by Rex Burns
“That kind of thing doesn’t happen much in this neck of the woods, Gabe.”
Tice had introduced him as Gabe Wager from DPD, and Yates went right to his first name. Which was friendlier than Tice was and all right with Wager. “Not many homicides in the county?”
“Nope. We get some shootings, suicides and accidents mostly. One or two a year. And if we do get a homicide, it’s because of a fight; somebody gets beat up in a bar and wants to get even, or somebody messes with another man’s woman.” Yates turned the four-wheel-drive car onto the bumpy state road that led back north to Rio Piedra and Mueller’s isolated ranch. “Burglary’s the big thing around here—we’re starting to get transient construction workers coming in, and they’ll rip off whatever ain’t tied down. Dope, too.” He bobbed his head toward the jagged snow-covered peaks fifty miles away. “The ski people bring that in. But the marshal up there won’t move against them. He calls it the ‘community life-style.’” Yates slapped his palm against the steering wheel. “He says those people hired him, and those people’s standards are what he’s paid to uphold.” He added, “No matter how low.”
“What about the DA? Doesn’t the marshal have to report to the district attorney?”
Yates’s yellow-brown eyes glanced from the narrow highway toward Wager, unsure just how much might be repeated and to whom. “Our DA don’t like to prosecute. He don’t like us spending our time in court when we should be on the road or serving warrants, he says. Besides, he’s a Republican, and the marshal’s a Democrat. They don’t work together too well.”
The deputy was a lean man in his thirties whose Adam’s apple bobbed prominently when he talked. Beneath his tan uniform shirt, trimmed with western piping on back and chest, the faint outline of straps and ridges showed that he wore body armor. Most of the street cops in Denver wore it, too, but there it seemed necessary. “What about the sheriff’s office? How does Tice get along with the DA?”
“Not too good. Tice wants to provide law enforcement for the unincorporated areas of the county—which is most of it. The DA thinks the sheriff should spend his time serving papers and running the jail. We make a little money on papers and prisoners.”
“How in hell does the DA get any convictions?”
“Guilty pleas on reduced charges, mostly. He says it serves justice and the county budget at the same time. Besides, he’s a good buddy of the leading defense lawyer in town. I won’t say there’s any pay-offs, but if you ever get charged with something, there’s one lawyer who can get you out of it without ever going to trial.”
As in every judicial district in Colorado, the DA decided which cases to prosecute and how hard to go after them. Plea bargaining could save the state a lot of money and the prosecutor a lot of work, as Kolagny, the Denver prosecuting attorney, knew. And if you only went after the sure cases, you could have a very good conviction rate, one that the state’s attorney general would be happy with. “It sounds like a real circus, Roy. How about the municipal police? How do you get along with them?”
“There’s only one municipality in the county—Loma Vista. The rest of the towns have marshals, and some are good and some are bad. As far as the Loma Vista police is concerned, it depends on who’s got duty. If you need backup, your friends come when you holler. The others don’t.” He told Wager about a bar fight during one of the region’s summer tourist celebrations, Gold Rush Days: two sheriff’s officers sent to quell a brawl of thirty drunken construction workers and not-too-sober cowboys. “Municipal didn’t send anybody into the county to help with that one. We ended up standing outside the door and picking them up when they flew out. If there’d been just four or five of us, we could have gone in and broken it up. But just the two of us, and one of them a reserve …” Yates tried to answer Wager’s silence. “Look, Gabe, the s.o. has three full-timers for the whole county, including Tice. We’re not as rich as Cortez or Grand Junction. We just don’t have the tax base for a good sheriff’s office. If I spend two, three days on a court case, I’m not out on calls, like I should be. And I’ll tell you what, if we don’t respond to calls, Sheriff Tice don’t get re-elected, and I don’t get reappointed. That’s just the way it is out here.”
