Blood Land (14 page)

“She didn’t show up today,” Miles Stanton told them.

“She didn’t call?” the sheriff asked.

“No, but that’s not surprising. Her two kids are always coming down with something. She takes her work home,” Stanton said.

“Cold feet?” Hanson said as they drove to the Blackstone subdivision east of town.

“Can’t say,” Pruett said. “She wasn’t thrilled about the news I gave her. Maybe Stanton’s right and her kids have the flu.”

Pruett knocked on the door of Shelly Delgado’s home, a large log house she inherited from her ex-husband in the divorce settlement. No answer. Pruett walked around and looked in the cathedral-height front glass, but could see no movement in the house.

“I’ll drop you at the courthouse,” Pruett said. “Figure I might just drop by Joe Delgado’s place out on the golf course.”

Shelly’s ex was home and invited Pruett in.

“Morning, Sheriff,” he said, offering some fresh coffee, which Pruett accepted.

“Wondering if you know where Shelly is today,” Pruett said.

“Don’t keep tabs on her, Sheriff. Something I should know about?”

“No. Just needed to talk to her. She didn’t show up at work so we figured she was home with the kids.”

“Kids are in school,” Delgado said, sipping at the black coffee. “They’re with me all week.”

“Hmm,” Pruett said. “Thanks for your time, Joe.”

Back at Shelly Delgado’s house, Sheriff Pruett walked around to the back yard and stepped through the two-rail fence. The rear door to the garage was unlocked, so he opened it and slipped in. Shelly’s Nissan was parked in there. Pruett walked past the car and checked the engine. Cold. He turned the knob to the house door; it too was unlocked. So he entered.

The house was like a palatial cabin. The kitchen was all granite, with tall pine cabinets offset by stainless steel appliances. Pruett walked through the kitchen and into the high ceiling living room. There was a cup of cold coffee on a table. Also on the table were what looked like Shelly’s hand-carry brief, a blank legal tablet, and two pens. A laptop power cable lay next to the tablet, unplugged.

“Shelly,” Pruett called out. The fact that he’d not thought until now to call for her caused a chill to creep up his spine. He removed the Smith and Wesson pistol from its holster. “Hello. Anyone?”

Pruett moved cautiously toward the back of the house. As he turned a corner, he saw one of Shelly Delgado’s bare legs protruding from the back bedroom, lying still on the hardwood floor. The Sheriff quickly made sure the rooms were clear and approached the office.

Blood spatter fanned up the log wall on one side. There was a large amount of thick, dark blood pooled around her head. He reached for Shelly’s neck. No pulse. The body was already cold, a hole in her head on one side. Pruett guessed she’d been killed the night before.

The sheriff rubbed his eyes and holstered his weapon. His peaceful Wyoming town was starting to feel like a war zone.

“Gonna put the world

away for a minute

Pretend I don't live in it

Sunshine gonna

wash my blues away.”

Zac Brown,

Knee Deep

PRUETT HAD once wondered to himself, years ago:
where does it come from, this duty good cops feel bound to—this sacred responsibility to speak for the dead?

He knew it was erroneous to say it was inherent in the job; that all law enforcement personnel felt this way. Some cops—patrol officers, detectives, deputies, agents, marshals—they worked the job just as any other professional: they clocked in, did their jobs, and they clocked out.

Survived the day. Made it home. Performed their duty as stated in the job description—no more, no less.

So the feeling did not simply
come with the territory.
Such noble ideals did not germinate in every man or woman who signed up for the job. For the really good cops, it seemed to Pruett, it was not a matter of applying for a position—the job, well, it found
them
. As if the duty was a part of their DNA waiting to be discovered.

No cop—good, bad, or otherwise—began their career thinking:
I will stand up for the deceased
.

The dead man.

Those murdered girls.

A bullet-riddled gang-banger.

A battered wife finally slain.

At some point in the job, however, the sense of duty changed. For many, that moment drove them to retire—to find a different career. For Pruett—and for so many other cops—it was the day they realized the dead had no one left to speak for them. They were victims who no longer had a voice and someone had to stand up on their behalf.

For Pruett, the case that changed him forever was a multiple homicide in the second year of his first term as Sublette County Sheriff.

A panel truck full of dead Mexicans, left in the middle of Wyoming to rot.

Men. Women. Teens.

And younger.

Pruett had listened to the tales of his ancestors—stories that described cruel, sometimes unbelievable acts that occurred in the “winning of the West”.

The prairie, it bled.

But it seemed to Pruett that the bloodletting at the core of those old stories—struggles between the white man and the Indian, the outlaw against the honorable, the harsh elements against anything that crawled or thirsted—scurrilous as bloodletting always is, still represented a kind of progress toward the future. Not always fair; not always judicious. Unavoidable human suffering in the building of a country; sacrifice—both just and unjust—in the construct of a nation.

But the carnage Pruett and his deputy were to discover in the sealed rear cargo bay of the rusted white truck—the wanton disregard for life—did not serve to build anything. Such atrocity had the capacity to destroy the faith of good inside every man and woman.

“I can smell it already,” said Deputy Fred Morgan as Pruett drove the old county Suburban over the tangled sagebrush. Morgan worked under Sheriff Pruett the first year and a half, taking the call from a rancher who’d been headed to town for a week’s supply of groceries and reported the old panel truck, parked several hundred feet off the dirt road. The rusted white Dodge was halfway into a small draw, cantering slightly westward, toward the now setting sun. The rancher had called, in part, because of the stench.

“Put on your kerchief,” Pruett said.

