“And there we have it,” she whispered. Against the earth-polished steel, the dark russet of dried blood might as well have been glow-in-the-dark paint. Caught in the folded steel, near the junction of metal blade and wooden handle, were several hairs. She leaned back and looked at Jackie Taber. “An interesting question.”
“A shovel makes a mean weapon,” the deputy said softly.
“Sure enough. But if it connected with somebody’s head before the grave was dug, then we wouldn’t expect to find blood and hair still on the blade.”
Jackie stood up with her hands on her hips, frowning down on the shovel. “It’s way up high, though. And on the back.” She grimaced. “Hard to tell.” She turned full circle, seeing Tom and Linda standing near the front fender of Jackie’s Bronco, their own and Estelle’s units nose to tail in a row behind it. In the distance, she could see a column of dust rising and then being whipped away in a spreading plume as the medical examiner and the EMT ambulance made their way up the rough, bouncing trail from Maria.
“This place gives me the creeps,” she said.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Estelle was surprised to see her husband riding with Dr. Alan Perrone. Although the friendship of the two physicians reached back more than a decade, and had been strengthened by their recently organized joint venture to build a new clinic in Posadas, Francis Guzman had expressed only a passing interest in the forensic side of medical practice.
Still, he assisted Perrone that morning as if the two had teamed at a hundred crime scenes. The two men worked, a study in opposites, quietly talking back and forth, never raising their voices so that anyone else was privy to their conversations.
Perrone would have looked at home behind the wheel of an elegant Dusenberg in a 1930s movie. Hatless even in the chill of the February wind, his long blond hair was parted in the middle and combed straight back, held in place as if molded out of yellow fiberglass. His lean, clean-shaven face was benchmarked by an aquiline nose, intense blue eyes, and full, sensuous mouth-his appearance drawing quick second looks from strangers who knew that he must be somebody.
Alan Perrone was of average size, but Francis Guzman made him look delicate in comparison. Well over six feet tall and powerfully built, Estelle’s husband had inherited an exotic combination of his family’s Andalusian and Moorish genes, from the dark polish of his mahogany complexion to the proud, ruler-straight bridge of his nose and his wide, expressive mouth. A year before his thirtieth birthday and his marriage to Estelle Reyes, Francis had grown a full beard-and was astonished when it sprouted fully salted and peppered. Nevertheless, he’d kept it and at the same time earned the nickname oso viejo, or old bear, from Estelle.
Perrone stood at the foot of the grave with his hands in his pockets and regarded the corpse with an expression of sad resignation. Francis Guzman’s frown of concentration was dark and formidable as he paced a slow circle around the shallow pit.
“This appears to be a dangerous spot of nowhere,” Perrone said without looking at any of the officers. “Until yesterday, I’d never been to this miserable little patch of the county. Now we’re having reunions out here.” He glanced up at Estelle. “Do any of you know this gentleman?”
“No, sir.”
“Interesting,” Perrone said, and knelt at the side of the grave. Francis Guzman did the same on the opposite side. Estelle stood a pace or two back, wishing that she had one of those nifty polyester folding chairs. She knew that the examination of misfortune’s target by the two physicians would be methodical and thorough…and she also knew that neither physician wanted to narrate every step of the process for an audience. At that moment, the persistent wind became an ally-without it, Estelle knew the warm sun would make the drowsies unbeatable.
Estelle watched Linda Real reload her thirty-five millimeter camera three times before Alan Perrone finally straightened up and brushed off the knees of his trousers. He turned and beckoned to Estelle.
“This isn’t going to give you much,” he said. “One gunshot, through and through. He wasn’t lying in the grave when it happened, so the odds of you finding the slug are slim and none.” He flashed a tight smile and shrugged. “If the bullet fragmented, we may find some pieces when we autopsy, but don’t hold your breath. That exit hole is only moderately larger than the entrance, so whatever tore through him did its damage and then just kept going.” His gaze wandered out toward the open prairie, and he shrugged again.
“What about the angle?” Estelle asked.
