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  “You finished up there?”

  “Yes. Two injured, both transported. One critical with head injuries, maybe more. The other just banged up.”

  “Okay. Look, I’m going to need you down this way. I’m at the gas company’s airstrip on Fourteen. We got us a problem.”

  Estelle had started the Expedition and she pulled it into gear, backing off the road so she could swing around. The brief hesitation as she did so prompted Torrez to add, “You on the way?”

  “Just heading out. It’ll be thirty minutes.” If he had given it long thought, Robert Torrez would have been hard-pressed to find a spot more removed from his undersheriff’s present location and still be within the county.

  “Got it. They’ll wait. But expedite on down here, all right?”

  “What have you got?”

  “A triple,” Torrez said. “So far, anyway.” He clicked off without further explanation.

  Estelle’s pulse kicked up a notch, and she accelerated harder than she intended, narrowly missing a sturdy piñon with the Expedition’s right front fender. She didn’t need to ask, A triple what? Bicycle riders were still on her mind, though, and she wondered how three riders had managed to kill themselves on a flat dirt road.

  Chapter Two

  The last hundred yards of the forest road cut through a dusty meadow before reaching the intersection with County Road 43, and Estelle saw a group of three bicyclists heading toward them. Another dozen or more had gathered just off the pavement of the county road for a rest stop, no doubt to let the large ambulance pass.

  She turned on the emergency lights and touched the yelp to guarantee their attention. The three cyclists darted off the two-track and stopped. Under other circumstances, the undersheriff would have stopped to chat with the riders, taking the opportunity to emphasize again the need for some small grain of caution on the trail ahead. Instead, as she passed, the cyclists were treated to a voluminous cloud of reddish dust that billowed up behind the Expedition.

  One member of the larger group broke away as she approached. He walked out to intercept her, expecting a conversation. She touched the siren again and shot past, tires chirping as she turned onto the asphalt of the county road.

  For the past several minutes, the county manager had been the ideal passenger, inquiring about neither the phone call nor the urgency of their departure from the mesa top-choosing instead to let Estelle concentrate on missing trees, boulders, and cyclists. Squared away on the pavement, Estelle glanced at Leona, who sat rigid, one hand holding the panic handle on the door post and the other gripping the top edge of the computer on the center console.

  “I can drop you off in town,” she said, and braked hard for a tight turn.

  “I’m fine,” Leona replied. “Don’t take the time.” She didn’t release her grip. “But where are we going?”

  “The sheriff has a multiple fatality out by the gas company’s airstrip,” Estelle explained. “I don’t know more than that.”

  “Oh, my God,” Leona said, and readjusted her grip. “That’s on the other side of the moon.”

  “Almost.”

  They accelerated hard down the hill, passing the last straight stretch along the old quarry before the switchbacks down into town. “Of course, the dead can wait patiently,” Leona whispered. She reared back in her seat as Estelle braked hard.

  “I don’t know what we have,” Estelle said, knowing that other bikers would be on the hill, letting the siren serve as conversation. Down past the abandoned mine, past the landfill entrance, they approached the intersection with the state highway that curved out of town, heading west toward the municipal airport. Estelle slowed just enough to have time to check for traffic and then shot through the stop sign, flying down the two-mile straight stretch toward Posadas.

  “I thought you said airport,” Leona managed.

  “No…out past the Broken Spur. The gas company’s airstrip? Just south of the Torrance Ranch.”

  “Oh, my God.” Estelle wasn’t sure if Leona’s reaction was to the distance-nearly thirty miles-or to the remoteness of the spot. By looking southwest with binoculars on a clear day, they could have seen the dash of the airstrip from the mesa top they had just left. “The state planes have used that on more than one occasion,” Leona added. “I wonder if…” She left the rest of the sentence unfinished, bracing herself for the dash through town.

  The state highway turned into Bustos Avenue, and after a few blocks the undersheriff turned south on Grande. Leaning forward, she turned up the radio. Because of the endless problem with what Sheriff Torrez liked to call “scanner ghouls,” they had stopped using the radio when a phone call would do. But the written radio log kept by dispatch still served as an official documentation of times and responses.

  With an open street ahead of her, she keyed the mike.

