Vengeance is Blind: Three Scott Drayco Short Mysteries (4 page)

“If you’re telling me this is all about
control—controlling your victims, controlling your destiny,
controlling me—I don’t buy it. This has the veneer of revenge.”

Wyse had given up tracing figures on the
desk, giving his full attention to Drayco. “I don’t suppose, Scott,
you can tell me when the first of those murders they’re attributing
to this serial killer began?”

“Five years ago, as I’m sure your attorney
told you.”

The FBI database had also turned up more
unsolved murders with the same MO. Those dated back fifteen
years—not long after the trial and conviction of Martin Hafften,
Wyse’s son, not long after Drayco had testified against him. No
similar cold cases had been linked back any farther. If none were
found, that would mean . . . Drayco truly was the model for Wyse’s
victims.

“Why did you say I was your inspiration,
Wyse?”

“We both know the answer to that question,
don’t we Scott?”

“You brought me here for what purpose? To
make me feel guilty? To suffer?”

Wyse’s voice turned soft, chiding. “I think
you’ve suffered already.” He smiled a smile that on someone else
might be called beatific. “I want you to remember. To think of me.
Every day, as I remember you.”

Drayco rubbed his temples, reminding himself
it was the game of a serial killer, nothing more. He was so deep in
the fog and lacking his usual situational awareness, the door that
opened to reveal the returning sergeant startled him.

“Thirty minutes. Time’s up.”

The officer unlocked the table handcuffs
constraining Wyse. As the sergeant led his shuffling prisoner out
of the room, Wyse turned around briefly. “I hope to see you at the
trial, Scott. When I’m released, I’ll come find you. Something for
both of us to look forward to, yes?”

Drayco rubbed his temples some more, trying
to ease his growing headache. As he waited for the agents to join
him, he mumbled to himself in the empty room. “You want me to
remember, Wyse? How could I forget the two-way looking glass of
death you’ve left me?” He shivered and hoped the agents would think
to bring a cup of very dark, very hot coffee. Preferably with a
shot of bourbon.

Ordinarily he’d admire the unusual
layered patterns in the rainbow sandstone of Antelope Canyon—if
only he weren’t clinging to handholds above the fragile rock
platform, which by some miracle he and his companions had banged
into when flood waters swept the three of them downstream. Instead,
Scott Drayco glanced over at his fellow clingees who were looking
like a pair of partially drowned prairie dogs.

This wasn’t what he’d had in mind when
rancher Will Pichford hired him to find out who was laming his
cattle. Not Drayco’s kind of case anyway, he would have turned it
down if he hadn’t promised a mutual friend of theirs to take it on
as a favor.

He remembered when he first saw the poor
beasts in pain from corium abscesses caused by the lacerations. It
hadn’t been pretty, but the damage was minor enough to prevent the
animals from being culled early. Just enough to add expensive
veterinary fees to the ranch’s bottom line and cause Pichford
himself to go nearly apoplectic. “It’s a warning. Has to be,” he’d
argued, to everyone he knew.

Drayco had pressed him further, “What kind
of warning?” Pichford might be a little too fond of the local
“cactus wine,” made from a mix of tequila and peyote tea, and would
bet on everything from llama races to boxing. But among friends and
other members of the Cattlemen’s Association whom Drayco
interviewed in nearby Page, the man didn’t seem to have an enemy in
the world.

Pichford had looked over in annoyance at
Drayco’s question. “If I knew that, I wouldn’t have hired you.”

Fair enough. But after a week of
investigating the case from every angle, Drayco hadn’t found any
evidence to link someone to the crime. Even the local veterinarian
wasn’t any help, saying the wounds could have been inflicted by any
small instrument, as long as it was sharp enough. Drayco’s sense of
failure was eased only slightly by the warm welcome Pichford and
his wife Natalie gave him, insisting he stay at the ranch.

As Drayco had learned, Pichford was the
quintessential self-made millionaire, from a broken family whose
mother had cheated on his father and left the two boys in his care,
never to return. After a stint in Vietnam, he’d settled in northern
Arizona and built up his cattle ranch from scratch to over five
hundred head of cattle, one of the first to breed Gelbvieh and
Balancers. He managed his spread with the help of a Navajo foreman
John Kinlichee, two full-time ranch hands and a few seasonal
part-timers.

