Nothing But Trouble Page 7

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And let Colonel Brannon know ASAP that she’s good to go as the team leader of the TDY assignment.”

  The line went dead before Thatcher could respond. His hands were sticky with sweat. He dropped the receiver in the cradle, rubbed a hand through his buzz-cut hair, stared at the palm print on the desktop, wiped it dry with his shirtsleeve, and let the reality sink in that he’d screwed up big time with the new vice chief.

  Sara eased to a stop in the driveway of the Aurora Heights cottage, killed the engine, and sat behind the wheel, trying to purge the last of her negative feelings about her meeting with General Thatcher before she went inside. She didn’t want to start the weekend with Kerney ranting and raving about her boss.

  She gazed at the small brick house with its pitched shingled roof, gabled second-story windows, and formal pilasters that bracketed the front entrance. She loved the house, loved the man and boy who waited for her inside, loved the fact that Kerney had bought it for her and Patrick. It was the first true home she’d lived in since the day she entered West Point.

  Inside, she called out to Kerney and Patrick and got no response. On the kitchen stove a pot of spaghetti sauce simmered, one of Kerney’s specialties he frequently fixed when he came to Arlington. She walked to the small enclosed back porch, heard the sound of Patrick’s laughter, and looked out through the screen door to see father and son playing baseball. Patrick stood with a small plastic bat on his shoulder, watching Kerney chase down a large rubber ball that rolled across the lawn.

  “Home run!” Patrick said.

  “Home run,” Kerney echoed, returning with the ball. He lobbed it underhand to Patrick, who swung and missed.

  The last of Sara’s snit about the meeting with Thatcher washed away as she watched her husband and son at play for another minute, before stepping to the bedroom to change out of her uniform. Last night, anticipating Kerney’s arrival, she’d shaved her legs and taken a long soak in the tub. She dressed in a pair of shorts that accentuated her legs and pulled on a scoop-necked short-sleeve top that revealed the tiniest bit of cleavage.

  In the kitchen Patrick and Kerney were at the table, reading Pablito the Pony. Sara nuzzled Patrick’s cheek and stroked the back of Kerney’s neck.

  “Are you just now reading the book?” she asked.

  “For the third time,” Kerney said, glancing at Sara. “You look yummy.”

  “Yummy means good,” Patrick announced as he turned the page.

  “Can you hold that thought until later?” Sara asked.

  Kerney grinned. “Easily. How did your meeting go?”

  “Okay.”

  Patrick poked his finger on the book to get Kerney’s attention. “This is where Pablito gets his hoof stuck in the fence, Daddy.”

  “Right you are,” Kerney said.

  “I’ll get the noodles started,” Sara said, “while you men finish reading.”

  The phone rang. Sara went to the living room and answered. Kerney paused, hoping it wasn’t the Pentagon calling her back to work. She was still on the phone when he finished reading the story. He closed the book, sent Patrick off to his bedroom to put it away, and found Sara in the living room, her eyes dancing with excitement.

  “Good news?” he asked.

  “I’m staying at the Pentagon for at least six more months,” Sara said, “in a new temporary assignment, with a new boss.”

  “What’s the job?”

  “I’m supposed to develop a military-police training course for reserve and National Guard units.”

  “How did you pull that off?”

  Sara shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “Does this mean your leave is canceled?”

  Sara snuggled up to him. “No way. We’re still going to the Bootheel with you to play Hollywood cowboy.”

  Kerney grinned with relief, held her close, took in her scent. “Well, for now, that’s another piece of puzzle solved.”

  “For now is good enough for me,” Sara replied.

  “I’m hungry,” Patrick said, as he bounded into the living room and grabbed his parents by the legs.

  After a great weekend with Sara and Patrick, Kerney returned to Santa Fe late Sunday night, caught a few hours of sleep, and arrived at work in time to convene an interagency planning meeting for the upcoming Santa Fe Fiesta.

