Nightzone Read online

  Sure enough, half a moment later, the lights reappeared. At that pace, the driver had about six minutes before reaching the intersection with NM 17, the center tine of the fork that eventually entered the village and became our main east-west drag, Bustos Avenue.

  What was now clearly a young prairie fire continued to grow. Unchecked, a fire in that country could run fifty miles without a pause—maybe a good thing, some environmentalists might argue. But the occasional rancher wouldn’t think so. I reached around my belt and found the little holster that contained the cell phone, an odious gift from my eldest daughter on my seventy-fourth birthday. I had promised Camille that I would always carry it. First, she had tried to get me to wear one of those medical alert gadgets around my neck. Not a chance. If I fell up here on the mesa, the buzzards’ circle would be my alert. Camille and I compromised on the phone. The first auto-dial rang twice before pick up.

  “Posadas County Sheriff’s Department. Sandoval.” Renee Sandoval sounded as if she were twelve years old. I’d known her since she was two, when Children, Youth and Families rescued her from a miserable non-home situation. I had put her dad in jail and, free of that creep and her child, Renee’s mother took off for a new life, leaving Posadas and Renee in her dust. By a kind twist of fate, Renee found happiness with a super foster family and took their name, then married a solid guy well into a career with the telephone company. She doted on hubby and their three well-grounded urchins.

  “Deputy Sandoval, this is Bill Gastner.” I rattled off the cell phone’s number, and she didn’t ask me to repeat. “We have what looks like a grass fire about twelve miles south of State 17 just off County Road 14, near Waddell’s place.” I raised the glasses again. “I’m watching a vehicle northbound on 14 that may have been involved somehow. He’s about five miles south of the intersection with 17, and I’ll let you know which way he goes when he reaches the highway.”

  “Say your location, sir?”

  “I’m on the rim of Cat Mesa about a mile in from Forest Road 128.”

  “Ten four.” After one a.m. on a brisk February night? The unflappable Renee didn’t ask. Like other members of the sheriff’s department, she knew my habits well enough, even though she’d never worked for me during my tenure. And as the current sheriff, Robert Torrez, had once observed, “What’s so great about daytime, anyways? You can’t see anything…”

  “Can you stay with me, sir?”

  “Affirmative.” I could hear the radio chatter, and recognized the voice of Brent Sutherland, the sole road deputy on duty. He reported from just east of María, a tiny hamlet tucked in the far southeast corner of the county. That put him twenty minutes out, even if he flogged the horses.

  The cold was starting to seep through the old blanket and my down-quilted coat. The boulder had given up the last of its daytime heat storage, and I stood up to unpetrify my butt. A cup of coffee and a cigarette would have tasted wonderful, even though I hadn’t smoked for a dozen years. And then I froze in place.

  “Well, I’ll be damned.” From a mile west of Posadas, itself a modest wash of lights, the county was black—not a ranch house, not a yard light, not even the parking lot lights of Victor Sanchez’s Broken Spur Saloon, far to the south. I turned carefully. The entire western half of the county was unbroken night. I’d been concentrating on one point of interest and hadn’t noticed the lights wink out—there were too few to make a grand show. But sure enough, the one sodium vapor light that should have illuminated the fuel island down at Posadas Municipal Airport didn’t. Much farther south, the Prescott ranch was in the dark where I knew two yard lights should have illuminated the yard and corral.

  “Dispatch, has anyone called in a power outage? To the west of the village?”

  “That’s negative, sir.”

  “You might want to give Posadas Electric a buzz, then. See what they have. I don’t know if it’s related to the fire I’m reporting or not. And be sure to tell the deputy that the vehicle I reported heading northbound may have nothing to do with any of this.”

  “Affirmative.” She was gracious enough not to ask who the hell I thought I was, delivering her marching orders.

  Minutes ticked by. That one set of headlights followed the black contour map north. Eventually the speeding vehicle reached the state highway and turned east with a wild swerve—I didn’t know any ranchers who drove like that, but their teenaged kids did, especially after leaving a beer blast to tackle a double-dog dare.

