Burning Time

6

They had seen the buzzards. That’s what Jimmy said made them go off the dirt track the bikers had worn years ago into the rough landscape of the lower hills. The girl was so hysterical Darlene had to take her into the storage room that doubled as a lounge and give her some herbal tea. She’d already vomited a couple of times, but still looked pretty green.

“Horrible, horrible, horrible. I’ll never get it out of my head.” The little girl with bright red hair didn’t look old enough to be riding around the hills behind a boy on a powerful motorcycle. She couldn’t stop crying.

“Just drink a little of this,” Darlene suggested. “It really works.”

The girl sipped, making a face as if she’d rather be having a beer.

“What’s your name?” Darlene let go of the hand she had been holding and took her pad out.

“Scarlett, don’t laugh,” the girl said.

“I won’t laugh.”

Nobody was old enough to find a dead girl being eaten by birds. “Scarlett what? I’d like to call your mother.”

She shook her head. “I’ll wait for Jimmy.”

“You’ll be here a while then.”

Jimmy had insisted on taking Sheriff Regis back there to show just where it was, even though they might be able to find it on their own, the teenager said, because of the birds.

“I didn’t have anything to cover it.” Jimmy seemed apologetic about that.

Sheriff Newt Regis, whose hair had gone gray by the time he was thirty, and who was now forty-three, churned into action. He was not as lean as he had been and already had a grandbaby, but he was fast when he had reason to move. He roused the coroner from a nap to come out and have a look—and bring an ambulance. He called Raymond and Jesse in from the field and told them to bring the equipment. If it was a crime scene, they wouldn’t have a second chance to go over it. He called Rosie and said he wouldn’t be having her Monday night pot roast.

Then he sighed deeply because this could very well mark the beginning of spring, and got into his car to follow the kid.

For Newt Regis, spring was not a welcome time in north San Diego County. Spring was when bikers from all over the world started drifting in to camp in the hills and hang around raising hell. They came for the motorcycle races at Carlsbad, and some of them could do some pretty terrible things. Stealing people, or killing them, was just one. Newt didn’t know which was worse. He’d heard gypsies used to take girls. Well, now the Hell’s Angels roaring through a town sometimes grabbed a pretty girl off the street just like that and drugged her so bad she didn’t know who she was or where she came from. Then they’d take her to another state and sell her. The fear that one of them would go berserk in his town made Newt pretty nervous and jerky from about March fifteenth to the beginning of June. Then when the races were over and it started getting really hot, they took off.

The rest of the year was pretty quiet in his small town of Potoway Village, a retreat of modest houses and stores tucked almost two thousand feet up in the hills of San Diego County, east of Carlsbad. It was a wild place, typical of California, where within the space of a few miles, there was glittering ocean and beaches; mountains that climbed as high as five thousand feet; and desert, as barren and dry as any in the world.

Newt wanted to keep his people safe, but he also liked quiet because there were only six of them in the Sheriff’s Office in Potoway: two grumbling rookies too green to know when to wipe their asses, two experienced deputies close to retirement, and Darlene, who typed, manned the phone, took care of women and children, and made awful coffee. Only six, and if there was more going on than a bad wreck on the road, a robbery at the Quick Stop, a rattlesnake in someone’s living room, and a drunk or an OD, they just couldn’t handle it without help from outside.

Usually, though, they only had one or two of these things happening at a time. Camp Pendleton, the Marine base that covered over twenty miles on the north-south highway that everybody called the Five, had their own policing; and Oceanside—affectionately called Marine City U.S.A.—and the bigger towns to the west netted most of the drug scene and homicides.

In addition, in this part of the world so close to the Mexican border, the Feds known as IMNAT constantly prowled the hills and deserts looking for illegal aliens. There was a lot of Federal and State money in law enforcement in San Diego County. But there weren’t many signs of it in Potoway, so Newt made it a special concern of his to keep up-to-date. He went to conferences and took some courses. Once he went all the way to Atlanta for one. And he still worried about what the Sheriff’s Office of Potoway would do if they ever had a really big case to solve. Collecting material from crime scenes was a complicated science these days. They could tell a lot of things from fibers and soil and the patterns blood made when it spattered, a lot more things than they used to. The last course he took emphasized how it was vital for labs and crime scene people to work together closely. Out here, close was a long way away. The nearest lab was thirty-five miles from here, and that kind of mattered because things like body fluids had to be handled just right, or they spoiled.

Newt gunned the accelerator and turned on his siren. Already the kid was way ahead of him, charging his Harley along the mountain road, clearly delighted to have a cop chasing him with no chance of being arrested.

It took nearly twenty minutes to get to the spot on the edge of the desert where the land started chunking up into hills and ridges. It was late afternoon, nearly evening. When Newt got out of the car, the boy had already been standing there motionless beside his bike for some time, riveted to the sight of two buzzards tearing at the nose and lips and cheeks of a dead girl, whose naked red and black body had already begun to dry and split in the sun.