Out here, back there, anywhere and everywhere, the sure conviction of criminals was the best prevention a law agency could offer. Proving your case in court was what it was all about, and if a DA took only the easy wins, the real crooks would get a lot smarter a lot faster. Wager gazed out the window at a flooded meadow whose grass was so green it was almost black against the blue of water-reflected sky. He was here on one case. As an outsider. He wanted to remember that. And Yates, like any good cop, preferred to be on the street instead of in court or filling out time-study forms. Even if things were done differently or downright wrong in Grant County, he wanted to remember that.
“Were you born around here?”
“Texas. El Paso. Worked for the s.o. in El Paso County for two years before coming up here. I been here almost ten years now. Man, talk about your budget—that El Paso s.o. had helicopters, take-home vehicles, overtime pay, everything! It cost me almost three hundred a month to come up here.” He pointed out the window by way of explanation. “But it was worth it—I like the country.”
Looking where Yates pointed, Wager could understand. It was the kind of scenery people traveled thousands of miles and paid hundreds of dollars to see. And Yates, assigned to live in the northwest corner of the county as the sole resident peace officer, would be his own boss most of the time. It was the kind of job a city cop might like to retire to. If he could stand the small-town politics. Gazing at those steep snowfields brilliant in the afternoon sun, Wager figured the years to his own retirement. He was about halfway there, and it wouldn’t be bad at all to move out to a place like this. “How many people in the county?”
Yates thought a moment. “Last census said a little over two thousand, outside Loma Vista. About twenty thousand in all. But it was wrong—I figure another five hundred, maybe more. I know a dozen new families up in my corner that have moved in from God-knows-where.” He grinned, wrinkling his flat cheeks. “A real population explosion.”
A pickup truck passed with a large tank filling the bed. The driver raised a hand and Yates waved back. Wager tried to remember the last time he saw someone in Denver lift a friendly hand to a cop.
“That’s Deputy Hodges’s uncle—looks like he’s going for a load of water.”
“Water?” They were climbing swiftly now; the wet meadow was left behind as the road lifted through piñon and scrub to the top of a mesa. But the grass was still green and fresh, and narrow gullies cut in the mesa showed that creeks ran from those distant snowfields. “It seems wet enough.”
“It’s spotty, and some areas are downright dry. Water rights! It’s the biggest damned headache we have, and the water laws in this state are a lawyer’s delight. Subsurface water, too; it’s a whole new area and nobody really knows what the law is. We’re always serving summonses on water rights cases.”
The road swerved in sharp curves as it dipped and rose again, this time into a pine-filled valley that was formed by the lowest ridges of the mountain range. Among the tree trunks scattered vacation cabins sat awaiting another brief season; occasional trucks and cars passed with a wave, and Yates seemed to know most of the drivers. Wager let him talk without interruption and gazed at the passing landscape. On the radio, infrequent coded messages crackled with the slow business of the sheriff’s office, the municipal police in Loma Vista behind them, the faint queries and answers of the county’s highway maintenance crews. Yates slowed suddenly to swerve onto a graded dirt road—”Got a paper to serve, won’t take long”—and groped his automobile down first one narrow dirt track and then another, looking for the plastic lot number nailed to a pine tree. Not all of the empty-looking A-frames or log cabins were vacation homes; Wager caught glimpses of pickup trucks with current Colorado plates, of large dogs sitting up to stare as the vehicle rattled past, o
f the occasional child playing alone around the cinder-block foundation of a half-hidden mobile home.
“Here we are,” said the deputy, and he guided the four-wheel drive along a twisty two-rut road that ended in a littered clearing before a barn-shaped log house. A woman stood behind the screen door and peered out cautiously. Unhurried, Yates checked out of the radio net and took the brown envelope with the summons. “Be just a minute,” he said to Wager; then, “Morning, ma’am,” to the silent woman.
