by Celia Kinsey
The next morning, however, I felt much better. It was a good thing, I decided, to gain some closure—although complete closure wasn’t possible until my divorce from Frank was final.
After breakfast, I went out to the trailer court in search of Ledbetter. I was glad I’d cleared the air the previous day about not being in love with the man. I was still a little mortified that I’d said it, but at least my position was perfectly clear, to the man in question anyway.
I’d found Ledbetter lifting weights outside again.
“I want to go back out to that abandoned ranch,” I told Ledbetter.
“Why?”
“I want to find out what’s going on out there.”
“Why?”
“Because it might have something to do with Jorge’s death.”
“Isn’t that a police matter?”
It was.
“It might have something to do with Janey.”
This seemed to be a more compelling argument. Ledbetter had continued doing curls with a free weight, but when I said that about Janey, he put the weight down and gave me one of his signature unblinking stares.
“It might be best not to involve yourself any further—”
“If you will recall, Hugo pulled a gun on me two nights ago, I think that’s about as involved as a person can get.”
“Hugo obviously knows you’re on to him. I think that’s a very compelling reason to lie low.”
Ledbetter wasn’t wrong. It was just that I couldn’t bring myself to stand by and wait for things to play out on their own. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Officer Reyes to do his job, it was just that I was more acutely aware than ever that a police investigation along strictly professional lines might well result in a hot mess and a cold case.
“I have to go back,” I said. “If you won’t go with me, I’ll find someone else who will.”
I wasn’t sure who else I trusted to stay cool in a crisis, and it would be a crisis if I returned to the abandoned ranch only to discover I was not alone there.
“When did you want to go out there?” Ledbetter asked. It seemed he didn’t trust anyone else to go out there with me, either.
“I’ll call Nancy and make sure that Hugo is otherwise occupied,” I said.
Nancy assured me that Hugo was making repairs to the pig shed, and she’d keep an eye on him to make sure he didn’t leave the ranch.
“What about August?” I asked.
“I sent him into town. He probably won’t return until after lunch.”
I wasn’t sure if I should be concerned with keeping tabs on August’s whereabouts, but it was better to be safe than sorry.
We rode Ledbetter’s bike out to the old ranch and parked it around the back of the old house in a small lean-to where somebody would have to walk right up to it to notice it.
“Where shall we start?”
I suggested the barn. I was curious what Hugo had been doing there the night I’d seen the light in the window.
The barn was the largest of the buildings, and if the place was functioning as a chop shop, then it was the most likely candidate for a place to strip down, reassemble and repaint stolen cars in an attempt to render them undetectable by the police.
Ledbetter and I approached the barn with caution. The large double doors on the front were closed and double-locked with beefy combination padlocks. We continued and found a small side door that was also locked but had only a flimsy residential knob.
“Go around the corner,” Ledbetter told me as he poised his hand to bang on the door.
I withdrew around the corner. Ledbetter banged on the door for a few seconds, then joined me out of sight, and we both listened to the silence.
“I guess no one is here,” I said.
“Let’s wait a bit longer,” said Ledbetter.
Another few minutes passed with no response from within, and Ledbetter repeated the process, banging even louder this time.
There were still no signs of life. We crept from our place of concealment around the corner of the barn. Ledbetter took hold of the knob, placed his shoulder to the door, and shoved all his considerable weight into it, but the door didn’t give.
“Stand back,” said Ledbetter.
“I don’t think you should break it down,” I said. “Won’t that give away that somebody’s been here?”
“Does that matter?”
“What if Hugo comes back and removes all the evidence?”
“If we find evidence, won’t we be alerting the police right away?”
Ledbetter had a point.
“I don’t think Nancy will like it if we break the door down.”
“I thought Nancy told you that she hadn’t been out here in years. Who do you think installed these locks?”
“Hugo or one of his associates.”
Put in context, breaking the door down didn’t seem like such a terrible idea.
“If we break it down and find nothing, I’ll pay Nancy to have it repaired,” said Ledbetter.
Ledbetter took a short run at the door and kicked it in. The door splintered away from the frame. Ledbetter reached inside and turned the button on the lock.
“Ladies first,” he said.
We stepped inside.
We found more or less what I had expected to, minus the stolen cars. There were two commercial jacks to allow for raising cars off the ground. There was a plethora of tools and a very professional looking paint booth. A large diesel generator powered the place.
“This is not a small-time operation,” said Ledbetter. “I think the police will be very interested in this.” He took his phone from the pocket of his jacket. “Do you want me to call it in, or do you think it would be better to contact Nancy and let her do it?”
“Wait,” I said. “I’m not done looking around.”
“Isn’t this chop shop what you were looking for?”
“Yes, but—”
“What else are you hoping to find?”
“I don’t know exactly, but I don’t want this opportunity to go to waste.”
“You want to search the haymow?” Ledbetter pointed up to the empty loft over the main room.
“I was thinking of exploring the rest of the ranch.”
“The house?”
