Scorpio Rising by Alan Annand
From Santa Fe to Jemez Springs it was forty-three miles as the crow flies, which the Jet Ranger covered in twenty minutes. As soon as they’d arrived over the area, the pilot checked out a dirty plume of smoke rising from a dirt road north of the village. As the chopper came in over the trees, Cobb saw a State Police car and a Ford Explorer parked on the dirt road downhill of the car in flames.
The pilot set them down at the top of the road, fifty yards from the burning car. As soon as the chopper touched ground, Cobb and the SWAT officers spilled out to check for occupants of the burning Neon and, finding none, moved into the woods toward the house.
~~~
Jemez Springs
Within fifteen minutes, the ten men from the FBI and New Mexico State Police had secured the site. Cobb spent a few minutes crouched behind the shed with Kramer before the SWAT team leader emerged from the house, weapon slung over his shoulder, helmet tipped to the back of his head.
“All clear,” he called out. “One occupant, dead of gunshot.”
While the SWAT team fanned out to check the surrounding woods, Cobb and Kramer went inside for a look. The victim had been shot twice, chest and head. Kramer had brought a photo he’d printed off the NCIC but there was no easy comparison between Zabriskie’s mug shot and the blood-covered face of the dead man. Fingerprints would confirm if it was really Zabriskie. Cobb phoned for a CSU from Albuquerque to come up here and process the crime scene.
Someone outside called for Cobb. He closed his phone and went out onto the porch, where one of the New Mexico State Police officers said, “Sir, we need to head out. We just got a call to respond, someone reporting a high-speed chase through the village.”
“Go for it.”
“And one of your SWAT boys wants to talk. I think they found something.” The officer and his partner ran toward their cruiser down on the road.
The SWAT team leader beckoned from the door of a shed. Cobb walked over. The SWAT leader stood aside to let him look, but barred the entrance with his arm.
“I wouldn’t go in there without full body armor.”
Inside the shed, lighted by a bare bulb hanging over a workbench, a SWAT officer was carefully removing items from boxes and ranging them on the workbench whose wall rack displayed screwdrivers, pliers and soldering guns. Cobb saw three different kinds of electronic alarm clock, several sizes of batteries, a bunch of primer charges on wire leads, and what looked like a dozen one-pound bags of putty.
The SWAT officer held up a bag for Cobb to see. “C4 plastic explosive.”
Kramer looked over Cobb’s shoulder. “What do you bet Forensics matches this stuff to the residue in Dr. Cassidy’s vehicle?”
“Good work, guys.” Cobb clapped the SWAT team leader on the shoulder. He walked away from the shed to confer with Kramer. “But if Zabriskie’s dead, who took him down? And what happened to the citizen who called in the tip?”
Kramer’s cell phone rang. The office dispatcher had the original tipster on the line again. Kramer took the call, listened briefly and passed the phone to Cobb. Cobb listened only a moment before Crowe, clearly out of breath, broke off. Cobb closed the phone and whistled to the SWAT team leader.
“I need you and one of your guys, on the double. Let’s go.” Cobb motioned to Kramer. The four of them ran down the driveway toward the chopper waiting at the road.
Chapter 73
Little Appaloosa Mesa, New Mexico
Carrie Cassidy had been running hard for five minutes when she paused to look behind her. She couldn’t believe her eyes. The man was still following her, less than a hundred yards behind. She was dismayed. He was way too athletic for his own good. Still breathing heavily, she adopted a two-handed shooting stance and tried to steady both her breathing and her pistol. When the man was within thirty yards, she fired. Missed.
Crowe slowed to a walk. He raised the shotgun, aiming it right at Cassidy. She couldn’t stand still for a spray of pellets. She took another quick shot from twenty yards away, missed again, and turned to run.
Crowe ran after her. He was drenched in sweat and struggling for breath, throat burning, field of vision collapsing, conscious of little else but the woman fifty yards ahead. But with every minute he persevered, ignoring his screaming lungs and shaky legs, he narrowed the gap a couple of yards each minute. If he could keep it up, he’d run Cassidy to ground in half an hour.
