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  Riverside New Mexico police wanted to pin a murder rap on James Ironheel. He was captured near the scene of a double murder, so it seemed a slam-dunk case. But law officer David Easton had his doubts. When Ironheel’s lawyer is murdered, and his transfer to a safe-house is compromised it seems Easton’s doubts were justified.

  Now they are being both hunted and whoever is hunting them down wants them out of the way – permanently.

  Apache Country is more than a chase thriller it’s a story filled with love, death, hope and hatred.

  APACHE COUNTRY

  By Frederick H. Christian

  Copyright © 2016 by Frederick H. Christian

  First Smashwords Edition: May 2016

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Editor: Mike Stotter

  Published by Arrangement with the Author.

  Chapter One

  Even this early it was hot.

  Tuesday was the sheriff’s day off, so chief deputy Dave Easton got to his desk well before eight. He said hello to DeAnn, the duty receptionist, then spooned some Arbuckles into the coffee machine. As it brewed he went through the mail and the usual batch of reports on crimes committed and arrests made overnight, e-mails from other law-enforcement agencies, and a sheaf of wanted notices and missing person inquiries. Routine.

  Then at eight twenty-two Bert Bonnell’s call came in.

  Up on Garcia Flat, north of town, rancher Bonnell had seen buzzards circling over an arroyo. Figuring maybe one of his cows had dropped a stillborn calf, he drove over to check. About a mile up the arroyo, he came upon a black Lexus slewed over to one side of the trail with both its front doors wide open. Near it, face down in a blackened pool of blood, lay the body of a man, a cloud of flies buzzing around the bloody mess of brain and bone that had been his head.

  A grizzled fifty-eight year-old, Bonnell had seen enough TV cop shows to know not to touch anything. He used his cellphone to call the Sheriff’s Office in Riverside. The dispatcher told him a squad car with two officers would be out there in twenty minutes, and it was.

  At 9:41 precisely DeAnn patched through Steve Jorgensen, one of the two responding officers.

  “Steve,” Easton said. “What you got?”

  “Bad one, Dave,” Jorgensen said. His voice was shaky. “We got a double murder out here. Robert Casey. And his grandson. Adam.”

  Easton’s mind raced. In a small town like Riverside, murder was a word you didn’t hear often. Especially when the victims were one of the State’s most wealthy and prominent businessman and his eleven-year-old grandson. It would hit the community like a smart bomb, unexpected, devastating.

  “Bonnell said there was only one body.”

  “I know. But when we got out there, we saw buzzards further up the arroyo. Took a look and found the boy. Someone cut his throat ear to ear. Carmody’s still puking.”

  “What’s your exact location?”

  “About a mile north of Garcia Flat,” Jorgensen said. “Not far from Arroyo del Macho.”

  Easton unrolled the map in his head. Garcia Flat was about ten miles north of town, maybe two or three miles off the highway. Arroyo del Macho was a sometime watercourse running toward the Pecos River from the Marcial Mountains sixty miles west. Sudden country, they called it, flat prairie that broke up into desolate gullies. You could hide an army out there and it would be invisible. As the US Cavalry had learned from the Apache about a century ago.

  What in the hell would Robert Casey be doing at Garcia Flat, out there in the middle of nowhere? he wondered.

  “Beats me,” Jorgensen said, and Easton realized he had spoken his thoughts out loud.

  “You’re sure it’s Casey?” he asked.

  “ID was in the Lexus,” Jorgensen said. “Kid’s name was on his school stuff. Found him behind some big rocks about a hundred, hundred fifty yards from the old man. You wanna make a guess what the fuck this is, Dave?”

  Easton didn’t reply. Like most southwestern towns, Riverside got its share of fatal violence, but this kind of butchery was way off the scale and Jorgensen didn’t know how to react. Hell, he thought, neither do I. Especially when one of the victims was someone you loathed and the other might have been your son.

  “CSI’s already on its way,” he said. “I’m leaving now. I’ll pick up the sheriff, should be with you in, what, twenty minutes max.”

