Head Games (The Hector Lassiter Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

sprung. But Pancho's skull was never found." I lit a Pall Mall and stared off toward the Rio Grande. "Allegedly, Holmdahl stole Pancho's head for twenty-five-grand paid him by Prescott Bush, that Connecticut senator who they say belongs to that Skull and Bones Society at Yale that all those frat boys are trying to show up."
    Fiske chewed his lip. He grinned. "Yeah, the senator with our damned eighty-grand. Why don't we just call him up and do this deal?"
    "Well Bud, because someone just fricasseed our frat friends and left the fake skull behind. Someone in the know and with a machine gun, near as I can tell. And, like I said earlier, Prescott has deep ties to the intelligence community. And beyond that, I don't know him from Adam. We'd be best to try to grasp the lay of the land before we make that critical contact, don'tcha think?"
    "Makes sense, put that way." Bud's skittish eyes checked the rearview mirror. His caution couldn't hurt, but I'd been watching pretty closely. We had no tail I could spot.
    Bud said, nervous-like, "On that note, I wonder how the boys of Delta Kappa Epsilon are doing?"
    "Gotta be better than the Sigs," I said.
    It went like that to El Paso --- whistling through the graveyard conversation, slapping windshield wipers and the roar of that Turbo-Fire V-8. Just a couple of writers tearing through the desert in a car whose trunk was filled with severed human heads.
    7
    El Paso: there was nothing there --- damned near literally.
    The Wednesday Group turned out to be some kind of social club of tony Texas Republicans. A feel-good coffee klatch or some such to bolster the spirits of the GOP House minority. Some of its members, a local historian told Bud and me, were reputed to have been among those who leaned on the Mexican government (or paid it, more likely) to release Emil Holmdahl so many years ago. But it was, on balance, a dead end.
    On the other hand, we had been asking a lot of questions around town --- and raising eyebrows.
    Now, as we moseyed through this shithole town, we began getting looks.
    Hmm .
    I indulged a hunch and hit the hardware store where I bought four old carpetbags. We ambled back to my Chevy and snuck a false-Pancho head into one of the bags. I stashed the others in the trunk.
    "We'll take this fella with us," I told Bud. "Just in case."
    "Where we going?"
    "Newspaper office. We're still in border country, so if the stuff is anywhere, it's apt to be here. Let's look up some old clippings. Refresh my memory on that grave robbing."

    We found an old tearsheet from The El Paso Herald Post dated Feb. 8, 1926.
    It was breathless stuff --- the purple prose of some hack writer who'd clearly scented something he thought might be a story to build a yellow-journalism career upon.
    Headlines and subheads:
    VILLA'S BODY IS ACCUSER IN GRIM CASE
    ---------------------------------
    American Soldier of Fortune
    Jailed Following Grave Robbery
    ---------------------------------------
    BANDIT'S HEAD HAS VANISHED
    ---------------------------------------
    Believe Decapitation Was Made
    For Sale To Some Institution
    1926: Emil Holmdahl strayed across the border for what was termed "a prospecting and hunting trip." He had a crony along for the ride --- some Angelino going by the handle of Alberto Corral.
    Feb. 5: Emil and Alberto made a Friday-night sortie into Parral, Chihuahua to crack open Villa's grave. Bad news for Emil and Alberto; their snooping around and the many graceless questions they had posed about Pancho Villa's grave in previous days had not gone unnoticed. A caretaker told all and ID'd the "ghoulish head snatchers."
    Emil and Alberto also had it tougher than Bud and me on the grave-robbing front. They had to chip through concrete to do their "wretched work."
    The AP article went on:
"No satisfactory explanation has been ascribed for the gruesome decapitation, although a note left with the body said the head was to be sent to Columbus, N.M., scene of the bandit raid in 1916 that