“Sir, Deputy Encinos just radioed in a possible homicide on County Road twenty-seven just beyond the second cattle guard off the state highway.”
“A what?”
“A homicide, sir.”
“I know what you said. Who, I meant.”
“Deputy Encinos didn’t say, sir.”
“All right. I’ll be there in a couple minutes. And Gayle-”
“Sir?”
“Is anyone with Encinos?”
“Deputy Abeyta,” Gayle said. “He wanted to work a weekend four-to-midnight, and you left standing orders that he couldn’t work that shift alone.”
“Okay. Good.” I heard a voice in the background and then Gayle came back on the line, this time a little more tentative.
“Sir, can you stop by and pick up a passenger on your way out?”
“A passenger?” Sheriff Holman didn’t get any kick out of riding in a police car-he avoided the opportunity whenever it presented itself. I couldn’t think of anyone else.
“Yes, sir. Linda Rael is here.” I groaned. The young reporter kept worse hours than I did. But company wasn’t what I had in mind. I started to refuse, then frowned. What the hell.
“Tell her to be standing out on the sidewalk at the corner of Bustos and Third. I won’t slow down much.”
I didn’t bother giving Gayle any other instructions. She knew full well what to do and would make her calls to the coroner, ambulance, and Sheriff Holman in due course. Deputy Encinos would keep the crime scene intact, with the rookie Tony Abeyta to assist.
I headed out the door to 310, my pulse hammering. The second cattle guard on County Road 27 was the one by Reuben Fuentes’s two-track. It didn’t take much imagination to picture a confrontation out there. All that was left was to find out who’d been killed.
11
The headlights of 310 picked up Linda Rael’s slight figure on the corner. The wind tugged at her long coat and her wide-brimmed slouch hat was pulled tightly down on her head. I could see the heavy camera bag slung over her right shoulder. I braked hard and she yanked open the passenger side door and was inside in one graceful, lithe movement. If I’d tried that, I would have ended up in traction for months.
As I accelerated the patrol car away from the curb I snapped on the red lights, and the pulsing beam bounced off the drab buildings as we headed out Bustos Avenue. Holiday cheer.
Clear of town, I nudged 310 a little faster. Traffic was light on the state highway and we flashed along for the first mile or so with Linda remaining silent. Her hands were tightly clasped together in her lap.
“Gayle said this was a homicide?” she asked finally.
“Apparently. Put on your seat belt. And what are you doing out at this hour?” Feeling paternal was a luxury I figured I could afford, even if her response was that it was none of my business.
“Just working…and there’s a deputy already out there?”
“Yes. Paul Encino and Tony Abeyta, both.”
In the dim light of the car, my peripheral vision caught the faint movement of her nod. We hurled past two big RVs driven no doubt by snowbirds trundling west. I wondered what they were doing out so late. When 310 was back in the proper lane, Linda turned slightly toward me. “May I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“If the body is already dead, and there’s an officer already out there, why are we in such a hurry?”
I glanced over at her, amused. She was resting her right hand on the dashboard as if that might stop her from going ballistic if we crashed into something solid.
“Are you serious?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I thought for a moment, trying to frame an appropriate answer, knowing that whatever I said would probably end up as a quotation in the damn newspaper. She didn’t have her pencil out, though, so maybe I was safe. And I didn’t slow down.
“If it’s a homicide, Linda, then every minute counts. Every minute that goes by in an investigation makes the trail just that much harder to follow.”
“But isn’t there a working deputy already on the scene?”
I braked hard and turned off on County Road 27. The rear end of the patrol car fishtailed on the gravel and Linda transferred her grip from the dash to the door’s courtesy handle.
“Yes. But he won’t investigate. All Paul has done is secure the scene.”
“Meaning what?”
“He makes sure no one tromps around and wrecks evidence. He makes sure nothing changes…the crime scene looks exactly the way it did when he found it. That’s all he does. Unless there’s someone standing over the corpse with a smoking gun or a bloody wrecking bar. Then I might let the deputy make an arrest.”
Linda nodded and put her hand up on the ceiling as she saw the first cattle guard approaching. We sailed across it without much of a thump and she brought her arm back down.
“And often evidence is time-related. So,” and I shrugged, “if weather conditions permit and if traffic permits, then we don’t let the moss grow.”
We were well away from the village and any other ranches. With no moon and a growing cloud cover, the prairie was a blank, featureless black void except for the bright tunnel bored by the patrol car’s headlights. We rounded a sweeping curve whose radius gradually tightened until we were down to twenty miles an hour-and that seemed too fast as juniper limbs almost brushed the fenders. Up ahead the wink of Encinos’s flashers was our beacon.
As we approached I could see a second vehicle on the shoulder of the road, far enough over that its wheels were nearly in the bar ditch. I didn’t have to see the magnetic sign on the door panel to know who owned the Suburban.
Deputy Paul Encinos stood by the front fender of his county Ramcharger, waiting. The dome light was on and I could see Tony Abeyta inside. Encinos raised his flashlight in salute as I pulled up behind his four-by-four.
“Should I stay in the car?” Linda asked.
“Yes,” I said and turned off the red lights.
The northwest wind had a bite as I stepped out of the car and I remembered the cloud banks I had seen earlier in the day, building in the west over San Cristobal mesa. I snapped my Eisenhower jacket closed and tucked my flashlight under my arm.
“What’s up?”
Paul Encinos pointed across the road with his flashlight. If I tried hard, I might make myself believe that I could see the body. But it was just a dark lump that could as easily have been bunch grass. “Tony and I were going to drive out this way as far as the Triple Bar T gate. I saw your orders on the bulletin board to close-patrol this stretch. And there he was.”
“How’d you happen to see him?”
“I had the spotlight on and was swinging it back and forth across the pasture there, trying to see dogs running or whatever.”
“Good man. Then you jumped the fence and walked over?”
Encinos shook his head. “No, sir. I used the binoculars and I could see that the victim was dead.”
I held out my hand and Encinos gave me the field glasses. He aimed the spotlight from the car until the corpse was centered in the pool of light. After a minute fussing with the adjustment I could make out that the body was lying roughly parallel to the roadway. The binoculars shortened the distance enough that I could see what was left of the man’s face. Unless there was a grass clump in the way, even my old eyes could tell that the man’s skull was missing from the bridge of his nose up.
“And you didn’t climb the fence?”
“No, sir. I didn’t want to mess anything up. Nobody’s been over there since we arrived.”
I nodded and handed the binoculars back. “Cut the top two strands of the fence,” I said, pointing directly across the road. “Watch where you step.”
Where the roadside fence ran along the ditch, the ground was tough bunchgrass and soil that was not much more than the bald top of an ancient limestone outcrop. A jackhammer wouldn’t have left many prints. I scanned the roadway carefully while Encinos rummaged in the trunk of his car for wire cutters.