Authors: William W. Johnstone
The Bleeding Edge (4 page)
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Stark was standing at the counter that separated his kitchen from the living room. He had just poured his first cup of coffee for the day and was breathing in the aroma of it when somebody knocked on the door of his mobile home. Carrying the coffee with him, he went over and opened the door.
Hallie Duncan stood there, looking trimly efficient and businesslike in a gray suit, yet still very attractive. She smiled and said, “Good morning, John Howard.”
“Hallie.” Stark lifted the cup. “Want some coffee?”
“No, thanks. I've got a latte in the car.”
“Didn't offer you a milkshake,” Stark said with a smile. “Asked if you wanted coffee.”
She laughed and said, “You're determined to hang on to being a dinosaur as long as possible, aren't you?”
“They ruled the earth for a long time, depending on who you believe.”
“And eventually they died out, too.” Hallie grew more serious and said quickly, “I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that. It didn't really come out like I meant it.”
“Don't worry about it,” Stark told her. “Come on in. A gentleman shouldn't leave a lady standing on his porch.”
He stepped back to let her into the mobile home. As she came in, she asked, “Have you had the TV on this morning?”
“No, it's a little too early in the day for me to have my intelligence insulted.”
“I suppose you'd say the same thing if I asked you if you'd been on the Internet.”
Stark just chuckled.
Hallie reached into her purse and took out her phone. She touched the screen, started swiping her finger across it, and said, “I'm sure I can find the clip I want on Google News. . . . Ah, here it is.”
She turned the phone so that he could see it as a video clip started playing. The sleekly handsome, smug features of a man Stark recognized as the attorney general of the United States were in close-up.
“. . . concluded that there was no basis for any sort of federal prosecution in the incident,” the attorney general was saying. “This is solely a matter for the state of Texas to handle, and I assume the local authorities will do so in a proper and prudent manner.”
Stark went over to the front door, opened it, and stepped out onto the porch. He tilted his head back and surveyed the sky.
“What are you doing, John Howard?” Hallie asked with a note of exasperation in her voice.
“Lookin' for pigs,” Stark said as he squinted upwards. “That was a federal official saying that there was something the state could handle better than the federal government, wasn't it?”
Hallie burst out laughing. She put her phone away and said, “It's not really funny, you big old galoot. The Justice Department has cleared you of civil rights violations in the case of those three punks who tried to steal your truck.”
“As well they should have,” Stark said as he came back inside and closed the door. “I didn't do anything wrong by protecting my property and my own life.”
“These days, a lot of people would disagree with you.”
Stark shrugged.
“They can disagree all they want,” he said. “That doesn't make them right.”
“Maybe not, but you're still lucky. I'm convinced that they never would have been able to make a case against you with that many witnesses on your side, but they could have made your life very unpleasant for a long time if they'd wanted to. And one thing about a case going to trial . . . you can never be one hundred percent certain how it's going to turn out.”
“Unless you've got a good lawyer, and I happen to know one,” Stark said. He raised his coffee cup in a little salute.
“I've been keeping a pretty close eye on the investigation these past few weeks,” Hallie said. “I have an old friend from law school who works in D.C. He's not in the Justice Department, but he's got a pipeline in there, and he's been monitoring the situation for me.”
“He?” Stark repeated. “Old boyfriend? Somebody you used to go skinny-dipping with at Hippy Hollow there in Austin?”
He was just teasing her, but the pink glow that suddenly spread across her face told him he'd inadvertently hit the mark. She muttered, “You wouldn't think that a woman of my age who'd been married for twenty years of her life would be embarrassed by anything, would you? But yeah, I may have flirted a little on the phone with him. I figured it was for a good cause.”
“Thanks, Hallie,” Stark said. “I appreciate that, and I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable.”
She waved that off.
“Don't worry about it, John Howard. What's important is that the whole weight of the federal government isn't going to come crashing down on you.”
“I'm grateful for that too, don't get me wrong,” Stark said. “There's no mess like a government mess, and I'm glad I don't have to deal with it.”
“I just wanted to let you know.” Hallie started to turn away, but she stopped and looked down at the newspaper sitting on the little table next to Stark's favorite recliner. She picked up the folded paper and held it so the main headline was visible. “Did you see this already?”
Stark nodded and said, “Yeah. Terrible business.”
The headline read
BODIES FOUND IN BURNED-OUT FARMHOUSE
. That was bad enough, but the real horror was contained in the story below the headline. Stark had scanned it enough to know that volunteer firemen called to the scene of a blaze had found the bodies of a young man and a girl in the ruins of the burned house. It was pretty obvious, though, that their deaths hadn't been a result of the fire.
BODIES FOUND IN BURNED-OUT FARMHOUSE
. That was bad enough, but the real horror was contained in the story below the headline. Stark had scanned it enough to know that volunteer firemen called to the scene of a blaze had found the bodies of a young man and a girl in the ruins of the burned house. It was pretty obvious, though, that their deaths hadn't been a result of the fire.
