Nightzone Read online

  “So what the hell?” I said aloud. Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman’s black sedan was parked in the dead center of the county road immediately behind Jackie Taber’s department unit with Eddie Mitchell’s Expedition damn near in the bar ditch beside her. A quarter mile beyond, just across the cattle guard that marked Miles Waddell’s property, a pickup truck was parked facing us, headlights bright and four-ways pulsing.

  My cell phone buzzed, and it took me a while to manipulate the tiny thing right way up.

  “Gastner.”

  “Sir, it would be good if you can pull your vehicle off the roadway about a hundred yards behind mine.” Estelle’s voice was unperturbed. “And if I get busy, don’t walk any farther south than my unit. We have a live power line down.”

  “Copy that.” I didn’t pester her with more questions. In fact, I was surprised that, upon noticing my vehicle driving up, she’d even taken the time for that brief message.

  We had enjoyed no weather capable of dropping power lines, and the only one I knew about in this section of prairie was the main line east-west—wooden double poles with double crossbucks, three double heavy lines plus the ground. Double poles don’t just fall over. They always reminded me of towering mechanical giants, striding confidently across the prairie, arms lugging their electrical burden. They didn’t just fall over. And even if they did, cops don’t leave a homicide scene to attend to the resulting power outage.

  I parked where I was told, then got out and stood beside my vehicle, heavy flashlight in hand. Something popped a shower of bright white very near the roadway. In a moment, the pickup truck’s headlights and four-ways switched off, and things became a bit clearer without those lights staring us in the face.

  Off to my left from the east, the parade of power poles marched across the prairie. And sure enough, the symmetry of their order was broken where the lines sagged in graceful waves toward the ground. Incredibly, three sets were down, three giants toppled, including the set just off the county road.

  Not possible, I thought. Over a lot of years, I’d seen errant trucks sheer single utility poles. Even careening cars sometimes accomplished that. Storms knocked them down now and then, but rarely if ever in our part of the world. Three double units in a row? The moon, working on a bright half, wasn’t much help in making sense of this scene.

  I’d been given permission to advance as far as Estelle’s vehicle, so I gingerly picked my way to the shoulder of the road. When the cavalcade inbound reached my location, I stepped well back. One of the big Posadas Electric Cooperative Kodiak line trucks, toting its bucket lift, broke off from the pack and trundled across the prairie eastward, bucking and lurching, breaking a trail that skirted the damage by a wide margin, finally circling in to the first standing pole set where the power lines started their graceful curve toward the earth.

  A state police unit and two more electric company trucks filed past, then made room for the pumper from the Posadas Fire Department. Behind them, a Bureau of Land Management yellow back-country truck idled in. We had a damn traffic jam.

  Little radio traffic broke the stillness now that most of the crews had embraced the privacy of the cell phone. And sure enough, mine beeped.

  “Gastner.”

  “Sir,” the undersheriff said, “the power has been shut off back at the relay station in Posadas, so we’re clear.”

  “Affirmative.” Why she thought my needing to know that was a priority, I couldn’t guess.

  “We’re going to use my vehicle as the command post, so if you want to make your way up there, we’ll get this circus underway.” I heard the tension in her voice, and knew her patience was thin. All the traffic obliterated prairie marks, pulverizing everything into the fine dust that now rose into the night. She’d done a good job of traffic directing, though. No one parked near the power lines.

  “I’m on my way.” My way was a sedate walk, since night, flashlights, and trifocals make a rotten combination. Ahead, silhouetted against the lights and inky sky, a plume of water fanned out from the pumper, and I could hear the hiss against the flames. It would have done the prairie good to burn off a few million acres, but that wasn’t going to happen.

  Miles Waddell, the rancher whose pickup had been blasting its lights into our faces, and who owned all the land to the south, advanced from his vehicle but stopped well short of the cattle guard where one of the twin legged poles had toppled, sprawling across the county road, one of its legs reared high in the air where it had teeter-tottered across a big juniper corner post that anchored the section fence.

