Crossers (12 page)

“And you were right, Gil,” Monica said. Her retelling of the saga almost word for word had taken close to half an hour. Miguel had left some time ago with Gerardo and Elena; they had brought him to their house to bathe and give him a change of clothes. “He saw the light in your place. He was going to ask for help, but the dog scared him off. He ran over the hill, and that was the last thing he remembered till you found him.”

Castle, trying to absorb everything he’d heard, said nothing.

“It’s like everything that can happen to an illegal happened to him,” she added.

Blaine, smoking a cigarette, nodded. “But some of it don’t add up.”

Monica looked at him, a question in her brilliant blue eyes.

“These dopers use guys they know and trust to mule their stuff over. They don’t give sixty kilos of dope to strangers.”

“You’re not suggesting that he—”

“No, that little guy didn’t shoot his buddies and make off with the merca,” Blaine said, exhaling smoke through his nostrils. “But it don’t add up all the same, and then there’s that massacre on the other side. Christ almighty. Who would do a thing like that?”

“Bandits, like he said. Bandits posing as federales.”

“There ain’t much difference between bandits and federales,” said Sally.

“Well, finding out what the hell went on is gone to be their job.” Blaine motioned out the front window at a green and white Border Patrol truck towing a horse trailer. It was followed by two Santa Cruz county sheriff’s squad cars.

4

B
LAINE AND A
B
ORDER
P
ATROL TRACKER
studied a topographic map draped over the coffee table while two sheriff’s deputies and another cop—an undercover agent in civilian clothes who’d identified himself only as Nacho—questioned Miguel in the Murrietas’ house, near the corrals. Nacho said he’d heard about the massacre of the migrants from a Mexican informant and wanted to find out if Miguel could “connect a dot or two.” The homicides that had occurred on this side of the line fell under the Sheriff Department’s jurisdiction. Of course, it could not be said for sure that Héctor and Reynaldo had been murdered until their bodies were found, and that was the tracker’s job.

Earlier the tracker had put his own questions to Miguel. Could he describe the scene of the shootings a little more clearly? He could not. How far was it from here? He didn’t know. How about in which direction? He had no idea.

“It could of been any one of half a dozen places on this ranch,” Blaine said now, poking a pencil at the map. “My best guess is right here.”

The tracker, a Navaho named John Morales, leaned over and squinted. “Why there?”

“This road runs alongside a big wash, Juniper Canyon it’s called. And it’s inside of five miles of where my cousin found him. The way I figure, that old boy didn’t walk far in the dark, him bein’ as beat as he was and not knowin’ the country.”

“Better get a start. I haven’t got all week to look for a couple of ten-sevens.”

“Ten-seven?” asked Castle, sitting on the other side of the room.

“A corpse,” Morales answered. He slapped a tan Stetson on his crew cut and stood. In a dark green uniform with a semiautomatic pistol and lawman’s accoutrements—handcuffs, magazine case, flashlight, and VHF radio—belted to his waist, he was an impressive-looking figure of six feet, with a steer wrestler’s shoulders and the profile of a Roman general. “You show me where you found him and I’ll backtrack from there,” he said to Castle.

“We’ll be goin’ with you,” Blaine said.

The tracker frowned and shook his head. “I can’t be responsible for any civilians.”

“Number one, this is
my
ranch. Number two, there’s not a square yard of it me and Gerardo don’t know. And Gerardo—now, don’t take offense, John—can cut sign better’n any man alive. Track a lost cow over bare rock. Seen him do it.”

“Okay,” Morales said after pondering a moment. “But I’m the cow boss. Nobody rides out ahead of me and fucks up the trail.”

Blaine got up with a slow, deliberate movement. “Let’s go, cousin.”

Castle hesitated. He considered himself a spectator in the theater of life, removed from the march of events great and small, and that included this particular event. “You go over the ridge behind my place,” he said. “Two-thirds of the way down, a little to the left, you’ll see a big manzanita thicket. Can’t miss it. You start from there.”

“For chrissake, Gil, it was you who found him,” Blaine said impatiently. “Least you can do is show us where. Then you can go back to readin your books or shootin’ quail or whatever the hell it is you do with yourself all day.”

The remark stung and struck Castle as unfair, but he didn’t want to argue. Besides, maybe Blaine was right. He’d stepped into this drama, if unintentionally, and he could not now step out of it in good conscience. “All right.”

“You can ride along with us after. Another pair of eyes. I’ll put you on Rojo. He’s so calm, you’ll think we’re feedin’ him tranquilizers.”

Morales unloaded his horse from the trailer and led it to the corral that held the ranch’s herd of cow ponies, where Blaine and Gerardo caught and saddled their mounts and Castle’s. Castle clutched Rojo’s mane and swung on board, feeling very much like the tenderfoot he was. As, following the others, he nudged the roan gelding out onto the road, Nacho and the deputies, with Miguel in tow, emerged from the Murrietas’ house, directly across from the corral. Miguel was shaved and washed and in clean clothes, but he looked pathetic none theless. Sally, changed out of her robe and nightgown, stood nearby with Monica and Elena.

