The Last Witness boh-11 Read online

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  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 Cartel del Golfo has its own gallows humor. I first saw this in Nuevo Laredo, then outside Juarez, 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.

  “Juarez 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 Juarez, 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?

  Byrth’s cell phone then made a ping! sound. He looked at it and saw that Sheriff Pabody had sent him the photograph he’d taken of the girl’s Pennsylvania Department of Transportation identification. He tapped the image and the ID filled the screen of his phone. He dragged his fingers on the screen, enlarging her head shot.

  “Wow,” he heard himself softly say aloud. “What a beautiful girl.”

  Framed in rich chestnut brown hair, the energetic, youthful face with a bright sensual smile seemed to stare out right at him.

  Then his mind flashed with the horrific image of the blue-black blotched flesh of the face that stared back at him from the drum of sulfuric acid.

  Could it be the same girl?

  That one was blonde. Or maybe bleached-blonde.

  And Glenn said the toll is at least ten.

  God help them. .

  Byrth, as was his ritual, reached down and double-checked his.45s-the full-frame Model 1911-A1 in his hip holster and the smaller-framed Officer’s Model on the inside of the top of his left boot. Then he grabbed his Stetson and stepped out of the Tahoe.

  [TWO]

  Society Hill, Philadelphia

  Sunday, November 16, 8:57 P.M.

  “I’m sure the police will solve this soon, Mrs. McDougal,” Michael J. O’Hara said after shaking hands with the sad-faced silver-haired elderly woman and stepping to the sidewalk in front of her townhome. “Thank you for taking the time to speak with me. Nice to see you again.”

  The woman nodded wordlessly, glanced up and down the narrow tree-lined cobblestone street, then quickly shut her front door. He heard a solid clunk-clunk-clunk as she locked the three new dead bolts she’d had a handyman install only hours earlier.

  O’Hara looked six doors down the street to where yellow CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS tape roped off the sidewalk in front of Margaret McCain’s fire-damaged home. Arranged against the wall under a soot-covered window was a small makeshift memorial. It consisted of more than a dozen long-stemmed flowers and a bouquet of balloons floating above a pair of plush two-foot-tall teddy bears embracing each other.

  The night air had a heavy acrid burned smell to it, and that clung to his nostrils and the back of his throat.

  O’Hara felt his cell phone vibrating in his pocket. He pulled it out.

  “Where’s my cameraman?” he said into it, answering without introduction. “I’m going to do my live shot here at the scene.”

  The phone began vibrating again.

  “Hold on a sec, damn it,” he said.

  He looked at the caller ID. It read MARSHAL EARP.

  Finally! he thought.

  O’Hara put the phone back to his head, snapped, “Just get him here now,” then touched a key that broke off that call and answered the incoming one.

  “Matty!” O’Hara said into the phone. “You really must be embracing island time if ASAP means four hours. Just how the hell is life as a beach bum?”

  “Well, it was fucking great, Mickey,” Payne said, his tone bitter, “until Philadelphia raised its ugly head down here.”

  “Whoa! What do you mean?” He paused in thought, then added, “This wouldn’t have to do with the McCain girl, would it?”

  Payne was quiet for a long moment, then said, “What do you know about that?”

  “Screw you, buddy. The question is, What do you know about it?”

  “Not a damn thing. I wish I did, though.”

  “Oh, come on! Matty-”

  “I’m out of the loop, Mickey. Even Jason Washington won’t tell me what the hell is going on. All I know is what Daffy Nesbitt told Chad: that it was a home invasion. Amanda has been trying to reach Maggie for the last hour.”

  “The Black Buddha-the best homicide detective on the East Coast-is working a home invasion case? I don’t buy it.”

  “I agree. And I didn’t say that. Because I don’t know. I just got off the phone with him. For whatever reason, he says I can’t ask about it.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  Payne grunted. “That’s one way to put it. All I know for sure is that it’s starting to screw up what began as an amazing trip down here.” He paused, then added, “Why are you playing journalist? You’re supposed to be the boss now.”

