Apache Country Read Online Free

encourage them to bust their butts for you.
    “Okay, just the headlines,” he said. “Adam’s
parents were in Santa Fe attending a convention. Kid was staying
with his grandparents while his folks were away. Same deal every
day. Casey would take Adam to school in the morning, pick him up in
the afternoon. Not everybody loved Casey, but everyone agrees him
and Adam were real close.”
    Close didn’t begin to cover it, Easton
thought, remembering how the old man would say ‘Like to have you
meet my grandson.’ Anyone could see the pride in his eyes when they
were together. There wasn’t anything that boy couldn’t have had,
just by asking. If Robert Casey had had the slightest idea Adam’s
life might be endangered, he would have fought. Like a tiger. Any
hurt to himself would have been irrelevant. Whoever killed Adam
must have killed Casey first. They would have had to.
    “Casey left the house at about three thirty
to pick up Adam from school,” he heard Cochrane saying. “He never
came back.”
    “Yes, yes,” McKittrick said impatiently. “We
know all that. But no bells rang until around six thirty, when
Ellen Casey called RPD and reported her husband missing,
right?”
    “Right,” Cochrane replied, deliberately
speaking slowly. TV interview or no TV interview, he wasn’t going
to let McKittrick stampede him. “Three minutes after the call came
in, RPD had a car on the way to the house, another to the school.
They retraced Casey’s route, checked all the places he might have
gone. His offices, the ranch, his daughter Kit’s place up in
Estancia. They didn’t miss a trick.”
    McKittrick half turned to shoot a question at
Joe Apodaca. “Anybody contact NCIC?”
    “Not yet, Olin,” Joe said imperturbably.
“Forty-eight hour rule, remember?”
    It is a tenet of law enforcement that an
adult isn’t officially a missing person until forty-eight hours
have elapsed. Only then are the national crime organizations
contacted for assistance. Maybe RPD hadn’t been able to officially
post Casey and his grandson missing, but everything else they could
do they had done. By the book.
    “But you’ll do it now. And VICAP?”
    “Olin,” Joe said patiently, drawing out the
‘O.’.
    He might as well have said what was written
on his face: Don’t insult our intelligence, for Chrissake. As if
anyone present needed telling it was SOP to contact the National
Crime Information Center and the Violent Criminal Apprehension
Program in any murder case.
    “Make sure they know how urgent it is,”
McKittrick said, skating right past the protest without even
noticing it. “Okay – autopsy results?”
    “Right here,” Jack Irving said, tapping a
file he was holding. Younger than Cochrane by five years, Irving
stood something under five eight in height, with the smooth skin,
clear eyes and trim body of an athlete. His laid-back sense of
humor made him a perfect foil for Cochrane, whose permanently
lugubrious expression was that of an accountant who has just found
something wrong with the books.
    “Yes, and?” McKittrick said, looking at his
watch again.
    “Doc Horrell estimates death occurred between
three p.m. Thursday and nightfall, best guess around five in the
afternoon. Casey was shot with a heavy caliber weapon but he can’t
give us much more than that because no slug was recovered. He found
powder grains imbedded in the scalp, carbon monoxide in the brain
tissue, indicating the shot was fired at very close range. No
bruises on the body, no signs of a struggle. Which suggests the
killer was someone the victim knew, someone who could just step up
behind him and blow his brains out. Moving on to Adam’s
injuries—”
    “Spare us that,” McKittrick said stiffly.
“We’ve all seen the photographs. Did forensics get anything at the
scene, footprints, tire tracks?”
    Jack shook his head. “You know what it’s like
out there,” he said. “Get a little rain, you can sometimes get a
halfway decent impression.