Leaning Land (26 page)

“Yep.” Ray nodded agreement and gingerly set the mug on the wooden floor beside his chair. “We hear the new owner’s thinking of doing some development out here.”

“Don’t know much about that. He ain’t thinking about running cows much longer, that’s for sure. Told me he wants to sell off the herd.” The man’s eyes glanced around the cheerless room. “It’s a real nice place, but it ain’t good for much else. Guess it won’t be good for much of anything, he sells off the herd.”

Wager asked, “The new owner’s name is Ronald Pyne?”

“Mr. Pyne, yep. Don’t know what his first name is—he never told me that.”

“Has he been out recently to look at the place?”

“Not recently, no. Came out, let’s see, sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey, so he didn’t stay long. Mostly sat by the stove and studied his maps and walked around looking out the windows.” He drained his mug. “Don’t know what he was looking at.”

“When does he want to sell the herd?”

“Ain’t said. If it was me, I’d tell him end of summer. Get their weight up and then sell them off.” He explained, “Everybody’s already bought their spring yearlings—ain’t no market for cattle right now.”

“He didn’t say anything to you about his plans for the ranch?”

“Nope. He talked with the other fella mostly. They looked at maps and the other fella wrote some stuff down, and they looked out the windows and after a while they got in their truck and went on off. Now—” Happy nodded to himself, “he did say they’d be doing some drilling here and there on the property.”

“For water?”

“Didn’t say what for.”

Wager leaned forward. “Have they drilled yet?”

“Did some a while back. What was it…late last year, I believe.”

Ray asked, “Did he say he’d keep you on?”

“He said there’d be work for me, but he didn’t say what kind. Tell you the truth, Ray, I don’t know what kind of work I’d be good for without the cattle.”

“Who was this other person?” Wager asked.

Happy wagged his head. “I can’t remember; we wasn’t introduced. Mr. Pyne called him something, but I can’t remember what.”

“Was he a rancher from around here?”

“No. Wasn’t no rancher. Some kind of geologist, I think. Talked about what kind of soil we got and fault lines and rock layers and what all. On the kitchen table he spread out a whole bunch of aerial photographs he kept showing to Mr. Pyne.”

“Could his name have been Buck? Buck Holtzer?”

“Could’ve been, yeah. I think that sounds like what Mr. Pyne called him. ‘Buck.’ Something like that, anyway.”

Wager studied the face with its deep lines that made the flesh seem to sag in teardrop shapes under his eyes, beside his mouth, even off his bristly chin. It was hard to tell if he was responding to Wager’s suggestion or if the man really remembered it. But there should be ways to find out who Holtzer, a freelance geologist, might have worked for besides the USGS.

“What have you heard about the killings, Happy?” asked Ray.

“What killings?”

He told the man about the four deaths.

His head wagged in surprise. “First I heard about any of that! I don’t get no newspaper, and the boys mostly watches the TV at night. I got enough to keep busy without worrying about what’s going on everyplace else. First I heard of it.”

He offered more coffee, which Ray quickly declined; and as the truck jolted its way back along the faint ruts through the sagebrush, the tribal policeman tried to stifle a loud and sour belch. “Gawd, that coffee! Happy said it gets the ranch hands up and going in the mornings.”

“Hell yes—they’re trying to get away from it.”

R
AY LET
W
AGER
use his office. “I’m going over to the tribal center, Gabe. I’ll let you know if I find out anything.” Wager’s first call was to Henderson; the man had tried to reach him, and now Wager had a question for the BLM agent. A recording of the Oklahoma voice told all and sundry to leave any messages and he would call back as soon as possible. So Wager took him at his word. The next call was to Sheriff Spurlock.

“Yeah, I talked to Nichols. At first he said he turned in the unused sticks of C-4. I told him Sergeant Yeager didn’t have any record of it, and then he said he must’ve used it on that silo, that it was a long time ago and he didn’t remember for sure, but that he sure as hell didn’t take any of that crap home and anybody says he did is a liar. That didn’t surprise me, of course, but I think it worried him to be asked about it. Which I suppose don’t surprise me either, if he took the stuff.”

“Did he have an alibi for the times of the explosions?”

“Not for the first couple. Said he was working his spread. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t—be hard to prove either way. But he was in Rapid City, South Dakota, when the last bomb went off.”