  “Bring a sick bag,” Jorgensen said flatly.

  Easton stood up, put on his gray Stetson and headed for the door.

  “Call Joe,” he told DeAnn. “Tell him I’ll pick him up in five minutes. And why.”

  Outside it was already summertime hot; he got into his Jeep Cherokee, flipped on the strobe and headed out.

  Sheriff Joe Apodaca lived over on Lea Avenue in a rambling turn-of-the-century beauty with a pecan tree in the backyard. He was already waiting on the curb, a fit and capable man in his middle fifties, built like a jockey, tough as whipcord. The beat cops called him Vinegar Joe and the name fit: if knowing he wasn’t everyone’s cupcake ever bothered him, he kept it pretty well hidden. In Easton’s book he did what the guy wearing the star is supposed to do: he got results.

  “Hit the siren,” he said urgently as he got in. “Move.”

  The lack of ceremony didn’t bother Easton. In all the years they had worked together he had never heard Joe fancy up anything he had to say, or use two sentences when one would do the job. It made for a certain tension sometimes. You’d be waiting for him to elaborate and he was already through talking.

  Lights on, siren whooping, they roared over the Spring River Bridge on to Main and headed north, traffic parting in front of the Jeep like porpoises evading a shark. After the junction with US-70, the siren became superfluous and Easton tramped down on the loud pedal, pushing the needle up into the seventies. The road ran as straight as a ruled line, pale gray-blue in the heat. Off to the west, huge alto-cumulus formations sailed in line astern across the Marcial Mountains.

  Apodaca listened intently as Easton told him what he knew, his weather-beaten face thoughtful. When Easton got through talking he took off his hat and ran a hand through his hair, iron-gray and as close-cropped as an Army drill instructor. Easton waited, wondering what he was thinking.

  “How’s this hitting you, Dave?” Apodaca asked.

  That again, Easton thought.

  Riverside was a small town. Everyone knew everyone. Word got around, no matter how tight the lid was screwed down. It was like a label stuck on him. To certain people he would always be the guy who’d wanted to marry Robert Casey’s daughter and got bounced.

  “You informed the family?” Apodaca asked.

  “Just the basics. I thought you might want to call them later. When we know exactly what happened.”

  “Thing like this just doesn’t make sense,” Joe muttered, more to himself than Easton.

  Never does, Easton thought. Murder is the answer to a question nobody dares to ask.

  Up ahead he saw a patrol car parked beside the highway, dome lights flashing palely. A deputy waved them toward a taped-off track snaking east through the mesquite and sagebrush. It was like driving on a washboard. The boulder-strewn arroyo opened up in front of them, as incongruous as a movie set with its yellow-taped c
ordon and scatter of vans, the occasional squawks of police radios, the pale flicker of flashguns, white-coated technicians going about their work.

  Out of the Jeep, the heat hit them like a blanket. Steve Jorgensen came over to meet them. The first officer to arrive at a crime scene automatically became investigating officer, I/O in cop-speak. His first priority was to maintain its integrity.

  A big, burly, blond guy who looked like exactly what he was, a former college football player in a cop’s uniform, Jorgensen logged them in and gave them clear plastic gloves and over-shoes provided by CSI.

  “OK,” Apodaca said. “Let’s do it.”

  He led the way over to the clear plastic isolator cube the CSI techies had erected. Robert Casey’s body lay face down, a brownish bloodstain the size of a dinner plate beneath his face, the contours of his skull distorted by the impact of the bullet that had killed him. He had on a tan colored windbreaker and tan pants, one knee drawn up, one foot turned unnaturally inward, accentuating his deadness.

  The techies in the tent didn’t even look up to acknowledge their presence. Nearby, other technicians using tweezers were meticulously retrieving and bagging the brain and bone fragments that had exploded through his forehead and splattered the scrub and sand.

  Easton stood looking down at the body, remembering.

  “Kit tells me you asked her to marry you. That right?”

  “Yes, sir. With your consent, of course.”

