See That My Grave Is Kept Clean

by Bart Paul

  “Hey, Sarah,” he said. Then he looked at me. “More trouble in paradise, Tommy?”

  Aaron had been the Bureau’s liaison with the Frémont County Sheriff’s office when Sarah’s dad, Dave, was kidnapped and almost killed by her first husband the year before.

  “I guess Erika Hornberg’s your headache again, pal.”

  That got Mitch’s attention. He put down his phone.

  “You absolutely sure it’s that bank manager?” Mitch said. “She must be picked clean as a whistle after all this time.”

  “Actually, she’s sorta pickled—like a brisket of beef.”

  Mitch shifted his look from me to Audie. She was still dragging the raggedy-assed sleeping bag.

  “Dang,” he said. “Is this the kid everybody’s been looking for?” He looked her up and down in her borrowed clothes. “You got some explaining to do, young lady.”

  “This is the child,” Sarah said. “She’s been through hell, so knock it off.” She told him Audie’s name, and that the losers we’d seen her with at the pack station two mornings ago weren’t her parents.

  “Then who the hell were they?” Mitch said. “And what was their deal?”

  “We’ve been looking for a kid who was supposed to be lost, and instead we find a dead body that’s been buried for months. No telling what the deal is.”

  Mitch looked around the big room like his brain had already moved on. “It looks like a danged daycare in here.” He fixed on Sarah. “So what’s the bottom line?”

  “If we find the fake mother,” Sarah said, “maybe we can get some answers.” Deputy Sorenson handed her a piece of paper. She read it and looked up at Mitch. “The Reno address the woman who calls herself Chrystal Dawn gave us two days ago is bogus.”

  They didn’t get very far into that before Mom came in with plastic shopping bags full of clothes and shoe boxes and toys for Audie.

  “You’re his mom?” Audie said. She seemed semi-amazed at the whole idea of that.

  “Yeah,” Mom said, “but don’t tell anybody.” The two of them started opening the bags. Mom pulled out a doll and handed it to Audie. She looked at it like she’d never seen one and dropped it on a chair.

  Right behind Mom was the lady from county Child Services down in Mammoth Lakes. Mom and Sarah huddled with the woman for a minute, then came back to the kid and me.

  “I can’t make any guarantees,” the county woman said.

  “We understand,” Sarah said. She sat on a chair and took Audie’s hands in hers. “If these people let us, how’d you like to spend a few days with Tommy’s mom while we try to find your real family?”

  “I don’t know if that’s such a great idea.”

  “This doesn’t concern you, Tommy,” Mom said.

  “Will folks mess with me there?” Audie said. The kid looked pretty wary.

  “Mom’s boyfriend is a big old Marine. Anybody messes with you, he’ll shoot their ass.”

  “Tommy,” Mom said. “Burt will do no such thing.”

  “He better,” Audie said. “What kind of gun does he have?”

  “Let’s not talk that way,” the county lady said. “I might change my mind.”

  She and Sarah took Audie and Mom in the conference room and closed the door. Mitch followed, but they made him wait outside.

  “Hey, Mitch.”

  “What now, Tommy?” he said.

  “Was that the highway patrol on the phone?”

  “What if it was?”

  “Can you have them check if in the last few years they had any renegades or grifters in their motor units named VanOwen?”

  “It would help if I had a first name.”

  “If I knew that I wouldn’t need you.”

  I ignored him when Aaron came over. We sat, and I told him about the guy on the Harley and how he might be tied in to Audie and her bogus parents. He said he’d get on it, since he and Mitch would be dealing with the CHP a lot that morning.

  “They’re not making fast progress retrieving those two bodies,” he said. “Any chance you could take me up there tomorrow along with an Evidence Response Team?”

  “Heck yeah.”

  “I want to leave a two-man crew to secure the site,” he said, “then they can pick a landing spot for a chopper and give us coordinates. I want to pack out the guy you shot as early as we can tomorrow so we can get started on him. Can you do that on a packhorse?”

  “Sure—if you stop sayin’ I shot the guy.”