But the bright spot in his life was the
charming Natalie, who’d been open and helpful to Drayco from the
start, not seeming to mind his prying questions. “How’d the two of
you meet?” Drayco had asked, having heard whispers from one of the
neighbors that Natalie hadn’t been quite as happy to leave her
former life as Pichford had indicated.

“It was a little over ten years ago.” She’d
shaken her head, seemingly amazed at the passage of time. “I was
touring in a rodeo.”

“Were you a performer?”

“You’re looking at a former IPRA barrel
racing champion, four years running.” She’d smiled briefly, then
quickly looked down at the leather purse she was making, a side
business of hers. “You probably can’t tell it now, though.”

Twenty years younger than her husband, she
certainly wasn’t over the hill. She was a foot shorter than Drayco,
and her braided blond hair with wind-blown wisps falling down over
her forehead gave her a pixie look. And she always wore something
with the color purple.

Drayco never felt suave enough to handle
female self-deprecation without getting himself into trouble, so
he’d settled for humor. “Oh, I don’t know. I think you could still
ride circles around Annie Oakley.”

That had elicited a full-blown smile, and
she’d taken her hand away from her lacing needle long enough to
squeeze his hand, her thumb brushing across his knuckles. She’d
jumped back when Pichford and Kinlichee entered, although they
hadn’t seemed to notice.

Kinlichee was another enigma. He’d been the
ranch foreman for three years and was good enough in his job that
others jokingly called him “the cattle whisperer.” Drayco hadn’t
seen him crack a smile once, and the man kept mostly to himself.
Kinlichee was rarely without a handful of pistachio nuts he cracked
one after the other.

Drayco tried using his own one-eighth Navajo
ancestry to cut through Kinlichee’s reserve a bit, without success.
“It Pichford a good boss?” he’d asked, to which Kinlichee had
replied, “Good enough.” One pistachio, crack, then two.

“You spend more time with the cattle than
anyone. Did you see or hear anything out of the ordinary? Sounds of
distress, perhaps? I know the mutilations happened at night, but
your bungalow isn’t far from the pen.”

“I’m a sound sleeper. Don’t hear much.”
Other than more pistachios being shelled and the husks thrown at
Drayco’s feet, that had been that.

Pichford himself didn’t suspect his foreman.
“Nah, he’s a two-hundred-fifty pound teddy bear. He loves those
animals. He’s even a vegetarian, if you can believe it.”

Drayco hadn’t, at first. “How could a
vegetarian possibly be happy working a ranch of cattle that are
raised to be slaughtered?”

“I guess he figures it’s his way of assuring
they’re treated humanely beforehand. I mean, he can’t get the whole
world to stop eating beef, so this is the best he can do.”

The more Drayco had gotten to know
Kinlichee, Pichford and Natalie, the more he liked them, and that
had made him worried. They were almost too good to be true.

It’s funny how extreme stress has a way of
focusing the brain into a single moment of clarity. Now, as he
clung to the rock face, he could still recall the exact second he
realized he’d been set up. After Drayco had expressed an interest
in touring Antelope Canyon, Pichford suggested Kinlichee take him,
since tourists needed an authorized Navajo guide. And it just so
happened the foreman worked part-time for an outfitter providing
such tours.

Then Pichford surprised Drayco at the last
minute by suggesting he himself tag along and was especially
adamant about the exact time they should take the tour. The local
resident collecting admission warned them of a storm in the area,
but Pichford, an amateur meteorologist, shrugged it off. “It won’t
be a problem.”

Pichford also insisted they dawdle in a
section of the slot canyon where the walls of red, gold, and orange
sandstone were so narrow, hikers could touch both sides. He’d
goaded Kinlichee into giving Drayco the long, detailed history of
the canyons, even chipping in his own commentary—much to
Kinlichee’s annoyance, whenever it seemed like Kinlichee was ready
to move on.

It was half-past three when the first sounds
of a low rumble reached their ears. Kinlichee’s knowing eyes had
grown wide, and he’d yelled, “Flash flood!”

Leading the way, Kinlichee darted toward one
of the permanent metal ladders the Navajo installed after a
drowning tragedy in that very canyon years ago. It was about a
hundred feet away, and Kinlichee could have easily made it to
safety.