  “The vehicle in question has turned east on 17. He’s moving right along.” That put him eight miles due west of the village.

  “Affirmative, sir. Deputy Kenderman is available. I’ll have him swing that way.”

  “Advise him to approach with caution. Sorry I can’t give him a description, but right now, it’s the only vehicle eastbound on that stretch of highway.” Perry Kenderman was a part-timer whom the sheriff’s department had inherited when the village of Posadas gave up its remnant force and contracted with the county for police services. Kenderman was far from the sharpest tool in the box, and had had his share of troubles in the past. But when the department had only one deputy on duty in the county, it was handy to have even a part-time officer ready to take a call in the village.

  The radio background told me that Deputy Sutherland was northbound toward the village from the southeast, and Kenderman was just swinging onto Bustos from Sixth Street. I could stand there on the mesa rim as a long-range bystander, but there was enough going on down below to trigger my curiosity and to remind me that the winter night’s chill was winning. I needed coffee.

  With a last look through the binoculars to make sure the scooting vehicle hadn’t turned off as it neared the village, I left the mesa rim. In a few moments, my SUV was jouncing down Forest Road 128, brushing its fenders against piñon and juniper limbs where the two track narrowed and twisted. I drove carefully, without any great sense of urgency.

  A cattle guard rough enough to loosen teeth marked the intersection with County Road 43, the ribbon that approached the village from the north, and in another three miles, gravel turned to pavement. As the macadam snaked down the mesa toward Posadas, I turned up the radio just in time to hear Kenderman’s gravelly voice announce, “Three zero two is stopping a blue Nissan pickup, license not readable.”

  I frowned with impatience at the lack of information. Where was Kenderman, exactly? How many occupants were in the truck? Even if the plate was unreadable, there was more he could give us. Camper shell? Club or crew cab? Guess at vintage?

  “PCS, three zero niner is five south on seventy-six,” Sutherland radioed. “I copy three zero two.”

  Dispatch wasn’t satisfied with Kenderman’s cryptic radio call. “Three zero two, ten twenty? Backup ETA is six minutes.” The traffic stop couldn’t have been very far from the village line. Kenderman didn’t respond, no doubt already out of the patrol car, flashlight in hand. I could picture him rolling his bony shoulders in that odd habit of his as if his uniform was chaffing in all the wrong places.

  The driver of the Nissan couldn’t know that he had been watched on his rush north across the prairie. Nor could he know that he was being stopped by a part-time cop who was both careless and inexperienced.

  We had several minutes to wonder about Kenderman’s traffic stop as his backup headed north toward him. If the truck driver was reporting a prairie fire, Kenderman should have been on the radio, relaying the information for the fire department. Maybe he was an acquaintance of Kenderman’s and the two men were standing under the stars, chatting.

  I had reached the abandoned Consolidated Mining boneyard halfway down the mesa when the relative peace and quiet of the early morning hours were broken by Deputy Sutherland’s frantic radio call as he reached the scene of the traffic stop—a call that set off the blizzard of radio traffic that filled the air during the time it took me to drive from the mesa into the village, then head wes
t on Bustos Avenue.

  It required more self-control than I possessed not to hurry in response to Sutherland’s frantic “officer down” call, but I paid attention to the road, muscles so tense they ached. The last thing I needed to do was collect a deer standing in the middle of the road, or some emergency vehicle headed to the scene. Just as important, I needed to stay out of the investigating officers’ way, and that was the hardest of all. By the time I arrived at that lonely spot just west of town, the sheriff was already there, dressed in rumpled jeans and sweatshirt. He had no hair long enough to comb, but I knew he’d just rolled out of bed and into the first thing he could find.

  Two off-duty deputies had joined him, and I pulled to a stop on the highway shoulder a hundred yards out. The real cops were on the job. There was nothing for me to do except tell someone exactly what I’d witnessed.

