Out of Season

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The block house was ninety paces from the windmill, slightly uphill. Roughly rectangular in shape, it was situated against the slope of a small mesa, its length running almost north-south. One door, perhaps the only one, was on the south end, facing the windmill.

Every time I saw one of these remnants from the homestead era, I marveled at how much physical labor the people had invested in the vain hope that the land would bloom for them, that the cattle would run fat and sleek, that this hundred-sixty-acre gift from their benevolent government would offer the magic they sought.

I ambled up to the structure and put my hand gently on the wall, feeling the cool silence of the stones. Some of the blocks showed shaping marks where the builder, sitting in the hot sun, chisel in hand, had whacked off the rock spurs that prevented a good, solid fit.

The walls were surprisingly square, still vertical after years of every manner of assault that the fickle weather could hurl at them.

The roof beams had been of juniper, and fragments stuck out from the upper portion of the walls.

Estelle was moving slowly along the outside wall, head down, searching the ground, and while she did that, I went inside, slipping past a jumble of roof boards and beams that had crashed across the doorway.

No doubt hunters had used the house in years past, but there was no sign now of their fires. Over in one corner, a wooden crate with “California Oranges” stenciled on its side had been crushed by one of the rocks that had slipped from its position high up, just under one of the ceiling-beam sockets.

The place was home to pack rats, but not much else. I toed the dirt floor with my boot. The earth was powdery, churned up by cattle when they’d wandered inside before the roof had caved in.

A bit of metal caught my eye, and I stooped and picked up an empty cartridge casing. The brass was dull and lifeless, and the end where the bullet had been was crushed flat.

I wet my thumb and rubbed the base of the cartridge, then held it up to try to read the head stamp. After several attempts, I gave up.

“Sir?” Estelle said. Her voice was muffled behind the wall.

“Inside,” I said.

“Can you come here for a minute?”

I picked my way out and walked around the side of the building. Estelle was standing near the wall with her back to it, facing east.

“Can you make this out?” I asked and handed her the casing.

She turned it this way and that, frowned, and read out loud, “Remington UMC, twenty-five thirty-five.” She looked up and handed the casing back. “That’s an old one. And it’s been here a while.”

I nodded. “What’d you find?”

She grimaced and looked at the wall beside her. “This is the north wall,” she said. “Am I right?”

I glanced over my shoulder at the afternoon sun. “Sure enough,” I said.

“Now, if this is north, that means that Sheriff Holman snapped the picture as they were flying west, and he tripped the shutter when the plane was actually a little way west of here.” She stepped away from the wall and held an arm up. “About there.”

“He was sitting on the right side of the aircraft, so that’s right,” I agreed. “He got the windmill, and then in the background, looking north, this structure. And so?”

Estelle opened the folder and took out the photo. “The sun is in the pilot’s face,” she said, holding up the photo. I tilted my head back so my bifocals would have a chance to bring the thing into focus. “The airplane is moving right along, and Martin takes the photo.”

“Remember that the Bonanza is a low-wing aircraft,” I said. “Unless they’re in a steep bank, the wing’s going to be in the way. So in order to take that photo, he’s got to actually turn and shoot almost over his shoulder.” I held up both hands, miming the photographer, and twisted to my right. “He’s shooting back and down.”

“That’s right,” Estelle said. “Back and down. The east wall of the house is in the shade, and it casts a pretty good shadow away from it, to the east. Right here.” She touched the photo with her little finger. “There’s no shadow on the west side.”

“Couldn’t be,” I said and looked at her quizzically. “So what’s your point?”

“What’s this, then?”

“Where?”

“Here,” and this time she slipped the pen out of her pocket and used it as a pointer. “The shadows are hard and well-defined. I mean, look at the windmill’s shadow, sir. You can count every cross brace. But what’s this?”

I frowned. Turning the photo didn’t help. “Let me see,” I said, and walked back to the northeast corner of the old house and stood facing east. If I stepped just a pace to the north, away from the building, the western mass of the structure didn’t block the sun, and it became a soothing warmth on my back.

“And directly in front of you, sir, is your shadow.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” I said.

“But look at the picture,” she persisted. “There is a shadow there. It’s not perfectly definite because of the distance. But it is a shadow.”

“Sure enough,” I said. The dark mark, little more than what would be left by a careless touch of a fine-line marker, stretched out from the northeast corner of the building, just about the same distance as my shadow was then doing.

“There’s nothing here to cause a shadow, sir.”

I turned and studied her face, then looked at the photograph, then back at her. She waited for me to catch up, her black eyes excited.

“You’re saying that someone was standing right here?” I asked.

“I think so. We need to have Linda enlarge this section. If she can’t do it, maybe the FBI labs can do something.”

“They can do anything,” I said. “If the government can read license plates from satellite images, it certainly can enhance this. But wait.” I stepped away from the house again and raised an arm. “The Bonanza is flying along, close to a hundred fifty miles an hour or so. I don’t believe that Martin Holman could have seen someone standing behind this building.”

“I don’t believe so either, sir. But look at the angles.” She raised her arm next to mine and swept it across the sky along the path that the airplane must have flown. “Whoever it is, he sees the plane and ducks behind the building here, out of sight. Now right there”-she stopped the swing of her arm-“is about where the airplane must have been when Martin took the photo.”

“The wall hides the person from view, but his shadow extends out to the east. It’d be visible,” I said.

“That’s what I think.”

I pursed my lips and studied the photo. “Mrs. Finnegan said that the plane was flying east-west tracks.”

“That fits, sir.”

“What a photo,” I said. “But if Charlotte is correct, the aircraft was coming toward her when it reared up. If this is the shadow of a man, then either it’s of the gunman or of someone who was really close to where the gunman was standing. He would have heard the gunshot clearly…if he didn’t make it himself.”

“It would make more sense to make the shot on a return trip, when the aircraft was heading east. Maybe on the next leg, they flew slightly north of this site. Whoever it was, he could see the plane coming and set himself up.”

“Why?”

“We don’t know that yet, sir.”

“And we don’t know for certain that this tiny black speck is a shadow, either. Not for sure.”

“It’s pretty clear, sir.”

I leaned against the cool stones of the north wall and regarded the ground. “As rocky as this area is, we’re not going to find prints.”

“Are you up for a little stroll, sir?”

“Stroll? That sounds nasty. To where?”

She gestured up the slope. “I’d like to see what’s up there. It’s just enough of a rise that we’ll see…” She stopped and shrugged. “Who knows what we’ll see?” She opened the folder again and looked at the photo. “Nothing is centered in this,” she said. “It’s always possible that Martin was aiming at something else and just plain missed.”

An unkind remark came to mind, the sort of thing I would have cheerfully voiced had Martin Holman been alive. I shook my head.

“That’s easy to do,” I said. “Let’s stroll.”