The woman driving the car wouldn't talk to him, although she had the rearview mirror at an angle so she could see him clearly. He stared out the window at the desert and mountain landscape to distract himself from the pain. They were traveling south toward Mexico on the Interstate, maybe three hours away from the border. Until they reached Las Cruces, which was a very short distance from El Paso, there would be only a few towns and small cities along the route.
The buzz of a cell phone made Terjo switch his attention back to the woman. He watched as she answered, listened, and disconnected after acknowledging the call. Still, she said nothing to him. Finally, after another half hour, she spoke.
"We'll be stopping soon," she said, Terjo nodded and watched a low-flying helicopter parallel the car and pass out of sight.
They left the Interstate ten miles further on at an exit where nothing but a dirt road cut through brown sand hills. After a few miles on the rutted road the car topped a small rise. Terjo saw a helicopter on the ground. Two men waited at the front of the aircraft canopy.
"Why is that here?" Terjo asked.
"To take you the rest of the way to Mexico," the woman said as she stopped the car.
"I have to make water first," Terjo said.
"No problem."
Outside the vehicle the woman took the handcuffs off and pointed at a nearby mesquite tree.
"Over there," she said.
Terjo walked to the tree with the woman close behind. He unzipped his pants and relieved himself. One of the men opened the hinged helicopter door and took out what looked to be a folded black blanket.
"Finished?" the woman asked.
Terjo nodded and zipped up. Before he could turn around, Agent Applewhite raised her handgun and shot him in the back of the head.
Chapter 6
Late in the afternoon Bobby Sloan released two of the state police agents who'd assisted in his investigation and held a debriefing session with the senior agent, Lalo Escudero. Escudero, an old friend who'd tipped more than a few beers with Sloan over the years, sat in the cubbyhole that served as Bobby's office reading off the list of people who'd been interviewed over the last two days. At his desk Sloan checked off the names one by one.
"That's it," Escudero said, looking at the sprawling stacks of files, reports, and paperwork on Sloan's desk.
"How in the hell do you find anything in that mess?"
"It's all organized," Sloan said.
"As far as I can tell, we've talked to every faculty member, student, and staff member at the college who had any contact with Mitchell."
"Including a few whose only interaction with the priest was sharing a table with him at the college library or using the men's room at the same time he was taking a leak," Escudero noted.
"So, nobody's lying, or withholding information?" Sloan asked.
"So it seems," Escudero replied.
"Supposedly it's not unusual for an academic researcher to stay tight lipped about his work."
"Yeah, yeah, I heard that from every faculty member I talked with,"
Sloan said.
"I'm thinking about personal stuff Mitchell might have talked about.
You know, his hobbies, his years in the army, what he liked to read.
Anything like that."
"The man kept to himself," Escudero said.
"Why?"
"Hell if I know," Escudero said.
"Maybe that was his personality."
"Or he was hiding something," Sloan said, stifling a burp.
"Maybe. But other than the robbery, you've got no motive for the murder.
Nobody had a grudge against him, he wasn't embroiled in any controversial campus politics, and nobody disliked him."
Sloan looked at the blank piece of paper he'd placed on his desk for note taking, removed his reading glasses, and rubbed his eyes.
"So say he wasn't killed by somebody on campus," he said.
Escudero rolled his eyes.
"What?" Sloan demanded.
"Either way, you've got robbery as a motive."
Sloan shook his head.
"Come on, Lalo. Robbers are the sloppiest killers on the fucking planet.
They get surprised by the victim, panic, pull off a couple of caps, bolt, and leave most of what they wanted to steal behind. We get prints, find witnesses, get a make on a vehicle, cruise the pawnshops, and make a bust."
"Okay," Escudero said.
"Mitchell was retired army and his research project involved interviewing ex-military types."
Sloan elaborated on Lalo's guess.
"Are you saying officer X or sergeant Y dusted Mitchell because of his research?"
"That would explain the professional kill," Escudero replied.
"The killer could have been one of those special forces types."
Sloan covered his mouth, burped, and noted the idea on the paper.
"Let's say Mitchell gets whacked because of his research. Something from the past he was writing about, maybe gonna publish. Now the robbery starts to make sense. The killer wasn't sure what Mitchell had or where it was, so he cleaned out everything."
"Or he knew exactly what he was looking for and staged the rest of the rip-off to throw us off the track."
"That, I don't buy," Sloan said, suppressing a burp.
"The perp didn't waste time killing Mitchell. I doubt he wanted to risk getting caught lugging a bunch of unnecessary stuff away."
"Okay, what's the motive?" Escudero replied, pausing to let Bobby finish another belch.
"Revenge?"
"More likely fear of exposure," Sloan replied, "if it was related to Mitchell's research. But what if the perp killed him for something that didn't have diddly to do with the army? Maybe it was personal.
Maybe the priest was a pedophile and the church was hiding him away."
"What we know about the victim doesn't tell us much," Escudero said, watching Bobby burp again.
"Maybe you should forget about figuring out the motive for now and concentrate on the victim."
"Yeah," Sloan said.
"You'd think if the perp didn't know exactly what he was looking for, he would have left something behind about Mitchell's research that would give us a clue."
"No good motive, no hard evidence, no known suspects," Escudero said.
"Your case is a piece of shit, Bobby. When do you want our paperwork?"
"Tell me about it. Tomorrow will do." Sloan let out a long belch and patted his stomach.
"We're finished talking, right? I want to get out of here before you start blowing farts."
"It's just gas," Sloan said.
"You sound like a bullfrog in heat," Escudero said.
"You gotta stop eating that junk food."
Sloan grimaced.
"Thanks for the advice and the help."
"Any time."
Lalo left the cubicle and Sloan picked up the page of notes he'd just made and let the paper float down to the desktop. Was Mitchell killed for revenge? Was Mitchell killed to cover up some past crime? Was he killed because of what his research had uncovered?
He hated this kind of homicide. The chances were good it would go unsolved unless someone stepped forward with solid information or another crime occurred that could be tied conclusively to the murder, with sufficient evidence to target a suspect.
He rocked his chair back and reached down for a thick three holed binder on the floor. Although forms and reports were now computerized, Sloan still used a homicide casebook to keep his material organized. He thumbed through the pages, stopping to look once again at the two yellow Post-it notes he'd found as page markers in Father Mitchell's Bible.
Mitchell had written INS COM on one Post-it and "video" on the other.
Sloan had no idea what INS COM meant. Maybe it was a stock-market abbreviation, the name of a corporation, or an acronym of some sort. He would try and track it down.