  The undersheriff’s black Charger rumbled by me, braking hard. This time, Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman didn’t park. She hesitated just long enough to exchange a few words with the sheriff, then drove past the scene and headed west on the state highway. How goddamn odd, I thought. She hadn’t even stepped out of her car before leaving the scene. And there was only one explanation for that.

  “What the hell is this all about?” I said aloud. From what I could see, State Route 17 would soon be slammed shut, this patch of macadam taped off. The vehicle that Kenderman had stopped was nowhere in sight, so common sense told me the assailant was history, leaving only a victim behind.

  I sat back, trying to relax but feeling that awful, too-familiar creep of ice in my gut. Kenderman’s patrol car was parked facing town, front wheels cocked toward the pavement, a wisp of exhaust issuing from the tailpipes, light show in full operation. A body was crumpled in the middle of the east-bound lane thirty feet or so in front of the aging Crown Vic county car. Part-time officer Perry Kenderman’s body had that flat, deflated look of the truly dead, underscored by the large dark puddle of blood spreading on the asphalt. I didn’t need a closer look.

  The radio jabbered some more, and I turned it down a bit. I knew the drill, and didn’t need to hear all the machine gun chatter of calls. I knew what the procedure would be now. Of all the people responding to this mess, I was the last one who needed to clomp his size twelves through the evidence field. I turned up the SUV’s heat a notch and sat quietly.

  Every road out of Posadas County should be corked, and there lay one of Sheriff Bob Torrez’s most obvious challenges. Sure enough, cops had responded to this site without delay or confusion once Deputy Sutherland’s distress call had gone out. But by then, Deputy Perry Kenderman had been dead for too many minutes. If the driver of the blue Nissan had headed for the interstate, he already enjoyed a substantial lead. If the killer hadn’t headed to the interstate, it was anyone’s game.

  This computer age would assure that an APB would reach its tendrils from sea to sea, well ahead of the killer. But the loopholes were plentiful, and no computer could plug them. The killer could have headed out of the county in several creative ways, sticking to back roads until he was free of the net. If he’d headed south toward Mexico without knowing that the border crossing at Regál was closed from midnight to six, he’d flounder a little trying to decide what to do. If he was a local—and his speed maintained on the gravel county road suggested that he might be, any side street, any alley, any parking lot or garage might hide the little truck.

  Dr. Alan Perrone’s BMW whispered into view, and he stopped in the middle of the highway beside me, never taking his eyes off the view ahead. Sheriff Torrez waved at him, pointing at a spot on the shoulder fifty yards ahead of Kenderman’s unit and the pathetic shape now under a blue tarp. As he pointed, Torrez strode down the road toward us. He paused for a moment to talk with the physician, then headed for my SUV.

  “Kenderman’s dead.” The sheriff’s voice was husky and nearly inaudible. He touched his own right cheekbone, then a spot two inches behind his left ear. When Perry Kenderman, flashlight in hand, bent his lanky six-foot three-inch frame down to peer into the driver’s window of the Nissan, he never suspected a thing. He hadn’t tried to jump back, hadn’t staggered away. He’d dropped in place when the bullet crashed through his brain.

  “He never had a chance to touch his gun,” the sheriff said. “And the son-of-a-bitch drove over Kenderman’s right foot when he left.” Up ahead, I watched as Dr. Perrone peeled back the blue drape and then stood quietly, looking down at Perry Kenderman.

  “What can I do to help?” I knew that detailed depositions of what I’d seen or heard would be required, but right now, this very dark second, there might be something more urgent that a well-trained civilian, however firmly retired, might do. Sheriff Torrez stared down at the pavement for a moment. He had no extra moments to waste, and I waited impatiently for him to kick into gear. The thunder of a heavy diesel interrupted us, and I looked in my rearview mirror to see the winking lights of a fire engine, and behind that in tight formation, two pickups and a couple of electric company bucket trucks.

