Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [144]
AT THE REPORT OF GUNFIRE, a Code 3—“Deputy needs assistance”—went out. Within minutes, dozens of patrol cars from nearby towns and counties were screaming across Highway 138 toward Kueck’s trailer. In Long Beach, a Sikorsky H-3 helicopter took off carrying five deputies, and a three-man SWAT team scrambled aboard a chopper in East Los Angeles and headed for the scene.
The first to arrive was Sgt. Larry Johnston, followed by Officer Victor Ruiz of the California Highway Patrol. Johnston spotted spent shell casings and human tissue all over the blood-soaked sand in front of the trailer. There was Sorensen’s SUV, its passenger door flung open, his two-way radio gone. But the Dodge Dart was missing, and Sorensen himself was not in sight. Was he being held hostage? Was he bleeding to death in a nearby desert wash? Did the assailant have them in his sights just waiting to ambush two more cops? Other deputies arrived and helped Johnston set up the first perimeter. Ruiz got in his Crown Victoria, siren shrieking, and followed a set of deep and freshly made tire grooves leading away from the bloody site.
As the SWAT team landed in the brush, Ruiz saw the body. “I went to listen for his carotid, and there was nothing,” he says. “It looked like he took a round to the eye because it was pushed in. Then I saw that his head was flat. When I looked inside, there was no brain.” The SWAT guys teared up at the sight of a fellow deputy reduced to a pile of mangled flesh. A commander told them to suck it up and someone said a prayer, and then they put a blanket over Sorensen’s body lest the news media, now swarming the skies like vultures, broadcast the scene on the evening news.
“This was the most bizarre murder of a sheriff I have ever seen,” recalls Detective Joe Purcell, a thirty-year veteran of the department. A vicious cop-killer with an automatic weapon was on the loose, and the search rapidly expanded beyond the sheriff’s department. In 1873, the bandito Tiburcio Vasquez eluded a mounted posse in this very region for a year; two centuries later, Kueck was contending with an arsenal developed for modern warfare. A few miles away, air traffic control at Edwards—one of the world’s largest Air Force bases—picked up the news and passed it on to the pilots who fly over the desert every eight minutes on maneuvers. The FBI dispatched a super-high-tech signal-tracking plane to pinpoint Kueck if he used his cell phone, picking up his signal as it bounced off local radio towers. By the end of the afternoon, as backup poured in from other desert towns, Lake Los Angeles had become the Gaza Strip—no one was getting in or out without showing ID; every parolee in every trailer park and tattoo joint in the Antelope Valley was hauled in and questioned. Officers from all over Southern California combed Kueck’s property and the surrounding desert, looking under every rock, behind every Joshua tree, deep into animal lairs and wrecked muscle cars and down ancient gullies and washes. Less than two hours after Kueck shot Sorensen, the SWAT team found his yellow Dodge Dart two and a half miles from the deputy’s body. A dog from a K-9 unit picked up a scent at the car and led deputies to an abandoned shed about fifty yards away, through a dilapidated doorway, still on the scent, right to Sorensen’s notebook, hat, and empty gun belt.
But if the cops thought all their manpower and technology would flush out the killer, they didn’t know who they were up against. Inside Kueck’s trailer, a team of criminalists found a pack rat’s library of books on electronics, telescopes, aeronautics, the geology of the nearby Los Angeles Aqueduct, and time travel. Kueck’s family confirmed what the evidence suggested—he was a self-taught scientist who, as one of his sisters put it, could “hook up a tin can to a cactus and power a city,” a desert savant who built model rockets and talked physics with engineers at secret military test sites in