Black Thunder (19 page)

Her musings came to a stop only a few miles out of Shiprock when her phone rang. Hearing Neskahi’s voice, she put it on speaker.

“Whatcha got?” Ella asked.

“I managed to cross another person off my list. That particular man was eventually found by
a neighbor and taken back home. He’s got dementia and wanders off sometimes. The family never notified the authorities.” He paused for a long time.

Ella had a feeling that he wasn’t finished, so she waited.

“There’s something else I thought you’d want to know,” he said at last. “On my way back to town, heading along the ditch road just south of Cudei, I saw a group of teens playing on one of
those big sandbars out in the river. One of them was Dawn. Isn’t she supposed to be at school today?”

“Yeah. So where exactly did you see my kid?” Ella asked immediately.

“About six miles northwest of the old bridge.”

“Thanks,” Ella said, ending the call. She turned to Justine. “You get the gist of that?”

Her partner nodded, but didn’t comment.

“Find the place,” Ella said, giving her directions.
Torn between concentrating on the case and her personal life, she felt the tension building inside her. But she couldn’t let this go.

“Has Dawn ever skipped school before?” Justine asked after a few minutes.

“Not that I know of. She’s always enjoyed school.”

“What’s changed?”

“I don’t know, and that’s what worries me.” She ran a hand through her hair. “Maybe this is my fault. I get so busy
with my cases, I may have missed something going on right in front of me.”

“Don’t go there. She’s a kid and bound to get in trouble at times, especially this close to the end of the school year. I’m sure you broke the rules once in a while when you were her age. I ditched the last day of school more than once.”

“There’s still a week left in this school year, cuz,” Ella said, trying to reach
Dawn on her cell phone but unable to get a connection.

After reaching Shiprock’s west side, Justine turned down the road paralleling the river, and they headed into the
bosque
.

“Just ahead,” Ella said, gesturing to an approaching pickup whose cab was filled with teens. “Pull them over.”

Justine turned on the lights and the sirens, then stopped diagonally, blocking the ditch road. The truck
slowed and came to a stop.

Ella walked up to the passenger-side door, while Justine went to the driver’s side to ask the boy at the wheel for his license.

As she drew near, Ella heard Dawn’s voice. “I’m DOA,” she whispered.

Ella opened the door, automatically sniffing the air and looking for alcohol containers. “Let my daughter out, please,” she said to the two girls seated closest to the window.
As they moved out of the way, she focused her gaze on Dawn, who was beside the driver. “Get out of the truck.”

“Mom,” Dawn said in a strangled voice as she scooted toward the door. “I can explain.”

“Not here, not now, Dawn. Let’s go.”

Rather than have a full-blown confrontation in front of her daughter’s companions, Ella led her back to the SUV and stopped beside the front passenger door.

Ella crossed her hands across her chest, then stared into Dawn’s eyes. “You cut school.”

Dawn looked down at the ground. “Just the last two periods, Mom. Mostly it was just a long study hall. Leonard had his dad’s pickup for the day so we thought we’d go out and wade across the channel to the sandbar. We wanted to unwind.”

“Those kids aren’t from your school,” Ella said. “Nobody middle-school
age can legally operate that truck.”

“Leonard’s sixteen. He’s from Shiprock High,” Dawn said in a hushed whisper.

“Get in the backseat. I’m taking you home right now.”

“Let me say good-bye to Leonard first?”

“No.”

Dawn started to protest, but seeing the look in her mother’s eyes, ducked her head to hide her anger and climbed into the SUV. Ella closed the door as her daughter fastened the
seat belt. There were no handles in the back of the unit—used to transport those under arrest—so Dawn wouldn’t be able to get back out until someone opened the door from the outside.

Ella headed back to the pickup, intending to speak to the boy behind the wheel, but Justine intercepted her. “You’re way too pissed off. Let it go for now. The boy has a legal operator’s license and proof of insurance,
and there’s no sign anyone has been drinking. I instructed him to drop the other girls off, then head home.”

“Who is he?”

“Leonard Skeet, the son of one of our patrolmen. I know the family. They’re basically good people, but Leonard’s become a magnet for trouble, or so I hear. There was a shoplifting incident in Farmington in March, and he was caught driving away from the Quick Mart last month
without paying for gas. His father made it good, promised it wouldn’t happen again, and the complaint was dropped.”

