I couldn’t think of anything much more macabre than opening a possible grave on a starless, moonless, wind-swept December night. I gave Linda Rael a choice—the safe, warm comfort of a locked patrol car or the dark, cold, blustery pasture.
Shivering against the wind, she clutched camera bag and notebook and followed me across the field toward the spot where the burro chugged away, powering four big arc lamps. For a radius of fifty feet around what we assumed was a gravesite, the light was brighter than high noon of a cloudless June day.
“What’s buried there?” she asked and I had to give her credit. There was more excitement than apprehension in her voice. Still, with fifty yards to go, she walked past me, her pace accelerating until she reached the reassuring light and the circle of armed cops.
“We don’t know,” I said to her back. I wasn’t willing to guess.
Before disturbing the soil, we completed a grid search, thoroughly inventorying the contents of each square meter of an area a dozen times bigger than any possible grave might be.
“You think we need photos, too?” Torrez asked at one point and I nodded.
“Film’s cheap.”
Finally, at nearly four in the morning, with the first small pellets of moisture salting the air, we began to dig. Working like a bunch of archaeologists with badges, we removed the loose dirt a shovelful at a time, dumping the soil through a small, coarse screen. It was the same sort of screen that folks hunting Anasazi remains would use to sift out projectile points, pot shards, or bone fragments. We didn’t care about the pot shards.
As the deputies worked, I realized that the young reporter was standing so close to my elbow she was almost leaning on me. Her breath pumped out in rapid exhalations and her eyes never left the spot of disturbed earth.
“Do you need a warrant to excavate someone’s private property like this?” she asked at one point, and I shook my head.
“Not when the owner gives us permission.”
“Do you think Mr. Fuentes had anything to do with this?”
“We don’t know, Linda. Well, wait a minute. No, we don’t think he did.”
Before she had a chance to question that, Tony Abeyta stopped digging, the tip of the shovel in the dirt. “I hit something,” he said.
Five minutes later, enough dirt had been gently removed that all of us could see the patch of brown fur.
“Looks like a dog or something,” Abeyta said.
“I imagine you’ll find three of them, then,” I said.
Linda Rael looked up at me quickly. “You knew what was here all the time?”
The steady two-cycle bray of the generator made it hard to hear. I laid a hand on her shoulder. “Say again?”
“Did you know what was buried here?”
“Not for sure, no.” I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and turned. A fair contingent of cars had assembled down on the county road, and one of our part-timers worked with two of the auxiliaries—the Sheriff’s Posse they called themselves—to keep the curious from hopping the fence.
I never ceased to wonder at folks who sat at home listening to scanners, then charged out into the night when something juicy was going down. If they were lawyers I could understand it. But most of the people who drifted by, idling their cars along at a slow walk, were just out on a lark, hoping they would catch a glimpse of something truly repulsive.
I suppose we could have held up each one of the poisoned dogs as it came out of the ground. Hell, front page news photos they’d be. But Linda Rael didn’t cooperate. As each one of the pathetic animals was uncovered, her camera remained bagged and her notebook remained in her coat pocket. Apparently there was a limit to what the
Register
wanted on its front pages.
The animals had been laid side by side in the grave like the good friends they’d been. Old Reuben hadn’t been able to dig very deep…the hole was less than eighteen inches when we were finished.
“I’m surprised the soil’s as deep as it is,” Martin Holman said. I felt escorted now, with him on one side and Linda on the other.
“Kind of a collection spot for erosion off the hillside,” I said, offering the extent of my geology background. “You can get pockets of soil that are six or seven feet deep in places along the bottom of these bluffs.”
But Holman wasn’t interested in lessons from Mr. Science.
“So why did Stuart Torkelson walk up here to this spot, and why was he shot?”
“I don’t know, sheriff.”
“You said the old man buried the dogs last week? I mean, is that what you said?”
“That’s what he told me.”
Holman fell silent as he watched the deputies finish up their photography session. The corpses of the dogs certainly weren’t daisy fresh, that was for sure.
Deputy Torrez jabbed the point of his shovel into the center of the hole’s bottom. “I guess that’s it,” he said.
“When are you going to arrest him?” Holman spoke directly into my ear. Either he didn’t want to shout over the generator or he didn’t want the reporter in on the conversation.
“Arrest who?” I turned so we were face to face.
“The old man. Fuentes.”
“I’m not going to arrest him, Martin.”