“My first guess-and it’s just a guess, remember-is that the trajectory was dead on, or nearly so,” Perrone said. “The slug exited through the seventh thoracic vertebra, so you maybe have a slight upward slant. Maybe. It’s impossible to say how the shooter was standing, or how your victim here was standing. And even as powerful as that weapon obviously was, it’s impossible to predict how the bullet is going to wander around when it starts smashing through things. My best off-the-cuff preliminary maybe guess is a dead-on shot.” He made a face of indecision. “No powder burns on the jacket or shirt, so there’s a little distance there.”
“A maybe guess.” Estelle grinned at Perrone.
“That’s it,” Perrone said cheerfully. “There’s a lot of blood in the grave, though, under the corpse. My guess is that he was shot while standing fairly close by. Hell, I don’t know. Maybe he dug it himself. And that was that. Bang. One shot, and in he goes.”
“You’re thinking that someone made him dig his own grave?” Tom Pasquale asked.
Perrone shrugged again. “It’s a good guess, isn’t it? If I’m holding a gun on you, why should I bother to dig the grave? My hands are full, for one thing. I’m busy holding the weapon.”
“He could have been shot first, and then the grave got dug.”
“I don’t think so,” Perrone said.
“It would take ten minutes at the least to dig that pit,” Francis Guzman said. “Maybe longer, depending how frantic the worker was. If your Mr. Doe had already been shot while all that was going on, he would have bled out with a wound that size. By the time he was placed in the hole, you’d be lucky to have a teacup drain into the soil. That’s not the case here.”
“Huh,” Pasquale said, and frowned.
“Huh, is right,” Perrone added. “My hunch is that the victim dug his own grave. Or at least took part in the ceremony. But that’s just a hunch. It’d be nice if he had great big shovel blisters on his hands, but he doesn’t.” He knelt down and turned one of the victim’s hands palm up. “This young man was used to work.” He traced along the plastic bag that covered the man’s palm. “No dude here. I’ll take a closer look and see if anything interesting shows up.” He stood up. “And by the way, the same thing is true of Mr. Doe from over west of here. You’ve got two hard-working men who ran afoul of somebody with a quick trigger finger. John and Juan Doe.”
He turned to Jackie Taber who had meticulously retrieved, bagged, and tagged the shovel. “The state lab is going to want to go over that, too. We might get lucky.”
“I think we did, sir,” Jackie Taber said, “There’s what looks like blood and human hair on the backside.”
“Better and better,” Perrone replied. As he talked, Estelle had been watching the progress of a yellow truck as it approached from the south. “The landlords,” she said. In another moment, the truck pulled to a stop behind the ambulance, and they could see the round Posadas Electric Cooperative shield on the door.
Marvin Hudson got out and hesitated, one hand anchored to the truck. As Estelle approached, he remained in place, forehead in a worried frown. Another man whom Estelle didn’t recognize remained in the vehicle.
“Good morning, sir,” she said.
“They told us over the radio that there was all kinds of traffic up this way,” Hudson said. “The supervisor said it might be a good idea to drive on up and see what was going on. See if there was anything we could do.”
Hudson’s eyes darted this way and that, taking in a
ll the vehicles and the small group standing by the pile of dirt not far from one of the power poles. He was a chubby man, his brown utility shirt stretched tight across a gut that draped over his belt. He turned and looked at Estelle, eyes inventorying her slender figure and then retreating back to her face.
“I guess we’ve met, ain’t we?” Hudson said, and extended his hand.
“I believe so, sir. I’m Undersheriff Reyes-Guzman.”
“Okay,” Hudson said, as if all the memory cells had been jogged on-line. “I got used to always workin’ with old Bill Gastner. He’s as much of a fixture as I am.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How’s he doing, by the way?”
“Fine, sir.”
Hudson released his hold on the truck and took a step forward. “So what’s the deal here?”
“One of the deputies discovered some human remains, sir,” Estelle said.
“No shit?” Hudson said. “Who is it, do you know?”
“No, sir, we don’t.”
