Nightzone (3 page)

“Tell you what…these guys need to get through. Go on ahead and follow Estelle. Jackie Taber is just about there by now.” He nodded toward the approaching parade. “These guys will be right behind you.” His huge hand slapped my window sill. “And be careful. We got us another one out there.”
Another one out there.
I could have asked a dozen questions, but as the iceberg grew below my heart, Torrez had already straightened up and was striding back toward the first truck, radio in hand.

“You got it,” I called, but he didn't pause to chitchat or explain. Nothing I could do would help Perry Kenderman. I wasn't a religious sort, but was a believer in balancing the scales here on planet Earth. To that end, my mind was already focused on
out there.

Chapter Three

Cops don't drive away from a homicide scene to check out something as mundane as an out-of-control campfire. I had expected Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman to hit supervision of the Kenderman homicide scene at a dead run. But she hadn't even stepped out of the car. Did
another one out there
mean that some other innocent soul had walked up to the blue Nissan, this time to beg a ride, a drink of water, a spare tire or lug wrench? Like anything else, I supposed, killing grew easier with practice.

I knew every rancher in that part of the country where I'd seen the lights, and counted most of them as friends—even the high-profile Miles Waddell, on whose ranch property I had been hiking lately in my quest to investigate the life of Josiah Bennett, and on whose property the rocks grew that had sheltered the Colt revolver. An hour after finding the gun, I'd showed it proudly to Waddell, and he'd wondered right along with me what kind of story it had to tell. He had left that investigation to me, though. He was deeply involved now in a project to place an observatory on top of his own private mesa. Contractors had just finished his access road, but they weren't working there at night. I could imagine Miles, sometimes a bit confrontational, running afoul of some wacko—although what either one of them would be doing out and about at one in the morning on a winter night on the open, desolate prairie was anyone's guess. Investigators would ask me the same thing. More scenarios.

I tried to relax as the SUV held eighty-five miles an hour on State 17, but that was impossible, knowing that the two young women—Sergeant Jackie Taber and Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman—were driving into the unknown…an unknown perhaps populated by some trigger-happy freak. Of course they could take care of themselves. I'd always thought that Perry Kenderman could, too.

A mile before the County Road 14 turnoff, a pair of headlights blossomed in my rearview mirror, the grill wiggle-waggle lights frantic. In a few seconds, an Expedition proved it could break one hundred as it shot past me, driven by Captain Eddie Mitchell. Mitchell, a veteran of large metro police departments Back East before joining first the village as chief, and then the sheriff's department as captain when the village department dissolved, was cool, tough, and fearless. I felt better, and lifted my foot as up ahead the intersection reflectors popped out of the dark.

County Road 14 had been a nasty, narrow two-track until a year ago when the road was widened, graded, and graveled, pounded by heavy trucks into a boulevard as they headed toward rancher Miles Waddell's project. Traffic produced plumes of cloying dust, and now the night air was thick with it as I bumped off the state highway. Up ahead, Mitchell's lights disappeared, and then I was forced to slow as the southbound county road tackled Bennett's Fort, a ragged mesa I'd named a dozen years ago—and the same geology I'd scanned through binoculars from the distant mesa-top less than an hour earlier.

I'd seen the Nissan's headlights dodging around the curves northbound, but try as I might, I could add no information that would be useful to the sheriff. Two headlights in the dark…that was the whole of it. But Sheriff Bobby Torrez hadn't just told me to go home and crawl into bed—he hadn't told me that he'd deal with my deposition in the morning.

In another five miles, I caught still more glimpses of the rainbow of lights in my rearview mirror, the cavalcade of emergency vehicles gaining on me relentlessly. One more rise, and I saw our target…a smallish grass fire working its way to the north, running right along the county road and edging out into the open prairie. The flames licked straight up, the smoke hesitant to pick a direction. It was the sort of prairie fire you could fight with a garden hose. It didn't need most of the county's emergency services resources.

I slowed, peering this way and that into the night. Surely this show of emergency support didn't leave the scene of an officer down to respond to a grass fire—in a spot where it could burn unmolested for hours without hurting anybody or anything.

