Out of Season

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Doug Posey appeared in the doorway and hesitated. He stood with his hands on his hips, surveying the collected remnants. He saw me and shook his head, a grimace on his face as he walked over. As tall as Bob Torrez’s six-four, Posey was so thin that he looked as if he’d break in the middle in a stiff breeze.

I introduced him to the federal agents. “Officer Posey has been with the State Department of Game and Fish for four years,” I said. “If we could steal him away from them, we would.” Posey tried to smile and he tugged nervously at all the junk on his Sam Brown belt. He looked more like nineteen than the twenty-nine that he was.

“I sure was sorry to hear about the sheriff,” he said. “God, look at this. The crash just tore it to bits, didn’t it?” He bent down and touched one of the twisted propeller blades. “It’s on the television, even.”

“You know it’s big when news from Posadas hits the airwaves,” I said, and then reflected privately that all the publicity would have made Martin Holman nervous. He wouldn’t have liked this at all-being the center of federal, state, and local attention. And sure as could be, now that the preliminary reports had leaked out, we’d be targeted by the news crews.

“They’ll descend like vultures when they find out it was no accident,” Neil Costace said. “I’m surprised they’re not knocking on the door now.”

“It wasn’t an accident?” Posey looked up, startled.

“Looks like it wasn’t, Doug,” I said. “The pilot caught a bullet that we think was fired from the ground.”

“No shit?”

I nodded. “Keep it under your hat for now, all right?”

“Sure. Frank Dayan was at the office when I stopped by. Gayle was giving him the official story, from what it sounded like.”

“Which means she was giving him zilch,” I said. I had nothing against the editor of the Posadas Register. In fact, there had been times when I’d orchestrated events-or at least news releases-so that they benefited the Register’s Wednesday/Friday publication days, giving them a local scoop over the big-city papers. But we needed some peace and quiet now. “Look,” I said and took Posey by the elbow.

“You want some privacy?” Hocker asked.

I waved a hand in dismissal. “No. In fact, you might be interested, too. Doug, our call logs show that Sheriff Holman was trying to get ahold of you yesterday. He tried several times.”

“Yesterday?”

I frowned. “What the hell is today? Sunday? Not yesterday, then. Friday. On Friday, he was trying to reach you. Did you get those messages?”

Posey nodded. “I was stuck down in the eastern part of the state with a little operation we had going there. I got his message on my machine when I came in just a little while ago.”

“What did the sheriff want, do you know?”

Posey rested his hand on the clip pouches on the front of his belt. “The crash wasn’t an accident? You’re sure of that?” he asked, and he glanced across at Hocker and Costace. I liked the kid even more.

“No, it wasn’t,” I said. “The firing of the bullet might have been. At this point, we don’t know if the bullet that struck the pilot was fired intentionally or not. None of us know for sure which direction we should be going with all this, but we’re trying to track down each loose end. There’s the question of Martin’s calls to you and we need to know where those lead, if anywhere. It’s conceivable that the flight he was making was somehow related to what he wanted from you. We don’t know.”

“Well,” Posey said, “about two weeks ago, he stopped me downtown as I was coming out of the bank. He asked me what I knew about the legalities of impounding wildlife. Game animals.”

“Impounding?”

Posey nodded. “That’s what the sheriff said. He told me that someone had asked him about it and that he didn’t know what the regs were.” Posey looked pained. “We both had places we needed to go, and he told me that he’d get back to me on it with more specifics if there was a problem. I got busy with other things and didn’t follow up on it. I guess he didn’t either, until last week.”

“When you say ‘impounding,’ you mean fencing in wildlife so it can’t roam outside of a given area?” Estelle asked.

“Sure. Mostly it’s done with fish. You dam up a waterway with a real restricted intake and overflow sluice so the fish can’t go upstream or down.”

“I don’t think we’re talking fish,” I said.

“I sure don’t know what you’d impound around here,” Posey said. “Antelope, I guess, maybe deer, although there’s enough of them out on the open that I don’t see what sense it’d make. Up in the northern part of the state, there have been a few ranchers who got into trouble restricting the movements of elk. The big-game ranches do that all the time. They manage herds, the whole bit-but they have the proper permits for it.” He shrugged. “I just don’t know. We didn’t talk again after that, so I don’t know what he was up to.”

I looked at Estelle thoughtfully. “What do you think?”

“I just don’t know either, sir.”

“Let’s go talk to this Boyd person,” Hocker said. “See if he was out shooting at prairie dogs on Friday.”

“You ready for it to go public?” Costace asked quickly.

Hocker shrugged. “Hell, why not? Maybe somebody’ll call in a hot tip.”

I beckoned to Estelle. “Come along,” I said. “If you get a chance to talk to Maxine Boyd, go ahead. Find out what’s eating her.”

I turned and nodded at the FBI agents. “We were just out there at the ranch before you came to the office. The Boyds haven’t had so much company in a long time. And they’re going to be really pleased to see you folks.”

Hocker caught the tone of my voice. “I bet,” he said.