  Every year in September the city celebrated the Spanish reconquest of New Mexico with pageantry, religious services, music, dances, parties, and the public burning of Old Man Gloom. It was a time when a good number of the citizenry got drunk, started fistfights, brawled in bars, vandalized property, fought with spouses, drove under the influence, and occasionally shot or knifed each other. Additionally, the birthrate in the city always spiked nine months later.

  Santa Fe’s finest hated fiestas so much that many officers counted their years to retirement by the number of remaining celebrations they would be forced to work before they turned in their pension papers.

  The meeting, held in the council chambers at city hall, brought together supervisors and commanders of all local, county, and state law-enforcement agencies, plus fire department, EMT, county jail, and hospital ER personnel. Working through the full agenda took the whole morning. Decisions were made on the streets to be closed and manned by uniformed personnel, where first-aid stations would be set up, how many personnel would be assigned to saturation foot and roving traffic patrols, the number of plainclothes, undercover, and gang-unit teams that would operate during the long weekend, and where DWI checkpoints would be established.

  After setting SWAT command-and-control protocols for crowd and riot control, the meeting moved on to a discussion of what bars, liquor establishments, and convenience stores would be targeted for alcohol sales to underage drinkers, and how transportation to the jail and hospital would be coordinated.

  Kerney brought the meeting to a close with a word of thanks and the announcement that he would be on vacation during the fiesta, leaving Larry Otero, his second-in-command, in charge. Because his pending retirement was now common knowledge in all the cop shops, the news was greeted with a lot of grins, head shaking, and friendly catcalls.

  When the last of the group dispersed, Kerney stopped by the mayor’s office and left word that he would stay on as chief until the new administration came into office. At the personnel office he picked up the application for pension forms that needed to be submitted at least sixty days in advance of his retirement.

  Paperwork in hand, Kerney left the building. In six months he would become a civilian. For many cops retirement was a difficult milestone. But with Sara and Patrick in his life Kerney felt ready and eager for the future. He smiled at his good fortune as he walked to his unit.

  In preparation for the tech scout Kerney read up on the history of the Bootheel, a part of New Mexico he’d never really explored. He also surfed the Internet for information and bought some maps of the area to study. In 1853, under the Gadsden Treaty, the United States bought from Mexico over twenty-nine-million acres along the border for a paltry ten million dollars. The land purchase stretched from the Rio Grande to the junction where the Colorado and Gila Rivers joined. The deal had been struck by the government on behalf of the railroad barons, who wanted a southern route to California. Thanks to political patronage a new international boundary was surveyed and the Bootheel was born.

  Eventually, at the turn of the twentieth century, the railroad had been built not to California, but to the copper mines in Arizona. Just as eventually, some sixty years later, the tracks were abandoned and dismantled, thrusting the small towns that had grown up along the right of way into free-fall decay.

  The night before the tech scout was to start, Kerney drove to Deming, a small city on Interstate 10 west of Las Cruces, and stayed in a motel. Although he wasn’t due to meet up with Johnny and the movie-people party until late in the afternoon, he’d come down early so he could poke around and take a quick tour on his own.

  On
a bright, cloudless Friday morning Kerney rolled into Hachita, one of the Bootheel villages devastated by the loss of commerce after the railroad had pulled out. An old locomotive water tank perched on tall steel pillars stood next to the raised rubble of the railbed, still visible under the weeds and shrubby bushes that had gained a strong foothold amid the rocks. Fronting the highway that passed by the settlement stood a low-slung white building that housed a café and store. Next to it was a garage that sold gas, and a boarded-up structure that, according to the sign above the door, had once been a food mart.

  The café consisted of a half-dozen tables crammed into a narrow room. At one end a passageway led to the kitchen, and a small area directly behind the diner served as a grocery store of sorts, offering a few basics such as sugar, flour, bread, and canned goods, and a wider selection of snack foods and soft drinks. On the wall of the café were sport plaques and framed certificates that had been awarded to teenagers from the village who attended high school in Animas, some thirty miles distant.