  An impatient shake of the head. “It’s not going to happen.”

  “Sir?”

  “Don’t act surprised. You know what I’m talking about.”

  “No, sir, I don’t.”

  “Then I’ll spell it out for you.” His voice was harsh. “No daughter of mine is going to marry a Mexican. ¿Comprende?”

  All those years ago, yet he could still hear the loathing in Casey’s voice, unexpected as dogshit on the breakfast table. He remembered how angry with himself he’d been for not having seen it coming. It was there in Casey’s politics, the people his donations went to, the far-right speeches he made. Eaton had made the mistake of believing himself past the race barrier, his path clear: run for sheriff, then maybe DA, marry Kit Casey and ride off into the sunset. Then in those few hating seconds, Robert Casey had torn it all apart and probably never gave much of a damn.

  Tough, charismatic, handsome, a perfectly polished one hundred percent stainless steel bastard, Robert Adam Casey had been as big a fish as fish got in the Southwest. The son of a prominent New York banker, he had come to Riverside during World War Two, getting himself started in the oil refining business just in time to make a fortune supplying high-octane fuel to the US Army Air Force bases in the area. Diversifying first into ranching and stock breeding, then masterminding the development of his Mescalero Corporation, now one of the country’s largest players in waste management. Casey always said the rules of his business were simple: the more disgusting the garbage, the more they would pay you to haul it away.

  Loved he was not; his racism, the political stance he took against illegal immigrants and racial dilution gave offense to many. Behind his back people called him Count Dreckula; he was the butt of sour jokes, like the one about him arriving at one of his waste disposal plants and they wouldn’t let him through the gate in case he contaminated the shit. And now he was dead and flies were clustering on what was left of that rat-trap brain. Wishing he could find a way to feel sorry, the only emotion Easton could summon up was pity. What a God awful place to die.

  “Been out here awhile,” Joe Apodaca said, breaking in on his reverie.

  Easton nodded agreement. Rigor mortis had come and gone. The grisly bluish postmortem distention of the flesh that sets in fast in severe heat was already clearly visible. The skin was tight and shiny, the middle of the body already swollen, and the dull coppery tang of death hung in the air. There were flies everywhere, feasting on the rips and tears on Casey’s face, on one of his arms, and on his right leg where some of the big calf muscles had been savaged by hungry teeth. Coyotes, he thought. They don’t wait long.

  “Kid’s body’s up there a ways,” Apodaca said, pointing up the arroyo.

  He set off up the arid watercourse, agile as a mountain goat, and Easton had to hustle to keep up with him between the rocks and on the shifting, treacherous shale.

  “You’re pretty damn spry for an old guy, Joe,” he panted.

  Apodaca made a face. “Never forget it,” he said.

  The sky was huge and empty. The sun burned his back. It was high-plains silent; Easton could hear his own breathing. At least with this many people around, there wasn’t much chance of rattlesnakes, he thought. They were one of the few creatures on God’s green earth that made him nervous.

  Skirting two huge rock outcrops that had probably been carved by glaciers during the Ice Age, they found another group of CSI technicians working silently, their focal point the body of the boy, stretched out face up, left arm extended, the hand curled. It looked very small and defenseless inside its plastic tent, a duplicate of the one they’d raised over Casey. Here, too, there were bugs, flies, beetles, spiders, the relentless scavengers of the desert, feasting on the reddish-brown globs of coagulated blood that had sprayed in an arc six or seven feet from the body, to hang like bizarre berries on the surrounding scrub.

  The deep gash in the boy’s throat looked like a dark mouth. His white school shirt and gray pants were stiff with dried blood, and dyed into the uncaring dun earth beneath his body was a wide dark stain, maybe a foot across. His face and lips were scored with small cuts and rips, and one eye socket was empty. These wounds had not bled, indicating they had been inflicted after death.

  Bert Bonnell had mentioned buzzards, Easton remembered. They didn’t wait long either.

  Anger mixed with an indefinable sadness flooded through him as he stared at the boy’s violated body. What kind of madness had to be burning through a man’s brain for him to commit such an atrocity?

