Bitter Recoil (9 page)

Chapter 16

I slept soundly until about four that afternoon. A car door slammed and I opened one eye and looked at my watch. Other than that I didn’t move.

What the hell. Nothing was going to happen up on Quebrada Mesa. That sorry patch of ground was sealed tight. Sheriff Tate’s staff had notified the victims’ next of kin. The medical examiner in the city would release the bodies to the families when every last
t
was crossed and
i
dotted. And Estelle didn’t need to worry about Nolan Parris…he wasn’t going anywhere.

I stretched and found a new ache. In the distance I heard a telephone ring and then quiet voices. I rolled onto my back and covered my eyes with one arm. Maybe we’d have a quiet dinner and go to bed early. We’d see Parris in the morning.

By then the Social Services office would be open and Estelle could turn Daisy’s case over to them if Parris balked about custody. That sounded pretty good. I enjoyed the illusion for another two minutes.

At six minutes after four a knuckle rapped on my bedroom door.

“Yo!” I called. I put my hand behind my neck and raised my head a little. The door opened and Estelle looked in. I was surprised to see she was in uniform. “What’s up?”

“There’s been a hunting accident over on the west side of the pueblo. The pueblo police asked us to assist. You want to come?”

“Sure,” I answered with more enthusiasm than I felt. I swung my feet off the bed and pulled on my boots, shoved the clip of the slip-on holster over my belt, and wondered for a minute where the hell I’d put my hat. I got up and walked out into the living room.

“Here,” Estelle said, holding the Stetson out to me.

“This means no dinner again, doesn’t it?”

“We’ll catch something,” she said cheerfully. “Anyway, we won’t be long. It’s not our case. We’re just assisting Buddy Vallo.”

I got into the car and noticed that Francis Guzman’s Isuzu was gone.

“Is Francis already out there?”

Estelle nodded.

“Who was it? Do you know?”

“No. Paul Garcia called dispatch and asked for me. That’s all I know.”

“You get tangled up in reservation jurisdiction, and you’ll be there forever,” I muttered.

“Well, they have only two officers,” Estelle said. “Buddy is chief…he’s Mary Vallo’s husband…Francis’s nurse? And Buddy has one assistant who works nights. Sometimes that’s not enough.”

I didn’t bother to remind her that there was only one of her for the entire northwest end of the county.

We skirted what looked like the main residential area of Isidro Pueblo. There wasn’t an extra square inch of packed dust to spare. Low, brown adobes that had been settling into the hard earth for centuries lined the single-track roadway.

Estelle slowed down. There were lots of children and they watched us go by with eyes wide. We headed for the river.

The crossing was one of those upside-down bridges where the engineers make a concrete dip through the riverbed. When the river is rolling, nobody crosses. It’s that simple. I could have jumped across the trickle of water that day.

The road turned south, following the river for a quarter of a mile before turning west again around a series of rolling hills that formed the base of Chuparrosa Mesa.

I relaxed as we poked along at forty miles an hour on a road designed for ten. The road forked again, one path going up through the hills. Estelle took the other, keeping to the flatland. We angled away from the river toward the vast, open country that stretched virtually unblemished to the Arizona border. The patrol car crested an abrupt rise and bounced down hard enough to scrape the undercarriage.

The road ran along the rim of a deep arroyo, and up ahead I saw Guzman’s Isuzu, Paul Garcia’s Suburban, and a white Chevy Blazer with government plates. Well off the road, its wheels less than a yard from the arroyo edge, was another vehicle, an old and battered International Scout.

We slid to a stop. So deep was this erosion cut that I couldn’t see the bottom until I stepped out of the car. Fifty yards up the arroyo I saw the officers. Estelle’s hand-held radio crackled.

“Estelle, there’s a spot behind you guys where you can get down into the arroyo. If you walk up the far side, you won’t disturb anything.”

Estelle waved a hand. We found where both Paul, Francis, and the Indian cop had slid down through the loose sand, and we followed their tracks up the arroyo bed.

The body was lying facedown, close to the arroyo side, with fresh sand from the edge both under and on top of the corpse. He was an Indian, maybe eighteen or twenty, broad-shouldered, and husky bordering on fat.

Estelle stood on the opposite side of the arroyo and looked first at the body, then at the area. I know she would have preferred that everyone had stayed well away until she had arrived, but the damage had been done. The Indian policeman watched us but made no move to walk over to meet us.

