Holman smiled broadly. “You ought to come work for us.”
Camille looked heavenward. “I don’t think so, Marty. But it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Mr. Cole thinks he’s pretty slick. And I can image his wife being furious with him, especially when he doesn’t come home on time. So she takes a day or two for expensive shopping out of town with her girlfriends. Payback time.”
Holman glanced at me, maybe a little hurt knowing that he hadn’t been elected to genius rank yet. He took a deep breath. “Lieutenant Steinberg said that he was going to nose around a little more and find out where Cole went, for sure. One way or another, he needs to know about his son.”
“And if he went hunting, then he was due back in school today,” I said. “Maybe he’ll show up in the next few hours. No message sent to his school today?”
“Apparently not.”
“That’s interesting. Thanksgiving break doesn’t start for another week or more in most schools. So it’s not like he’s just taking another couple of days to nose into the vacation time.”
“In the meantime,” Holman said, “I think it’s a good idea to keep the search teams up on the mesa. You know, we’ve got all these theories, but the whole thing is really”-he made swirling motions with both hands-“pretty nebulous. We don’t have a damn thing to go on, other than the youngster’s jacket. I’d hate to pull the search off and have the bones found next spring by some turkey hunter. What do you think?”
I shrugged. “It was interesting watching Estelle today. I don’t think there’s any doubt in her mind that Cody Cole was abducted. And after watching the way her own youngster behaved up there, I’m ready to agree with her.”
“Yeah,” Holman said, and sighed. “But she’s got a lot on her mind right now, with her mother and all. I’m not so sure she’s thinking straight.”
“There’s that possibility, but I wouldn’t count on it,” I said. “And think of it this way. By leaving the search teams on-site, all you risk is the budget. If he’s up there and alive, all Cody has going for him is that no one gives up. So it’s worth it until we know for sure.”
Holman showed signs of rising, and I added, “By the way, we need to ask Judge Hobart for an exhumation order.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Holman said.
“No. I went over a bit ago and talked to the old man. There’s some kind of grudge he’s got against his stepson. And the stepson-”
“That’s this Willit guy who called from California?”
I nodded. “He’s coming in a day or two. It’s a mess. And it’s just going to be simpler to move the old lady off my property and plant her in a proper cemetery. That way, everyone will be happy.”
“Except Mr. Apodaca,” Holman said.
“He’ll come around,” I said. “He said he’d file a lawsuit to prevent having the grave disturbed, but he’s got no legal recourse. And any lawyer will tell him so.”
“And you don’t think this Willit person will give in, either? Maybe just drop the issue?”
I shook my head. “No. He thinks his mother was murdered.”
“Well, shit,” Holman said, and stared at me. “Murdered?”
Holding up a hand to reign in Holman’s active imagination, I added, “That’s just what the stepson thinks. He’s dreaming, but you know how it is once somebody like that gets an idea in his head.”
“Dad, is what Mr. Apodaca did actually legal? I mean, can you just bury someone in this state without any formal procedures?”
“Well”-I ducked my head-“that’s the way it used to be, anyway. The state’s dotted with thousands of little family plots, some consecrated, most not. Technically, I suppose that Florencio should have contacted some authority when his wife died, but he didn’t, and Chief Martinez didn’t press the issue. And technically, the old man can’t just dig graves on his neighbor’s property, either. But in this case, I didn’t press the issue, and there wasn’t anything surreptitious about what he did. He dug the grave, even marked it in his own fashion. And he told me that he thought he owned the property. So”-I shrugged again-“it’s no big deal.”
“Unless he murdered her,” Camille said.
“Exactly. He’s not supposed to do that,” I said.
“If he’d buried her in his own backyard, his stepson couldn’t force an exhumation, could he?” Holman said. “Unless the stepson could show cause and get a judge to go along?”
“It doesn’t matter where she’s buried. He’d have to show cause,” I said.
“I don’t understand why he buried her across the street, then,” Camille said.
“He told me that he thought it was his property. Other than that, I don’t have a clue, except it’s more isolated. It’s been a woodlot for generations, and the old man probably figured it would always be.” I pushed my empty coffee cup away. “At first, I was just going to deed a small chunk of land that included the grave site over to the Apodaca family. But I got to thinking about it, and I don’t want the nuisance. I don’t want my property encumbered with some crazy complication. So we’ll move the old lady, and that will be that.”
Chapter 17
On Cat Mesa, two hundred weary, depressed searchers took a deep sigh of relief when the morning dawned bright, sunny, and windless. By eight o’clock that Tuesday morning when I walked into the Posadas County Sheriff’s Office, it was already pushing fifty, with a promise of much higher temperatures. Deputy Tom Pasquale was coming off graveyard shift, and with the typical endless energy of the young, he was changing clothes in preparation for a day on the mesa.
“At least if he’s still alive, this change in weather might stretch his chances some,” Pasquale said, and I was sure the same sentiment would fire up the search party’s enthusiasm for the rest of the day.
And as the weather improved, so did the number of leads, some fanciful, some ridiculous, some just plain worrisome. Every one had to be followed through on, though, and that sapped manpower and time.
Shortly after nine, one of the Search and Rescue coordinators was standing on a ridge north and east of the rim, sweeping the terrain with binoculars. Movement caught his eye, and he zeroed in on a small moving object and no doubt sucked in enough breath to choke.
The child was walking on a narrow Forest Service road, then disappeared over the horizon before the man could fumble his radio off his belt.
Ten minutes later, hopes were dashed when half a dozen Guardsmen caught up with the kid and discovered that he was actually twelve years old, in perfect health, other than being startled by the sudden appearance of troops, and belonged to a family who was cutting wood on the far north side of the mesa.
Shortly before noon, two members of the Posadas Volunteer Fire Department, working the mesa face almost down at the base road, discovered several small bones that, with an active, desperate imagination, might have been mistaken for those of a child.
Despite what common sense should have told them, the discovery created enough furor that search coordinators raced to the scene with one of the medical examiners. The bones were scattered remnants of a mule deer fawn that had met its fate months before.
With the door of my office ajar, I listened to the radio traffic with half an ear. Each new surge of adrenaline that pumped through the search team’s veins kept them eager and interested, but it wasn’t going to be long before each surge pumped the men just a little less, and then a little less.
The top of my desk was nearly clear when the telephone lit up. “Well, well, well, well” came out as a rumbling chuckle from the other end, and I relaxed back.
“Sam, what’s up?”
“I’m supposed to ask you that,” he said. Sam Preston had been selling real estate in Posadas for thirty years. I’m not sure what the thrill was of selling the same weed-infested, dusty lot over and over again, but Preston was good at it. “You got time to jaw?”