A Long Road Back: Final Dawn: Book 8 (10 page)

     And to track down and punish the killers when he failed to.

     The worst part of the job was that he was getting to know the townsfolk. He was starting to consider them friends. There hadn’t been a homicide within the city limits since he took the job, and he cringed to think the first victim might be someone he knew.

     He got up and took his cowboy hat off his desk, perched it atop a thinning crop of salt and pepper hair, and headed for the door.

     “Let’s go,” he said. “Show me.”

-18-

    Marty and Shane stood over the body of a man in the woods. He looked to be dead for about a week or so. His body was horribly swollen and decaying badly. But some things were easy to assess.

     The cause of death were several gunshot wounds which entered his forehead and blew the back of his skull completely off.

     His hands and feet were tightly bound with duct tape.

     A few feet away from him was another piece of duct tape, three courses thick. Marty guessed had been a gag and had been cut off with a knife.

     Marty wondered if the killer had removed the gag so the victim could plead for his life. Or to try to negotiate his release.

     If either was the case, he’d failed miserably.

    “Do you know him?”

     “Nope. Never saw him before.”

     In a way, Marty was relieved. He didn’t have to bury a friend. On the other hand, though, the murder of a stranger would be much harder to solve. These weren’t like the old days, where everything worth knowing about a homicide victim was available by a few strokes on a keyboard.

     This would be a tough one for sure, and for a variety of reasons. First of all, Marty wasn’t a real cop. At least not in the true sense of the word. He was hired by the people of Eden to protect them and given the title of Police Chief, sure. But that was partly out of gratitude for risking his ass to save them.

     And partly because there was no one else willing to accept the position.

     But he wasn’t a policeman by trade. He was a trucker. And just as he wouldn’t expect a beat cop to hook up a fifty three foot trailer and back it up to a loading dock, he didn’t expect to learn how to be a cop overnight.

     There was a training curve involved.

     He was reminded of that daily, as he continued one of his ongoing projects of clearing out a mountain of old records at the police station. Trying to decide what was important enough to keep and to type into a new database he was building. And which items he thought he could safely discard.

     He kept coming across unfamiliar terms. Things like APB, EOS, BICJ, and AOS. Acronyms which meant something to the officers who’d filed the reports years before, but were little more than a foreign language to Marty.

     And that didn’t include the criminal codes, which used equally alien numbers. He’d come across a reference that a suspect was charged with Title 29, Sec. 29-03 of the Texas criminal code. Then he’d have to go find a bound copy of the code to find out what the reference meant.

     He frequently found himself muttering.

     “Jeez, why couldn’t they have just said
aggravated robbery
? It would have made this so much easier.”

     At least he didn’t have to memorize the phonetic alphabet or the radio “10-codes” that police officers tend to use.

     For he was the only officer on the force. There was no one else to communicate with, via radio or otherwise.

     He knew this was going to be a tough case for him to crack.

     But he had several things going for him as well. Not the least of which was his desire to do his job well. This was the first homicide under his watch, and he’d do his damnest to make sure it didn’t get filed in his “unsolved case” file. That would be a terrible precedent.

     Marty had the tenacity of a bulldog when he was working on something important. And this was to be the most important case to date in his fledgling law enforcement career.

     Another thing he had going for him was a wide circle of friends. Not only had he personally met with nearly every one of Eden’s residents. But while working at the Trucker’s Paradise he’d gained a widespread reputation as a good man. He’d done a lot of good for an awful lot of people in a variety of ways.

     He knew that when the time came, most of the residents in the surrounding counties as well as his own would aid him in his investigation as best they could.

     One of his best resources would be Frank Woodard. Frank was a lawman back in the days when citizens still respected cops and regarded them as heroes. He served stints in the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office and the San Antonio Police Department and rose to the rank of Chief Homicide Detective in both agencies.

     He had a reputation for always catching his man.

     Marty planned to visit Frank as soon as he finished processing the crime scene and took the body to Doc Halliway’s office.

     He bent down and rolled the victim over to check his pockets.

     Nothing. No wallet or other type of identification that would make his job easier.

     A great start to his most important case so far.

     Of course, it wasn’t uncommon for men not to carry ID anymore. There was no longer a DMV to issue driver’s licenses. There would be no need for them anyway, since there were precious few law enforcement agencies even in existence anymore.

     And those which were couldn’t have cared less about writing tickets or enforcing seatbelt laws.

     A credit card with a name on it or a social security card would have been nice. At least to give the victim a name.

     But credit cards were worthless now, and the Social Security Administration had gone the way of the dinosaurs.

     Extinct at the hands of a rogue meteorite.

     Even Marty, the police chief with no police experience, knew that the first and most crucial step in solving a homicide was knowing the victim.

     The lack of identification would be a big problem.

     Then, as he was getting ready to roll the victim onto a canvas tarp for transport, he saw something.

     On the man’s back, just below the neckline, appeared to be a tattoo of some type.

