Leaning Land (2 page)

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.”

“A pleasure,” said Wager just as insincerely. He had an image of two strange cats studying each other over a safe distance, tails twitching with tension and suspicion.

“I understand that officially you’re supposed to be working on this by yourself, Detective Wager. Through the—what do you call it, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation?”

Wager nodded. “CBI, that’s right.”

“CBI. Right.” A wag of his head said what he thought of amateurs who relied on important-sounding initials to substitute for the extensive training that real professionals received. “Well, I also understand that your independent status is supposed to make you more palatable to the local yokels. That it’s supposed to make them open up to you. Frankly, I think you’re going to be wasting your time, but this little plan wasn’t my idea and nobody asked me.” Another wag of his head for the inexplicable stupidity of superiors. “From this point in time, we’ll use the telephone to exchange information. Any other personal meetings you and I have will be damn rare and clandestine. So don’t be afraid to ask your questions at this briefing, because you’ll be pretty much on your own after this.”

“If I decide to take the job.”

The man’s eyes widened briefly. “If you decide to take it?”

“It’s my decision, Special Agent Durkin. That’s what I was told: Come out here, get a read on the assignment, and make up my mind about it.”

The man’s lips puffed out with a long exhale. He scuffed an expensive Gore-Tex hiking boot in the soil and glanced at the Forest Service man. “Christ, Henderson—a prima donna. I guess that’s what we get when we work with local agencies: prima donnas. All right,” he leaned forward as if to challenge Wager, “you can decide whether or not to take it. No skin off my nose either way. See if this makes up your mind for you: we’ve lost two BLM employees so far. One an agent, the other a civilian with Interior—a contract scientist doing some work for the Geological Survey. The civilian didn’t have a damn thing to do with investigation or enforcement or anything remotely threatening to anyone—he just happened to be out by himself on BLM land over near the north side of the reservation. Bastards gut-shot him and crippled his vehicle and left him to die. The medical examiner said that chore probably took about fifteen hours.” He added, “Toward the end, it must have hurt like hell because the man finally used a pocketknife to cut his own wrists and hurry things along.”

Henderson said, “That was Buck Holtzer. Real nice young man. Lived up near Grand Junction.”

“The BLM agent was murdered last week,” said Durkin. “He was out on BLM land near Many Goats Canyon and somebody shot him in the back.”

“That’s the other one I was telling you about,” said Henderson. “Larry Kershaw. I met his wife and two kids at the funeral down in Cortez three days ago, and I ain’t got over feeling sick about it yet. Real nice folks. There was no reason at all for anybody to do something like that to him or to them. Two little boys, one eight, the other six.”

“Same weapon?”

Durkin had the answer to that. “No. Both thirty-thirties, but different barrels.”

“Do you know what either of them was looking for?”

The FBI agent eyed Wager with something like real interest. “Good question. What did you find out about Holtzer, Henderson?”

“Not much. Holtzer was probably out there on government business; he was driving a USGS four-by.” The man nodded toward Durkin’s government issue four-wheel-drive pickup. “But it’s hard to say because the kind of project he was working on was a part-time contract: collecting long-term erosion data. Every now and then he’d drive all over BLM properties and measure erosion, which is why he was assigned a government truck. Anyway, he was found way over near Narraguinnep Wash. Some of it’s BLM land, some of it’s private, and most of it’s reservation. Just a bunch of broken country and not much ranching—and he didn’t leave any notes, so we don’t know for sure if it was his own business or government business he was on. Larry Kershaw was just on routine patrol, as far as we know—keeping an eye on things, you know.” He explained to Wager, “We since tightened up on patrol procedures for our personnel: travel in pairs when possible—which ain’t often, given we only got two hundred and fifty field officers to cover two hundred and seventy million acres spread across every state in the union. And always leave information about where you’re going and why you’re going there. The regular BLM personnel in this region’s been issued radios, too, but you get down in some of these canyons and they’re about as useful as a flashlight to a blind man.”

“We also had another death close to three weeks ago,” said Durkin. “We lost an informant. I don’t know if it was a screw-up on his part or the result of a leak in the local sheriff’s office. I wouldn’t put it past Spurlock, that asshole.”