“Two visits in one day, I don’t guess this is a social call. What can we do for you?”
I took off my Stetson and ran a hand across the stubble of gray hair. “Well, we’ve got some things that sort of puzzle us and thought that maybe you might have some answers. Or some ideas.”
Boyd sucked hard on his cigarette. “Do what I can. You know that. You want to talk in the house? No point in standing out here in the dust if we don’t have to. Got cold beer. Hot coffee. The worst water you ever tasted. What’s your pleasure?”
“Actually, a cup of hot coffee would be wonderful,” Walter Hocker said. He’d been surveying the ranch setting, both hands shoved into his pockets, rotating at the waist as if his feet were cemented in place. “Water a problem out here? That’s a good-sized windmill you’ve got there.”
The contraption hadn’t drawn my attention before, but the windmill was big, its blades spanning at least twelve feet, maybe sixteen, the pumping motor supported on a tower that must have been forty feet high.
“That well’s three hundred and thirty feet deep,” Johnny said.
“That’s a fair lift,” Hocker mused.
“You a farm boy?”
Hocker grinned at Boyd and tilted his head. “I’ve done my time. You ever been up on one of those rigs with a storm brewing?”
I looked over at the windmill’s steel tower again and saw it for what it so easily could be—a massive lightning rod. I could picture the young Finnegan boy scampering up the steel ladder with the speed and coordination that only the young enjoy. And then…a flash and a thunderclap all in one as a couple million volts shot through the angle-iron structure. The boy would never have known what hit him.
“Nope,” Boyd said. “Had a cousin killed on one, though. Over in eastern Kansas. And the neighbors here lost their boy that way. So it happens.”
“What do you do when the wind doesn’t blow?” Neil Costace asked. He had craned his head back to look up at the blur of blades.
“That don’t happen much,” the rancher said. “We got an electric auxiliary pump for those few times. But I don’t guess you came in to talk about my windmill.” He started toward the door and then turned to frown at me. “This about that picture you had earlier, Sheriff?”
“We haven’t been out to the block-house site yet,” I said, and that vague answer seemed to satisfy Boyd for the moment.
“Come on in,” he said, and we followed him into the house. He led us to the kitchen and gestured at the white table in the center of the room. “Have a sit-down,” he said. “Maxine!” he shouted, and added, “Excuse me a minute.” We heard him off in another part of the house and in a moment, he returned with his wife.
“She’ll get us fixed up,” Boyd said. He quickly introduced Maxine to the two agents, calling them “these federal boys,” and even before he’d finished, I heard the front door open and in due course, Edwin Boyd appeared, his face in a grimace and one hand reaching down toward his knee. He nodded at us and drifted off toward the easy chairs in the living room. He left no doubt in my mind about who was ranch boss.
“So,” Boyd said and clasped his hands together in front of him. “What brings the Federal Bureau of Investigation out to these parts?” At the mention of the agency, Maxine murmured something and almost lost her hold on the coffee urn. She shook her head and poured water into the machine, then turned to find the coffee and a filter. She shot a glance first at me and then at Estelle, but otherwise, her face was impassive.
Estelle hadn’t settled in a chair yet, and she took a step over to Maxine Boyd, setting a light touch of the hand on the woman’s shoulder. “Mrs. Boyd, would it be too much trouble to use your rest room?”
“Well, of course not,” the woman said. “It’s right around past the living room, that little doorway on the left. Let me show you.”
She flipped the power switch on the coffeemaker, smiled warmly at the rest of us and said, “Give it about five minutes. Johnny, use the mugs in the cupboard over the sink.” Johnny Boyd was already seated, well into the process of finding another smoke, one thin, long leg hooked over the other. I got the impression that he didn’t fetch his own coffee cups on a regular basis.
Estelle and Maxine left the kitchen and I didn’t waste any time. “Johnny, a couple of things have all of us puzzled.” He drew smoke and exhaled a thin blue jet. “In the past couple of days, have you or Edwin seen anyone around on your ranch property?”
“Strangers, you mean?”
