“Gotta see if the water’s running down at the drinker,” Herb said. “You going to be up there a while?”
“Probably just a few more minutes, Herb. We’re running out of light, and we’re not finding much. One of the deputies is checking down Forest Road 128 to see if Pat went wood hauling or some such, but I don’t hold out much hope for that.”
“Can’t see why he’d try to wrestle the rig down that way,” Herb said. “Sure as hell, we got easier places to pick up firewood.”
“I don’t think that he did. But we have to check it out.”
“Well, don’t forget to close the gate.”
“I’ll make sure,” I said. “Call me if you hear anything. You know, the odds are just as good that he’ll show up back at the ranch.” I didn’t believe that, but it sounded good.
Estelle had approached, and she raised an eyebrow as if to say, “You first.”
“That was Herb,” I said. “He’s coming up to check his livestock.” I had entered Pat Gabaldon’s cell number in the phone, and just to give my frustrations something to do, I selected the number and pushed the auto-dialer. The signals vanished out into the vapors, unanswered. “He says Pat hasn’t shown up back at the ranch.”
“I didn’t expect that,” Estelle said. She thrust both hands in the pockets of her trousers, and I saw her shoulders slump a bit.
“So what’s up, then?” The sheriff directed his question at Estelle, who hadn’t mentioned who she’d been on the phone with. I glanced at him with a little sympathy, since over the years we’d both become accustomed to Estelle Reyes-Guzman’s reticence. It was a tribute to Bobby’s tight rein on his own ego that he didn’t seem to mind when folks called the undersheriff instead of him. He knew that in due time, everything flowed uphill.
“That was Tony.” She let that suffice for a moment, drawing an arc in the dust with the toe of her boot. “Preliminary tests point to the wine.” It was so quiet that we could hear the whisper of the early evening breeze through the piñons.
“Spiked, you mean?” Torrez prompted.
Estelle frowned at his choice of words. “There’s a chemical complex in the wine that is ‘unexpected,’ the med tech says. But not all of the wine, either.”
“Whatever that means,” the sheriff said.
Estelle flashed a rare and thoroughly fetching smile. “No, what I mean is, there’s a complex in the wine spilled on the floor, and from the trace remains in the glass. Nothing in the bottle. Nothing in either bottle. Some of the same chemical also shows up in the victim’s saliva. They haven’t run the tox tests on his blood yet.”
“What about in the food itself?” I asked.
She shook her head. “At this point, that’s all they have. But Dave Hewitt is going to work tonight to see if he can crack it.” I’d seen Hewitt’s name or initials on a crime lab report or two. Most of the time, the state crime lab was prompt, efficient, and accurate. But routinely, toxicology and other complex blood work-or even DNA comparisons-took days or weeks. It helped to have a young kid working there who let himself become excited by the chase…and who maybe didn’t have much of a home life.
“Natural or not?” I asked. “This ‘complex,’ I mean.”
“He can’t say yet.”
“Christ,” I muttered. “First one thing and then another. I don’t know which goddamn way to turn. First George, and now all this.” I turned in a half circle, surveying the shadows. Twilight made it impossible for me to distinguish hummocks of grass from rocks until I tripped over them. In a moment, we heard the whisper of Deputy Pasquale’s unit as he returned from scouting FR 128, but his report didn’t help us. I hadn’t expected any great discoveries. The forest road was pummeled by the tire tracks and foot prints of woodcutters, hunters, and just plain folks looking for places to dump their worn-out mattresses, chairs, and stoves.
“Are you ready to head down?” Estelle’s hand touched my shoulder lightly, and I jerked awake.
“I guess.” I shrugged helplessly and looked at both Estelle and Bobby. “I’m ready to hear bright ideas.”
“He sold the rig and skipped town,” Tom Pasquale offered. “Simple as that.”
“He wouldn’t leave the dog,” I said.
“Why not?” the deputy asked.
“You don’t own a dog, do you?” I replied. “Especially one who works with you every hour of the day and sleeps at the foot of your bed every night. Besides, Patrick’s own pickup truck is still parked down at the ranch.”
“He’s somewhere between here and the border,” the sheriff said. “They might have chucked him in the quarry, or in one of the junk piles down by the mine, or you name it.” He started toward his own truck. “But I think we’re gettin’ ahead of ourselves. It’s only been a few hours…what, three since Diaz waved the truck through the gate? For all we know, Pat might be sittin’ in the Dairy Queen in Deming, counting his money, trying to figure out what to do next.”
“We could wish for that instead of the quarry,” I said. “I know I sound like a broken record, but he wouldn’t have left the dog behind.”
Chapter Sixteen
“Swing in here a minute,” I said, but the undersheriff had already read my mind and turned off County Road 43. We jounced across a few yards of impromptu parking lot and parked facing the four-strand barbed wire fence that marked U.S. Forest Service property. Fortunately, the quarry wasn’t announced by a historical marker, and couldn’t actually be seen from the highway. But in the bunch grass, the well-worn trails leading to the fence and beyond suggested that there was something attractive over there through the trees.
I was convinced now that Patrick Gabaldon hadn’t taken the rig south of the border. In fact, it seemed to me that Patrick would have done everything in his power to prevent such an episode-and that didn’t bode well. The abandonment of the cattle and his dog told me that somehow, Patrick had run afoul of someone whom he’d either befriended along the highway or who had materialized out of nowhere up on the lonely mesa top. That someone had taken the rig, but no one would be fool enough to attempt a border crossing hauling a body in the back of the trailer.
If the perpetrators were familiar with Posadas County, they would know about the quarry and its dark, deep, foul waters.
For a few minutes we concentrated on the parking area, flash-lights criss-crossing the informal turn-out beaten into the weeds over the years by traffic, an area about the size of a tennis court.
In the failing light, it was difficult to distinguish one set of tire marks from another, but nothing unusual drew my attention. A big pickup pulling a long, twin-axle stock trailer would leave characteristic tracks, and I didn’t see any that came close. We didn’t see any blood stains, although in that light, on that terrain, it would have required a quart or two to make a visible mark.
“What do you think?” I asked, and Estelle stopped and ran her light beam along the top strand of the Forest Service fence. “I can’t imagine somebody lugging a corpse all the way over to the quarry,” I said. “But I can’t imagine a lot of things. You up for a look?”
“We need to do that.”
I used my weight to crush the fence’s top wire down until I could scissors across, then with a boot on the second and tugging upward on the top wire, created a generous hole for Estelle to duck through. A moment’s hike through dust-frosted scrub brought us to the east edge of the attractive nuisance that the Forest Service wished would just go away.
The quarry yawned as a sink hole approximately eighty feet across with huge limestone benches along one side that once upon a time had been damn attractive lounging spots between skinny dips. The crater had been blasted out of the side of the mesa in the 1920s, when some genius decided that there might be something really valuable in the spring-soaked limestone. There wasn’t. The only remains of industry was a concrete block about the size of a Chevrolet on the west bank, with eight rusted bolts projecting from the top. I was surprised that sometime in the past an enterprising kid hadn’t slapped a diving board to those block bolts. Then he could have had us dragging the waters for his corpse.