“He was lying in that corner facedown.” Yates had steered the vehicle up a jolting path and across a soft meadow. Tucked beneath the pines fringing the open space sat a small cabin built of dark logs and railroad ties and roofed with rusting sheet metal. A rain-speckled cardboard sign was nailed to the door: CRIME SCENE KEEP OUT UNDER PENALTY OF THE LAW. D. L. TICE GRANT COUNTY SHERIFF. A still-shiny chain and padlock dangled across the door; Yates found the key and unlocked it and let Wager into the single room cluttered with the years of debris of a man’s isolated life. On plank shelves spiked along one wall, piles of old magazines and newspapers slowly yellowed; a black iron stove, used for both heating and cooking, sat with its firebox door sagging open; a half-dozen pots and pans hung within easy reach. Over a steel sink resting in an iron frame, a pump nozzle drooped; the corners of the room were crammed with cardboard boxes holding tools, license plates going back thirty years, scraps of electric wire and baling cord, jars and cans of food, old clothes that smelled of stale dirt, letters and legal papers dating from the 1940s and brittle to the touch. A twisting avenue led from the front door to a large sofa, its upholstery split, past a tasseled lamp, to the rumpled blankets of the sheetless mattress, to a table whose planks were cleared at one end for use and whose other end was crammed with more magazines, an old clock, a pad of Indian Head lined paper, pencil stubs, an old-fashioned radio with a cathedral front, and dishes and tin silverware, more or less clean, and finally to the stove sagging beneath its rusty chimney pipe.
“He was one old packrat, wasn’t he?” Yates said. “I had to inventory this whole pile of crap.”
Wager had seen a copy of the wearisome long list in the victim’s file. He sidled down the aisle looking at this and that. “How’d you find out about him?”
“He had a job to do over at the Lazy J ranch—fencing, roofing; when he was more than a couple days late, Mr. Connell, the ranch manager, came over and found him.”
So Mueller had been dead for a couple of days before he was discovered. That explained the lingering and half-familiar odor that blended with the general damp mustiness of the cabin. Wager studied the corner Yates had pointed out. It was behind the table and away from the door. He knew from the crime report that Mueller had been shot once in the back of the head with a large-caliber weapon, probably a pistol, and that the slug had not been found either in the body or in the log walls.
“You didn’t outline the body with chalk?”
Even in the dim light of the unshaded ceiling bulb, Wager could see Yates’s sallow neck turn red with embarrassment. “Where the hell would I get chalk? I took pictures, is what I did. You seen the pictures, didn’t you? That shows you where the body was.”
You couldn’t measure distances from a picture; you couldn’t get as clear an idea of the body’s position, either. But Wager nodded silently and stepped carefully to a location that might have been where the killer stood when he fired into the man’s head. Given the narrow alleys between boxes and piles, there weren’t many other places the gunman could have stood. In one of the railroad ties, near eye level, three or four gouges showed freshly splintered wood. “Is that where you looked for the slug?”
Yates said yes. “I stood right where you’re standing, Gabe—I figure that’s where the killer stood. And then I went and dug into every hole in that wall. I even used a metal detector on the floor and along the chinks. But all I found were nails and screws and such.”
He expected Wager to tell him he did the right thing. “That was the right thing to do.”
“Well I didn’t need chalk for something like that.”
“But the slug should still be here somewhere.”
“I looked. Sheriff Tice looked. Even the coroner. Every crack in the logs, floor, even the roof. The only thing we can figure is it angled off Mueller’s skull and out that window.” He pointed to the small hinged square of panes. “It was open. I had to close it to keep varmints out.”
Wager eyed the screenless window from where he stood. It was a possibility—faint, but possible. If the killer had stood over by the stove, the possibility was more likely, but the location of the body wasn’t quite right for that. And the coroner’s report said the body had not been moved.
“Did you go over the place for fingerprints?” Wager lifted the cover on the Indian Head pad to reveal a penciled scrawl of numbers and a painfully totaled column reading $24,974.00, heavily underlined twice.
“Yep. But the only good ones found was Mueller’s. The front door was messed up—everybody coming in the place put their hand to the latch.” He watched Wager scan the tablet. “That make any sense to you?”
“Just numbers. Income, payment, who knows?” He looked around the jumble of the room. “You found no other recent documents? Nothing to show what he was figuring on?”
