Twice Buried

13

The harsh lights added to the ghoulish scene. Sheriff Martin Holman pulled his Stetson down low over his forehead and hunched against the growing chill of the night wind. His hands were thrust in the pockets of his coat. His face was stone white and his upper lip quivered a little now and then.

If he was going to vomit, I hoped he’d have the good sense to move far away, downwind. He didn’t like what he saw, and neither did I.

We pieced it together this way. Seventy-eight feet, four and one-half inches southwest of Stuart Torkelson’s corpse was a single splotch of blood the size of a tea-cup saucer. It was nearly circular, puddled for the most part on a bald patch of limestone. Part of the circumference of the puddle touched a clump of dried grama grass.

With a tape measure stretched tight between that single glob of blood and the toe of Torkelson’s left boot, we then measured fifty-one feet, three and three-quarter inches toward the body. At that point we taped a perpendicular line off to the north another seven feet, eight inches to the first of many blood patches there.

And at this site, it was more than a single, neat puddle. The spray of blood, bone, and tissue covered a fan-shaped area nearly sixteen feet across.

Looking as if some gruesome surveyor had been at work, a cheery red flag with its wire post pushed into the ground marked a large fragment of skull and attached tissue that had flown almost nineteen feet out from the first droplet of blood.

As the camera flashguns continued their private electric storms, Holman looked at a preliminary drawing that Deputy Torrez had handed him. I held a flashlight so he could hold down the corners of the page against the wind.

“If this is Torkelson’s blood,” Holman said, pointing at the solitary blood puddle, “then he was wounded first here and then maybe stumbled over to here.” He pointed at the spot where the spray began.

“Yes. If that’s his blood. We don’t know that yet.”

“How-” Holman stopped. He grimaced and shook his head, looking off into the night. When he’d collected his thoughts and fought his supper back down, he continued, “If this is where he was standing when his head was blown off, how did he finish up some twenty-seven feet away, over here? Did someone carry him? Drag him?”

“It could have happened any number of ways,” I said. “He might have been running when he was shot. His momentum could have carried him that far, easily. Even if he’d just been walking away, or staggering, he could have covered that distance.”

“So he wasn’t necessarily dragged, then,” Holman said. He snapped the notebook closed and pushed it in his pocket. “He had a confrontation with someone, maybe saw something he shouldn’t have, and was shot.”

“That’s possible.”

“The first time he maybe fell down. Maybe on his hands and knees. Enough blood pumps through his clothing that it puddles on the rock back there.” Holman stopped and turned, staring over at the mass of lights that bathed the little puddle of blood. I was impressed that he’d managed to think the possibilities that far through.

“And then he pushes himself to his feet, turns, and staggers off toward his Suburban, over there.” He pivoted and pointed toward the road. The Suburban was almost in a straight line with Torkelson’s final line of travel. “He manages fifty feet or so before the killer catches up with him and-” He let the rest hang.

“It could have happened that way.”

Holman looked at me, one eyebrow raised. “You don’t think that’s what happened? So what was he doing out here, in the middle of nowhere, at night, for God’s sake?”

“I don’t know, Martin. Right now, what you suggest is as good a theory as any we’ve got.”

“This is the old man’s land, isn’t it?”

“I think so, yes. This hill here,” and I gestured to the west where the pinon and oak grove rose up on the limestone swell, “is actually Torkelson’s, I think.”

“Well, the old man and Torkelson had an argument earlier. That’s what you said. And we know Fuentes always carries a gun, and we know that he would use it. It’s easy to see-”

“Now wait a minute, sheriff,” I said quickly. “Reuben Fuentes did have a minor confrontation last Sunday with Torkelson, that’s true. But he doesn’t always carry a gun. In fact, in past months, it’s been rare that he does. And the last time he shot anyone, as far as I know, was in 1920, in old Mexico.”

“There are plenty of rumors to the contrary, Bill,” Holman said.

“And that’s just what they are…rumors. For one thing, Reuben is too frail to be any part of this.”

“He’s not too frail to pull a trigger.”

“Martin, think about what you’re looking at here. If Reuben pulled the trigger and Torkelson staggered away from him, Reuben would have had to have been quick enough to catch up with him. He’s not. He hobbles, and a slow hobble at that.”

“What about earlier, in the post office? He was carrying a loaded revolver then. You said so yourself.”

I took a deep breath. “Yeah, he was carrying one in the post office. And, if anything, that proves my point. According to Carla Champlin, Reuben was too frail to even pick up the gun after he dropped it. He was using a cane as well. He’s upset over what someone did to his dogs, but he-”

“Sir?” Deputy Paul Encinos appeared as a silhouette, backlit by the floodlights to the west. “You should come look at this.”

Holman and I followed him across the pasture, staying away from the line that had been laid on the ground between the blood remains.

Encinos stopped near the first blood stain and pointed with his flashlight. “From here, we measure thirty-one feet and some inches to there.” He swung his flashlight to the west until the beam touched a grove of runty, gnarled Gambel’s oaks that grew from the foot of a low limestone escarpment.

“And what did you find?” Holman asked. I could hear the excitement in his voice as he recovered from his initial reaction to brains, bone, and blood.

Encinos, now joined by Tony Abeyta and Bob Torrez, made his way toward the oaks. Holman and I followed. I didn’t like all those boots tramping the ground, but the deputies had done their preliminaries before calling us.

Encinos stopped and held his light. “We’ll get the generator and portables over here in a minute, but you can see pretty clearly even with just the flashlights,” he said.

In a spot where over the years leaves and runoff had deposited the makings for soft dirt at the base of the escarpment, the ground was disturbed by recent digging. The layer of leaves had been disturbed, too. I could see the line farther up the bank where the neat seasonal layering of the leaves had been interrupted.

When whoever it was had finished digging, they’d swept leaves back in place, trying to conceal the spot.

“So what do you suppose is there?” I asked.

Deputy Bob Torrez, methodical and careful as usual, snapped off his flashlight and slipped it in his pocket. “Do you want to wait until morning to dig it up?”

I started to reply but Sheriff Martin Holman beat me to it. “Right now,” he said. “I don’t think we should wait. If this is somehow connected, and if we wait until morning, then the trail will just be colder than it already is.”

“Sir?” Torrez asked, looking at me.

“The sheriff is right,” I said.

Torrez immediately turned to the other deputies. “We’ll be a while taking the photos before we disturb anything. Tony and Paul, why don’t you bring up the burro.”

The burro was the small portable generator that would provide all the light we’d need to make an artificial daytime in this lonely spot.

While the deputies assembled their equipment, I made arrangements for the removal of Stuart Torkelson’s remains. He’d lain out in the cold long enough.