Out of Season (18 page)
Estelle and Maxine left the kitchen and I didn’t waste any time. “Johnny, a couple of things have all of us puzzled.” He drew smoke and exhaled a thin blue jet. “In the past couple of days, have you or Edwin seen anyone around on your ranch property?”
“Strangers, you mean?”
“Anyone.”
“Not since the satellite guy was out here last week. Damn dish doesn’t work about half the time, and the other half, there’s nothing worth watching.” He smiled.
“No one Friday afternoon, when the plane went down?”
“Not that I know of. Of course”—he looked over at the coffeepot—“this is about six thousand acres we’re talkin’ about…so I guess that at one time or another, there could be a whole damn army over the hill and we wouldn’t know it. But no, I didn’t see anybody.”
Hocker turned so that he was sitting sideways in the chair, his left arm hooked over the back. The fingers of his right hand drummed a nervous little tattoo on the tabletop. “Hear any gunshots Friday?”
“Excuse me?” Johnny Boyd said, and Hocker didn’t reply immediately. He was gazing out the kitchen window at what appeared to me to be blank sky. Boyd got up and stepped to the cupboard. With one hand on the cupboard latch, he turned and asked, “Why would I hear gunshots?”
“Johnny,” I said, “we’ve got some information that’s pretty nasty.” He took four mugs out of the cabinet and I waited until he’d lined them up on the counter. He was a patient man. He said nothing as he pulled the decanter out of the machine and filled each mug in turn.
“Take anything?”
I shook my head, and Hocker and Costace did the same.
“Edwin, you want a cup of coffee?” Johnny said loudly, and we heard a muddled, “No, no thanks,” from the living room. Johnny started to fetch a fifth mug, but I stopped him.
“Detective Reyes-Guzman doesn’t drink the stuff,” I said.
“So, then,” Johnny said, returning to his chair and his cigarette, “you were talkin’ about nasty information.”
“The pilot of that airplane was killed by a rifle bullet fired from the ground,” I said.
Dead silence hung in the kitchen for the count of ten. Hocker turned his head and regarded Johnny Boyd impassively, and Neil Costace did the same, coffee mug cupped between two hands.
Finally, Boyd said quietly, “You don’t say.”
I nodded.
“You’re sure?”
I nodded again. “A portion of the bullet was recovered during autopsy.”
Boyd frowned. “You mean somebody shot a rifle and that bullet flew all the way up and hit that airplane? Hit the pilot?”
“So it would seem,” I said.
He set his coffee mug down carefully and snubbed out his cigarette. “And you think it came from somewhere around here, or you wouldn’t be out here right now.” He regarded me, eyes unblinking. “Let me ask you something, Sheriff. When you and the detective were out here earlier today, did you know about this…” He paused and groped for the right words. “…this mystery bullet?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you mention it then?” His tone was even and controlled, just above a whisper, but a little muscle ticked under his left eye.
“The information was still preliminary,” I said, and knew how lame that sounded. The quirky thought drifted through my mind that this was exactly the sort of time for a little dissembling—the sort of thing Martin Holman had been damn good at when need called for it. “We didn’t know what to think,” I said.
Boyd lit another cigarette. “So tell me just how you come to figure the shot was fired from somewhere around here.”
“Not from right here, Johnny. I didn’t say that. But the plane was flying in a pattern—a roughly rectangular pattern—that extended east-west from about your property here over toward the Finnegans’ property.”
“And then it up and crashed,” he said.
“Yes, it did. If the pilot had been shot, let’s say when they were flying over the mesa, or over the landfill, or over something like that, then they wouldn’t have flown all the way over here, circled, and then crashed.”
“Bullet kill him right away, did it?”
“It looks that way. A fluke thing.”
He frowned and took a tentative sip of his coffee. Mine remained untouched in front of me. “No one in this household,” he said finally, “fired a gun at any airplane. Not yesterday, not ever.” He set the mug down with a thump of finality. “You going to drive on over now and ask Dick Finnegan the same damn-fool question?”
“What question did we ask you?” Costace said quietly. “Just if you’d heard anything. We didn’t ask if it was you who fired that shot.”