That might rule out Nichols, but it didn’t rule out an accomplice. “Do you know if he’s one of the people investing in the Flying W development?” Wager explained about Ronald Pyne and his plans for the ranch. “I understand his buddy Litvak met with Pyne off and on over the last few months.”

“How in hell’d you dig that up? I don’t know. What I do know is Stan’s been running real lean on that ranch of his lately. All the ranchers in the county are short on credit and long on debt, price of beef being what it is and costs of operating going up. I didn’t think he had any cash money to invest in anything.”

“He’s recently married, right?”

“Yeah—second marriage for both of them. Maybe it’s her third: gal named Bonnie Reimer. Seems a real nice gal. Why?”

“I heard she brought some money to the marriage. Maybe that’s what he’s investing.”

The sheriff was silent for a long moment. “Damn, you sure hear a lot of things and you sure got a twisted mind, Wager.” Another silence. “But I don’t see how that has anything to do with the bombings and killings.”

“Me either. I’m just trying to find out who’s up to what and why.”

A shorter silence. “OK—I’m not sure who to ask, but I’ll try to find out.”

The third call was long distance but he got only Liz’s answering machine. He left his message and two or three ways she might be able to reach him, then turned to leaf through the advertising pages of the local telephone directory. It was a magazine-sized publication that covered La Sal and two other counties, as well as the reservation. “Mr. Haydn? This is Officer Wager. I talked to you four or five days ago regarding the death of Rubin Del Ponte.”

The man said he remembered, and Wager asked if he had been contacted about doing any drilling on the Flying W ranch. “Yeah—I was contacted. Done it, too.”

“When was this, Mr. Haydn?”

“Oh, hell, let’s see—first week or so of December, I think it was. I didn’t want to do it, I tell you that! Colder’n hell out there and no place to hide from the wind. But that new owner—what’s his name—said he wanted it right now and he was willing to pay my winter rates.”

“What kind of drilling?”

“Water—that’s the only kind I do. He wanted some test holes dug, so I dug ‘em.”

“Did you find water?”

“Sure—it was there. There were a couple of dusters and dry holes, but the rest of them had a pretty good flow. Exactly how much and how long it’s going to last, nobody can say for sure—I don’t care what these fancy hydrologists claim. And there might be some question about who it belongs to, too. But I guess that fella’s got his lawyers working on that.”

“Who it belongs to?”

“It was a subterranean water course. Comes in from the southeast side of the ranch, somewhere under Narraguinnep Wash, is my guess. Probably starts out on the reservation—that’s the high ground south of the ranch. I told him that and that it could mean all sorts of legal questions about who owns what portions of it, but he didn’t seem too worried. Just wanted to know if it was there and how much. Hell, water flows toward money, and if he’s got the money, he’ll get the water.”

“Did he have a hydrologist working for him?”

“Yeah—same fella got killed not too long after. Working for the government. What was his name … Holtzer. That’s it, Holtzer Surveying.”

“Did Holtzer say anything to you about what they were after?”

“Not to me, no. Just told me where to drill and visited the sites a couple of times. Mostly just wanted the site reports—depth, soil samples, flow, pressure.” Haydn snorted. “Too damn cold out there for a fancy desk engineer to hang around.”

“Do you remember the locations of those sites?”

“Oh, yeah. Got them in my records somewhere. Why?”

“Could you give me a copy if I came by?”

“I reckon,” he answered. “Wasn’t asked to keep them secret, anyway. Sometimes people want the drilling records confidential, and I’ll do that if a customer wants. But he didn’t.”

Wager didn’t bother to explain the power of a deuces tecum subpoena regardless of what a customer might want. He just thanked the man. Then, before hanging up, thought to ask, “Did Rubin Del Ponte work with you on that job?”

“Well, yeah. Matter of fact, he did. It was so cold I needed to bring out heaters for the rig—he trucked them and some fuel out for me.”

“Did he seem interested in the job?”

“Not too much. But he knew what I was drilling for and where. I don’t know what else he would want to know.”

“He went to each site?”

“Had to—to move the heater units and butane tanks.”

Wager was staring out the office window when Ray came back. “I guessed right, Gabe.”

It took a second or two for the man’s words to register. “About what?”