“Anyone.”
“Not since the satellite guy was out here last week. Damn dish doesn’t work about half the time, and the other half, there’s nothing worth watching.” He smiled.
“No one Friday afternoon, when the plane went down?”
“Not that I know of. Of course”—he looked over at the coffeepot—“this is about six thousand acres we’re talkin’ about…so I guess that at one time or another, there could be a whole damn army over the hill and we wouldn’t know it. But no, I didn’t see anybody.”
Hocker turned so that he was sitting sideways in the chair, his left arm hooked over the back. The fingers of his right hand drummed a nervous little tattoo on the tabletop. “Hear any gunshots Friday?”
“Excuse me?” Johnny Boyd said, and Hocker didn’t reply immediately. He was gazing out the kitchen window at what appeared to me to be blank sky. Boyd got up and stepped to the cupboard. With one hand on the cupboard latch, he turned and asked, “Why would I hear gunshots?”
“Johnny,” I said, “we’ve got some information that’s pretty nasty.” He took four mugs out of the cabinet and I waited until he’d lined them up on the counter. He was a patient man. He said nothing as he pulled the decanter out of the machine and filled each mug in turn.
“Take anything?”
I shook my head, and Hocker and Costace did the same.
“Edwin, you want a cup of coffee?” Johnny said loudly, and we heard a muddled, “No, no thanks,” from the living room. Johnny started to fetch a fifth mug, but I stopped him.
“Detective Reyes-Guzman doesn’t drink the stuff,” I said.
“So, then,” Johnny said, returning to his chair and his cigarette, “you were talkin’ about nasty information.”
“The pilot of that airplane was killed by a rifle bullet fired from the ground,” I said.
Dead silence hung in the kitchen for the count of ten. Hocker turned his head and regarded Johnny Boyd impassively, and Neil Costace did the same, coffee mug cupped between two hands.
Finally, Boyd said quietly, “You don’t say.”
I nodded.
“You’re sure?”
I nodded again. “A portion of the bullet was recovered during autopsy.”
Boyd frowned. “You mean somebody shot a rifle and that bullet flew all the way up and hit that airplane? Hit the pilot?”
“So it would seem,” I said.
He set his coffee mug down carefully and snubbed out his cigarette. “And you think it came from somewhere around here, or you wouldn’t be out here right now.” He regarded me, eyes unblinking. “Let me ask you something, Sheriff. When you and the detective were out here earlier today, did you know about this…” He paused and groped for the right words. “…this mystery bullet?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you mention it then?” His tone was even and controlled, just above a whisper, but a little muscle ticked under his left eye.
“The information was still preliminary,” I said, and knew how lame that sounded. The quirky thought drifted through my mind that this was exactly the sort of time for a little dissembling—the sort of thing Martin Holman had been damn good at when need called for it. “We didn’t know what to think,” I said.
Boyd lit another cigarette. “So tell me just how you come to figure the shot was fired from somewhere around here.”
“Not from right here, Johnny. I didn’t say that. But the plane was flying in a pattern—a roughly rectangular pattern—that extended e
ast-west from about your property here over toward the Finnegans’ property.”
“And then it up and crashed,” he said.
“Yes, it did. If the pilot had been shot, let’s say when they were flying over the mesa, or over the landfill, or over something like that, then they wouldn’t have flown all the way over here, circled, and then crashed.”
“Bullet kill him right away, did it?”
“It looks that way. A fluke thing.”
He frowned and took a tentative sip of his coffee. Mine remained untouched in front of me. “No one in this household,” he said finally, “fired a gun at any airplane. Not yesterday, not ever.” He set the mug down with a thump of finality. “You going to drive on over now and ask Dick Finnegan the same damn-fool question?”
“What question did we ask you?” Costace said quietly. “Just if you’d heard anything. We didn’t ask if it was you who fired that shot.”
Boyd flushed crimson and clenched his mouth shut so tight that his lips were two white lines. Hocker gestured toward the living room. I looked that way and realized that the agent could see the large gun cabinet from where he was sitting. “Mind if we take a look at your firearm collection?” he asked. The request was pleasant enough, conversational, but Johnny Boyd had heard enough.
