Double Prey

Chapter Twelve

By Saturday morning, Estelle was reasonably sure that the entire community had heard of Freddy Romero’s death. The timing of events had shut out coverage by Frank Dayan’s Posadas Register, of course, but other newspapers would report the incident with a paragraph or two. The Romeros themselves would have spoken to friends of the family, and from there, like a wildfire roaring across the prairie, the news would sweep through the community.

That grapevine could be a powerful tool, Estelle knew. If there was a relationship between the discovery of the handgun and the bullet hole in the cat’s skull, someone besides Freddy Romero knew about it. It made sense to her that Freddy had found the handgun only recently. Otherwise, he likely would have let someone in on his secret-Freddy actually turning the gun in to authorities was too much to expect-and he likely would have cleaned it up…at least wiped off the grime and guano.

Early Saturday morning, Linda Real and Sgt. Tom Mears had taken the Smith and Wesson for a comprehensive series of macro-photos, documenting the condition of the gun before it was cleaned and prepared for a comparison firing. Even scrapings of the dust and droppings had been sampled and preserved for analysis should that become necessary.

Estelle had agreed to meet with George Romero at nine, and ten minutes before that time, she looked out from her office and saw her neighbor standing at the dispatcher’s island talking with Sheriff Robert Torrez. George looked as if he had tried for sleep while crumpled in a hard plastic waiting room chair. Dense stubble darkened his face, and his eyes were sunken with fatigue. When he saw the undersheriff, he slumped a bit more, as if hit with the awful news for a second time. He shook Torrez’s hand and approached Estelle, surprising her with a powerful hug.

“Hey, neighbor,” he murmured. After a long moment, he pushed back a bit, one beefy hand on each of the undersheriff’s shoulders. It appeared as if he wanted to say something further, but couldn’t.

“Can you take George out to the site?” Torrez asked, and the man nodded at him thankfully. He’d been unable to find words for that simple question.

“Of course,” Estelle replied. “Give me a moment to collect a few things.”

Back in her office, she selected a series of photographs and placed them in a folder, tucking that into her briefcase. “Tata’s with you?” she asked when she returned to dispatch.

Romero shook his head. “She wanted to stay at the house. It ain’t been a good night, I can tell you that. She told me to go ahead and go, if that’s what I wanted to do. She was tending to the neighbors that came over. It’s just something, you know? Something that I got to see. Couldn’t tell you why.”

They left the building, and Romero turned toward his own Suburban.

“Let’s take mine,” Estelle said. “I need to have my office with me.”

He settled in the passenger seat of the county SUV, stiff and uncomfortable, obviously feeling out of place. He watched her go through the routine with the log and dispatch.

“Makes it a little easier having something to do, don’t it.”

“I think it does,” she said.

“You said Bill was with you? I mean when you found the boy.”

“Yes, sir. He was.”

“Well, that’s good, at least. He still getting out quite a bit?”

“You bet.”

His right fist pounded a slow, thoughtful tattoo on the door’s arm rest as they pulled out onto Grande and headed southwest.

“Yesterday sometime,” Romero said.

“Thursday, sir. That’s what it appears.”

“And we drove off up north without even knowing he was lying out there.”

“There was no way you could.” Estelle knew full well that the assuaging comment wasn’t even close to the truth. When he should have been in school, Freddy Romero had loaded his ATV into the back of his aging pickup truck and set off for the boonies. Tata Romero was home all day, every day. For her not to have seen the boy making preparations for his escapade was unlikely. But Freddy was an independent, feisty eighteen-year-old. Estelle knew that it would be easy to let him go his own way, unquestioned.

“I’ll show you what we did yesterday,” Estelle said. “If you know anything about what Freddy might have been doing, I’d appreciate hearing it.”

Romero nodded, but said nothing, and they rode in silence until Estelle turned onto the Borracho Springs access road. The tracks of Stub Moore’s vehicle hauler were obvious. “We found his pickup truck parked here,” she explained. “Stub took it down to the county impound until we’re done with it.” Romero would have known exactly how the procedure worked, but the small talk might help cut through his fatigue.

“He unloaded his four-wheeler and rode it out to the highway. No tracks back up toward the campground or the springs.” She maneuvered the SUV around and they returned to the highway. “He drove along the shoulder to the saloon. I was parked down the highway a little, on the shoulder just beyond the County Road 14 cattleguard. I saw him ride down here, right along the highway. He skirted the saloon and took the backcountry trail out to Bender’s Canyon.”

“I don’t understand what he was doing,” Romero said. “You talked to Casey?”

“Not since earlier yesterday.”

“She lives out this way, you know.”

This way was fifteen miles as the crow flew, and on that Thursday, Freddy Romero would have know that Casey was in school-where he should have been. Because the girl of his dreams obviously wasn’t home, there would have been no reason to stop by the ranch.