  “If Erika Hornberg’s been pickled in a pond like you say, an extra day won’t matter. Our medical examiners will want to supervise the body removal in case nobody can ID her and we need to do a full-on exam later. Meanwhile, I’d like to get an ID on the dead guy ASAP.” He semi-smiled. “Your dead guy.”

  “Thanks so much. How ’bout you bring a body bag for the sake of the mule.”

  He thought about that a second then looked grossed out. “You sure you don’t want to take Mitch along with us?”

  I must’ve looked sour, and that made him laugh.

  “The guy we ought to take is Erika’s brother, Buddy. He can let us know right away if it’s her. Sarah’s gonna contact him.”

  “We worked him over pretty good last year when the embezzlement first came to light,” he said, “so he might not want to go. We were looking to see if he was involved. The guy had financial issues. Dug the old homestead into debt.”

  “I can talk to him about riding up with us if you want.”

  “That’d be good.”

  “Was he involved in the embezzlement?”

  “Nothing concrete.”

  “I wouldn’t think old Buddy was that smart.”

  “Your words,” Aaron said, “not mine. And don’t worry. The Bureau will pay for the trip.”

  “Damn right they will.”

  Aaron took a call, and I looked at the dirty sleeping bag on a chair. It had the name of some kid’s cartoon show on it from back when I was little. It looked like the safest thing to do with it would be to burn it. I was pretty sure neither Audie or the fake parents were dragging that with them the first morning I saw them walking through the pack station. Sarah and Mom walked out of the conference room with the county lady. Audie followed them. She had on new shorts and a new tee shirt and shoes. She looked like a totally different kid.

  The Hornberg Ranch sat three miles south of Paiute Meadows on the Reno Highway. It was one of the oldest in the valley but smaller than either Becky Tyree’s place or the big Dominion outfit that bought out the Allison ranch where I’d grown up when my dad was manager. And Hornberg’s looked way more rundown, some of the outbuildings old and not well maintained. The two-story house was even older, and smallish, sitting under some poplars with a screened front porch that sat right on the grass, and smoke pouring from the chimney even at midday. I turned down into the ranchyard from the pavement and saw the only new thing on the place, a big Ford F-350 extended cab with the dealer sticker still on the window. Buddy must’ve been doing better than the look of the place would let on, financial issues or not. Or maybe he was just one of those guys who always got their spending priorities back-asswards. Maybe Fuchs’s team should’ve worked him over harder.

  A guy in a tee shirt walked over to my truck from the house.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “Buddy Hornberg?” He’d gained a bunch of weight since I’d seen him last, and I didn’t recognize him.

  “Who wants to know?”

  I got out of my truck, and he stepped back like I was going to bite him. “It’s Tommy Smith. How the hell are you?”

  “Well, I’ll be a sonofabitch,” he said. We shook, but he didn’t break a smile. “I thought you were still in the Army in some godforsaken hellhole takin’ down the towelheads.”

  “Been back a while. Married Sarah Cathcart. Got a baby girl, and we’re re-opening the pack station in Aspen Canyon with Harvey and May Linderman.”

  “I guess maybe I did hear something about that,” he said. “I
heard Becky Tyree got the pack station site from Dominion in a land swap. Something about highway access for shipping their steers. Then she just gave it to you for nothing.” He looked like that pissed him off.

  “Yeah, sure, Buddy. That’s exactly what happened. But I didn’t come here to talk about the pack station.”

  “So this must be about my sister, then.” He said it slow, more nervous than nice.

  I told him about searching for a missing child with Jack Harney, and how, when the cadaver dog found a corpse, it wasn’t a child at all but a grown woman who looked like it could be his sister, Erika. He didn’t turn a hair when I told him we got shot at almost as soon as we stepped off our horses. He just stared off into space till I was done.

  “You saying somebody was following you guys?” he said.

  “Either that or they were waiting for us. Or we mighta just had the bad luck to surprise ’em at something extra-legal.”

  “No offense, Tommy, but this all has jack shit to do with me.”

  “The FBI’d like you to ride up the canyon to ID the body.”

  “Screw that.” He finally looked at me. “Why?”

  “They want a positive ID to know what they’re dealing with. Might take a cloud off of you.”

  “Then why don’t they ask me?” He sounded tense.

  “‘Cause you and me were neighbors.”

  “And when did these Feds want to do this?” he said.