“Know how it happened?”
Estelle shook her head. “We don’t know that either, sir.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Hudson added. His eyes narrowed. “Is this related to that thing yesterday? I’m hearing that they found some guy dead over in the MacInernys’ gravel pit.”
“We don’t know, sir.” She said it pleasantly enough, but it wasn’t the informative answer Hudson was looking for. Estelle saw a brief flash of irritation cross his face, then a shift of the eyes at the same time as gravel crunched behind her. Tom Pasquale ambled up and leaned an arm on the hood of the company truck. Hudson put his hands in his hip pockets.
“What are you guys up to?” Pasquale asked. He turned slightly and aimed an index finger at the young man in the truck cab and flicked a couple of shots off with his thumb. The target lifted a hand in tentative greeting.
“Just drove on up to see who the hell was messin’ with our electric lines,” Hudson replied. “Looks like you guys got quite a deal goin’ on.”
Tom nodded and cocked his head at Hudson. “When did Eurelio start workin’ for you folks?”
Hudson shot a glance at his partner. “Hell, it’s been a couple of months now. You two know each other?”
“Oh, sure,” Tom said. He patted the hood of the truck and ambled around to the passenger side.
Hudson took a deep breath. “So,” he said to Estelle. “Is there anything you need from us?”
“Not at the moment, sir,” Estelle replied. “If either of you happen to remember seeing or hearing anything out in this area in the past couple of weeks-any unusual traffic, anything at all-I’d appreciate you giving us a call.”
Hudson grunted in dismissal. “This ain’t the sort of place I hang out much, young lady. You might talk with Eurelio, there. He’s one of the locals. You want me to give Matt Tierney a buzz?” Estelle knew that Tierney, as area manager of the Electric Coop, would be interested to know that the transmission line right of way was being used for the disposal of more than beer cans.
“I’ll be talking to him later today, most likely,” she said. “There’s nothing else we need at the moment. Right now, we’re waiting for the coroner to finish up. That always takes a while.” She smiled at Hudson. “How often do you get up this way?”
“Blue moons,” Hudson said. “This line here is just a straight shot, you know. No pots or anything. Not much is going to happen. Once in a while some damn kid from Maria wanders up this way to shoot snakes or something and ends up doing a little target practice on things he shouldn’t. But most of the time, we don’t have much cause to come up this way. Hell, I haven’t been up here since before Thanksgiving. There’s a routine inspection schedule, but I don’t know what it is offhand. Tierney would know.” His lips pursed. “Technically speaking, this transmission line doesn’t even belong to us. Sort of a reciprocity thing with the big guys, you know.”
She saw Hudson’s neck stretch and turned to see the two paramedics maneuvering the corpse into a black plastic body bag. “Geez,” Hudson said. “Tried to bury him and all, eh? This ain’t the easiest diggin’ in the world, out here.”
“No, it’s not,” Estelle agreed.
“What, was he shot, or what?” Hudson sounded as if he were fishing for a tour invitation, and of course an opportunity to gape at the corpse would be a nice bonus.
“That’s what the coroner will tell us, sir.”
Even Marvin Hudson was bright enough to know that Dr. Alan Perrone wasn’t about to sit down for a nice chat. “Well,” he said, reaching for the truck’s door handle, “if there’s anything we can do for you, you let me know.”
“I’ll be in touch, sir.” She heard Tom Pasquale chuckle at something that Eurelio said, and then Hudson climbed aboard and started the truck.
“There’s a good clear spot right behind you there,” Pasquale said helpfully, and they watched the power company truck kick rocks as Hudson backed up over a small berm and cranked the wheel. He lifted a hand in salute as he drove off.
“I think that old Marvin doesn’t like me much,” Tom Pasquale said.
“I noticed that.”
“I gave him a ticket last week. He didn’t say anything about it, did he?”
“No, but he was pretty quick to put his hands in his pockets so he didn’t have to shake hands with you.”
Pasquale laughed. “Oh, yeah. You noticed that, too.”
“Who’s Eurelio?”
