The Voxlightner Scandal

by Don Travis

  The trees, mostly pines and spruce with a few aspen groves dotting the landscape, grew close together. This part of the Santa Fe National Forest hadn’t been thinned or seen a controlled burn in a couple of generations, making it prime for a wildfire.

  Two hours of searching anywhere a car could be made to go in this wilderness resulted in nothing. To the best of my knowledge, this wasn’t mining country, so there were no shafts or holes in the vicinity. And beneath the thin topsoil, the bedrock was lava, which would require heavy equipment to excavate a crater big enough to hide two cars.

  “Well crap!” Paul exclaimed as we made our way back down the mountain. “That was a wasted afternoon.”

  “Maybe so. But it was something we needed to do. If I’m right, there are two cars and two bodies hidden somewhere. We’ve just eliminated one of the possibilities.”

  He waved impatiently at the forest surrounding us. “Yeah. And another million possibilities right outside the car window.”

  “Don’t think so. I believe we’ve eliminated this entire mountain range. Took us too long to get here. And between here and Albuquerque, there aren’t many suitable places.”

  He snorted. “There are a thousand roads leading off every which direction.”

  “Too close to civilization. This might look like wide-open country, but have you ever gone anywhere no one else has been before you? I seriously doubt it. Paul, it’s not easy to hide two bodies, much less two vehicles.”

  “The cars are probably down in Mexico.”

  “Possible. But if they disappeared that quickly, Wick had help in making them vanish. And if he did, he made himself vulnerable when the news of the disappearances broke. He’d be susceptible to blackmail and/or exposure. My take on Hardwick Pillsner is he wouldn’t allow that to happen. If I’m right and both Voxlightner and Stabler are dead, he did it himself without the assistance of anyone else.”

  “Maybe Herrera helped him, and that’s why he’s dead now.”

  “Possibly. But why would he kill Stabler and let Herrera live another seven years?”

  As we turned out onto the highway, I experienced a twinge of sadness. Another time, Paul would have suggested we stop in the woods and make whoopie.

  I SPENT half of Monday rechecking what Gene had tasked Roy to do earlier—call car rental places to see if someone rented a vehicle to Hardwick Pillsner on or about the fifteenth of March back in 2004. Unfortunately I was making my calls right as the New Mexico State Fair kicked off, and most people I spoke to made it clear they’d prefer to be renting cars to out-of-town tourists rather than looking up ancient records. I didn’t even have Paul to help me with the chore. He was off with Detective Guerra reinterviewing principals in the old scam.

  While I always try to keep an open mind, I became so obsessed with the idea Wick did away with the two VPMR officials that I was in danger of developing tunnel vision. Both Hazel and Charlie cautioned me against falling in love with my own theory. Even so they pitched in to help cover the bases. Midafternoon we gathered at the table in the corner of my office.

  “Nothing,” I said. “But Wick had to have a way to get back from wherever he hid the bodies.”

  “Maybe his wife helped him.” Charlie suggested.

  I considered the Wick I’d known for years. I saw his brutality in the way he played his sport, his determination when he coached me and a host of other tweeners in the art of football. This also gave me an insight into the clever way his mind worked and the speed with which he could change directions when the winds blew against him. I easily pictured him undertaking illegal acts, even violent ones, but I could not see him involving his family in any misdeeds.

  “That’s a possibility,” I acknowledged. “But somehow I don’t believe he’d involve them. He’d want to keep his image squeaky clean with his family.”

  Hazel put in her two cents. “Not everybody kept records that far back. Even so I’m willing to bet he didn’t rent a car… under his own name, anyway.”

  I smacked my forehead with enough force to hurt. “Of course he didn’t. He used the name he rented the house on Georgia Street under. William Stark.”

  She stood and stretched her back. “Here we go again.”