“Tata was going to call her,” George added. “That Casey…just a real swell girl, you know? The boy and her were pretty tight. This…this is going to be tough for her.” He shook his head. “Tough for all of us.”

Estelle slowed and turned into the Broken Spur’s parking lot and skirted the building. As they nosed down into the arroyo, her passenger reared backward, one hand flying to the dash.

“Jesus, you’re really going down in…” he let the rest trail off as they did just that, the SUV jouncing and spitting gravel. As they crested the north rim and trundled along the rough two-track, Romero relaxed back. “I rode out here with him once. Must have been a year ago now.”

“On one machine, or two?”

“Me and Butch on one, Freddy on the other. We were going to see if we could find that big prairie dog town that Herb Torrance said was over here…all the way over on the back of his place. He said it was easy to find, but we sure as hell never did. Just some scattered colonies.”

“Freddy had his.22 rifle with him. Would he have gone prairie dog hunting, do you suppose?”

“Maybe. He’s done that a time or two, but not with a.22. Never reach out with that.”

“Freddy’s had that rifle for a while?”

“That little Ruger? I bought that for his sixteenth birthday,” Romero said. “Made him take hunter safety…all that. Told him I didn’t want him carrying that rifle loaded on the ATV.”

“Well, the rifle isn’t the issue,” Estelle said gently. “It was in the boot with the magazine in place but nothing in the chamber. As nearly as we can tell, sir, your son was riding a little fast, cleared a sharp little rise, went airborne, and hit a rock coming down. The trail is narrow there, and he didn’t have time to control it before he went over the edge.”

“He wasn’t drinking,” Romero said, a flat statement rather than a question. “He wasn’t twenty-one.”

“Mr. Romero, kids take liberties all the time. As a matter of fact, there were two cans of beer in his cooler, but he left them in the truck. The cab smelled of beer, but that could be from any time.”

Romero fell silent, watching the prairie pass by.

“Your son explored a lot on his own, sir?”

He nodded. “I had words with him now and then, but what can you do, you know? Look, I knew that he skipped school. I knew that. Tata and I argued about that, too. But his grades were all right. He went to school when he had to. That’s the way I look at it.” Romero wiped his eyes. “Freddy wasn’t all too concerned with planning ahead,” he said, and then, as if that topic held memories too painful, asked, “So you and Bill followed his tracks all the way out here? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I got to thank you for that. For worrying about him, I mean. He could have been lyin’ out here for days even…” He choked the thought off. “This isn’t easy for you. I mean, you got the two little ones yourself.” He reached out a hand to brace himself as the Expedition lumbered over an outcropping. He fell silent again as they crested the rise above Bender’s Canyon Trail, joining the wider two-track that ran east-west.

“You have no idea why he would have taken this particular route?” Estelle asked. “Other than that you had been out hunting before in this general area?”

“No idea. Except there’s a trail here that he could follow. I told him that private property was just that-private. He wasn’t to go riding around on somebody’s ranch just because there wasn’t no fence to keep him out. Folks don’t want to see those tracks all over everywhere. And if he was going to shoot dogs, then he needed to ask the rancher first.”

“He generally did that, then?”

“Sure, he did that. Freddy has an independent streak a mile wide, but he’s a good kid. You know that.”

They reached Trujillo’s homestead, and once more Estelle looked at the faint traces of a vehicle’s turning around in the brush and grass beside the two-track, and the short section of clearer tracks in the sand beside the corral. Linda had photographed those every way possible, but they showed next to nothing-not clear enough to show tread, not even defined enough for an accurate measurement center to center, no way to tell when they’d been made. Estelle found herself curious about them only because they were there, in this particular, isolated place, so near to the scene of the tragic accident.

Cresting the small hill, a welter of tracks marked the two-track and the area around it. The big duals of Stub Moore’s tow truck crisscrossed the trail where he had maneuvered to bring the hoist into line with the crushed ATV. The edge of the arroyo had crumbled back another foot or so, a cascade of fresh dirt collapsing down to the bottom of the cut. She stopped the truck and saw that the tracks and the disruption of the arroyo edge were not lost on George Romero.

“Oh, God,” he whispered.

“It appears that he came over this little rise ahead of us way too fast, sir. His left front tire clipped the rocks, and he lost it.”

Romero didn’t reply, but slipped out of the Expedition, hanging onto the door as if his knees had turned to jelly. Only scuffs in the gravel arroyo bottom remained to tell the story, but Estelle could see the ATV and the quiet form of Freddy Romero, his helmet thrown to the other side of the arroyo, as clearly as if they were still lying there. Perhaps mercifully, George Romero saw only the arroyo gravel. He wiped his eyes on first one sleeve and then the other.