“Oh, him? That’s Eurelio Saenz. You know the intersection in Maria? He lives in that house with the turquoise trim on the south side of the road. His mother owns the bar right next door. La Taberna Azul, I think it’s called.”
“Paulita Saenz is his mother?”
“That’s the one. Most of the family lives across the border. I think Eurelio’s got about a hundred cousins down there.”
“Paulita was originally from up north, though. Chama, I think,” Estelle said. She smiled at the quizzical look on Pasquale’s face. “Once upon a time, she and my Uncle Reuben had a little thing going.”
Pasquale wagged his eyebrows. “You and Eurelio might be cousins then,” he said. “You might be one of the hundred.”
“That would be interesting,” Estelle said, amused at the young deputy’s good-natured insolence. She watched the dust from the electric company’s truck fan out across the empty prairie as it headed south. “Eurelio didn’t happen to say that he was missing a couple of those relatives, did he?”
“No. But he’s spooked.”
She looked at Pasquale sharply. “How do you mean?”
“He wasn’t all that eager to get out of the truck, for one thing. But just in the little while that I stood there and talked with him, he kept tuggin’ at his shoulder harness, like he needed something to hang on to.” He saw Estelle’s left eyebrow drift upward. “Well, it’s just a little thing, I know. But it’s the impression I got.”
“Some people get nervous when they know there’s a corpse in the neighborhood, Tomás.”
“Nah,” Tom said, waving a hand in dismissal. “He and the rest of the bunch hunt all the time.”
“He didn’t hear or see anything unusual in the last week or so?”
“He says not-but then again, he didn’t say a whole lot about anything. He did volunteer that working with Marvin Hudson was something of an experience.”
“Imagine that,” Estelle said. “If that pair had to dig a hole, guess who’d get to run the shovel?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
State 61 plunged south from Posadas and passed through Maria as the highway wound along the state’s southern border toward El Paso and Juarez to the east. The State Highway Department had recognized the tiny community’s existence by hammering in a sign at each end of the village pleading for forty-five miles an hour. Wary of radar and the threat of languishing in a redneck jail cell, only tourists bothered to lift their foot.
Locals took potshots at the signs, most often when they wandered out of la Taberna
Azul, the small saloon owned by Paulita Saenz. Bullet holes punctured the reflective surface of the sign and paint from bumpers and fenders scarred and bent the supports below.
Most of the paint had long since worn off the sign swinging from the two-by-four support nailed to the porch of la Taberna Azul. When locals mentioned the place, years of comfortable usage had worn down the name, too. Estelle could remember her Uncle Reuben referring to the Blue Tavern in Maria simply as la Barra.
Paulita Saenz walked to work each day from her square adobe house just east of the saloon. Her thirty-five- or forty-step journey crossed a stretch of worn bricks. The idea at one time had been to construct a neat patio between home and saloon, creating a sheltered spot for outdoor tables. Over the years, the bricked yard had become a convenient spot to stash those items not urgently needed in either building. Paulita’s walkway had been forced to meander as the space filled with worn-out plumbing fixtures, great mounds of cans and bottles that were always going to the recycler next week, and a jumbled collection of various bargains in roofing materials.
Diagonally across the street from la Barra, Wally Madrid’s dingy gas station and convenience store dominated the north side of the intersection of State 61 and J Street, J being the only cross-street in the village. No one in Maria recalled how the dirt lane had come by its cryptic name.
Wally was Paulita’s first cousin. He resented that fate had allowed Paulita possession of a liquor license, and hadn’t spoken directly to her in more than a decade.
Wally’s store carried so few items that convenience was pure euphemism. By pricing his gasoline well over the sensible limit and keeping his store inventory down, Wally had found that he could avoid most things that reminded him of work. The west-facing window that would have looked out on J Street was covered with various posters and advertisements, bleached nearly printless by the sun. That was also a comfort to Wally. Had the window been clear of trash, he would have been able to glance out and see la Comida de Lucy, his wife’s diner, and the third and final commercial establishment in Maria.
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