Years ago, I had sued Solms County and the Sheriff’s Department for an unnecessary beat down and subsequent hospitalization. I’d had a good chance of winning the lawsuit, too, but I had settled before we went to trial and it was for a fraction of the amount Constance had sued for on my behalf. I was and still am a man that believes a bird in hand is worth two in the bush. Constance had never forgiven me for the low settlement and felt to this day I had shortchanged her out of millions. I suspected that I had not heard the last of it, especially after telling her I might sell the Pape Ranch. She would come after me now with a vengeance.
Constance’s call reminded me that my association with her for over forty years was more about unpleasantness than joy, but it was what it was. I was too far along in life to worry about her anymore. She had made a nice living off of me as my attorney. I had more important things in front of me now than to concern myself with Constance and whether I had done right by her.
Emily had once told me that I saw the world through rose colored glasses. I wasn’t sure exactly what she meant by the expression‒who wore rose colored glasses? The truth was, I tended to see life through the experiences I had lived through; not how other people saw life.
Me and ol’ Hopalong saw things pretty much alike and it didn’t do me a damn bit of good to try and explain myself to other people. Kevin was a good example. Sure, I was angry that he had gotten Ariana pregnant, but that wasn’t what this was about. Kicking him out of the house was just a knee-jerk reaction to that anger. What the boy needed now, was not sympathy, but a challenge. He needed to find out for himself what he was made of and I was just the man to help him do that. And, it was time to head Constance off at the pass before she could bushwhack me.
I stepped down out of the truck to relieve myself and thought better of it with guests on the ranch. I went inside the ranch house to see if the plumbing was working yet. As I headed for the house a roadrunner scooted between the scrub bushes near the toolshed with a small writhing rattlesnake in its beak. It couldn’t have been more than eight inches and too young to be dangerous, yet. Another few years that snake would be chowing down on the roadrunner if it was stupid enough to mess with a grown rattlesnake. It reminded me that it was getting near lunch time and maybe I didn’t really need to go see what the turkey vultures were up to. At that particular moment I was thinking more about my stomach and not the significance of gathering vultures or a baby rattlesnake.
Water to the bathroom still hadn’t been hooked up but there was a bucket of water to flush with. After I answered the call of nature, I headed outside to refill the water bucket. The number of vultures circling had increased so I decided to skip lunch and go see what was happening out there. After I brought the bucket inside, I did a quick look around to inspect the work being done.
A man I knew as Pepe was sanding a drywall.
“Qué pasa,” I said as I walked up. “Have you seen Tomás?”
“No, Señor Howard. Not today. Or yesterday.”
“You think he left?”
Pepe shrugged. “You need a new man? My brother is good with animals.”
“I’ll let you know, Pepe.”
I felt the seams on the wall Pepe was finishing. Pepe was pretty good at hanging sheetrock. He did a better job than I could do. Every piece I hung in my new house had a couple of dimples in it.
I felt Pepe’s eyes on me. I was avoiding going out to see what was going on the pasture. “Good work, Pepe,” I said. “Where’s Hank?” Hank was the stone mason.
“I have not seen him in a while. Last week, maybe.”
I didn’t feel like waiting around for the crew foreman. He had crews all over the county and there was no telling when he would show up to check on his crew at the Pape Ranch. I also didn’t want to call him to ask where his stone mason was; that would alert Hank. I wanted to catch Hank by surprise so I good gauge his reaction when I questioned him.
I left Pepe and the ranch house and headed out for the area I had seen the vultures. Turkey vultures were pretty common in this part of the Texas Hill Country. They had in fact helped me to locate two of the four missing college students from Texas State University not long ago. It was more their sociable behavior and the resulting raucous gathering that had pointed me to the student’s bodies. I did eventually find the other two missing students alive on the Texas Coast and that was the only good thing to come out of the whole ugly and sordid mess. I was glad it was over with and I was outdone with myself for being wary at the sight of vultures again; vultures were a good thing for any working ranch; not so good for what they circled.
