The Unseen - A Mystery (The Baudin & Dixon Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  Dixon swiveled in his chair. “I couldn’t give less of a shit, Hector. And no, I’m not goin’ up there to search for body parts. He probably got attacked by a mountain lion or something.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. Cut looked pretty clean to me.” He hopped off the desk. “Suit yourself. I’d rather be out in the sunshine than stuck in here, though.”

  Dixon opened then closed his eyes again. His muscles felt tight. He used to jog and lift weights, but he hadn’t done that since…

  The thought of Hillary filled his mind again. Thinking of her was a unique experience—love, disgust, hatred, and lust all at once. He hadn’t thought he would feel the lust. The woman had betrayed him as deeply as one person could betray another. But she was beautiful and tender in bed, and Dixon hadn’t even touched a woman in eight months.

  “Kyle, come with me to get a Coke across the street.”

  “I’m fine.”

  Baudin rose. “Come with me.”

  Dixon sighed. “Why?”

  “Just come with.”

  Dixon grudgingly rose and followed him out of the station. They waited on the sidewalk for the traffic to clear before crossing the street. Baudin lit a cigarette and puffed at it for a moment before turning to Dixon.

  “That arm they found,” Baudin said.

  “What about it?”

  He hesitated. “I buried Chris at Sky Gorge.”

  Dixon stared at him a moment. “But he said he just found an arm.”

  Baudin shook his head. “I cut him up, man. I buried him all around.”

  Dixon felt ill and wanted a drink. He didn’t want to think about any of that. Not now or ever, but there it was, staring him in the face.

  “Should we… tell them?” Dixon said.

  “No, man. They got you for murder and me as an accomplice after the fact. Both life sentences, man. You wanna live in a cell? You know what they do to cops in prison, Kyle? They bust out all of your teeth so you can’t bite their cocks while they force you to blow them. One after another after another. I’ll die first.”

  Dixon took out his tobacco and stuffed some between his gum and lip. “Is there anything that could lead them back to us?”

  He shook his head. “No, I washed the body with hydrogen peroxide. It cleans a body better than even bleach. No physical evidence. But if they ID him, don’t you think that’s a pretty big fuckin’ coincidence that your wife’s lover was hacked to pieces and buried in the desert?”

  Dixon spit. “This is so fucked up.”

  “It is what it is. We gotta fix it.”

  “How?”

  “We gotta make sure they don’t find the rest of the body.”

  Dixon went home and changed. He dressed in a long-sleeved shirt and dirty jeans with work boots. He and Baudin had told Sanchez they would help with the search. The news hadn’t picked up the story yet, so Jessop wanted an entire body found and an ID made before they did pick it up. They would look like they had a handle on things and that people weren’t just dropping body parts in the desert.

  Dixon stepped out of his house and saw Baudin in the passenger seat, wearing a sleeveless black shirt and cowboy hat. Dixon got in, turned on the car, and pulled out. He rolled down the windows and turned on a Toby Keith song.

  Baudin groaned.

  “Not a country fan?”

  “I don’t like any music where the most popular song is about getting drunk on a plane.”

  “Says the man in the cowboy hat. The most popular country singers are Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline. You don’t think they had somethin’ to say? It’s just stories. That’s all country music is. It tells a story.”

  Baudin lit a cigarette. “I don’t consider Johnny Cash country.”

  He snorted. “That is just plain ignorant, Ethan. The man was about as country as you can get.”

  “Shit, man. He’s inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That makes him rock.” He blew out a puff of smoke. “And he wrote his music—he didn’t steal it or have producers write it.”

  Dixon chuckled. “You think your precious Rolling Stones didn’t steal songs or have producers write ’em? Everybody steals from everybody. There’s only so many emotions we feel and only so much you can say about ’em.”

  The drive to Sky Gorge was one of the most beautiful in all of Wyoming. Great expanses of desert met the blue sky at the edge of the earth. When the sun was setting and the sky was the same brownish-gold color as the dirt, telling where one ended and the other began was sometimes difficult.

