Tularosa

by Michael McGarrity

  A second message, from one of the investigators assigned to follow Kerney, got her full attention. Kerney was back on base asking to speak to her after spending hours at the sheriff’s department in Las Cruces, and then interviewing a salesman at a used-car dealership. The investigator’s partner was talking to the salesman and would report as soon as he returned.

  She reached for the phone, hesitated, and took her hand off the receiver. Fred could wait, and Kerney could cool his heels for a while. Curling up on the couch, she opened the envelope. It contained an FBI report on Kerney and a memorandum to her from the post historian. Setting the memorandum aside, she read the FBI report.

  Kerney had been born at home on the 7-Bar-K Ranch east of Tularosa, New Mexico, on land now part of the missile range. A year younger than his high school classmates, he had graduated as valedictorian and won the state high school rodeo championship in his senior year. Taking a heavy load in college, he had earned his degree in three years, finishing in the top 10 percent of his class.

  His parents, Matthew and Mary, had been killed in a head-on automobile accident while driving to Albuquerque to meet Kerney upon his return from duty in Vietnam.

  Sara skimmed his military service record, pausing to read the Silver Star citation. Kerney had led an extraction team into VC territory, encountered heavy enemy resistance, and successfully brought out a downed fighter pilot.

  After returning home, Kerney had enrolled in graduate school at the university in Albuquerque and married a woman who was a first-year law school student. In less than a year, the marriage had ended, and Kerney had quit school to join the Santa Fe Police Department. Sara wondered what had happened to precipitate so much change so quickly in Kerney’s life.

  The report finished with a summary of Kerney’s law enforcement experience. Rising rapidly through the ranks, Kerney had been a prime candidate to become the next police chief until he was badly wounded and forced to retire.

  Sara dropped the report on the cushion, rummaged through the bookcase for a map of the missile range, and spread it out on the carpet. The location of the old 7-Bar-K Ranch, identified clearly on the map, was almost within shouting distance of Sammy Yazzi’s duty station.

  Sara’s eyes wandered over the topographical symbols. Where in hell had Sammy Yazzi gone? Through Seep Canyon? Tip Top Canyon? He had stayed on the restricted road that crossed the basin to the small ranching settlement at Engle, but trackers had lost all sign of him at the entrance to Rhodes Canyon, still deep in the missile range.

  Sara knew Yazzi hadn’t used Rhodes Canyon as an escape route. He would have been spotted by personnel stationed at the secret observation post that guarded the pass. And most probably he had not traveled through Engle. Every inhabitant, including the area ranchers, had been interviewed, with no reported sightings. So Sammy had skirted the canyon, but none of the intrusion sensors on the base perimeter had picked him up. The search and rescue teams she’d sent in had scoured the immediate area for his body with no luck.

  As her eyes drifted back to the 7-Bar-K Ranch symbol on the map, the telephone rang. Not wanting to talk to Fred, she let the answering machine click on and didn’t pick up until she recognized the watch commander’s voice. “What is it?”

  “That sheriff’s lieutenant is still waiting to see you,” the voice replied.

  “Send him over,” she said.

  She put the report in her briefcase—she would finish it later—walked to the patio door that led to the backyard, and watched the wind spatter sand against the glass. The branches of a lone willow tree bent and jerked in the force of the gale. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the glass door, made a face, and went to change into something less informal.

  KERNEY SLIPPED INSIDE as Sara Brannon closed the door behind him, blinking his eyes and rubbing sand from his face. The short walk from his truck to the front porch made him feel as if he had been sandblasted. The weather had turned ferocious. Sara said nothing as she ushered him to the living room through the hall that divided a galley kitchen and dining nook from the main part of the house. In the living room another small corridor took a left turn to the bedrooms and bath.

  The house, a utilitarian cement-block structure, would have been depressing if not for Sara’s good taste. A wicker chair with a matching ottoman served as a reading niche next to an oak bookcase. The chair faced the patio door to the backyard. On the top shelf of the bookcase were framed family photographs. Sara gestured for Kerney to sit in a second easy chair that matched an expensive tan couch. She arranged herself at the corner of the couch by an end table that held a lamp, telephone, and answering machine. On the floor in front of a low coffee table was an open map.