  Hazel found what we were looking for within half an hour with one of the larger locally owned car rental places. William Stark rented an SUV on the night of March 14, 2004. At Stark’s request the vehicle was delivered to a cabin in the Sandias and picked up in the parking lot at a bar and lounge near VPMR’s 3300 Lomas location on the morning of the sixteenth. A rough map of how to reach the delivery spot was still appended to the order. The bill was settled with a prepaid Visa card in the name of William Stark.

  “I’m amazed anyone keeps records that far back,” Hazel said, although she’d spent most of the day checking such records.

  “Insurance and police,” Charlie said. “They keep them for insurance purposes and so cops can trace people’s movements. But I’m floored Wick made such a bonehead mistake.”

  “He needed a way to get back to Albuquerque in a timely manner and figured the cover of William Stark would be enough,” I said. “He used the best cover he had. It’s mighty hard to move around this world and leave no traces at all.”

  “Lucky for us.”

  “Let’s not count our chickens before they hatch,” I cautioned.

  I wasted no time in getting the information to Gene. Within the hour he let us know the Voxlightner family once owned a 10-acre spread on the mountain at what seemed the terminus of the rough map in the car rental agency’s files. Marshall Voxlightner, not Barron. When I contacted Dorothy, she confirmed the entire family and a few friends made liberal use of the mountain cabin until she sold the property shortly after the precious metals fiasco broke in 2004.

  GENE GOT a search warrant for the former Voxlightner property on Sandia Peak by noon the following day. An appointment with the police chief to discuss his promotion left him unable to serve the paper himself. Det. Roy Guerra welcomed Paul’s and my company the next day as we drove up the back of the mountain in his departmental blue Ford.

  The present owners were a family named Gillis who waved away the need for a warrant and invited us to search wherever we wanted. They were the second owners following the sale of the tract by the Voxlightners, having been in residence only two years. They had never seen abandoned cars and certainly not stray human bones.

  After our exhausting search showed nothing, we came off the mountain frustrated, but I was unwilling to let it go. Wick wouldn’t have parked the cars in the woods. He’d have hidden them someway. A Chevrolet Blazer and a Ford Crown Victoria concealed somewhere on the mountain held what was left of Barron and Walther. I knew it and was determined to prove it.

  The next day I began my search in earnest. A few people I knew held privately owned plots in the Cibola National Forest, and on Sandia Peak in particular. Several phone calls developed some interesting information. The man everyone pointed to as being most knowledgeable about the Sandias was Foxy Slight.

  Foxy was not easy to find. Reclusive and described as about halfway hostile—which I read as loopy—he lived in a board cabin in a small canyon a mile or so off the paved Sandia Crest National Scenic Byway, the road running to the top of Sandia Peak. Apparently he could hear a car approaching from half a mile away and was never home when Roy, Paul, and I arrived. After the third try Roy stopped at the nearest neighbor’s place to ask about Foxy. The man about laughed us off his place but in the end agreed to get word to Foxy some folks wanted to talk to him about the old Voxlightner place. He suggested we not mention one of us was a badge-wielding lawman.

  As we came off the mountain yet again, Roy asked why I was so set on locating a character who went by the name of Foxy. “That name oughta tell us you can’t trust his word.”

  “If we approach him right, I’ll wager we can get a load of information from him,” I said.

  “Vince is a history buff,” Paul volunteered. “From all we
’ve heard, it sounds like this Foxy is one too. If so, Vince can communicate with him.”

  “What are we looking for?” Roy asked.

  “Old mines,” I said.

  “Mines?”

  “Mines or mining shafts. I know there are some up there, but I can’t find a sign of one on any of the maps.”

  “Sign?”

  “You know,” Paul said. “A crossed pick and shovel on the map.”

  “I didn’t know they mined anything up there. I know about the coal at Madrid, but that’s a long way from the Voxlightner place,” Roy said.

  “Uh-oh.” Paul made no effort to hide the sigh in his voice. “You just asked the wrong question.”