  “Dawn tomorrow.”

  He fussed about all the things he needed to do before he could even think of going anywhere, but quit objecting soon enough. He quit so soon that it seemed like quitting was something he’d perfected over the years. I followed him into the house, and we talked about nothing, then I waited in the living room while he disappeared upstairs. The furniture was old and cheap, but the plasma TV was new and Judge Judy was scowling at somebody with the sound off. The place was hot from a woodstove in the corner and close with the smell of the way other folks lived. I wondered why I’d even come inside. There was a bookshelf with a bunch of pictures and doo-dads, but no books. Two of the pictures were of Erika when she was younger, about twenty. In one she was standing at the edge of a cliff in hiking clothes wearing shades with a big mountain behind her. She was smiling and looked the way I remembered her, kind of pretty and sandy-haired, but compact and athletic as hell. In the second picture she was out past her dad’s barn, posing in a shooter’s stance with earmuffs, holding a tiny automatic pistol and blasting away at something. In a minute, Buddy came downstairs and we went outside. He said he wanted to take his own horse in the morning but wanted me to check it out to see if it was up to the trip.

  I waited in the yard while he got a halter and walked out into an irrigated pasture to try to catch the horse. It was pleasant enough on the grass outside of the screened porch in the shade of the poplars. Something at the far edge of the yard caught my eye. In the shade under a single aspen I saw a tiny enclosure made of white picket fence, about four feet by three. I walked up to it and looked inside the fence and saw it was only a cast-iron well-head. From a distance it looked like the grave of a small child.

  I took a closer look at the ranchyard. It was actually a semi-functional place, and the corrals and chute and an empty feedlot weren’t as decrepit as they looked from the highway. The brick slaughterhouse was still standing. Buddy’s dad and grandfather before him had run a commercial meat business for years until grandpa Fritz got cranky and wouldn’t make the upgrades the state health folks had wanted. I stuck my head in while I waited. On one side of the center aisle, the door to the refrigerated meat locker was open, and the locker was stuffed with old furniture and crap and the fridge motor was silent. On the other side of the aisle, the concrete killing floor was empty, but the gambrel hung high from the ceiling pulleys like it did when my dad taught me to butcher a steer in that place and hoist it by slipping the curved tips of the gambrel under the tendons above the hock. Then the carcass would be sawed in half along the spine. Each hind leg would be swapped from the gambrel tips onto a single hook hanging from a steel wheel that ran along a ceiling rail, then the two halves of the carcass were pushed across the center aisle to the refrigerated room to cure.

  Back outside, the bunkhouse door hung open, and a broken front window was covered in plywood. The equipment shed was empty except for two motorcycles. A pretty beat-up looking dirt bike and a tricked-out Harley street bike under a clear plastic sheet. Next to them sat stacks of motorcycle parts, some still in boxes. I saw that the Harley packed Nevada plates. I dug out my phone and took a picture of the tags.

  I walked out to the barbed wire and looked over some cattle. I saw longhorns, maybe thirty head, in an under-irrigated over-grazed field near the barn, and saw the Hornberg brand on them. Some folks like to keep a few around, but dad always thought of longhorns as a vanity project. In the big field that stretched out across the valley toward the Summers Lake Road, I could see a good bunch of Angus heifers. On the ones close enough to read, I could make out Becky Tyree’s brand on their sides. So other than the handful of longhorns, Buddy Hornberg wasn’t even running his own stock on the family ground.

  He came back wet to the knees leading a shaggy gelding he said hadn’t been ridden in a while. A couple more horses had followed him to the gate. One of them didn’t look much better than the horse he caught. The other was a zebra dun that at least looked like it wouldn’t fall over after an hour under saddle. The feet of the gelding Buddy led were crap and would never make the ride up the canyon. I told him to turn the horse loose, and in the morning I’d get him mounted at the pack station. He asked what time he should meet me there. I said not to worry, I’d pick him up at six. I didn’t trust him not to flake on me.

  “So you gonna rent me a horse then?” he said.

  “Something like that.”

  “Am I gonna hafta pay?”

  “No.”

  “Your department should pay,” he said.

  “I don’t have a department. I’m no sheriff.”