  The wires were a jumbled mess, and the heavy transformer complex that the pole had also carried had broken from its supports and lay askew. That’s where the fire had started, the power lines arcing into the grass. And odds were I’d seen the initial lightning bolts of the short circuit from my perch on Cat Mesa, twenty miles away.

  I reached Estelle’s vehicle and stopped. She had parked directly across the road, and Jackie Taber was unreeling the yellow tape to keep the hordes at bay. With the power now shut down, the electric company crews still kept their distance, waiting for the word from the Sheriff to move in.

  My first view through the binoculars told me that nobody was going anywhere for a while. This wasn’t about the little fire, or the downed poles. A body lay in the dust of the electric company’s two track along the power line, just a few feet from the last broken stump. The victim was lying on his back, arms thrown wide. In the vague, flickering light, the body had that same flat, deflated look shared by Deputy Perry Kenderman. And just beyond his feet, the stump of the electric pole had been cut off three feet above the ground, leaving sharp splinters on one side where the electric tree had taken leave of its stump. Above the dead man, the butt of the pole hung suspended, teeter-tottering over the fulcrum offered by the fence line’s juniper corner post.

  Even a simple crime scene gives up its details a few at a time. Some investigators would claim that, just as there is no such thing as a “routine” traffic stop, there is no such thing as a “routine” homicide crime scene. This night, the questions tumbled in one atop the next, with no coherent pattern or order.

  The most obvious explanation to me, from my vantage point a hundred yards away where I leaned against the front fender of the undersheriff’s Charger, was that somehow this unfortunate soul had stumbled upon the driver of the Nissan pickup, perhaps as the killer was putting the chain saw to the final pole. And like the unsuspecting Perry Kenderman, a single slug had dropped the passerby in his tracks. Nissan man had left the victim to stare at the stars. I was uncomfortable with that scenario, easy as it was. Nothing directly connected this site, this death, with the Nissan. I hadn’t seen it parked in this lonely place.

  But maybe…and where was the victim’s vehicle? Had he been a Mexican afoot? Our harsh desert ate a few of them every season. Or had the little Nissan pickup belonged to him, only to be stolen after his murder? If that was the case, what odd circumstance had set the killer afoot in the desert in the middle of the night, so eager to kill and steal a truck? Again, someone from across the border? I grunted in disgust and dug a toe of my right boot into the dust. That scenario just didn’t work, for myriad reasons. I watched the dark figures moving about in the harsh lights, and took a deep breath of impatience.

  Another state patrolman arrived, a grim-faced kid who looked so much like my eighteen-year-old grandson that he earned a double take from me. Doug Posey, the local Game and Fish officer, joined the party. More Posadas Electric Cooperative hardware, a couple more of the sheriff’s department’s dwindling staff. Then, coming up from the south, three Border Patrol SUVs raised their own dust cloud.

  We had so many flashing red and blue lights that it was impossible to find the Big Dipper.

  Slipping in quietly, Dr. Alan Perrone—finished with his preliminary examination of the unfortunate Perry Kenderman—parked immediately behind Estelle
’s car and paused as he reached me. This time, I earned a long, careful scrutiny.

  “Hell of a night.” He shifted his heavy medical bag to his other hand.

  “Looking endless,” I said.

  “Are you holding up all right? The sheriff tells me you watched all this from up on the mesa?” He turned his back on the light display and gazed off to the north, where Cat Mesa lay rugged and invisible. He shook his head in wonder.

  “I caught just a couple of flashes,” I replied. “My guess is that’s when the transformer went down. But it all beats the hell out of me. And then I saw a single vehicle driving north up to the state highway. That’s not much to go on.”

  He stood quietly, surveying the convocation ahead, an uncharacteristic moment of repose for the peripatetic physician. “So let’s see…” He thumbed his phone. A hundred yards away, it appeared that the undersheriff had her personnel organized to allow some working room. The now-covered body lay in isolation, the black plastic tarp bathed in harsh light from a portable generator.