I guess you sometimes get so caught up in what you’re doing that you miss the tale-tell warning signs that something is about to change in your life. Circling turkey vultures went right by me.
Chapter 14
The circling buzzards didn’t worry me so much for the ranch’s livestock; I’d sold off all Fran Pape’s cattle long ago and the few horses that I’d kept on the ranch were all accounted for. The buzzards stirred more of an inborn curiosity that I knew every rancher had. You wanted to know what was happening on your land. If the carcass was a deer or hog the only concern you had was what killed it. You didn’t want a pack of feral dogs running loose or poachers on your land. Coyotes were another matter and I didn’t care what they did with the deer or the hogs. Cougars and bobcats, either. Both predators kept the deer and wild hog populations in check.
After a short drive to where I’d seen the vultures circling, I broke out of the brush and cactus into a small clearing of about half an acre of dry bleached caliche soil. I was on a slight rise and I could see there wasn’t anything growing in the caliche except for a few clumps of cactus that had managed to hang on. The crew doing the land clearing on the ranch hadn’t reached this section of the property yet. I doubted we could do much with it since all the top soil was gone, but I made a mental note for Shane to take a look at it, anyway. I saw a clump of fieldstones in the distance and what looked like a body. I drove over to take a look.
When I reached the fieldstones, I stayed in the truck and leaned out of the window for a closer look at the ground. The remains of a man were visible. The more aggressive vultures refused to leave the body even after I honked the horn at them. That aggravated me enough that I got out of the truck, took out the deer rifle behind the back seat and fired a shot in the air. That scattered them all except for one, which was his bad luck, because I was thinking maybe the man was Tomás and I shot the damn thing out of plain spitefulness.
I was amazed at my sense of detachment at what the vultures had done to the body. I supposed it was because I had seen too much death in my lifetime to still be surprised by much of anything. Or, it could be, I had enough on my plate and didn’t need this additional distraction in my life right now. Either way, it was a grizzly scene and I wasn’t upset by it as I should have been. That was a tell-tale sign that something was up and again it went right by me. The rational thing for me to do, I told myself, was to call 911 and leave an anonymous tip; then go about my business. I seriously considered doing just that, but I called Sheriff Molina, instead. Molina and I had one of those relationships that were symbiotic in nature‒like a jackrabbit and a coyote‒and I couldn’t help myself.
I took Ramona at her word that Sheriff Molina was unavailable. Since my last dustup with the Sheriff’s Department, when the TSU students went missing, Molina had been ducking my calls to him. He was an imperceptive kind of man, who had come up through the ranks of the Sheriff’s Department. His predecessors, in my opinion, were just one step up the evolutionary ladder from men who lived in trees and walked on all fours. He wasn’t a bad guy; he just didn’t know any better. Sunny could have taught him a few things about being the head lawman, if he had been willing to listen to her, but he wasn’t the type to take advice from anyone, especially a woman.
“Tell him for me that I’ve found another body on the Pape Ranch. He might want to send someone out,” I said.
&nbs
p; “You need to call 9-1-1, Mr. Howard.”
I knew Deputy Ramona Rodriguez pretty well. We’d had many interactions through the years involving the different Sheriffs for Solms County. We each had our own imagined role to play in training, educating, and enlightening each newly elected Sheriff. She took her responsibilities more seriously than I did, though. I was just a taxpayer, she was a civil servant.
“Ramona, a murder scene doesn’t constitute an emergency. The guy is already dead. Tell Molina I’ll hang around for a little while. If I don’t hear from him, I’ll call the Texas Rangers. Bye,” I said and quickly closed the call. I knew the idea of a Ranger’s involvement in his county’s business would get Molina motivated.