  Dixon took the first dirt road just off an exit near a gas station. It led up past two small hills and into a wide valley. Several police vehicles were already there. Men with T-shirts that said “CPD” in white lettering on the back were huddled in a group, receiving instructions from Sanchez and his partner, Rick. Four German shepherds sat quietly at their feet.

  Dixon parked a bit away from them and got out. He and Baudin hiked over without a word then stood at the back of the crowd. Sanchez was going through the search pattern and what they were looking for. The dogs would be spread out, and a few metal detectors would be brought in just in case the vic had on a watch or rings.

  Sanchez bellowed, “Any questions? No? Good, let’s get this over with. I wanna be home before the Packers game starts.”

  Dixon and Baudin spread out in a grid search pattern. Slowly, they began to fall back from the others. Within ten minutes, nobody else was within earshot, and within twenty, they were practically alone, far enough away from everyone else that no one could see what they were doing.

  “How much you bury up here?” Dixon said.

  “Both arms. I cut the fingertips off. I pulled out his teeth, too. They’ll send the face to the lab at Quantico for facial recognition. If Chris ever had his photo taken at the DMV, they’ll find a match.”

  Dixon chuckled. “I bet Sanchez doesn’t even know what ‘FBI’ stands for. This is simple stuff, Ethan. They’re gonna put out a photo, and if anyone that knew Chris sees that photo, they’ll call it in. Including my wife.”

  Baudin thought in silence. “You okay?”

  Dixon looked at him and knew what he was talking about. Dixon had killed an innocent man who had done nothing but love the same woman he had loved. He’d put a bullet in his head and watched the life drain out of him. That kind of thing didn’t leave a person, at least a person like him, for a long while.

  “Let’s just find this damn guy and get outta here.”

  8

  Deputy Sheriff Ben Rivera stopped his car just outside the property. He got out and tucked his shirt back into his pants. In the past year, he’d gained about thirty pounds and didn’t really know why. It had happened so gradually that he hadn’t even noticed until his clothes didn’t fit right anymore and his wife suggested he start cutting out dessert.

  He trudged up the hill to the fence. Next to it was a mailbox with the words “The Walks” scrawled across it in black paint. He unlocked the gate, which was just fastened with a bit of wire, then got back into his car and drove up the winding road to the farmhouse.

  The Walks’ farm sat on about a hundred acres of property just on the outskirts of Cheyenne. Close enough to overlook the city, the place was far enough away that nobody would end up there by chance. The road narrowed, and Ben slowed down before approaching the off-white house surrounded by gravel. A massive barn sat about fifty yards away, and beyond that were livestock pens and a large garden. The Walks liked to eat what they could make or grow on their own farm.

  Loud rock music was playing inside the house. Ben stopped and got out, surveying the cars parked haphazardly around the property. He strolled up to the door, watching a few horses farther out, and knocked with the back of his fist. No one answered.

  He pounded on the door then just opened it and went inside. At least thirty people were inside, where the smell of marijuana smoke was so strong that it made him want to cough. Some of the women had their tops off or were in their underwear. One woman wa
s completely nude, except for a pair of sunglasses, and strumming a guitar.

  “Dennis!” Ben shouted. After making his way through the living room, he looked in the first bedroom, then the bathroom, and walked down a hallway. He opened the door to another bedroom, where Dennis was on the bed, a nude woman bent over in front of him. “Sweet jumpin’ catfish, son. Get your damn pants on.”

  Dennis jumped up and grabbed his mud-caked jeans. He slipped them on and buttoned them as the woman casually rose and began to dress.

  She kissed him on the cheek and said, “Same fee.”

  Dennis nodded and took some cash out of his pocket. He handed it to her, and she brushed past Ben and left the room.

  “Boy,” Ben said, putting his hands on his hips, “if you had another brain, it would be lonely, wouldn’t it? You gonna pay a hooker in front of a cop?”

  Dennis looked down to the floor, shifting from one leg to the other. He was slow, always had been, and Ben felt bad that he’d yelled at him. Without the prostitutes, whom Ben had known about for years, Dennis wouldn’t have had any female affection in his life.

