The Last Witness Read online

  “Hold one, Glenn,” Byrth said into his phone as he heard the growing whine of twin turbofan jet engines. “Here comes another damn plane.”

  He looked across the street to where an elevated line of airport runway approach lights blinked into the distance. A moment later a Boeing 737—the medium-range passenger jet’s bright orange belly illuminated by its landing floodlights—flashed overhead with a deafening roar. He watched it descend over the runway lights, then land at Love Field, Dallas’s municipal airport.

  After a moment, Byrth said, “Okay, Glenn, give it to me again. What’s the kill count up to?”

  —

  Texas Rangers Sergeant Jim Byrth had spent most of the day with Hunt County Sheriff Glenn Pabody, after Pabody had put in the call around seven o’clock that morning. Since the founding of the legendary Rangers in 1823—making them the United States’ oldest state law enforcement organization—the relentless lawmen had earned a reputation for taking on extraordinary cases that others didn’t have either the resources or the authority, or often both, to handle. Such was its importance that Section 411.024 of the Texas Government Code stated: “The Texas Rangers may not be abolished.”

  “I ain’t sure what exactly this is, Jim,” Pabody had reported. “But it ain’t just another Hunt County meth lab. It’s a helluva lot worse. Definitely some kind of organized crime. Maybe cartel? You need to see it to believe it.”

  Byrth had headed toward Lake Tawakoni, an hour’s drive east of Dallas. As he drove along Interstate Highway 30, the city gave way to suburbs, then that turned to large spreads of horse and cattle ranches, some of which were dotted with towering rigs drilling for natural gas in the vast shale. Exiting the freeway, he picked up two-lane farm-to-market roads, following them through country that became increasingly rugged and heavily wooded.

  Near the lake, finding the entrance to the property had not proven a problem. It was just past a wide spot in the road—the tidy little town of Quinlan, population a thousand or two—and had a Hunt County Sheriff’s Office patrol car parked on the shoulder of the road. The white Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor, even with its emergency lights dark, stood out in the middle of nowhere.

  A uniformed deputy sheriff, who looked to be maybe thirty and apparently hadn’t missed a meal in all those years, stood in the middle of the dirt road, his thumbs dug into the black leather Sam Browne gear belt just below his well-rounded gut.

  Byrth hit his wig-wags and the enormous deputy, now recognizing the Tahoe as an unmarked vehicle, stepped aside.

  “It’s a ways back, sir,” the deputy sheriff said with a pronounced drawl, after Byrth introduced himself. “But you sure as hell can’t miss it. And it is hell—I ain’t seen nothing like it. Ever.”

  Limbs from bushes and trees scratched and thumped at the Tahoe’s sides as Byrth navigated the narrow dirt road. It was muddy and deeply rutted, and he was convinced the SUV might at any moment slide into one of the oak trees that edged the road.

  He then passed open fields with barbed-wire fences. And, after a good ten minutes of bouncing down the road from rut to rut, the Tahoe bottoming out twice, the narrow road turned sharply.

  Around the bend there was an iron pole, rusty and bent, pushed to the roadside. It had a sign wired to it, a wooden board crudely hand-painted PRIVATE! DONT ENTER!

  He rolled past and saw that the road now widened, opening up onto a sleepy ramshackle property that looked to have been hacked out of the wild by hand.

  The first thing he saw, also standing out in the middle of nowhere, was a white Ford F-150 four-door pickup truck with the same HUNT COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE markings as the Crown Vic. It was parked beside a beat-up Chevy Malibu and an old moss-covered fifth-wheel camper. The boxy aluminum-sided trailer, its four tires long ago gone flat, leaned sharply. To the right of it, ringed with barbed wire, was a small corral, at the back of which he could make out a two-stall stable that had been patched together with mismatched boarding.

  Jim Byrth rolled to a stop beside the pickup and got out. He saw Sheriff Pabody, in his tan uniform, stepping out from behind the trailer.