“Only that angel drawing.”
Wager nodded.
“You want to look around outside?”
He followed Yates back into a sunshine which, after the dimness of the cabin, needled the eyes with glare. A worn path led around the corner to an outhouse that tilted forward enough to hang the slatted door open to reveal its empty bench. A black Dodge pickup, 1950s vintage, sat at the end of two well-worn ruts beside the cabin. A large spread of oil-soaked earth showed where Mueller habitually worked on the rusted truck.
“You couldn’t find any tire impressions or footprints?”
“It’d rained.”
“You have any guesses why he was shot?”
“Just that drawing. Mueller didn’t have a damn thing anybody’d want. You can’t graze a goat on most of his acreage, and the timber’s not worth that much either. Nobody figures he had any money to hide, and he wasn’t tortured or nothing, like somebody was trying to make him talk. Besides, the place looked just like it does now— it’s a mess, but it’s not tore up like somebody was looking for something. I’ve tried and I’ve tried, Gabe, but all I come up with is that angel.”
And Wager had seen enough.
On the way back to Loma Vista Wager finally asked, “What can you tell me about the avenging angels?”
Yates concentrated on the highway’s snaking, downhill curves. “Mister, you might laugh. I know Sheriff Tice does. But I believe in them.”
“Why?”
“Because most of the people around here believe in them. If they believe, by God, so do I.”
He tried to follow the deputy’s reasoning. “Suppose they believe in Bigfoot or flying saucers?”
Yates’s yellow-brown eyes slanted his way. “I’d have to go along with them, Gabe. I mean, look, I been here almost ten years; same northern half of the county, same roads, same patrols, damn near the same pay. But every day I find out something new about the people around here. We got folks living back in the hills or over on that benchland that’ve been here since Christ wore diapers. Some of them don’t even send their kids to school because they don’t want nothing to do with the state. Others I just know about from the county tax rolls, and they never call on the law or anybody else for a damn thing. If they get into a hassle they settle it themselves and nobody comes running to me about it.” He braked slightly and glided around a fishhook bend. “And I don’t go out bothering them if there’s no call to. I guess what I’m trying to say is that things go on around here that I never see and a lot of times never even hear of. And some of the families that have been in these hills since before Colorado was a state were on the side of, or fought against, the avenging angels when the Mormons moved in here. They�
��re the ones that act like the angels are real. Some of them are scared shitless, I swear.”
It still sounded like a lot of crap to Wager. “Tice said he found no connection at all between Mueller and any Mormon group.”
“That’s right. I never heard of any either. But like I say, Gabe: there’s a hell of a lot about these people that I plain don’t know. And just because I don’t know something, I’m not about to say it’s impossible.”
They rode in silence until the deputy turned the Jeep onto a paved county road leading into a narrow valley. “I’ll run you through Rio Piedra—it’s not too far out of the way. You might as well get the fifty-cent tour.”
The valley twisted close to a stream that foamed whitely until the walls of pine and aspen opened; then it stilled into dark pools behind weathered beaver dams. Wide, shallow pools like these used to be Wager’s favorite fishing spots, and he half wished he had brought the rod and reel and tackle box that were gathering dust in his apartment closet. He remembered how the trout could be seen as dark, hovering shadows halfway across a pond, and how you had to keep low and move gently to get close enough for a cautious flick of the light line, a gentle touch of the fly on the still surface.
“We get good fishing along here earlier in the spring. Fish and Game stocks this area. By now the tourists have about cleaned it out; it’s too close to the road and all.”
“I see.”
The valley began to widen, and up ahead Wager spotted a road sign with two nameplates on one pole, RIO PIEDRA. Among the trees a handful of buildings made up the town: a worn gas station whose rusty pumps stuck out of a muddy drive like tree stumps, a windowless board building converted from a storage shed to a cafe with a pink Coors sign hanging on the closed door, some log cabins black with time and dampness that, except for wood-smoke, looked abandoned. Dirt roads led off to either side toward more thin trails and half-hidden cabins.
