Credo's Betrayal: Alex Wolfe Mysteries, #5
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About this ebook
Amazon bestselling author Alison Naomi Holt returns with a new novel in her popular mystery series about a brash, irreverent young detective who solves often overlooked crimes using unorthodox, and at times, unsanctioned methodology.
When Tucson Police Detective Alexandra Wolfe moves to arrest a particularly obnoxious skinhead, the man steps back and literally falls into the lap of a long undiscovered skeleton, opening both a literal and figurative can of worms.
Set among the streets and barrios of Tucson, Arizona, this whodunit pits Alex and her friends against a twisted killer who'll stop at nothing to protect his family's dark legacy.
"Alison Naomi Holt brings a wealth of experience as a former officer of the Tucson Police Department. That experience is welcome and telling in her descriptions of the department, their procedures, and the day-to-day lives of the women and men of the department, as well as those of the people they encounter. The mysteries are complex, and the action is taut."
- Laurence W. Kriv, Amazon
Alison Naomi Holt
“Words are such uncertain things; they so often sound well but mean the opposite of what one thinks they do.” ― Agatha Christie, Partners in Crime Alison, who grew up listening to her mother reading her the most wonderful books full of adventure, heroes, ducks, and dogs, promotes reading wherever she goes and believes literacy is the key to changing the world for the better. In her writing, she follows Heinlein’s Rules, the first rule being You Must Write. To that end, she writes in several genres simply because she enjoys the great variety of characters and settings her over-active fantasy life creates. There’s nothing better for her than when a character looks over their shoulder, crooks a finger for her to follow, and heads off on an adventure. From medieval castles to a horse farm in Virginia to the police beat in Tucson, Arizona, her characters live exciting lives, and she’s happy enough to follow them around and report on what she sees. Alison's previous life as a cop gave her a bizarre sense of humor, a realistic look at life, and an insatiable desire to live life to the fullest. She loves all horses & hounds and some humans… To find out more, go to her website at www.alisonholtbooks.com.
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Credo's Betrayal - Alison Naomi Holt
CHAPTER 1
First, watch the hands.
Then the eyes.
If the hands disappear, then front sight.
Front sight until the hands reappear.
They didn’t, so now I have the front sight of my Glock pointed dead center at this lowlife’s chest. Standing with my back to the cold vinyl siding of a single-wide trailer, I knew I was either going to die or kill this man if my partner, Casey, couldn’t find me in the next few minutes.
The problem wasn’t necessarily the man, although my guess was, he’d spent a whole lot of his twenty-five years in jail. The tats alone told me that. The most prominent being the number fourteen eighty-eight inked into his forehead—fourteen for the number of words in some famous Nazi quote and eight-eight, which stands for H-H or Heil Hitler.
No, the real problem was the other three wannabe members of the Aryan Brotherhood who had joined fourteen eighty-eight. They’d arrived while I’d been speaking with the lady who rents the trailer. After I’d finished the interview and turned to head to my car, these four prison-hardened skinheads surrounded me.
One carried a wooden baseball bat over his shoulder while another, whose dark brown eyes and dangerous smirk said he’d used this particular weapon before, smacked his palm with a rusted tire iron. The other two, as I alluded to earlier, had their hands hidden behind their backs as if reaching for guns. None of them had obeyed my repeated orders to put down their weapons and leave. All of them had varying amounts of tattoos covering the crowns of their heads, faces, necks, and arms.
So, here I was with my back against the trailer trying to give my partner, Casey, directions over my handheld while keeping the four of them at an acceptable distance. She wasn’t that far away, but, unfortunately, the witness I’d just finished talking to lives in a trailer on a piece of land that has no street names, no address and probably twenty broken-down trailers and dilapidated houses scattered throughout.
Technically, I suppose, the one square mile this hell hole sits on could be called a neighborhood since there were remnants of paved roads and alleys, but it had taken me thirty minutes of driving down side streets—nameless side streets—and pounding on doors to find the woman I needed to interview.
My name, by the way, is Alexandra Wolfe, and I’m a detective in the Special Crimes Unit of the Tucson Police Department. I’d been hearing someone, presumably Casey, gunning their engine and rapidly accelerating through the neighborhood
for some time now and vowed that in the future I wouldn’t enter this type of wasteland without back-up.
The ape with the bat called out to fourteen eighty-eight. Hey, Drew. Perfect date for the probate, don’cha think?
This numbnut had a complex triangular symbol tattooed on the front of his neck that I didn’t recognize as one of the typical gang tats I usually saw on the streets. Three swords made up the triangle’s sides. In the middle, a red heart had a fourth sword stuck into it. The number two-eleven had been inked in the center of the heart.