  “Three-oh-eight, three-ten is in the village, westbound.”

  The speaker barked squelch a couple of times for reply.

  “Three-oh-eight, ten-fifty-five?”

  “That’s negative,” Torrez said, and he sounded impatient. Had he used the radio earlier, Estelle would have heard it-either in the unit or from the handheld on her belt. “I got a multiple ten-sixty-three. And ten-twenty-one from now on.”

  Estelle glanced in her rearview at the winking lights that had appeared behind her on Grande just as she guided the Expedition around the curve under the interstate overpass and onto State 56-the long, empty stretch of twenty-six miles between Posadas and the tiny village of Regál at the Mexican border.

  “Three-oh-five ETA about eighteen minutes,” Sergeant Tom Mears’ voice said. No matter how hard Estelle pushed the bulky Expedition, the sergeant’s sedan would overtake her before she’d gone a dozen miles. The county coroner-either Dr. Alan Perrone or her husband, Dr. Francis Guzman-would respond to the 10–63 code more sedately. As Leona had already observed, no one was as patient as a corpse.

  Holding a steady hundred, Estelle didn’t slow until the turnoff to County Road 14, a half mile beyond the Broken Spur Saloon. Tom Mears’ patrol car remained a dozen car lengths behind. As they crossed the cattle guard, Leona Spears appeared to relax for the first time, her left hand releasing its grip on the computer.

  The wide dirt road swept down to cross a shallow arroyo on a bridge none too wide, then angled up a rise. In a quarter mile, Estelle saw Bob Torrez’s again Chevy pickup truck parked on the shoulder of the road. The sheriff leaned against the truck’s front fender, arms folded across his chest, one boot crossed over the other-a lounging rancher waiting for a good gab fest.

  With no need of lights and siren, Estelle approached slowly. The desert showed no signs of catastrophe. No airplane lay in a smoking heap on the gas company’s runway just to the west, no truck pulling an overloaded livestock trailer lay crunched in the bar ditch, no lost tour bus rested on its top…and no mangled cyclists littered the right-of-way.

  Torrez pushed himself away from the fender and motioned her away from his side of the road. She stopped, window down.

  “You need to park on the other side,” he said. He leaned on the Expedition’s windowsill and looked across at Leona. The expression on his handsome, dark face asked “Why?” with a raised eyebrow, but he didn’t voice it. Estelle had taken the county vehicle that the sheriff normally used because her Crown Victoria would never tackle the rough paths on top of the mesa. Leona’s powerful perfume would linger in the Expedition for days, giving the sheriff plenty of reason to complain.

  He straightened up and waved for Mears to follow her.

  She parked and switched off the truck. “Stay here for a few minutes, all right?” she asked, and Leona nodded.

  “How’s the kid up on the mesa?” Tom Mears asked as he joined her.

  “Badly busted,” Estelle replied. Torrez met them in the middle of the county road, his hands thrust in his hip pockets.

  “Hey,” he greeted. “All the way down at the end. We gotta walk down. There’s some stuff you’
ll want to see.”

  “What are we looking at?” Estelle asked.

  “Three,” the sheriff said. “Middle-aged man, middle-aged woman, and a younger guy.”

  “Migrants?” Mears asked. The jagged mountains to the south formed an effective barrier at this point of the border, and a somewhat less effective border fence had been built just south of Regál, where the official port of entry was manned twelve hours a day.

  “No, I don’t think so. They aren’t dressed like it, and they sure as hell aren’t day laborers.” He turned and looked back at the Expedition and its occupant. “Tell her that when the coroner shows up, he needs to walk down the right edge of the runway. I don’t want any tire tracks in there yet.”

  Estelle passed the message on to Leona, who brightened instantly. Her interest in law enforcement was keen. Among her various election campaigns-all unsuccessful-was a run for sheriff against Robert Torrez. She had lost in spectacular but good-natured fashion. And now, as an appointed county manager, she had become a powerful voice on behalf of the Sheriff’s Department. She frequently indulged herself in ride-alongs with deputies, and had learned when to stay out of the way.

