“Here,” Torrez said. “Hold it still.” He slid a pencil into the bore, marked where it stopped with his thumb, and withdrew it, laying it along the pistol’s slide. “Still got one in the chamber.”
“This isn’t something Freddy was just carrying,” Estelle said. “It’s been in the elements for a long time.”
Torrez bent down a little and scrutinized the handgun. “Smith and Wesson. Not a bad piece. Be interesting to know if that bad boy’s been fired.”
“And at what.”
“Hunters, maybe. Remember the revolver that power walker found along the roadside over east of town? We had all kinds of theories about how that ended up there until we found out it belonged to some kid who’d been shooting from the roadside. He laid the gun on his jeep, and then got preoccupied with something else. Drove off and sure enough, the gun bounced off. That’s most likely with this. Some hunter got careless. If it wasn’t stainless steel, it’d be just a hunk of junk right now.”
“It wasn’t Mr. Romero’s,” Estelle said.
“Not likely. He was nervous enough about his son drivin’ around with that. ” He touched his toe to the.22 carbine in the nylon boot. “He called me to find out how many laws Freddy was breakin’ by carrying that on his ATV. Made him kinda nervous that the kid was doin’ that.”
“You need anything?” Bill Gastner’s voice interrupted them.
“If you’d find me an evidence bag for this.” Estelle held out her hand so Gastner could see the gun. “In my briefcase.”
“You got it.”
While she waited, she carefully wrapped the gun in the cloth, mindful of where the charged weapon’s barrel pointed.
“Let me take that and have Mears get started on it,” Torrez said. He strolled with no urgency to the arroyo bank and reached up to catch the plastic bag that Bill Gastner dropped to him. “How are you doin’?” he asked the older man.
Gastner knelt with one knee in the dirt, surveying the scene below him. “I’m okay,” he said. “What’s with the gun?”
“Don’t know yet,” Torrez replied. “We’re gonna know. That’s for sure. She got any masking tape in that briefcase? That and a marker.”
Gastner returned with the two items, and Torrez peeled off a long strip, wound it across the outside of the evidence bag and wrote LOADED in large, block letters.
Chapter Nine
The four-wheeler tracks crisscrossed the two-track here and there, and it soon became apparent, as they reached low spots where the sand was a perfect matrix for tracks, that more than one round trip on Bender’s Canyon Trail had been made. At one such location, Estelle stopped the Expedition and she and Bill Gastner got out.
“At least three,” Gastner said. “Now, that’s interesting.” He bent his head back, gazing at the sky. “Look, we haven’t had a drop of moisture in three weeks. If we hadn’t found the kid and his wrecked machine in the arroyo, there’d be no way we could tell if these tracks were made this morning, yesterday, last week, or three weeks ago.”
“There’s a time puzzle here,” the undersheriff agreed. “For one thing, it’s likely that Freddy rode in here maybe yesterday some time. Fair enough. Then,” and she stepped across a hummock of grass, looking down at a particularly clear, deep impression left by the knobby tires, “did he ride back and forth? In and out? And this?” She paused, a toe almost touching another track.
“Not an ATV,” Gastner said. “Truck, car, jeep, something. Ground’s too gravelly to give us an impression.”
“But it’s on top, isn’t it.”
Gastner knelt down with a loud popping of knees, one hand on the ground to keep his balance. “Sure enough. But look, like I said, out in the boonies as this might be, there’s still a fair amount of traffic on this two-track, sweetheart.”
“Interesting,” Estelle muttered.
“What is?”
“All of it. Freddy didn’t say what day he found the jaguar skull, but the school records show that he was in school all week-except yesterday. Now, if you were a teenager getting his kicks out of exploring caves, and if you found something as neat as that skull, what would you be likely to do?”
“Oh, I’d be back there,” Gastner said without hesitation. “Damn right.”
“So would I. Why would I be over here, across the valley, out on the prairie counting cow pies? And where did I find the handgun? That’s quite a discovery all by itself.”
“That could have been anywhere, even along the highway,” Gastner offered. “Things bounce out of trucks all the time. You’ve seen that collection that they have over at the state highway barns. People drop the damnedest things. Gloves, chains, jacks, hubcaps, coolers, shoes. Have you ever lost a shoe along the highway?”
“Ah, no.”
“How do they do it? Always amazed me. I once found a loaded shotgun up on Regál Pass. Turns out that a guy had it in the back of his Jeep, and somehow it bounced out when he turned onto the highway from the ridge trail. People are just plain numb, sweetheart.” A sudden recollection lighted his heavy features. “My all-time favorite was finding a set of dentures up on Cat Mesa. A perfect set of choppers, lying on an old, moldy mattress. Now you could have a grand time making up a scenario to fit that. No matter how hot the moment of passion was, how could someone forget his teeth? ”
He grunted to his feet and shook his head. “But a fair enough question. Regardless of where he picked up the handgun-if he picked it up somewhere and didn’t just buy it from somebody-then what was he scouting over here?” He held out a hand as if to add, “after you.” Estelle snapped a series of photographs of the tracks, knowing that they showed little.
For another mile, the two-track skirted the base of a mesa whose top looked as if it had been laser leveled. The rim itself was a vertical jumble for the last fifty feet, but despite the formidable barrier was still scarred by cattle trails. Rounding the mesa, the path headed due north past a dilapidated windmill missing most of its blades. The water tank, one side caved in, was peppered with bullet holes. The barbed-wire fence around the well head had fallen in a tangle, the posts weathered to steel gray.
The ATV tracks led past the attraction, keeping to the two-track. In another hundred yards, the road forked, the tracks leading northwest. They jolted to a stop facing a small arroyo too shallow to hide a car. The ATV apparently hadn’t hesitated.
“You’ll make it,” Gastner encouraged.
“When was the last time you were out here?” Estelle asked, and Gastner laughed.
“Mid-afternoon of June 21st, nine years ago. Good God, come on, sweetheart. I have no idea when it was.”
“But you’ve been here, in this very spot.”
“Yes. Absolutely. I have no recollection of why or when. I know that this two-track here winds around about a million acres of worthless prairie, and in about two miles we’ll run into one of Herb Torrance’s gates, and if you go that way, you’ll end up right in his back yard. Otherwise, we’re going to go around that big mesa behind Herb’s and come out to a fork in the road. One path goes on through Miles Waddell’s place, back out to the county road. The other choice heads north, out to the old state highway.” He sat up a little straighter, peering over the hood. “Just where Freddy Romero didn’t go.”
They had just bumped into the shade of a scrub oak grove, the dry leaves scraping along the Expedition’s flanks, when Estelle’s cell phone buzzed. She stopped the vehicle. For a moment, the connection produced nothing. Finally, a voice that clearly was struggling with emotion said, “Estelle?” The connection wasn’t particularly good, with plenty of background noise.
“This is Estelle.”
“George Romero,” the caller said, and Estelle found it impossible to imagine the stocky, gruff auto mechanic trying to choke the words out. “Look,” he said, and stopped, then tried again. “Look, is all this true?”