“Hey, neighbor,” he murmured. After a long moment, he pushed back a bit, one beefy hand on each of the undersheriff’s shoulders. It appeared as if he wanted to say something further, but couldn’t.
“Can you take George out to the site?” Torrez asked, and the man nodded at him thankfully. He’d been unable to find words for that simple question.
“Of course,” Estelle replied. “Give me a moment to collect a few things.”
Back in her office, she selected a series of photographs and placed them in a folder, tucking that into her briefcase. “Tata’s with you?” she asked when she returned to dispatch.
Romero shook his head. “She wanted to stay at the house. It ain’t been a good night, I can tell you that. She told me to go ahead and go, if that’s what I wanted to do. She was tending to the neighbors that came over. It’s just something, you know? Something that I got to see. Couldn’t tell you why.”
They left the building, and Romero turned toward his own Suburban.
“Let’s take mine,” Estelle said. “I need to have my office with me.”
He settled in the passenger seat of the county SUV, stiff and uncomfortable, obviously feeling out of place. He watched her go through the routine with the log and dispatch.
“Makes it a little easier having something to do, don’t it.”
“I think it does,” she said.
“You said Bill was with you? I mean when you found the boy.”
“Yes, sir. He was.”
“Well, that’s good, at least. He still getting out quite a bit?”
“You bet.”
His right fist pounded a slow, thoughtful tattoo on the door’s arm rest as they pulled out onto Grande and headed southwest.
“Yesterday sometime,” Romero said.
“Thursday, sir. That’s what it appears.”
“And we drove off up north without even knowing he was lying out there.”
“There was no way you could.” Estelle knew full well that the assuaging comment wasn’t even close to the truth. When he should have been in school, Freddy Romero had loaded his ATV into the back of his aging pickup truck and set off for the boonies. Tata Romero was home all day, every day. For her not to have seen the boy making preparations for his escapade was unlikely. But Freddy was an independent, feisty eighteen-year-old. Estelle knew that it would be easy to let him go his own way, unquestioned.
“I’ll show you what we did yesterday,” Estelle said. “If you know anything about what Freddy might have been doing, I’d appreciate hearing it.”
Romero nodded, but said nothing, and they rode in silence until Estelle turned onto the Borracho Springs access road. The tracks of Stub Moore’s vehicle hauler were obvious. “We found his pickup truck parked here,” she explained. “Stub took it down to the county impound until we’re done with it.” Romero would have known exactly how the procedure worked, but the small talk might help cut through his fatigue.
“He unloaded his four-wheeler and rode it out to the highway. No tracks back up toward the campground or the springs.” She maneuvered the SUV around and they returned to the highway. “He drove along the shoulder to the saloon. I was parked down the highway a little, on the shoulder just beyond the County Road 14 cattleguard. I saw him ride down here, right along the highway. He skirted the saloon and took the backcountry trail out to Bender’s Canyon.”
“I don’t understand what he was doing,” Romero said. “You talked to Casey?”
“Not since earlier yesterday.”
“She lives out this way, you know.”
This way was fifteen miles as the crow flew, and on that Thursday, Freddy Romero would have know that Casey was in school-where he should have been. Because the girl of his dreams obviously wasn’t home, there would have been no reason to stop by the ranch.
“Tata was going to call her,” George added. “That Casey…just a real swell girl, you know? The boy and her were pretty tight. This…this is going to be tough for her.” He shook his head. “Tough for all of us.”
Estelle slowed and turned into the Broken Spur’s parking lot and skirted the building. As they nosed down into the arroyo, her passenger reared backward, one hand flying to the dash.
“Jesus, you’re really going down in…” he let the rest trail off as they did just that, the SUV jouncing and spitting gravel. As they crested the north rim and trundled along the rough two-track, Romero relaxed back. “I rode out here with him once. Must have been a year ago now.”
“On one machine, or two?”
“Me and Butch on one, Freddy on the other. We were going to see if we could find that big prairie dog town that Herb Torrance said was over here…all the way over on the back of his place. He said it was easy to find, but we sure as hell never did. Just some scattered colonies.”
“Freddy had his.22 rifle with him. Would he have gone prairie dog hunting, do you suppose?”
“Maybe. He’s done that a time or two, but not with a.22. Never reach out with that.”
“Freddy’s had that rifle for a while?”
“That little Ruger? I bought that for his sixteenth birthday,” Romero said. “Made him take hunter safety…all that. Told him I didn’t want him carrying that rifle loaded on the ATV.”
“Well, the rifle isn’t the issue,” Estelle said gently. “It was in the boot with the magazine in place but nothing in the chamber. As nearly as we can tell, sir, your son was riding a little fast, cleared a sharp little rise, went airborne, and hit a rock coming down. The trail is narrow there, and he didn’t have time to control it before he went over the edge.”
“He wasn’t drinking,” Romero said, a flat statement rather than a question. “He wasn’t twenty-one.”
“Mr. Romero, kids take liberties all the time. As a matter of fact, there were two cans of beer in his cooler, but he left them in the truck. The cab smelled of beer, but that could be from any time.”
Romero fell silent, watching the prairie pass by.
“Your son explored a lot on his own, sir?”
He nodded. “I had words with him now and then, but what can you do, you know? Look, I knew that he skipped school. I knew that. Tata and I argued about that, too. But his grades were all right. He went to school when he had to. That’s the way I look at it.” Romero wiped his eyes. “Freddy wasn’t all too concerned with planning ahead,” he said, and then, as if that topic held memories too painful, asked, “So you and Bill followed his tracks all the way out here? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I got to thank you for that. For worrying about him, I mean. He could have been lyin’ out here for days even…” He choked the thought off. “This isn’t easy for you. I mean, you got the two little ones yourself.” He reached out a hand to brace himself as the Expedition lumbered over an outcropping. He fell silent again as they crested the rise above Bender’s Canyon Trail, joining the wider two-track that ran east-west.
“You have no idea why he would have taken this particular route?” Estelle asked. “Other than that you had been out hunting before in this general area?”
“No idea. Except there’s a trail here that he could follow. I told him that private property was just that-private. He wasn’t to go riding around on somebody’s ranch just because there wasn’t no fence to keep him out. Folks don’t want to see those tracks all over everywhere. And if he was going to shoot dogs, then he needed to ask the rancher first.”
“He generally did that, then?”
“Sure, he did that. Freddy has an independent streak a mile wide, but he’s a good kid. You know that.”
They reached Trujillo’s homestead, and once more Estelle looked at the faint traces of a vehicle’s turning around in the brush and grass beside the two-track, and the short section of clearer tracks in the sand beside the corral. Linda had photographed those every way possible, but they showed next to nothing-not clear enough to show tread, not even defined enough for an accurate measurement center to center, no way to tell when they’d been made. Estelle found herself curious about them only because they were there, in this particular, isolated place, so near to the scene of the tragic accident.