Hidden Heritage

by Charlotte Hinger

  It should not be necessary. Carlton County is a small county in Western Kansas. But after a couple of bizarre cases had spiraled out of control, the three of us became edgy. On the lookout for shadows. For menace.

  Dwayne turned toward Keith without so much as an apologetic glance toward me. A man doing a man’s business. Naturally, he wanted to talk to another man. I no longer smolder over such things. I took notes.

  “Victor had no business here,” Dwayne blurted. “None whatsoever.” He pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and blew his nose. “He’s my right-hand man. My foreman. I just don’t understand what the hell he was doing here at this time of night.”

  “And he’s only worked here five years?” I broke into the conversation. “That’s a pretty good step up the ladder to become a foreman in that short a time.”

  “He was great. Just great. One of those employees you can count on for just about anything. No matter how trivial. He cared and worked hard and…” Dwayne choked on his words, then embarrassed at his loss of control, turned away.

  “We’ll talk more later.” Keith clapped Dwayne on the shoulder, then walked over to the EMTs who were transferring the body to the ambulance. The solemn crowd of onlookers was dispersing and heading for their cars. Victor’s identity was now known and whispered around. There was no need for anyone to stay.

  Sam went over to the three firefighters still in wet suits and gestured toward the lagoon. They headed back toward it. Shocked, I looked at Keith.

  “They need to make sure.”

  “Sure of what?”

  “Sure there’s not another body down there.”

  Chapter Two

  Sam left them to their work. He walked over to where we were standing. “Mighty sorry, Dwayne. Wasn’t around Victor much, but he was a fine man, from everything I’ve heard about him.” He gestured toward the office buildings. “It’s going to take the men a while. Can we go in there to talk? I need to get a little more information to send along to the district coroner.”

  Keith and I exchanged glances. Sam saw, and then gave a slight shake of his head warning us not to ask questions. We had them, of course. The normal procedure was to send a body to our county coroner, not the district coroner.

  “Christ,” Keith muttered under this breath, too low for anyone but me to hear. The three of us followed Dwayne across the lot. Sam’s white hair gleamed below his Stetson. I squared my shoulders. I always did when I was around this old man who should have been enjoying a spot by the fire in his old age. But having lost his only son in Vietnam and his wife to cancer years ago he’d turned to work and was re-elected sheriff every four years.

  There was no better mind for police work, but Keith was beginning to grumble about the lack of equipment and methods that were outdated. In short, Sam’s unwillingness to integrate computers and data diminished his natural aptitude.

  Dwayne took us back to his office, the largest of three administrative suites. He gestured toward the two chairs facing his desk. “Sorry. I’ll get a folding chair.”

  “No need. I’ll stand,” Sam said. “This won’t take long.”

  The phone rang and Dwayne automatically started to pick it up, then stopped. “Forgot. Bart’s dispatching tonight.”

  The furnishings were Danish modern. Easy to clean in an environment dominated by dust. Keith glanced at the main server that was large enough to store data for half the state. In a couple of hours it would display a running tape of the commodities futures market. What Carlton County lacked in population, it more than made up for in computer geeks per square mile. MBAs and Agriculture Economics majors now ran corporate farms, and the beef industry was dominated by men hardwired for profits.

  Opposite the hall leading past Dwayne’s office are several rooms for the drivers’ comfort. In them are exercise equipment and a small kitchen with a mini fridge and a microwave. Dwayne had given me a tour once and I knew the shower had a full collection of toiletries. Another room has a flat screen TV and another has four bunk beds so drivers could catch up on their sleep between loads. The tile floors gleam and there are plants galore.

  I had been out here many times during daylight hours and knew that no amount of filtering would eliminate the faint haze of dust particles that permeates the air or minimizes the odor rising from thousands of cattle being fed out.

  The sky was lightening. Poets can write all they want about the glories of dawn, but when there’s been a death, daylight isn’t welcome. Dark and shadows soften reality.

  A truck entered the feedyard and Dwayne rose and went to the plate glass window that faces the road.

  “They can’t unload yet,” Sam said. “Not until…” He faltered. Keith looked at him sharply and I knew he was mentally filling in the missing sentence. Knowing instantly that Sam had seen something when Victor’s body was loaded. Knowing for some reason our sheriff thought this death was suspicious.

  Dwayne’s face flooded with blood. A vein on his temple throbbed. “Just a minute here, Sam. We have to unload that truck right away. Get those cattle weighed and put in a holding pen. The cowboy crew gets here right before daylight. In another hour or so, the processing crew will start coming in, too, and finish them the rest of the way. Other trucks. More cattle coming in all day long. We can’t have truckloads of cattle just sitting here. They need to be inspected, and fed and watered.”

  He turned to Keith who was often called on to look over the cattle. “Tell him, Fiene. They have to unload.”

  “He’s right, Sam. He can’t leave them on the truck.” Keith studied the whiteboard dominating one wall and listing pens and ear tag numbers. He glanced at Dwayne. “Where are you going to put them?”

  “Pen fifty-one. It’s empty right now. Three more truckloads coming in today with feeders that weigh about the same. They aren’t custom feeders, so they will all be put in the same pen.”

