Strong Darkness Read online

  “You were with Dylan in Spats last night,” Caitlin said, after clearing her throat in the hope it might do the same to her mind.

  “He showed up there after his football meetings,” the one named Ross said.

  “But this isn’t the football fraternity. Have I got that right?”

  “You do,” Ross told her. “Football players join Thete—Theta Delta Chi. Dylan will probably end up there, but he fits in better here.”

  “Get back to last night,” Caitlin told him. “You said you met up with Dylan after his football meetings.”

  “We didn’t exactly meet up with him,” Salaar answered instead. “We were already inside when he arrived. He sat down with us, but he was waiting for a girl.”

  Cort Wesley eased himself forward on the couch he’d pulled out and tilted on an angle so he and Caitlin could better face the boys. It still smelled of fresh leather. Caitlin noticed that the room’s sole light, other than that emanating from the television screen, spilled from two tracks missing half their fixtures.

  “This would be the Chinese girl we heard about,” Cort Wesley said to them both. “Was she his girlfriend or something?”

  Ross and Salaar looked at each other, then shrugged in virtual unison.

  “Something,” Ross said.

  “And what’s that exactly?”

  “Definitely not his girlfriend,” Salaar tried to elaborate.

  “I believe we’re straight on that much. Now tell me what’s bothering the two of you about this. What’s got you so uncomfortable?”

  “He recognized her,” Salaar managed, while Ross was still collecting his thoughts. “From another night, the first time he saw her.”

  “Recognized her from where?” Cort Wesley asked them.

  The two boys looked at each other, as if to determine who would answer.

  “From where?” Cort Wesley repeated.

  “A video,” Salaar responded.

  “The kind you may not want to hear about,” Ross added.

  15

  PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

  They watched what could only be described as a pornography video right there, projected wirelessly via laptop onto the widescreen mounted over the fireplace. Caitlin told Salaar to hit pause as soon as the young Chinese woman made her first appearance, still fully clothed.

  The bar manager’s description didn’t do her justice. Her beauty was as natural as it was ravishing and exotic. Her black hair was long, tumbling past her shoulders in light waves. Her complexion seemed fair and pristine, like a porcelain statue until the screen froze on her smiling, which exaggerated her beauty and made her look a notch beyond seductive.

  Caitlin supposed that was the point. She hadn’t had much dealings with pornography, Internet or otherwise, but any experience was too much. Especially when it involved what could only be equated as a modern form of slavery. A seminar Caitlin had taken last year at Quantico pegged human trafficking as a thirty-five-billion-dollar-a-year international industry with the vast bulk of that being spent in the United States. That seminar had provided samples of various brands of pornography, and as things went, this looked relatively high-end as opposed to the underground variety that ranged from kiddie porn to even higher up on the demented scale.

  The film featured credited names that were almost surely fake and a grabber of a title, Pumping Iris. Caitlin guessed that the Iris of the title was the very girl with whom Dylan had left Spats the night before.

  “Any way you can lift a still picture off this?” she asked Salaar.

  “Sure. I can isolate it and e-mail it to you. Or print it out if you can wait a few minutes. The quality won’t be great, though.”

  “It’ll do and I’d like you to jot down the URL link to the video,” Caitlin said, standing up and turning her back to the screen. “And we don’t mind waiting at all. I appreciate your help, both of you. I’m sure Dylan would too. Isn’t that right, Cort Wesley?”

  He grunted something, still coming to terms with all he’d learned about his oldest son, then nodded with apparent reluctance.

  “We’ll wait down here, if that’s okay.”

  “Fine,” Salaar said with Ross nodding behind him, the two of them relieved to be able to make their exit. “Just be a few minutes.”

  * * *

  Caitlin turned off the television as soon as they were gone. “I know what you’re thinking, Cort Wesley.”

  “Don’t even go there, Ranger.”

  “When did you start drinking exactly?”

  “Why is it always your job to defend Dylan?”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “I was different.”

  “You sure were. Boone Masters had you working with his crew boosting major appliances out of warehouses when you were, what, fifteen? Took all of that long before Dylan got himself kidnapped and went up against a serial killer because we dragged him into our shit.”

  “I get the point.”

  “I don’t believe you do, Cort Wesley. I seem to recall you saying you started drinking whiskey around the same time you rode in the back of your dad’s truck holding the fridges in place. I don’t see a problem with Dylan doing it in college along with pretty much all the rest of the population. I think you’re more bothered by this fake ID thing because it reminds you how young he is and how much you miss him, especially with Luke off in boarding school. You think I don’t feel the same way?”

  Cort Wesley made a point of checking his watch.

  “What are you doing?” Caitlin asked him.

  “Finneran gave you until midnight to get out of Dodge. I wanted to see how much time you had left.”

  “And that makes me figure I should take you with me when I go.”

  “Why exactly?”

  “You want me gone so you can handle this your own way.”

  “I’ll handle it my own way, whether you’re here or not.”

