The Big Gamble Read online

  “Really?” Seton said. “Was anyone hurt?”

  “Two bodies were found inside.”

  Seton’s eyes darkened. “That’s terrible. Were they killed in the fire?”

  “We’re still investigating the cause of death,” Clayton answered.

  “That place has been boarded up for years. I drive by it all the time.”

  “Do you or any members of your family ever stop to inspect the property?”

  Seton’s expression tightened. “There’s been no reason to. Whoever those poor people were, they trespassed. That property is posted with a keep-out sign. Are you suggesting negligence?”

  “That’s not the focus of the investigation.”

  Seton’s look darkened. “I’d better contact our lawyer anyway.”

  “Maybe you should,” Clayton said. “Who has access to the property?”

  “Just the family, and the realtor who has it listed for sale. We’ve been trying to sell it, but nobody is interested in an acre of highway frontage outside of town without water or electricity.”

  “Have you rented it out in the past twelve years?”

  “Not to my knowledge. But my father would know for certain.” Seton pulled her chin back and gave Clayton a chilly look. “Why twelve years? The stand has been there longer than that.”

  “I’m just gathering information, Ms. Seton. Who’s the listing agent?”

  Seton gave Clayton the name of a Carrizozo realtor.

  “How long has it been up for sale?” Clayton asked.

  “Ten years or more,” Seton replied.

  “Are you aware the fruit stand had a cellar?” Clayton asked.

  Page Seton nodded. “The cellar served as cold storage for our apples and fresh cider.”

  “When was the last time it was used to sell fruit?” Clayton asked.

  Seton paused. “Twenty years. Grandfather shut it down the year I turned seven.”

  “Has anyone—family, employees—been there since then?”

  “It’s impossible for me to answer that question,” Seton replied. “We have seasonal workers. Some of them return every year, others will pick one crop for us and never come back, and there are always a few we have to let go. As far as family goes, you’ll have to ask, and it’s a pretty big clan, Deputy.”

  “The names and phone numbers of family members involved in the business will do for now,” Clayton said.

  “What exactly are you investigating, Deputy?”

  “Unattended deaths, at this point, Ms. Seton. Has the fruit stand been used for any other purposes?”

  “Such as?”

  “Parties, beer busts, a make-out place?”

  Page Seton looked upward as if to seek divine relief from stupid questions. “Not by me, Deputy, and certainly not by any member of the family that I know of.”

  “I’ll need those family names and phone numbers,” Clayton said.

  While Seton assembled the information, Clayton asked a few more questions. He left knowing that the Tully ranch and farm had been a family business for over a hundred and twenty years, that Page Seton was the financial officer of the company, and that the ranch operation was headquartered on the east side of the Capitan Mountains, where her parents, Morris and Lily Tully Seton, were staying while the spring works, a semiannual cattle roundup and calf-branding event, took place.

  Clayton also learned that Hiram Tully’s stroke had not hampered his ability to communicate. He decided to interview Tully first and then swing by the ranch on the back road to Capitan. In his unit, a four-by-four Ford Explorer, Clayton keyed the microphone and checked dispatch for messages. No calls had come in from either the Santa Fe PD or Chief Kerney, but the state police crime scene supervisor reported that a match had been made with the skeleton found in the cellar and Anna Marie Montoya’s dental records.

  Clayton’s interviews with Hiram Tully and Morris and Lily Seton served only to confirm what Page Seton had told him. He came away thinking that he’d accomplished nothing more than eliminating some highly unlikely suspects. The chances of solving an eleven-year-old homicide were slim at best. If no creditable leads materialized, background investigations on everyone in the Tully family would need to be done.

  He looked over the list of family members Page Seton had provided. Excluding the four people already interviewed, another eight would need to be contacted. He’d ask Quinones and Dillingham to start the ball rolling if they came up empty on the field interviews near the crime scene.