The heads of both bodies were missing. Someone had chopped them off, possibly with a machete, according to sheriff's department investigators. Despite that, the bodies had been identified, although those identities were being withheld pending notification of next of kin.
“We're just going to keep seeing more and more things like this,” Hallie said as she set the newspaper back on the table. “Unless the government decides to secure the border and stop the cartels from moving inâ”
“Might as well go check the sky for flying pigs again if you're gonna start talking like that,” Stark advised her.
Hallie sighed.
“I'm afraid you're right.” She put a smile back on her face. “I need to get to work. Congratulations on not being railroaded.”
“I don't plan on getting too worked up about it,” Stark said as he set his coffee beside the chair and opened the front door for her. “I'd like to think they backed off because they didn't have a case, but I can't help but wonder if they're up to something else.”
“That's a good question,” Hallie agreed. She paused on the porch. “Pop's going to be barbecuing Saturday night. I assume you and the Gomezes will be there?”
“You bet,” Stark said. “I wouldn't miss one of your dad's barbecuesâ”
A shrill, horrified scream interrupted him.
Stark's head jerked up at the sound. The screams continued, coming from across the street. The neatly kept mobile home over there belonged to an eighty-year-old widow named Dorothy Hewitt. She had a small vegetable garden at one side of her lot, and thanks to her constant tending of it, the garden produced enough tomatoes, green beans, peppers, squash, and cabbage that everybody in this part of Shady Hills shared in the bounty.
Dorothy was standing at the edge of her garden, a hoe at her feet where she had dropped it, her hands clapped to her cheeks as she continued screaming.
Stark shouldered past Hallie and said, “Stay here!” He hit only one step on his way down to the ground. His long legs carried him at a run across the street. He heard Hallie's high heels clicking on the pavement behind him and knew she had ignored his order to stay put, which didn't particularly surprise him.
Other people were emerging from their homes, drawn by the sound of Dorothy Hewitt's screams. As far as Stark could see as he came up to the elderly woman, she was all right, just scared out of her wits as she stared into her garden. He took hold of her shoulders and turned her to face him.
“Dorothy, what is it?” he asked. “What's wrong?”
She couldn't find the words to answer, but she flapped a hand at the garden. Stark realized she was indicating a row of cabbage plants. Some of the cabbages nestled in their leafy bowers had grown pretty large.
But a couple of them were gone and had been replaced by one of the grisliest sights Stark had ever seen. Despite everything that had happened in his life, he was still shocked to the core as he stared into the empty, lifeless eyes of the two human heads that had obviously been placed with great care in Dorothy Hewitt's vegetable garden.
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Hallie called her office to let her secretary know she would be late; then she took charge of Dorothy, putting an arm around the older woman's shoulders and leading her away from the garden. Stark posted himself at the edge of the street to keep everybody else away from the gruesome scene while he took his phone from his pocket and called 911.
His efforts didn't do a lot of good. People might not be able to approach the garden as long as he stood there glaring at them, but they could still look past Stark and see the grim, bloody “produce” being grown there. A few of the neighbors turned green and ran off to throw up, but more remained to stare in horrified fascination and babble questions.
Stark didn't want to look at the heads again, but he had already seen enough to know that they had belonged to a young Hispanic male and an even younger Hispanic female, and it didn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that they went with the two bodies that had been recovered from that burned-out farmhouse northwest of town.
Since the Shady Hills Retirement Park was located well outside the city limits of Devil's Pass, Stark's 911 call was directed to the sheriff's department. He told the operator where he was and what Dorothy had found in her garden and was told to remain where he was.
“I don't plan on going anywhere,” Stark said.
Fred Gomez and Alton Duncan came over to him. Alton said, “Hallie's got Dorothy over at my place trying to calm her down. That poor woman. What a terrible thing to find first thing in the morning.”
“Or any other time,” Fred added. “You know where they came from, John Howard?”
“I've got a pretty good idea,” Stark said. “Have you read the morning's paper?”
Alton snapped his fingers.
“Those bodies in that house that burned,” he said. “The paper said they'd been decapitated.”
“This has to do with those drug gangs,” Fred said, his voice trembling with anger and outrage. “You know it does.”
“More than likely,” Stark agreed.
“But why put them in the garden?” Alton asked. “Dorothy Hewitt doesn't have any connection whatsoever with those thugs. She's not even from around here. She just moved here after her husband died.”
Stark knew the story. Dorothy and her late husband had bought a place at Shady Hills years earlier, when it first opened, thinking they would retire there. Then Dorothy's husband had died before they could do that, but she had moved in anyway, stubbornly carrying out the plan they had made back in a time when violence along the border hadn't been so prevalent.