“Get anything out of him?” Morales asked

Nacho twitched a shoulder. Of medium height, potbellied and bespectacled, he looked more like a supermarket clerk than an undercover agent. On the other hand, a good undercover agent would not look like one. “Not much more than I got from my snitch,” he said. “Miguel didn’t see the massacre, just heard the gunshots. There’s something weird going on over there.”

Morales rested his hands on his saddle horn. “What’s weird about bandits?”

“Whoever killed them didn’t take a thing, that’s what my snitch told me. Wallets, money, watches, rings—everything was still on them. And the women’s clothes weren’t messed up, like they would have been if they’d been raped. It’s like some psychos wasted those people just for the helluva it. Or like something terrorists would do.”

“Terrorists?”
Castle blurted out.

“I’m talking narco-terrorists, not Osama bin Laden,” said Nacho.

To Castle, this was hardly reassuring. One of the deputies meanwhile led Miguel to the patrol car, in which a third cop waited behind the wheel. As he climbed in, Miguel threw a fleeting, bewildered glance at Castle and his saviors.

“So what happens to him now?” Monica asked Nacho.

“Mr. Espinoza is what we call an I-two-forty-seven detainee, ma’am. Meaning a special case.”

“He’s a suspect?”

“It’ll be up to the sheriff to decide that, but I kind of doubt it. If Héctor’s and Reynaldo’s bodies are found and it looks like what happened is what he says happened, they’ll hold him as a material witness. Protective custody in the county jail till the investigation’s over.”

“We’re not going to find anything by yakking here,” Morales said, and they rode at a slow trot in single file, the Navaho in the lead. The deputies, one a rookie, the other a sergeant, followed them in the second patrol car as far as Castle’s cabin. They parked there and, slinging assault rifles over their shoulders, proceeded on foot alongside the mounted party to provide security.

Earlier, preoccupied with horsemanship, Castle had failed to notice that Gerardo and his cousin were also armed, Blaine wearing a refurbished Luger in a military-style flap holster, Gerardo a revolver. Turning in the saddle, he asked Blaine, “Why the guns?” They had three cops to guard them.

“We got us a real badass out here somewheres,” Blaine answered. “If my old A-team was with us, I’d still carry this piece. I don’t rely on nobody to take care of me. I take care of me.”

If they hadn’t been on a search for dead bodies, Castle could have believed they were riding for pleasure on a fine winter afternoon, the high desert air so pure it seemed as if there were no atmosphere at all. The snow-rimmed Huachucas were bright in the sun, a light breeze was blowing, and white clouds drifted like a fleet of blimps over the mountains and past a real tethered blimp floating above the Fort Huachuca army base. It was, he’d heard, loaded with surveillance cameras and all manner of high-tech electronics, its purpose to detect planes flying drugs into the United States.

They rode over the ridge. Castle directed them to the manzanita thicket. Morales and Gerardo dismounted, studied the ground, and set off across the arroyo, leading their horses. They walked along at a normal pace, barely pausing. Whatever sign they were reading, it was all Sanskrit to Castle. It was in fact invisible. He could see nothing but grass and rock and scrub.

“As another pair of eyes, I’m not much good,” he murmured to Blaine, riding beside him.

“Look there.” Blaine pointed ahead. “That line of bent grass? It’s bent in the opposite direction to the grass around it. That’s where he was walkin’. It’s his breadcrumbs.”

Castle strained to see the breadcrumbs, but they remained hidden. Morales and Gerardo followed them north for a distance, then west, then east, then north again. Alone and terrified in the moonless dark, Miguel had gone in circles. The meandering route led to another arroyo, paved with red and brown boulders. Morales squatted, examined the rocks, then walked up and down the arroyo. He’d lost the track. Gerardo, making his own survey, stopped by a huge boulder and called out, “Oye, John. Ven aquí.” He gestured at the boulder’s surface and at a smaller rock lying beside it. He and the Navaho conversed for a while in Spanish, motioning downstream, or what would have been downstream if water had been running.

“That little rock got knocked off the big one, that’s what Gerardo’s sayin’,” Blaine explained before Castle asked. “The small one is red, got a lot of iron oxide in it. If it had been kicked off a while back, the stain it left on the big one would have been faded by now, but it ain’t. So whatever knocked it off, two legs or four, did it in the last couple of days.”

Morales and Gerardo made their way slowly down the arroyo, eyes lowered. When they stopped some thirty yards away, Gerardo summoned Blaine and Castle with a wave of his arm. They rode to where the two other men stood on a slab of slanting rock, its base powdered with sand. In the sand, clear as a plaster cast, was the print of a tennis shoe with a diamond tread.

“Did I tell you Gerardo can track a lost cow over bare rock or what?” Blaine crowed. “Now ain’t you glad we came along?”

“Blaine, your company alone makes it all worthwhile,” Morales quipped.

