest wound seeped across the newly refinished, once pristine hardwood floor, which was no longer a strong selling point for the property.
“What did you do?” she screeched again, her gaze locked on Larson’s face.
“Three’s a crowd,” Larson explained with a smile as he wrapped his hand around her neck. “You must be Tami.”
Tami averted her eyes. “Please don’t hurt me.”
“Hurt you?” Larson replied softly, feigning indignation. He dug the barrel of the Glock into Tami’s neck and forced her to raise her pretty head so he could take a closer look at her. “Why, when I’m finished with you, sweetie, you’ll be calling me your daddy and begging me for more.”
He cocked the Glock for dramatic effect and ripped open Tami’s blouse. She was indeed stacked.
Everett Dorsey met Officers Lowe and Mares at the entrance to the Lazy Z. The two men stood with Dorsey in front of his unit while he filled them in on his conversation with Hannelore Schmidt of Frankfurt, Germany.
“Nancy Trimble is in her sixties and lives alone at the ranch,” he added, “so it’s possible she might not be missing at all. She could have taken a bad fall or dropped dead.”
Officer Mitch Lowe consulted his paperwork. In his late twenties, he had just completed his seventh year with the state police. A frown crossed his boyish face. “The locked gate was reported by the officer assigned to contact residents in this area. He left a phone message, but there’s been no follow-up since then.”
Rick Mares, Dorsey’s senior officer, a thin and wiry man in his forties, shrugged a shoulder. “It’s been frustrating as hell to make contact with everybody, and a bitch to track people down. There are folks who are out of town, people on vacation or sick in the hospital, people who live somewhere else and have a second home or a getaway place out in the boonies. Hell, we’ve even got some Texas ranchers who own outfits just for summer grazing and there’s not a soul to be found on any of those spreads.”
“It hasn’t been easy,” Lowe concurred.
“Let’s hope Nancy Trimble is alive and well,” Dorsey said as he stepped over to the electronic keypad of the solar-powered gate and punched in the code. “But with Larson on the loose, we go in prepared for anything.”
The gate swung open and the three officers convoyed their units slowly down the ranch road, scanning the landscape for anything that looked out of the ordinary. They arrived at the ranch headquarters to be greeted by a saddled horse that cantered over from a nearby open field, the reins of its bridle falling loose to the ground.
“Could be that Trimble did have an accident,” Mitch Lowe said as he reached out and caught the horse’s reins. He wiped a hand across the dusty saddle. “Nobody has been astride this animal for at least a day, maybe more.”
Dorsey unholstered his sidearm. “Let’s check the house before we get ahead of ourselves.” He knocked on the locked front door while Lowe and Mares inspected the exterior for any sign of forced entry.
“Anything?” he asked when they returned.
Rick Mares shook his head. “It’s locked up tight and the window shades and curtains are drawn.”
“Do we break in?” Mitch Lowe asked.
Dorsey didn’t hesitate. “Kick in the door.”
Inside, they did a quick plain-view search and found evidence that the house had been ransacked.
“Do we call in forensics?” Rick Mares asked as they returned to the front porch.
Dorsey scanned the grounds. “Let’s do a sweep of all the other structures first.”
They forced their way into the two guest houses, walked through the barn, the stables, the tack room, and the horse arena, looked inside the fenced paddocks and the silver Hummer, and did a field search of the immediate surrounding area. There was no sign of Trimble, her body, or her green Subaru.
Mitch unsaddled the horse, put it in a paddock, and fed it some oats. In the late afternoon light, Dorsey stood with the two officers in front of the main ranch house looking up at the mesa.
“Trimble is missing, her car is gone, the ranch house has been tossed. The gun cabinet was left unlocked, so we can presume some weapons are missing along with other items,” Dorsey said. “I’m thinking there’s a good chance Larson has been here. We’ll call in forensics and keep looking.”
He pointed to the ranch road that snaked up the mesa. “Let’s see where that road goes.”
The road, with fresh vehicle tracks, took them to a hunting lodge on the mesa top where they found the truck Larson had stolen from the Dripping Springs Ranch. Mitch Lowe called it in and they took a quick look inside the lodge and found it occupied by vermin, spiders, some squawking crows perched on the back of a leather couch, several flighty robins, and a coiled rattlesnake. There were bird droppings, rat shit, and coyote scat in every room, along with about a million or more red fireants.
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.