  Ben sighed. “Dennis, you gotta stop with the hookers and find yourself a good woman. Did you go to church like I said?”

  For a second, he didn’t move. Then he slowly shook his head.

  “Where’s your mama?”

  He pointed downward with his finger.

  Ben sighed and looked around the room. “I know you’re lonely—we all get lonely—but hookers won’t fill that loneliness. Do you understand what I’m saying, son?”

  Dennis didn’t move, his eyes glued to the floor. He was a large, tall man, with hands that could palm someone’s face comfortably. Ben wondered if things had been different, if Dennis could’ve gone on to play basketball in high school or college. As things were, he doubted Ben would ever leave the farm.

  Dennis’s most prominent feature was his particularly bad cleft palate. His upper lip was nearly split in half, and the Walks either hadn’t been able to afford the surgery when Dennis was younger or hadn’t bothered to see a surgeon about it.

  Ben left the room and pushed his way through the crowds of prostitutes, drug addicts, and the homeless who knew the Walks wouldn’t turn them away. No one seemed to care one bit that Ben had a badge. No one looked nervous or tried to hide the drugs that were in plain view. It was a crowd of people who had lost hope, and nothing made much of a difference to them anymore.

  Ben gingerly took the stairs to the basement. He’d once fallen down his own stairs and hurt his back. The basement had been converted into an apartment, though it still had the bare cement floors of a basement. In the corner, pushed in front of a television, was an old woman. Her gray hair was matted, and he could smell the urine on her robe from where he stood.

  He ambled over and sat in a chair next to her. Ben sat in silence for a few minutes, watching the game show on television.

  “That boy o’ yours, Teresa, he is one hell-raiser. Reminds me of his daddy when we was young.” He paused. “But he’s gotta do something with his life. Idle hands and all. He’s addicted to them hookers, and they’ll be the death o’ him.”

  The old woman didn’t move. She didn’t even blink. Her head was tilted slightly to the side, and the quilt on her lap had fallen down. Ben picked it up and put it over her. He couldn’t believe the change as he stared into her face. Teresa had been in high school with him, and what a looker she’d been. Ben, pudgy and shy, hadn’t even had the guts to ask her to a dance. Now, she looked like little more than a corpse. Teresa was worse than a corpse, because a corpse was obviously no longer animate, but there was still life in her eyes. She just couldn’t speak or move, like inanimate, animate flesh.

  “Bye, deary.”

  He walked back up and saw Dennis grab another one of the prostitutes by the wrist and pull her into the bedroom. There was no getting through to him. Hell, Ben thought, if he were in Dennis’s situation—born slow and painfully shy because of a deformity, with a papa that drank and abused worse than anything and a mama that was a mute—maybe Ben would have been finding warmth wherever he could get it, too.

  He decided he wouldn’t be writing any citations that day. He just left the home and shut the door behind him.

  9

  The search went painfully slowly. Dixon had rings of sweat around his arms, and his collar was soaked. The sun beat down relentlessly, and the air was so dry, he felt as if he were swallowing hot sand whenever he took a breath. The temperature was probably over a hundred degrees.

  “Where is it?” Dixon finally asked.

  “Another couple minutes this way, under a boulder.”

  They hiked up a small hill to a massive boulder. It was tilted just enough to fit a person underneath, and Baudin stopped to wipe the sweat off his brow with the back of his arm. He bent down over a small pile of rocks and began tossing them to the side. Dixon watched him for a second then turned away, scanning the great expanse of desert before them.

  “This used to be Indian territory,” Dixon said. “They found some oil ’bout a hundred years ago, and that was that. Forced them to move and took the land like they was just deer or somethin’. Told ’em to move along. When I was a boy, my daddy told me that the Indians, before they left, cursed the land.” He looked back to Baudin, who had moved the rocks aside and was digging with both hands. “You believe that? That a land can be cursed?”