“So what the hell?” I said aloud. Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman's black sedan was parked in the dead center of the county road immediately behind Jackie Taber's department unit with Eddie Mitchell's Expedition damn near in the bar ditch beside her. A quarter mile beyond, just across the cattle guard that marked Miles Waddell's property, a pickup truck was parked facing us, headlights bright and four-ways pulsing.

My cell phone buzzed, and it took me a while to manipulate the tiny thing right way up.

“Gastner.”

“Sir, it would be good if you can pull your vehicle off the roadway about a hundred yards behind mine.” Estelle's voice was unperturbed. “And if I get busy, don't walk any farther south than my unit. We have a live power line down.”

“Copy that.” I didn't pester her with more questions. In fact, I was surprised that, upon noticing my vehicle driving up, she'd even taken the time for that brief message.

We had enjoyed no weather capable of dropping power lines, and the only one I knew about in this section of prairie was the main line east-west—wooden double poles with double crossbucks, three double heavy lines plus the ground. Double poles don't just fall over. They always reminded me of towering mechanical giants, striding confidently across the prairie, arms lugging their electrical burden. They didn't just fall over. And even if they did, cops don't leave a homicide scene to attend to the resulting power outage.

I parked where I was told, then got out and stood beside my vehicle, heavy flashlight in hand. Something popped a shower of bright white very near the roadway. In a moment, the pickup truck's headlights and four-ways switched off, and things became a bit clearer without those lights staring us in the face.

Off to my left from the east, the parade of power poles marched across the prairie. And sure enough, the symmetry of their order was broken where the lines sagged in graceful waves toward the ground. Incredibly, three sets were down, three giants toppled, including the set just off the county road.

Not possible,
I thought. Over a lot of years, I'd seen errant trucks sheer single utility poles. Even careening cars sometimes accomplished that. Storms knocked them down now and then, but rarely if ever in our part of the world. Three double units in a row? The moon, working on a bright half, wasn't much help in making sense of this scene.

I'd been given permission to advance as far as Estelle's vehicle, so I gingerly picked my way to the shoulder of the road. When the cavalcade inbound reached my location, I stepped well back. One of the big Posadas Electric Cooperative Kodiak line trucks, toting its bucket lift, broke off from the pack and trundled across the prairie eastward, bucking and lurching, breaking a trail that skirted the damage by a wide margin, finally circling in to the first standing pole set where the power lines started their graceful curve toward the earth.

A state police unit and two more electric company trucks filed past, then made room for the pumper from the Posadas Fire Department. Behind them, a Bureau of Land Management yellow back-country truck idled in. We had a damn traffic jam.

Little radio traffic broke the stillness now that most of the crews had embraced the privacy of the cell phone. And sure enough, mine beeped.

“Gastner.”

“Sir,” the undersheriff said, “the power has been shut off back at the relay station in Posadas, so we're clear.”

“Affirmative.” Why she thought my needing to know that was a priority, I couldn't guess.

“We're going to use my vehicle as the command post, so if you want to make your way up there, we'll get this circus underway.” I heard the tension in her voice, and knew her patience was thin. All the traffic obliterated prairie marks, pulverizing everything into the fine dust that now rose into the night. She'd done a good job of traffic directing, though. No one parked near the power lines.

“I'm on my way.”
My way
was a sedate walk, since night, flashlights, and trifocals make a rotten combination. Ahead, silhouetted against the lights and inky sky, a plume of water fanned out from the pumper, and I could hear the hiss against the flames. It would have done the prairie good to burn off a few million acres, but that wasn't going to happen.

Miles Waddell, the rancher whose pickup had been blasting its lights into our faces, and who owned all the land to the south, advanced from his vehicle but stopped well short of the cattle guard where one of the twin legged poles had toppled, sprawling across the county road, one of its legs reared high in the air where it had teeter-tottered across a big juniper corner post that anchored the section fence.

The wires were a jumbled mess, and the heavy transformer complex that the pole had also carried had broken from its supports and lay askew. That's where the fire had started, the power lines arcing into the grass. And odds were I'd seen the initial lightning bolts of the short circuit from my perch on Cat Mesa, twenty miles away.

I reached Estelle's vehicle and stopped. She had parked directly across the road, and Jackie Taber was unreeling the yellow tape to keep the hordes at bay. With the power now shut down, the electric company crews still kept their distance, waiting for the word from the Sheriff to move in.