“Why not? What more evidence do you need? The body was found on his property, associated with this—” he ran out of words and waved a hand at the dead dogs and their shallow grave. “And when you figure that half the time he runs around waving a loaded gun under people’s noses—”
“Martin,” I said and took him by the elbow. I led him several paces away. Linda shrugged off her hood, freeing up her ears for maximum pickup. But she had the good sense not to follow us.
“In the first place, yes, the old man sometimes carries a gun. He happened to do so in the post office, and he dropped the damn thing. I don’t deny that. And yes, he had a confrontation with Torkelson last weekend. But Stuart isn’t—wasn’t—the type to do anything to exacerbate the affair. Hell, he told me about it the minute he saw me. If there had been any other problem, he would have called us. He’s got a goddamned telephone right in his Suburban, for God’s sake.”
Holman shook his head vehemently. “You’re right there, Bill. Stuart Torkelson wouldn’t do anything to pick a fight. And it looks to me like he was trying to make a beeline right back to his truck when he was shot. It’s the old man who went off his rocker and nailed Torkelson before he had a chance to explain.”
I rummaged in my pocket for a cigarette for a full minute before I remembered that I had probably quit smoking.
“Explain what, sheriff?”
“Well, I don’t know what. But something.”
“What would make Torkelson jump the fence? He knew it was Reuben’s property and he knew the old man didn’t want him on it. Reuben thinks Torkelson was trying to force him to sell.”
“He had to see something,” Holman said.
“Yes, he had to see something. What?”
The sheriff shrugged. “I still say you’ve got enough evidence to hold the old man for a preliminary hearing.”
“For what? Where’s he going to go?”
Holman looked up and almost smiled. “Mexico, Bill.”
“Come on.”
“I’m serious. Hell, he’s got relatives down there, just what… twenty-five miles away? If he knows we’re on him, I’ll bet you a hundred dollars that he’s gone before we can blink an eye.”
“I’m not going to throw a ninety-year-old man in jail just because of this,” I said. “He buried his dogs here. He’s got a right to do that. The rest is just conjecture.”
“He doesn’t have the right to shoot one of our leading citizens who was just out minding his own business.”
“Martin, think on that one, will you? Stuart Torkelson obviously
wasn’t
minding his own business. If that had been the case, he’d be home in a comfortable bed right now. He wouldn’t be dead. What we’re going to have to find out is what he
was
doing out here. And what someone else was doing out here.”
Holman took a deep breath and jammed both hands in his coat pockets. The rain was still light, but the small drops were icy cold, driven by the wind out of the west.
“So what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to talk to Reuben again. In the morning. And I’m going to call his grandniece as soon as I get back to the office. And I’m going to wait until the medical examiner has something concrete to go on before jumping to conclusions.”
“What’s it going to take before you figure you have enough to make an arrest?” Holman asked.
“You mean before I’ll take Reuben Fuentes into custody? A whole lot, Martin. A whole lot.”
He shook his head. “I think you’re too close to this one, Bill. I really do.” He stepped around me as if he was going to join the deputies at the hole. But he stopped, turned, and added, “If Reuben Fuentes wasn’t related to Estelle Reyes-Guzman, he’d be in the lockup right now. And you know it.”
Martin Holman’s sudden attack of spine surprised me. But he was dead wrong on all counts. Maybe he was just playing the hard-driving sheriff for Linda Rael’s benefit. That was all right, as long as he didn’t get in the way, or do something stupid on his own.
I touched Linda’s elbow. “I’m going back to the office. Want to come along?”
“Aren’t they going to rebury the dogs?” she asked. Her voice was small and she was shivering.
“No. They’ll take them for analysis. The old man didn’t press the issue, but as long as we’ve gone this far, we might as well find out what killed ’em. You never know.”
She saw the black plastic bags laid out on the ground and she turned away. “I’m ready,” she said.
We were nearly back to the village limits when she asked, “What happens now?”
I shrugged. “We wait for the medical examiner’s report on Torkelson’s corpse and any of the other physical evidence. A couple of the deputies will be working out there all day tomorrow, double-checking that we didn’t miss anything. We’ll interview the old man.” I shrugged again.
“Do you think he did it?”
“Don’t you start, now.”
She almost laughed. “Well, everyone’s heard the stories about him.”
I swung into the department parking lot and pulled up next to the gasoline pumps. “Linda, we can’t arrest a man based on what folks say they’ve heard…or what they haven’t heard. We’ll do what the evidence tells us to do.”
It was pellet snow, then, pinging off the windshield. I was loath to stand outside another minute, pumping gasoline into the county gas-guzzler. But I’d thrown enough fits in the direction of young deputies who’d put a half-empty patrol car away that I was trapped now. I shrugged my coat tighter and got out.