I heard her curse me in Spanish before the call closed. I didn’t take it personally. She was distantly related to the wife of my deceased ranch foreman and believed all the tall tales he used to spread in town. Juan’s knack for story telling was like an anchor around my neck back then. Less so now that he was gone. But back then, the Mexicans in town tended to believe a good yarn about a gringo rancher, true or not.
I could see several paw prints in the dirt and felt the hair on the back of my neck standup. It was obvious that a large animal had been inspecting the body, as well as several other different animals, waiting for their chance to get at the remains.
The paw print that had un-nerved me was that of a big cat. I immediately thought of the spotted jaguar that had sought refuge on my ranch several years ago, but he was dead. Well, dead in the physical sense. He was still alive in my imagination and still visited me in my dreams on occasion. The other tracks belonged to coyotes.
I slowly lowered myself down on one knee and inspected the prints. It was probably a cougar or a big bobcat I assured myself. I surveyed the stand of trees in case he was still in there. It wasn’t in my nature as a hunter or a rancher to let this go.
I chambered another round in my bolt action .30-06 deer rifle and picked up the brass from the ground.
I couldn’t be positive, but the belt and buckle still on the jeans looked familiar and I suspected this might indeed be Tomás. I walked around the area. Besides the foul odor of the decaying body, I was picking up something else. It was almost like a pungent incense of some kind.
I moved in closer to the body. Near his body was a bundle of dried weeds and plants that had been lit on fire and left to burn. The twine that held the offering, or whatever it was, was partially burned, but it still bound the weeds together. I resisted the temptation to examine it. I backed away slowly and answered an incoming call on my cell phone.
I knew it was Sheriff Molina from the Stealer Wheel’s ringtone. My grandson, Andy, had found the old tune for me after I told him what I wanted for Molina and installed it on my iPhone. I thought it was appropriate for the man.
“’Bout time,” I said just to aggravate him.
“What the fuck, Howard. Every time you call me somebody has died.”
“That’s why I call you. You’re the Sheriff. I don’t call you to be sociable.”
“Where are you?” he demanded.
“At the Pape Ranch.”
“Alright, I’ll have someone out there. Stay put.”
“You should know the body has been scavenged by the buzzards.”
“Is it Martinez?”
“Probably.”
“Don’t touch anything or disturb the scene.”
“Something already has, but you can see for yourself when you get here,” I said.
My stomach was still a little queasy after finding the body of Tomás and I certainly wasn’t interested in engaging Raul Molina any longer. I closed his call before he could protest. I ignored his call-backs as I drove back to the ranch house to wait for the chaos I knew was about to unfold. Deputies would be all over the area. The one consolation was that the barren patch where I’d found the body was on the opposite side of the ranch from the cistern. I called Shane to let him know what was happening and to make himself and the others scarce again. I also put a call into Sabine Henderson just to keep her posted on what was happening and left a message for her on her voice mail.
The letter from Tomás was sitting on my dash. He obviously hadn’t been in Mexico, if that was him. Why had someone been trying to make me think he was? Did his killing have anything to do with the smashed capstone in the cistern? Being the suspicious man that I was, I suspected that it did. I debated with myself whether to give the letter to Sheriff Molina. It would certainly complicate things. By the time I heard the sirens at the front gate to the ranch I had decided to give the letter to Molina and keep the capstone incident and the cistern to myself. The letter didn’t matter anymore; Tomás was either dead or in Mexico.
It was well after lunch time and the heat from the overhead sun was relentless. The Sheriff’s Department had a tarp canopy over the site where the body had been and a team of Texas Rangers was going over it meticulously. The Medical Examiner’s staff had already removed the remains while a canine search team searched in an ever-widening circle around the site. I could hear them in the distance and enjoyed listening to the handler and his dog work together, despite the circumstances.
Sheriff Molina had told me to stick around but stay out of the way. I did and remained in my truck with the AC on.
