“What go-around?” Holman interrupted.
“They had a little set-to about property boundaries. I talked with them both. It has nothing to do with this.”
“How do you know that?”
I started to answer but then hesitated. I didn’t know, that was the trouble. “I just don’t think so, that’s all. For one thing, if Torkelson was actually shot where Deputy Abeyta says he was, then someone had to drag the body from there,” and I pointed across the field toward the cluster of lights, “to there,” and I indicated where Torkelson’s body still lay, covered with black plastic. “That’s probably a hundred feet or more.”
“Anyone could do that,” Holman said.
“Come on, Martin. Not anyone. Torkelson was huge. He must have weighed two-fifty at least. Reuben Fuentes couldn’t move him two feet, let alone a hundred.”
“Maybe after he was shot he staggered-”
“Sheriff, did you look at the body?”
“No, not yet.” The hesitation in his voice was obvious. He didn’t want to look.
“Then let’s go do that.”
13
The harsh lights added to the ghoulish scene. Sheriff Martin Holman pulled his Stetson down low over his forehead and hunched against the growing chill of the night wind. His hands were thrust in the pockets of his coat. His face was stone white and his upper lip quivered a little now and then.
If he was going to vomit, I hoped he’d have the good sense to move far away, downwind. He didn’t like what he saw, and neither did I.
We pieced it together this way. Seventy-eight feet, four and one-half inches southwest of Stuart Torkelson’s corpse was a single splotch of blood the size of a tea-cup saucer. It was nearly circular, puddled for the most part on a bald patch of limestone. Part of the circumference of the puddle touched a clump of dried grama grass.
With a tape measure stretched tight between that single glob of blood and the toe of Torkelson’s left boot, we then measured fifty-one feet, three and three-quarter inches toward the body. At that point we taped a perpendicular line off to the north another seven feet, eight inches to the first of many blood patches there.
And at this site, it was more than a single, neat puddle. The spray of blood, bone, and tissue covered a fan-shaped area nearly sixteen feet across.
Looking as if some gruesome surveyor had been at work, a cheery red flag with its wire post pushed into the ground marked a large fragment of skull and attached tissue that had flown almost nineteen feet out from the first droplet of blood.
As the camera flashguns continued their private electric storms, Holman looked at a preliminary drawing that Deputy Torrez had handed him. I held a flashlight so he could hold down the corners of the page against the wind.
“If this is Torkelson’s blood,” Holman said, pointing at the solitary blood puddle, “then he was wounded first here and then maybe stumbled over to here.” He pointed at the spot where the spray began.
“Yes. If that’s his blood. We don’t know that yet.”
“How-” Holman stopped. He grimaced and shook his head, looking off into the night. When he’d collected his thoughts and fought his supper back down, he continued, “If this is where he was standing when his head was blown off, how did he finish up some twenty-seven feet away, over here? Did someone carry him? Drag him?”
“It could have happened any number of ways,” I said. “He might have been running when he was shot. His momentum could have carried him that far, easily. Even if he’d just been walking away, or staggering, he could have covered that distance.”
“So he wasn’t necessarily dragged, then,” Holman said. He snapped the notebook closed and pushed it in his pocket. “He had a confrontation with someone, maybe saw something he shouldn’t have, and was shot.”
“That’s possible.”
“The first time he maybe fell down. Maybe on his hands and knees. Enough blood pumps through his clothing that it puddles on the rock back there.” Holman stopped and turned, staring over at the mass of lights that bathed the little puddle of blood. I was impressed that he’d managed to think the possibilities that far through.
“And then he pushes himself to his feet, turns, and staggers off toward his Suburban, over there.” He pivoted and pointed toward the road. The Suburban was almost in a straight line with Torkelson’s final line of travel. “He manages fifty feet or so before the killer catches up with him and-” He let the rest hang.
“It could have happened that way.”
Holman looked at me, one eyebrow raised. “You don’t think that’s what happened? So what was he doing out here, in the middle of nowhere, at night, for God’s sake?”
“I don’t know, Martin. Right now, what you suggest is as good a theory as any we’ve got.”
“This is the old man’s land, isn’t it?”
“I think so, yes. This hill here,” and I gestured to the west where the pinon and oak grove rose up on the limestone swell, “is actually Torkelson’s, I think.”
“Well, the old man and Torkelson had an argument earlier. That’s what you said. And we know Fuentes always carries a gun, and we know that he would use it. It’s easy to see-”
“Now wait a minute, sheriff,” I said quickly. “Reuben Fuentes did have a minor confrontation last Sunday with Torkelson, that’s true. But he doesn’t always carry a gun. In fact, in past months, it’s been rare that he does. And the last time he shot anyone, as far as I know, was in 1920, in old Mexico.”
“There are plenty of rumors to the contrary, Bill,” Holman said.
“And that’s just what they are…rumors. For one thing, Reuben is too frail to be any part of this.”
“He’s not too frail to pull a trigger.”
“Martin, think about what you’re looking at here. If Reuben pulled the trigger and Torkelson staggered away from him, Reuben would have had to have been quick enough to catch up with him. He’s not. He hobbles, and a slow hobble at that.”