“The tribal council selling Walter Lawrence’s land. Ramey Many Coats put money down on it in late February, less than two weeks after Lawrence’s death.”

“Lawrence didn’t have any relatives with a claim on it?”

“Not living on the reservation. And from what I guess, the council didn’t make much effort to locate any relatives off it.”

“I wonder if Ramey has an alibi for that death, too.”

“He’ll find one, I bet.”

Wager told the Indian policeman about Haydn Drilling Service.

“And he identified Holtzer?”

Nodding, Wager glanced at the notes he had been scratching on a pad headed “Squaw Mountain Tribal Police” and bearing a feather-decorated Indian shield and crossed lances colored red and yellow.

Ray caught the glance. “Red and yellow, those are the Ute war-paint colors. Somebody before me designed that. I’d rather have blue. Means peace. Could use some peace around here.”

“Del Ponte worked for Haydn on that job.”

The tribal policeman stared at Wager for a long moment. Then he ticked off the names of the victims on his fingers. “Buck Holtzer. Walter Lawrence, now Rubin. All three tied to the Flying W project. But where does Larry Kershaw come in?”

Wager started to say he didn’t know when the telephone rang. Ray answered, then held it across the desk. “For you.”

It was Don Henderson returning Wager’s call. “You wanted to know what Holtzer was doing when he was killed? I know what he wasn’t doing—he wasn’t sent out there by USGS. His job for them was erosion measurement over on the BLM land west of the reservation. They wanted to get some winter base readings in the canyons to measure spring runoff. They didn’t have any surveys up north, near Needle Rock, where he was killed.”

“Isn’t that BLM land, too?”

“Yeah, a lot of it is. He might’ve been found on government land, but he wasn’t on government time.”

Haydn had said nothing about drilling outside Flying W boundaries. “Any idea why he’d be there on his own?”

“No, but I’m on my way up to Grand Junction. Maybe I can drop by and talk to his widow, see if she has any idea. Maybe she’ll let me look through the papers from his office.”

“You need a subpoena? I can get you one.”

“I don’t think so, Gabe. I’ll tell her it might have a bearing on who killed him. I’m sure she’ll let me.”

After the BLM agent hung up, Wager shared his message with Ray. “Can you show me where Needle Rock is on your map?”

Ray turned to the acetate-covered wall map and began tracing his finger down a corridor of contour lines that Wager figured was Narraguinnep Wash. “The white name for it’s ‘Needle Rock.’ We call it something else.”

“What?”

“What did it look like to you?”

Wager thought back, remembering the round, weathered spire aiming its blunt tip at the sky. “Oh.”

“Here it is.” He held his finger on a small, packed circle of contour lines.

Tiny black print spelled “Needle Rock,” and south of it were a dozen or so points off Goat Mesa, each given a name: Saffron Point, Thompson Point, Kanab Point, Knife Point … . “This is the BLM boundary, here?” Wager pointed to a black line whose long dashes were separated by dots of ink.

“Yep. Needle Rock’s just inside BLM land. This would be the Flying W Property on this side of the wash, and the reservation starts here.”

“Walter Lawrence’s land. Now Ramey Many Coats’s.”

“Now Ramey Many Coats’s.”

“Holtzer was found, what, a quarter mile inside the line?”

“A little less. It was here, on this side of the Needle.”

“Was the body moved?”

“Nobody seemed to think so. He was found at his truck—its motor had a bullet in it, too. If you’re asking whether he could have walked across the line, been shot on the reservation, and made it back to his truck before he died, yeah, he could’ve. I was asked to look for bloodstains, but I didn’t find any. It was a gut wound that bled mostly internally, and he had on a down vest and parka that absorbed what leaked out.”

Wager nodded, still studying the map.

Ray rubbed a thumb along his pocked jaw. “It seems to me we’re getting close to a ‘why,’ Gabe.”

It felt that way to him, too, but they still didn’t have a “who.”

“I’d like to talk to Henry Many Coats and Louis Cloud—they’re in the same National Guard unit as Nichols.”

Ray took his cap from a point of the deer antlers that served as a coat and hat rack. “Let’s do that.”

Wager expected another long ride, but it was a short walk instead. Both men were in the comfortable air-conditioned lounge of the tribal building and neither was anxious to talk to Wager about Nichols or the C-4.