“Your neighbor?”
“Yeah. Reg Freiburg, in the apartment next door. Doesn’t like loud music.”
Martinez sat back, running his fingers through his close-cropped black hair. He stayed silent for what seemed like a long time. At last he sat forward. “Mr. Kelly, Teresa Gonzales was found dead last night at your ranch house.”
Suddenly, Skip’s body felt strangely heavy. “Teresa?”
Martinez nodded. “Every Sunday afternoon, she gets a delivery of feed for the farm animals. Last Sunday, she didn’t answer the door. The man noticed the animals hadn’t been fed, and that her dog was locked in the house. When she still didn’t answer the next morning, he got worried and called us.”
“Oh, my God.” Skip shook his head. “Teresa. I can’t believe it.”
The lieutenant shifted in his chair, eyes on Skip. “When we went out there, we found her bed unmade, clothes set out. The dog was terrified. It looked like something had gotten her up in the middle of the night. But there was no sign of her on the property, so we decided to visit the neighboring ranches. Your place was our first stop.” He took a slow breath. “We saw movement inside. Turned out to be dogs, fighting over something.” He stopped, pursed his lips.
But Skip barely heard this. He was thinking of Teresa, trying to remember the last time he’d seen her. He and Nora had gone out to the house to pick up a few things to decorate her apartment. Teresa had been outside in her yard, seen them, and waved her enthusiastic wave. He could see her still, jogging down the path to their house, brown careless hair flapping and dancing in the breeze.
Then his eyes fell upon the single folder lying in the center of the desk. GONZALES, T. was written along one side. The glossy edge of a black-and-white picture peeked from beneath one corner of the folder. Automatically, he reached out for it.
“I wouldn’t,” Martinez said. But he made no move to stop him. Skip lifted the edge, exposing the photograph; then froze in horror.
Teresa was lying on her back, one leg across the other, left hand thrown up as if to catch an errant football. At least, Skip thought it was Teresa, because he recognized the room as their old kitchen: his mother’s ancient stove stood in the top right-hand corner of the picture.
Teresa herself was less recognizable. Her mouth was open, but the cheeks were missing. Through gaps in the ruined flesh, teeth fillings gleamed hollowly in the light of the camera’s flash. Even in the black-and-white photograph, Skip saw that the skin was an unnatural mottled shade. Several parts of Teresa were missing: fingers, a breast, the meaty part of a thigh. Small black marks and ragged lines dotted her body: evidence of unhurried sampling by animals approaching satiation. Where Teresa’s throat had once been was now just emptiness, a ruined cage of bone and gristle, surrounded by ragged flesh. Congealed blood ran away in a horrific river toward a long hole in the scarred floorboards. Pattering away from the river of blood were countless small marks Skip realized were paw prints.
“Dogs,” Martinez said, gently removing Skip’s hand and closing the folder.
Skip’s mouth worked soundlessly for a moment. “I’m sorry?” he croaked.
“Stray dogs had been working on her body for a day or so.”
“Was she killed by dogs?”
“We thought so at first. Her throat had been torn out with a large bite and there were claw and bite marks over the body. But the coroner’s initial examination found definitive evidence that it was a homicide.”
Skip looked at him. “What kind of evidence?”
Martinez rose with an easy affability that seemed incongruous with his words. “An unusual kind of mutilation to the fingers and toes, among other things. We’ll know a lot more when the autopsy is completed this afternoon. Meantime, please do three things for me. Keep this to yourself. Don’t go near the farmhouse. And most important of alclass="underline" stay where we can find you.”
He ushered Skip out of the room and down the hall without another word.
22
AT BREAKFAST THE NEXT MORNING, THE expedition was uncharacteristically silent. Nora felt a mood of doubt. All too clearly, Black’s comments from the night before had made their mark.
They proceeded northwest, up a harsh, brutal canyon destitute of vegetation. Even at the early hour, heat was rising from the split rocks, making them look airy and insubstantial. The unwatered horses were irritable and difficult to control.
As they continued, the canyon system grew increasingly complex, branching and rebranching into a twisted maze. It continued to be impossible to get a GPS reading from the canyon floor, and the cliffs were so sheer that Sloane could not have climbed to the top to take a reading without putting herself in danger. Nora found she was spending as much time consulting the map as traveling. Several times they were forced to backtrack out of a blind canyon; other times, the expedition had to wait while Nora and Sloane scouted ahead to find a route. Black was uncharacteristically silent, his face sick with a combination of fear and anger.
Nora struggled with her own doubts. Had her father really gone this far? Had they taken a wrong turn somewhere? A few swales and scatterings of charcoal were visible here and there, but so faint and infrequent as to be background noise; they could easily be the result of wildfires. There was a new thought now she barely dared to consider: what if her father had been delirious when he wrote the letter? It seemed impossible for anyone to have successfully navigated this labyrinth.
At other times, she thought about the broken skull and dried blood, and what it could possibly mean. In her mind, Pete’s Ruin had changed from an unremarkable set of roomblocks to a dark, unnerving little mystery.
By midmorning, the canyon had ended in a sudden puzzle of hoodoo rocks. They squeezed through an opening and topped out in a broken valley, peppered with scrub junipers. As she went over the rise, Nora glanced to the right. She could see the Kaiparowits Plateau as a high, dark line against the horizon.
Then she faced forward, and the vista she saw both horrified and elated her.
On the far side of the valley, raked by the morning sun, rose what could only be the Devil’s Backbone: the hogback ridge she had been anticipating and dreading since they first set out. It was a giant, irregular fin of sandstone at least a thousand feet high and many miles long, pocked with vesicles and windblown holes, riven with vertical fractures and slots. The top was notched like a dinosaur’s back. It was hideous in its beauty.
Nora led the group over to the shade of a large rock, where they dismounted. She stepped aside with Swire.
“Let’s see if we can scout a trail up it first,” Nora said. “It looks pretty tough.”
For a moment, Swire didn’t answer. “From here, I wouldn’t exactly call it tough,” he said. “I’d call it impossible.”
“My father made it over with his two horses.”
“So you said.” Swire spat a thin stream of tobacco juice. “Then again, this ain’t the only ridge around here.”
“It’s a fault-block cuesta,” said Black, who had been listening. “It outcrops for at least a hundred miles. Your father’s so-called ridge could be anywhere along there.”
“This is the right one,” Nora said a little more slowly, trying to keep the tone of doubt out of her voice.
Swire shook his head and began to roll a smoke. “I’ll tell you one thing. I want to see the trail with my own eyes before I take any horses up it.”
“Fair enough,” Nora replied. “Let’s go find it. Sloane, keep an eye on things until we get back.”
“Sure thing,” came the contralto drawl.
The two hiked north along the base of the ridge, looking for a notch or break in the smooth rock that might signal the beginnings of a trail. After half a mile, they came across some shallow caves. Nora noticed that several had ancient smudges of black smoke on their ceilings.