Boyd flushed crimson and clenched his mouth shut so tight that his lips were two white lines. Hocker gestured toward the living room. I looked that way and realized that the agent could see the large gun cabinet from where he was sitting. “Mind if we take a look at your firearm collection?” he asked. The request was pleasant enough, conversational, but Johnny Boyd had heard enough.
He stood up and as if in slow motion, turned and set his coffee mug down on the counter by the sink. He looked out the window, eyes narrowed and jaw muscles so tight I could see them clench from across the room. His hands gripped the counter, and he turned without releasing his grip, looking at Hocker over his left shoulder.
“I guess what you can do is pack up and get off my property,” he said. “You can get yourselves out of my home, and you can get yourselves off my land.”
I heard quiet voices, and then Estelle appeared in the kitchen doorway. She stopped there, watching Boyd.
“Johnny—” I started to say, but he cut me off.
“There isn’t a thing more we need to say to each other, Sheriff. Just pack up your friends and get on out.”
Hocker sighed and pushed himself to his feet. “Mr. Boyd, you have to realize that in the course of an investigation like this one, we’re forced to dig out answers wherever we can.”
Boyd released his grip on the counter and turned around. “Well, you just go dig somewhere else. Can’t say as I’m surprised. Took you two goddam years, but you managed.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Hocker asked.
“You just get,” Boyd snarled ignoring the question. His face was flushed and his anger had set his jaw to quivering.
“You know as well as I do,” Hocker said, “that if we have a bullet fragment, we’ll be running some ballistic comparisons. That includes your firearms. I can get a warrant if I have to, but we’d prefer—”
“I don’t give a good goddam what you prefer, Bucko,” Johnny said. “The next time you want to come on this land and talk to me, you make sure you have that warrant. And if it isn’t signed by Judge Hobart, then you better
get
it signed by him.”
Hocker shrugged, still glacially calm, and started to cross the kitchen toward Estelle.
Neil Costace took a final sip of his coffee and grimaced. “I’d think that you’d want to do all you could to prove you—”and that was as far as he got. Boyd pushed himself away from the sink and took two steps, bringing himself nose to nose with the FBI agent. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Hocker’s left hand drift down toward the gun under his jacket.
“I don’t have to prove a goddam thing,” Boyd snapped.
“Neil,” I said gently, “let’s let these folks be.” The two men stood as if frozen, Boyd glaring with white spots of anger on his cheeks, Neil Costace unflappable.
“Thanks for the coffee,” Hocker said. “We’ll be in touch.” He slipped past Estelle, and I waited until Costace and Boyd had unlocked eyes and Costace left the kitchen.
“Johnny,” I said, “we’ve got a murder on our hands. You know as well as I do that the investigation is not going away. Now, if you know something, you tell me.” He didn’t reply. “You hear me?” His only response was to pull another cigarette out of his pocket. The hand that held the lighter shook.
I turned to Estelle and motioned toward the front door. Johnny Boyd’s voice stopped me. “I’ll be talking to you later, Sheriff,” he said. “Give me some time to calm down, and then we’ll see.”
I knew that was the best I could hope for.
Walter Hocker agreed that he’d take a tour of the crash site with Vincent Buscema after the two had had a chance to talk in private. That was fine with me. It would keep them busy for a few more hours, and keep them off of Johnny Boyd’s back.
I had a feeling that Boyd’s reaction was as much to the federal authority as to anything else. I didn’t know what he’d meant with the comment about it taking the agents two years to figure something out, and it hadn’t been the time to push the point.
I hadn’t told him about the cause of the crash when I’d had the opportunity, and now he had heard the message loud and clear that the federal agents, at least, included him in the pool of suspects. If he was innocent, and at that point I was sure he was, becoming the target of an investigation would be enough to send his blood pressure off the scale.
I couldn’t imagine Johnny Boyd taking potshots at a passing airplane. Almost certainly he carried a rifle in at least one of his ranch trucks, and I had no doubt that he could drop a coyote in its tracks at a couple hundred yards. But firing at a pesky, circling airplane was another matter altogether.
As we drove away from the ranch, I turned to Estelle, whose only contribution to the conversation as we left the ranch house had been a quiet “Thank you” directed at Maxine Boyd. “So, what did she tell you?” I asked. “And that was nicely done, by the way.”
