The Devil Went Down to Austin

Page 42

"We don't have a positive ID, Navarre. I want you to hear that. The brass—they're willing to assume it's Ruby McBride, but things were done ... I don't know how much you noticed underwater, but
things were intentionally done to the body to make the ID hard. It'll be days before we get enough medical records together, call in the forensic anthropologists to be sure."
"You can't have any doubt," I said. "You saw the way she was. Right at the base of that tree. She was . . . placed. Displayed. And you know Garrett didn't do that."
"Which is why I'm on leave," Lopez said. "I told my bosses we were chasing the wrong guy."
"You told the truth."
Lopez laughed without humour. "Good old truth. Ain't what the brass wants, especially when they've got a fugitive suspect with no alibis, solid ballistics work to place him at at least one homicide. Good motives for both homicides. A friend that works the docks for McBride, could give him access. The DA likes all that just fine. His point of view—it doesn't take much to dump a woman's body overboard. Even a guy in a wheelchair could do it. Especially with the drugs in her system. It would look very bad on the Channel 4 news if the department backed down, reconsidered pressing charges."
"Drugs."
Lopez brought out a sheaf of papers.
"I wasn't even supposed to get these. A guy I know in Toxicology, he ran me a copy."
He flipped a few pages, handed me one. "Check the spike graphs."
I couldn't tell much about the chemical names, the abbreviations, the numbers, but one thing was clear. "They're the same."
Lopez nodded. "The one on the left shows the levels of the alcohol and tricyclic antidepressants in Jimmy Doebler's blood. The one on the right shows the levels in the female victim. They match. Now check the next page."
Another match. The date on this one was much older—May 1995.
"Clara?"
"I had my friend pull that out of the archived records. That's her tox report."
"Three people," I said. "Virtually identical graphs."
Lopez nodded. "Taken separately, they can be explained. Jimmy and Clara both were on medication. If victim three is Ruby, she was on the same stuff. But taken together—we've got a poisoner. He's doing an extraction process with the amitriptyline, dissolving it
down to lethal concentration, mixing it with alcohol for quick dissemination. These three people were poisoned with the same recipe. Ninetynine to one—by the same person."
I looked across the plaza. The musician was playing Pete Seeger. Even the pigeons made a wide arc around him.
"Jimmy's past," I said. "Clara's missing child."
Lopez stared at the pigeons. "I don't know, Navarre. I still don't like it. But let's say the killer uses drugs to make the victims pliable. They get sleepy, almost comatose—they follow simple instructions. He can manipulate them. My bosses would tell you this explains a lot about how your brother could do this. Me, I'd agree with your friend, Miss Lee. I think this bastard wants to talk with his victims. He wants to get intimate before he kills them. I think the old guy in Waco, Ewin Lowry, I think that was our boy's first attempt. It left a bad taste in his mouth, didn't satisfy his urges. So he refined his strategy."
"He started drugging them."
The musician kept playing his harmonica music.
"W.B. Doebler," I said. "Has anyone interviewed him since Jimmy's death?"
"No need," Lopez said. "W.B. calls the sheriff every other day for updates. I don't know what gets said. I know Sheriff's an honourable person."
He didn't need to say more. We both knew the reality—a rich family, heavy political connections. Getting the Sheriff's Department to expand a criminal investigation to include W.B. Doebler would take incontrovertible proof and signatures in triplicate from God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost.
"Something else, though," Lopez said. "Pena's girlfriend, the night she drowned. We know now that his alibi is for shit. One thing the witness statements all agreed on: Adrienne Selak had had too much to drink. She kept slurring her words, losing her balance. Pena himself stated that he had to support her several times to keep her from falling over. She got very drunk very fast."
"As if Adrienne Selak had been given an amitriptyline cocktail."
Lopez nodded.
"But it's all still speculation," I said. "Garrett's been missing over twentyfour hours. I have to find him before your colleagues
do. If he could trace the Techsan sabotage to Pena—it's a long shot, but it might be some leverage."
Pena picked at the knee of his camouflage pants. "Which brings me to my last point. I put out feelers on Garrett's whereabouts early yesterday. This morning a CI of mine, local biker—he gave me a tip where your brother might be. Of course, he didn't know I'd been pulled off the case. Ethically, I should hand the information over to my superiors."
"Ethically."
Lopez's eyes glittered like a crocodile's. "My CI tells me your brother's hiding out with the Diablos. They got a whole network of safe houses. As of this morning, they moved him into a place where they figured nobody will look for him—the marina."
"You must have that place under surveillance."
"Boats go in. Boats go out. You know the guy who runs the docks, it would be pretty easy to come and go unseen. We can't search every boat, not without cause. I should tell my sergeant what I know, let him make the call."
