“I’m not talking about the car. I’m talking about here in North Carolina.”
Sam Bob Jackson swallowed hard, his heavy breathing pushing his stomach in and out over his belt as if there was something trying to free itself from inside. “We’ve got a problem, Cray. A big one.”
33
AUSTIN, TEXAS
Daniel Cross stood next to Razin Saflin as Ghazi Zurif knocked on the back door of Hoover’s Cooking.
“Health inspectors,” Zurif said, showing his fake identification to the man who answered.
“Why didn’t you use the front door?” the man wondered, adjusting his apron as Cross and Saflin flashed their fake IDs, too.
“It’s procedure with surprise inspections,” Saflin explained.
“Since we don’t want to disturb your customers,” Zurif added. “Cause as little disruption as possible.”
And there are security cameras in the front of the restaurant, but not here in the back, Daniel Cross thought.
He returned the ID wallet to his jacket, hand closing around the capped syringe filled with ten milliliters of clear liquid in his front pants pocket. Ten milliliters seemed a safe estimate; a bit on the high side, in all probability, but he’d opted for it to make sure the demonstration his ISIS handlers had requested achieved its desired results, and then some. Truth was, everything up until today had been theoretical. Even Cross wasn’t sure exactly what to expect, once things got rolling—how many would die, or how fast. He hadn’t conducted any tests on humans, for obvious reasons. So, little did the diners about to lunch at Hoover’s Cooking realize that they were about to become part of the living fabric of history.
Well, the dying fabric, Cross thought, trying not to smile.
“We’d like to start with the kitchen, if you don’t mind,” he heard Zurif say to the man in the apron.
PART FOUR
The Rangers have done more to suppress lawlessness, to capture criminals, and to prevent Mexican and Indian raids on the frontier, than any other agency employed by either the State or national government.
—Alex Sweet, Texas Siftings magazine, 1882
34
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
“So what is it you’re saying, exactly?” Caitlin asked Doc Whatley, Bexar County medical examiner, from the side of the sink in his lab.
Whatley finished washing his hands for the second time and went to work on the third.
“That I’m tired of the days ending too late or starting too early on account of you,” he groused.
“I didn’t kill that man, never mind tear him apart, Doc.”
“No, Ranger, you didn’t.” Whatley shook his hands free of water, then pulled a long stream of paper towels from the dispenser over the sink. He dried his hands yet again and then rolled the sleeves of his lab coat back down. “And if you came here this afternoon expecting me to tell you what did, I’m afraid you wasted the drive.”
Frank Dean Whatley had been the Bexar County medical examiner since Caitlin was in diapers. He’d grown a belly in recent years, which hung out over his thin belt, seeming to force his spine to angle inward at the torso. Whatley’s teenage son had been killed by Latino gangbangers when Caitlin was a mere kid herself. Ever since, he’d harbored a virulent hatred for that particular race, from the bag boys at the local H-E-B supermarket to the politicians who professed to be peacemakers. With his wife lost, first in life and then in death, to alcoholism, he’d probably stayed in the job too long. But he had nothing to go home to, no real life outside the office, and he remained exceptionally good at his job.
The body currently covered up on one of the room’s steel slabs represented the remains of the victim found just outside the Comanche reservation earlier that day. Whatley had certainly completed at least his preliminary examination quicker than she ever expected, perhaps coaxed by this being a Homeland Security matter, thanks to Jones.
“If you can’t tell me what did kill the man, Doc,” Caitlin ventured, “maybe you can tell me what didn’t.”
“You notice anything about the wounds?” Whatley asked her.
“I couldn’t tell much about them through all the blood and mess.”
“Let’s take a walk,” he said, starting for the door.
*
In his office, Whatley switched on his computer and positioned the screen so that Caitlin could follow along without standing over his shoulder. He inserted the drive containing the pictures he’d shot of the victim, enlarging one that showed a deep wound that had shredded skin and flesh all the way to the bone.
“Tell me what you see, Ranger.”
“Three individual tears, one starting above the other two.”
“If this were a bear, there’d be five. If a mountain lion had done this, there’d be four. And in both cases the claw cuts would be symmetrical—more shallow for the bear, and teeth marks clearly evident for the mountain lion.”