  At a window table in the empty café, Kerney ate breakfast. From the time it took to place his order and finish his meal, not one vehicle passed along the two-lane blacktop. The bill came to pocket change, and Kerney tripled the tip for the young woman who had served as both waitress and cook.

  Back in his pickup truck he made a quick tour of Hachita, which sat almost squarely on the Continental Divide. In among the derelict buildings, broken-down trailers, and trashed-out, sandy lots filled with the skeletal remains of cars, trucks, and miscellaneous pieces of cannibalized heavy equipment were a few tidy, well-tended, occupied dwellings. Kerney figured no more than sixty people lived in the village proper.

  Aside from the post office, a small, stuccoed structure with a pitched roof, the only other buildings of substance were an old brick schoolhouse now used as an occasional community center, and a Catholic church with a mortared stone vestibule and bell tower that soared above whitewashed adobe walls.

  Beyond the village, at a distance much farther than the eye imagined, the raw and barren-looking Little Hatchet Mountains jutted up from the valley. The mining town of Playas, where the film company would be headquartered, sat due west on the slope of desert scrub hills, out of sight.

  With hours to kill, Kerney turned south, away from Playas, and drove the state road that would take him to Antelope Wells, the most remote port of entry into Mexico along the entire international boundary. The chill of the early desert morning had long passed and the day was heating up. Kerney rolled down the windows to allow the sharp smell of dry air to wash over him, cruised down the empty highway at a leisurely pace, and let his gaze wander over the valley.

  By western standards Kerney’s two sections of rangeland outside Santa Fe hardly qualified as a ranch. Although it contained some good pastureland and live water, a great deal of it consisted of rocky soil that had been overgrazed and invaded by piñon and juniper woodlands.

  Kerney had little knowledge of modern land conservation practices, so to get up to speed he’d enrolled in a series of weekend workshops on restoring western rangeland. Using what he’d learned, he had begun to institute changes on his ranch. Last year he’d cut, lopped, and bulldozed over a hundred acres of woodland that had intruded into a pasture. He would burn the piles later in the fall and reseed the acreage the following spring with cool-season grasses. With that accomplished he planned to create some swales at the lower end of a pond where an arroyo was forming, so the water could spread out slowly and allow the marsh grass and cattails to stabilize the banks.

  What Kerney had in mind to do was only a start. He had a great deal more to learn about good stewardship of his land. But he’d met a number of smart, well-informed people he could turn to for advice and information.

  Along the highway Kerney could see the effects of drought and over-grazing on parts of the valley. Vast acres of gray rabbitbrush and broom snakeweed stretched across the plain under thick stands of greasewood and mesquite. To the untrained eye the landscape looked lovely. But, in fact, it no longer resembled the open grasslands settlers had found over a hundred and twenty years ago.

  At a pasture that had been brought back to life, Kerney stopped the truck and walked to the fence line. A rancher had restored the sandy soil as far as the eye could see with Indian rice grass, blue grama, little bluestem, burro grass, and a few varieties Kerney didn’t recognize. In some places grass stood in waist-high clumps, seed tips waving gently in a slight breeze. Close to the faraway mountains a herd of cattle moved slowly across the valley in the direction of a stand of trees that signaled a water source.

  Only the song of a blue jay on a nearby fence post and the lowing of a cow broke the silence. The growing sound of an engine drew Kerney’s attention to the road and soon a noisy, rattletrap panel truck came into view, traveling at a high rate of speed. Headed north to Hachita, it passed Kerney without slowing.

  Back on the highway, Kerney continued in the direction of Antelope Wells with the Big Hatchet Mountains guiding his way south, announcing the border and Mexico beyond. The road curved sharply at Hatchet Gap. Kerney came through the pass and saw a small flock of crows converging over the blacktop. On the center stripe, a quarter mile distant, he spotted what appeared to be the carcass of a large animal, perhaps a yearling calf. Kerney drew near and hit the brakes as soon as he realized it was a body facedown on the pavement.