I thought about what Travis County would do, how they would proceed against a suspected murderer hiding out with a motorcycle gang. They would activate SWAT.
They would go in hard and fast. They would be quick to shoot and they'd cry no tears if there was any resistance.
"I'll go to the marina with you," I told Lopez. "But you forgot one thing."
The cords of his neck muscles stood out like bridge cables. "Yeah?"
"Clara Doebler supposedly killed herself," I said. "Unless you saw something that night you didn't put in the report."
Something in Lopez's demeanour changed, like a tide reversing, drawing back in.
"Heard," Lopez murmured. "I heard something. And yes, Navarre, I reported it. Every day for five years, I've tried to convince myself that my superiors were right—that I was imagining things. I went along with what the brass told me. I went along with my shrink, telling me it was just frayed nerves. But when I walked up to Clara Doebler that night, while she was writing her suicide note, I could hear her talking—whimpering, almost.
There was nobody
with her. If there had been, for me not to see them, they would've had to have been in the trees—ten, fifteen feet away, standing in total darkness. But just for a second, as I was coming up, I could swear I heard a second voice. A man's voice. Real gentle."
The tide was still pulling in Lopez's direction, washing out the patio stones under my feet.
"What did the voice say?" I managed.
Lopez shifted, pulled the sunglasses off his shirt collar.
"It wasn't a conversation, Navarre. More like the voice was instructing Clara Doebler, telling her what to write."
Date:Thurs 15 Jun 2000 03:17:54 0500 From: [email protected] /* */ ReplyTo: none XMailer: Mozilla 4.7 (Macintosh? I? PPC) XAcceptLanguage: en To: [email protected] /* */ Subject: search patterns
What was the hardest part, Detective?
Talking to the family? Those pinched faces. The old grandmother crying, cupping her hands over a grimace. They are chattering at you in Chinese, and the ones who can translate, the adolescents, are telling you with embarrassment that the family believes in evil spirits, that something down there took a liking to their child.
The victim's family always wants so much from you. You arrive on the scene and they have knives and forks ready to dig in—taking whatever they can from you. They want reassurance. They want answers. They want you to bring their little boy back to life.
And so you dive, day after day—such a small area on the surface, one little cove in one public park. You could throw a football across it and hit the opposite bank. But you dive the entire area and find nothing. You comfort yourself with formulas, buoyancy charts, DPS manuals that tell you where the body should be, what it should look like, how the currents might have moved it. But you find nothing.
Every evening you come up from your third, maybe fourth dive that day, and the family is still there, holding vigil on the shore, looking for any sign—anything in your face, any gesture.
You have to be a wall, completely impassive. You wish somebody would tell the family,
"You don't want to be here. You don't want to see the thing when we finally find it." You wish you could tell them that the real find will be quiet. When it happens, the diver will say nothing. He will quietly direct the boat around, place it between the spectators and the surface site. They will bag the body underwater. They will do everything they can to keep it hidden.
You can't tell the family that. The only thing they want to hear is the one thing you can't tell them—that their kid is okay.
But that's not the hardest part, is it? The job isn't so bad. It's a community project.
You're never alone, never more than a few inches from the neon gloves of the next diver on the line. You can think of the lake in grids, tidily partitioned by weights and yellow strings, flags and GPS coordinates. It's impersonal. Scientific. And when the time comes to call it quits, to face the facts that enough taxpayer money has gone toward finding one little Chinese boy, that eventually he'll surface anyway—the decision isn't yours. You don't have to tell the family. You just roll up your line, fold the unused body bag.
Afterward, you sit on the rocks at sunset, thinking about the boy, what he must have felt like that Saturday—a sunny picnic, the cool water such a welcome relief after lunch, no one worried about that extra hot dog he ate. Maybe he heard his mom calling to him—"Be careful." And he looked down the shore, way out past the bend where the rich yachters were eating lunch on the decks of the restaurant, and he thought how fun it would be to go there. It didn't look far.
That moment comes when you realize what the kid was doing, what he felt like when he ate water, then found he couldn't surface.
And for all your mapping, your talks with the parents, your days of searching—it all comes down to one horrible realization. You're alone, and you decide to do one more dive.
You find him there, the glint of his gold necklace in your flash light. The rest of him is fuzzy, white, unhuman—a child turning into a cloud.
And rationally, you realize what happened. He dove under the deck, thinking of the novelty of swimming beneath a building. He didn't realize the old spools of wire were down there, bricks, fishnets, hooks, crayfish traps. And then he became tangled, and realized that the sounds above him were the last he would ever hear— people walking, the voices of diners, the clink of dropped plates, all amplified through the aluminium pontoon floats and the water. He drowned in the dark, and stayed there for days while above him, rich folk toasted the sunset with Chardonnay. Yacht purchases were discussed. Engagement rings were unveiled over crabcakes and microbrewery beer.