My cell phone was ringing as often as my stomach was growling to be fed. I had let all the calls go unanswered and probably had half a dozen messages. I wasn’t in the mood to talk to anyone. I was too busy trying to figure out what was going on and whether the death had anything to do with our discovery of the cistern. I wasn’t making any logical connection, but by nature, I was a suspicious man and knew that all of the events on the Pape Ranch were connected, starting back several years ago when Fran Pape asked me to help her. Actually, it went further back than then; to when a neighbor named Ida Mae Schröder-Triesch was in the hospital and Fran Pape shared her hospital room. It was like this giant cosmic conspiracy was at work here and I was caught up in it; or so it seemed to me on an empty stomach.
Sheriff Molina kept giving me the eye from off in the distance beneath the tarp. He was not a happy man, I could tell, especially after he got a call that the Texas Rangers were sending out a forensic specialist to help in the investigation. I had been standing next to him when he got the call and he had walked away to take it. He had looked at me like their intervention was my fault and I was to blame for his miseries, which I suppose I was, and I took some pleasure in it. I waved back at him from inside the cool truck. There was a German word for that feeling where I took pleasure, while in the comfort of my air-conditioned truck, at his misery in the hot afternoon sun, but I couldn’t think of it.
Protocols said that the local authority had to ask for help before the Texas Rangers could get involved in a case, or so it was explained to me. I kind of doubted that and knew they could go wherever the governor sent them. Molina wasn’t sharing with me why the Rangers had shown up on site, but I suspected their interest went beyond the death of my caretaker.
I counted heads and there were nine people on site. I called Clete.
“I’ve been trying to get ahold of you, Max.”
“Sorry. I’ve been busy here. I need you to go into town to Bob’s Ribs and get enough BBQ sandwiches and bottled water to feed a dozen men. Then bring it out here to the Pape Ranch. Can you do that for me?”
“Sure. I’ll phone it in right now. I’ll be there in an hour.”
“Good man. What was it that you needed?”
“It can wait. What’s going on?”
“I found Tomás. He’s dead.”
“What? No, way, Max. He’s standing right here. That’s what I called you about. He came by here looking for you. He’s got his family with him.”
“Go get the food and bring it out to the Pape place. Tell Tomás to stay put. I’ll come to the Meeting Center to talk to him after I eat.”
Ranger Henderson had come in by helicopter with her team and she and Sheriff Molina were
standing under the tarp over the scene to get out of the sun. I walked over to them from my truck. It was time to let them know about Tomás.
“That isn’t Tomás Martinez. I just spoke to my foreman and he’s there at my ranch with him,” I said.
“You said it was him based on the belt buckle,” Molina said angrily.
I shrugged. “It looked like the one Martinez used to wear. Maybe the dead man stole it from the cabin where Martinez was living.”
“Where they found Rebecca Haas?” Sabine asked.
I nodded that she was correct.
“What’s going on, Max?” she asked.
“You tell me. Why are the Texas Rangers here? I know the Sheriff didn’t ask for your help.” I gave them a big smile.
Ranger Henderson looked at Molina for permission to tell me. He shook his head no just to be contrary.
“Fine. Look, Clete’s bringing out lunch for you guys and I’ve got a business to run. Call me if you need me,” I said and walked back toward my truck.
“Schadenfreude,” I said to myself. That was the German word, I remembered.
“Hold it, Howard. Where is Martinez?”
“At the Meeting Center.”
“I want to talk to him.”
“Go ahead. He doesn’t work for me anymore.”
“What’s he doing at your place then?”
“He’s probably looking for his old job back. I’m going to talk with him now.”
“I’ll go with you,” Molina said.
“You’d better follow me. I didn’t vote for you, remember,” I said. That was about as polite as I wanted to be. I didn’t want to ride with the man or have to bring him back out to the Pape Ranch when he was done.
Ranger Henderson raised an eyebrow at me.
The Turbulence of Butterflies (Max Howard Series Book 6) Page 17