A Thousand Falling Crows (21 page)

Aldo chose to ride in the bed of the truck, leaving Blue in his spot next to the passenger door. The gesture disappointed Sonny and made him happy at the same time. He enjoyed talking with Aldo, but he appreciated the fact that the Mexican realized that Blue could cause himself more harm in the bed of the truck with all of the stops and starts between Aldo's house and downtown Wellington. Concern about the dog's welfare made Sonny forget about his itchy stub—some of the time, briefly, but enough to be a respite from his own pains and suffering. He probably should have brought a dog into his life long before he did.

The sun had burned all of the color out of the sky, and the way forward was unhindered by any weather at all. As Sonny drove into town, his thoughts wandered in and out about Frank Hamer, hoping the ex-Ranger could help them. Hamer was famous now that he'd put an end to Bonnie and Clyde, and he hoped the man would have some time to help them find Carmen, or at least put them on a trail that would eventually lead to the girl's safe return home. Sonny knew saving Carmen was a long shot. It might not be possible. Especially if the police got to her before they did. And there was nothing to say that Carmen was not culpable for her actions. She might very well deserve to be handed over to the police. He knew he would have to prepare Aldo for that possibility before it came.

The road was dry and left a plume of dust behind the truck. Sonny had adjusted to the mechanics of driving with one hand, but on occasion, he still missed a shift and ground the gears. Which is what happened as Sonny came to a crossroads, stopped, and started again. Blue looked at Sonny oddly, and Aldo yelled from the back, “Are you all right,
señor
?”

Sonny nodded, frustrated, looked down, shifted again, and made a smooth transition the second time around. “I‘m all right,” he yelled back and caught sight of Aldo settling back down into the bed.

When Sonny looked back up, he saw a car ahead of him, pulled off to the side of the road. There was no mistaking that it was the sheriff's car, Jonesy's new-model Ford. He pulled his foot off the accelerator and slowed as he approached the car.

Jonesy was standing out in a field, about thirty feet from the berm. He was looking down at something like he was puzzled. The engine drew his attention, and he looked away from whatever it was he was looking at and made his way back toward the road.

Sonny eased up alongside the Ford and stopped, leaving the engine running.

Jonesy was standing at the edge of the fender. A piece of short grass dangled out of the corner of his mouth. “I thought that was you, Sonny.”

Sonny nodded, hung his left arm out the window, and looked out into the field but didn't see anything of note. “Something the matter, Jonesy? You look a little pale.”

It was true. The sheriff's face was white as a fresh-bleached sheet.

Jonesy shook his head. “Hard to believe.” He sighed heavily.

Aldo had edged from the middle of the bed to the driver's side and nodded at Jonesy, but the sheriff ignored him. He stared straight at Sonny and said, “There's another girl out there, Sonny. Murdered and dumped like she was trash. Dead as a doornail, but still fresh enough to bleed out like a stuck pig.”

CHAPTER 20

Sonny stepped out of the truck with a heavy sense of dread racing up the back of his neck. It wasn't like he'd never seen a murder victim before. Hardly—not after nearly forty years as a Texas Ranger—but he'd been prepared for that when he was on duty. Not so much these days. If there was one thing he hadn't missed about being hale, hearty, and on the road with a badge on, it was being a witness to the unexplainably violent things human beings did to one another.

“You stay here, Blue,” Sonny said, as he closed the door. The dog had limped across the seat and stood on all fours next to the steering wheel, wagging its tail, wanting to follow along. Sonny ignored the dog the best he could. “You best stay here, too, Aldo,” he said.

The Mexican nodded, then looked at the floor of the truck bed without saying a word.

Sonny made his way to Jonesy, who still looked pale and haggard from the find. The sheriff said nothing once Sonny caught up to him, and they walked on, matching steps easily, toward the spot he'd been originally standing in.

The girl was apparent now that Sonny knew what he was looking at. A lump of earth-tone clothes that, in the right light, melded into the solitary landscape. Only her skin stood out, alabaster white, like broken bits of porcelain obscured by drought-hewn weeds and out-of-place fabrics.

