"Negative, so far," Clayton replied. "I still have to search the body and the backpack."
"He was probably a drifter," Hewitt said. "Wrap it up here as soon as you can."
Ray Bonnell shook his head. "Can't do that, Paul."
"Why not?" Hewitt asked, scanning Bonnell's face.
"We've got another body, Sheriff," Clayton said, "and what looks like a completely different crime scene."
"Show me," Hewitt replied.
Clayton took the sheriff to the doorway, clicked on the battery-operated flashlight, and beamed the light into the back part of the dark cellar.
Hewitt saw an exposed skull with a fractured forehead, covered with patches of what appeared to be leathery skin. Pressurized water from the fire hoses had revealed some of the torso and Hewitt could see what looked like swaths of fabric.
"It's a female skeleton," Clayton said. "The fracture to the skull was most likely from a blunt-force instrument. A clutch purse was buried with the body. According to the driver's license inside the purse, the victim's name was Anna Marie Montoya. She had a Santa Fe address."
"You're sure this is a separate incident?" Hewitt asked.
"There's no way she was killed in the fire," Bonnell said from behind Hewitt's shoulder.
"Any guesses on how long the body has been here?" Hewitt asked.
Clayton shrugged. "Her driver's license expired ten years ago."
"Let's hold off on doing any more until the state police crime techs get here," Hewitt said.
"Are you going to give the investigation to the state police?" Clayton asked.
Hewitt had recruited Clayton to complete the staffing of his major felony investigation unit, made up of three specially trained field officers. His twelve-man department was too small and underfunded to manage felony cases any other way. But with the addition of Clayton, Hewitt now had a unit that could do a hell of a lot more than take a report, collect evidence, interview witnesses, or get an occasional voluntary confession from some feebleminded perp.
At least, he hoped they could. Up to now, the unit was untested. It was time to see what they could do.
"It's your case, Deputy," Hewitt said. "Call in the team."
Clayton stripped off his plastic gloves. "I'll get them rolling."
Ray Bonnell watched Clayton walk to his unit to make the call. "I think you hired yourself a good one, Paul," he said.
"I do believe you're right," Hewitt said.
"How come I'm all dirty and you're all spick-and-span clean?" Ray asked, brushing dirt off his pants and eying Hewitt's freshly pressed shirt.
Paul Hewitt smiled. "You do look a mess, Ray. How about you wipe the dirt off your face, wash your hands, and I buy you some biscuits and gravy?"
"I could use some breakfast," Bonnell replied.
Sergeant Oscar Quinones and Deputy Von Dillingham arrived in a hurry. Clayton briefed them, paying particular attention to how the men reacted to the news that he'd been assigned by the sheriff as lead investigator. He didn't need an attitude flashed at him for being placed in charge.
Quinones didn't even flinch. A retired border patrol supervisor who'd been with the department for five years, he'd worked on many task forces, investigations, and multiagency operations run by lower-ranking officers.
"Where do you want us to start?" Quinones said when Clayton finished.
"We'll work it as two separate crime scenes," Clayton said, looking at Dillingham for a reaction, "starting with the male victim. Search the body and the backpack, and bag and tag all evidence. Then we'll do a field search around the perimeter."
Dillingham pulled a toothpick from his mouth and smiled. "What about the female victim?"
"We treat it as a buried body and do an excavation," Clayton said. "But not until victim number one is removed and all evidence recovered."
"Sounds like a plan," Dillingham said.
The crime scene techs appeared as they were finishing up the perimeter search. Motorists passing by slowed down to check out the emergency vehicles parked just off the highway, creating a potentially hazardous situation. At Clayton's request, another deputy was sent out to keep traffic moving and the curious locals at bay.
The officers and the techs worked deep into the night. Piece by piece, they brought out an accumulation of trash, broken pieces of old wooden fruit baskets, bits of rope, a rotting ball of twine, and several cracked glass gallon jugs. In the cellar, they used tweezers, paint brushes, magnifying glasses, trowels, and other small tools to dig around the female victim for evidence. The most surprising discovery came when the female skeleton was finally unearthed. Patches of leathery skin showed that the dry cellar had caused a certain degree of mummification. Bits and pieces of apparel still covered parts of the trunk and lower extremities. Earrings lay next to the skull, and a turquoise and silver ring loosely encircled a finger bone.
By the time the search concluded and the bodies were removed, midnight had come and gone. Another hour passed doing some preliminary paperwork. Clayton released Quinones and Dillingham and drove home feeling fairly certain, based on a missing-person report in the computerized National Crime Information Center's files, that the dead woman was Anna Marie Montoya, who had disappeared from Santa Fe without a trace eleven years ago.
A match of the victim's teeth with dental records would make the identification conclusive. The state police tech supervisor promised to track down the dental records first thing in the morning and call him with the results.
The Istee family lived on a dirt road just outside the tribal village of Mescalero. Nestled in tall pines at the end of the lane, the house had two bedrooms and only one bath, which was woefully inadequate for a family of four. Soon his son and daughter would need their own rooms, so next up on Clayton's home improvement list was a master bedroom and bath off the living room, away from the children, which he would build himself. He'd spent hours drawing up the plans and figuring out a budget with his wife, Grace. Financially, he could swing it. But with the new job, finding the time to do it was the problem.
In the kitchen Clayton stripped off his dirt-caked clothes, cleaned up as best he could at the sink, and slipped quietly into bed without disturbing Grace. He slept hard until his son, Wendell, jumped on the bed to wake him up.
"Mommy says you made a big mess in the kitchen," Wendell said when Clayton opened his eyes.
Wendell, age three and fast approaching four, had recently turned into something of a motormouth, and Clayton was secretly hoping this new behavior wouldn't last too long. "Your mother said that?"
"Uh-huh. The floor and the sink are all yucky."
"Go clean it up for me," Clayton said.
"Mommy already did."
"Then go away and let me sleep," Clayton said.
"No."
"Why?"
" 'Cause it's breakfast," Wendell said.
"Okay, I'm up."
Clayton pulled on a pair of jeans and a tee shirt, and with Wendell leading the way, found his wife and his two-year-old daughter, Hannah, at the kitchen table.
"I got him up," Wendell said proudly as he slid into his chair.
The family took its meals at a table in a dining nook adjacent to the kitchen. After tearing out a partial wall that originally separated the two areas, Clayton had added a bay window to bring in light and create a feeling of openness. He took his chair at the head of the table, which gave him a view of the woods at the side of the house, and smiled at his wife and daughter.
In her high chair, Hannah, who considered herself an adult, spooned cereal into her mouth and looked at her brother with quiet, thoughtful eyes. Then she wrinkled her nose at him.
"She made a face at me," Wendell said.
"Yes, she did," Clayton said. "Eat your breakfast." He turned to Grace. "I caught a homicide case yesterday."
"You were so late coming home, I thought something important might have happened," Grace said.