Scavengers

CHAPTER SIX

The second corpse lay in the shallow grave with his feet pointing south. Estelle stood with her hands in her pockets, gazing down at what no doubt had once been a young man who had entertained all manner of exciting ideas about his future. Those ideas had been cut short when a heavy caliber bullet had smashed through the xiphoid process on the lower end of his sternum and then minced the internal organs that bone was supposed to protect.

“Juan Doe,” as Deputy Thomas Pasquale had dubbed him, was no more than twenty-five years old, slight of stature with a lean, swarthy hawklike face, and long, black hair pulled tight behind his head in a short ponytail. He was dressed in blue jeans and a heavy denim shirt. A brown windbreaker had been tossed into the grave, perhaps as an afterthought, and lay across the man’s knees. Other than laboriously removing the dirt using first the small short-handled spades that the deputies routinely carried in their units and then by hand, the body hadn’t been touched or moved.

The grave was no more than eighteen inches deep, just enough to frustrate all but the most diligent coyotes. Estelle stood with her hands on her hips, surveying the distant horizon. Whoever had chosen the spot had worked at it. They had bounced along the rough service road that paralleled the power lines north from Maria for eleven miles. Five miles north of where she stood, the transmission lines crossed the interstate-and it was conceivable that the killers had gained access to the service road and driven south to this point. From whichever direction they’d come, this spot had served their purpose. They’d gouged out the young man’s final resting place under the hum of commerce overhead.

Estelle turned and looked west to where a shovel lay a couple dozen yards out on the prairie, partially concealed by a runty creosote bush-marked now by a bit of red flagging tied to one of the bush’s brittle limbs.

At a glance, it appeared to be a standard issue contractor’s shovel, long of handle with an elliptical blade and good, sturdy blade shoulders that would take a beating from heavy-soled work boots. The shovel was new enough that portions of the label still clung to the hickory handle.

Following Estelle’s gaze, Deputy Tom Pasquale said, “World class dumb. Somebody goes to all the trouble to dig a grave and then leaves the shovel behind.”

“Let’s hope so,” Estelle said. “If the shovel and grave are related in the first place.” She backed up half a dozen steps until she could lean against the eastern most upright of the huge transmission line support. It had taken nearly two hours to meticulously uncover the corpse, one careful scoop of desert soil at a time. She slid down the warm steel until she was resting on her haunches, arms comfortable across her knees.

“The crossroads,” she murmured, and pointed west. “I can make out the tracks that head out from here.” The sparse grass, bent and broken by the vehicle’s tires, would remain so for months, until summer rains hastened the decay of the vegetation, and new sprouts took their place. “And Perry MacInerny told Collins that he heard shots on the evening of Friday, February second. He’s got a parts receipt from the next day to lock in the date. All the way from here, you think?”

“Easily,” Tom Pasquale said. “Unless the wind was howling from the west.”

“MacInerny said it was calm.”

“Then he could have heard gunshots from miles away…especially heavy caliber artillery.”

Estelle nodded. “If the two killings are related, then Perry would have heard this shot first,” and she nodded toward the grave, “followed by the ones that killed number one, way over there to the west.” She turned, scanning the prairie. “I wonder how long.”

“How long?”

“MacInerny doesn’t remember an interval between the shots. If this one was first, and then”-she pointed to the west and stopped, brow furrowed-“that could be five minutes, ten minutes…almost anything.” She shook her head in frustration. “We’re going to have to work on Perry’s memory a little bit.” Turning to Jackie Taber, she said, “Tell me again what you saw.”

The stocky deputy pushed her Stetson back on her head and squinted up into the sun, now harsh and winking on the power lines overhead. The wind was strong enough to touch the expanse of power lines between each tower, flexing them slightly, making them moan.

“I was sitting in the unit, right there,” she said, indicating where the department Bronco was still parked. “I was waiting for Linda to come out. We were going to walk the tracks that showed up in the aerial photo. I saw where they took off to the west, right here, so this is where I parked. I was watching the changes in light, and I was getting ready to do some sketching. And that’s when I saw the pattern.”