“I don't have any explanation,” Stark said. “Maybe it's just somebody's idea of a sick joke. They were driving around, looking for a place to get rid of the heads, and saw those cabbages. That could have given them the notion.”
“It's a perverted notion,” Fred muttered. “What's wrong with some people?”
“If we knew the answer to that and could fix it, I reckon the world would be a better place,” Stark said.
Sirens wailed in the distance. A couple of minutes later a sheriff's department cruiser reached the park and turned in with a squeal of tires. People cleared the street as the car came up with its flashing lights.
A stocky deputy got out and hurried over to Stark, Fred, and Alton. He leaned to the side to look past Stark and exclaimed, “My God, those are human heads!”
“Didn't your dispatcher tell you that?” Alton asked.
“Well, yeah, but I thought I must've heard her wrong.” The deputy swallowed and looked queasy. “I gotta get the sheriff out here. I don't want any responsibility for this.” He started back to his car, then paused to say to the three men, “You guys stay right there.”
“We're not going anywhere,” Stark promised again.
During the next half hour, several more sheriff's cars showed up, as well as an ambulance. Once there were more deputies on hand, Stark and his neighbors were shooed away from the garden as the officers set up a crime scene perimeter. They went back over to Stark's mobile home, where they were joined by Fred's wife, Aurelia, and Hallie, who explained that the EMTs were checking out Dorothy Hewitt.
The five of them sat on lawn chairs in Stark's yard drinking coffee. Hallie dumped her latte and poured a cup of hot coffee from the pot in Stark's mobile home. Stark hadn't had breakfast yet, but he didn't have much of an appetite most mornings anyway, and even less of one today.
Once a couple of ice chests containing the heads were loaded in the back of the ambulance and driven away, Sheriff George Lozano came across the street. Stark had met the sheriff before and stood up to shake hands with him.
“I'd ask you how you're doing, John Howard, but after starting your morning the way you did, I expect the answer would be âNot very good,'” Lozano said.
Stark shrugged.
“You'd be right about that, Sheriff,” he said, “but I'm doing better than some.”
“Yeah,” Lozano said. “Jimmy Rodriguez and his little sister, Sonia.”
Hallie said, “That's who those . . . those . . .”
“Yes, ma'am,” Lozano said, not forcing her to finish the question. “That's not for public consumption, though. We've notified the Rodriguez family about the bodies that were found in that farmhouse, but they don't know about this yet. Neither does the news media.” Lozano sighed. “Although I don't expect that to last long. I figure cell phone pictures and videos of the scene here will be showing up on the Internet in no time.”
“I'd be surprised if they haven't already,” Hallie said. “There were quite a few people standing around earlier.”
“True,” Lozano said with a resigned nod.
“I kept 'em back as much as I could,” Stark said.
“That's not your job, John Howard, but I appreciate the effort anyway. Tell me what happened.”
Stark went over the details of the story. It didn't take long, because he didn't really know much.
“I'm guessing those . . . remains . . . had been there for several hours,” Lozano said when Stark was finished. “They must have been put in the garden during the night. Those plants around them were leafy enough that it would be hard to see them from the street unless you knew what you were looking for.”
Alton said, “Quite a few people probably drove by this morning and never noticed they were there.”
“That's right. But whoever put them there knew that somebody would come out to work in the garden sooner or later and find them.” Lozano looked like he had bitten into something that tasted bad. “They didn't care what a shock it would be. They probably got a big laugh out of it.”
“It was the drug gangs, right, Sheriff?” Fred asked.
“I can't even speculate on that right now, sir,” Lozano told him.
“What about the Rodriguez boy?” Stark said. “He tied in with one of the cartels?”
Lozano shook his head.
“Sorry. I just can't get into that.”
“Which means he is,” Hallie said.
“You have the luxury of guessing, Ms. Duncan,” the sheriff replied. “I have to concentrate on the facts our investigation turns up.”
“The cartels are behind all the crime down here,” Fred said. Stark heard the bitterness creeping into his friend's voice. “This used to be a decent place to live. A beautiful place. You couldn't beat the weather. Now the weather's still nice, but the criminals run everything.”
Predictably, Lozano bristled.
“That's not true. They don't run the sheriff's department, and they never will as long as I'm in charge. We'll get to the bottom of this. I give you my word.”
“You'd better be careful what kind of promises you make, Sheriff,” Fred said. “If you give them too much trouble, they'll just get rid of you.”
“Fred!” Aurelia said. “You shouldn't talk like that.”
“It's true,” her husband insisted. “We can't stand up to them. If we try, we end up like . . . like . . .”
He couldn't finish, but he turned his head to look across the street toward Dorothy Hewitt's vegetable garden, so they all knew what he meant.
Cross the cartels too much, and you might wind up in a cabbage patch.
Only part of you, though.
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