  “I expected to hear from you before now,” she said. She wore jeans, a red short-sleeved turtleneck top, and sandals, and sat with one leg tucked under the other.

  “I wanted to have something to say first,” Kerney countered.

  “Fair enough. What have you got?”

  Kerney started talking, and Sara listened for anything that would contradict the reports she’d received from the surveillance teams. He gave it to her straight, including his curiosity about Bull McVay and the surprising fact, unknown to Sara before Kerney’s arrival, that Sergeant Steiner had let Sammy do pencil sketches on his free time without getting proper authorization.

  She paid even closer attention when Kerney briefed her on his conversation with Dewey Boursard—that was fresh information that had yet to come to her from the team.

  He concluded with a smile and added: “I’m sure none of this is news to you. Your people have been with me every step of the way.”

  “What tipped you?”

  “The cars. Same make and model. Plus your men are sloppy on the shift changeovers. They like to chit-chat with each other before they make the switch,” He got up, stepped around the coffee table, and bent over the map. “Show me where you searched for Sammy.”

  She joined him, sat on the floor, and gave him a rundown, watching for a reaction as she traced her finger past the 7-Bar-K Ranch location. There was none.

  “Were there any visitors uprange at the time of his disappearance?” he inquired when she stopped.

  “Nobody who wasn’t authorized and cleared.”

  “Any ideas where he went to do his sketching?”

  “None at all.”

  “What did the Jaeger autopsy reveal?” Kerney asked, moving the map aside.

  “Jaeger’s blood alcohol level was twice the legal limit,” Sara replied. “He had a clean record—no disciplinary action, no history of substance abuse, and no DWI arrests.”

  “And the Camaro?”

  “Clean as a whistle. The only mechanical damage was caused during the accident.”

  “So much for statistical probabilities.”

  The phone rang, and Sara went to answer it. With her back to him, she listened without comment for several minutes, thanked the caller, hung up, and swiveled her head in his direction. “We’ve found your man,” she said. “The Mustang is owned by Specialist Fifth Class Weldon Robinson. He supervises the post auto shop.”

  Kerney smiled broadly. “Your people work fast.”

  Sara wrinkled her nose at him. “Come on,” she said, getting to her feet. “Let’s go talk to Robinson.”

  THE POST AUTO SHOP, in an old Quonset hut near the motor pool, served as a do-it-yourself center for shade-tree mechanics. The building was locked, but the inside lights were on, and through a window Kerney saw a Mustang parked over a service bay. He pounded on the door while Sara huddled for cover from the strong gusts of wind that made the outside light above the door flap precariously.

  Kerney kept pounding until a surly-looking black man climbed out of the service bay, came to the window, and pointed at a closed sign. Robinson’s name was stitched over the right pocket of his fatigue shirt. Kerney put his badge against the glass and pointed at the door. The surly look cleared, and Robinson nodded in agreement. He let them in and slamm
ed the door shut fast to keep out the storm.

  “Sorry about that,” Robinson said, “but if I don’t stick to my schedule, I’d have guys in here twenty-four hours a day.”

  “That’s okay,” Kerney replied.

  Robinson gave Sara a cautious look. “Captain,” he said politely, “is there a problem?”

  “Relax, Specialist,” Sara said easily. “We’re here to talk about Sammy Yazzi. Do you know him?”

  Robinson pulled at the tail of his greasy fatigue shirt. “I sure do,” he answered. “Me and him had an agreement. I was gonna buy his old Chevy. The fuel pump is busted and the carburetor needs to be rebuilt. I was gonna give him the money on payday, but then he went AWOL. It’s still parked up by the barracks.”

  “Did you take anything out of the car?” Kerney asked.

  Robinson nodded. “Right before Sammy split he said I could start working on it anytime and gave me the keys. There was a bunch of stuff inside that I cleaned out.”