He stood up and as if in slow motion, turned and set his coffee mug down on the counter by the sink. He looked out the window, eyes narrowed and jaw muscles so tight I could see them clench from across the room. His hands gripped the counter, and he turned without releasing his grip, looking at Hocker over his left shoulder.
“I guess what you can do is pack up and get off my property,” he said. “You can get yourselves out of my home, and you can get yourselves off my land.”
I heard quiet voices, and then Estelle appeared in the kitchen doorway. She stopped there, watching Boyd.
“Johnny—” I started to say, but he cut me off.
“There isn’t a thing more we need to say to each other, Sheriff. Just pack up your friends and get on out.”
Hocker sighed and pushed himself to his feet. “Mr. Boyd, you have to realize that in the course of an investigation like this one, we’re forced to dig out answers wherever we can.”
Boyd released his grip on the counter and turned around. “Well, you just go dig somewhere else. Can’t say as I’m surprised. Took you two goddam years, but you managed.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Hocker asked.
“You just get,” Boyd snarled ignoring the question. His face was flushed and his anger had set his jaw to quivering.
“You know as well as I do,” Hocker said, “that if we have a bullet fragment, we’ll be running some ballistic comparisons. That includes your firearms. I can get a warrant if I have to, but we’d prefer—”
“I don’t give a good goddam what you prefer, Bucko,” Johnny said. “The next time you want to come on this land and talk to me, you make sure you have that warrant. And if it isn’t signed by Judge Hobart, then you better get it signed by him.”
Hocker shrugged, still glacially calm, and started to cross the kitchen toward Estelle.
Neil Costace took a final sip of his coffee and grimaced. “I’d think that you’d want to do all you could to prove you—”and that was as far as he got. Boyd pushed himself away from the sink and took two steps, bringing himself nose to nose with the FBI agent. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Hocker’s left hand drift down toward the gun under his jacket.
“I don’t have to prove a goddam thing,” Boyd snapped.
“Neil,” I said gently, “let’s let these folks be.” The two men stood as if frozen, Boyd glaring with white spots of anger on his cheeks, Neil Costace unflappable.
“Thanks for the coffee,” Hocker said. “We’ll be in touch.” He slipped past Estelle, and I waited until Costace and Boyd had unlocked eyes and Costace left the kitchen.
“Johnny,” I said, “we’ve got a murder on our hands. You know as well as I do that the investigation is not going away. Now, if you know something, you tell me.” He didn’t reply. “You hear me?” His only response was to pull another cigarette out of his pocket. The hand that held the lighter shook.
I turned to Estelle and motioned toward the front door. Johnny Boyd’s voice stopped me. “I’ll be talking to you later, Sheriff,” he said. “Give me some time to calm down, and then we’ll see.”
I knew that was the best I could hope for.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Walter Hocker agreed that he’d take a tour of the crash site with Vincent Buscema after the two had had a chance to talk in private. That was fine with me. It would keep them busy for a few more hours, and keep them off of Johnny Boyd’s back.
I had a feeling that Boyd’s reaction was as much to the federal authority as to anything else. I didn’t know what he’d meant with the comment about it taking the agents two years to figure something out, and it hadn’t been the time to push the point.
I hadn’t told him about the cause of the crash when I’d had the opportunity, and now he had heard the message loud and clear that the federal agents, at least, included him in the pool of suspects. If he was innocent, and at that point I was sure he was, becoming the target of an investigation would be enough to send his blood pressure off the scale.
I couldn’t imagine Johnny Boyd taking potshots at a passing airplane. Almost certainly he carried a rifle in at least one of his ranch trucks, and I had no doubt that he could drop a coyote in its tracks at a couple hundred yards. But firing at a pesky, circling airplane was another matter altogether.
As we drove away from the ranch, I turned to Estelle, whose only contribution to the conversation as we left the ranch house had been a quiet “Thank you” directed at Maxine Boyd. “So, what did she tell you?” I asked. “And that was nicely done, by the way.”