Cassidy slowed to a ragged jog. She turned, almost losing her balance, and raised the pistol. Crowe could see her arms shaking, and even with two hands supporting the gun, she couldn’t keep her sights on him. He raised the shotgun. Earlier when they’d abandoned their vehicles and exchanged shots, Crowe had intentionally fired over her head. Now, even if he could keep the shotgun steady, he didn’t want to shoot her. But she didn’t know that.
Crowe worked his tongue, gathering just enough saliva to lubricate his words. “I called the FBI,” he yelled at her. “They know about you...,” he gulped air, “…and Zabriskie.”
Cassidy waved the gun, her lungs a wheezing bellows, hurling back a few words at a time. “You back off…, let me go...” She massaged the stitch in her side. “...I’ll give you fifty grand.”
Crowe’s response was a hoarse laugh. “Is that what you… promised Zabriskie...?” He swallowed hard, coughing it out. “…Before you killed him?”
Cassidy turned and ran toward Crowe, skidding to a halt at the fifteen-yard mark, knowing she had to do this right, end it now. She whipped her pistol up, scared now in a way she’d never been, because this wasn’t a paper target on the shooting range, this was a man with a shotgun rising to meet her sight line, and she didn’t have time to take a deep breath and a slow squeeze. She banged off one quick shot as the shotgun boomed, then another as she twisted away, knowing she’d missed Crowe on both counts. She turned and ran like an old jackrabbit.
Crowe lowered the shotgun and followed. As he pursued her, he counted the number of shots she’d fired. Two for Zabiskie, five at him in Zabriskie’s yard, another three into the Neon, another three at him in the arroyo, four more since then… Was that seventeen? Did an automatic carry that many shots in its clip? He was pretty sure Cassidy must be running on empty.
Up ahead, the mesa rose from the desert floor in a steep bluff, almost vertical in places. Cassidy was so intent on outstripping her pursuer, she’d neglected to pay attention to the topography. When the horizon disappeared from her peripheral vision she saw too late that she’d entered the mouth of a canyon. She faltered, realizing she might get boxed in if she wasn’t careful. She looked over her shoulder and got a jolt of panic when she saw the man only thirty yards away. No way could she angle left or right because with every step she took, her pursuer would close the gap.
A jumble of rock lay at the base of the cliff, broken and sharp-edged after tumbling from above. Cassidy jammed the Glock into her waistband and scrambled up through the rocks, using hands as well as feet to negotiate the larger boulders.
Crowe halted at the base of the cliff, trying to figure out where Cassidy thought she was going. Near as he could see, the cliff was too steep to climb, its face too eroded to offer secure handholds or footholds. He maneuvered through the boulders, picking his steps so as not to fall among the broken rock, until he was directly beneath her.
Cassidy had only got about thirty feet up the face of the cliff. If he’d wanted to use the shotgun, Crowe could have blown her off the face of the cliff.
He summoned enough wind in his lungs to call up to her, “You can’t make it.”
Cassidy had just come to the same conclusion. She was jammed into a crevasse that gashed the face of the cliff, almost at the top of it where an overhang blocked her further passage. No way could she get around it without rope and crampons. She’d have to retrace her steps. She looked down at her pursuer, startled to see how close they were. She was totally exposed on the cliff face. Why didn’t he shoot?
Crowe finally got his breath back. “This is the end of the trail
“Back off!” she yelled. “You don’t know me.”
“I know more than you think. I know what started back in Berkeley as a little ménage-à-trois...”
Cassidy pulled the Glock from her waistband. At ten yards, she could hardly miss this shot, even if the angle presented only a diminished profile of the man below. Gripping the rock wall with her left hand, she took careful aim and pulled the trigger. The action clicked on empty. What the hell? She worked the breech block and tried again. Nada. She ejected the magazine to check the load but it slipped from her hand and clattered down the cliff face. Her extra rounds were in her car and the gun was useless now. She flung it at the man, striking him on the arm.
Crowe winced and rubbed his elbow. He looked for the pistol but it had fallen into a gap among the boulders. He looked up at Cassidy wedged into the crevasse, her face a mask of fury.
Cassidy scanned the rock face above, vertically and laterally, confirming her earlier fear: she had no place to go but down.