  He grabbed his first-aid kit from under the seat of his truck, ran to the body, and rolled it over. Blood bubbled from the smashed mouth and nose, and the skull had been crushed at the temple, exposing the cranial cavity. Teeth protruded through the lower lip, and Kerney couldn’t force the mouth open. He ripped open the shirt, took a small penknife from the kit, probed for the soft spot beneath the trachea, and punched a hole in it. Bloody fluid gushed out, splattering Kerney’s hands and face.

  He dropped the penknife and started CPR, but it was too late. He sat back on his haunches and stared at the body. From what Kerney could make out from the mangled features and the clothing the victim had been a young man, maybe a teenager, probably Mexican, and most likely an illegal immigrant worker.

  Had he been dumped out or accidentally fallen from the back of the panel van?

  In the silence of the sun-drenched morning, as the crows circled noiselessly above, Kerney sat next to the body for a moment on the empty highway, thinking that he’d seen, in both war and peace, far too many dead people.

  He got slowly to his feet and used his cell phone to call for police assistance and an ambulance. He got a tarp and some road flares from the toolbox in the bed of his truck, covered the body, and set out the flares. Above him the crows called out in protest as they floated down to the side of the road and pranced noisily back and forth, while Kerney kept them away with his silent vigil.

  Forty minutes later an EMT from Hachita arrived on the scene, closely followed by a Border Patrol officer up from Antelope Wells. Kerney identified himself to the men, and the officer took his statement while the EMT inspected the corpse. Soon after, a state police officer from Deming appeared with an Animas volunteer fire department ambulance trailing behind. Two cowboys in a pickup truck, hauling a horse trailer filled with hay, stopped to watch the proceedings.

  Kerney gave another statement to the cop, a senior patrol officer named Flavio Sapian, whom Kerney knew from his days as deputy chief of the New Mexico State Police. Sapian put out a radio bulletin on the panel van and took photographs of the dead man. He checked the roadway, the shoulder, and Kerney’s truck for any sign of a collision before releasing the body for transport. As the ambulance pulled away and the Border Patrol Officer left, Sapian walked to Kerney, clipboard in hand.

  “Does this happen often?” Kerney asked.

  Sapian, a stocky man with a fleshy face and deep chest, waved at the cowboys as they drove off. “Not like this. Sometimes a rancher will find a body on his land, or the coyotes—the smugglers who bring the illegal immigrants across the border—will abandon th
em in the desert. But mostly that happens west of here, where the copper smelter is located. It’s forty miles north of the border. The coyotes and immigrants use the flashing lights on top of the smelter stack as a beacon to guide them into the United States. They call it the Star of the North.”

  “Do you think the dead man fell or was pushed?” Kerney asked.

  “It’s hard to say,” Sapian replied. “If he was riding in the panel van as you suggest, you’d think there would be skid marks or other evidence to indicate that something happened to cause the rear door to pop open and the victim to fall out. On the other hand the coyotes pack their customers in trucks like sardines to maximize their profits. The victim could have been leaning against the door and it just gave way.”

  “That may not be what happened,” Kerney said as he walked to the spot where the body had landed on the highway. “He hit facedown, and the only bruising and blunt-force trauma was on the front of his head and torso. There’s nothing here or on the body that shows he either tumbled or slid along the pavement.”

  “That doesn’t prove murder,” Sapian said.

  Kerney looked at Sapian. “You’re right, but homicide can’t be ruled out either.”

  Sapian shrugged. “Maybe the autopsy will tell us something.” “Yeah,” Kerney said as he stared at the bloodstained pavement.

  “You did the best you could to save him,” Sapian said.

  “He was just a kid.”

  Sapian nodded solemnly. “When I was first married, I’d come home from work and my wife would ask me how my day went. Some days I’d just say that she didn’t want to know. Once she asked and I told her. She doesn’t ask that question anymore.”

  “There are days it just gets to you.”

  “I know that feeling, Chief,” Sapian replied, eyeing Kerney’s blood-splattered face, hands, and shirt.

  “I look a mess, don’t I?” Kerney said. “Is there anyplace nearby where I can clean up?”