“I was thinking of climbing down the well.”
“The well. Why?”
“Just a hunch there might be something interesting down there.”
“How do you plan to get down an old well, and more importantly, back out again?”
“That!” I said, pointing to a long aluminum extension ladder that had been used to access the haymow.
“How deep is this well?” said Ledbetter, looking exceedingly skeptical. “A ladder won’t do much good unless it’s an exceptionally shallow well.”
“Nancy seemed to think it was shallow,” I persisted. “She fell down it once and almost died.”
“I’d say that’s a compelling reason not to go down that well voluntarily.”
“I still want to try.”
Ledbetter was far from eager to participate in my plan, but he took charge of the ladder. I picked up a coil of rope laying over one of the stalls, and we went out of the barn in search of the well Nancy had told me about.
It took us a while to find it, and in the process, we found the old root cellar Nancy had also referenced.
“We should search the cellar, too, while we’re at it,” I told Ledbetter.
A peek into the root cellar confirmed that it was dark and dank, and Ledbetter said he preferred to get one unpleasant task out of the way before committing to any others.
We finally found the old well under a large slab of concrete beneath some dead bushes back of the house. It was a brute of a thing to remove, but Ledbetter managed it.
I looped the rope around the ladder, and Ledbetter started to lower the ladder into the chasm in the ground.
“At this rate,“ he said, “Someone is going to owe Nancy a ladder as well as a new door.”<
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“Someone?”
“I’ll pay for the door, but the ladder is on you.”
It was as he spoke that we heard the sound of the ladder hitting splash into the water. A few more feet of rope and it lost tension as if the legs of the ladder had come to rest on the bottom.
“Already?” I said.
Ledbetter peered down the well using the inadequate aid of the light on his phone. “Looks like it really hit bottom. I’d say the top of the ladder is only about six feet down. You’ll have to go down on the rope until you hit the ladder.”
“Can’t you go down?” I asked.
“I could, but if anything goes wrong, I’m not sure the rope would hold me.”
“Are you saying I should go down?”
“I’m afraid so,” said Ledbetter. “I can pull you back out if it comes to that, but you couldn’t do the same for me.”
Ledbetter tied one of the loose ends of the rope around my waist and wrapped the other around his forearm.
“Try and warn me if you plan on falling,” he said.
“What if somebody comes while I’m down the well?” I asked.
“I’ll tie you off to the well cover,” said Ledbetter, pointing to a loop of rebar embedded in the chunk of concrete, “and hope nobody notices.”
The idea of being marooned down a well was not appealing.
“What about you?” I asked. “What will you do if somebody comes?”
“I’ll hide in the old root cellar. I don’t think that’s likely to happen, though.”
Usually, Ledbetter is right. That’s why I listened to him.
Unfortunately, no one can be right all the time, and this time Ledbetter couldn’t have been more wrong. Barely had I lowered myself into the well, letting myself inch by inch down the rope, hoping soon to feel the rungs of the ladder beneath my feet, when I heard Ledbetter using immoderate language.
“What is it?” I called up the well.
“A truck is driving in,” Ledbetter said. “I’m going to have to make a run for it.”
Chapter Thirty-One
I was less than thrilled to be left alone halfway down an old well. I’d found the rungs of the ladder and felt my way gingerly down to the bottom of the well, which, while not exactly dry, only had a few feet of water in the bottom.
As I stood knee-deep in the frigid water, I decided to risk using the light on my phone to take a look around. If whoever had arrived in the truck didn’t see the lid of the well had been removed and a rope tied off to it, they certainly weren’t going to notice a puny little light at the bottom of the well.
I shone the light around. There wasn’t much to see. It was an old well, probably dug by hand and no more than six feet in diameter. The bottom was uneven.
It was only a matter of minutes before my feet would go numb from the cold, and I had to climb back up the rungs of the ladder, so I shuffled my feet along the murky bottom in search of anything resting on the bottom. The first thing I kicked was a rock, and so was the second.
They say the third time’s a charm. It certainly was in this case, because the third time I reached down into the muddy water—I was wet not only to the knees but also to the elbows by this time—I pulled a manmade object out of the water.
It was a handgun.
A gun was exactly what I was hoping to find, but it still startled me. Once I had it, I didn’t know what to do with it. I needed to get out of the cold and damp, so I held the gun gingerly in one hand while I used the other to hold onto the ladder and climbed back up until I was out of the water.
I don’t know how long I stood on the ladder, dripping water from my soggy shoes. I had just about lost all feeling in my legs, and my teeth were chattering so much I couldn’t keep the lower half of my face still when I felt a tug on the rope tied around my waist and heard Ledbetter say, “You can climb up now. I’ll pull you up when you run out of ladder.”
When I emerged from the top of the well into the sunlight, Ledbetter was laughing.
“You’re a real mess,” he said.
He stopped laughing when he saw the gun in my hand.
“You’d better call the police,” he said.
An hour later, I was in the dining room of the Bird Cage, turning over the handgun to Officer Reyes.