  Caitlin checked her phone to find a call from Captain Tepper that had come in while she and Cort Wesley had been questioning the two Delta Phi fraternity brothers.

  “Get your butt back in the saddle, Ranger,” his message started, choppy and stiff the way all his voice mails were. “We got ourselves a genuine serial killer. I need you back here.”

  * * *

  “You smoking right now, D.W.?”

  “See the influence you got on me even from a thousand miles away?”

  “I’m guessing you already heard from the Providence police again.”

  “Yeah, a pissed-off detective who told me he gave you until tonight to leave town. I laughed and warned him that he issued his ultimatum to somebody who bulldozed the last person to piss her off into a drainage ditch.”

  “I was looking forward to what he was going to do when I’m still here tomorrow.”

  “Didn’t you listen to my message, Ranger?”

  “We’ve had serial killers in Texas before, D.W.,” Caitlin told him.

  “Right. Before, as in a hundred and thirty years ago, on your great-granddaddy William Ray Strong’s watch.”

  Caitlin knew there was only one case he could be talking about, the legendary one that had seen William Ray Strong paired with none other than Judge Roy Bean.

  “And if I wasn’t of reasonably sound mind,” Tepper continued, his voice scratchy from cigarette smoke, “I’d say the same killer’s back for an encore.”

  16

  LANGTRY, TEXAS; 1883

  Judge Roy Bean rode out to the Chinese camp alongside William Ray Strong, the Ranger keeping his pace slow since Bean looked like a man ready to be thrown well before his horse reached a gallop. They hitched their horses to posts under the watchful, suspicious gazes of the Chinese milling about, their eyes widening at sight of William Ray’s Texas Ranger badge proudly displayed on his lapel.

  “Anybody here speak good enough English to understand what I’m saying?” Judge Bean asked them.

  Many raised their hands, all of them tentatively.

  “W
e’re here about the killings of your women and need to be pointed in the right direction.”

  Those who understood him took Bean literally and pointed off to the right, toward a single structure on the camp’s outskirts perched in the shade. The judge and Ranger had just started that way when a thin woman with ash gray hair gathered in a bun grabbed hold of William Ray’s arm.

  “My daughter,” she said in what sounded more like a plea, squeezing his arm even tighter. “My daughter.”

  William Ray saw the sadness of mourning in her eyes and nodded. “I understand, ma’am, I understand,” he said, hoping she did as well.

  The woman released his arm, looking no less sad as she bowed repeatedly. “Thank you, thank you.”

  She moved aside so the two men could continue on, followed the whole way by even more curious stares. The mud-strewn center of the camp was dominated by canvas tents stained dark and dotted with clotheslines, fire pits, and several larger tents, these strung over heavy posts and served as a school for the children and a cafeteria where the workers ate breakfast and dinner. William Ray and the judge noticed a few whites mixed in among the Chinese, talking to them with Bibles held in their grasps and crucifixes dangling from their necks.

  “Missionaries,” Bean noted, “trying to turn the Chinks’ skin white.”

  This vantage point afforded a clear view of both the earthen dam up the river to the north and the actual worksite several hundred yards to the south, where Southern Pacific personnel were visible as mere specs checking to see if the land was dry enough to resume work. Normally this time of year the land would be parched, a veritable dirt and gravel bowl laid over a landscape so flat that walking it bored a man’s feet, William Ray’s father used to say. The railroad had chosen, for precisely that reason, to originate this northern spur of the Trans-Pecos line here. The unseasonable rains had taken everyone by surprise, and William Ray heard it told that it had actually been one of the Chinese who suggested the dam’s construction based on a similar experience he’d had on a railroad worksite in California.

  A Chinese man was busy writing something out on an oblong board placed upon an easel in the lee of a grove of trees. William Ray figured it must be the coming week’s work schedule, and he took his hat off, along with the judge, when they got close enough to the man to block out what little light streamed through the trees. He worked with paint and brush, an artist more than a laborer, looking up after he finished the line he was working on.

  “I’m Texas Ranger William Ray Strong and this here’s Judge Roy Bean,” William Ray said by way of greeting.

  The man regarded them suspiciously. “Did the railroad send you? Are you going to arrest us all?”

  “No, the railroad didn’t send us, and that would depend on what you did.”

  “We went on strike. After the railroad refused to pay us for building their dam for them. They are very angry, but so are we over them breaking their word.”

  “Never trust a man in a suit, friend,” said Judge Roy Bean, hitching his thumbs in his vest pockets. “And it’s these murders of your women we’re here about, not this here strike.”

  The man’s expression brightened immediately. He reached and shook each of their hands, clearly grateful for their presence.

  “Call me Su,” he greeted in perfect English. “All the Americans do.”

  “We were directed to you, sir,” William Ray told him.

  “The railroad does not care about the killings. They have done nothing about them, even before the strike.”

  “That’s why we’re here, Mr. Su. Because we do and we will.”

  “Just Su,” the man corrected. “Please.”

  “Okay. Su.”

  “What can you tell us about the victims?” Judge Bean asked him.