“Hello, Buddy,” Estelle called, and he nodded a greeting. He was of indeterminate age, moon-faced, and short. My first impression was one of great patience. I guess he’d have to be patient, working law enforcement in an area the size of an average cattle ranch. I’d have been bored to pudding in a month. He stood with his hands in his pockets, leaning against the arroyo bank, watching the doctor.

Francis Guzman knelt just beyond the corpse’s feet, waiting for Estelle’s undivided attention.

“What killed him?” I asked, walking across the arroyo.

“A single gunshot wound under the chin,” Guzman said. When he saw Estelle step closer, he stood up and gently pulled the corpse’s shoulder, rolling the body just enough so that we could see the weapon underneath. It was one of those stubby little .22 auto-loaders.

“See the hand?” Francis asked. The man’s index finger was still in the trigger guard and was twisted awkwardly.

When the victim had fallen, he’d clenched onto that rifle out of reflex. He’d have been better off to drop it. Sometime during the fall, probably when he’d crashed to the arroyo bottom, he’d jerked the trigger.

The small bullet had torn into his throat on the right side of the Adam’s apple. He’d bled profusely from the mouth, and Guzman added, “It angled up…almost straight up. Through the roof of his mouth and into the brain.”

“It looks like he fell when the edge of the arroyo caved in,” Estelle said.

“That’s what I guessed,” Buddy said. I squinted at his name tag and read Rupert Vallo.

“Who called it in?”

“I found him myself,” Paul Garcia said. He was on quite a roll.

Estelle looked sharply at him. “What were you doing over here?”

When she said that, the corner of Buddy Vallo’s mouth twitched just a little. Indian pueblos were sovereign, each with its own police department. We were careful not to trespass on their turf unless asked. Their lead agency for the serious stuff was the Federal Bureau of Investigation—and who the hell wanted to mess with
their
paperwork.

Garcia said, “I left the station and was going to patrol south, since Deputy Martinez was up on the mesa. One of the things on my list was to talk with Chief Vallo here and find out what I could about Robert Waquie. Maybe find out who he hung around with. Maybe get a lead on who was with him Friday night in the truck.”

He took a breath and continued as if he were reading from a report.

“Then I heard on the scanner that the Forest Service had a little brush fire off to the west somewhere. They were reporting smoke but hadn’t found the source yet. And you know how they’ve been talkin’ that one little smoker could spread and take out the whole mountain. So I thought, what the hell. I was already headed this way.

“I got to the pueblo and saw that this dirt road crossed the river. So I decided to follow it and see if it went far enough to reach the National Forest over on the mesa. Maybe I could see the smoke better from over here. Three point two miles later, I see this Scout parked by the road. Just out of habit, I checked the plate. I saw that the tag was expired so I called it in. Then I got out to look around.” He shrugged.

“That’s when I saw the fresh crumbled sand along the arroyo lip. I got to lookin’, went downstream a ways, and then I saw him.”

“How’d the plate come back?”

“The Scout’s registered to a Cecil Lucero. From here.”

“That’s Cecil,” Buddy Vallo said. “I know him real good.” A long pause followed. “I warned him about the license plate last week. Him and Robert Waquie, I spend more time chasin’ their tails than anybody else in the pueblo.”

Estelle glanced at Vallo. I saw a flicker of what might have been annoyance. She knelt down as Francis handed her the man’s wallet. The corpse’s driver’s license said that Cecil Lucero had turned twenty-one three days before.

“Are there any other injuries?” I asked Francis.

“A broken index finger on his right hand.”

“Caught in the trigger guard when he fell?” Estelle asked. Francis nodded. “Probably.”

“How long’s he been here?”

“I’m no expert on postmortem lividity,” Francis said, “but if I had to guess, I’d say no more than a couple hours…five or six at the outside.”

Estelle straightened up and craned her neck to see the top of the arroyo. The sides were steep and twelve feet high…enough that we couldn’t see the truck unless we stepped to nearly the center of the arroyo.

More to herself than any of us, she said, “So he maybe saw a rabbit or something, stopped, got out, and got excited. Stepped too close. The arroyo is a little undercut here. It caved in and he fell. Pop.”

“That’s what I thought,” Paul Garcia said.

“I don’t see any other obvious tracks,” I said. The bottom of the arroyo was a mass of hoofprints where rambling cattle had mixed the gravelly sand.