  So I delivered my history lesson. “The Spanish mined the Sandias and the Manzanos long before the Anglos got here. And before the Spanish, the local natives likely did as well. The Spanish are said to have operated five gold mines somewhere near Placitas. They used Indian slaves to work until Popé’s Rebellion. After the Pueblos threw out the Spanish, the natives are supposed to have filled the mines with dirt.”

  “Be damned,” Roy said.

  “There’s an old legend the Aztec emperor Montezuma shipped a fortune in gold northward to keep it out of the hands of Cortez’s invaders. The stories say it’s hidden in the foothills near Placitas.”

  “Placitas is at the north end of Sandia Peak. That’s a pretty good distance from the Voxlightner property.”

  “True. Don’t forget there’s the Galena King Mine in the Manzanos where they mined lead and fluorspar for years. One Albuquerque Journal report said they hit a vein of gold.”

  “The Galena’s too far south of the Voxlightner place,” Roy objected.

  “And there’s supposed to be nothing in between? There are lots of reports of lost turquoise mines. And then there are the coke ovens about a mile and a half off the Sandia Peak road. That’s evidence of mining.”

  “Okay, okay. I’m convinced. But shouldn’t we be asking the people at the School of Mines instead of a fellow named Foxy?”

  “Good idea,” I said. “You pursue them while I hunt for Foxy.”

  THE STATE fair had barely concluded when New Mexico’s biggest show, the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, kicked off. Both Paul and I had our fill of fighting bumper-to-bumper traffic, wearing layered clothing, and jostling crowds to participate in the Fiesta, but we weren’t averse to getting up early and watching the grand ascension on TV on the first Saturday in October. But if you’ve never been to the festival before, it’s well worth the trouble to witness pilots readying their crafts, hear the throaty hiss of burners, be overwhelmed by colors, some of which were never dreamed of by the rainbow, hear exclamations uttered in a myriad of languages, and finally watch as hundreds of balloons launch into the blue Albuquerque sky. The special shapes in particular delighted children. Darth Vader, the Creamland Cow, a water bottle, a lady bug, three different bees, and countless more shared the skies with the Yellow Sub and ordinary-shaped balloons.

  Of course this also meant the streets were clogged with traffic, the hotels and motels were full, and people were more concerned with pleasure than with answering a confidential investigator’s pushy questions.

  WHEN I finally ran Foxy to ground, the name described the man. He owned a sharp nose, which contributed considerably to his nickname. But the appellation defined the man’s character as well.

  The neighbor had done his task well. After a couple of fruitless trips up Sandia, Paul and I found Foxy Slight at his cabin. A small, sly, and suspicious man, he was reluctant to talk until I told him what I knew of the Sandias. Forming the eastern edge of the Rio Grande Rift Valley, the mountains, actually a single mountain with two crests, the northern known as Sandia Crest and the southern as Sandia Peak, rose a million or so years ago. K-spar crystals in the Sandia granite gave the mountain a distinctive pink color, especially in the autumn light, giving rise to the Spanish name of Sandia, meaning watermelon. Local Pueblos call the mountain Bien Mur—big mountain—or Sleeping Turtle because of its distinctive shape. The Tewas and the Navajo had their own names for the hulking mass of rock.

  That was enough to loosen Foxy’s tongue. I’d given the geologic history, but he recited the human past, from the critically important gap between the Sandias and the Manzanos, which means apples—or more appropriately apple trees—in Spanish. Tijeras Pass served as a trade route to the Rio Grande valley for millennia. His discourse was interesting to me, but Paul was beginning to fidget beneath our host’s outpouring of dialogue. Even so I heard Foxy out until he spoke the magic words.

  “Heard tell you was interested in the old Voxlightner place.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Right nice place when the old man was alive. He come up hardscrabble hisself, so he was sociable with the locals. The old lady was standoffish, but okay. The kids, though. Thought they was made out of diamonds and emeralds. Didn’t want nothing to do with the local folk. Brought their own friends.”

  “You ever run into a man named Hardwick Pillsner?”

  “Wick? Sure. He used to come up all the time. He wasn’t too uppity to talk to a man. I always liked Wick. And he was sure a corker of a football lineman in his day.”

