Mateo appeared to be a semiprominent figure in town. Although Tobias hadn’t actually said so, it was clear he thought Mateo knew a fair amount about Macanas’s gold-mining operation. If Mateo would be willing to talk to Estefan, they might get somewhere.
“Did you guys see a telephone number for Mateo anywhere?”
Neither of them had, but Estefan had seen Mrs. Perez’s home number written on the back of one of the letters. He’d written it down in his notes.
“Apparently, Mrs. Perez and Pastor Tobias were close friends,” Estefan said.
Nathan thought he heard a little resentment. He wanted to question how close but decided discretion was the right play. Besides, it didn’t matter. “Let’s give her a call,” Nathan said. “She’s probably got Mateo’s number. Think she’ll talk to you, Estefan?”
“Based on everything I read, I’m pretty sure she will.”
Estefan put his phone on speaker and made the call. Mrs. Perez answered, and a minute later they had a phone number to Mateo’s house. During the call, Mrs. Perez’s biggest concern was over secrecy. Estefan assured her they were both in the same boat and that their conversation would never be repeated to anyone. Mrs. Perez also told them Mateo should be home, but it would be better to call him earlier than later. It seemed Mateo suffered from severe alcohol impairment after 7:00 PM. When Estefan called Mateo’s house, a young woman answered. A few seconds later Mateo was on the line. They heard him issue a muffled command, presumably to the same young woman to go outside and give him some privacy. It took some convincing, but Mateo agreed to meet Estefan late tonight, especially after Estefan referenced some monetary compensation. No surprise there.
Nathan had no doubt the young woman who answered the phone was Antonia, Mateo’s daughter. She was frequently mentioned in Tobias’s letters. Tobias hadn’t said anything too specific about her, except that she seemed to be somewhat reserved. One of the letters from last year mentioned Mateo’s concern about some creepy looks Antonia had received from one of Macanas’s white shirts.
One thing became clear from Tobias’s letters: Estefan was right about Macanas controlling the town. It had little to no police presence, and even when an NNP officer cruised through town, no one spoke to him. It seemed like Macanas and his men maintained an iron-fisted reign over Santavilla.
It surprised Nathan to read that for the most part, the residents of Santavilla seemed somewhat content. Tobias often wrote about their indifference or lack of ambition. It seemed they’d given up and resigned themselves to a life of poverty. Antonia, however, was one of the few exceptions. She’d argued with her father extensively about wanting to leave Santavilla. But where could she go? Without money, her options were limited. Many of Tobias’s letters mentioned her resentment about the situation. She seemed unwilling to accept the idea of living the rest of her life in a crappy little town full of losers and drunks. Quite honestly, Nathan didn’t blame her. Life in Santavilla lacked any kind of excitement or change. It had to be tough, feeling like things were hopeless with no way out.
It seemed many families were being torn apart by substance abuse, and it wasn’t always the men who were the problem. Some of the women in Santavilla could drink and smoke their men under the tables. Since Mrs. Perez and her husband owned the general store, most of the letters containing her name also referenced their store. Many of them mentioned how devoted Mrs. Perez was to Pastor Tobias’s church. She was one of its biggest donors.
After they had a fairly clear picture of the key players and locations, they turned their attention to the aerial photos. Over the last five years, Estefan said he’d been to Santavilla fewer than ten times but had a pretty good idea where the major buildings were. He’d always stayed in the local motel rather than his father’s hut. Nathan didn’t think it was a statement of Estefan’s social status; he simply preferred having running water and a functioning toilet.
Estefan grabbed the cardboard tube containing the aerials, pulled them free, and laid them on the dining room table. There were three, each map was about one meter square. All of them were centered on the small church. The 1:500-scale sheet offered the best detail, but it didn’t include the lumber mill to the north or the wooden bridge to the south.
“Estefan, I’m a little rusty on this stuff. What distance does one inch cover on this 1:500 aerial?”
Estefan closed his eyes, concentrating. “Let’s see…”
“Your phone should have a calculator,” Harv told Nate. “We need to be as precise as possible. Since these maps use the metric system, we’ll make some conversions. A meter isn’t much longer than a yard.”
Nathan pulled it from his pocket. “Give me the numbers, Estefan.”
“Okay, like Harv said, one meter is 39.3 inches. So divide five hundred by that number.”
“Got it. It’s 12.72. So every inch equals 12.72 meters. One meter is 1.1 yards, so each inch equals… 13.9 yards.” Nathan crunched a few more numbers. “Okay, so on the 1:500 scale aerial, one inch equals forty-two feet. The 1:2000 aerial is going to be four times that. Each inch becomes 168 feet or so, or just over… fifty-six yards. Let’s be conservative and say it will take seven seconds to run one inch on this aerial. That means it will take one minute to sprint from the church due east to the river. The lumber mill is just over a one-minute dash. Let’s calculate and memorize some additional numbers using the church as the anchor point.”
They spent a few minutes marking the aerial with an orange highlighter and wrote the sprint times in black marker next to the colored lines. They allowed for changes in direction and unforeseen obstacles like fences and walls by padding the numbers slightly.
“As you can see, the topographic lines are only on the 1:10000 aerial. These are Macanas’s open-pit mines.” Estefan pointed to the top edge of the map. “As the crow flies, they’re about one mile from the church and about half a mile from the lumber mill. I should be able to identify some of the prominent buildings in town.” He moved his finger along the main road bisecting the town on the 1:2000 aerial. “Pretty much everything’s along this road.”
“That’s definitely the church,” Nathan said. “You can see the shadow of its steeple on the roof below. Let’s study the basic layout of the town, so when we get there we can minimize our radio chatter.”
Nathan was a quick study. Based on Estefan’s input, he had a pretty good idea of the town’s layout within a few minutes. The valley containing Santavilla was mostly flat. Although much larger in scale, the basin below the surrounding mountains was roughly the same shape as a football stadium field — a giant oval. The river followed the east side of the valley along the base of a sickle-shaped mountain. Everything had a gentle slope toward the river. Santavilla basically sat atop a thick alluvial buildup — higher on the west, lower on the east. Small farms and ranches surrounded the buildings near the center of town. Houses were interspersed across the valley like randomly thrown pebbles. It looked like a thousand other small towns nestled in mountainous valleys. The topo map indicated the town’s elevation was two thousand feet. The open-pit mines were about five hundred feet higher, and the wooden bridge to the south was two hundred feet lower. As Estefan had indicated, the town was bisected by a thirty-foot-wide dirt road running north and south. Beyond the town to the north, the valley pinched down to a narrow gorge where the road wove its way up the canyon to the open-pit mines.