Blood Line (24 page)

Wager scraped at his rice and tried to make a joke. “Old McGraw have anything to do with Denver International Airport?”

“No, but he’s been making up for it ever since.”

At last month’s committee meeting, Liz had moved for an evaluation of the entertainment center’s operations by the county assessor’s office, but McGraw had ruled the motion out of order. So it looked like the city budget would have to absorb bond payments that should have come from the profits the private investors claimed they weren’t making.

“And those same investors are talking now about developing a riverfront entertainment area along the South Platte. Opening up restaurants and a new aquarium, water sports, music venues, whatever.”

“Paid for by the city?”

She nodded. “Another ‘public-private partnership.’ It’s Ronald Pyne and his gang, again.” A wry smile twisted the corner of her mouth. “He’s calling it the Weldon F. McGraw River Park Project. If nothing else, you have to admire the man’s gall.”

There was nothing illegal in the name or the deal, if the city approved it. But it made Wager grateful that he was working Homicide. At least with murder, the fact, if not the degree, of guilt was a lot clearer than it was in city politics.

Liz suddenly asked, “Do you know Evelyn Litvak?”

“The state representative?” Wager shook his head. “Only by name. Why?”

“One of her committee assignments is state waterways, and I had a meeting with her the other day about Pyne’s newest boondoggle. While we talked, the poor thing broke down crying.”

Wager waited for Liz to tell him why.

“Her ex is suing for sole custody of their daughter. He claims Evelyn can’t be a state representative and a parent too.”

“What’s he, a house husband?”

“Rancher. Recently remarried. He and his new wife can offer the girl a more stable home life, he says. He also says he doesn’t want his daughter going to school in Denver.”

Depending on the school, the man might have a point. “How old is the girl?”

“Six. Evelyn says the hearing is scheduled for three weeks from now and she’s absolutely distraught.”

Liz didn’t consider herself a feminist—at least that’s what she repeated to Wager. But she did want equal and fair treatment for everyone—regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and all the other terms of political identification. It was only fair, she argued, that human rights should be applicable to all humans, an attitude that, in Colorado state politics, marked her as a raving liberal. Wager didn’t see why Liz or anyone else got all fired up over the idea; as far as he was concerned, the crooks he caught were equally guilty despite their gender, race, ethnicity, etc., etc. But he didn’t quite understand why Liz was telling him about Evelyn Litvak. “Has she asked you for some kind of help?”

“No—she just needed to talk with someone and I happened to be there. But La Sal County is in her district. Didn’t you say that’s where you’re going?”

He nodded. “Part of the Squaw Point Reservation’s there. It goes along the line into eastern Utah, too.”

“I thought so. It’s where her husband’s ranch is. It just made me think of her—and of how angry I got when she told me about it.”

“What does her daughter want?”

“To stay with her mother. But the court may decide she’s too young to have a considered opinion. Certainly Evelyn’s worried about it. She says her husband is very vindictive and doesn’t want their daughter as much as he wants to hurt Evelyn for daring to divorce him.” Liz tilted her wineglass and looked at the pale yellow light filtered by its contents. “Now that he’s remarried, he has a strong claim. He says he doesn’t want his daughter to be another latchkey kid.”

And her ex had everything to win and nothing to lose by trying. Wager’s ex would have had no trouble claiming any children they might have had, either. But Wager, given the kind of life he led, would not have fought it. There would have been no point. He was just grateful that children had not suffered his marriage or his divorce. And, besides, Lorraine hated him enough by herself without having to hate him on behalf of any children, too. “Well, good luck to her. But I don’t expect to be seeing any state representatives or their exes where I’m going.”

“No,” said Liz. “I suppose not.”

B
ELOW, THE AIRPLANE’S
tiny black shadow rippled across an earth that looked like treeless and rutted mud. In shades of red and yellow and gray, it was an alluvial expanse that spread out and away from the snow-covered clusters of mountain ranges and pine-shaded plateaus of west-central Colorado. Here and there dirt roads scratched straight lines through the thin covering of sagebrush and scattered piñon; the occasional ranch was a convergence of wavering cattle trails and splotches of bare, churned earth that surrounded water tanks and weathered roofs. The writhing beds of gulches and washes carved by seasonal streams were marked by tongues and ripples of dry sand; the larger canyons were abrupt crevices where, in the shadowed bottoms, pools winked with reflected sky.

