Double Prey

Chapter Twenty-three

The rancher was dressed for town-clean, pressed blue jeans, a white western-cut shirt with embroidered pockets flaps, and a purple scarf knotted around his neck like a 50s country western singer. He picked his way carefully up the slope, not looking up at the officers until he reached the flat by the guardian boulder.

“Morning, all,” he greeted. “Sorry I’m late for the meeting.” He stopped when he saw the gridded trap. “Well, how about that.” He shook hands with each member of the party like a politician, adding a gallant little bow and a two handed grip for Estelle. “Is somebody going to tell me what’s going on here?” His pleasant smile faded immediately and he lowered his voice as if the rocks might harbor eavesdroppers.

“Herb Torrance called to tell me about the Romero boy.” He frowned. “I can’t recall his first name.”

“Freddy,” Estelle said.

“That’s the one. Gosh, just too damn bad that things like this have to happen. You know, I’ve seen him out and around now and then, flying low on that four-wheeler of his. Jesus, I’m surprised something hasn’t happened before this.” He turned and looked at Bob Torrez, eyebrows arched. “But that was down there in the canyon, wasn’t it?”

“Yup.”

“So what’s the deal here?”

“You read the papers?” Torrez asked.

“Once in a while, I do.”

“You read about the kid finding the jaguar?”

“Well, I did. Wasn’t that just the damnedest thing, though. But that was over at Borracho, I thought.”

“That’s what we thought, too. Turns out it was right here.” Torrez pointed at the rock overhang behind him with his upper lip, like a Navajo.

“Is that right?” Waddell stepped closer and peered at the packrat nest, then squatted down. “You got some lights in there,” he announced. He ducked his head even more, trying to peer into the rocks. “Goes on a ways? I can feel the air.”

“You ever crawled back in there?”

Waddell scoffed and stood up. “Not this son-of-a-bitch, no sir. Gives me the heebie-jeebies to be underground. I’m no spelunker.” He stretched out each syllable as if knowing the word impressed him. “So tell me something. You got one, two, three, four people here, and I saw Doug Posey down on the two-track a ways back. What’s the deal? All this just to recover some more bones, or what?”

“That’s just about exactly the size of it,” the sheriff said.

“Your tax dollars at work, Miles,” Gastner quipped.

“Did you know this was here, sir?” Estelle asked.

Waddell shook his head. “You know, I got a bad knee. I’m not much for hikin’ around in the boonies. I like to keep level ground under my boots. But that’s interesting, you have a pretty good air flow coming out here, too. Most of this mesa is one big jumble of caves, seems like. Somebody’s going to have a ball exploring them. You know, when we were grading that two-track up the side of the mesa, I bet we found five or six spots where air was leaking up to the surface. Kinda makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

“Indeed it does,” Gastner said, but he didn’t pursue the thought. “You ready?” he said to Torrez.

“’Bout an hour ago,” the sheriff replied.

“You know, I was kidding about a warrant this morning,” Waddell said to Estelle. “You guys want to spelunk all day, have at it.” He hadn’t sounded so cooperative on the phone, but then again, it had been early on a Sunday morning. Perhaps he hadn’t had his coffee and Sunday paper yet.

“We appreciate that, sir,” Estelle said. Waddell glanced in puzzlement at the laptop computer that she carried.

“Hi-tech stuff,” he said.

“We’re nothing if not hi-tech,” she said by way of explanation.

“I’ll just stay on out of the way,” the rancher said. As he backed up, he almost stepped on the gridded tarp. “Now what’s this for?”

“Like she said, we’re hi-tech,” Gastner said, a pleasant non-answer that seemed to satisfy the rancher.

“Hey, what do you think about the new digital ear tags? What, GPS located and all that?”

“It’s coming, Miles. It’s coming.”

“What the hell are we going to do about that? All this is just getting out of hand, Bill.”

As Estelle ducked into the crevice, careful not to whack the laptop on the surrounding rocks, she only half-heard Gastner’s reply. Moving carefully to disturb the dust as little as possible, she slid forward, staying far to the right. She repositioned the spotlight to her left so that she could use the flat spot for the computer. In the odd light, a combination of soft darkness and harsh spotlight, the screen was bright, almost garish.

She touched the respirator to make sure it was secure, took a deep breath, and reached out for the holster-the first artifact. Removing only enough dust to see where the belt fragments might be attached, she saw that a three-inch portion was caught in the buckle, the rest gnawed off. Two trouser loops remained, one dangling by a thread. The piece of trouser fabric was crumpled, no larger than a small napkin.

“We have a couple of vertebrae caught in the belt, but nothing else,” Estelle said. She could hear Torrez’s breathing behind her, but he said nothing. “I don’t see any sign of the pelvic bones yet.” Taking a moment to orient herself to the computer, she then typed in a number. The bright yellow digits H-3,4 appeared on the screen.

The holster and belt slipped off the vertebrae as Estelle eased them out of their place on the cave floor. They felt wispy light, all of the life long dried out of them. She repeated the numbers to Torrez, who simply held out both hands, palms up. “The three vertebrae will be the same numbers,” she said.

Piece by piece, she worked her way into the cave. Bits of bone were mingled with scraps of clothing and desiccated carcass. With each discovery, she reached back and touched in the data. The grid on the computer screen became an explosion of yellow numbers, a random scatter that didn’t coalesce into any recognizable pattern. After an hour, her neck and shoulders aching, she paused and gazed at the computer screen. “There’s no way to tell how the body lay in here originally. We can’t tell if he was curled up, flat on his belly, or what.”

“He?” Torrez asked.

“That’s a fifty-fifty guess,” Estelle said. “Someone wearing a gun like the one Freddy found? I don’t see many Annie Oakleys around Posadas County.” She picked up an artifact that was easily recognizable, despite years of critter chewing. “Or that wear size twelves,” she added, and passed the pathetic remains of the boot and its contents out to the sheriff. He took it without comment.