“Besides,” I said over the top of 310 as Linda prepared to make a break for the warmth and coffee of the office. “If Reuben Fuentes was guilty of murder, he wouldn’t have just sat up there in his little cabin, letting us dig the hell out of his field.”
She nodded and started to walk inside. But she stopped and turned around. “Do you call in other agencies?”
“What do you mean?”
“The state police, maybe. You know, for help.”
“If need be, of course. But our people are pretty good at what they do, Linda.” She pulled her coat tighter against the wind and walked inside.
While I waited for the nozzle to click off, I thought about the old Mexican in his tiny shack. At first I had thought that maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to bring him into town for the night, for his own protection. But there were some pieces that didn’t fit.
Reuben Fuentes might be damn near senile, maybe half blind and almost stone deaf when he needed to be…but let someone sneeze near his land and he was out the door with pistol or rifle or shotgun in hand.
Hunters didn’t roam his property during deer season without challenge…and earlier Stuart Torkelson hadn’t read two numbers off his tape measure before the old man was at his backside. And now, the old man had allowed a revival-sized crowd of people to tramp one of his pastures, dig his earth, and disturb the eternal rest of his hounds. That wasn’t like him.
I screwed on the gas cap, snapped the door closed, and sat back inside the car to jot all the bookkeeping gibberish in the log. I’d committed some real boners in my twenty-three-year career in law enforcement, generally because I had assumed, with complete certainty, that I was right at the time. I knew that Reuben Fuentes hadn’t shot Stuart Torkelson. My unflinching certainty was making me nervous.
By eight-thirty that morning, we were handed one of the missing puzzle pieces, Martin Holman issued an order, and I couldn’t put off calling Estelle Reyes-Guzman any longer.
I closed my office door against interruptions and found the number I wanted on the roller file. The signals were traveling no more than thirty miles as the crow flies—probably less. But for efficiency, I might as well have been calling the moon.
Finally a small voice came on the other end.
“
¿ Hola?
”
“
¿ Quien es?
” I asked.
“
Tinita
,” the tiny voice said, well named.
“Tina,” I said, “is your father or mother home?”
A long pause followed my sudden excursion into English. “Tina?” I repeated.
“
¿ Hola?
”
I closed my eyes with frustration, trying to remember back forty-seven years to when I was a high school junior and Mrs. Hempsted had tried to twist my hopelessly Scotch-Irish tongue around Spanish I.
“
Hija, quiero hablar
with…
con
your
madre
or
padre
.”
That brought a response. The kid probably thought she was talking to a drunk. “
Un momento
,” she said primly. A couple loud clanks as the phone was dropped on the table were followed by a bellow of startling proportions from such young lungs.
“Hello?” a teenage voice said after a minute. “Who’s calling, please?”
I knew that Felicia Diaz was fourteen, and that sounded about right for this voice.
“Is this Felicia?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, good. Felicia, this is Undersheriff Bill Gastner up in Posadas.”
“Good morning, sir.”
She was so damn polite I wanted to bottle her manners and sell them to parents of American teenagers.
“How’s your family enjoying the holidays?”
“Fine, sir. Even Roberto is home for a week.” Roberto Diaz was twenty-two or so and studying to be a dentist. Where he found the money for that was a mystery to me. I heard a voice in the background and Felicia said, “One moment, please.” She did a good job of covering the speaker of the phone, but I managed to hear her say something that included
policia
in it.
“Sir, here is my father.”
“Thanks, Felicia. You have a good holiday. See you next week at the christening.”
Roman Diaz’s voice was hearty and heavily accented. “Señor Gastner. Good to hear from you!”
“The same, Don Roman. How’s the family?”
“Fine, sir. Fine. When are you coming down? And let me assume that you need to reach Estellita?”
“You read my mind. I sure do. Is there any way you could send someone down the lane?”
“Tinita is on the way,” he said. “Do you want me to have Estelle call you or—”
“I’ll hold on if I might.” I had a good connection and didn’t want to risk losing it. Roman Diaz and I exchanged pleasantries about the weather, family, and the upcoming christening of Estelle’s infant son.
In no more than five minutes, our conversation was interrupted by a shout from Tinita’s tiny lungs. When Estelle came on the line she was breathing hard.
“Make yourself comfortable, doll. We’re going to be talking a while. This is Gastner.”
“Now what have you done?” She said it as a joke, in between breaths. “Are you in Posadas?”
“Of course. Where did you think I’d be?”
