Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [148]
Jello’s death sent Kueck into a tailspin. He left the desert and made a pilgrimage to the warehouse where Jello died. Shortly afterward, he was busted for slicing a guy’s stomach with a box cutter while waiting for his daughter to complete an errand in the Department of Social Services in Riverside. “It was another speed freak,” she says. “He asked my dad for a cigarette, but then my dad thought he was making a move for a weapon, so he cut him.”
Kueck went to jail for a year and came out a changed man: more paranoid, scarred for life—burrowing deep like a lot of excons into the desert sands outside L.A., waiting for a trigger to strike. He called his daughter every day; when Welch said she wanted to be a cop, her father tried to talk her out of it, saying he would kill any cop—or at least white ones—who tried to pull him over. On his frequent visits to his daughter’s home, he always brought toys for her four toddlers, whom he adored, and gave her at least two guns. Once, he threatened to bury Welch’s ex-boyfriend in the desert if he continued to abuse his daughter. Another time, he spun a bizarre tale of going to the site of busted meth labs and extracting chemicals from the dirt.
A month before he killed Sorensen, Kueck visited his daughter for the last time. “He almost ran over some guys who were working on the driveway,” she says. “I knew he was doing speed. He slept for a couple of days and then he was all right.” Before he left, he took a few hits of speed from his nasal inhaler. “He was like Charlie Chaplin,” Welch says, recalling her final image of her father. “He was running around and breaking things.”
AS THE FOURTH DAY of the manhunt wore on, the killer was still at large and the media were clamoring for answers. Cops from all over the West poured in by the hour. By now, Kueck could have been anywhere—or nowhere. He could have been nailed by a Mojave green—in the summer they were all around, especially the newborns, which were the most lethal. He could have succumbed to hyperthermia, which sets in when you are overheated and you have no water and your temperature spikes to 106 degrees, at which point your brain literally cooks. He could have fallen into a mine shaft. But without his body, there was no way of knowing if the desert had taken Kueck down.
Lake Los Angeles is close to top-secret aeronautical sites such as Plant 42, where the Stealth bomber was developed, and the mysterious Gray Butte, second only to Area 51 in terms of high-tech weirdness, from which Predator drones are launched by night to drag the skies over the Mojave and test the latest surveillance equipment. “We are used to seeing strange things flying above us out here,” says Deputy District Attorney David Berger, who had joined the hunt for Kueck. But now, Berger and others noticed a C-130 Hercules flying low over the Antelope Valley, making repeated sweeps, as if probing the desert for the fugitive.
But there was no sign of Kueck until Tuesday afternoon, when a local cop decided to have another look at his trailer. Snakes always return to their lairs, and there it was—a rattlesnake stuck to Kueck’s front door, with a knife through its head. Somehow, it seemed, Kueck had survived both the desert and his human hunters, slithering under the crime-scene tape to leave his calling card.
Two days later, Deputy Sorensen was laid to rest at Lancaster Baptist Church. “Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends,” said Capt. Carl Deeley, as he eulogized the deputy before Sorensen’s family, Gov. Gray Davis, and thousands of spit-shined deputies and cops from all over the country who filled the pews and spilled out onto the somber streets. The grief-stricken cops were uneasy. What if Kueck were hiding somewhere, looking through a rifle scope at the congregation as they laid their fallen deputy to rest? They prayed for their fellow officers who were still out searching for Kueck, wondering why nothing could flush him out,