  Pushing sixty, Pabody was tall and fairly fit, with weathered skin and a bushy head of white hair. He had his right hand on the grip of an almost new matte black .30 caliber Springfield Armory M1 carbine. It hung by a black nylon sling from his right shoulder, next to the older Springfield Armory tactical 1911-A1 .45 ACP holstered on his hip. His left hand held a folded red bandanna over his nose and mouth.

  As the two men approached each other, Byrth called out, “Glenn, I thought I told you that cutting out those greasy fried mountain oysters would stop that foul gassy problem of yours.”

  Pabody grinned as he stuffed the bandanna in his back hip pocket. He let the carbine dangle, and held out his hand.

  “Sure good to see you, Jim,” he said sincerely, meeting his eyes. He then nodded in the direction of the corral and added, “It’s pretty damn nasty back there.”

  Byrth knew that Pabody, once an Army reserve major, had seen his share of gruesome scenes as a Green Beret fighting the Taliban. He recognized that for the understatement that it was, and nodded.

  “So, what the hell do we have here? You said a game warden found it?”

  Texas game wardens, like the state troopers under the Department of Public Safety, were peace officers with the power to enforce laws statewide, on and off the pavement.

  Pabody nodded. “Luckily not just any game warden. I thought you knew Gerry Bailey.”

  Byrth shook his head. “Should I?”

  “There’s good guys in the business”—he pronounced it bidness—“and there’s really good guys.”

  “Don’t tell me. Another of you Green Beanies?”

  Pabody nodded. “Fifth Special Forces Group. Led assault sniper teams in Afghanistan and Iraq. Put in his twenty years, then figured he was pushing the odds of meeting his maker after four long tours in the Sandbox. Good ol’ country boy. Nothing makes him happier than hunting and fishing—and, okay, to hear him tell it, that and fucking.”

  Byrth grunted and grinned.

  “And now Bailey gets paid to be around it,” Pabody went on. “The hunting and fishing, that is.” He paused in thought, then went on, “I meant that crack about fucking as a joke, but maybe that, too. Man, this was the last thing that he—hell, any of us—expected to find out here.”

  He sighed audibly, then went on: “Anyway, Bailey was making a routine patrol early this morning looking for poachers. He was on his all-terrain vehicle when he crested a hill not far from the lake and came across the guy. This Mexican was big and beefy, maybe thirty. He was dressed all in black and carrying a nice Mossberg pump, a twelve-gauge. He took off running. When Bailey ordered him to stop, then pursued him, the guy stopped and took two shots at him.”

  “Hit him?”

  Pabody nodded. “Got grazed by some pellets. Birdshot. Nothing bad. I made him go to the ER—he was able to drive himself.” He paused, shook his head, then added, “But wouldn’t that be a bitch? Do four years dodging raghead bullets and IEDs only to get blown away by an illegal Mezkin damn near in your own backyard?”

  “Yeah, a real ironic bitch. Did Bailey bag him?”

  Pabody nodded again. “So the guy takes off into the bush. Bailey gets off his fancy four-wheeler, grabs his Car14, and takes off after him. Bailey gains ground on him, shouts for him to stop. Fucking idiot then tries to take another shot—and it’s game over. Bailey says it wasn’t intentional—blames not hitting center mass on his heavy breathing, but that’s bullshit because he’s such a good shot he could drive nails at a hundred yards with a .22, and he had the selector on single, not full auto—he puts a round right above the bad guy’s right eye. Top of his head explodes like a ripe cantaloupe.”

  “Nice shot. You said he was an illegal. Any ID, background?”

  “Not a damn thing on
him—just my gut feeling that he’s illegal. We’re running down property records to find who owns this place. Anyway . . . when Bailey comes up on the guy, he gets a whiff that’s overwhelming. Since it’s not Bailey’s first rodeo around a mess of gray matter, and he knows that that’s not what he’s smelling, he can’t figure it out. So he recons the area—and bingo.” He nodded toward the corral. “Hell, come here. I’ll show you.”

  —

  Jim Byrth smelled it before he saw it. The combination of odors was that of rotten eggs and putrid meat. It was oddly familiar to him, in an unsettling way.