She laughed. “No way of telling, sir.” She took a deep breath. “How are you?”
“Fine. I really am. We’ve got a little problem of a different sort up here.”
“Oh?
Que?
” Her voice, once she found her breath, was rich and velvety.
“You remember Stuart Torkelson?” When she didn’t respond immediately I added, “He’s a realtor here…has been for years.”
“I know the name. I’m not sure I ever met him…wait. A great big man? White hair like one of those people in the silver hair commercials?”
“That’s him.”
“Right. He tried to sell Francis and me a home once. And I saw him again at a Lions Club luncheon where I was the guest speaker. He introduced me. What did he do?”
“He got himself killed.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. How?”
I hesitated. “Someone shot him.”
“Right there in town?”
“No. About seven miles southwest of the village.”
She didn’t miss a beat. “Out by Uncle Reuben’s place?”
“Yes. One of the deputies was close-patrolling the area after an earlier complaint we had, and he found the body. About fifty feet off the road in that big pasture that fronts on both the county road and the old man’s two-track.”
“And he’d been shot?”
“Yes. Twice.” I told her every detail of what we’d found, including Torkelson’s tale of his confrontation with Reuben earlier.
“I don’t think so, sir,” she said when I’d finished.
“Neither do I. But it’s harder to argue with Martin Holman when he’s got the medical examiner behind him.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, earlier I was operating under the assumption that a shotgun was used for the head wound. We didn’t move the body, and we didn’t do much of an on-site examination. The weather wasn’t cooperating, it was dark—that sort of thing. We took a half million photos and figured the examiner would tell us all we needed to know.”
“Sure. The deputies did a grid search for shell casings and the like?”
“Yes. And found nothing. But that’s not the point. The belly wound was caused by a heavy-caliber handgun, fired from far enough away that there was no flash burn, no powder. The slug hit him just above the belt and drove right on through. Through and through.”
“So no recovered slug.”
“That’s right. But Estelle, this is where I went wrong, I guess. The head wound was pretty massive. Lots of skull case missing, that sort of thing. I saw the wound and assumed shotgun, held close.”
“I don’t think Reuben ever owned a shotgun in his life.”
“That’s what I was figuring. But the medical examiner says the head wound was caused by a handgun, probably the same caliber as the other wound…and the damn thing was held so close that the corona was only a couple inches in diameter.”
“Under the chin?”
“Almost. The point of entry was right on the left jawbone, just in front of where the bone starts to curve upward toward the ear. The M.E. says the bullet hit that heavy bone and mushroomed right away.”
“Huh,” Estelle said. “And let me guess the bad news. Uncle Reuben was carrying one of his guns when he and Torkelson had their set-to a week ago?”
“That’s what Torkelson told me.”
“And he was wearing it in the post office too?”
“Yes. Three witnesses. No doubt about it.”
There was a long moment of silence and then Estelle said, “It doesn’t look good, sir.”
“Nope.”
“You find a corpse shot to death on the property of a person who you know carries a gun and who has been known to use it in the past and you’re bound to make certain conclusions.”
“Yep.”
“And Sheriff Holman wants you to arrest Reuben?”
“At least hold him for a preliminary hearing.”
“I suppose I can’t blame him. But he doesn’t know Reuben Fuentes like I do…or like you do.”
“No, he doesn’t. But he’s the sheriff. And he’s got the district attorney’s ear. They sit at the same table during Rotary.” Estelle ignored the acid in my tone.
“You can’t talk him out of it? I mean, where does the sheriff think Reuben will go?”
“He thinks the old man will run to Mexico.”
“
Por Dios
,” Estelle said with considerable acid of her own. “
Ahora el se las da de experto
.”
“Speak English, dammit.”
“Sorry, sir. I said now he wants to be the expert. Why can’t he stick to talking with the legislature about the budget?”
“Come on, Estelle. He’s not as much of an idiot as we first thought, three years ago.”
“He is if he thinks Reuben would leave his place for Mexico.”
“There’s always a chance.”
“No, there isn’t. He’s so old and…and…
caduco
that he probably doesn’t remember what direction the border is.”
I let that pass and said, “Sheriff Holman wants to go out this morning and bring him in for questioning.”
This time, there was more than exasperation in Estelle’s voice. “This is going to kill him, sir. If he thinks for one minute that he’s going to jail for something…especially something he didn’t do, it’ll kill him.”
“Yes.”
“Should I come up?”
“Yes.”
“I can be there in an hour. Will you have Holman at least wait until I get there?”
“It’s a promise, Estelle.”