It didn’t look much different from the ground, except that the scattered mountaintops, hanging just above the flat horizons, were hazy with the blue and silver of distance, and you couldn’t see the sudden chasms and gorges sliced by the occasional small river.

Despite the thin streak of heat waves that rippled at the rim of the wide earth, the late-morning air still had the bite of early spring and high altitude, and Wager was glad for his old denim jacket, taut across his shoulders. Joining the half-dozen other passengers, Wager had trailed across the tarmac to the flat-roofed airport with its stubby control tower at one end. From another door flanked by plate-glass windows, a second small line of passengers toted their hand luggage toward the idling airplane. When it took off on the return to Denver—with stops at Durango, Alamosa, and Trinidad—the runway would be empty of everything except wind and an occasional tumbleweed, and the dozen or so small planes tied down on the apron near a quiet maintenance hangar.

“Officer Wager?” A heavyset man whose bowed, thick legs made him even shorter than Wager, aimed his reflecting sunglasses Gabe’s way. The man wore sharply pressed khaki trousers and a forest green Ike jacket with leather trim at the pockets and leather patches on the elbows. He had a bolo tie with a turquoise slide that contrasted with the tan of his shirt, and although he was hatless, the span of white flesh at the top of his forehead said he usually wore one. He didn’t wear a badge that Wager could see, but everything else about him said “Law Officer.” “I’m Don Henderson.” A thick-fingered hand tested the strength of Wager’s grip. “Glad to meet you. Got any other bags?”

When Wager said no, Henderson offered to carry the clothes bag and led him around the sand-colored building to the airport’s parking lot and an unmarked sedan whose very plainness said it was government issue. Then they were in the vehicle and pulling north onto a vacant highway. It pointed like an arrow towards a horizon that stretched unbroken between the distant glimmering peaks of two mountain ranges. The man finally cleared his throat before asking, “Your people over in Denver tell you what it’s all about?” Henderson’s voice had a nasal twang that Wager guessed was Oklahoma or maybe east Texas.

“Just that you wanted somebody new to the area. I was told I’d find out the rest from you. What agency are you with?”

“Bureau of Land Management.”

That surprised Wager. “I thought you’d be FBI.”

“You’ll meet him, too. That’s where I’m taking you to. But I’m BLM—I’m their enforcement officer for this sector, and I’ll be honest with you, Officer Wager. I haven’t had experience with homicides before—the FBI handles those, regularly.” The muscles in the heavy jaw tightened. “But that’s what we’re talking about here, outright murder. Sons of bitches have killed two good men—both of them real decent human beings.”

“Is this about narcotics? People growing pot on Forest Service land?”

The large head wagged. “Wish it was that simple. Tell you true, I ain’t sure what all it’s about. I ain’t sure Special Agent Douglas D. Durkin knows what it’s about, either.” As if the mention of the FBI agent’s name reminded him of something, Henderson steered with one hand while he fished in his breast pocket for his badge and pinned it on his shirt. “That there’s my disguise: take my badge off,” he said and laughed. “Hell, nobody in Montezuma County knows me, anyway, but Chief Leicht told me this here’s real secret-agent stuff.”

“Sure fooled me,” said Wager. He leaned to glance in the paddle mirror on the rider’s side of the car. The road behind was an empty notch of dwindling asphalt. “Anything at all you can tell me?”

“I can tell you it don’t seem to be dope growers. Nor it don’t seem to be the dog food people rounding up wild burros and horses—there’s no sign of that kind of activity anywheres. And it ain’t oil or gas theft—there’s no wells up there. What it is, is murders. One of our USGS contract geologists, Buck Holtzer, was bushwhacked near the end of January, for no reason on earth that we been able to find out. Somebody just shot him, maybe because he was driving a government car. And the latest murder, just last week, was one of our agents, Larry Kershaw. Shot in the back—a damn good man. Family man, and I tell you I’m still tore up over it. I figure we just flat-out got some crazies that’s got it in for any and all federal agencies. That’s my opinion, anyway. Neither me nor Durkin’s had a damn bit of luck trying to find out who, but by God we got our suspicions. You got reciprocal jurisdiction in La Sal County, right?”

“Yes. But I’ve been told the sheriff hasn’t been too cooperative.”