“What about earlier, in the post office? He was carrying a loaded revolver then. You said so yourself.”
I took a deep breath. “Yeah, he was carrying one in the post office. And, if anything, that proves my point. According to Carla Champlin, Reuben was too frail to even pick up the gun after he dropped it. He was using a cane as well. He’s upset over what someone did to his dogs, but he-”
“Sir?” Deputy Paul Encinos appeared as a silhouette, backlit by the floodlights to the west. “You should come look at this.”
Holman and I followed him across the pasture, staying away from the line that had been laid on the ground between the blood remains.
Encinos stopped near the first blood stain and pointed with his flashlight. “From here, we measure thirty-one feet and some inches to there.” He swung his flashlight to the west until the beam touched a grove of runty, gnarled Gambel’s oaks that grew from the foot of a low limestone escarpment.
“And what did you find?” Holman asked. I could hear the excitement in his voice as he recovered from his initial reaction to brains, bone, and blood.
Encinos, now joined by Tony Abeyta and Bob Torrez, made his way toward the oaks. Holman and I followed. I didn’t like all those boots tramping the ground, but the deputies had done their preliminaries before calling us.
Encinos stopped and held his light. “We’ll get the generator and portables over here in a minute, but you can see pretty clearly even with just the flashlights,” he said.
In a spot where over the years leaves and runoff had deposited the makings for soft dirt at the base of the escarpment, the ground was disturbed by recent digging. The layer of leaves had been disturbed, too. I could see the line farther up the bank where the neat seasonal layering of the leaves had been interrupted.
When whoever it was had finished digging, they’d swept leaves back in place, trying to conceal the spot.
“So what do you suppose is there?” I asked.
Deputy Bob Torrez, methodical and careful as usual, snapp
ed off his flashlight and slipped it in his pocket. “Do you want to wait until morning to dig it up?”
I started to reply but Sheriff Martin Holman beat me to it. “Right now,” he said. “I don’t think we should wait. If this is somehow connected, and if we wait until morning, then the trail will just be colder than it already is.”
“Sir?” Torrez asked, looking at me.
“The sheriff is right,” I said.
Torrez immediately turned to the other deputies. “We’ll be a while taking the photos before we disturb anything. Tony and Paul, why don’t you bring up the burro.”
The burro was the small portable generator that would provide all the light we’d need to make an artificial daytime in this lonely spot.
While the deputies assembled their equipment, I made arrangements for the removal of Stuart Torkelson’s remains. He’d lain out in the cold long enough.
14
I couldn’t think of anything much more macabre than opening a possible grave on a starless, moonless, wind-swept December night. I gave Linda Rael a choice-the safe, warm comfort of a locked patrol car or the dark, cold, blustery pasture.
Shivering against the wind, she clutched camera bag and notebook and followed me across the field toward the spot where the burro chugged away, powering four big arc lamps. For a radius of fifty feet around what we assumed was a gravesite, the light was brighter than high noon of a cloudless June day.
“What’s buried there?” she asked and I had to give her credit. There was more excitement than apprehension in her voice. Still, with fifty yards to go, she walked past me, her pace accelerating until she reached the reassuring light and the circle of armed cops.
“We don’t know,” I said to her back. I wasn’t willing to guess.
Before disturbing the soil, we completed a grid search, thoroughly inventorying the contents of each square meter of an area a dozen times bigger than any possible grave might be.
“You think we need photos, too?” Torrez asked at one point and I nodded.
“Film’s cheap.”
Finally, at nearly four in the morning, with the first small pellets of moisture salting the air, we began to dig. Working like a bunch of archaeologists with badges, we removed the loose dirt a shovelful at a time, dumping the soil through a small, coarse screen. It was the same sort of screen that folks hunting Anasazi remains would use to sift out projectile points, pot shards, or bone fragments. We didn’t care about the pot shards.
As the deputies worked, I realized that the young reporter was standing so close to my elbow she was almost leaning on me. Her breath pumped out in rapid exhalations and her eyes never left the spot of disturbed earth.
“Do you need a warrant to excavate someone’s private property like this?” she asked at one point, and I shook my head.
“Not when the owner gives us permission.”
“Do you think Mr. Fuentes had anything to do with this?”
“We don’t know, Linda. Well, wait a minute. No, we don’t think he did.”
Before she had a chance to question that, Tony Abeyta stopped digging, the tip of the shovel in the dirt. “I hit something,” he said.
Five minutes later, enough dirt had been gently removed that all of us could see the patch of brown fur.
“Looks like a dog or something,” Abeyta said.
“I imagine you’ll find three of them, then,” I said.
Linda Rael looked up at me quickly. “You knew what was here all the time?”
The steady two-cycle bray of the generator made it hard to hear. I laid a hand on her shoulder. “Say again?”
“Did you know what was buried here?”
“Not for sure, no.” I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and turned. A fair contingent of cars had assembled down on the county road, and one of our part-timers worked with two of the auxiliaries-the Sheriff’s Posse they called themselves-to keep the curious from hopping the fence.
