Dark closed in around the little cabin like a tight envelope. With no moon and obscured stars, the pockets under the piñons and junipers sank into absolute black. The lights from the Dodge were brilliant and harsh, cutting across the junk, the old bus, and the Ford Bronco. I parked and switched off the headlights. Without them, I couldn’t see Reuben Fuentes’s little cabin twenty feet beyond the front bumper.
Gradually my eyes became accustomed to the ink, and I could make out a glow drifting out of the single high window on the west wall. It was the window over the sink, and the wash of light was so faint that it was like looking at a star that shows up best when caught in the peripheral vision.
I opened the door of the Dodge, grimacing against the bright dome light. As I stepped out, I saw the slight figure backlighted in the now open doorway of the cabin.
“
Buenas noches, Don Reuben
,” I said and shut the truck door. I cradled my flashlight under my arm without turning it on.
“Come inside,” he said. He turned and vanished into the shadows. I felt a wave of relief that Reuben was all right, untouched by what had happened down at the road.
I stepped through the doorway and saw a single lamp across the room in the corner by the fireplace. The bulb couldn’t have been more than ten watts, the light further muffled by a dark brown shade that had once been burlap before the moths and spiders got to it. A book lay in the chair.
“I’m sorry to disturb you so late, Reuben,” I said, pushing the door closed behind me.
“You want a beer?” He shuffled toward the refrigerator and I quickly held up a hand.
“No, really. Thanks just the same.” My refusal had no effect. He opened the small door and brought out first one brown bottle and then another. He set one by the sink and frowned.
“I don’t know where the opener is,” he said almost in a whisper. He rummaged through the detritus around the sink.
“It’s a twist-off,” I said. I reached over and opened one of the bottles, then handed it to him. I left the other on the counter, unopened.
“
Siéntese
,” he said, indicating one of the two straight chairs. I chose the one without the cat.
“How have you been?” I asked.
“Since this morning?
Bien
.” He picked up the book that had been in his chair and sat down. “You have news of
Estelita
.”
“No. That’s next weekend, Reuben.” I leaned forward, rested my forearms on my knees, and folded my hands. There was no fire in the fireplace, but the cabin was snug and warm. “We’ve got us a problem down by the road.”
For a minute I thought he’d forgotten my presence and had started reading again. But after a bit he closed the book and carefully laid it on the small lamp table next to his beer bottle. His hands composed themselves in his lap and in the dim light I couldn’t tell if he was regarding me with interest or simply had his head pointed in my general direction.
“What kind of problem do you have?” Reuben asked.
“One of your neighbors got himself shot.”
“
Lo siento
. It happened earlier?”
“Yes. We think so. We don’t know when, for sure.”
Reuben shifted a little in his chair and groped in his shirt pocket for a cigarette. He tamped both ends with care and then lit it with a kitchen match that he scratched against the stones of the fireplace. The smoke smelled too good…I damned near asked him for one myself.
“I heard two shots,
señor
. Two. I think it was two.”
“When was this, Reuben?”
“As I remember it was after the sun went down. Maybe seven o’clock. Maybe later. Maybe eight. I don’t remember with certainty.” He smoked in silence for a while. I was sure he was thinking the story through and I didn’t interrupt him. Finally he said, “I thought that it was probably hunters across the road.”
“The shots sounded far away?”
“Yes.”
“Did you drive down to see?”
“No.”
“Did you hear or see anything else? Out of the ordinary, I mean.”
He shook his head. “So tell me…who was it?”
“Stuart Torkelson, Reuben.”
“
¿ Verdad?
” He frowned. “Somebody beat me to it, then.”
“Beat you to it?”
“You know,
señor
, that he and I have our arguments. He thinks he should have deed to every acre on earth, this man. And then sell it to foreigners from—” he waved his hand in frustration. No doubt folks from back east were foreigners to him.
“We found him in your field, Reuben.”
“What was he doing there?”
“I don’t know. I was hoping you could tell me.”
“
No se
,” the old man said. “If you mean the field down by the road, he was there earlier, too.”
“I know. He told me this afternoon.”
“I do not know why he was there.”
“We’ll be going over that field and the area around it pretty carefully, Reuben. We’ll be down there the rest of the night and probably all day tomorrow.” I stood up and stepped over to the sink. I put the bottle of beer he’d offered me back in the refrigerator.
The inside of the fridge was as dark and forbidding as the rest of the cabin. I had never won the Good Housekeeping seal of approval for my home’s cleanliness either, but at least I could still recognize many of the items in my refrigerator.
I turned around, leaning against the edge of the sink. My eyes had adjusted enough that I could make out the mantel of the fireplace. A piece of what might have been lava rested there, its shiny black surface muted by cobwebs and dust. In almost the exact center of the mantel lay a large revolver.
“I came by to ask your permission, Reuben. To ask if we can search the field. We might be able to find something that will help us.”
“
Claro
.”
As I spoke I made my way over to the fireplace and picked up the revolver. It was a single-action Colt, and it smelled as musty as everything else in the cabin. And it was fully loaded. I laid it back down. “If you see anything else, or hear anything, will you call me, Reuben?”