Estelle regarded the grave expressionlessly. Scant as the vegetation was, there were an infinite number of places where a dedicated gravedigger could find a patch of earth two feet wide and five feet long without disturbing any plant life. Of all the places in Posadas County likely to remain undisturbed, and thus be suitable for an unmarked grave, the eastern Posadas prairie should have topped the list.

The transmission line service road, nothing more than a rude two-track in the best of places, paralleled the power lines just to the east of the tower’s legs at this particular point. The grave was across the two-track, its northwest corner forty-five feet, nine inches from the tower’s eastern support leg.

Estelle clasped her hands together and rested her chin on her intertwined fingers. “The pattern,” she repeated.

Jackie Taber’s were the eyes of an artist, Estelle knew. Why the young woman chose to spend her time as a graveyard shift deputy sheriff instead of using her GI bill money to attend a university and pursue her art was a question only Jackie could answer-and so far she had kept her reasons to herself. But the large eleven-by-fourteen sketch pad that was the deputy’s habitual companion included detailed pencil or pastel drawings that often revealed more than the impersonal wink of a camera’s lens.

“When the sun’s low, just when it starts up over the horizon,” Jackie said, holding her hand flat, palm down, “the way the light trips over things is really interesting.”

“Deputy Picasso,” Pasquale said.

Linda Real was standing within striking distance with her elbow, and did so. “She’s right, bozo.”

“I know she’s right,” Pasquale said easily and with a touch of admiration. “I tried one of those matchbook art contests once. It was so bad that when I tried to mail it in, the Post Office refused to deliver it.”

“What’s interesting is that this prairie is covered with rocks, all sizes and shapes, but uniformly covered, you know?” Jackie said. “If you want to sit down, you’re going to have to nudge a couple of rocks out of the way, no matter what. You look at Linda’s panoramic photos when she develops them, and you’ll see the grave, too. Whoever did it didn’t bother to take the time to kick the dirt smooth, so there wouldn’t be a hump. And they sure didn’t go back and duplicate the pattern of rocks.”

“Did you do a sketch?” Estelle asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’d like to see it.” She pushed herself upright and waited, one shoulder leaning against the steel support while Jackie walked to the Bronco. She returned with the pad, opening it carefully so that the wind wouldn’t grab the pages. She extended it to Estelle, who shook her head. “My hands are dirty,” she said. Jackie held the pad while the undersheriff scrutinized the drawing.

“There’s even a sort of windrow of rocks that got left after the construction crews went through, isn’t there,” she said. “Whoever dug the grave disturbed some of them.” She looked up at Jackie and smiled.

“Yes, ma’am. And it looks like whoever dug this grave didn’t take much time with it. They didn’t go a millimeter deeper than they had to.”

“So you saw this first? The grave?”

“I saw the disturbance of the ground, and that kind of tickled my imagination. I mean, this is a big prairie. To have an out-of-place feature of any kind…I mean, we’re interested in the tracks that lead over this way from the MacInerny site, and so that’s what I was looking for. Any kind of mark on the ground, any kind of disturbance. But I didn’t make the connection at first. I mean that it might be a grave.” She shrugged. “I mean, it could have just been a spot where one of the line crews parked a Bobcat or something. They let the blade down and made a mark.”

“A neat two by five,” Pasquale said.

“Well…” Jackie shrugged again. “And then I saw the shovel. The sun caught the blade. At first I thought it was just a tin can or something, then I saw the handle.” She grinned and flipped the sketch pad closed. “The handle makes a nice, hard straight line that’s really out of place. My first thought was, ‘Ah-ha, I’ve got me a nice new garden shovel, free of charge.’ And as I was getting out of the unit, it felt like somebody came up behind me and whacked me upside the head with a billy club.” She tapped her forehead with the palm of her hand. “I’m thinking, whoa! Over here’s what looks like a grave, and over there’s a shovel. And a mile or so due west, if we maybe follow a vague set of vehicular tracks, is a corpse that didn’t get buried at all…” She stopped and looked at Estelle. “It all hit me at once.”

“He’d still be comfortable under the dirt if they’d picked up their tools when they were finished,” Pasquale observed.