He and Gerardo remounted. Because the lower arroyo was mostly pulverized gravel, it was easy to track from horseback, almost as easy as tracking in snow. At a point where the arroyo plunged some twenty feet down a sheer rock wall, the footprints turned off onto a stock trail that wandered through a dense oak and juniper forest. Mexican jays flitted through the trees, making harsh cries. Knotty branches scraped the riders’ faces, and on the ground prickly pear spread oval stems bristling with barbed spines. Finally the stock trail came out onto a road with a broad wash beyond it and low hills beyond the wash.

“Juniper Canyon.” Blaine flashed a satisfied grin that his guess had proved right. “Straight-line distance, we ain’t three miles from where we started.”

Miguel’s footprints led up the road. Morales could tell, by their depth and the length of the stride, that he’d been running. There were several old tire tracks in the reddish beige dust. One pair, deep corrugated treads spaced more narrowly than a car’s or truck’s, was new. It had been made by an ATV.

As they rode around a bend, the horses threw their noses into the air, snorted, and danced nervous little jigs.

“Must be right close,” Morales said. “Nothing like the smell of a corpse to give a horse the fits.”

They dismounted and led the horses into the woods and hitched them to the stout branch of an old black oak, then went up the road on foot, following Miguel’s prints and the four-wheeler’s ruts. Morales held up when he came to a break in the ATV’s track.

“The driver stopped the vehicle here, and those must be his. He was wearing hiking boots.” Morales pointed at footprints with a zigzag pattern to the soles that led a few feet into the sandy wash, choked with willows and the gray-green whisks of Apache broom. Then, walking a little farther, Morales declared, “Well, we’ve got us a homicide, sure enough.” Ten yards away was the first body—Reynaldo’s, Castle assumed, because Miguel said he’d been shot in the head, and there was a dime-size hole above one eye. A great amount of blood, all his body had held, had pumped out the much larger hole in the back of his skull, leaving a rust-colored stain in the ground. Héctor’s corpse lay behind Reynaldo’s and a few yards off to its right. He was on his side, and with his head pillowed on one hand, he could have been mistaken for a man taking a nap were it not for the two ragged exit wounds, one in the back of his shoulder, the other in the chest. The bodies had been in a deep freeze overnight, but now, as they thawed, the men picked up the smell that had spooked the horses, an odor something like rotting garbage.

Castle stood, staring at the corpses with morbid fascination, reminded once again of his sheltered life. Soon to be fifty-six years old, he never had seen dead men before, much less men who had died violently. He had even been spared from the sight of his father’s body; he hadn’t been at the hospital when Dr. Castle expired at two o’clock in the morning, and because that once-handsome, vigorous man had been ravaged by his cancer, his mother had insisted on a closed coffin at the visitation.

“You boys stay put,” the older deputy, the sergeant, commanded. “Too many people walking around will contaminate the crime scene.”

Taking care where they stepped to avoid erasing any part of whatever story was written in the earth, he and the rookie searched for shell casings from the killer’s gun but did not find any.

“Probably used a revolver,” the sergeant said. “If it was a semiauto, the dude policed up his brass, left as little evidence as possible.”

A short distance from Héctor’s body, hidden by a clump of broom, the two policemen found the brush pile in which Miguel said he and his friends had cached the marijuana. It appeared to have been kicked apart, and a few fragments of burlap hung from the tangled branches.

Morales in the meantime moved deeper into the wash, scaring up a jackrabbit as he vanished into the willow thickets. He returned about fifteen minutes later.

“Everything I’ve seen so far pretty much confirms Miguel’s story. He took a dump over on the other side, like he said. He laid down over there for quite a while—the grass is flattened, like a deer bed. And then he came back to see what happened to his compañeros.” Morales paused, gazing thoughtfully. “That’s what I love about tracking. Sign doesn’t commit perjury. You know how to read it, it’s a truth-teller every time.”

“So what truth is it tellin’?” asked Blaine.

Morales dropped to one knee and drew a diagram in the dirt with a forefinger. “The one guy, the guy shot twice …”

“That would be Héctor,” Blaine said. “Other one is Reynaldo.”

“Héctor is laying down over here,” Morales continued. “He hears the ATV, goes to the edge of the road and flags it down. The driver gets off. Him and Héctor are standing almost face-to-face by the vehicle. Then Héctor walks a ways back into the wash to where the dope is stashed. The driver follows him a couple of yards but stops right here”—he makes another mark with his finger—“maybe ten or twelve feet from Héctor. Reynaldo is over here, off to Héctor’s left. Okay, Miguel says he saw Reynaldo drop first. A well-aimed shot to the head. Reynaldo’s dead before he hits the ground. Then the killer pivots to cap Héctor—you can see where he did, there’s a kind of arc-shaped mark where he turned his feet. Héctor’s turned and started to run. The first round hits him square in the back, comes out his chest. I’m no ballistics expert, but I’d guess the impact spun him around, and the next round catches him in the upper chest and comes out his shoulder. That’s page one of the story.”