He nodded.
“Someone will be down at the cattle guard most of the night if you think of anything. Just holler.” He stood up with considerable effort and followed me to the door. The old man and his rude cabin were instantly lost in the shadowless night as I turned the Ramcharger around and drove back down the lane.
The number of lights, blinking red and otherwise, had grown exponentially in the few minutes I had been gone. I parked the Dodge in the middle of Reuben’s lane, nose to nose with Sheriff Martin Holman’s black Buick.
I had no more than opened the door when Deputy Tony Abeyta materialized. His face was animated.
“We found where the shooting took place, sir.”
“Good work. Where?”
“Just over there, this side of that grove of piñons.” He aimed his flashlight and the beam stabbed across the pasture, the light lost in the sea of crisscrossed spots from three patrol units and half a dozen other flashlights.
I frowned, puzzled, and muttered, “Why did they drag him almost a hundred feet after they shot him?”
“Sir?”
“Nothing, Tony. You got the place roped off?”
“Yes, sir. And Bob is almost finished taking pictures.”
Deputy Robert Torrez had climbed out of bed for this one, too. That didn’t surprise me. Before dawn, most of the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department employees would have trekked across this field for one reason or another. And that included the sheriff himself, Martin Holman.
I stood at the barbed wire fence, my right hand resting lightly on the top strand, as I watched Holman make his way across the rough ground toward me.
The sheriff was medium height, medium weight, his hair medium brown, medium thick, and medium long. When I’d first met him, I’d thought that he was medium stupid, too. But he wasn’t, really. The used car lot he’d operated before the election made him a fair living. His brother still ran the place.
He’d won the election on one of those sweeping tides of promises for fiscal responsibility to which voters fall prey periodically. During the first months of his tenure, he’d discovered that money hadn’t been wasted in the department. When we requested a new patrol unit it was because the piece of junk it replaced was just that—junk. He’d discovered that we were understaffed, undertrained, and underbudgeted in general.
And my estimation of him had soared when Martin Holman started spending his time doing what he did best—lobbying legislators for more money. He was no cop, though. I tried my best to forgive his occasional gaffes when he decided to play at being one. We’d made it through three years of his tenure with few embarrassments.
Holman reached the fence. He was breathing hard.
“Christ, Bill,” he said.
I didn’t know whether he was referring to the crime itself, the late hour and chilly wind, or my being absent when he arrived…or all of the above. So I said, “I was just up at Reuben’s.”
“Well this is a hell of a thing, Bill,” Holman said. “First the Hocking woman and now this. I mean, Stuart Torkelson, for God’s sake.”
I nodded in the darkness.
“What the hell happened out here?” Holman asked.
“We don’t know yet,” I said. “Torker got himself shot. Deputy Abeyta was telling me they found the spot where the shooting happened.”
“Way the hell over there by the trees,” Holman said, waving a hand. “They’ve got the place roped off. I started to walk across and I thought Bob Torrez was going to chop my head off. Christ.”
“Well, sir, you know how it is. Sometimes it’s just the tiniest bit of evidence that makes a case. If someone steps in the wrong place and destroys that evidence—” I let the rest of it go. Holman had heard the same story often enough. He had heard me chew ass during previous investigations when deputies didn’t pay attention to clumsy feet or hands, and most of the time he had the good sense to stay out of the way.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, his tone tinged with impatience. “So what did the old man say?”
“He heard two shots.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all. He said they were in the distance and that he ignored them.”
“That’s hard to believe.”
I looked at the smudge in the darkness that was Holman. I couldn’t see his face, but the sharpness of his voice surprised me. “How is it hard to believe, sir?”
“Well, come on. You know how old man Fuentes is as well as I do. Someone sneezes around his property and he’s out the door, waving some damn gun in your face.” He lowered his voice. “I heard about what happened at the post office earlier.”
“That was a separate incident, Sheriff.”
“Maybe. The old man’s crazy, is what I say.”
“He may be old and crazy, but he’s not capable of this. He and Torkelson had their differences, I’ll admit that.” I pulled my coat a little tighter against the wind. “In fact, according to Stuart they had a go-around a week or so ago. But that doesn’t mean—”
“What go-around?” Holman interrupted.
“They had a little set-to about property boundaries. I talked with them both. It has nothing to do with this.”
“How do you know that?”
I started to answer but then hesitated. I didn’t know, that was the trouble. “I just don’t think so, that’s all. For one thing, if Torkelson was actually shot where Deputy Abeyta says he was, then someone had to drag the body from there,” and I pointed across the field toward the cluster of lights, “to there,” and I indicated where Torkelson’s body still lay, covered with black plastic. “That’s probably a hundred feet or more.”
“Anyone could do that,” Holman said.
“Come on, Martin. Not anyone. Torkelson was huge. He must have weighed two-fifty at least. Reuben Fuentes couldn’t move him two feet, let alone a hundred.”
“Maybe after he was shot he staggered—”
“Sheriff, did you look at the body?”
“No, not yet.” The hesitation in his voice was obvious. He didn’t want to look.
“Then let’s go do that.”
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 piñon 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.