“She’s worried, sir,” she said. She didn’t look at me, but concentrated on the gravel road, her black eyebrows knitted.
“She has good reason to be, after that exchange,” I said.
“No, not about that. She’s really upset about trouble brewing between her husband and Richard Finnegan.”
“Really? Trouble how?”
Estelle took a deep breath. “Apparently Richard Finnegan has a grazing allotment from the Forest Service for a piece of property on the back side of Cat Mesa. There’s no more grass there than anywhere else, but there is a productive spring on the allotment. Finnegan wants to pipe the water over to one of his major stock tanks. Remember those rolls of black-plastic pipe that we saw by Finnegan’s barn?”
“Sure. But that’s got to be a hell of a distance. And pipe isn’t cheap. So what’s the argument?”
“Simple, as ever, sir. There’s a corner of the Boyd ranch that’s situated right in the way. If Finnegan can’t run the pipe across Boyd’s property, then it means going up an escarpment and out of the way over the east. A lot more distance, and going up the escarpment means that he couldn’t use gravity flow. He’d have to pump.”
I frowned. “And so…what’s the argument? Are you saying that Johnny won’t let Dick Finnegan run a few yards of black plastic across his property?”
“He will,” Estelle said. “But he tried to cut a deal with Finnegan to use some of the water in exchange for letting the pipe go across his land.”
“And Finnegan objected to that? Is he out of his mind?”
“Maybe. The last argument they had, and I guess from what Maxine was saying, it was right in the Boyds’ front yard, was that Dick Finnegan maintained that he can’t afford the extra pipe it would take to go around Boyd’s property, or pay for a pump, and that there isn’t enough water to serve both their needs. He’s being held up, he contends.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I muttered. “What’s the old saying out here—there are more friendships broken over access to water than anything else?”
“Except in a wet year,” Estelle said. “Then it’s over alcohol.”
“And this is what Maxine wanted to talk to you about?”
Estelle nodded. “She’s afraid that the two of them will exchange more than words sometime. She said that her husband has a hot temper and so does Dick Finnegan.”
“No kidding,” I said. “By the way, did she happen to say which stock tank Finnegan wanted to run the pipe to? Was it the one at the block house, by any chance?”
“She didn’t know. And we didn’t have long to talk. I did ask her, though, if she knew anything about someone up in this part of the county impounding wildlife.” Estelle slowed for the Newton cattle guard and at the same time, glanced in the rearview mirror. The dark Suburban still followed us at a discreet distance.
“At first she didn’t want to say anything, but I could tell she knew something about it. I told her that we really needed to know and that before the crash, the sheriff had been talking with Doug Posey…and that maybe that was why the sheriff was flying out over that area. Anyway, she said, ‘Oh, that’s another get-rich-quick scheme. It doesn’t amount to anything.’ But she wouldn’t say whose scheme it was.”
“What did she mean by that, I wonder.”
“I don’t know. I was going to ask, but then I heard the ruckus out in the kitchen.”
We rode in silence for a few minutes, watching the last of Newton’s sorry buildings slide by. We hit the pavement and heard a roar of engine, and then Costace passed us. Hocker lifted a hand in salute.
“You know,” I said, watching the truck dwindle ahead of us, “Johnny Boyd said something to me yesterday, or maybe the day before, to the effect that if the federal agents got the chance, they could invent almost any case out of this scenario. We need to make certain we find the person who fired the shot, but I sure don’t want a bunch of other lives destroyed in the process.”
“Sir, if Johnny Boyd is running his own herd of antelope, then he might have reason to be edgy.”
“I can’t imagine that,” I said. “Of course, I’ve been wrong before.”
“The first thing I think we need to do is to find the block-house windmill,” Estelle said. “It’s on Finnegan’s land. I suggest that we drive out there and get ourselves a tour. Sheriff Holman thought it was important enough that he took a photo from the air. Let’s see if we can find out why.”
An hour later, a flustered Charlotte Finnegan was trying to explain to us how to find the windmill in question. Her husband wasn’t home, and at least one of the large rolls of black pipe had been taken. Mrs. Finnegan knew exactly where the government spring was, though—or so she said. If we followed her rambling directions, we would no doubt end up in Utah.