  “Custom?” I asked, doing my best to follow the conversation.

  “We buy most of the cattle at sales through order buyers. They belong to the feedyard. Custom-fed cattle belong to mostly local men who contract with us to feed them out.” Annoyed at having to explain basics, he turned back to Sam and Keith. My face flamed. The menfolk!

  “Have you done anything special to that pen?” Sam asked.

  “Like what?”

  “Disinfected? Anything like that?”

  “No, just the usual. The maintenance crew comes in and cleans it up with bulldozers with a blade on front. All the manure is removed and piled and sold to local farmers for natural fertilizer. Then the ground is leveled, and the water and feeding troughs cleaned out. That pen is ready now.”

  “Other cattle been there in the last month?”

  “No.”

  “Good,” Sam said. He turned to me. “There’s a kit in my car. Please process that pen immediately.” I glanced at Keith. A surprised look flickered across his face. “Keith, go with her to record any notes.”

  I had become the unofficial CSI person for the sheriff’s office. Keith’s powers of observation were second to none, but both men accepted my intuition and my ability to sense that something was “not quite right.” From time to time Keith would grumble that it was like living with a witch, but I knew what came into play was my training as a historian. I accepted the importance of documentation, but so often documents were wrong. Facts—black and white—could lead to a false conclusion.

  My twin sister, Josie, a clinical psychologist and part-time professor at Kansas State University, had said last spring that personalities as high in intuition as mine were rare. She is more logical. More cynical. Together, our separate academic disciplines equaled a regular science team.

  Neither of us, however, could hold a candle to Josie’s spoiled little shih tzu, Tosca, whose judgment was infallible. If Tosca didn’t like someone, there was something rotten in Denmark. Thankfully, she found most
people neutral.

  “This won’t take long,” Sam told Dwayne. “All we need are a few soil samples.”

  “Why are you doing this? Going over an empty cattle pen?”

  “This is just standard procedure.” Sam didn’t blink.

  But it wasn’t standard. Keith and I exchanged looks.

  “Tell me what happens when a load of cattle come in.”

  Dwayne went through the routine beginning with a load logged in, the cattle unloaded and sent through chutes one at a time, inspected, ear-tagged with the pen number, and moved to their base pen where they remain until they are sent to market. When he finished explaining the process, ending with the trucks backing up to the shit pit and getting rinsed out, Sam held up his hand, palm out turned like a traffic cop.

  “Not tonight. They have to wash out somewhere else. You can unload, but you can’t wash out here.”

  Sam cut off Dwayne’s furious protest.

  “I don’t want that pit touched until we’ve had a chance to analyze it, too.”

  Now I was certain that Sam had seen something. Inwardly, I groaned. We were looking at holding pens of thousands of cattle and a lake of wine-rich manure teaming with excrement and bacteria. It was an impossible situation.

  Then I understood. The unoccupied pens would serve as a control. Pen fifty-one had been empty.

  “Since you’ve said Victor wasn’t supposed to be here, we want to do things right from the beginning,” Sam said. “Just in case.”

  “Just in case,” had become the sheriff department’s motto by now. Nevermind the serve and protect bit. We automatically assumed that no matter how innocent a situation seemed on the surface, whatever could go wrong usually did.

  “I won’t know what might have been dumped in that lagoon until the boys from KBI have taken a look,” Sam continued.

  My skin crawled. Keith was silent. The KBI from the very beginning. No doubt now that Sam had seen something.

  The whole feedyard was being treated as a crime scene.

  “Lottie, Keith, after you process that pen, I want you to take soil samples of every tenth unoccupied pen.” He turned back to Dwayne. “Send your trucks to a commercial washout. There’s one in Dunkirk.”

  It was an order, not a request. Sam has a commanding voice that goes with his military bearing. Only a fool challenges the general.

  “All right,” Dwayne said reluctantly. “I’ll tell the men to unload and then go to Dunkirk and wash out. But we need to go to Victor’s wife right away. I can’t take a chance that someone else will tell her—if they haven’t already.”

  “Does Diaz have other family here?” Keith asked.

  “His great-grandmother. A sister. And I think George Perez is his cousin. He’s a welder for a heating and air-conditioning company over in Dunkirk.”

  “No children?”

  “None. There was just the two of them.”

  “Goddamn it.” Sam took off his hat and ran his hand through his hair. “Can’t be helped. You and I can go tell his wife while Keith and Lottie make sure those empty pens don’t have anything we need to know about.”

  “Why pen fifty-one? It’s been empty for four months.”

  “That’s why,” Sam said. “I want soil samples and scrapings off the fencing in that pen as a control to compare with the other full pens.”

  He looked at Dwayne hard. I had been on the receiving end of Sam’s zingers often enough that I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t.

  “Was Victor a citizen? Is everyone working here legal?”

  Dwayne’s face reddened. “Victor’s family has always been here. He was born in America. He didn’t come from Mexico. His family has always been here.”

  “And all the others? Do they have the right papers?

  “Of course. We check that out first thing. My office manager takes care of all those details.”

