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.”