“How'd you see her?” Sonny asked. He stopped before arriving at the destination of the death. He wasn't ready to see the details of it all just yet. Instead, he looked past the body like it was an old log and scanned the horizon.

An abandoned house sat off in the distance but not much else. Just fields as flat as the bottom of an iron. The brown ground met the blue sky with a few withering trees in between. Only the crossroad brought the promise of movement, of life, and even then the traffic was nonexistent. Not one car or truck had passed by since Sonny had stopped.

“Saw a glint in the sun,” Jonesy said. He'd stopped short of Sonny without voicing any opposition. He didn't seem to be in any hurry to see the girl again, either. “She's still wearing a pendant on her neck. My eyes have been trained by the other finds. Always on the lookout, I suppose.” There was a sadness in his voice that was unmistakable. It was a hard job being a sheriff, being a law man. Moments like this never made the newspaper in election years.

“Gold?” Sonny asked.

Jonesy shrugged. “Not sure. I felt her wrist for a pulse even though I knew there wasn't gonna be one. That's all I did. Then you pulled up.”

Sonny changed his focus from the far surroundings to the ground in front of him. “Any footprints you could see?”

“Nope. But I haven't looked real close. Kind of seems like she just fell out of the sky.”

“Or somebody carried her out here.”

“Most likely.” Jonesy spit out the soggy piece of grass he'd been chewing on. “I think it's the same person who done it,” he said, staring straight at the girl now.

Sonny followed suit. The girl's body was about twenty feet ahead of them, but she was close enough for him to see the color of her hair. It looked like straw in late summer; not quite brown, and not quite yellow, still healthy. From a distance, her hair might have looked like a thick bush, dead from the beating of the sun's rays. But that wasn't the case.

“Why would you think that?” Sonny asked.

“Everything's pretty much the same, at first glance, anyways. Face pummeled, nearly beat to a pulp, and I ain't never seen her before. Looks like another Jane Doe to me. I bet there ain't a stitch of ID on her, just like there weren't on the others.”

“The necklace might help.”

“Might. But you know how that goes. Takes time to track stuff like that down. Time enough for a killer to get away.”

“Or kill again.”

“Exactly.”

Sonny nodded. “I don't know much about what's going on with the other two. I haven't been paying close attention.”

Jonesy looked up at Sonny and studied his face. The man's gaze made Sonny uncomfortable. “They started just after you got tangled up with Bonnie and Clyde. Strangers coming up dead every once in a while. Two of them found on the side of the road just like this one. We held some things back from the newspaper so folks wouldn't know everything. Only me and Hugh Beaverwood knows all the details.”

“And you trust him?”

“I do. Said so earlier at Tom Turnell's store and I‘ll say it again. Hugh Beaverwood is soft. Man ain't got an ounce of meanness in him.”

“You know him better than I do.” Sonny drew in a breath, listened to the silence around him. The insects were holding their breaths, like they were afraid of being discovered or waiting for a curtain to fall, and there were no birds about to sing. It was like the earth was dead, too. When it came to murder, Sonny didn't trust anyone, not even the local coroner.

He felt eyes on him and looked up at the road. Blue and Aldo were staring at him with unwavering curiosity from the truck. “There's fair reason for unknown girls to come to this county from points beyond, Jonesy,” he finally said.

Jonesy looked away from him, back to the girl. “I‘ve been out to talk to Pete Jorgenson a couple of times if that's what you're sayin'.”

“It is.”

“He didn't know any of the girls. Claimed he'd never seen them before. Of course, all we had was a picture of them that Hugh took at the morgue, and I dare say they probably didn't look anything like they did when they was alive.”

“You believed him? That he didn't know these girls?”