  “What stuff?” Sara demanded.

  “Just the usual junk people leave in cars, and a big leather case to keep art stuff in.”

  “A portfolio,” Sara clarified.

  “That’s it.”

  “Do you still have it?”

  Robinson inclined his head toward the small office next to the service bay. “Yes, ma’am. I kept everything.”

  They followed Robinson to the office and waited while he pulled the portfolio out from behind a filing cabinet and located a small box mixed in with some cartons on the floor. “That’s all of it,” he said.

  Sara took the portfolio, Kerney grabbed the box, and Robinson walked them to the door. “Is that all you need, Captain?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you drive a Jeep Cherokee?” Robinson inquired.

  “I do.”

  “Bring it down and I’ll give it a tune-up. Cost you for the parts only.”

  “I may do that, Specialist.”

  Outside she told Kerney to take her back to her house. Protocol called for them to log the items as evidence immediately, and Kerney had assumed they would do it at Sara’s office. He said nothing, and they drove in silence, the box on the floorboard and the portfolio in Sara’s lap. The storm had blown itself out quickly, and the sky had cleared enough for a moonlight haze to pour over the basin. The top of the post water tower emerged on the side of a hill above the residential area, and streetlights illuminated the precise rows of military housing units with neat lawns and carefully trimmed shrubbery. A soft breeze pushed lines of sand across the pavement in lacy waves.

  In the living room, Sara put away the map to make space on the carpet for the evidence. They sat opposite one another and went through the contents of the box first, like children saving the best present for last. It contained a pair of sunglasses, cassette tapes for the car stereo, a class catalog from the university, a small car repair kit in a plastic case, and several wrinkled road maps.

  Sara unzipped the portfolio and spread it open on the carpet, revealing a series of watercolors and pencil drawings, each separated by a sheet of clear plastic. She laid them out in order, fingers touching only the tips of the paper. Kerney scooted next to her on the rug, his bad leg protesting the movement.

  “Marvelous,” she said, almost to herself, switching her attention from one painting to another. “Sergeant Steiner said nothing about a portfolio of watercolors.”

  “Did you have Steiner picked up after I talked to him?”

  Sara smiled sweetly. “Of course I did.”

  “I promised him he wouldn’t get in trouble.”

  “He’s not, although I did chew him out for not leveling with us.”

  “Did you find any other artwork?”

  Sara nodded. “We have Sammy’s sketchbooks that were in his quarters. All very harmless: anatomy studies of animals, pencil sketches of plant life, caricatures of some of his buddies. Until you talked to Steiner we had no knowledge that Sammy was sketching in restricted areas.”

  “What Steiner said amounts to nothing more than the reason Sammy went hiking on his free time,” Kerney replied.

  “I agree, but until now, we operated on the assumption that Specialist Yazzi left with the intent to go AWOL. That no longer seems to be the case.”

  She dropped her gaze to the watercolors, a series of wildlife studies. Each consisted of three separate panels: a landscape field sketch, a pencil drawing of a wildlife subject, and the final watercolor version, combining both elements. The landscape pencil drawings showed the locations of Sammy’s field trips—the rickety windmill at Windy Well, the dilapidated corral at old John Prather’s ranch, the mesa above the 7-Bar-K Ranch. Sammy had traversed a large chunk of real estate on the missile range.

  “I wish we’d had these when we were looking for him,” Sara reflected. “He’s been all over the damn base, at places we didn’t even think to search.”

  “Maybe we should search again,” Kerney suggested.

  “Maybe we should.”

  “He’s been to some remote back country, from the looks of it,” Kerney added. “Not places you can hike into in less than a day. Any ideas on how he got there?”

  Sara watched carefully to see what drawing Kerney looked at as he spoke. A bobcat seemed to command his attention. She had no idea what the locale for the painting might be. “The service club operates a jeep excursion program for post personnel. They can sign out for a vehicle for day trips into the wilderness areas. Use is limited to specific roads and locations on the range.”