  “Glad to hear it. It’s a good idea to have everything shipshape if the Feds come around.” There was a ghost of a smile on Sam’s face. “Grab anything you need and let’s go break the news to his widow.”

  Chapter Three

  It didn’t take much time to process the cattle pens. It was a matter of putting samples from the floor of the pens into test tubes for the KBI lab—but we didn’t know why—since Victor had drowned. It had the feel of busywork. We scraped off samples from the creosote-soaked fences. Keith noted that there was nothing visibly wrong. The soil and the fencing would give an excellent sample of what clean pens should be like—provided the labs didn’t find anything out of place.

  When we finished, we went back to the processing area. Keith walked over to the cattle truck and beckoned to the driver, who backed up to the chute, then hopped down out of the cab to check his position. The best drivers could maneuver the exit door within inches of the opening.

  I didn’t know him, but Keith obviously did.

  “Hear there’s been a little excitement out here tonight.”

  “Yeah, well,” Keith said. “Can’t talk about it, Billy.”

  “Plenty of chatter about it on the CB.”

  “Can’t help that. But none of the details came from me.”

  “Hear ol’ Victor’s dead? That right?”

  “That’s public knowledge. That’s right.”

  “He drowned in the shit pit? That right too?”

  Keith nodded. “The holding pen is ready to go. Best hop to it.”

  Cattle left standing on a truck shrink at a predictable rate of three to four percent an hour. Nothing made buyers and sellers more irate than dawdling drivers who sat too long at truck stops swilling coffee while cattle on hot stationary trucks are deprived of food and water and becoming smaller and smaller. Loads are weighed when the trucks are first loaded, then again at the end of a run. Buyers who had bought cattle weighed on the hoof weren’t happy to be paid considerably less when critters arrived at their destination shedding pounds like contenders for The Biggest Loser.

  Keith and I turned to leave and then my cell phone rang. I glanced at the screen. Sam.

  “Need you to get over here, Lottie.” His voice was low and terse as though he didn’t want anyone to overhear. “This got ugly fast and I think you can help calm Mrs. Diaz down.”

  “Be right there.” I hung up. “Problems, Keith. We need to get over to Victor’s, or at least I do. It might complicate the situation to have another man around.”

  “If it does, I’ll go back to the car.”

  ***

  “Ugly” wasn’t a strong enough word. Maria Diaz had dissolved into a bitter bawling mess. My heart ached, and I could not find words to comfort her. The trite overworked one on every cop show, “I’m sorry for your loss,” struck me as woefully inadequate. I bit my lip in a vain attempt to hold back tears.

  It didn’t help. I put my arms around this little sparrow of a woman. I only knew her by reputation. She was the go-to person when new arrivals hit the town. She helped parents enroll their kids in school and looked over everyone’s paperwork. She took them to the right place to learn more about citizenship proceedings.

  Hospitals in three counties were grateful when she called on patients because she was fluently bilingual and could help relay symptoms. One look at her kindly brown eyes, light olive skin, and pillowed breasts was all it took. They knew they had a friend. She had a fine sense of outrage and could do battle with city hall when it was necessary.

  But now there wasn’t a trace of her toughness and resourcefulness evident. She was reduced to the most primal of all emotions. Grief. Profound grief.

  I held her as she sobbed. From over her shoulder I gazed at the array of statues and candles arranged before photos standing in gilt frames. Heavy incense perfumed the small living room. Even though Sam and Dwayne had brought her the news, they clearly thought I should know how to comfort her. Even more tha
n telling someone about a death in the family, I hate trying to figure out what to say next.

  By now, I knew she might as well set a place at the table for Grief—for the shadow that would dog her heels. Prepare herself for the quick embarrassing onslaught of tears. For the bittersweet memories that would wake her in the middle of the night.

  She quieted a little. “They told me he died where they wash out trucks.”

  “Yes,” I murmured, knowing this religious woman could not bring herself to say “shit pit.”

  “Why was he there? Why would he be called out in the middle of the night? He didn’t say when he left.”

  She was asking important questions and raising issues we should talk about formally. It wouldn’t be seemly for me to suddenly push her away and start taking notes. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure I could trust my memory to recall everything she was saying. I wanted to follow up on her “why” questions.

  I gave her a final squeeze and led her to the sofa, hoping we could give her some concrete information soon.

  Trusting me to know what to do and say, Sam and Dwayne had gratefully fled to the relative peace of the small lean-to porch when we arrived. Keith had stayed there with them. Their voices drifted inside, competing with the racket coming from the cheap air cooler that strained to overcome the heat in the tiny airless room. The cooler was poorly ventilated. Nauseated by the odor from the feedyard, the stale air robbed of oxygen by the array of candles, I wanted out. Feeling dizzy, I started to rise. I needed a drink of water.

  Silently, I cursed the men who had escaped this burden. Angry now, I stepped outside.

  “Sam, Keith. If you have questions for Mrs. Diaz, please ask them now. I’ll ask members of Victor’s family to come spend the night with her. I don’t want her to be alone. Don’t string out anything you want to ask. Let’s get this over with so she can be around people who might help her.”