“She’s worried, sir,” she said. She didn’t look at me, but concentrated on the gravel road, her black eyebrows knitted.
“She has good reason to be, after that exchange,” I said.
“No, not about that. She’s really upset about trouble brewing between her husband and Richard Finnegan.”
“Really? Trouble how?”
Estelle took a deep breath. “Apparently Richard Finnegan has a grazing allotment from the Forest Service for a piece of property on the back side of Cat Mesa. There’s no more grass there than anywhere else, but there is a productive spring on the allotment. Finnegan wants to pipe the water over to one of his major stock tanks. Remember those rolls of black-plastic pipe that we saw by Finnegan’s barn?”
“Sure. But that’s got to be a hell of a distance. And pipe isn’t cheap. So what’s the argument?”
“Simple, as ever, sir. There’s a corner of the Boyd ranch that’s situated right in the way. If Finnegan can’t run the pipe across Boyd’s property, then it means going up an escarpment and out of the way over the east. A lot more distance, and going up the escarpment means that he couldn’t use gravity flow. He’d have to pump.”
I frowned. “And so…what’s the argument? Are you saying that Johnny won’t let Dick Finnegan run a few yards of black plastic across his property?”
“He will,” Estelle said. “But he tried to cut a deal with Finnegan to use some of the water in exchange for letting the pipe go across his land.”
“And Finnegan objected to that? Is he out of his mind?”
“Maybe. The last argument they had, and I guess from what Maxine was saying, it was right in the Boyds’ front yard, was that Dick Finnegan maintained that he can’t afford the extra pipe it would take to go around Boyd’s property, or pay for a pump, and that there isn’t enough water to serve both their needs. He’s being held up, he contends.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I muttered. “What’s the old saying out here—there are more friendships broken over access to water than anything else?”
“Except in a wet year,” Estelle said. “Then it’s over alcohol.”
“And this i
s what Maxine wanted to talk to you about?”
Estelle nodded. “She’s afraid that the two of them will exchange more than words sometime. She said that her husband has a hot temper and so does Dick Finnegan.”
“No kidding,” I said. “By the way, did she happen to say which stock tank Finnegan wanted to run the pipe to? Was it the one at the block house, by any chance?”
“She didn’t know. And we didn’t have long to talk. I did ask her, though, if she knew anything about someone up in this part of the county impounding wildlife.” Estelle slowed for the Newton cattle guard and at the same time, glanced in the rearview mirror. The dark Suburban still followed us at a discreet distance.
“At first she didn’t want to say anything, but I could tell she knew something about it. I told her that we really needed to know and that before the crash, the sheriff had been talking with Doug Posey…and that maybe that was why the sheriff was flying out over that area. Anyway, she said, ‘Oh, that’s another get-rich-quick scheme. It doesn’t amount to anything.’ But she wouldn’t say whose scheme it was.”
“What did she mean by that, I wonder.”
“I don’t know. I was going to ask, but then I heard the ruckus out in the kitchen.”
We rode in silence for a few minutes, watching the last of Newton’s sorry buildings slide by. We hit the pavement and heard a roar of engine, and then Costace passed us. Hocker lifted a hand in salute.
“You know,” I said, watching the truck dwindle ahead of us, “Johnny Boyd said something to me yesterday, or maybe the day before, to the effect that if the federal agents got the chance, they could invent almost any case out of this scenario. We need to make certain we find the person who fired the shot, but I sure don’t want a bunch of other lives destroyed in the process.”
“Sir, if Johnny Boyd is running his own herd of antelope, then he might have reason to be edgy.”
“I can’t imagine that,” I said. “Of course, I’ve been wrong before.”
“The first thing I think we need to do is to find the block-house windmill,” Estelle said. “It’s on Finnegan’s land. I suggest that we drive out there and get ourselves a tour. Sheriff Holman thought it was important enough that he took a photo from the air. Let’s see if we can find out why.”
Out of Season Page 14