  “Let me know,” Perrone said into his phone, and listened patiently, nodding now and then as if the speaker on the other end of the phone could see him. “I can bring him in with me.” The physician nodded again, glancing at me. “You bet.” He snapped the phone closed. “You know, we can probably do something about that insomnia of yours.”

  “Maybe tonight it paid off,” I said.

  He chuckle didn’t carry much mirth. “Are you up for a hike?”

  “Hell, why not,” I replied. The sheriff had sent me out here, and I had taken that as just a simple courtesy extended to a former colleague and friend—and since I’d been the only one to witness the beginning of this episode, he’d want to keep me on a short leash until I’d handed in a thorough written deposition. But the last thing I needed right now was to gawk at a corpse.

  The undersheriff would have her reasons to invite me in, and I had the sinking feeling that the answer was obvious. I had known Perry Kenderman for years. Odds were good, in a county this small, that I would also know this pathetic figure lying here, under the black plastic.

  Chapter Four

  Maybe Curtis Boyd’s final fading vision was the great Milky Way spreading across the desert sky. Maybe he had struggled for a few seconds to ponder his lot in life, and what he’d leave behind. All maybes that didn’t concern Dr. Alan Perrone. What did concern the medical examiner was how a veteran Posadas County rancher’s youngest son came to rest in this particular spot, dead as dead can be.

  I’d known the dad, Johnny Boyd, for thirty-five years. He had already become a Posadas County institution by the time I first met him. Service as chairman of the County Fair Board back when the economy allowed fairs, member and then president of the school board for a decade or more, active on the livestock board—he and his wife had raised four kids with all the usual family triumphs and catastrophes. His older bachelor brother, Edwin, had lived at the main house too, and he’d kept the sheriff’s department busy from time to time.

  Curt Boyd, the rancher’s youngest son, had attended his share of rodeos and county fairs as a tyke, sporting the little cowboy boots and oversized hat that scrunched down on top of his ears, so cute, cameras clicked when he scampered by. Years later, I had watched the track meet when the Posadas Jaguars took state, and it had been Curt Boyd who had hammered the pole vault, anchored the mile relay, and set a state record in the 440. He’d dominated the 4-H livestock classes at the county fair as a teenager, but with all of his big fish in a small pond success, Curt had never taken to the ranching life, hadn’t beaten himself lame like his daddy with a life of livestock, barbed wire, post-hole diggers, and recalcitrant windmills.

  The last I’d heard, he had settled in as a social studies teacher in Las Cruces, coaching track on the side. I couldn’t remember when I’d last seen him, but this poor battered corpse bore enough resemblance to the living Curt Boyd that I had no doubts it was him.

  Dr. Perrone muttered something, scrunched down and manipulated the victim’s head and neck. “Is Linda here yet?” He looked up at Estelle, whose own camera had shot dozens of images while she waited for the department’s photographer, Linda Real, who should have been working for the FBI, but instead had married one of the deputies and stayed home and happy.

  “She’s on the way.”

  “You’re going to want to document this pretty thoroughly,” Perrone said. “His neck is broken right at the first cervical. Damage right on down to the fourth. There’s no sign of exterior trauma from the rear, though.” He let out a long breath. “That’s just about the most massive whiplash injury I’ve ever seen.”

  “He wasn’t hit from behind, then.”

  “No. From this.” He traced a line along the victim’s jaw, mangled and bruised. It didn’t take a physician to see that the jaw bone was smashed, with teeth splintered as if some gargantuan boxer had caught him with an uppercut to end all haymakers. Perrone probed delicately with a gloved hand, holding his flashlight close. He fished a small plastic bag from his kit and deftly snapped it open. From a spot just under the jaw line he withdrew a splinter of dark wood. “Somebody clubbed him a good one under the chin.”

  “Somebody or something,” I said. The memory cards were beginning their long, lazy turns around the rusty spindle of my brain’s Rolodex.

  “Sir?” Estelle prompted.