The part of my mind that wasn’t concentrating on getting Casey to my location idly thought I’d need to contact Chuck, the department’s gang expert, to find out what it meant.
A year earlier he’d taught an in-service training specifically focusing on the racist skinhead groups in Arizona. Part of that training had been a lesson on the terms and tats used by their gangs. A date
meant an initiation fight and probate
meant a ‘member in waiting’ who hadn’t yet become a full-fledged member of the ‘crew.’
Drew, who wore a sleeveless white t-shirt and faded jeans, smiled grimly and moved to my left, trying to draw my attention away from the other three. He stood about five-nine with a rounded but strong jawline covered in a couple day’s beard—the only hair on his otherwise bald head. His dark eyes watched me with an amused but deadly intent.
I moved left so he couldn’t maneuver me into a position where I’d be standing in the middle of all four men with one or two in my blind spot, or worse, at my back. I’d been wondering which of the remaining two was the probate until the man on my far right tossed his tire iron from his right hand to his left and back to his right. He took two steps forward, closing the gap between us to an uncomfortable distance.
Enough was enough. I can count on my left hand the number of times I’d had to pull my backup Colt Mustang .380, but I decided today was a good day to add to that exclusive list. I hitched my radio onto the back part of my pants and reached down to tug up my pant leg, exposing a black holster holding my extra, technically not sanctioned, semiauto strapped to my ankle. Pulling the weapon free, I stood and held out both weapons, leaving me at the apex of a fully-loaded triangle.
That stopped them in their tracks. In fact, the two closest men took a couple of steps back. The one with the flaming red beard held his hands out from his side making sure I knew he was unarmed and the probate holding the tire iron didn’t look quite so smug. He jerked his head to the side, flicking his long, brown bangs out of his eyes. He was the only one of the three who actually had hair on the top of his head, and I wondered if they couldn’t shave their heads until they were made official members of the gang.
I decided to retry the friendly cop spiel I’d given earlier. Look, I’m doing some follow-up with Penny, the lady who’s renting this trailer, that’s all. I have no clue why the hell you’re here or what you want.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, the fact that I was half-Jewish reared its ugly head.
Drew growled his answer. You see anybody with skin that ain’t white around here? You smell like a Jew. You a Jew, Pig?
He grinned and glanced at his buddies. A Jew pig. Get it?
They all thought that had to be the funniest thing they’d heard all day, and I would have bet money the neighbors could hear their howling laughter from a half-mile away.
Drew’s face morphed from thoroughly entertained to menacing in the blink of an eye. We own this hood, Bitch, and you bein’ here pisses me off.
He showed his yellowed, sharpened teeth. It ain’t healthy to piss me off.
I crinkled my brow in confusion since I obviously had whiter skin than he did. Well, judging by the color of your eyes and the ugly black hair sticking out from under your pits, I’d say you have a healthy amount of Hispanic blood running through your veins, so I’m actually whiter than you are.
Probably not the brightest response, but ignorant racists of any color piss me off.
Thankfully, at that moment, a green sedan slid around the corner in a cloud of dust causing all four men to dive out of the way: two to the left, one to the right and one straight over the hood. To my surprise, it wasn’t Casey in the driver’s seat, but my sergeant, Kate Brannigan, and boy did she look pissed.
Kate is five-foot-seven, wears her blonde hair in a short ponytail and her badass temper on her sleeve. She shoved the car into park before it came to a complete stop, threw open her door and had tire iron man shoved against the side of the trailer before the dust settled. With one forearm jammed against his throat, she yanked the lug wrench out of his hand and threw it under the trailer.
I’m always up for a good fight, well, that is if the odds are in my favor. I re-holstered my Colt and shoved my Glock into its holster as I ran toward the man holding the baseball bat.
He was the one who’d had to roll over the hood and he was just now picking himself up out of the dirt. His eyes were laser-focused on the back of Kate’s head and he held the bat high across his right shoulder as though he were Ty Cobb ready to hit a home run. Shoulders hunched in rage and fingers white from the force of his grip, which for some reason was a quarter of the way up the bat, his attention was so totally focused on his target he never saw me coming.
As he pulled the bat off his shoulder, I grabbed both ends and used his fists as a fulcrum to slam the knob into his ear.
He released his grip to grab his ear and I hauled back and punched the knob into his neck so hard he fell onto his knees, then toppled face first into the dirt, unconscious.