“Did you see any tracks when you climbed down here?” Estelle asked Buddy Vallo.

“No.”

She looked at Paul Garcia. “And he was dead when you found him?”

“Yes. He sure was.”

Estelle methodically pressed on. “Was the Scout idling when you came by or switched off?”

“Off. The keys were in the ignition.”

“And the driver’s door was closed?”

“Yes.”

“And the window?”

“Closed.”

“Was the door locked?”

“I didn’t check.”

Estelle frowned. I said to Estelle, “You’re wondering about the window, aren’t you?”

“That’s what I was wondering.”

“People do drive with their windows closed, Estelle.”

“When it’s ninety out and they’re hunting?”

I exhaled wearily. “Estelle, maybe he was planning to do some hiking. He got out and buttoned the thing up.”

“Then he locked his keys in the car.”

“That’s happened before.”

We heard another vehicle and Francis Guzman said, “That’s probably the ambulance. One unit was tied up with a transfer, and they had to get the second one out of the garage.”

Estelle turned to her briefcase and began to unpack the camera equipment. She was still frowning and thinking hard, and I knew it was best just to let her stew until she was ready to put the pieces together.

But this time if she was trying to tie Lucero’s accident to the murders up on Quebrada Mesa, she was daydreaming. She had the murder jitters. Vallo had mentioned Lucero and Waquie in the same breath, but what the hell did that mean? The pueblo was tiny. The odds were nearly a hundred percent that two victims from the same village would know each other.

What had happened here was obvious to me. Accidents where the hunter shot himself almost always involved a fence, a fall, or a dropped weapon…one or more of the three. This one fit the pattern.

I looked around for some shade. Even in the late afternoon, the arroyo was an oven. It was going to stay that way until sunset, too, since the arroyo’s general orientation was east-west. And when Estelle began her unpacking, I knew I had time to spare.

My bladder began to send signals. The only tree in sight was a sorry little scrub juniper that was about to fall out of the arroyo bank fifty yards upstream. At that point, the arroyo veered to the right.

“I’m going around the corner,” I said and thrust my hands in my pockets as I walked slowly through the soft sand. It was almost as much work as trudging up a mountainside.

I reached the juniper and stopped. What looked like a single boot print was pressed into the sand. It was hard to be sure, since the sand was so coarse and dry that it refused to hold any positive definition. I stood and looked at the mark, then up at the slope where the juniper was hanging on.

If someone wanted to climb up out of the arroyo, this was a good spot. The bank was sloped, and cattle had beaten an obvious trail down from the top.

With the lack of rain the boot print—if indeed it was one—could have been made any time in the past month. I decided to walk around the next “S” in the arroyo for some privacy. I took about twenty steps.

“Well, son of a bitch,” I said aloud and stopped in my tracks. My right hand drifted around behind my back to where the stubby .357 nestled. I didn’t move for a good three minutes, looking and listening.

With my hand still on the magnum, I stepped forward to take a closer look at the corpse. No hunting accident had dropped this one.

Chapter 17

The corpse lay on his face, arms and legs outstretched like he’d been bashed to the ground by a giant club.

A bloodstain the size of a dinner plate soaked his denim work shirt. The shirt was old and faded, with plenty of rips here and there, the kind barbed wire would tear when a man’s a little careless ducking through fences.

I stepped closer. The seven small holes in the center of his back weren’t from barbs…and they were grouped tightly enough that I could have covered them with my hand.

Without moving my feet I twisted around looking for spent shell casings. There were none. I walked backward the way I had come, trying not to disturb the arroyo bottom. A half dozen times I thought I had found a shell casing, but it was only the sun winking from the quartz-loaded stream gravel.

At the juniper I turned around. Downsteam, the ambulance crew was just making preparations to load Cecil Lucero’s body on the gurney. I whistled sharply. Estelle Reyes-Guzman must have read the urgency on my face, because she got off her knees where she’d been photographing the .22 rifle and walked up the arroyo to meet me.

“I don’t think this is a simple hunting accident,” I said.

“Why? What did you find?”

“There’s another corpse, just around the corner. And he didn’t fall on his own gun.”

“Shot?”

“Yes.”

“For sure murder?”

“No doubt. Seven times in the back. That’s tough to do by accident.”