  “Tell you what…these guys need to get through. Go on ahead and follow Estelle. Jackie Taber is just about there by now.” He nodded toward the approaching parade. “These guys will be right behind you.” His huge hand slapped my window sill. “And be careful. We got us another one out there.” Another one out there. I could have asked a dozen questions, but as the iceberg grew below my heart, Torrez had already straightened up and was striding back toward the first truck, radio in hand.

  “You got it,” I called, but he didn’t pause to chitchat or explain. Nothing I could do would help Perry Kenderman. I wasn’t a religious sort, but was a believer in balancing the scales here on planet Earth. To that end, my mind was already focused on out there.

  Chapter Three

  Cops don’t drive away from a homicide scene to check out something as mundane as an out-of-control campfire. I had expected Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman to hit supervision of the Kenderman homicide scene at a dead run. But she hadn’t even stepped out of the car. Did another one out there mean that some other innocent soul had walked up to the blue Nissan, this time to beg a ride, a drink of water, a spare tire or lug wrench? Like anything else, I supposed, killing grew easier with practice.

  I knew every rancher in that part of the country where I’d seen the lights, and counted most of them as friends—even the high-profile Miles Waddell, on whose ranch property I had been hiking lately in my quest to investigate the life of Josiah Bennett, and on whose property the rocks grew that had sheltered the Colt revolver. An hour after finding the gun, I’d showed it proudly to Waddell, and he’d wondered right along with me what kind of story it had to tell. He had left that investigation to me, though. He was deeply involved now in a project to place an observatory on top of his own private mesa. Contractors had just finished his access road, but they weren’t working there at night. I could imagine Miles, sometimes a bit confrontational, running afoul of some wacko—although what either one of them would be doing out and about at one in the morning on a winter night on the open, desolate prairie was anyone’s guess. Investigators would ask me the same thing. More scenarios.

  I tried to relax as the SUV held eighty-five miles an hour on State 17, but that was impossible, knowing that the two young women—Sergeant Jackie Taber and Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman—were driving into the unknown…an unknown perhaps populated by some trigger-happy freak. Of course they could take care of themselves. I’d always thought that Perry Kenderman could, too.

  A mile before the County Road 14 turnoff, a pair of headlights blossomed in my rearview mirror, the grill wiggle-waggle lights frantic. In a few seconds, an Expedition proved it could break one hundred as it shot past me, driven by Captain Eddie Mitchell. Mitchell, a veteran of large metro police departments Back East before joining first the village as chief, and then the sheriff’s department as captain when the village department dissolved, was cool, toug
h, and fearless. I felt better, and lifted my foot as up ahead the intersection reflectors popped out of the dark.

  County Road 14 had been a nasty, narrow two-track until a year ago when the road was widened, graded, and graveled, pounded by heavy trucks into a boulevard as they headed toward rancher Miles Waddell’s project. Traffic produced plumes of cloying dust, and now the night air was thick with it as I bumped off the state highway. Up ahead, Mitchell’s lights disappeared, and then I was forced to slow as the southbound county road tackled Bennett’s Fort, a ragged mesa I’d named a dozen years ago—and the same geology I’d scanned through binoculars from the distant mesa-top less than an hour earlier.

  I’d seen the Nissan’s headlights dodging around the curves northbound, but try as I might, I could add no information that would be useful to the sheriff. Two headlights in the dark…that was the whole of it. But Sheriff Bobby Torrez hadn’t just told me to go home and crawl into bed—he hadn’t told me that he’d deal with my deposition in the morning.

  In another five miles, I caught still more glimpses of the rainbow of lights in my rearview mirror, the cavalcade of emergency vehicles gaining on me relentlessly. One more rise, and I saw our target…a smallish grass fire working its way to the north, running right along the county road and edging out into the open prairie. The flames licked straight up, the smoke hesitant to pick a direction. It was the sort of prairie fire you could fight with a garden hose. It didn’t need most of the county’s emergency services resources.

  I slowed, peering this way and that into the night. Surely this show of emergency support didn’t leave the scene of an officer down to respond to a grass fire—in a spot where it could burn unmolested for hours without hurting anybody or anything.