“We know it’s not a wedding,” Schroeder said. He braced his hands against the dash as I bounced the car over a hump of bunchgrass and a low rock border garden to the right. The dogs went nuts as I pulled past their enclosure, and I parked beside Bishop’s car.
One of the men who had been holding up the front of the Dodge pickup hustled toward us, as if I’d arrived with just the information he needed. “Hey, Sheriff,” he called, and I recognized Steve Parker, a county highway department foreman.
“The first thing you can do,” I barked before he had a chance to ask his question, “is to get all those goddamn vehicles out of the road so we can do our job. And no, I don’t know what the hell is going on.” Apparently that answered whatever question he had, because he stopped short.
Baca’s tiny front yard was a mass of people. If it had been the church, I’d have guessed that they were waiting for the bride and groom to come out. Then they would let fly with the rice. I picked what looked like the easiest route toward the front gate and then the passage across the dirt yard to the front door. That door was wide open-with the incomprehensible din of rapid-fire Spanish. The flow of people was outward from the house, though, and that’s what was causing the ruckus.
As we went through the front yard gate, Deputy Thomas Pasquale appeared from inside the house with his nightstick held in both hands like a bumper, herding a knot of jabbering sightseers out of the house. Schroeder and I stood to one side as the deputy escorted six people, every one of whom was talking a mile a minute, across the front yard toward us.
I held the little rickety gate as they passed through. Three I recognized by name. The others were only familiar faces I’d seen many times but never formally met. The largest and noisiest of the group was Clorinda Baca, Sosimo’s older sister. She was proving that she could talk louder and faster than her niece, Mary Silva, or Mary’s sister, Sabrina Torrez.
“We got here as quick as we could,” Pasquale said to me, “but it’s a mess.” I wasn’t sure to what he was referring, but unless the gathered herds were corralled and controlled, any evidence there might have been would be stamped to dust, regardless of what had happened to spark the crisis.
No doubt irritated that the deputy wasn’t paying any attention to her, Clorinda latched on to my forearm and directed her torrent of words at me, never bothering to switch languages so that I might understand.
I pried myself loose and held up a hand, shaking my head. “Not now, Ms. Baca,” I snapped. Off to the left, Scott Gutierrez appeared, his dark green Border Patrol uniform looking as if he’d been lying on his back under a car. He spun a large roll of yellow crime-scene tape across the side yard, looped it around a sagging juniper post at the corner, and headed across the front of the yard toward us.
“Where’s Torrez?” Schroeder asked, and Pasquale ducked his head toward the rear of the house.
“Backyard,” he said. “He wants the place cleared out to the road, no one inside.”
In another five minutes, without knowing anything about events that may have transpired, we had established a semblance of order with most of Regal’s population outside the yellow ribbon. Ten people wanted to talk to me at once, but I ignored them and entered the house, stopping just inside the door to let my eyes adjust to the dim light. Nothing had changed in those few hours since I’d found Matt Baca asleep on the old sofa.
Bob Torrez appeared in the doorway that led to the kitchen, and he ducked to avoid cracking his skull on the low, narrow archway.
“Sosimo Baca’s out back. He’s dead,” Torrez said cryptically, and beckoned Schroeder and me to follow. The kitchen would never grace the pages of House Beautiful magazine. A dingy little room, it had stopped looking fresh and appealing sometime around 1937.
A white drop-leaf table stood in the center of the kitchen floor with four chairs neatly placed. That was the extent of any order. The old round-topped refrigerator graced a dusty corner under a two-door cabinet that had been first painted yellow, and then, probably years later, layered with not quite enough gloss white to hide the previous color. The door of the fridge, dented, scarred, and stained, stood ajar a couple of inches.
Several meals’ worth of dishes waited beside and in the old cast-iron sink, and underneath, jammed between the two-by-four sink supports, sat an incongruously bright and cheerful blue plastic trash can.
“Be careful,” Torrez said when he saw Schroeder beginning to drift toward the back door. The door swung inward, and was unlatched. Torrez toed it open with his boot. The upper glass door pane had been broken long ago and then repaired with cardboard and tape, the whole affair painted white to match the frame. The lower pane had been shattered outward, leaving long, ragged shards projecting from the glazing. The screen door, dilapidated to begin with, had been flung open so hard that the frame split and sagged against the side of the house, held in place by remnants of torn screen. The recoil spring hung limply along the doorjamb, a chunk of wood still attached to the eye hook that had pulled free.
“A little ruckus, it looks like,” I said, taking a careful step through the broken glass. Two concrete blocks served as a none-too-steady step to the backyard. A dozen paces beyond the house, its bright, shiny black stark against the bare earth, lay a plastic tarp.
“Sosimo?” I asked.
Torrez nodded. “We’ve got some clear shoe prints, so stay well over to the side.”
I took a step or two toward the tarp and then stopped, turning back to look at the house. I could see a knot of people who had drifted along the fence to the east so that they could see past the building, hoping for a glimpse of something. “What about the two girls? Where are they?”
For a moment, the undersheriff looked as if he hadn’t heard me, but then he said, “Josie was here earlier this morning. Father Anselmo was still here. Clorinda and a couple of others were too.” He saw the blank look on Schroeder’s face and added, “Josie is Sosimo’s wife. Clorinda says that Josie came and got the two girls. Maybe around seven-thirty or so.”
“She wasn’t living here? The wife?” Schroeder asked.
“No. She hasn’t been for almost two years now.”
“They were divorced?”
“No.”
“And who’s this Clorinda person?”
“My aunt. She’s Sosimo’s older sister.”
“Married?”
“Nope.”
“Terrific,” Schroeder said. “So the ruckus was with her? The wife? Ex-wife? Whatever she is?” I looked back at the shattered screen door, trying to picture what might have happened.
“We don’t know that,” Torrez said. “But the way the relatives were piling in here, I thought I’d better get some help…before everything was trampled.”
I sighed and regarded the tarp. The lump under it didn’t look big enough to be the man who’d been sitting in the passenger seat of my car less than twelve hours before.
Torrez bent down and peeled the plastic tarp away. Sosimo Baca was lying on his face, right knee drawn up and his arms under his body as if he’d been crawling and then collapsed. His eyes were open wide, staring at the dirt.
“Is Perrone on the way?” I asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Any ideas about what killed him?” I asked.
“Doesn’t look to be any wound that I can see,” the undersheriff said. He knelt down and gently touched what he could see of Sosimo’s left hand.