  The gas company’s access gate was new, solid, and securely locked. The four padlocks, one each for the owners, the Sheriff’s Department, the State Police, and the Rural Electric Cooperative, were all intact. Torrez dug out his keys and popped the county lock, swinging the gate just enough for the three of them to enter before dropping the latch. The gravel access road curved fifty yards to the verge of the runway, and they walked it in silence.

  Reaching the pavement, Torrez pointed down the runway, a 2,560-foot strip of macadam 26 feet wide with a neat dotted white line down the middle. “All the way down at the other end,” he said.

  “Well, all right,” Tom Mears mused. “Do we get to know how you discovered the bodies without driving in here?” A slender, sandy-haired man an inch shorter than Estelle’s five-seven and a full head shorter than Torrez, Mears always seemed completely at ease with his moody boss.

  “Damn coyotes,” Torrez said, and let that suffice. “Come on.” They walked down the right side of the runway for only fifty yards before he held out a hand. The macadam was scrubbed clear in most places, with patches of sand here and there. The prairie vegetation grew right to the edge of the pavement, poised to take over if ignored for more than a season. “Right there,” Torrez said. “You can see where the plane landed.” Sure enough, two scuff marks about ten feet apart straddled the centerline. “It’s the only set I saw,” he added. “Most of the time, you can’t see ’em. But once in a while, they cross a patch of blow-sand, and it’s pretty clear.”

  They walked on in silence, the half-mile-long runway sloping slightly downhill as it ran from east to west. The afternoon light slanted across the pavement at a perfect angle, picking up the airplane’s narrow tire prints every time they ran across a patch of sand. As the end of the runway drew closer, the aircraft had drifted smoothly toward the right, until its right tire ran along the edge of the asphalt. A hundred feet from the end of the runway, the tracks showed that the plane had swung tightly to the left, turning around to face east.

  “He went off over there,” Torrez said. He pointed without crossing the runway. “Ran the right tire and the nose wheel off the pavement. We’ll look at that later. Lemme show you this. And watch where you step.”

  The first corpse lay partially in a bed of cacti, his right cheek pegged to the fleshy pads by the tough thorns. Estelle bent down and saw the small wound centered just above the collar of the man’s dark green work shirt, in the crease between skull and neck-the single shot would have snuffed out the man’s life as effectively as an on-off switch kills a light. The wound hadn’t bled much, and what blood there was had crusted hard and brown. Without disturbing the body, it was impossible to tell if the bullet had exited the skull. In the past few days, the sun had been harsh, the days hot. The man’s shirt stretched taut over his bloating torso.

  “No personal possessions? No weapons?” Estelle asked.

  “Nothing yet,” Torrez said. He stood like a signpost, waiting for her to move, adding no more tracks that later would have to be sorted out.

  Moving with great care, Estelle picked her way through the sparse vegetation, aware of Bob Torrez’s breathing behind her. The second corpse lay twenty feet from the first, dropped by what appeared to be a single shot just above and behind the right ear. A younger man, perhaps in his early twenties, he lay on his face, hand outstretched as if reaching for the heel of the woman who lay in front of him. She lay curled up in a fetal position as if asleep, exhausted from the grueling trip. The wound through the bridge of her nose had bled a single track to puddle in the sand under her head.

  “Just the three?” Estelle whispered.

  “So far,” Torrez said.

  “Looks like they could be mom, pop, and oldest son,” Tom Mears said, and Estelle nodded. All three victims were dressed in simple, nondescript clothing, but the older man’s fancy leather loafers weren’t designed for farm work. The young man wore new running shoes, the woman a neat pair of tan-colored pumps.

  She hesitated at the woman’s body. Death had not crept up from behind for this one. Perhaps, in the last seconds, she had turned to face her attacker, but there had been no time for a struggle.

  “I’d like to run this film backward,” Torrez said. “We got somebody out there that knows how to use a gun.”

  “Ay,” she said, and shook her head. “Maybe teamwork. So many questions.” She turned in place, trying to picture how a single shooter could so efficiently pop three people, perhaps even in the dark, with them trying desperately to scuttle for cover. Unless it had happened so unexpectedly, so suddenly, that the last victim of the three had had only time to pause and half turn toward her attacker.

  “Just a few.”