     Even on the hideous gray-brown color of a decaying body it was visible, in heavy black ink, the type of tattoo one gets in prison. In heavy old English script.

     He held his nose and peeled back the man’s shirt just far enough to read the tattoo.

     One word. Or, more accurately, a name. A Surname, it appeared.

    
Martel
.

     Hey, it was a start.

-19-

     Hannah paused as she walked down the main hallway toward the control center. She reached out and pressed her hand against the wall beside her, waiting for a dizzy spell to subside.

     She’d pushed the doctors to release her from Wilford Hall Regional Medical Center against their wishes and recommendations. She’d said she missed her family and wanted to get back to them. And that she wanted to console her good friend Sami, who lost her father in the crash.

     And all of that was true.

     In a way.

     For although she missed her family horribly, she knew she wouldn’t do them much good to be released earlier than she should have and suffered a dizzy spell and passed out. Or a blood clot. Or a severe infection.

     She knew she could have waited a few days longer to go back home to them.

     And it was true that she wanted to console Sami.

     But there were lots of other people at the compound who were smothering her with sympathy and consolation.

     No, the driving factor for her demanding an early release was a desperate desire to talk to Sarah about Cupid 23.

     And now that was impossible. At least for the time being.

     She wondered why it took ten years for her memory of Cupid 23 to resurface.

     Was it, perhaps, her subconscious mind’s way of warning her? Had she repressed the knowledge of Cupid 23 for all this time, and was her brain telling her it was time to warn the world?

     Had Sarah forgotten about Cupid 23 too? Or had she just discarded it as a non-threat? She was of the opinion, even way back then, that Cupid 23 was a nonplayer. Of course, that may have been just because Saris 7 was undeniably a more immediate threat and threatened to wipe out all of mankind.

     Was it possible that Sarah, like Hannah, had put Cupid 23 so far back on the back burner that she’d put it out of her mind completely?

     In any event, it was impossible to know. At least for now.

     Since she couldn’t consult with the only other person she knew who’d known of Cupid 23 and its possible collision with earth, Hannah was going to do the next best thing.

     She was going to talk to NASA.

     After she was steady on her feet again she continued to walk down the hallway toward the control center.

     It was a mistake, she now realized, to leave her apartment without her cane. Her left leg was still giving her problems and there were times she didn’t even feel it. Nerve damage, the doctors had told her. They’d also told her she needed to stay in the hospital for at least a couple more weeks, but she had refused.

     “Hello Hannah. How are you feeling?”

     “Hi Frank. I’ve had better days, to be honest.”

     “You know, we do have a couple of wheelchairs in the storage room in the back of the lobby. How about if you watch the monitors for a few and I’ll go get one for you? You can take it for a test drive and see if you like it. Or better yet, I’ll take you for a spin when I get off shift. I haven’t taken a pretty young girl like you for a spin in a very long time.”

     It was false flattery and they both knew it.

     “Thanks for that, Frank. But I don’t feel very pretty these days. I have a fat face covered with bruises. I keep waiting for the swelling to go down, but it won’t. I think I’m going to have a head like a pumpkin for the rest of my natural life and then some.”

     “Don’t sell yourself short, Sugar. If you’re a pumpkin head, you’re the most beautiful pumpkin head I’ve ever seen for sure.”

     She ignored him.

     “Anything going on today?”

     “Well, yes. The team of doctors has already left Wilford Hall and they’re headed this way. Should be here in a couple of hours. Your doctors are coming as well as Sarah’s evaluation team. I’m gonna tell your doctors they need to make you get in a chair until you’re stronger.”

     “Why?”

     “Because I don’t like seeing you walking down the hall and having to stop to put your hand against the wall to keep from falling.”

     “I didn’t know you were watching.”

     “I’m working at the security desk, sweetie. It’s my job to watch the monitors. I can see everything that goes on in the compound.”

     “I’ll remember that next time I get into the shower.”

     “Except that. I tried to put a security camera in your shower but your husband wouldn’t let me. Damn him.”

     She smiled. He accomplished his mission.

     “Seriously, Hannah. You’re a beautiful woman. Men will always watch you. Plus, you’ve become a good friend. I’m concerned about you.”

     She wanted to change the subject.

     “Thank you, Frank. I’ll be fine. Are you a good enough friend to let me use the ham radio and to keep it to yourself?”

     His curiosity was aroused.

     “Sure. You got a boyfriend you’re trying to keep a secret from Mark? Because if you wanted a boyfriend all you had to do was ask. I’m sure Eva will give me permission.”

     “Oh, Frank, she would not. And I have no boyfriend. Mark is the one and only man I’ll ever have. He’s perfect.”

     “Even more perfect than me?”

     “Even more perfect than you, Frank.”

     “Shucks. Can I ask who you’re gonna call?”

     “NASA. I want to find out if there’s any chance of getting hit a second time.”

     He raised his eyebrows.

     “Do you know something I don’t?”