Crowe addressed his captive audience. “I know all about the three of you, Carrie. I know Jeb married money, but fell in love with someone more beautiful than his wife. When his Wall Street career couldn’t feed the appetite he had, he wondered why he shouldn’t have all of his wife’s money. Then he fell victim to your imagination.”
Having hurt Crowe with the pistol she’d hurled, Cassidy got an idea. She inspected the rock face at the edges of the crevasse, looking for cracks that might reveal a loose piece, and tugged at it with her fingers.
Crowe summed up the life of her partners in crime with a brevity as insulting as it was accurate. “Your buddy Dave tried to keep his dreams alive but couldn’t put together anything better than a garage band for the songs he wrote. He killed time, swinging both ways, until he found a boyfriend with an estate big enough to retire on.”
Cassidy broke off a piece of rock the size of a coconut and hurled it down.
Crowe saw it coming and stepped aside, the rock missing him by a yard.
“Meanwhile, you did time in a marriage of convenience, working on the Great American Novel, doing field research on characters like Zeke Zabriskie...” Crowe watched Cassidy scrabble at another section of the rock face. He checked his footing in case he had to dodge another missile. “Until one day you all ended up with a mutual itch to scratch. And the frustrated but clever writer plotted the ultimate three-way…”
“You don’t know shit.”
“Dave’s dead and Jeb’s in police custody.” Crowe let that sink in. “And you’re stuck... between a rock and a hard place.”
Cassidy struggled to break off another piece of rock. She pried at its edge with growing desperation, pulling as hard as she could until suddenly it cleaved away from the wall. But it was so much bigger than she’d expected – a piece the size of her torso! As the weight of it toppled against her, she couldn’t get out of its way, and it pushed her off balance. In a final desperate gambit, she turned with it and rode it down in a kamikaze scream of fury, hoping to crush Crowe beneath it as she plummeted to earth.
Crowe jumped to another boulder just in time. Cassidy, tumbling head over heels, crashed into the boulders, the 100-pound rock landing atop her with a sickening crunch.
Crowe dropped the shotgun and scrabbled to her side. He eased the rock off her chest and cradled her head in his hands.
Her eyelids fluttered with pain as she looked up at Crowe. Blood oozed from her mouth. “Damn you.”
“Don’t go with a heart full of hate.” Crowe gently touched Cassidy’s lips with a finger. “Leave it behind. Better to think of a time when you were happy. Hold onto that.”
Her hands made fists. Crowe closed his hands over hers. She fought a moment before giving up and her hands went soft inside Crowe’s. He looked down on her as the muscles slackened in her face and he saw her spirit getting ready to take flight. Her eyes were filming with tears and in the middle of each pupil was a black hole into which all the light was descending.
~~~
Summer was her favorite time of the year, when she and Mom went to Vermont, leaving Dad to fend for himself. They took the train on Dad’s Army pass, three days and nights from Austin to Boston, reading comics and magazines by day, scrunched together in a lower bunk at night, watching America roll by beneath the stars. Grandpa and Grandma met them in Boston for a day of shopping and then drove up to Middlebury, arriving late at night, the dogs barking as they drove up the lane. When she hugged the two dogs who never seemed to forget her, and smelled the fresh hay on the cool night air, she knew she was home, really home.
In the green mountains of New England, while Texas baked under an unforgiving sun, she and Mom spent seven weeks on Grandpa’s farm, going to Burlington for the Fourth of July parade, visiting relatives, picking strawberries, swimming in Lake Champlain, some nights sleeping in Grandpa’s old canvas tent. While Mom helped Grandma cook meals and make preserves, Carrie spent time with her Grandpa.
She watched him milk cows in the morning, helped him feed the chickens and pigs, rode on the tractor as he mowed hay, and lay beside him when he took a mid-afternoon nap on the front porch. She loved how he looked in denim coveralls and red plaid shirt, the way he held her tight so she wouldn’t fall off the tractor seat, how he always smelled of Old Spice, how his whiskers bristled her cheek when he kissed her good night.