  “We don’t know if any of this,” she turned to frame the three bodies with both hands, “has anything to do with the airstrip, or the plane. We need to establish that.”

  “Common sense says it does,” the sheriff said. County Road 14, passing by the entrance to the small airstrip, was the nearest byway, but it ran north-south, teeing into State 56. That state highway, heading northeast toward Posadas and southwest to the Mexican border of Regál, was a full mile south of this lonely spot in the desert. The border was eight miles by air, eleven by road. “For one thing, nobody’s tampered with the gate, near as I can tell. I didn’t find any tracks where they walked in across the desert….You can’t hide the tracks of three people.”

  Estelle knew that to be true-as far as Robert Torrez was concerned. Hunting was his passion, whether pronghorn, deer, peccary, coyotes, or people.

  “At least four,” Estelle corrected. She turned in a complete circle, trying to conjure a scenario in her mind that made sense. “They have nothing with them, though. No water bottles, no extra clothing, no weapons no…nothing.”

  “Got to be a simple answer,” Torrez said.

  “I think you’re right about the airplane,” she said. “That makes sense after a fashion.” She stood on her tiptoes, as if adding an extra inch or two would give her the panorama that she needed. “I’d like to have the county’s cherry picker down here. An overview might help.”

  Torrez nodded. He looked at his wristwatch. “It’s three fifty-five. It’ll take an hour to get the maintenance crew out here with a bucket. In the meantime, I want Perrone to establish a TOD just as quick as he can. I don’t think these folks have been camped out here more than a couple of days, three or four at the most. Don’t smell like it.”

  Estelle knelt, looking south. “Why here?” she mused. “Why here?”

  “’Cause that’s where it was convenient,” Torrez said.

  “It’s like real estate,” Estelle said. “Location, location, location.”

  Chapter Three

  Within two hours, the area surrounding the gas company’s runway looked like a movie set, complete with
a Posadas County utility truck’s cherry picker hoisted aloft into the gusty late afternoon sky. Each time she shifted position, Estelle felt the bucket’s gentle sway. Her commanding view, with the lift truck parked fifty yards from the end of the runway and the bucket hoisted thirty feet high, told her nothing new. The three bodies lay in pathetic isolation on the prairie, a few tantalizing yards from the spot where they had apparently deplaned.

  Sergeant Tom Mears worked with Deputy Tom Pasquale, and the “two Toms,” as the sheriff’s wife, Gayle Torrez, called them, had established that the pilot had stopped the aircraft just as the right tire sank into the sand, off the macadam and sixty-five feet from the end of the runway. Swinging wide to turn, the pilot had misjudged by mere inches, dropping first a main and then the nose wheel off the pavement. An odd mistake, Estelle thought, for someone who had landed a loaded aircraft on a short runway, most likely in the dead of night.

  A night landing made sense to her. The risks of trying to cross the border and then land in this isolated place would escalate in daylight-State 56 was a busy highway, and a plane parked on the airstrip would be in plain view.

  With tires precariously in the sandy gravel, it appeared that the pilot had elected to stop the aircraft, perhaps to off-load extra weight. The passengers had deplaned, their feet creating a welter of scuffed prints.

  “That’s one question answered,” Estelle said aloud. Linda Real, the Sheriff’s Department’s photographer and Deputy Pasquale’s roommate, didn’t move a muscle. She hung on gamely as the bucket rocked and dipped like a stuck carnival ride.

  “Which one?” she asked.

  “The trail of shoe prints. I can see them from here.” Estelle swept her arm to indicate the route the three victims had apparently taken, and just that small motion bounced the bucket. Linda flinched. The trail was marked with a row of small wire-stemmed surveyor’s flags.

  “We know-well, we’re close to knowing-that they came here by air. We know that in all likelihood they climbed out of the plane right there,” and she pointed to where the two Toms worked to pour plaster casts of the vague footprints and the one reasonably clear aircraft tire print. “The trouble is that when the pilot gunned the engine to pull the plane forward out of the sand, the prop wash obliterated most of the prints. That’s what I’m thinking right now. We’re not going to be able to tell much from the casts. But when he did that, he gave us a sequence of events.”