I never ceased to wonder at folks who sat at home listening to scanners, then charged out into the night when something juicy was going down. If they were lawyers I could understand it. But most of the people who drifted by, idling their cars along at a slow walk, were just out on a lark, hoping they would catch a glimpse of something truly repulsive.
I suppose we could have held up each one of the poisoned dogs as it came out of the ground. Hell, front page news photos they’d be. But Linda Rael didn’t cooperate. As each one of the pathetic animals was uncovered, her camera remained bagged and her notebook remained in her coat pocket. Apparently there was a limit to what the Register wanted on its front pages.
The animals had been laid side by side in the grave like the good friends they’d been. Old Reuben hadn’t been able to dig very deep…the hole was less than eighteen inches when we were finished.
“I’m surprised the soil’s as deep as it is,” Martin Holman said. I felt escorted now, with him on one side and Linda on the other.
“Kind of a collection spot for erosion off the hillside,” I said, offering the extent of my geology background. “You can get pockets of soil that are six or seven feet deep in places along the bottom of these bluffs.”
But Holman wasn’t interested in lessons from Mr. Science.
“So why did Stuart Torkelson walk up here to this spot, and why was he shot?”
“I don’t know, sheriff.”
“You said the old man buried the dogs last week? I mean, is that what you said?”
“That’s what he told me.”
Holman fell silent as he watched the deputies finish up their photography session. The corpses of the dogs certainly weren’t daisy fresh, that was for sure.
Deputy Torrez jabbed the point of his shovel into the center of the hole’s bottom. “I guess that’s it,” he said.
“When are you going to arrest him?” Holman spoke directly into my ear. Either he didn’t want to shout over the generator or he didn’t want the reporter in on the conversation.
“Arrest who?” I turned so we were face to face.
“The old man. Fuentes.”
“I’m not going to arrest him, Martin.”
“Why not? What more evidence do you need? The body was found on his property, associated with this-” he ran out of words and waved a hand at the dead dogs and their shallow grave. “And when you figure that half the time he runs around waving a loaded gun under people’s noses-”
“Martin,” I said and took him by the elbow. I led him several paces away. Linda shrugged off her hood, freeing up her ears for maximum pickup. But she had the good sense not to follow us.
“In the first place, yes, the old man sometimes carries a gun. He happened to do so in the post office, and he dropped the damn thing. I don’t deny that. And yes, he had a confrontation with Torkelson last weekend. But Stuart isn’t-wasn’t-the type to do anything to exacerbate the affair. Hell, he told me about it the minute he saw me. If there had been any other problem, he would have called us. He’s got a goddamned telephone right in his Suburban, for God’s sake.”
Holman shook his head vehemently. “You’re right there, Bill. Stuart Torkelson wouldn’t do anything to pick a fight. And it looks to me like he was trying to make a beeline right back to his truck when he was shot. It’s the old man who went off his rocker and nailed Torkelson before he had a chance to explain.”
I rummaged in my pocket for a cigarette for a full minute before I remembered that I had probably quit smoking.
“Explain what, sheriff?”
“Well, I don’t know what. But something.”
“What would make Torkelson jump the fence? He knew it was Reuben’s property and he knew the old man didn’t want him on it. Reuben thinks Torkelson was trying to force him to sell.”
“He had to see something,” Holman said.
“Yes, he had to see something. What?”
The sheriff shrugged. “I still say you’ve got enough evidence to hold the old man for a preliminary hearing.”
“For what? Where’s he going to go?”
Holman looked up and almost smiled. “Mexico, Bill.”
“Come on.”
“I’m serious. Hell, he’s got relatives down there, just what… twenty-five miles away? If he knows we’re on him, I’ll bet you a hundred dollars that he’s gone before we can blink an eye.”
“I’m not going to throw a ninety-year-old man in jail just because of this,” I said. “He buried his dogs here. He’s got a right to do that. The rest is just conjecture.”
“He doesn’t have the right to shoot one of our leading citizens who was just out minding his own business.”
“Martin, think on that one, will you? Stuart Torkelson obviously wasn’t minding his own business. If that had been the case, he’d be home in a comfortable bed right now. He wouldn’t be dead. What we’re going to have to find out is what he was doing out here. And what someone else was doing out here.”
Holman took a deep breath and jammed both hands in his coat pockets. The rain was still light, but the small drops were icy cold, driven by the wind out of the west.
“So what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to talk to Reuben again. In the morning. And I’m going to call his grandniece as soon as I get back to the office. And I’m going to wait until the medical examiner has something concrete to go on before jumping to conclusions.”
“What’s it going to take before you figure you have enough to make an arrest?” Holman asked.
“You mean before I’ll take Reuben Fuentes into custody? A whole lot, Martin. A whole lot.”
He shook his head. “I think you’re too close to this one, Bill. I really do.” He stepped around me as if he was going to join the deputies at the hole. But he stopped, turned, and added, “If Reuben Fuentes wasn’t related to Estelle Reyes-Guzman, he’d be in the lockup right now. And you know it.”
Martin Holman’s sudden attack of spine surprised me. But he was dead wrong on all counts. Maybe he was just playing the hard-driving sheriff for Linda Rael’s benefit. That was all right, as long as he didn’t get in the way, or do something stupid on his own.
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