  “Behind the stable there,” Pabody said, pointing to what was the edge of an eight-foot-tall open-air shed. “That’s where Bailey found the drums.”

  Pabody put his bandanna to his face as they stepped back to it. Byrth fished out a handkerchief from his pants pocket.

  The shed was roughly twenty by thirty feet, with a floor of bare earth and, atop what looked like four old telephone poles, a low, flat roof of rusted sheets of corrugated metal. It held eight fifty-five-gallon high-density polyethylene drums more or less in two lines of four. The blue plastic—with SULFURIC ACID CAUTION! HIGHLY CORROSIVE! stenciled in white—was faded and stained.

  Six of the drums were covered with blue plastic lids. The lids for the other two were missing, and when Byrth looked in the nearest one, the disfigured face of a teenaged girl stared grotesquely back.

  “Jesus!” he said from behind his handkerchief. “You never get used to seeing something like that.”

  The flesh on her cheeks and chin and forehead—all the parts above the surface of the murky fluid in the drum—was blue-black. What little hair she had left was ragged stubs of blonde along the top of her forehead.

  Under the fluid’s surface, the body was simply bony skeleton. And what was left of the skeleton—there was nothing below the waist—was in various degrees of disintegration.

  Byrth felt Pabody’s eyes studying him.

  “Pozole,” Byrth said, shaking his head and turning to look at Pabody.

  “What?”

  “South of the border, that’s what they call this process of getting rid of bodies,” he explained. “Pozole is actually a Mexican stew. Apparently, the Cártel del Golfo has its own gallows humor. I first saw this in Nuevo Laredo, then outside Juárez, a couple years back. Those Zetas are ruthless sonsofbitches. They’re literally liquefying anyone in their way—the cops and soldiers and reporters they can’t buy off—just making anybody they don’t like disappear. Their rivals they behead and stack ’em in town like cordwood to intimidate everyone else.”

  Los Zetas was made up of deserters from commando units in the Mexican army—units that were trained and armed by elite U.S. forces in the war against the very drug cartels they joined. Los Zetas had acted as the enforcement arm of the Gulf Cartel before breaking off on their own. Battles over routes for the trafficking of drugs and guns and humans across the United States border—the areas leading to Interstate 35 at Laredo being highly prized—became an endless bloodbath.

  “Juárez is the murder capital of the world,” Pabody said. “Six thousand killed in the last two years.”

  “That’s just counting official deaths,” Byrth said. “No telling how many more get murdered. The Mexican government acknowledges that almost thirty thousand of its citizens have simply disappeared. Cases get opened when family members report someone’s gone missing. Someone who just never comes home, or was abducted from their home, or even ‘arrested’ by uniformed police or military.”

  “There’s a lot of cops on the take.”

  Byrth nodded. “Theirs and ours. Then there’s also the fact that Zetas and others not only got trained as cops or soldiers before joining the cartels, they kept the uniforms and weapons. How the hell is the average abuela going to know that the ‘official’ hauling off of her son or grandson in front of her very eyes ain’t legit?”

  “And when she goes down to the police station asking questions, there’s no record of arrest.”

  Byrth nodded again.

  “No body means no murder, no nada,” he said. “That’s very effective intimidation.”

  Pabody’s eyes grew. “It’s not just girls here, there’s evidence men were also . . . liquefied. You figure this is some of Zetas’s work?”

  “For lack of better words, it damn sure smells like it. But out here? It could be someone copying them. Sinaloas, Knights Templar, any of them. Fucking cartels and their splinter cells can be anywhere.”

  Pabody’s eyes went back to the drum. “It looks like he just stood the dead bodies in there.”

  Byrth nodded. “And as the acid ate away at them, they slowly sank lower.”

  “Until they were completely gone,” Pabody added.

  “In Juárez, they did the same with sodium hydroxide, potassium hydroxide—”

  “What’s that?”

  “Lye. Caustic soda. Much easier to get than acid.”

  “At least a couple of these barrels have got labels that show they were sold to Tyler Oilfield Services,” Pabody said.

  “Probably stolen from an oil- or gas-drilling site,” Byrth said. After a moment he added, “Lye requires heat. And it’s not as thorough. This acid, however, dissolves it all, including dental fillings and such.”