My first view through the binoculars told me that nobody was going anywhere for a while. This wasn't about the little fire, or the downed poles. A body lay in the dust of the electric company's two track along the power line, just a few feet from the last broken stump. The victim was lying on his back, arms thrown wide. In the vague, flickering light, the body had that same flat, deflated look shared by Deputy Perry Kenderman. And just beyond his feet, the stump of the electric pole had been cut off three feet above the ground, leaving sharp splinters on one side where the electric tree had taken leave of its stump. Above the dead man, the butt of the pole hung suspended, teeter-tottering over the fulcrum offered by the fence line's juniper corner post.

Even a simple crime scene gives up its details a few at a time. Some investigators would claim that, just as there is no such thing as a “routine” traffic stop, there is no such thing as a “routine” homicide crime scene. This night, the questions tumbled in one atop the next, with no coherent pattern or order.

The most obvious explanation to me, from my vantage point a hundred yards away where I leaned against the front fender of the undersheriff's Charger, was that somehow this unfortunate soul had stumbled upon the driver of the Nissan pickup, perhaps as the killer was putting the chain saw to the final pole. And like the unsuspecting Perry Kenderman, a single slug had dropped the passerby in his tracks. Nissan man had left the victim to stare at the stars. I was uncomfortable with that scenario, easy as it was. Nothing directly connected this site, this death, with the Nissan. I hadn't seen it parked in this lonely place.

But maybe…and where was the victim's vehicle? Had he been a Mexican afoot? Our harsh desert ate a few of them every season. Or had the little Nissan pickup belonged to him, only to be stolen after his murder? If that was the case, what odd circumstance had set the killer afoot in the desert in the middle of the night, so eager to kill and steal a truck? Again, someone from across the border? I grunted in disgust and dug a toe of my right boot into the dust. That scenario just didn't work, for myriad reasons. I watched the dark figures moving about in the harsh lights, and took a deep breath of impatience.

Another state patrolman arrived, a grim-faced kid who looked so much like my eighteen-year-old grandson that he earned a double take from me. Doug Posey, the local Game and Fish officer, joined the party. More Posadas Electric Cooperative hardware, a couple more of the sheriff's department's dwindling staff. Then, coming up from the south, three Border Patrol SUVs raised their own dust cloud.

We had so many flashing red and blue lights that it was impossible to find the Big Dipper.

Slipping in quietly, Dr. Alan Perrone—finished with his preliminary examination of the unfortunate Perry Kenderman—parked immediately behind Estelle's car and paused as he reached me. This time, I earned a long, careful scrutiny.

“Hell of a night.” He shifted his heavy medical bag to his other hand.

“Looking endless,” I said.

“Are you holding up all right? The sheriff tells me you watched all this from up on the mesa?” He turned his back on the light display and gazed off to the north, where Cat Mesa lay rugged and invisible. He shook his head in wonder.

“I caught just a couple of flashes,” I replied. “My guess is that's when the transformer went down. But it all beats the hell out of me. And then I saw a single vehicle driving north up to the state highway. That's not much to go on.”

He stood quietly, surveying the convocation ahead, an uncharacteristic moment of repose for the peripatetic physician. “So let's see…” He thumbed his phone. A hundred yards away, it appeared that the undersheriff had her personnel organized to allow some working room. The now-covered body lay in isolation, the black plastic tarp bathed in harsh light from a portable generator.

“Let me know,” Perrone said into his phone, and listened patiently, nodding now and then as if the speaker on the other end of the phone could see him. “I can bring him in with me.” The physician nodded again, glancing at me. “You bet.” He snapped the phone closed. “You know, we can probably do something about that insomnia of yours.”

“Maybe tonight it paid off,” I said.

He chuckle didn't carry much mirth. “Are you up for a hike?”

“Hell, why not,” I replied. The sheriff had sent me out here, and I had taken that as just a simple courtesy extended to a former colleague and friend—and since I'd been the only one to witness the beginning of this episode, he'd want to keep me on a short leash until I'd handed in a thorough written deposition. But the last thing I needed right now was to gawk at a corpse.