I threw the bat under the trailer just as the third man jumped on my back and hit me in the side of my head with a very hard fist. He must have weighed close to one-eighty and my knees buckled; not from the force of the blow but because I’d already been off balance and his weight shoved me down toward the dirt.
It would have been suicide to give him enough time to clobber me again, and on the way down I twisted to my right, grabbed his ankles and slammed his head into the ground. He still had his arm around my neck, so I drove my elbow up into his manly parts. Unfortunately for him and for any future little bangers yet to be born, my adrenaline spiked, and I hit him hard enough that his eyes rolled up and he drifted off to wherever emasculated skinheads go when they check out of consciousness.
Kate had her man handcuffed to the railing of the wooden stairs leading to the trailer door and we both looked to my right, expecting Drew to come to the aid of his crew. I didn’t see him, but since I still knelt on the ground next to the unconscious skinhead, I searched under Kate’s vehicle, trying to locate the lower part of Drew’s legs on the far side of her car.
Shit.
What I saw didn’t bode well for poor little Drew. I pushed to my feet and moved around the trunk toward the passenger side.
Shit what?
Kate glanced down at my two goons, made sure they were still unconscious and then walked around the hood to see what had caught my attention. What the hell?
During her dramatic arrival when she’d careened around the corner to rescue me, she’d fishtailed to the right, corrected the slide and skidded back around to where the men had been standing. Her skid marks abruptly stopped on the far side of a cavernous hole and then picked up on the side nearest us. Half of her right front and rear tires rested on the dirt while the other half hung out over thin air. Apparently, the weight of her car combined with the vehicle’s erratic movements had caved in the decaying roof of some type of underground chamber.
While we gawked at the hole, Casey finally found us. She skidded into the yard, plowing up another choking lungful of dust.
Emasculated Redbeard awoke and began rolling back and forth making choking noises and clutching himself.
Casey got out of the car, quickly took in the scene and walked over to the moaner. Pulling her handcuffs from behind her back, she tried to get him to let go of himself so she could cuff him. She ended up jerking his arm back and flipping him onto his stomach so she could get enough leverage to bring his second hand around to meet the first.
Once I saw she’d be able to manage him on her own, I turned my attention back to the hole. I inched forward until I could look over the edge and despite the circumstances, grinned at what I saw.
Approximately ten feet down Drew stared up at me with eyes as round and white as a full moon rising over the Catalina mountains. Incredibly, he must have fallen right into the lap of a human skeleton because scattered around his prone body were arm bones with hands still attached and two femurs fully connected to the lower legs and feet.
Resting squarely in the middle of Drew’s stomach, the fully intact remains of a stark white skull moved up and down with the rhythm of each terror-stricken breath. A toothless mouth grinned at him, apparently rendering the big, scary skinhead unable to move.
Judging by the smooth walls lining the hole, he’d fallen into some kind of basement that had long ago been covered over and buried. I could understand why someone had sealed and abandoned the room since it’s generally not acceptable to have a human corpse lying around next to your washer-dryer combo.
Kate’s car had apparently snapped the rusted rebar supporting the cement of the basement’s ceiling, or to put it another way, the cement of the floor of the house that no longer existed above it. Pieces of concrete and a large amount of dirt that had originally covered and hidden the basement littered the area around where Drew lay. Long strands of rebar hung down into the room where the combination of the erratic movement of the car combined with Drew’s dead weight had overloaded the already cracked cement and snapped the rusty metal in half.
The cement and rebar meant either the basic frame of the basement and ceiling had been left intact after the accompanying home had been torn down or there had never been a home and the basement had been built as a standalone structure similar to an underground fallout shelter or bunker.
Parts of the room remained in darkness because not all of the ceiling had collapsed. Enough had fallen, however, that I could see the side walls were roughly fifteen feet on all four sides. Since I could see the four corners, I felt safe knowing where the support beams formed the outer frame and I carefully circled to the opposite side where a set of dilapidated steps led down into the basement.
I thought I’d find an open hole over the stairs, but when I got down on my knees and brushed the dirt out of the way I found a metal plate padlocked shut with a rusty lock. I called across the gaping hole. Hey Kate, do you still carry those bolt cutters in your trunk?
She had the reputation of carrying everything that might be remotely needed at a crime scene, and we’d used her bolt cutters on many, many locked fences, sheds, and garages.
Yes, hold on.
She retrieved the cutters and came around to make short work of the lock.
I bent my knees, grabbed the handle, braced myself and heaved on the heavy door. The hinges creaked from age and once I’d hauled it past ninety degrees, I let it drop with a clang. We both peered down to the room below, but unfortunately, the rickety stairwell descended to a section completely bathed in shadow.