Jonesy nodded. “I do. I‘ve knowed Pete Jorgenson all my life. His mother was the same, soft-hearted, you know. She took in wayward girls, too, and Pete's just carryin' on the family tradition. He says girls just show up out of nowhere at all times of the day and night. Hobos mark you on the curb so's they can find a soft touch, get a handout out at the back door. I suppose easy girls got the same kind of ways of telling one another where there's a place to go to solve their troubles. They stay 'til they're past their problems. Lidde does the midwifery and there's been a slew of babies taken to the county orphanage out of that house. There's a docket kept, a list of girls that've come through that house. Pete showed me. So, I‘ve poked around plenty and haven't come up on anything that makes me distrust what Pete's tellin' me. But I sure do agree with you, Sonny; it's an odd coincidence that these girls appear out of nowhere. Pete's the most obvious link, but I‘ll be damned if I can't come up with a connection that turns on any of the lights except for the obvious.” Jonesy bit his lip and looked back at the girl.

Sonny followed the sheriff's gaze and found himself at a loss for words. It was as if the two of them were trying to will away the body, make it disappear, or travel back in time, so they could see what had truly happened to the girl. Sonny wasn't sure he really wanted to know. He eased forward in silence and walked softly toward her, like he was on hallowed ground. Jonesy followed, sniffling like he was trying to ward off the onset of an allergy attack.

There might as well have been cotton stuffed in Sonny's ears. He couldn't hear a thing in the outside world once he got close enough to really see the girl.

Her face had lost its shape. Her cheek bones were shattered, caved in like they had been ramrodded with a club, making her eyes bulge out. Blood trailed out of the corner of each eye, bright red, fresh, still gooey if someone were to touch it. Sonny had no intention of doing that. The blood reminded Sonny of a statue he'd seen once of Mary, the Mother of God. It was in an old Mexican mission church, a long time ago. She'd stood under the crucifix staring up at her dying son with tears of blood. If he had been a religious man, then and now, he would've crossed himself, genuflected. But that was not the case. Instead, he kneeled and very gently took the girl's cold hand into his. “She's still limp,” he said to Jonesy. “Rigor hasn't had time to stiffen her up.”

“Fresh. I told you.”

Sonny breathed in deep, exhaled, then laid the girl's hand back down as gently as he'd picked it up. He gazed up and down her body, coming to a stop at the big red pool that had seeped out from underneath the low part of the girl's midsection. A shiver ran through him, and he looked away immediately, not stopping until he found Blue in the distance, staring back at him. “The others, they were like that?” he asked, breaking eye contact with the dog and finding the sheriff's eyes.

“We kept that out of the papers for a lot of reasons.”

“They were all pregnant?”

Jonesy nodded. “If Pete was somehow involved in this, we didn't want him to run off. And if he wasn't, we didn't want folks paintin' a black hex on his mailbox and throwin' rocks through his windows. You know how things like that go. He's got more than a few folks that don't take kindly to the work he does anyways, and they've been pretty vocal about it. Says it reflects poorly on the town.”

“And you agree?”

Jonesy shrugged. “None of my business, now is it, if there ain't no laws broke in the process?”

“I suppose you're right,” Sonny said. “But he seems like the most obvious suspect.”

“He does, but that don't make him a heartless, cold-blooded killer, now does it?”

“Innocent until proven guilty. I know the process.”

“Pete don't seem nervous at all. Lidde, neither. She still drives into town and does her shoppin' like there's not a care in the world. I don't think that woman could fake her way out of a brown paper bag. Pete, neither, as far as that goes. I‘ve had him down to the station more times than I can count, and he always claims innocence and has an alibi for his whereabouts. I can't arrest a man on a hunch. Simple as that.”

“But the killer knows you're holding back information.”

“Sure, but that don't seem to be stoppin' him, does it?”

Sonny exhaled and stood up. He wanted to run as far away from the girl as he could, but he knew he would never be able to forget her. “You said they were all pregnant. What happened to the unborn babies?”

Jonesy shrugged. “Beats me. No sign of anything. Just like this one. A pooch in the belly and cuts with a sharp knife in places cuts ain't supposed to be.”

Sonny felt woozy, pale at the thought. “You don't suppose these girls wanted to get rid of the babies and something went wrong?”

“I asked Hugh the same question. He said he'd seen that before—a coat hanger, you know—but this was something different. There's intent, anger, no care at all for the girl. He claims he don't know of any places nearby that might do such a thing, and I think Pete would know that, too—and tell me. Seems to be against everything he stands for.”