“What were you doing down the bottom of an old well?” Officer Reyes asked.
I’d wiped the mud off my face, but I had a feeling I was still looking rather more than a trifle deranged.
“Oh, this and that. Just looking around.”
“Did you have reason to believe you’d find a gun down that old well?”
“Nobody told me to look there if that’s what you are getting at.”
Officer Reyes looked at me, then back at his paperwork. He sighed. I think he believed I was telling the truth, but my behavior still baffled him.
“We’ll run a check on this,” said Officer Reyes, “and see if it’s legally registered to anyone, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up.”
“I think it might be the murder weapon.”
Officer Reyes raised one eyebrow.
“I think it might be the gun someone used to kill Jorge,” I said.
“Someone?”
“Someone.”
I wasn’t certain who had thrown that gun down the well, but I had a couple of ideas.
Officer Reyes looked like he wanted to ask more questions, but instead, he got up and went over to the table where Ledbetter was waiting to give his statement. While Ledbetter had been hiding in the old root cellar next to the house, he’d overheard who’d arrived in the pickup. It had been Hugo and August.
I’d feared that Ledbetter’s eavesdropping would not be sufficient to swear out a warrant for their arrest, but apparently, my fears had been misplaced. While Officer Reyes had been interviewing Ledbetter and me, another posse of policemen had been going over the chop shop with a fine-tooth comb. They’d found not only all the equipment needed to process stolen cars; they’d also recovered a trove of records detailing the thousands of stolen cars that had passed through the shop.
By six that evening, both Hugo and August were in custody for involvement in a car theft ring of impressive proportions.
I should have been happier that they were off the streets, but I wasn’t. It was only a matter of a day or two before they’d make bail, and I was convinced that one of them had put a bullet in Jorge.
Jasper was the key, I decided. He was the one who knew the truth, but where he’d disappeared to, and why he was choosing to stay missing, remained a mystery.
When I told Janey what had happened out at the ranch, she was interested, but I got no sense that she knew anything about the chop shop that I didn’t.
“I hate to come right out and ask this,” I said, “but is there any chance your brother Jasper was involved in the car theft ring?”
“What makes you think that?” Janey's face was flushed, but I think it was more from indignation than guilt at concealing anything from me.
“I told you about the dirty coveralls I found under his bunk?”
“Yeah.”
“And the paint-spattered boots?”
“Yes.”
“Well, there was one other thing I found that I didn’t tell you about.”
As I’d been speaking, I’d taken out my phone. I scrolled through my photos until I came to the one showing the small leather case of tools I’d found amongst Jasper’s belongings.
“Do you recognize these?”
Janey shook her head. “What are they?”
“Ledbetter thinks they are made for breaking into cars.”
“That’s not possible,” said Janey. “When he was a teenager, my brother got arrested a couple of times for shoplifting, but he hasn’t stolen anything for years.”
Not that Janey knew of, anyway. We always want to believe the best of those we love, even if the evidence suggests otherwise.
“Don’t you think—”
“He wouldn’t be so stupi
d. He’s studying hard to get his GED.”
“GED?”
“Yeah. He wants to go back to college and get a degree in animal husbandry. He hopes to get into vet school when he’s done.”
I’d thought August was the one who’d been staying in evenings studying for his GED. He’d certainly given Nancy that impression, but if Jasper had been the one committing all his spare time to prepare for getting into college, nothing I’d assumed about what Nancy’s ranch hands had done in the evenings made sense anymore.
“How long has Jasper been working on getting his GED?” I asked.
“Since about a year ago.”
Somebody was lying, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t Janey.
“Have you heard again from Jasper?”
Janey looked at me warily and shook her head. I couldn’t decide if she was telling the truth this time.
“And you really have no idea where he might be hiding?”
Janey hesitated.
“You know something, don’t you?”
“Not really,” said Janey. “It’s just a guess.”
“Where do you think Jasper might be?”
“He’d just started seeing this woman in Albuquerque—”
She trailed off.
“Just before he disappeared?”
Janey nodded.
“You think she has anything to do with why he disappeared?”
“No, but I think that might be where he’s at.”
“Do you know where she lives?”
Janey didn’t. Jasper had introduced her to the woman, but they’d met at a restaurant. All she knew about the woman was that her name was Tina, she was the customer service desk person at a tire shop, and that she lived somewhere in Albuquerque.
“Albuquerque’s a big place,” said Janey. “She wouldn’t be easy to find.”
“That’s quite enough to go on,” I said.
“I wish you wouldn’t look for him,” said Janey. “I don’t think he wants to be found.”
“I’m not going to turn him in to the police,” I promised. “I just want to talk to him.”
I was almost certain that Jasper was not the one who’d killed Jorge, and I was equally certain that he knew who had.
After I’d taken a long, hot shower, Janey had gone to work, and Georgia and Maxwell were sitting at the kitchen table working on what looked suspiciously like introduction to algebra, I curled up on the couch with my laptop and went to work.