Twice Buried

11

The headlights of 310 picked up Linda Rael’s slight figure on the corner. The wind tugged at her long coat and her wide-brimmed slouch hat was pulled tightly down on her head. I could see the heavy camera bag slung over her right shoulder. I braked hard and she yanked open the passenger side door and was inside in one graceful, lithe movement. If I’d tried that, I would have ended up in traction for months.

As I accelerated the patrol car away from the curb I snapped on the red lights, and the pulsing beam bounced off the drab buildings as we headed out Bustos Avenue. Holiday cheer.

Clear of town, I nudged 310 a little faster. Traffic was light on the state highway and we flashed along for the first mile or so with Linda remaining silent. Her hands were tightly clasped together in her lap.

“Gayle said this was a homicide?” she asked finally.

“Apparently. Put on your seat belt. And what are you doing out at this hour?” Feeling paternal was a luxury I figured I could afford, even if her response was that it was none of my business.

“Just working…and there’s a deputy already out there?”

“Yes. Paul Encino and Tony Abeyta, both.”

In the dim light of the car, my peripheral vision caught the faint movement of her nod. We hurled past two big RVs driven no doubt by snowbirds trundling west. I wondered what they were doing out so late. When 310 was back in the proper lane, Linda turned slightly toward me. “May I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“If the body is already dead, and there’s an officer already out there, why are we in such a hurry?”

I glanced over at her, amused. She was resting her right hand on the dashboard as if that might stop her from going ballistic if we crashed into something solid.

“Are you serious?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I thought for a moment, trying to frame an appropriate answer, knowing that whatever I said would probably end up as a quotation in the damn newspaper. She didn’t have her pencil out, though, so maybe I was safe. And I didn’t slow down.

“If it’s a homicide, Linda, then every minute counts. Every minute that goes by in an investigation makes the trail just that much harder to follow.”

“But isn’t there a working deputy already on the scene?”

I braked hard and turned off on County Road 27. The rear end of the patrol car fishtailed on the gravel and Linda transferred her grip from the dash to the door’s courtesy handle.

“Yes. But he won’t investigate. All Paul has done is secure the scene.”

“Meaning what?”

“He makes sure no one tromps around and wrecks evidence. He makes sure nothing changes…the crime scene looks exactly the way it did when he found it. That’s all he does. Unless there’s someone standing over the corpse with a smoking gun or a bloody wrecking bar. Then I might let the deputy make an arrest.”

Linda nodded and put her hand up on the ceiling as she saw the first cattle guard approaching. We sailed across it without much of a thump and she brought her arm back down.

“And often evidence is time-related. So,” and I shrugged, “if weather conditions permit and if traffic permits, then we don’t let the moss grow.”

We were well away from the village and any other ranches. With no moon and a growing cloud cover, the prairie was a blank, featureless black void except for the bright tunnel bored by the patrol car’s headlights. We rounded a sweeping curve whose radius gradually tightened until we were down to twenty miles an hour-and that seemed too fast as juniper limbs almost brushed the fenders. Up ahead the wink of Encinos’s flashers was our beacon.

As we approached I could see a second vehicle on the shoulder of the road, far enough over that its wheels were nearly in the bar ditch. I didn’t have to see the magnetic sign on the door panel to know who owned the Suburban.

Deputy Paul Encinos stood by the front fender of his county Ramcharger, waiting. The dome light was on and I could see Tony Abeyta inside. Encinos raised his flashlight in salute as I pulled up behind his four-by-four.

“Should I stay in the car?” Linda asked.

“Yes,” I said and turned off the red lights.

The northwest wind had a bite as I stepped out of the car and I remembered the cloud banks I had seen earlier in the day, building in the west over San Cristobal mesa. I snapped my Eisenhower jacket closed and tucked my flashlight under my arm.

“What’s up?”

Paul Encinos pointed across the road with his flashlight. If I tried hard, I might make myself believe that I could see the body. But it was just a dark lump that could as easily have been bunch grass. “Tony and I were going to drive out this way as far as the Triple Bar T gate. I saw your orders on the bulletin board to close-patrol this stretch. And there he was.”

“How’d you happen to see him?”

“I had the spotlight on and was swinging it back and forth across the pasture there, trying to see dogs running or whatever.”

“Good man. Then you jumped the fence and walked over?”

Encinos shook his head. “No, sir. I used the binoculars and I could see that the victim was dead.”

