Claudia dialed Tami’s office and let the phone ring until the message machine clicked on and she heard her daughter’s cheery voice say she was out of the office but could be reached on her cell. But she couldn’t get a connection when she tried the cell phone number.
Back in her car, Claudia drove to the real estate agency Tami owned. The door was locked. Through the big plate glass window Claudia could see clearly that the front room Tami used as her office was unoccupied.
Tami had no employees, so it wasn’t unusual for the building to be locked when she was out showing property or getting new listings. And on the wide open spaces of the northeastern plains, cell phone reception was spotty at best.
At the rear of the building Claudia expected to see an empty space where Tami always parked her Yukon. But to her surprise the SUV was there, missing Tami’s vanity license plate, “COWGIRL,” which she’d had for almost twenty years.
Claudia had seen enough. With her hands shaking on the steering wheel, she drove directly to the Raton Police Department and told the civilian receptionist that her daughter was in danger and she needed to speak to an officer “right now.”
Starting with the crime scenes on the mesa, Clayton and Kerney took their time at the Lazy Z. Using the briefing document supplied by Major Vanmeter, they walked through the trashed-out hunting lodge, looked over the pickup stolen from the Dripping Springs Ranch, examined the spot where Nancy Trimble had fallen, shot dead from behind, and then drove to the site where her body had been dumped.
Fingerprints lifted from the lodge, the ranch house, and the stolen truck left no doubt that the brutal rape and deliberate murder of Trimble were the work of Craig Larson.
With the sun at high noon and a hot breeze freshening from the southwest, Kerney and Clayton stood on the porch of the hunting lodge.
“This kill was different,” Kerney said. “He’s changing.”
Clayton squinted against the windblown sand. “I don’t see it. He shot Officer Ordonez at the roadblock from a distance with a long gun.”
“I would argue that his motive in shooting Ordonez was to escape capture,” Kerney said. “But with Trimble, he first turned her into wounded prey. He’s killing for vicious pleasure now and that’s an entirely different MO.”
“I figured him to be a head case right from the start.” Clayton glanced at the sky. The clear blue morning had given way to a gritty, dusty afternoon.
“Agreed,” Kerney said. “But I think he’s about to take it in a whole new direction.”
“Like what?”
Kerney shook his head. “I don’t know. But let’s assume he’s well provisioned, heavily armed, and is obviously proficient with firearms. That combination scares me. Let’s go down to the ranch headquarters and see what we can discover there.”
Clayton reached down and brushed off some red fire ants that had crawled up his pant leg. The stench from the inside of the lodge was nasty. “I could use a change of scenery,” he replied.
In his cubicle, Sergeant Joe Easley, a twelve-year veteran of the Raton Police Department, read the note that had been brought to him by a secretary. Claudia Tobin was in the reception area waiting to speak to someone about her missing daughter.
From the daily logs, Easley knew that officers had already gone to Tami Phelan’s home and place of business. Although no contact with Tami had been made, nothing suggested any mishap had occurred.
As a longtime cop in a city of under ten thousand people, Joe Easley personally knew by sight or by name virtually every permanent resident of the community. Thus, Claudia Tobin, who’d for years operated a day-care center in Raton before moving to Albuquerque with a husband dying of cancer, was not a stranger to him. Neither were Tami Phelan and her ex-husband, Brodie.
Until Brodie had moved to Trinidad to shack up with a very hot-looking young barmaid, he’d played second base on Easley’s softball team, and Tami was a member of Easley’s Downtown Rotary Club, which met monthly at Suzy’s Sizzlin’ Steakhouse.
Joe Easley also knew that since being dumped by Brodie, Tami had been throwing herself at every eligible male in town—and there weren’t that many of them—between the ages of twenty-five and sixty, almost as an act of revenge for being done wrong. Or was it an act of self-loathing? Whatever it was, she was most likely shagging somebody in or around the area, which accounted for her being missing.
Furthermore, since the sighting of Craig Larson in the northeast part of the state, there had literally been hundreds of calls to his department reporting strangers resembling Craig Larson lurking about, hiding in the foothills, camped out at a nearby state park, breaking into vacant houses, stalking women and children, cruising by in cars, or eating in the restaurants and registering in the motels near the interstate.
Each and every call had been thoroughly checked out and found to be unsubstantiated. Easley had taken to thinking of the undercurrent of panic that gripped the community as the “Craig Larson Bogeyman Days.”
A distraught-looking Claudia Tobin got to her feet when Easley came into the reception area.
“Mrs. Tobin,” Easley said pleasantly. “Good to see you. I understand that you’re concerned about Tami.”
Tobin nodded. Easley had remembered her as once being a good-looking older woman with some flesh on her bones. Now she was skinny to the point of seeming anorexic, her dyed blond hair was thinning on top, and she was heavily wrinkled around her mouth and eyes.
“Something terrible has happened to my daughter,” Claudia said. “I just know it.”
“Why do you say that?”
“She’s not at home, her office is locked, her car was left at work, and her license plate has been removed and replaced with another one.”
Easley’s interest level rose a thousand percent. Tami’s “COWGIRL” vanity plate was a common sight in Raton. She even billed herself as the “Cowgirl Realtor” in all her print advertising.
“What kind of license plate is on her car now?” he asked.
“It’s a New Mexico plate.” Claudia opened her purse and handed Easley a piece of paper. “I wrote it down.”
Joe Easley gave Claudia an approving smile. “That’s great. Wait right here. I’ll be back in a jiffy.” He paused at the security door. “Would you like some coffee?”
Claudia Tobin smiled weakly. “Yes, please.”
After getting Claudia some coffee, Easley sat at his computer, accessed the Motor Vehicles Division database, and typed in the license number Claudia Tobin had supplied.
In New Mexico, drivers own their license plates, and when Easley got a hit that the plate belonged to Nancy Trimble, the murdered caretaker at the Lazy Z, his eyes widened. He reached for the phone and dialed dispatch.
“I want two officers at Tami Phelan’s real estate office right now,” he said. “Have them secure her office and vehicle, and await my arrival. Advise Major Vanmeter of the state police that I have evidence pertaining to the Lazy Z murder investigation and need his assistance at that twenty immediately.”
“Ten-four,” dispatch replied.
At the Lazy Z Ranch headquarters, Clayton and Kerney went through every room of the rambling house, which was filled with the sort of expensive, oversize Western-motif furnishings favored by rich people from somewhere other than the West. Looking for anything that might have been missed by the investigators and crime scene techs, they dug into nooks and crannies. From what they could tell, except for the probability that Larson had taken weapons, provisions, and some camping gear, nothing else appeared to have been stolen. A wall safe behind a painting in the master bedroom hadn’t been tampered with, many valuable rifles and handguns had been left behind, and an unlocked petty-cash box in the office adjacent to the kitchen held over three hundred dollars in currency.