“Sir?”
“You hunt every year, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s your favorite spot?”
Torrez paused, and I wondered for a moment if he was reluctant to give up personal secrets. “I usually go down on my cousin’s place. Down by Regal.”
“That’s Aurelio Baca’s ranch?”
“Yes, sir.”
“He runs cattle?”
“Santa Gertrudis,” Torrez said. “And lots of antelope.”
“Aurelio uses barbed-wire fencing?”
“Sure.” Torrez leaned on Costace’s windowsill, and I could tell from the change in the tone of his voice that he’d tuned in to the same wavelength. “He runs barbless wire on the bottom strand, though, so the antelope can come and go. One clean strand doesn’t make any difference to the cattle, but it makes it easy for the antelope to scoot through.”
“Cut to the chase,” Costace said impatiently. “What are you guys telling me?”
“That fence we just crossed is designed to keep antelope in,” I said.
“How can it? It’s not high enough.”
“Antelope don’t jump fences,” Torrez said.
“What do you mean, they don’t jump fences? ’Course they do. There’s fences all over this country.”
“They duck through…or under,” I said. “They don’t jump.”
“I don’t believe that,” Costace said. “Fast as they are?”
“Fast has nothing to do with it. Remember when you watched them running yesterday?” I asked. “Remember what they looked like? A nice flat sprint, back flat like a horse’s. Not like deer. Deer bounce and leap, sometimes even doing that ridiculous gait where they go on all hooves at once, stiff-legged like some goddam four-legged pogo stick. Deer and elk jump. Antelope scoot.”
An entire row of pieces fell together for Neil Costace at that moment. “The only reason I can imagine to bother containing game animals is to make them easy to hunt. This is Finnegan’s land?”
“Yes.”
“So if he’s herding antelope, maybe someone complained. That would explain Martin Holman’s wanting to put questions to the Department of Game and Fish. And it might explain why Martin Holman wanted to see the area from the air. He could wander around here forever on the ground and not see what he needed to see.”
“Photos,” I said. “Lots of pictures of fencing.”
“None of which show the wire close enough to make it obvious,” Costace said.
“No, but no one ever said that Martin Holman was a brilliant investigator. His intentions were on track, though.”
“Are there any antelope in those pictures? If we blow them up enough, maybe we’ll see something. You have a couple of the photos with you, don’t you?”
“Yes. But let’s find that intersection before we blow our night vision all to pieces. If we’re right…if that’s what Holman was after, and if he saw the antelope from the air, I’m sure he’d try for a picture. Maybe it’s there, now that we know what we’re looking for.”
“And if Finnegan saw that airplane fly over, he might spook,” Costace said.
“He might if he saw the registration numbers and thought they were on an official airplane,” Torrez said.
I realized I had a fair crop of goose bumps on my arm. “Let’s find out,” I said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
By the time we reached the next gate, we had ghosted our way through three more herds of antelope-and one small group of thin, uninterested cattle. This time Torrez didn’t stop at the gate, but swung to the right, driving along the fence line, the hummocks of close-cropped bunchgrass jarring his vehicle this way and that.
We followed. I noticed that whoever had strung the fence had done a workmanlike job. The four barbed-wire strands were tight and uniform, and the sheep fencing was taut and smooth, its top wire laced to the barbed-wire strand behind it.
“He knows where he’s going?” Costace asked as we jounced over a hummock of rotting vegetation that had once been a yucca. The flower’s hard stalk cracked under our tires.
“I certainly hope so,” I replied.
Costace grunted something that told me he wasn’t too happy with my answer. “If he’s been out here before, didn’t he see the wire?”
“You’d have to ask him,” I said. “I’m not sure he’s actually been in this particular spot.”
“He said he knew where the corner was.”
I laughed. “I think he looked at the map, Neil. Sergeant Torrez is one of those rare people for whom a topographical map holds no mysteries. And in this part of the country, most fences follow section lines-or at some point, connect to them. It’s all very logical, most of the time.”
“I know all that. And in ten minutes-no, make that two-I’d be so goddam lost I’d have to sit and wait for the sun to come up to figure out east from anything else.” We jounced over another hummock and Costace added, “You people have forgotten what the hell headlights are for.”
“They make you go blind before your time,” I said, then held up a hand that Costace probably couldn’t see anyway. “Hold it.”
Torrez had stopped, and I could make out the looming structure that blocked his path. He walked quickly back to us and leaned down. “This is it.”
I picked up the radio. “Three-oh-three on channel three.”
Silence followed. “Three-oh-seven, do you copy?” When Mitchell didn’t answer, I dropped the handheld on the seat. “Out of range. Robert, give them a try from your unit on the main frequency. I want to know where they are.”
The blast of light when we opened the doors made me flinch. As I got out of the Suburban, I took along my heavy flashlight and the folder that included the photo of the fence corner.
“Mitchell says that he’s just on the outskirts of town. Boyd stopped at the American Legion Hall on Pershing. Pasquale is parked behind the hospital down the street, with a clear view of his truck. Boyd’s been inside now for about three minutes.”
“Good. Let’s see what we’ve got here.” The walking was mercifully easy. The ground had been beaten flat over time by the countless hooves of cattle. The windmill tower loomed in front of us, rising thirty feet above the abandoned well.
“This didn’t show in the photo,” Costace said.
“Nope.” I held the folder against my leg and fished out the print. “If we’re in the right spot, this tower is just out of the picture-by no more than a dozen or so feet.” I handed the photo to Costace and stepped away, flashing my light up the tower. The mechanical head of the mill had been removed, as had the steel stock tank at the bottom, and the sucker rods that would have hung down in the middle. Only the old weather-scarred wood of the tower remained.
The ground was slightly dished on the north side of the tower, where the tank probably had been at one time, and where Boyd said Finnegan had thought briefly about digging a dirt tank. I swept the light in an arc. “Nothing,” I muttered. The beam reached out to the corner of the fence, and sure enough, another fence took off to the north, this one a four-strand barbed-wire line without the sheep fencing.
I walked over to it, fifty yards of dusty, hoof-rumpled dirt. At each step, the aroma of prairie sod and old manure wafted up. Costace followed, sweeping his flashlight this way and that.
“So we’ve got a three-way corner here,” he said, and put a hand on top of one of the steel posts, rocking it. “So what?”
“This is the northwest corner of the antelope enclosure,” Torrez said. “That’s what it looks like to me.”
I turned the flashlight on the eight-by-ten photo. “And this is the corner in the picture. Holman didn’t catch the windmill tower in it. Maybe he intended to, maybe he didn’t.” I slapped the print against my thigh in frustration. “Goddam it, why the hell didn’t he tell us what the hell he was doing?”
“The sheriff, you mean?” Costace asked.
“Yes, the sheriff. It’s almost like he was trying to make this big coup…lay all the pieces out in front of us when he had it all figured out. Do it all by himself.”