  Even without any tangible progress, Clayton remained pumped about his assignment. He was particularly eager to go to Santa Fe and do some real digging into Anna Marie Montoya’s past. Besides, it would be a kick to clear a case that had stymied Kerney. He smiled at the prospect of it.

  The day was more than halfway gone. With all that was left to do, Clayton figured he had another full day or two of work before he could leave for Santa Fe. He called the tribal day-care center where Grace worked as a teacher and told her that he wasn’t going out of town right away.

  “When will you go?” Grace asked.

  “I’m not sure yet,” Clayton said. “Maybe the day after tomorrow.

  “Sometime soon, I think all of us should go to Santa Fe.”

  “I can’t take you and the kids with me.”

  “I know that,” Grace said. “I’m thinking of a weekend family outing.”

  “If we left early in the morning, we could make it a day trip,” Clayton said, thinking about how pricy Santa Fe could be.

  “That wouldn’t be enough time,” Grace replied.

  Since neither Clayton nor Grace worked in high-paying professions, Clayton constantly worried about family finances. “I thought we were saving money to build the addition,” he said.

  “A weekend trip to Santa Fe won’t bankrupt us, Clayton.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.”

  “Will you be home for dinner?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “I’ll see you then,” Grace said before hanging up.

  He checked in with dispatch. Kerney still hadn’t called back. He gave his ETA to Carrizozo and told the dispatcher he’d be at John Foley’s real estate office when he got into town.

  The office was in an old building where Central Avenue curved and became E Avenue. One of the town’s first permanent structures, it had started out as a tin shop in the early part of the twentieth century. Foley’s late-model Cadillac was parked at the side of the building.

  Inside, Foley pressed a cup of coffee into Clayton’s hands and sat with him, making small talk. A big man in his late seventies, Foley had slightly hunched shoulders and carried some extra pounds around his midsection that spilled over his tightly cinched belt and showy turquoise and silver buckle.

  With some difficulty, Clayton guided Foley to the topic of the fruit stand. After talking about the fire, he got a short history of Foley’s failed attempts to sell it. He asked if Foley had records on any prospective buyers that went back eleven or twelve years.

  Foley shook his head. “I only keep information about potential clients who are solid prospects. I don’t recall ever showing that property to a serious client. It’s too far out of town to have any commercial value and there’s no water, phone, or electricity to the property line.”

  “When was the last time you were out there?” Clayton asked.

  “Let me think,” Foley replied. “Two, three years ago. I showed it to a fella who was interested in starting a flea market and living on the property. But he didn’t want to invest any money in extending the utilities and digging a well.”

  “Did you ever go into the fruit stand?”

  “There was no need to,” Foley said. “According to the Ruidoso newspaper, you found a murder victim in that fire.”

  “I didn’t realize that information had been released.”

  Foley handed Clayton the newspaper. Sheriff Hewitt had not only briefed the press about the homicide, but had gone on at some length about assign
ing his highly qualified Apache deputy, Clayton Istee, as lead investigator.

  Clayton folded the newspaper, gave it back to Foley, thanked him for the coffee and his time, and left the office. He understood the sheriff’s decision to go public about the homicide, but he would have liked to have been forewarned. He also wondered when all the sheriff’s self-congratulatory public and private back-patting about hiring an Indian cop was going to end. Soon, he hoped. It was getting tiresome.

  He sat in his unit and wrote up some notes before checking in with dispatch. Kerney still hadn’t returned his call, and Quinones and Dillingham were reporting that no useful information had been gathered so far in their field interviews. But on a more positive note, there weren’t any anxious messages from the sheriff asking for a status update.

  He reached Quinones by radio and got the names of people who still needed to be contacted. If he hurried a bit, he could finish his part of the canvass, go back to the office to finish his paperwork, hold a quick team meeting, and call it a day.