“And, of course, that’s the boy my twelve-year-old daughter’s interested in,” Ella muttered.

“The bad boy…,” Justine said with a shrug, turning off the flashing lights, then backing up to their right so the pickup could pass.

Ella watched in the side mirror as the truck pulled
away. This wasn’t over, not by a long shot.

A tense silence followed as Justine drove southeast toward the highway, but that was soon interrupted by the call coming in on Ella’s cell phone.

The ring tone told Ella that it was Kevin even before she flipped it open and answered.

“I just got out of a court hearing and was on my way home when Dawn’s school called. Dawn’s missing. She never made
it to class this afternoon. A campus search is underway.”

“Call it off. She’s in the car with me,” Ella said, giving him a quick update. “When did the school report her missing from class?”

“She wasn’t there for science class after lunch, so they sent an administrator and security to search the building and grounds.”

As Kevin hung up to call the school, Ella gave her daughter a lethal glare.

Dawn avoided eye contact and shrunk down even farther into the seat.

As Ella considered how to best handle the situation with Dawn, she heard a call coming over the radio. A shooting victim had been found several miles east of the reservation line, and the sheriff’s department was requesting her presence at the scene. From their current location, approaching the main highway west of the bridge,
taking Dawn home first would cost them at least a half hour.

Ella asked Justine to pull over, then called Kevin back. “Is there any chance you can meet us at the junction just east of the high school and take our daughter home?” she asked him. “I just got an urgent call from dispatch.”

“I’m coming down off the mesa now, and I can meet you there in less than five. Park by the gas station. I’ll
take her over to my place and she and I will have a long talk there.”

“Good idea.”

As Justine headed to the location, Dawn fidgeted, wiping off a shade of lipstick that wasn’t on her permitted list.

“Mom, we’re meeting Dad
now
?”

“Yes,” Ella replied curtly. “He’s happy for the chance to speak to you face-to-face.”

“But you’ll be too busy to be there, too?”

The words stung, but Ella knew her
kid was using the tactic as a diversion. Her daughter was bright and knew which buttons to push. “I wasn’t too busy to come looking for you, was I?”

“Mom, I can explain everything. Really. Can’t you and I talk right now, just for five minutes?”

“No. I’ve got to calm down first. I’m too ashamed of you at the moment. I trusted you, and you really let me down this time. You knew that I was especially
worried about you today—that you might be in danger. Yet you took off like this anyway.”

“But I wasn’t alone, I was with people the whole time. Besides, nobody could have found us,” Dawn argued.

“I did,” Ella retorted.

Kevin pulled up behind them as they turned into the business parking lot. By the time Ella opened the back door and let Dawn out, Kevin was already out of his car.

“Get inside,”
he snapped.

Dawn burst into tears and practically ran to Kevin’s sedan.

“The boy’s sixteen,” Ella said, filling him in as they stood by the SUV.

“Who’s the kid?”

“Leonard Skeet.”

“He’s bad news. Dawn and I are going to have a talk she isn’t likely to forget. And that boy—he’s history. He won’t be getting anywhere near our kid again.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“You’ve met his stepmom, Mona
Todea, now Skeet, my legal assistant. In fact, that’s how Dawn and Leonard met, in my office,” Kevin said, then shook his head at Ella’s raised eyebrows. “Don’t say a word.”

Ella climbed back inside the tribal SUV and nodded to Justine. “Let’s roll.” She’d just finished fastening her seat belt when her phone rang again.

This time it was Blalock. “Dan and I are going to meet up at the county
crime scene. Are you on the way?”

“Yeah. Did you get any specifics? All I know is that the vic was shot to death,” Ella said.

“I’ve asked that details be kept off police frequencies. Too many reporters are monitoring calls,” Blalock said. “But to answer your question, the vic was found about a mile west of Kirtland High School, within sight of the bridge. He’d been shot in the head. That’s the
only similarity so far to the Hogback cases. This guy was found inside his car, fully clothed, and the shooting took place only a few hours ago.”