Most of all, she loved when he let her ride his horse. Trixie had been known to kick down a stable door or jump a fence in search of sweet grass, but Grandpa always kept a firm hand on things. With Carrie astride Trixie, arms half-wrapped around the horse’s neck, face pressed against the dirty-blonde mane, Grandpa walked Trixie down the lane with one hand on the reins, one hand on Carrie’s ankle. It was a short ride to the brook and back but in that half hour, Carrie knew no greater joy and security, astraddle a horse with Grandpa’s reassuring hold upon her.
She loved him in a way that only a child with a daddy for a soldier could understand, and she herself didn’t fully comprehend until her father was killed along with most of his company in Beirut in 1983. From that distant summer day when her Grandpa winked at her, she saw a light in his eye that was pure love, and she laid a hand on his shoulder, wishing he could always be there to keep her from falling. It was the happiest, and the last, memory of her life.
~~~
Crowe folded Cassidy’s arms across her broken chest and reoriented her body with her head pointing west. He took the photocopy of the Berkeley Karate Club from his back pocket and twisted it into a fuse that he set on a boulder a few feet from her head. He found matches and lit the twist of paper. As it burned, he closed his eyes and recited a mantra to Shiva, an invocation for the safe passage of the dead from a battlefield.
Soon after the ashes from the twist of paper had scattered, he heard a sound.
A helicopter approached from the north, coming in low like a vulture that had located the source of its carrion spoor. Crowe stood and waved. The chopper with FBI painted on its belly hovered a short distance away, then settled to the floor of the canyon.
SUNDAY
Chapter 74
Albuquerque
Special-Agent-in-Charge Liam Cobb held Axel Crowe for twenty-four hours, during which he conferred via phone with Detectives Levinson in New York and Starrett in San Rafael. Eventually he understood the three-way high-wire trapeze act that had crashed to earth on his turf. While Crowe’s name and fingerprints went through the NCIC database, Cobb also called the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in Ottawa to verify Crowe’s credentials as a private investigator.
Although Crowe’s name and prints came back clean from NCIC, his prints were nonetheless compared to those found on the wreckage of Dr. Cassidy’s BMW X5, and on the pistol found among the boulders beneath Carrie Cassidy. Forensics promptly confirmed the Glock as the weapon that had killed Zeke Zabriskie.
Satisfied of Crowe’s innocence, Cobb released him with an
“I like to think of myself as open-minded,” Cobb told Crowe as he stopped in front of the terminal, “but I still find it hard to believe you cracked three murders in the space of four days, doing...,” he waved his hand vaguely, unable to say the words, “…whatever it is you do.”
“Maybe I was just lucky.”
“Lucky in more ways than one. How many bullets did you dodge – almost a dozen?”
“I was praying so much, I lost count,” Crowe said. “Probably that had something to do with it.”
~~~
New York
Crowe caught an American Airlines flight out of Albuquerque mid-afternoon. He phoned Blaikie during a stopover in Denver and told him what time he’d arrive at LaGuardia. Blaikie met him there shortly after ten.
“Did they break Jeb yet?” Crowe tossed his luggage into the car.
“No, but they moved him to Riker’s yesterday,” Blaikie said. “They could have kept him downtown another day or two, allowing easy access to his lawyer, but Levinson said it’s a psychological ploy.”
“It’s a wake-up call to make him realize he’s one step away from entering the system, no matter what.”
“I guess that could cut both ways – make him stiffen his spine, deny everything, try to ride it out.”
“I don’t think he’s got that much spine.”
“Speaking of wake-up calls, this has held a mirror up to my face and I’m not proud of what I’ve seen. Every time I think of Janis, I’m overwhelmed by rage. If I could have just ten minutes alone with Jeb and a baseball bat...” Blaikie shook his head. “It embarrasses me to think there’s so little that separates me from a beast.”
“It’s a perfectly human reaction,” Crowe said.” Yogic philosophy says we’re all constantly subject to three modes of being. Tamas is the animal desire to feed, couple and sleep. Rajas is the human desire to accumulate things and wield power over others. Sattva is the godly desire to know reality and our place in it. In the course of our existence we cycle through all three states. The only difference between us is the amount of time we spend in each. We should count ourselves lucky we don’t get stuck at the lowest level.”