  “You act like one,” he said. “And I heard about you tangling with drug dealers and killing some guys. Last year, then the year before that, too.”

  “You said you thought I was still in the Army and still deployed.”

  “Look,” he said. “This crap with my sister has made my life a steaming shit pile.”

  “The embezzling?”

  “Everything. Everybody thinks I must know what she did with the money.”

  “Do you?”

  “No, goddammit,” he said. “And it’s not just the money. Since Dad died, she was always hard-assing me about the ranch and how it was run and why didn’t we cash out and live like kings. It was always all about her.”

  I snuck a look. He was so mad he was almost crying.

  “I don’t care what anybody says. I’m glad she’s dead.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I had to wait about twenty minutes for him the next morning. I knew I would. I’d brought a Thermos and a month-old issue of The Progressive Rancher and sat in the truck cab in his yard with the diesel idling, drinking coffee and reading and enjoying the morning until Buddy shuffled out. He got into the truck and slammed the door. I looked at him. He was still wearing just a tee shirt and jeans. It was a cool morning like all mountain mornings even in summer, and the smoke was still pouring out of his chimney. We’d be riding a long way, maybe well into the darkness, and he hadn’t as much as brought a jacket or a damn granola bar. And he was one of those guys that never wear a hat unless it’s snowing. He didn’t say a word all the way to town and out across the meadows and up the logging road to the pack station.

  Sarah dragged a saddle and a pad from the shed and set them up on the back of one of the horses tied to the hitching rack. She had three more already saddled and two mules rigged out and set to go. She was wearing her deputy uniform, ready for work, but she still made me catch my breath. I parked the truck, and Buddy and I got out.

  Aaron sat on one of the
pack platforms talking to a man and a woman in FBI windbreakers and ballcaps. Stuff sacks of camping and cooking gear and what I figured was their forensic kits were already stowed in sets of panniers on the platforms, the pack tarps and lash ropes laid out next to each pair. Sarah’d had herself a busy morning. Buddy looked around at the work we’d done on the pack station and walked over for a close look at the cabin.

  “Is that Erika Hornberg’s brother?” Sarah said.

  “Yeah. Glad he’s not my brother.”

  “I wouldn’t have recognized him,” she said.

  “I’ll go catch him a horse. Where’s Audie?”

  “Shoshone Valley. Still at your mom’s. I’ll see them both in a couple of hours.”

  “Still, huh?”

  “Child Services went for it … for Audie to stay with Deb a few days more while they try to find her legal guardian.”

  “Ain’t that a bit loosey-goosey?”

  “Don’t be so grumpy. Deb’s daughter-in-law is a county deputy,” she said. She pulled her blond hair over the back strap of a Frémont County ballcap and shook it out real slow then squared the cap. She turned and smiled at me. “In case you hadn’t noticed. That’s how we bureaucrats look at things.”

  “And the kid is cool with that?”

  “She doesn’t seem in a hurry to go back to wherever she lives.”

  “With some guy named Sonny who ain’t her dad.”

  “Audie said she’d stay with Deb if she could take Hoot back to the ranch with them,” Sarah said.

  “Terrific.”

  She started off towards her truck with an armload of Lorena’s stuff.

  “Hey, babe?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “She shouldn’t get too comfortable with this deal.”

  “Who shouldn’t get comfortable?” she said.

  “Either of ’em.”

  In another half hour Aaron and I were heading back up the canyon with our livestock and passengers. I drove the gooseneck with five saddle horses and two pack mules to a small meadow on the south side of the creek, figuring to shave off an hour or so of horseback time for my non-riders. We unloaded and got the gear lashed down and everyone mounted. Agent Fuchs didn’t look super comfortable on a horse, but he seemed pretty athletic in a hoops-shooting, bike-racing, downhill-skiing sort of way and was relaxed enough I didn’t worry about him. In spite of looking like a couch left out on a curb, Buddy Hornberg rode my gray gelding like the rancher he was. Still and all, it was slow going. We could finally see the buzzards circling above the timber from below the Roughs, and they were still loitering overhead when we got to the shooting scene. Old dad in the black shirt was already reduced a fair amount by the time we swung off our horses, his polyester holding up better than the rest of him.