  “A jeep would do it,” Kerney said, getting up stiffly from the carpet. “I’ll check the service club records in the morning. It might give us a better idea of where to start looking.”

  “I think you already know where to look,” Sara asserted.

  Kerney gave her a wry smile and shook his head. “I don’t know where to start.”

  Sara stood up. “I’ll let the service club NCO know you’re coming.”

  “Thanks.” He walked to the bookcase and picked up a framed photograph of four riders on horseback, a man, woman, young boy, and girl. The girl, with pigtails dangling down under the brim of a cowboy hat, had a broad, happy smile. From the looks of it, Sara must have been no more than thirteen years old when the picture was taken. “Your family?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where was the photograph taken?”

  “Montana. North of Livingston on the Shields River. My parents are sheep ranchers. My brother and I are the fourth generation. Paul runs the ranch now. Mom and Dad work part-time, and head south in the winter. They call themselves snowbirds.”

  Kerney looked at the photograph again before replacing it on the bookcase. If Sara’s mother was an indication of how her daughter would age, it was clear Sara would be very lovely for many years to come. “They look like good people,” he said.

  “They are.”

  “Do you think you can locate Bull McVay?” he asked.

  Sara smiled. “Already done. Meet me at my office at noon and we’ll drive up to see him.”

  “I’ll be there. Is the BOQ available, or am I still out of time?”

  “I think we can forget the clock, Lieutenant. I’ll let them know you’re staying over another night.”

  “Can you lose the tail on me?” he asked.

  “Good night, Lieutenant,” Sara said sweetly, brushing off the request.

  She watched Kerney limp to his truck with his half-rolling, busted-up gait and smiled in spite of herself. It probably hurt him like hell, but the walk reminded her of home and the men she had grown up with. She watched him drive away, called the BOQ, sat at the dining-room table, opened her briefcase, and took out the memorandum prepared by the post historian.

  Patrick Kerney (born Live Oak County, Texas, 1872; died Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1964, age 92) came to the Tularosa Valley at the age of thirteen, as a horse wrangler for one of the original Texas cattlemen. He was a contemporary of Eugene Manlove Rhodes (see W. H. Hutchinson, A Bar
Cross Man, University of Oklahoma Press, 1956), a cowboy who became one of the best-known western novelists of the early twentieth century.

  Both Rhodes and Kerney worked at the Bar Cross Ranch as wranglers and hands. Kerney took a patent on six thousand acres in the foothills of the San Andres Mountains about the same time that Rhodes laid claim to his land in what is now known as Rhodes Canyon. Both ran longhorn cattle, hired out to other spreads and broke mustangs to make ends meet. Patrick Kerney hauled freight from the railroad in Engle to the Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation on a contract with the Army for several winters.

  Kerney and his son, Matthew, played a significant role in the resistance by the local ranchers to the military takeover of the valley. The Kerney family was one of the last to move off the range and one of the few to continue operations on a co-use arrangement with the Army into the early 1960s. Court action mounted by Kerney and his neighbor Albert Jennings, who ranched on the west slope of the San Andres, was dismissed after several years of litigation.

  The last confrontation between ranchers and the government occurred at the Prather ranch in 1959. In spite of a court order, John Prather had refused to accept a writ of eviction served by military police and United States marshals. Word of the standoff spread to friends, relatives, and neighbors, who flocked to assist old John Prather. For hours the group kept a large Army contingent at bay. The writ was reversed and Prather was allowed to remain at his ranch until he died. It was the last property seized on the original installation under the eminent domain condemnation proceedings.

  Patrick Kerney, age 87, his son, Matthew, and his grandson, Kevin, took part in the Prather showdown, armed with repeating rifles. (Attached are archive photographs.) The incident made national news and was covered by the wire services, newspapers, and broadcast media.

  The Kerney family moved to the Jennings ranch, where Matthew was employed as foreman. Patrick Kerney resided with the family until 1963, when deteriorating health forced his son to place him in an Albuquerque nursing home, where he died the following spring.