The combination of skeletons and eerie darkness had my imagination ramping into overdrive. I got down on my stomach and hung my head over the edge to get a better look into the shadowy patches where any number of angry spirits might dwell. I could vaguely see into the area surrounding the stairs, but directly beneath them the complete blackness yawned with the ghosts and ghouls of my vivid imagination.
To understand my overabundant imagination, you should know a little of my history. My paternal grandmother came from the backwoods of Pennsylvania. She made her own hard cider, ran a hundred-acre farm, and canned everything in sight. She also read everything she could get her hands on and that habit made her into a very talented storyteller.
I alternately loved and hated her visits. Don’t get me wrong, I loved her more than I can say, but when night fell, she’d take me outside with only a small flashlight to light our way and weave the most wonderfully terrifying stories. She created incredible worlds from the shadows thrown off into the darkness by our lights—worlds full of shapeshifters and trolls, lost spirits, and ghouls.
When I pushed to my feet, I bumped into Kate who was standing over me, waiting.
She indicated the stairs with a flick of her hand. Checking to see if they’ll hold you?
I shook my head as I wiped the dirt from my hands. Looking for ghosts.
Her jaw jutted sideways as she seemed momentarily at a loss for words. Her eyes hardened into impatience, and I put my hands up. Okay, okay, I’m going.
I gingerly put my foot on the first rung, but she grabbed my arm to stop me. That plywood is riddled with termite holes, Alex, which means the stairs probably are as well. Stay to the sides of each step, and you’ll have a better chance of making it to the bottom. If we didn’t need to get down there to make sure he’s not too badly hurt, I’d say wait, but…
I grabbed the railing and shook it, testing to make sure the thing would hold my weight. Once again, when I went to step, Kate grabbed my arm. I looked back, and the anger in her eyes surprised me.
We’ll talk about the stupidity of coming into a neighborhood like this without back up when we’ve finished here. You’re lucky this shithole used to be in my beat when I worked patrol, or neither Casey nor I would have gotten to you in time.
I raised my eyebrows, I had it covered, Boss.
She snorted as I turned back to the steps and gingerly made my way down. When I came to the bottom, Drew turned his head one tiny inch at a time in my direction and whispered, Get this thing offa me.
A chill raced down my spine at the terror in his voice, and, mimicking his quiet tones, I asked, Why are you whispering? The guy’s dead, he’s not gonna hear you.
There’s a snake inside.
I’d been glancing behind me into the shadows and when he said, snake,
I whipped my head back around. What?
He hissed his reply, A fucking snake! Get it offa me.
I looked back at Kate, who had her attention focused on the reliability of each step as she made her way down the stairs. I needed to control my rising panic. I absolutely hate snakes. Hate is perhaps not a strong enough word. Maybe despise, abhor, or detest might better describe the loathing I feel for the wriggling spawns of Satan.
Swallowing the fear rising in my throat, I knelt next to Drew’s shoulders so I could get a look into the skeleton’s empty orbs. I don’t see anything.
He hissed back at me through gritted teeth. I hate fucking snakes. Get it offa me!
Giving him my best, ‘you idiot’ look, I picked up his left arm and pointed to the diamondback rattler tattooed from his shoulder all the way down to his wrist. What’s this then, Dumbass?
His glare would have singed an ice cream cone.
I waited for Kate to get to the bottom and join us. Watch him, okay?
To Drew, I said, You move, and I’ll stuff the snake’s head down your throat, understand?
Kate knelt on the extremely hard and uncomfortable concrete, grabbed his left hand in a wrist lock, pulled his arm straight, twisted it and then jammed the palm of her free hand into his extended elbow. Her low growl emphasized the danger in her words, She might stuff it down your throat, but if you even twitch in her direction I’ll dislocate your elbow, leave your upper arm on the ground and stuff your hand down your ear canal, understand?
Figuring that was a rhetorical question, I didn’t wait for his answer. I pulled out my cell phone, turned on the flashlight, and held it close to the empty orbs of the bone-white skull. I hesitantly peered down through the eye socket.
What I saw made me say a small prayer of gratitude for allowing me the evil I was about to commit. Yahweh must not like skinheads very much either, because tucked in close to back of the skull, a fairly good-sized desert horned lizard peered out at me. I put an artificial tone of strain and fear into my voice and cringed back. Oh my God, you’re right. It’s a mean-looking one, too.