He and Deputy Morgan had soaked two bandanas in gasoline earlier, anticipating the supplication of flesh to the sweltering, airless heat—bodies having waited for them there in the brushy arroyo for days or weeks.

At fifty feet, the horseflies sounded like an army of motorbikes. Enough blood had run from under the closed rear door that the loamy ground surrounding the vehicle was stained the color of molasses.

“Cut it,” Pruett said to Morgan, who carried bolt-cutters.

Morgan clipped the padlock that withheld the horror on the other side of the door. Both men left their pistols holstered. Whatever evil had been in this place had locked the door from the outside. Pruett reached down and pulled the sliding door up.

The rush of decay was too much for the gasoline rags and the two cops were forced to backpedal ten or fifteen feet. Morgan fell to his knees, coughing, and emptied his stomach on the dusty earth.

Pruett gathered himself and walked forward. The carnage was unspeakable. Bodies lay in a twisted heap of decomposition. The sheriff could see immediately it was mass murder. The men’s heads each exhibited a single gunshot wound to the head, as did all the male teenagers. Younger children, teen girls, and women had been strung together in twos or in threes, twine tied about their throats to cut off the airways and to keep them from struggling as their killers assaulted them.

It took thirty-eight hours for the medical examiner, six members of the Sheriff’s department, five officers from the Wyoming State Patrol, four EMTs, and several volunteers from town, to move and bag the bodies. The crime scene was preserved as best they knew how.

But it wasn’t the egregiousness of the murders that changed young Sheriff Pruett. It was the facts of the case that settled him at his core.

Bud Havenstead was well known and well liked. He and his family had run cattle south of Wind River, in Rock Valley, since there were but ten post office boxes for all the mail in town.

But ranching in the twenty-first century had become a crapshoot. Bud had lost his tits more times over in years than he cared to count. And the drying up of the money was hurting his boys, too. They’d been pulled from the rodeo circuit two years running, and for thick, surly, hardened young men, rodeo was the only thing that burned off the angst.

Turned out Buck, the oldest boy, had worked out a deal with a couple of coyotes from Mexico—met them when they delivered several bulls to an outfit in Nagel, Arizona near the end of two-thousand and one. For a hundred dollars a head, plus expenses, Buck would drive a panel truck full of illegals up through Wyoming and Montana, and drop them off near the border of Canada.

Buck Havenstead made ten runs a year, right up to the final trip—the one just after the coyote boss in Arizona discovered Buck was running his mouth in a Nagel bar about the business.

Sheriff Pruett found Bud Havenstead’s oldest son at the bottom of the heap of bodies. They never did find his head.

Until that day James Pruett had believed in his heart that there were havens where the things that walked in his nightmares never visited. Like small towns in the middle of the rugged Rocky Mountains. But that day a Sheriff learned that lawlessness and evil are a human inherency; that you can travel to any of the four corners of the land, move to a quaint, peaceful Wyoming town, hide even, within the four borders of your home.

But evil will come.

Pruett learned that day, it always does.

He also learned that day that if his office did not champion the dead—if
he
did not—no one would.

  “There’s something I think you should hear,” Hanson said to the sheriff. He’d just come from his client’s cell.

“From the prisoner,” Pruett said.

Hanson nodded.

“Kinda goes against the whole protected conversation thing, don’t it?”

“My client has pled guilty and is asking for the death penalty to be applied to himself,” Hanson said. “Under the circumstances I think I can chance a breach of ethics. This is important.”

Pruett followed the lawyer back to the jail.

“Tell him what you told me,” Hanson said to Ty.

Ty rubbed the back of his skull. “Dryin’ out has give me back some of the memories from that night.”

“Memories,” Pruett said.

“Yep. I remember why it was I went out to the ranch. I was lookin’ for Pa.”

Pruett turned to Hanson. “Not exactly worthy of the evening news.”

“I went out there,” Ty interrupted, “because that son-of-a-bitch tried to kill me.”

“Rory tried to kill you?” Pruett said.

“As sure as the day is long he tried to put a bullet in my skull.”

“It’s more than a little hard to believe you are just remembering all this right now,” Pruett said.

“I tied a helluva rope on that night. After my Pa tried to put me in the grave, that is. At first, I wasn’t goin’ to do nothin’. But the drunker I got the madder I got.”

“Any reason you can think of your pa might be driven to murder you? That’s a steep accusation, Ty.”

“He must’ve found out I knew about the swindle.”

“What swindle?”

“The one got cooked up with that fuckin’ lawyer. Jorgensen. She’s been takin’ the old man’s money for years to screw me over.”

Pruett dragged a chair across the cold concrete. “Tell me the whole thing. The attempted murder first,” he said to his prisoner.

“Whatever I can remember,” Ty said.

“That’ll have to do.”

Ty gave the sheriff a pretty tall tale. Said he was getting drunk in his own ranch house when he thought he heard a vehicle driving up the road. He went outside but no one was there. No headlights either. So the old cowpoke went back to drinking.

A few minutes later Ty heard a floorboard creak and turned just in time to see the muzzle of a Colt 32-20 Army revolver pointed at the back of his head. He was pretty drunk by then but he managed to put a forearm into the side of the barrel and knock the cannon a few inches sideways before it went off. The concussion knocked Ty sideways and he fell out of his chair. He scrambled to his feet the best he could, but when his vision cleared, there was no one there—just the acrid smell of cordite, hanging there in the air like a shirt on the clothesline. He stumbled out to the front but it was moonless and he couldn’t see anyone. He did, however, hear an engine start up in the distance and a pair of headlights swing wide and away, the vehicle roaring back the way it had come.