“Likely so,” Jackie said. “When Linda got here, she took a bunch of pictures, and then I dug down as carefully as I could, at one corner. You know, maybe somebody just buried a bunch of garbage or something. Or maybe it was nothing at all. I took about five little bites with the shovel, and uncovered the tip of one of his shoes. With my fingers, I dug down just far enough to determine that there was a foot inside the shoe, and stopped.”

The phone in Estelle’s pocket chirped, and she fished it out. The conversation was brief and one-sided. She snapped the phone closed. “They just turned on the service road down in Maria,” she said. “That’s what…almost eleven miles? So we’ve got about twenty minutes if they’re really hustling.” She turned in place, head down. With the toe of her boot, she loosened a small mound of sand and watched the wind rearrange it. “Any tracks have been obliterated long since,” she said. “And that’s too bad, because we’ve got some questions here.” Without moving, she turned and looked at the grave. “Forty-five feet, nine inches from here to the grave,” she said, tapping the vertical steel of the tower. “And how far in the opposite direction to the shovel?”

“It’s sixty-one feet from the tower’s northwest leg.”

“And so we’ve got more than a hundred feet between the grave and the shovel that dug it…if we want to make the logical assumption that the two are related.”

“That’s a far toss,” Linda Real said. “But it doesn’t make sense that they’d throw the thing in the first place.”

“No, it doesn’t. Did you check it for blood or anything like that?” Estelle asked Jackie.

“Not yet. I haven’t touched it. Linda took pictures of it in place, and I flagged the bush. I didn’t touch the shovel. There were no tracks in the immediate area, nothing but the shovel. And the way it’s caught in the bush, it sure looks like it was thrown.”

“But from where?” Estelle said. “No one’s going to dig a grave way over here, and then when they’re finished, wind up and hurl the shovel about a hundred feet west, assuming that they’d miss the framework of the towers. And assuming that they could throw it that far in the first place.” She thrust her hands in her pockets. “Why throw it at all?”

“I wonder how many more of these little surprises we’ve got out here,” Tom Pasquale said. He grinned at Jackie Taber. “You see any more patterns, Picasso?”

“No,” Jackie replied without a trace of humor. “Except I’ll be willing to bet that when we move Juan here, we won’t find any ID. That’s a pattern. And whatever weapon took off the back of John Doe’s head over by the MacInernys’ could sure enough have punched that big hole through this young man’s chest. That’s a pattern.”

“The answer’s with the shovel,” Estelle said more to herself than anyone else. She ducked her head against the wind, hunched her shoulders, and walked across the rough prairie toward the creosote bush in whose angular, spiky limbs the tool had lodged.

She walked around the bush, turned her back to the wind, and knelt, hands on her thighs. “TemperRite,” she said, reading the remains of the label on the handle. The tiny rectangular price tag was worn smooth, the printing nothing but a faint trace.

Jackie Taber knelt beside her. “The finish on the handle is smooth enough that we’re going to get some prints if we’re lucky,” Estelle said. “And we’ve got a price tag that might give us a point of purchase.” She rested her hands on the ground and leaned close. The shovel was turned slightly, and she could see the back of the blade, where the steel formed a deep groove to the handle socket.

“And there we have it,” she whispered. Against the earth-polished steel, the dark russet of dried blood might as well have been glow-in-the-dark paint. Caught in the folded steel, near the junction of metal blade and wooden handle, were several hairs. She leaned back and looked at Jackie Taber. “An interesting question.”

“A shovel makes a mean weapon,” the deputy said softly.

“Sure enough. But if it connected with somebody’s head before the grave was dug, then we wouldn’t expect to find blood and hair still on the blade.”

Jackie stood up with her hands on her hips, frowning down on the shovel. “It’s way up high, though. And on the back.” She grimaced. “Hard to tell.” She turned full circle, seeing Tom and Linda standing near the front fender of Jackie’s Bronco, their own and Estelle’s units nose to tail in a row behind it. In the distance, she could see a column of dust rising and then being whipped away in a spreading plume as the medical examiner and the EMT ambulance made their way up the rough, bouncing trail from Maria.

“This place gives me the creeps,” she said.