  Baudin exhaled and sat back. “It’s all cursed, brother. It’s cursed because no matter who we are or what we do, it ends in death. The only question we can really ask, the only one that matters, is do we keep going or stop?”

  “Stop? You mean suicide?”

  “It’s the only real question that matters.”

  Dixon spat and looked back over the desert. “The night after I shot Chris, I thought about it. I can’t live in no cell, Ethan. I can’t do it.”

  “You’re not gonna have to. What you did was pure emotion from a place of pain. You got nothing to feel sorry over. Anyone in your spot would’ve done the same. We just gotta fix this and move on.” He tossed one of the rocks then sat back in the dirt. “It ain’t here.”

  “What d’ya mean?”

  “I mean it ain’t here.”

  “You sure this is the right spot?”

  He nodded. “Positive.”

  “Well, maybe this was the arm they found?”

  “No. That was his right arm. His left, I buried here. And it couldn’t have been an animal that came and took it. The rocks were put back over it.” He paused. “Someone came and got it.”

  They searched for another six hours. The bottled water they’d brought only lasted half that long. By the end, Dixon’s lips felt burnt, and his neck itched. He sunburned easily and regretted not bringing sunblock with him.

  By the end, after Sanchez had called it a day, Dixon sat in the car for a while with Baudin and just ran the air conditioner. The air wasn’t cold, but it wasn’t hot, either, and it felt pleasant on his skin. Then he started the car and pulled away. Neither one of them spoke until they had pulled into the drive-through of a fast-food restaurant and ordered two large waters. As they waited, Baudin stared out at the horizon. Dixon had seen him do that often. He got a certain look in his eyes that told Dixon he was no longer there.

  As they rolled out of the drive-through, sucking on their straws, Dixon said, “Were you followed?”

  He shook his head. “No, man. No way. At least… I wasn’t even thinking of that. There was no one around. I picked some spots on the GPS at random. I didn’t think there was any need to look for a tail. But who would do that? No one was there but us.”

  “Might just be a coincidence. Some sick fuck thought it’d be cool to keep a human arm they found as a trophy or something.”

  “There are no coincidences.”

  Dixon kept the air conditioner on the entire drive back. He had drunk his water so quickly that he felt ill and was amazed how something necessary and good could be so bad in ex
cess.

  At the station, Dixon collapsed into his chair, feeling nauseated. He would have thrown up if he hadn’t thought it would dehydrate him even more. So instead, he went to the break room and found a package of Alka-Seltzer. As he tore it open, he remembered a trick his buddy had told him about in college. He always carried an Alka-Seltzer packet in his wallet. If a girl wanted him to wear a condom, he tore open the Alka-Seltzer. In the dark, it sounded just like a condom wrapper. Dixon had never tried it.

  Neither Dixon nor Baudin could really concentrate on work. The sun had a way of draining everything out of a person.

  “Assuming it is someone that followed you,” Dixon finally said, “what do we do?”

  He shrugged. “Wait and see what he wants, I guess.”

  Dixon exhaled. He opened his email and saw that he’d received fifty-two messages since he’d last checked his email on Monday. He closed his email, leaned his head back, and closed his eyes. His every muscle screamed for sleep that probably wouldn’t come.

  10

  Baudin stayed at the station as long as he could. He had several cases that needed follow-up, but in the end, he just didn’t have the energy. The desert had taken everything out of him. He had thought LA was a desert, but now he knew what that actually meant. The desert wasn’t about heat—it was about nothingness, an inhospitable environment that tried desperately to extinguish life. He wondered how the Native American populations had turned that place into a home for centuries.

  He rose from his desk and told Dixon he would see him tomorrow. As he was about to leave, Jessop bellowed from his office, “Ethan, Kyle, get in here.”

  He stopped, debating whether to ask if it could just wait until tomorrow. Then he reluctantly turned and headed into Jessop’s office. He sat on the couch while Dixon stood by the door with his hands in his pockets.

  Jessop sat down and looked from one to the other. Baudin sensed resistance, maybe even a negative energy, mingled with fear. He got the impression that Jessop really didn’t know how to feel about the two of them.