“Okay. I’ll be there shortly,” Ella said, already wondering if the killer was changing his M.O. or if this would turn out to be an unrelated incident.

FIFTEEN

When Ella arrived on the scene, she immediately spotted Nez and Blalock. They were standing about twenty feet back from where the county crime scene team was processing a blue, older-model sedan with a muddied license plate. The car was parked under a low-hanging cottonwood, in the shade.

As she walked up, techs were carefully easing the body out of the car, guided by one of the county’s
deputy medical investigators. The victim appeared to be a Hispanic male. He’d been shot in the upper left temple and in the neck.

“That’s not our killer’s M.O.,” Justine said. “This was an in-your-face–style shooting.”

“There are a couple of empty beer cans on the floor on the passenger’s side,” one of the techs said into a throat mike as he continued to examine the interior of the car. “Three
other empties are on the backseat and two unopened cans were sitting on the seat beside him. Tire tracks indicate he pulled off the road and parked before the shooting. Blood splatter indicates he was killed in the car. Blood smears on the seats and the position of the body when discovered suggest the deceased was manhandled. He was pushed over onto the passenger seat, maybe to allow the shooter
or another party to remove the vic’s wallet. The fade pattern—outline of a wallet—is still present in the vic’s jeans, but the wallet hasn’t been located.”

“Road rage incident leading to murder and robbery?” Ella suggested to Blalock and Nez.

“The commonality between M.O.’s so far is that this vic was also shot twice. The other hit was in the neck, which could mean the killer’s aim was a bit
off this time, the victim tried to duck, or we’re dealing with someone else entirely,” Dan said.

“This is a well-traveled area, close to a lot of school traffic. Maybe the killer struck, but something happened that kept him from repeating his usual M.O.,” Justine said. “The victim might have resisted, or a potential witness could have forced him to hightail it out of here.”

“There’s another
possibility we haven’t discussed before,” Nez said. “We could be dealing with a professional hit man—a hired gun who has been working right under our noses for a while. That would explain how unrelated victims ended up dumped in the same area. And now that the original burial site has been compromised, he’s had to change his game plan and M.O.”

“By leaving the vic in the open like this, he also
might be sending a message to any interested parties—including us. ‘Screw with me and you’re dead,’” Justine said.

“A pro … that could make things even more difficult,” Ella observed. “The killer wouldn’t need a motive except serving his client. But that theory still doesn’t fit in with that once-a-year pattern.”

As Nez and Blalock voiced other possible scenarios, Ella heard her cell phone’s
distinctive beep signaling a text message. Moving away from them, she flipped open the phone.

This time the message was succinct:
THOSE IN MY WAY DIE
.

Justine, who’d watched Ella’s reaction, came over and looked down at the text message. “We’ve got the court order. You can ask for a trace,” she said.

Ella called her cell phone carrier and requested the message be traced.

After a wait, an administrator
answered. “The call came from a prepaid device, Investigator Clah. That means that the only thing I was able to get for you is the location of the closest cell phone tower at the time he sent the message. It’s in Farmington at the west end of Apache Street.”

Blalock came over. “What’s up, Clah?”

Ella showed him the message. “He’s trying to keep me off balance, maybe to slow down my work. I’m
sure that’s why he chose to mention my kid in the last message. He’s playing head games with me.”

“Keep us posted,” Blalock said. “In the meantime, the possibility of a hit man is worth following up, if only to rule out that theory. Nez and I will do the legwork here on the county side. This vic still has fingerprints and a face, so we should have more on him soon, unless he’s an illegal.”

As he spoke, the head of the county’s crime scene unit came over. “Here’s what we know,” she said. “The vic was shot in the temple and neck. There’s one nine-millimeter slug embedded in the headrest, the other is still in the vic. His wallet’s gone but we got a quick hit on his prints. His name is Ignacio Candelaria, he’s got a green card, and he works at a business called Eddy’s Garage just this side
of the Farmington city limits. Candelaria had several DWI arrests, but nothing else.”

“This is looking more and more like a road rage incident, or maybe even an attempted carjacking,” Ella said. “County should check out the locals, beginning with the high school students. I realize this would have happened while class was in session, but kids come and go. Maybe one of them saw something, or worse,
was the perp.”