“He was out here all night,” he managed to say after a moment, and he beat his fist gently against the Expedition’s fender. He stared down into the arroyo. There was something about the site of a personal tragedy that drew people like magnets-they erected markers along the highway, laid wreaths on sidewalks, anything to help them remember that this was the spot where a loved one breathed his last. Estelle stood quietly, leaning against the open door on the driver’s side, allowing George Romero time to come to terms with his ghosts.

“Maybe he didn’t suffer,” he said at last. Maybe, maybe not, Estelle thought. Her husband had said that in most cases, killed instantly was a nicety invented for grieving relatives. She gave Romero another full minute with his own thoughts.

“I’m still wondering why Freddy parked his truck over by Borracho,” she said when it looked as if George was going to turn away from the arroyo. “If he was going to ride over here, it would make more sense to park down at the intersection of this canyon road with 14.”

“I have no idea,” Romero said. “No idea whatsoever.”

“There’s really nowhere to ride the ATV over at the Springs, unless he was going to take the old county road to the east…up on Salinas mesa.”

“He’d been up there a time or two,” Romero said. “He’s been all over.”

“I would suppose so. Sir, let me show you something.” She reached in the window of the SUV and picked up the folder of photographs. Selecting a view of the handgun as it lay on the oily cloth used to wrap it, Estelle handed the photograph to Romero.

“Now what’s this?” He frowned at the photo.

“That was tucked in the carrier of your son’s four-wheeler, sir.” She handed him a second photo taken of the wrapped gun in situ, its blocky shape easily discernable through the cloth.

“He doesn’t own anything like this,” he said, and Estelle almost smiled. But George Romero’s surprise was genuine, and that surprise quickly turned to apprehension and concern. “You mean to tell me that he had that gun with him on the four-wheeler?”

“Yes, sir. The only fingerprints on it are his.”

“Nobody’s been shooting that thing.” He brought the photo close and his eyes narrowed with concentration. “Looks like it was dug out of the bottom of a chicken coop. Where…”

“We don’t know, sir.”

“Why do you think he had anything to do with it?”

The question was so obvious as to be nearly rhetorical, but Estelle said patiently, “It was in the carrier on his machine. It has his fingerprints on it.”

“Well, he found it somewhere. That’s what I say.”

“I agree with you.” She left the obvious question hanging.

For a long moment, George Romero stood with his shoulders slumped, hands clasped together at his belly as if waiting for the knots in his gut to untangle, gazing out over the peaceful arroyo. His head started to shake, a slow, agonized oscillation. “What are we going to do without Freddy,” he whispered.

He turned his back to the arroyo, facing Estelle. “Tell me what you’re doing with all this.” He wiped his eyes and started to climb back into the SUV.

“What are you asking, sir?”

He nodded at the folder of photos on the seat. Estelle got in the driver’s side and waited while he settled himself. “I got a right to know about what’s going on with Freddy,” he continued. “Look, I’ve been to my share of wrecks and such. You know that. I even drove a wrecker for a while. I know there’s always questions nagging. You got that,” and he nodded at the folder again. “That says to me that you got questions about how all this happened. Tata and me got a right to know.”

The undersheriff hesitated. The Romero family had suffered an unimaginable upset in the past two days, and still more lay ahead for them. There was no point in digging at open, painful wounds, but she didn’t wish to dissemble with George Romero by offering mindless platitudes.

“We have two questions lingering, sir. One may be more important than the other. Number one,” and she tapped the steering wheel with her right index finger. “I’m curious why Freddy parked his truck over at Borracho, then rode his ATV all the way over here. There’s probably a simple explanation, but I’d like to know what it is. There’s nothing illegal about what he did, there’s nothing illegal about parking over there, and then riding over here, as long as he stays off the highway. The beer is a violation, but I don’t care about that right now.” She looked across at George Romero, and her dark, aquiline features softened. “Why he did what he did just seems an oddity to me, and I’d like to know.”

“So would we,” George Romero murmured.

“And second, I’d like to know where Freddy found the handgun. That’s all. I think he did find it, sir. I have no reason to believe that he stole it, or bought it illegally, or anything like that. We know folks who have found all kinds of crazy things out in the boonies, and the most simple, innocent explanation is that the junk bounces out of trucks or Jeeps or whatnot. I just want to know, that’s all.”

“Sure don’t look like something he’d buy from somebody,” Romero said, nodding. “And no gun shop is going to sell something like that to an underage kid. Least I hope they wouldn’t. Maybe a friend? I don’t know.”

“As new information comes to light, I’ll be in touch,” Estelle said. “I’ll keep you and Tata informed.”

Romero nodded again as if that satisfied him. Estelle did not add that finding a bullet lodged inside the jaguar skull also fascinated her, or that there was a coincidental possibility that the bullet had come from the very Smith and Wesson that Freddy Romero had found…somewhere.