“You been told right. Was I you, I wouldn’t even let the son of a bitch know I was working out here. Especially you don’t want to do it if he thinks you’re working with me. Not unless you like being treated worse than a skunk with rabies.”

Wager didn’t have much choice about that. “What about his deputies? Any help there?”

“He owns his deputies; there’s not many ways to get a paycheck in La Sal County, and they know it. We tried—God knows we done our best to work with the man. But we don’t bring in any votes for Sheriff Spurlock.”

“He knows who killed your people?”

Another wag of the head. “I don’t know about that. He might. Main thing is, he hasn’t been too eager about helping us, and even now with this latest killing, he’s dragging his goddamn feet. He doesn’t want his constituents to think he likes working with the FBI or BLM, and he owes his job to them, not to us.” The highway made a rare swerve, dipping to a worn and age-yellowed concrete bridge that spanned a sharp gash in the earth. Only a trickle of water darkened the sandy bed down among the tamarisk and willow branches. In a few weeks, when the distant snows began melting and thunderstorms pelted the surrounding red clay, the gully would fill with churning orange floods of mud-thick water. Then, after a couple of hours, the water would be gone and the fragile, bright flowers of the high desert would fade back into dead-looking weeds. Henderson guided the car up a low ridge and into the converging lines of the highway beyond. “Lots of the ranchers around here hate our guts. Say we’re taking their grazing land away from them.”

“It’s not theirs.”

“True. But they been using it for a long time. And now that the government’s trying to increase the grazing fees and regulate use … . Well, they say we’re putting them out of business and out of their homes.”

Wager remembered what Chief Menzor had said. But he didn’t have an answer. The land belonged to the government, not to the ranchers; but most of it was too poor and dry for anything except raising cows. Without the use of a lot more land than they could afford to buy, the ranchers couldn’t make a living from their cattle; and without the cattle-grazing fees, the land wouldn’t make any money for the government. “What about the reservation? I was told there was a murder there recently, too.”

“Yeah, that was early February. An Indian. That’s Special Agent D. D. Durkin’s problem, though, and he’ll likely tell you about that.” The man shook his head. “But Durkin don’t seem too excited about that one. It looks like a routine drunk fight and it don’t fit his theory.”

“What’s his theory?”

“I better let him explain all that. He’s kind of touchy, and he’ll get worse if he thinks I been putting words in his mouth.”

After another half hour, Henderson slowed to turn off the pavement onto a dirt road. Equally straight, it rose and fell across the rippled earth toward the glimmer of a single snowy peak that seemed to be fifty miles distant. Wager, listening to the occasional rock thrown up to thump against the car’s undercarriage, studied the spread of flat earth tufted with knee-high sagebrush, smaller tufts of wiry grass, an occasional big-eared cactus or narrow-leaved yucca plant. Between weedy clumps, the red-brown dirt looked like the cracking bed of a dry lake; contorted fissures opened blackly in the clay, slabs of earth curled up at the edges in waterless agony. Narrow, windblown tongues of sand formed rippled streaks here and there, and worn shoulders of rock rose up where the sand had blown away. Except for the occasional flicker of a startled bird, there appeared to be no life at all on the heat-shimmered flats. But of course there was. It was just the kind of life that relied on sharp eyesight and camouflage for protection, on speed for the hunt—and on greater speed for the escape. It was a manner of survival, Wager thought, that anybody out here might be wise to adopt.

“There he is.” Henderson nodded toward the quivering glint of afternoon sunlight on a distant windshield. It turned out to be a pickup truck painted in the pale green shade of government issue and pulled to the side of a wider stretch of road. “Douglas D. Durkin, special agent. And he’s a pistol.” The deputy’s heavy jaw wagged. “Yessir, he is a pistol.”

The pistol was a silhouette in the truck’s cab until Henderson’s vehicle pulled to a halt in a wind-tossed swirl of dust. Then the agent stepped out to nod at Henderson and to study Wager flatly for a long moment before he made up his mind about whatever he was wondering. Taller than Wager and Henderson, Durkin looked half as heavy and half as old, though he tried to give more weight to his boyish face with a thick brown mustache that curved around the corners of his mouth. He did not smile, but he did hold out a hand. “Detective Wager? Agent Durkin.” There was no warmth in the businesslike handshake. “I appreciate your taking the time to work with us.”