  I glanced at the undersheriff. “All this brings back memories. You remember Morris Ferguson?” No, she didn’t remember. Morris Ferguson was well before her time. But twenty-five or so years before, old Morris had won the job as Posadas’ mayor. He never had the chance to lift the gavel.

  “Morris went up to spend a weekend with his brother in Truchas,” I said. “They went out wood cutting, and a two-foot thick aspen tree they were felling got tangled and kicked back off the stump.” I looked up at the severed electric pole high above our heads, held suspended by the tangle of wires and the stout juniper fence post that acted as its fulcrum. Its marching partner, with the remains of the twisted transformer supports, lay flat in the dust. “Same thing. The aspen kicked back and caught him in the head.” I touched my temple.

  Estelle favored me with a bemused grimace, her dark olive skin and movie star teeth spectacular in all the surrounding lights. I shrugged. “Once in a while I remember something useful.” I reached up, but stretched as tall as I could manage, the butt of the pole was still three feet out of reach, a spear of uncut wood projecting a sword’s length where the pole had been jerked off its stump before the saw cut finished the job. “That would fetch him a hell of a clout.”

  “You’re saying that the pole hit him?”

  “I’m guessing,” I said. “That’s all.” I pointed upward. “Check that butt of the pole for tissue and blood, and that’ll confirm it. But in order for that pole to end up so far in the air…see there? It jacked over that juniper corner post and boom. That would be the sucker punch of all time.”

  Perrone grunted something as he pulled clothes out of the way and then hiked Boyd’s T-shirt up. He found not a mark on the ghostly white skin, not a bruise or nick. Rolling the corpse over, an examination of the back found only some faint scuffing, most likely from landing back-first in the gravel. One elbow had found a patch of cacti.

  “And where’s the saw?” I asked. “Have you had the chance to walk the line back east to the first cuts? If we stick to the tracks of the service road, we can do that without wrecking the scene before daylight.” We, we, we. But hell, I wasn’t the one who had invited me out here. “See, this whole thing makes me nervous.” I turned in a semi-circle. “We have six poles down. Three sets of two. Now, you cut the first one,” and I waved toward the east, “and they’re just going to hang there, maybe all crooked and saggy, but they won’t go down. I’m willing to bet on that.”

  “It takes a special kind of crazy to chain saw a major power line,” Estelle said. “That�
��s a lot of voltage hanging overhead. And you couldn’t possibly predict which way they’d fall…or sag, or whatever.”

  “True. And even worse with the second set. You already have the weight of one pair hanging out of place, their weight on the wires. You whack a second set, and something is going to give way. And a third set?” I shook my head, and touched a toe of my boot to the stump. “What do you think?”

  Estelle remained silent as she knelt down, holding her flashlight to illuminate the back side of the power pole’s fourteen-inch diameter stump. After a moment, she turned and let the light track the few feet over to the county road. “This pole has been hit a number of times.” Her voice was so quiet and husky that I could hardly hear. Maybe the thought hadn’t been intended for me, but I barged in with my two cents anyway.

  “You got this pull-out on the county road,” I said. “A handy turn-around after the cattle guard. Miscalculate a bit and the stock trailer takes a chunk out of the pole. Or somebody backs into it trying to do who knows what.” With a crackle of joints, I knelt beside her, letting my hand run over the rumple of scarred wood on the back side of the pole. “Huh. With all the damage over the years, there isn’t as much wood as maybe our guy thought there was.”

  Estelle stood and beckoned to Linda Real, whose plump figure had materialized out of the shadows. “We need portraits of this every way you can, Linda.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Ditto all the others. Both the stumps and the downed poles. Number them starting at the eastern-most set, one-two, three-four, and these five-six. Northern member of each pair is odd—one, three and five. And I’m more interested in the backside of the cut, how much was left when he jerked the saw out of the wood.”

  “You got it.”

  “Good close-ups of the saw cut and the break point.”

  Linda nodded, but she was already selecting a lens from her camera bag as well as some gadget for the strobe to mute the burst of light.