“Son of a bitch,” Estelle breathed. It was the first time I’d ever heard her curse. She touched my elbow. “Lead me up there. I’ll walk in your tracks.”

***

“That’s Kenneth Lucero,” Buddy Vallo said.

“Cecil’s brother?” Estelle asked.

Vallo nodded. “Younger brother.” Buddy pointed, holding his arm out straight like he was pointing a rifle. “You can see their truck from here.”

I stepped over to where he was standing, just where the arroyo turned south. Sure enough, for several feet the banks didn’t block the view.

“Maybe seventy yards,” I said. “Any kid with a scoped rifle could do that or better.” I looked at Estelle. “Hell, even I could shoot like that.”

Francis Guzman pulled up Kenneth Lucero’s shirt. The bullet holes were small and dimpled inward. “Right through the spine, at heart level,” Francis said, pointing at two of the small holes.

“That explains why he dropped in a heap,” I said. “Just like tagging a rabbit in midhop.” I knelt down. “Twenty-two caliber, you think?”

Guzman nodded. “Not much bleeding. No through-and-through. That’s what I would guess.”

“And the rifle downstream is a semiautomatic,” I said.

“There’s still one bullet in the clip of the rifle and one in the chamber,” Estelle said. “The clip’s capacity is ten.” She turned to Buddy Vallo. “It could have happened that way. Cecil could have shot his brother and then fell and shot himself by accident. That would account for all the rounds.”

“If the gun was fully loaded in the first place,” I reminded her.

She squinted against the sun and harsh sand. “We need to find those shell casings.”

I asked Vallo, “Was there any animosity between the two brothers? Anything that might have led to this?”

He pushed out his lower lip and frowned. “Maybe. Brothers fight sometimes.” I was about to add that a fight between siblings usually didn’t result in murder, but Vallo added, “And they were both chasin’ the same girl.”

He half grinned at the irony of it. “I don’t think she was interested in either one of ’em. She was a white girl.” He said it as if that explained everything. He hadn’t spent much time in society outside Isidro Pueblo, where you never could be sure who—or even what—was going to experiment with matrimony.

Estelle asked, “Who’s the girl?”

“Lucy Grider. She lives on that ranch on the way to Encinas.”

“Where the hell is that?” I asked. The girl’s name hadn’t registered.

“About six miles. Where the state road forks, south of the pueblo? You go east. It’s a little village up that valley. She’s the sister to one of the boys you pulled off the mesa yesterday.”

I turned and looked with surprise at Estelle. She’d sat down abruptly on a hummock of sand. She took off her Stetson and dropped it crown down beside her. “Kelly Grider’s sister,” she said. “I don’t believe this.” She looked up at me. “Waquie and Grider were killed together. Now these two. They both chased Grider’s sister.”

“They hung out together off and on,” Vallo said.

“The four of them?”

“I’ve seen them together.”

“I would have liked to have known that,” Estelle said, more to herself than anyone else. But she knew as well as I that the information would have come out in due time. None of us had been at leisure the past thirty-six hours to survey the county, picking up leads. “Have you seen anyone else with them?” Estelle asked, and Vallo shook his head. Old man Waquie had said five in the truck…maybe he’d miscounted. Or maybe the fifth one had been Cecilia Burgess.

Estelle took a deep breath. “All right. We’ve got the daylight. I want this arroyo swept clean. I want those shell casings. And anything else. Paul, go back the way we came, start at the truck, and, really carefully, work along the top edge of the arroyo to this spot and even beyond. Then do the same on the other side, just in case. Buddy and I will work the body and this area.”

She turned to me. “Sir, would you dust Lucero’s truck? The print kit is in the trunk of the car.”

“You bet. Are you going to call Pat Tate?”

“After a bit. We’re on the reservation, and it’s Buddy’s case. It’s up to him.” She raised an eyebrow at Vallo.

“Let’s see what we find,” he said. “Maybe this is as far as it goes.”

Stranger things had happened, of course. But I think the same scenario was going through my mind as Estelle’s. That little International Scout was small enough that a man could hide it pretty easily…especially on a mesa as thickly timbered as Quebrada Mesa. And if there’d been friction between the Luceros and Grider over the latter’s sister, who the hell knew.

If Cecil Lucero was cold-blooded enough to use his own brother for target practice, he’d have had no trouble arranging a trip for two friends over a cliff—and then snapping a neck afterward.