  I let him run on for a little, hoping he’d say something that would catch my ear. Eventually, I interrupted to ask about old mines in the area.

  “Hell yes. They’s abandoned shafts all through this country. Have to be careful where you put your boots. Liable to step into one of them. Some of them’s kinda growed over and hard to spot.”

  “Any big ones in the area?”

  “A whopper. A hole as big as a locomotive engine in the side of a canyon wall. Or used to be.”

  He caught my attention. “When was the last time you were in it?”

  “Who said I been in it?”

  “Come on. Bet you have a pickax and a miner’s helmet in that cabin over there. You’ve probably tested rock in the tunnel a dozen times.”

  His smile heightened his resemblance to a varmint. “More like a hunnert, I’d guess. Traces but nothing commercial. Anyways I was off in that direction ’bout three months ago. This is September? No? October. Lordy, where did the year go? It was probably last May sometime.”

  “Anything different about it over the years?” I asked.

  “Why don’t you let me in on what you’re looking for, and I’ll tell you what I can. If you’re planning on opening up the mine, save your money.”

  “No. I’m looking for a 2003 Ford Crown Victoria and a 2004 Chevrolet Blazer. With a body in each of them.”

  “Lordy! You talking about murder. When?”

  “The night of March 15, 2004.”

  His eyebrows shot up. “That’s a long time back. I can tell you for certain there ain’t no vehicles in the place. Over the years the shaft’s closed up. But back in them days I was a little more hopeful and went inside regular-like. You can’t go more’n fifty feet into the adit now, but I’m here to tell you nobody stashed two cars in there. I found them, I’d be riding in style not bumming around in a worn-out pickup.”

  My heart sank.

  “But you know,” he said slowly, “I got a more likely place for you. What you’re saying might explain something I been puzzling over for years.”

  “How many years?” Paul asked.

  “Since something like five er ten years. Hop in the truck. I wanna show you something.”

  I would have preferred the comfort of Paul’s Charger, but Foxy knew what he was doing. Pretty soon he was climbing over rocks that would have stopped the Dodge cold. I thought I’d break my neck on the ceiling of the cab before we entered a large glade with an area in the middle protected by a rusted fence bearing a No Trespassing sign.

  We piled out of the pickup and trailed him to the fence where he ignored the warning and vaulted over it easily. Paul and I followed a bit less deftly. Foxy gestured to a large hole in the ground, circular in nature, with a big chunk torn out of the
far wall. The interior was black, so I couldn’t tell how deep it was. Foxy picked up a stone and tossed it inside. A few seconds elapsed before we heard it hit bottom.

  “This here was a vertical shaft around a hunnert feet deep. Some fellers dug it out in the fifties when they thought they’d found gold. They used to be some gold mines up in the Placitas area, they claim.”

  “A couple of hundred years ago,” I said.

  “Anyhow this big mother’s been gaping here ever since I was a kid. I got fifty years in the country, you know. Family come here when I was six. There used to be a rickety wood ladder fixed to the side, and you know how kids is. It was a hole to be explored, so I explored it. Been down in it a hunnert times at least. Even repaired the ladder a few times when rungs rotted away.”

  “When’s the last time you were down it.”

  “Been years now.”

  “How come?” Paul asked.

  “Cause the last time I come here, it was different. See the caved-in place over on the other side. It used to be solid, but something tore out the side. Dumped a few tons of dirt and rock down in the hole. And the ladder weren’t there no more. I found a couple of pieces of charred wood up on the ground, but that’s all.”

  “Someone dynamited it,” I said.

  “I figure.”

  “Can you remember when it was?”

  “Not exactly. But like I said, five-ten years back. After that happened I used to come across pieces of metal around the area once in a while.”

  “You still have any of it?” I asked.

  “Hell no. Metal’s money. Hauled it down to Albukerk and sold it to a scrap metal place on Juan Tabo, just off of Central.”