If Pichford hadn’t stuck out his foot and
tripped him.

Despite their imminent danger, this was the
moment Drayco remembered the new hand-made leather pouch on the bed
in Kinlichee’s cabin. The one with a purple cactus flower design,
the symbol for courtship among some native tribes. He really should
have paid more attention to the neighbor’s tales of Natalie’s
unhappiness.

As Drayco bent down to help Kinlichee, he
cast a glance back into the canyon where they’d been only moments
before and saw a roiling stream of brown foamy liquid tumbling
their way. By the time the wall of water was up to Drayco’s waist,
all thoughts of reaching that metal ladder were swept away as
cleanly as the bodies of the three men would be very soon.

Pulled under by the onslaught, Drayco
somehow managed to push against the canyon floor, giving a little
prayer of thanks for his six-four frame, and hauled himself up on a
ledge. Kinlichee soon surfaced near the ledge, and also managed to
get hold of a piece of it. Then the two men grabbed Pichford as he
bobbed by, helping him up to their precarious refuge.

Kinlichee glared at Pichford and managed to
gasp out between deep breaths, “What the hell did you do that for,
kicking me like that?”

Pichford couldn’t answer, busy coughing from
the mouthful of brackish water he’d swallowed, so Drayco spoke up.
“As bizarre as it may seem right now, I think he was aiming to get
back at you for the affair with his wife.”

Kinlichee’s eyes were dark with anger, but
there was also something else. Guilt, perhaps? He shook his head.
“We broke it off.”

Pichford finally managed to quiet his
coughs, his newly-raw throat giving his voice a harsh, rasping
quality. “That’s a pretty story, if I ever heard one.” With a look
over at Drayco, he added, “He’s not the first, you know. And I’ve
also seen the way she looks at you. Did my oh-so-friendly wife take
you out back of the calving barn for one of her private tours?”

It couldn’t get more surreal. Three men
having a conservation about who did what with whom as roiling flood
waters threatened imminent doom mere inches below.

Drayco looked at the water, then back at the
other men. Before being swept away into oblivion, he had to get the
answer to one burning question. “So the cattle laming was a
smokescreen? I’m guessing you used one of your wife’s
leather-working tools to do the deed.”

Pichford coughed a few more times. “I was
too proud to admit my wife was cheating on me. During the course of
your investigation, I’d counted on you finding out about the
affair. And who the bastard was so I could get evidence for a
divorce. As it turns out, I discovered it on my own. When I saw you
were the latest among her conquests, I realized I was going to have
to take care of the problem myself.”

Drayco’s hands were beginning to shake from
clutching the rock face while simultaneously grasping Pichford’s
arm to steady the man. He didn’t have much energy left to argue his
innocence with Pichford, and it hardly seemed to matter right
now.

When Pichford’s coughing suddenly grew
quiet, Drayco turned to check on him. He was just in time to watch
as Pichford kicked Kinlichee off the ledge.

“Good God, man, you’re insane!” Drayco
watched helplessly as Kinlichee disappeared downstream. “Couldn’t
you have just settled this in a bar brawl?”

Pichford was surprisingly subdued, despite
having just committed murder if Kinlichee didn’t survive. “I really
loved Natalie, you know,” he said, almost too softly for Drayco to
hear above the roaring flood. “More than I’ve loved anyone or
anything else in my entire life. I can’t live without her.”

Drayco sighed and looked up at the sky, the
deep cloudless blue belying the storm that had formed miles away.
Probably somewhere near Le Chee Rock, dumping the fateful rain into
the canyon wash that was acting like a funnel. “Pichford, for what
it’s worth, I never—“

“I know. I guess I knew all along but was
too angry to admit it. Obviously, I’m not the best judge of
character. Deep down, I do believe you’re an honorable man. It’s
not your fault my wife doesn’t love me.”

His jaw was set in a firm line, his eyes
slightly unfocused, as he turned toward Drayco and raised his free
hand. Taken by surprise, Drayco braced himself for a fight, but
Pichford flashed a grim smile, called out, “Good luck,” then
wrenched his arm from Drayco’s grasp and launched himself backward
into the debris.