“You see the skull yet?” he asked.

“It’s in the very back. I’m working that way.”

“That’s where the answers are.”

“Sin duda. ” Reaching the back of the chamber, even though it was only five feet across at the broadest point, was a chore for a gymnast. Unyielding geology dug into her hips and bumped her head and shoulders as she maneuvered, trying to disturb the gray dust as little as possible. Each time she moved, another small piece was revealed and she forced herself to remain patient and methodical as she worked her way in.

Finally, the gray mound that she recognized as the skull was within reach. Whether the skull had rolled thanks to gravity, or whether a resourceful coyote had played soccer with it, was impossible to tell. It had come to rest with its face against the back wall of the little cave, just inches from the air vent. A little more coyote play, and it might have tumbled into the bowels of the earth, gone forever.

None of the neck tissue remained, and as she brushed off dust, the harsh light revealed gnaw marks on the occipital mounds. Mixed now with dust and other detritus, a thin wisp of hair the size of a dime remained on a patch of skull above where the left ear had once been.

“A-nine.” But she paused before passing the skull to the sheriff, considering how she might hand it backward without yielding her progress into the chamber. A large rock jutted out of the ceiling, forcing her head low.

“You got claustrophobia yet?”

“I’m close,” Estelle said.

“Can’t put a name with the face,” Torrez said drolly as he watched her rotate the artifact. She stopped when she saw the ragged hole low on the left frontal bone, immediately over the orbit. The skull was badly fractured around the quarter-sized hole, and a half turn revealed the smaller entry fracture on the posterior surface of the parietal.

“Okay, ” she whispered to herself.

“This guy didn’t crawl in here to die of old age,” Torrez said.

“A-nine,” she repeated, and managed an awkward underhanded pass to the sheriff, running her hand down along her leg.

Other voices outside the cave were muted, but the arrival of the skull prompted a rush of conversation, most of it Miles Waddell’s articulate tenor.

Estelle kept her voice down. “Waddell shouldn’t be here. Not now.”

“Bill’s keepin’ him back. There ain’t anything outside the cave anyways.”

“Nos vemos. I’d like to see Alan out here now, though.”

“You got it.”

She waited for a moment, letting her pulse back off from its pounding, spiked by bad air, the dust, the confines of the rock sarcophagus, the adrenalin rush of the discovery. How much had Freddy seen?

For another hour, she combed the cave floor, sending fragments back to the sheriff. Some, like the left side of the lower jaw, were sizeable, even though the right half was missing, a treasure that some creature had grabbed as a trophy. She could imagine the coyote or skunk scuttling away with his find, maybe attracted by the wink of a gold tooth filling.

By lying flat, she could worm her way toward the rush of cool, musty air that forced its way up the chimney. A flashlight revealed only fissures where the limestone had fractured and slumped, streaks where moisture had followed those fissures, and dust-always the fine gray powder that covered every surface.

“What are you doin’?” Torrez asked. He tapped the sole of her boot.

“Thinking.”

“There’s more comfortable places to do it.”

“Sin duda.” She turned her flashlight in an arc, probing the small corners where the glare of the spotlight didn’t reach. She moved several rocks that lay loose, finding nothing. “I need a sifter. We need to sift whatever we can scrape up from the floor in here, and then we need to go through the packrat’s nest back behind you.”

That brought a moment of silence from the sheriff.

“C-six, three,” she said. That fragment, probably bone, had been roughly the size of a dime, and perhaps an eighth of an inch thick-a tiny piece that her fingers, clad in the thin surgeon’s gloves, had found almost by accident as her hand relaxed for a moment. “And if that’s a piece of the skull, that means he was in this cave when he was shot.”

“Or shot himself,” Torrez amended.

“I would bet against that.”

“Not to mention one little thing…it’s hard as hell to shoot yourself in the back of the head. I mean, you can do it, but not too many folks try.” He coughed gently. “Maybe it’s the idea of seein’ their own face explode out right in front of their eyes.”

Estelle shifted and examined the ceiling with care…dust, loose rocks, stains here and there that were most likely bat guano. An earth tremor of insignificant magnitude could rearrange this place in an instant-and probably had over the years.

“It would be no small trick to push a body up in here. Close to impossible. But if the victim willingly crawled in, and then pop. Right in the head.”

“Could.”

“I need a sifter screen,” she repeated.

“Lemme see,” Torrez said. “You going to stay there, or are you comin’ out?”

“I’ll stay put.”

Five minutes later, she glanced back over her shoulder to see the sheriff working his way back in, mask hanging down under his chin.

“Doug Posey’s going to run over to Torrance’s and see what he can find.”

“He’s going to go back past Waddell’s well and take the county road?”

“I’ll tell him to.”

“I don’t want any more traffic down through the canyon. Not until we have the chance to take a careful sweep through there.”

“He knows that,” Torrez said. “You need to back out of there for a while.”

He tapped the sole of her right boot again.

The sun felt unusually hot and welcome as Estelle emerged out from under the overhang. Head clear of the overhanging rocks, she turned and saw Linda Real with camera poised, a wide grin on her face. Always the shutter-bug opportunist, Linda rapped off four or five exposure before Estelle could raise a hand in self-defense.

“The earth insect look,” Linda said. “I love it.”

Estelle removed the respirator, aware for the first time of how hard the rubber seal had been digging into her face. Her cheeks ached, but fresh, unfiltered air tasted wonderful.

Bill Gastner stood at the far end of the blue tarp, hands on his hips. He held out both hands toward the bones, as if they might suddenly reassemble themselves. “Let the fun begin, Madame Undersheriff.”