  Chapter 2

  Back late from an all-day meeting in Albuquerque, Kevin Kerney sat in his office and paged through the Anna Marie Montoya missing person file. Until yesterday Montoya had never been found and the investigation had remained officially open, although not actively worked for some time. There were periodic entries by various detectives summarizing meetings and phone conversations with family asking if any new information about Montoya’s whereabouts had surfaced, along with unsuccessful query results from other law enforcement agencies regarding the identification of human remains found elsewhere.

  Notations in the record showed that every year on the anniversary of Montoya’s disappearance, her parents met with a detective sergeant to ask about progress in the case. One supervisor had scrawled in the margin of the supplemental contact report, “These sweet people foolishly refuse to give up hope.”

  Kerney shared the detective sergeant’s sentiments. Based on what was known about Montoya, she was an unlikely candidate to go missing, so foul play was the only scenario. He scanned the woman’s personal information. Born and raised in Santa Fe, Anna Marie, age twenty-nine, was about to earn a master’s degree in social work when she disappeared. She lived in an apartment with a roommate, her best friend since high school. She was engaged to be married to a young, up-and-coming businessman, had a good job lined up after graduation, and worked as a part-time counselor at a youth shelter. She had strong ties with her family and a tight-knit circle of friends.

  Montoya’s roommate reported her missing on a day when the major crimes unit was busy busting a burglary ring, so Kerney, then serving as chief of detectives, handled the call. Montoya had failed to return overnight from an evening reception for graduating students held near the university campus in Las Vegas, fifty miles north of Santa Fe.

  Kerney had run his inquiry according to the book and come up empty. Montoya’s car, which was found at a shopping mall parking lot in Santa Fe the day after her disappearance, provided no clues or evidence of foul play. People at the reception remembered Montoya leaving the gathering alone. All in attendance had strong alibis for their whereabouts during the remainder of the night. Family, friends, and coworkers knew of no troubles which would have made Montoya want to go missing. Her fiancé, who’d spent the night Montoya vanished in the company of his roommate, reported no problems with their relationship. Faculty members at the school of social work disclosed that Montoya stood near the top of her class academically, had congenial relationships with instructors and fellow students, and had evidenced no signs of stress, unhappiness, or depression.

  With nothing that pointed to a motive or a suspect, Kerney had dug for some dirt on Montoya, hoping to uncover a shady tidbit about her past or a shabby little secret. Nothing incriminating had surfaced. Anna Marie had been a solid, upstanding young woman who’d lived a respectable life.

  He’d interviewed casual male acquaintances and all the men who lived in the apartment complex where Montoya resided in the hopes of finding someone who fit a stalker profile, but nothing emerged.

  He studied the woman’s photograph, taken just a few weeks before she vanished. She had round, dark eyes that looked directly at the camera and seemed to hide nothing, full lips that smiled easily, a quizzical way of holding her head, and long curly hair that fell over her shoulders. It was an intelligent face that held a quiet, sincere appeal.

  The telephone rang and Kerney picked up.

  “I thought you might be working late,” Sara said.

  Kerney smiled at the sound of his wife’s voice. “How are you?”

  “Tired of being a pregnant lieutenant colonel in the army,” Sara replied. “Emphasis on the word pregnant.”

  “Protecting the country from known and unknown enemies while having a baby does seem a bit inconvenient,” Kerney said.

  Sara laughed. “The pregnant part is slowing me down and I don’t like it. I have to sleep for two, eat for two, and basically think for two. It’s distracting me from my career path.”

  “Does that mean you won’t be the honor graduate at the Command and General Staff College ceremony?”

  “I will be the biggest blimp of an officer to ever waddle up to the stage and receive that high honor,” Sara said.

  Kerney let out a whoop. “You got it!”

  “You’re first supposed to say that I will look beautiful at the ceremony, pregnant or not. Indeed I did, by two-tenths of a percentage point. And if you’re not here to see me graduate, I’m divorcing you for mental cruelty and emotional abandonment.”

