Page 5 of Never Stay Gone
Drew laced his fingers through hers and squeezed.
“Please, sit.” Amanda gestured for Dakota to join Wayne on the couch opposite her and Drew. “I’m sorry for taking you away from your evening. I know you’ve been working late with the senate hearings recently.”
“No problem. I’m here for whatever you need.” He frowned as he sat. “What’s going on?” He didn’t see any other law enforcement personnel around. The downstairs was quiet, and the trooper manning his post outside hadn’t seemed overly on guard. If there was a threat or some kind of safety situation, it didn’t seem like anyone had gotten the alert yet.
Wayne unclasped his hands. His cell phone had been pressed so tightly between his palms it should have been as flat as a sheet of paper. He swiped the screen on and held it up for Dakota to read. “I got a tip from the editor of theStatesman. This is the headline for the morning paper. It will hit the web at four a.m.”
“Riggs Staffer Jessica Klein Found Slain: Serial Killer Suspected in Big Bend.”
Dakota’s eyes scanned the copy, the article pasted into an email. Jessica Klein, a staffer working out of the governor’s Odessa office, had vanished a month ago after a campaign rally. And not just any campaign rally: the rally where Amanda Riggs had announced her candidacy for president.
Odessa had erupted that night, fireworks and street celebrations and what felt like the whole city throwing a barn burner of a party. Dakota had line danced in the middle of the street with a bubbly brunette, then caught the eye of a Texas Tech frat boy down from Lubbock. At two in the morning, he was making out with the college boy in the back of his truck, listening to Tejano music and smelling the leftover gunpowder from the fireworks lingering on the wind.
In the morning, Jessica was gone. At the Odessa office, they’d thought maybe she was sleeping off a hangover and graciously let her tardiness go. But her fiancé came to the office before ten a.m., asking if anyone knew where she was, his Stetson mangled in his nervous hands. He’d had cow eyes, as wide as the moon, and his lips had trembled when he said, “I think somethin’s really wrong.”
“In a mass grave?” Dakota’s eyes skittered over the article. “Five hours away from Odessa?”
“Six bodies in a shallow grave out in the desert,” Wayne growled. “She was on top.” His gaze bored into Dakota. “In Big Bend County.”
Dakota’s jaw clenched.
“I can’t believe this,” Amanda breathed. She buried her face in one of her hands. The other clasped her husband’s so hard it started to tremble. “Jessica—” She shook her head, pressing her lips together. Dragged in a slow breath through her nose. It was the classic don’t-cry move from a female politician.
“She worked in Austin during the summers when she was in college,” Drew said. He was ashen, his whole focus on his wife. He brushed a single tear from her cheek with his thumb. “We knew her. We’ve met her family. Beforethis, I mean.”
Amanda had flown Jessica’s family to Austin early in the investigation, when everyone was still hoping for a quick—and happy—resolution.
After a week, they’d quietly flown back to Odessa. Dakota had seen their phone number on Amanda’s private schedule several times a week since then.
“Jessica was such a sweet girl,” Amanda choked out. “Ambitious too. She had that fire, you know? She had the right mixture of what you need in this world. She wanted to go far.” Another shake of her head. “She reminded me of me at that age. At least, the good parts of me.”
Silence. Amanda’s inhale shook the air between Drew and Wayne. Drew stroked his hand up and down Amanda’s arm.
“How did this happen?” Amanda suddenly cried. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and glared at Wayne’s phone. “How did she end up in a grave with five other bodies? How was Jessicamurdered?”
Of course, none of them had answers for her. Not yet, at least. But Dakota was starting to understand why he was there, watching Amanda and Drew quaking in their private pain. Even Wayne, in his own way, seemed torn apart by the news.
Wayne wasn’t an effusive man by nature. He was as dry as the Rio Grande outside El Paso, nothing but dust and wry sidelong looks. His seriousness was measured in the cut of his jaw, the narrowing of his eyes. The tension that corded through his shoulders. Now, he was practically vibrating.
“We want you to take the lead on this, Dakota,” Wayne said. “They need your expertise. The Big Bend Sheriff’s Department is so smalland underfunded they might as well be a bunch of crossing guards out there for those farm and ranch roads. Call it a gut feeling, but this sounds like a lot more than they’re equipped to handle.”
“You thinkin’ a serial killer, like the paper said?” Dakota asked.
Wayne ran one hand down his weary, thin face. “Six bodies in a single grave? A body dump? Damn likely. What about this: do we have a serial killer crossing the border?”
“Crossing the border would be a mighty hard way to get your murder jollies.”
Criminals were, on the whole, opportunistic. It was far easier to kill in one’s own country than run the risk of crossing an international boundary. There was just too much opportunity for the border patrol of either country to catch a killer traversing the desert.
“What if this is connected to the cartels, and the drug wars?” Wayne asked. “You know better than anyone what we’re up against down there, Dakota. And why we need to keep that violence south of the border.”
Dakota shifted. Mexico’s borderlands were ground zero for the cartels’ battles. Land and people were being torn apart by soul-crushing violence. Dakota had been around the world twice, had seen things he’d never speak of, never let out of the vault inside his soul, but all those evils combined didn’t come close to the horrors he’d seen in the cartel wars. He’d seen the remains of men who’d been carved open with chainsaws. People burned alive or vivisected. Heads left on pikes, bodies hanging from overpasses. One massacre took place the day before Dia de las Madres—Mother’s Day. The horror wasn’t solely physical.
“The Big Bend Sheriff’s Department doesn’t have the resources for this kind of investigation,” Wayne continued. “You need to take the lead, and you need to do it fast. We want you on the ground ASAP.”
“What about the Rangers out in Company E? The Trans-Pecos, and Big Bend County, is their area. Aren’t they the ones need to take the lead?”
Wayne shook his head. “They’re all wrapped up in that big public-corruption case out in El Paso, and coordinating with the military police at Fort Bliss for that other murder case. The whole company is spread thin, and they don’t have the capacity for a murder investigation right now. Certainly not one of this magnitude. We already spoke to Major Kent in Company E, and he’s more than happy to accept the help.”