  “Four women so far. Every few days these last few weeks. Always found dead. Always the same. Always killed at night. One found in camp, one just outside it, and two nearer the head of the tracks,” Su finished, referring to the congested temporary town set up where the rails currently ended.

  “What were they doing there at night exactly, sir?” William Ray asked.

  “Some of our women have taken to providing service to the workmen. To bring in extra money.”

  “Whores, in other words,” elaborated Judge Bean.

  Su didn’t bother to argue his point.

  “Anybody ever see anything at all?” William Ray asked him. “Maybe somebody who didn’t belong who might have done this.”

  Su stiffened, black paint dribbling down off his brush to stain his otherwise perfect chart. “Not who,” he said. “What.”

  * * *

  Su led the Ranger and the judge through a camp William Ray found surprisingly well maintained, right down to the clapboard outhouses the Chinese workers had built themselves with no assistance or funding whatsoever from Southern Pacific. The camp had a seasoned look to it, populated no doubt by Chinese who’d been in the United States and working the rails for some time. That explained the organized nature of the surroundings and why, unlike every other Chinese worker camp he’d ever been in, this one featured children rushing about, their bare feet churning through the mud that speckled their faces.

  “The latest woman murdered was last seen alive hanging laundry after another storm passed. A few hours later, her body was found just like the other three.”

  “And how’s that?” William Ray asked him.

  “Better you see, Ranger,” Su answered, leading them on.

  * * *

  Judge Roy Bean pushed a thick wedge of chewing tobacco into his mouth when they reached a lone tent set way back from the others, in the camp’s shadiest and thus coolest spot. The Chinese had built the bulk of this particular camp in the heat of the Texas sun, but that also brought them closer to the river swelling over its banks. Fetching the pails of water needed for a camp of maybe five hundred residents was no small task, making the heat better to brave than the endless succession of treks.

  Su parted the flap and held it open, eyes tilted almost reverently downward as William Ray and the judge entered. The stench assaulted them immediately, like spoiled meat spilled from a grocery wagon left to roast on the street. Enough to tell William Ray the woman had been dead for a day, maybe two at the most, as he moved ahead of the judge toward a wooden slab of a table that still smelled like fresh lumber.

  Su pinned the flap open behind him so the light could shine into the tent. Wooden shelves dominated the square structure, lined with knickknacks and trinkets that all looked handmade. William Ray’s eyes were drawn first to a series of finely stitched dolls lining the upper reaches, each unique and personal as if possessing a soul made of stuffing.

  “I make toys for the camp’s children,” Su explained. “Often I make too many.”

  The dolls were beautiful, the Ranger thought, but somehow sad, as if to reflect the general plight of the Chinese who’d worked the rails almost since the first tracks had been laid on the Transcontinental Railroad. Amazing how changing the placement of a few threads could create virtually any emotion in such seasoned hands. Too bad the feelings of real people, not just elegantly embroidered dolls, could be affected as easily.

  William Ray also noticed several intricate creations, including a series of train cars carved out of wood in the process of being painted. And on a table set in a darkened corner, he saw what looked like a scale model of the river and the recently completed dam.

  “It was your idea,” he said, realizing. “Building the dam, I mean.”

  Su nodded humbly and bowed slightly. “I am something of an engineer. But more recently I am, how do you say, a coroner.”

  William Ray moved his gaze toward the outline of a body evident beneath a water-stained canvas blanket. He eased the canvas back, peeling it away as respectfully as he could.

  “Holy hell,” Judge Bean muttered, taking off his hat. “Am I seeing this wrong?”

  “Nope,” William Ray told him, “that’s the back of her head all
right.”

  * * *

  It was facing the wrong direction, the victim’s hair falling over the nape of her neck where her face should have been.

  “Looks like it was cut off and sewn back on,” noted Bean. “Backward.”

  “But the way the blood settled here, here, and here tells me he broke her neck or strangled her first. Then he cut off her head and sewed it back on.” William Ray looked toward Su who’d remained by the tent flap, his eyes distant and distracted as if he was hearing what he’d already determined for himself. “Were the others found like this?”

  “Almost exactly. Their bodies are in the ground now.”

  “Before you reported the murders?”

  “We did report them, to the chief of the Southern Pacific railroad police.”

  “He do anything about it?”

  “Yes. He told me to leave his office.”

  The stitching on the woman’s neck and throat, William Ray noted, was irregularly spaced; the thick, jagged lines marked by makeshift black thread that looked more like twine. Thick trails of dried blood ran from each stitch. Something made him want to turn the woman’s head back around the way it should be. Instead, though, William Ray peeled more of the canvas backward; bundling it over the corpse’s thighs to expose her midriff and private area, he set to examining.

  “What is it you’re doing there, Ranger?” Judge Bean asked him, his stomach gurgling audibly with distaste at the scene.

  “There’s bruising here but no swelling,” William Ray reported, angling his frame to block view of the woman’s body from Bean. “That tells me the killer likely violated her after she was dead.” Then he looked toward Su. “How old was this girl, sir?”