  “You are beautiful,” Kerney said. “I promise to be there. But it’s still a whole month off.”

  “And you won’t see me until then,” Sara said.

  “You can’t break away for a weekend at all?” Kerney asked.

  “I’ve way too much to do. Besides I’m not sure you want to see me minus my girlish figure.”

  “I’ll stare at your chest,” Kerney said.

  “Even that has enlarged a bit.”

  Kerney laughed. “I’ve heard from Clayton in a roundabout way.”

  “Really? Tell me about it.”

  Kerney gave her the facts about the missing person case he’d handled eleven years ago, and Clayton’s discovery of Anna Marie Montoya’s remains.

  “Sometimes fate smiles on you, Kerney,” Sara said when Kerney finished.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Now you have a perfect opportunity to connect with Clayton. Use it.”

  “I tried that before, remember?”

  “You’ve had three, maybe four conversations with Clayton in your lifetime, all in the space of a few very intense days. That hardly constitutes a major effort.”

  “The effort has to be mutual,” Kerney said.

  “You cannot tell me that Clayton isn’t at least a little bit curious about who you are on a personal level.”

  “He hasn’t shown any interest,” Kerney said.

  “Oh, stop it, Kerney,” Sara said. “You sound like a little boy with hurt feelings. Just because Clayton didn’t follow through on a dinner invitation he hastily suggested, after you left him speechless by establishing a college fund for his children, doesn’t mean he’s cold to knowing you.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “So?”

  “So, I’ll try to be a grown-up.”

  “Good. If I were with you, I’d be giving you sweet kisses right now.”

  “As a reward for trying to be a grown-up?” Kerney asked.

  “No, as a prelude to wild, abandoned sex. I’ll talk to you soon, cowboy.”

  Kerney hung up smiling and returned his attention to the Montoya case file. What had he missed in the original victim profile? Unless Anna Marie had been abducted and killed randomly by a complete stranger, events in her life should point to a motive for murder.

  He’d found nothing when the case was fresh, and now surely people had scattered, memories had dimmed, and hard physical evidence—if any
was to be found—had vanished.

  Kerney sat back in his chair and inspected the two framed lithographs Sara had helped him select for his office. One, a winter scene with a solitary horse grazing in a pasture, was centered above a bookcase on the wall opposite his desk. The second image showed an old cottonwood in summer, branches dense with leaves. It hung next to the office door.

  At the time, he’d teased Sara about picking out such serene, idyllic images to hang on a police chief’s office walls.

  “These are reminders,” she’d replied.

  “About?”

  “Places we need to find when we’re together.”

  “For what purpose?” Kerney had asked.

  “Are you dense, Kerney? Look at that cottonwood tree. Look at that pasture. What would we most want to do in either setting?”

  “Just checking.”

  Kerney put the remembrance aside and flipped through the Montoya case file one more time. It was Deputy Sheriff Clayton Istee’s homicide investigation now. He’d heard through the cop-shop grapevine that Clayton had recently switched from the tribal police to the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department. He called the sheriff’s dispatch number, left a message advising Clayton he’d be available to discuss the Montoya case first thing in the morning, locked up his office, and walked downstairs through the quiet, almost empty building to his unmarked unit.

  Clayton bypassed the office and started work interviewing ranchers and home owners he’d missed yesterday. By the fifth stop, the responses became predictable. The canvass had turned into a see-nothing, know-nothing Q-and-A exercise. Nobody knew diddly or had a shred of useful information.

  Once the formality of being questioned was out of the way, everybody tried to get some juicy gossip-talk going. He just smiled and shook his head in reply.

  He contacted Sergeant Quinones and Deputy Dillingham by radio, who reported similar dead-end results. Dispatch called to advise that the local crime-stoppers organization had put up a thousand-dollar reward for any information leading to the arrest of Anna Marie’s killer. The news gave Clayton a touch of renewed enthusiasm.