I held out my hand and Encinos gave me the field glasses. He aimed the spotlight from the car until the corpse was centered in the pool of light. After a minute fussing with the adjustment I could make out that the body was lying roughly parallel to the roadway. The binoculars shortened the distance enough that I could see what was left of the man’s face. Unless there was a grass clump in the way, even my old eyes could tell that the man’s skull was missing from the bridge of his nose up.

“And you didn’t climb the fence?”

“No, sir. I didn’t want to mess anything up. Nobody’s been over there since we arrived.”

I nodded and handed the binoculars back. “Cut the top two strands of the fence,” I said, pointing directly across the road. “Watch where you step.”

Where the roadside fence ran along the ditch, the ground was tough bunchgrass and soil that was not much more than the bald top of an ancient limestone outcrop. A jackhammer wouldn’t have left many prints. I scanned the roadway carefully while Encinos rummaged in the trunk of his car for wire cutters.

“Just let it snap back,” I said when it looked like the two deputies were going to try and coil the wire after the cut. The remaining two strands were low enough that even I could hoist my bulk over without difficulty. “Walk the fence line along the road and along the two-track,” I said, pointing at the road to Reuben’s shack. “See where entry was made if you can.”

I walked a direct, careful line to the corpse, concentrating on the ground at my feet. Nothing marred the crumpled limestone. What dry grass blades had not been mowed down by cattle or deer stood pale and unbroken in the glare of the flashlight.

The corpse was lying on its side. Brown boots, blue jeans, lightweight down jacket over a brown cotton work shirt. Stuart Torkelson hadn’t changed his clothes since we’d talked earlier, not fifty yards from this spot. His head was a mess, with most of the forward vault of the skull missing.

I knelt down on one knee. There was a small puddle of blood under Torkelson’s head and another near his belt buckle. I frowned. If the realtor had dropped where he’d been shot, he’d be lying in an ocean of blood, bone, and brain tissue.

I swept the light in a circle, gradually working the beam out from the corpse. Stuart Torkelson had weighed 260 if he’d weighed an ounce. If he’d been shot first and then dragged, some marks would show, however faint. I stood up.

Encinos’s and Abeyta’s lights had stopped at a point about twenty feet up the two-track from the cattle guard. In the distance I could hear a siren and knew that the ambulance and coroner were only moments away. “What did you find?” I called.

“I think where they crossed over,” Encinos’s quiet voice replied. “Come look.” I retraced my steps, hopped the wire and walked around the corner of the fence to where the two deputies waited.

“The top wire is loose,” Deputy Abeyta said.

“That could have been that way for days…months,” I replied.

“I don’t think so,” Paul Encinos said. “The staple is right here.” He held the flashlight close to the ground. “It hasn’t been out of the wood very long. See the ends? They’re not rusted like the part that was exposed.”

He raised the light and held it three inches from the staple that secured the second wire. “And see? If you look real close you can see bright metal on the crown of this one, where it was pounded back in.”

I straightened up with an audible cracking of joints. “Maybe. Maybe not. There might be fifty explanations for that.”

“Yes, sir,” Encinos said. My skepticism hadn’t convinced him.

“If Torkelson was shot out here somewhere, we’ll find blood, bone, and bits of brain tissue. Somewhere. If the place is clean, then he was shot somewhere else, brought here and dumped. But I don’t believe that.”

“Why not, sir?”

“Because it would be too much of a coincidence. The last place I saw him alive was right here, and he told me about an earlier confrontation of sorts. If he had enemies in town who killed him there, why would they choose this spot as a dumping ground? It doesn’t make sense.” I turned as first the ambulance and then another sedan rounded the corner and pulled to a jarring halt behind my car.

“Tony, go tell them to stay put for a while. We’ll call ’em when we’re ready.” The officer trotted off and I turned to Encinos. “We’ll take a set of photos of the body and the area tonight. Especially these staples. Use the close-up attachment. You up to that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Fine. And I want sequence and grid photos. Start at the roadway and work your way in to the body. Then document the area around the body about five feet at a time as far out as you’ve got film. We might not be able to see a damn thing, but at least we’ll have some backup in case this weather brews some snow or rain. As soon as you’ve done that, let me know.”

I started back toward the vehicles, then stopped. “Are your keys in the Dodge?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I need to borrow it for a few minutes.” I wasn’t about to crash and jar my way up the two-track and across two arroyos in the Ford sedan at night. That was one reason. The other was that I could leave Linda Rael, her notebook, and her camera parked in harmless ignorance while I went to visit Reuben Fuentes.