  He looked up to see Mart Horrell, the county pathologist who also acted as coroner, coming toward them. Fifty-something, reedy and thin, with watery blue eyes and an unconvincing mustache, he looked harassed and irritable, as always. There was a squad room joke that he’d once asked one of the corpses in the morgue for a date but she turned him down.

  “Well, Mr. Coroner,” Apodaca growled by way of greeting. “You got a time of death for us yet?”

  Mart Horrell took off his wire-rim granny glasses, polished them, and put them back on again, and Easton saw the sheriff thinking, as plainly as if the words were printed on his forehead: Goddamn fusspot. In Apodaca’s book, pathologists were about one step up from the guys who trimmed lamb chops, and Mart resented Joe’s scornful attitude toward the work he did.

  “Ballpark estimate, I’d say they’ve been out here ’tween twelve and twenty four hours.”

  “You basing that on rectal temperature?” Easton asked.

  “Mostly,” Horrell nodded.

  Although it was only a very rough guide, subtracting the rectal temperature of the body from its norm and dividing that figure by one-point-five produced what the textbooks called ‘a very approximate estimate.’ Horrell’s would be all the more approximate because of the ambient heat of the location, Easton thought.

  “I’ll try to be more precise when I get them to the morgue,” Horrell said. “Which better be soon,” he added, sniffing.

  “The wagon’s on its way,” Easton told him, and Horrell nodded approval.

  “Sooner the better,” he said.

  “Bert Bonnell said he thought Casey had been shotgunned,” Joe said, making it a question. Mart shook his head, buttoning and unbuttoning his shiny alpaca jacket as they set off back down the arroyo.

  “Nah,” he said. “Handgun, for sure. Heavy-caliber, three-five-seven Magnum, forty-five, something like that. Probably a hollow-point – there’s bone fragments and brain tissue all over the place. The entry wound was just above and behind the left ear. Slug went ri
ght on through and kept on going. I take leave to doubt they’ll ever find it out here.”

  “What about the boy?”

  Horrell grimaced. “You’ve seen the body. Killer used something very sharp. Scalpel, knife, maybe a razor. Deep, deep cut. Severed the larynx, carotid artery and the jugular. Damn near took his head off. That’s why there’s so much blood everywhere. Real messy killings, both of them.”

  His voice was reproachful, like a housewife chiding a husband for coming into the house with muddy boots.

  “Whoever did it must have had blood all over him,” Easton said.

  “Out here, would it matter?” Apodaca observed sourly.

  “Out here, no,” Easton said. “But if someone saw him?”

  “Could have been more than one person involved,” Mart Horrell offered. “Maybe

  even a car stashed someplace near the highway.”

  Good point, Easton thought, making a mental note. “Anything else we ought to know?” he asked Horrell.

  The pathologist did his routine with the jacket again, and once again Easton wondered if maybe Mart knew his fussbudget ways irritated Joe and that was why he did it. If so, it certainly worked. He saw the sheriff clamp down on his impatience, like he’d ordered himself not to let Horrell’s nervous tics bug him. What’s he so uptight about? Easton wondered.

  “Best I can do for now,” Mart Horrell said. “I’ll autopsy tonight. You want to sit in?”

  Apodaca grunted something that might have been acceptance or not. He wasn’t enamored of autopsies. Hell, Easton thought, who is? There was no way you could watch one and not think, one day that might be me.

  “Here comes the wagon,” Mart said, spotting the dust cloud as the vehicle bounced up to where the technicians were starting to pack up their equipment. “Your people done down here?”

  Apodaca shrugged. “Jorgensen’s the I/O.”

  “Wagon’s here, Steve,” Mart Horrell called. “Okay if I put them on ice?”

  Jorgensen automatically glanced toward the sheriff, then quickly away.

  Although he was I/O, nobody was in any real doubt about who was actually in charge. Nothing changed on Joe’s face, and neither of them spoke, but Jorgensen got a message. He nodded.