  “I am the boss. But once a journalist, always a journalist, Matty. Write that down. It’s in my blood to chase a good story, just as it’s in your blood to chase bad guys. And when the home of a scion of a Philly family is firebombed and she’s missing, I’m personally going to cover the story.”

  “Did you say firebombed?”

  “Yeah. The accelerant was gasoline. One of the guys in on the crime scene-you can guess who-quietly told me Molotov cocktails.”

  “No shit. .”

  “And I’ve got the scoop on whose house it is because my so-called competition hasn’t figured that out. It’s listed on the property records under a generic named trust, and neighbors aren’t talking to the media for fear they might be next. Old Lady McDougal just had three-count ’em, three-new dead bolts put on her front door. She said she wouldn’t have opened her door if she hadn’t known I was ‘a nice laddie.’ So, I know it’s Maggie’s, and I like Maggie and want to help.”

  “How do you know her?”

  “I can’t believe you just asked that. I know damn near everyone. It’s my job.”

  Matt grunted again. “Point taken. So, how?”

  “About a year ago she called me about my CPS stories, and said because of Mary’s House she wanted to continue our talks. . ”

  When Michael J. O’Hara had been the lead investigative reporter at The Philadelphia Bulletin, he wrote “Follow the Money,” a series of articles that blew open the City of Philadelphia Department of Human Services. O’Hara had spent months digging, and uncovered gross incompetence and graft. His front-page reports led to a wholesale revision of the department, including the resignation of long-entrenched top administrators.

  It also won O’Hara a Pulitzer Prize for public service.

  Curiously, his winning the prestigious award had been the beginning of the end of O’Hara’s long career in newspapers.

  The owners of the Bulletin had put their public relations flacks to work overtime, boasting that the Pulitzer proved their newspaper offered the highest caliber of reporting anywhere. Mickey’s redheaded mug was plastered on the sides of Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority buses and practically every billboard in town. But all that-and the perception of the PR having gone to O’Hara’s head-had created more than a little animosity among certain colleagues in the newsroom.

  A great deal of the friction was the result of petty jealousy on the part of the managing editor, Roscoe G. Kennedy, who took enormous pride in having earned a mast
er’s degree from the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Kennedy knew that O’Hara was equally proud of having, as Mickey put it, attended the School of Hard Knocks.

  Mickey’s first job with the Bulletin was at age twelve, when he pedaled his rusty bicycle on a West Philly newspaper route, slinging copies of the afternoon edition at row house after row house.

  By the time Mickey was sixteen, one of his best buddies at West Catholic High School convinced him to add a sideline to his route-running numbers slips for Francesco “Frankie the Gut” Guttermo.

  That had worked out reasonably well, until Monsignor Dooley, who had made absolutely clear that he would not tolerate any immoral act, caught Mickey with the slips at school. The monsignor offered to go lenient on him if Mickey would confess his sins-and assist the monsignor in cleansing the school of the unholy filth that was gambling.

  Mickey, embracing the code of silence that was omerta, refused to rat out his buddy. And he damn sure knew better than to even mutter the name Frankie the Gut.

  Accordingly, the monsignor booted Mickey to the curb, telling him not to come back until he was repentant and prepared to make amends.

  Mickey, turning to his Bulletin job to fill his now extra time, discovered that a newsroom copyboy position had opened. He was told that it was little more than a gritty gofer job, but it sounded like the best job on earth to someone who was looking at another bitter winter throwing papers from a worn-out bike.

  Against all odds-including being evasive about his proof of having graduated from high school early-he got the job and survived the ninety-day probationary period.

  Mickey had found the newsroom a fascinating environment. He not only did the lowly tasks thrown at him, he made sure he was conveniently in the line of sight when the assistant city editor looked around for someone to do last-minute work no one else wanted-research, fact-checking telephone calls, et cetera.

  Proving himself competent and reliable, he soon was given small writing assignments.