“Yeah, I thought about that, too. Maybe that’s why the lawsuit was settled. Maybe Connors framed Mace and when he was made, Guy dropped the suit.”
“But then why would Mace have been demoted if he were innocent? And if Mace wasn’t innocent, why would Guy keep his cheating brother in any aspect of the business?”
“Maybe that was part of the settlement.”
“But from talking to Mace and Grant, Mace is heavily involved in the multimillion-dollar Greenridge Project. Why would Guy keep him in something so costly, especially if he thought that Mace was embezzling?”
“Maybe it was Grant who was embezzling, Mace took the fall for him, and Guy put Mace back east to keep an eye on Grant.”
Decker frowned. “Sort of a convoluted theory, but I’m open to anything. The Greenridge Project sounds like a big boondoggle.” “You wrote Guy up as a hard-nosed business type. If something was flushing money down the toilet, I don’t think Guy would hesitate to pull the plug.”
“On Mace, for sure, but maybe not on Grant. Maybe the old man had a soft spot for his sons. I found a year-old interview with Mace’s son, Sean, on Kaffey Industries. Sean said a lot of things, but one particular thing stuck in my mind. Sean said and I quote, ‘My uncle has more than a soft spot for his sons. It’s actually a blind spot.’”
ELEVEN
THEY STOOD TWENTY abreast, police officers interspersed with volunteers trained in this tedious aspect of protocol. All of them had a whistle around their neck and held a map in their hands.
They were waiting for Wynona Pratt to give the signal-one long toot to begin and two short toots to stop. The detective had come down to the ranch several hours earlier to scope out Coyote Ranch.
The vast acreage beyond the buildings and the riding corral was hard-packed terrain pocked with clumps of grasses, thorny briar, silver-leaf shrubs, purple sage, wild daisies, yellow dill weed, and chaparral, the land stretching out until it collided with the foothills. There the fauna climbed and joined forces with fragrant pines, eucalyptus, and stunted California oak, greening the mountainsides and shading the trails that cut through them.
Adjusting her sun hat, Wynona peered through UV-protected spectacles at the map in front of her.
She had divided it into five sectors, and with a little luck they’d finish it today. She had dressed comfortably-cargo pants to hold extra items, a cotton T-shirt, and sneakers. Her fair skin necessitated that she slather on sunscreen, and she hoped sun damage would be limited to freckles.
She held her hand aloft, then brought it down with a snap along with a long, shrill whistle. The line walked forward in a unit, eyes on the ground in front of them. The list of what they were looking for was long and varied-footprints, tire tracks, drag marks, bits of clothing, popped buttons, bloodstains, food and food wrappers-any kind of evidence that pointed to human contact with nature.
The morning was cool but warming quickly. The sun was unmasked in a clear sky, reflective against the red stone. The air was filled with spring insects that had hatched with the heat-gnats, flies, bees, wasps. Crows cawed lazily as a hawk circled high above, looking for its breakfast.
The search of the first sector lasted just a little over two hours with meager results-a scattering of various fibers and metals including pop-tops and bottle caps. More numerous were horse prints and desiccated horse shit. A volunteer found a shoe impression that was clear enough to merit an alginate cast. The rest of the search was slim pickings. They moved on to sector two and by the time that space had been combed, the crew was hot and tired and needed sustenance. During the twenty-minute allotment they had for lunch break, Wynona called Marge.
“How’s it going inside?”
Marge said, “TMI.” Too much information. “Everywhere we turn, we have blood or tissue or a footprint or hair or a bullet casing.”
“If you have TMI, we’re suffering from TLI.”
“How far along are you?”
“We’re about to start with sector three. I’ll call you in a couple of hours.”
The group resumed their hunt at two in the afternoon. At 4:14, someone sounded two quick toots and the row of searchers lurched to a stop. The whistle blower was a young police officer in his twenties named Kyle Groger. He called Wynona over.
“Take a look at that area, Detective, about twenty feet from here.” He pointed to the spot. “It looks odd.”
Wynona took off her sunglasses and stared at the ground, her eyes traveling forward until she saw what had caught Groger’s attention. From a distance, the patch was indistinguishable from the surrounding area. Same color ground, same types of foliage, same pebble-strewn earth. Yet it looked distinctly different.
First of all, the eight-by-eight plot of ground had sunk into the earth, lower than the surrounding terrain by about an inch or so. There were also two big boulders on top. The environs supported many big rocks, but two in such close proximity was a little odd. Also the foliage on the plot wasn’t faring welclass="underline" around a dozen drooping sage plants, straw yellow grasses, and scattered daisies with limp petals. It could be that these particular plants had wilted in the heat except that the flora that surrounded the area was erect and hydrated.
She walked over to the spot and pulled up a sage plant. It gave way with relative ease, and the roots were soft and dried out. She dropped to a stoop and dipped a finger in the ground. The soil was compact, and not easy to dig into. It was then she noticed that the earth had been scored by hundreds of little lines running in all directions. She stared at them closely. It was as if someone was hitting the ground, tamping it down with a shovel over and over and over.
A homemade grave?
She stood up and searched for shoe or tire prints, but found nothing. She called Marge on her cell phone and asked her how it was going inside.
“Still slogging through the muck. What’s going on?”
“I think there’s something here that you should see.”
WHILE WAITING FOR extra shovels and buckets, Marge assigned one of the CSI techs the official role of police photographer.
“Get all those little hash marks,” she told him.
The day had been long and fruitful…overly so. The evidence inside the main house included several types of shoe treads, a couple of bloody finger- and palmprints, a number of bullet casings, loose fabric and hairs, and that wasn’t counting the blobs and streaks of blood and massive tissue spatter.
The identification of what belonged to whom was to be sorted out later. Marge was happy to take a break from the charnel house, and Pratt’s call was a good excuse for a breather.
Oliver, on the other hand, was probably much happier working inside because it was air-conditioned.
He said, “Summer is upon us.”
“You can go back inside. I can handle this.”
“Nah, I’ll stick around.” He wiped his forehead. “We can work inside all night as long as DWP doesn’t turn off the electricity.”
They were both looking at the caved-in spot. Marge said, “It’s disturbed ground. That’s a no-brainer.”
“Big grave for just one man,” Oliver said.
“So maybe it’s more than one man,” Marge said. “I think it was predug. If it was done spur of the moment, it would take too long to dig.”
“Unless it’s shallow.”
“We’re missing two guards. If they’re in there, it can’t be all that shallow. Plus someone took the time to put plants back in the soil. This was a planned thing, Scotty.”
“But not planned too far ahead. Otherwise someone might have spotted a big hole in the middle of the property.”
Marge said, “It’s really far from the main house.”
Oliver said, “I don’t know…maybe.”
“We’ll know soon enough.” Marge tented her eyes with her fingers and regarded the vast tract of land. Wynona’s search crew had scattered but was still in whistle-blowing reach. Most of them were sitting in the few tiny patches of shade available, roasting their butts while drinking tepid water and fanning themselves with their hands or sun hats. A flick of the wrist told her it was almost five.