I sat back on my heels, then leaned in and gingerly grabbed the back of the skull. When I raised it up, the lower jaw fell open and the horny toad jumped out onto Drew’s chest. He shrieked and tried to scooch backwards—obviously prevented from moving by Kate’s twisting hold on his arm. He froze when the toad, as this particular species is wont to do when startled, squirted blood into his face from the corner of its eye.
I grinned down at the big bad skinhead who reached up with his free hand and, in his panic, smeared the blood all over his face. I said, helpfully, I’m pretty sure the blood’s not poisonous, unless you get it in your eyes or mouth.
Which, of course, he’d already done.
His glazed and terrified eyes focused on me, and off to the side I recognized Kate’s ‘I’m gonna kill you’ growl. Alex.
What?
I pointed to the swastika covering most of the asshole’s chest. Payback’s a bitch, Boss.
I leaned close to Drew’s ear. What do you know? Saved by a Jew.
Kate still hadn’t allowed him to get up, so I set the skull to the side and carefully scooped up the horny toad. I put him next to one of the walls where he wouldn’t get trampled by the many, many boots that were about to descend on this place.
Drew wore his hatred like a tight-fitting shirt and every muscle in his face pulled taut in a rictus of loathing.
Kate kept him in the armlock but finally allowed him to stand. She pointed to the wall near the steps with her chin. Move over there and sit.
His muscles bulged with homicidal malice, and when he didn’t budge, she put more pressure on the elbow.
He squeaked and dropped to his knees. Unfortunately, he plunked down in the middle of the skeleton again, scattering a few more ribs.
Kate rolled her eyes, pursing her lips into an irritated scowl. She spoke to him in the same forced calm she often uses on me, "Stand up, do not step on any bones, She said this very slowly to make sure he understood.
Move to the wall."
Wincing—this guy really was all bark and no bite—he immediately complied but not before he picked something off the ground and snuck it into his pants pocket.
Hold it.
I moved toward him and held out my gloved hand.
What?
Wiggling my fingers, I said, You know what. Give.
When he didn’t move, I felt his pocket to make sure he didn’t have anything sharp in there. Satisfied I wouldn’t get poked, I slipped my hand in and pulled out a ring. What’s this?
He shrugged and I showed it to Kate who shook her head. I held it closer so she could see it better. It has some kind of symbol etched into it.
Drew mumbled, Stupid bitch.
Right, as if you know what it is.
I turned on the phone flashlight and studied the symbol. It looked like nothing more than an arrow pointing straight up.
I guess Drew couldn’t stand me thinking he didn’t know something. It’s a Tyr.
At our blank looks, he rolled his eyes at our stupidity. You know. The god of war? The Nazi’s used it to mark the graves of the SS officers.
Kate shoved him forward. Move.
She continued to twist his arm and he gingerly stepped over or around any stray femurs and tibias lying scattered about. Before she allowed him to sit, she called up to Casey, who’d remained topside guarding the other three. Casey, throw down a zip tie.
After a long moment, a car door slammed, and Casey’s face appeared over the rim of the opening. She held out one of the zip ties so I knew she was going to drop it and then tossed it down.
I caught it, and when Kate pulled one of the man’s arm behind his back, I did the same to the other. I ran the tie through his belt and then secured it around his wrists.
Once he’d lowered himself to the ground, Kate shouted up again. Casey.
Wisps of Casey’s short-cropped blonde hair blew in the breeze as she once again poked her head over the side. Boss?
Figure out some way to get this guy out of here safely. I’m not sure these stairs are going to hold.
If anybody can scrounge around to find something we need, it’s my partner. She owns a small farm where she keeps a horse, a donkey, two pigs, seven goats, and God knows how many dogs, cats, and birds she’s adopted over the last several years.
I’ve seen her use a rubber bicycle tube to stop a leak in a waterpipe that supplied one of her livestock watering troughs. Heck, once, when we were looking for a stray dog someone had seen abandoned in the desert, the tie rod on her old truck broke. She’d grabbed a pair of pliers from her toolbox, cut a length of baling wire she’d stashed in the bed, and with the stabilizing help of a sturdy stick, had the rod patched enough to hold until we were able to limp back to town.
Not usually long on words, she simply nodded and disappeared from sight.
Drew’s fall had majorly disrupted our crime scene. In fact, he’d broken most of the skeleton’s ribs, snapped the spine, and sent the skull tumbling down onto his chest. I walked over to where he’d fallen and knelt to survey the area better. Hey Kate, look at this.
She came over and I pointed to the smashed remains of a wooden chair lying underneath the skeleton. He or she might have died sitting in a chair, and look…
I used one finger,