  “How quick?”

  “Tissue’s gone away in about half a day, bones and everything else in two.”

  Byrth looked around the immediate area.

  There was a fire pit that had a scorched black metal ring about four feet in diameter. Byrth recognized that it was part of a wheel from a big-rig tractor trailer. Inside the ring were smoldering ashes and the remnants of charred logs. Just outside the ring was a swath of partially burned fabric from a pair of blue jeans.

  “The guy was pretty sloppy about getting rid of evidence,” Pabody said. “That is, if he even cared.”

  Pabody reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a small plastic zipper-top bag. In it was a business card.

  “This is just a tip of what I saw when I stuck my head in the door of that shithole of a RV.”

  He handed the bag to Byrth. He saw that it was a cheap generic business card, white with black type, for the Hacienda Gentlemen’s Club. It showed its address and a “hotline” phone number. Under that was a box with flowery handwriting that read: “April. In town Nov 11–15 only!!! Call me to reserve my dance room!!! 561-555-4532.” The “i” in April, instead of being dotted, had a heart drawn over it.

  “That’s a South Florida area code,” Byrth said.

  “Yeah, and when you call it, the auto voice-mail message says her box is full.” He grunted. “So to speak.”

  Their eyes met. Byrth smirked.

  “Sorry, Jim. More of that gallows humor. This girl—none of these girls, hookers or whatever—didn’t deserve whatever happened to get them here. Anyway, I called in this April’s phone number to the office. They got the process started on getting her records from the phone company. And I’m having a flatbed tow truck come fetch the trailer so forensics can go through it after they’re done doing the scene here.”

  “Good idea.”

  “With the exception of what’s left of this body, we ain’t getting any DNA off any dissolved bodies. There’s nothing left but acid in those covered drums. But there’s a shitload of panties—those string ones? ‘thongs’ mostly—and some bras in the trailer that could give us something. And Lord knows what they’ll find on the mattress.”

  Byrth pulled out his cell phone and, using its camera function, took a close-up picture of the business card through the clear plastic bag.

  “November eleven through fifteen?” Byrth said, handing the bag back and checking the date window on his wristwatch. “Today’s the fifteenth.”

  “You reckon April was missed at work last night? Or if she’s expected tonight?”


  “One way to find out.”

  —

  “Well, it’s entirely possible she could have a cell phone with a Florida number,” Texas Rangers Sergeant James O. Byrth said into his phone as he looked through the Tahoe’s windshield at the front door of the Hacienda. “But it’s a Pennsylvania ID you found?”

  “Yeah,” Hunt County Sheriff Glenn Pabody said, “a DOT non-driver ID issued to one Elizabeth Cusick, age twenty, five-one, one-ten, blonde, blue eyes, a Hazzard Street address in Philadelphia. That’s Hazzard with two z’s. Last name spelled Charley Umbrella Sierra India Charley Kilo. What kind of name is that?”

  Byrth was writing that down as he heard the turbine engines of another jet approaching.

  “Maybe Polish?” he said. “Lots of Poles in Pennsylvania. And Italians and Irish and Germans and Latinos . . . Would you pop a shot of it and send it to me?”

  “Sure thing. Didn’t you say you were just up there? In Philadelphia?”

  “Yeah. Running down some mean bastards who thought they were going to be the next Zetas.”

  “Maybe you can pull a few strings then, get some answers quicker.”

  “I’m damn sure going to try.” He paused, then, his voice rising, added, “Here comes another jet. I’ll call you back later.”

  Byrth broke off the call as the roar overhead drowned out whatever Sheriff Pabody had begun to say. It wasn’t as loud as the 737 had been a few minutes earlier. He looked up to the approach lights and saw that this aircraft was a corporate-sized jet, white with elaborate red artwork.

  Nice. Are those gambling dice painted on it?

  His eyes then went back to the Hispanic bouncer at the front door of the strip club.

  That boy looks friendly as fire ants.

  Wonder what my odds are of getting any answers in there—a million to one? Worse?