by Blake Banner
I was a little surprised at the question. “No, Sheriff, I confess I haven’t.”
“Well, I can tell you without having to. Last time we had a murder in Lee County was in 1922. And then the fellow who done the shooting was from Denver. I guess we have a small population, everybody knows everybody, and we just don’t go around killing each other. Now,” he wheezed a laugh, “I know that ain’t no defense in a court of law.” He put on an absurd voice. “‘Your Honor, couldn’a done it coz I’m from Lee County, and we don’t do that kind’a thing there!’” He laughed. “But the fact is that my resources, as sheriff, reflect the fact that we ain’t had a homicide in nigh on a hundred years.”
We watched him stuff a pancake onto his mouth, nod with pleasure while he chewed, and wash it down with coffee. There was something almost hypnotic about the slow pace with which he did it.
“Now, what I do have, is a canyon where people from out of state like to dump their bodies. We’ve had a lot of bodies dumped in Lefthand Canyon. It’s known for it, and it’s been on TV. That was before my time. We even had people drive eight hundred miles from Las Vegas to dump their bodies here. Italians, mainly. But when they allocate resources to the county sheriff’s department, they don’t look at who dumps bodies there, they look at where the bodies was killed. So, what I am telling you, Detectives, is the reason I called on you was because we just don’t have the resources to look into this case.”
I drew breath to answer him but he held up his hand and said, “Now, just hold on one minute. If you’re telling me that Seth Brown has gone and shot Pete Svenson on account of Pete makin’ improper suggestions to Seth’s wife, then I can deal with that. I have the resources. But in this case…” He shook his head and stuffed another pancake in his mouth, chewed slowly, still shaking his head, swallowed and drank coffee. Again we watched him throughout, listening to the crackle and spit of the fire. “Well now, that’s a whole different matter, ain’t it? Because we don’t even know that she was killed here at all. And if my experience is anything to go by, she weren’t.
“So what am I saying here? I’m saying, if you two want to stay a week, or two weeks, or six months and investigate this murder, and solve it, and take the darn thing off my hands, you won’t get no complaint from me. Anything I can do to help, except manpower, all you have to do is ask.”
I nodded, watching him, wondering if he was going to start talking again. He didn’t, so I said, “Good to know, Sheriff. We appreciate it.”
“You want to see the scene now, or you want to settle into your rooms and have a rest?”
I looked at Dehan. She was chewing on a pancake. She swallowed, gave her head a twitch and said, “Let’s do it. I’m a New Yorker, Sheriff. We can eat, sleep, think, work, and become neurotic all at the same time.”
We took his truck. Dehan pushed me into the front passenger seat and climbed in the back, where she immediately folded her arms and closed her eyes. We headed northwest along Sunshine Canyon Drive, through the town and out into the wilderness. As we drove, Sheriff Watson talked, with his slow, assertive, hypnotic rhythm.
“If you asked me,” he said, “which you didn’t, but I’ll tell you anyhow, one of the things that really confused me about this case, and you’ll see what I mean when we get there, is…” He stopped and turned to look at me with a frown, as though I had said something that was somehow incomprehensible. “This Kathleen, I remember her from back when she was a young kid, always used to come here in the summer with her mom and dad. Well, she knew the place. She was familiar with it. Her and her sister and them Olvera boys, and young Greg Carson, they was always goin’ on long treks and riding around on bikes, and Greg’s horses,—adventures they called them back then. My point is, she knew the place.”
He paused and pulled a cheroot from his breast pocket and poked it in his mouth. He took his time lighting it with a green disposable lighter, and when it was burning, carried on talking.
“So, according to her mom, nice lady, genuine Irish, Kath come out here to see her in-laws. No doubt you’ll go and see ’em. She’s of Swedish stock, old school Protestant. His great-grandparents were Mexican, Catholics, but he converted so he could marry her. Takes all sorts, I guess.”
“You were saying about…”
“Anyhow, like I was saying, she was coming here to see her in-laws, for some reason which was best known to herself. Now, Lee County ain’t all that big, as the crow flies. But I often think, if you flattened it out, with all the mountains we have, it might be three or four times the size. You know what I mean? You look at it on a map, and you might think, hell, Lefthand Canyon ain’t that far away. But boy! When you’re done getting there, you’ve covered maybe twenty mile or more! So, what I’m wondering is, how in the hell did she wind up in Lefthand Canyon, if she was goin’ to see the Olveras in Seven Hills?” He stared at me. “It ain’t like she got there, to her in-laws, and then left with somebody. She never even showed up. And still managed to wind up in the canyon. That don’t make much sense to me. But maybe you and your partner will figure it out.”
I nodded. “I had wondered about that. The receptionist at the Wagon Wheel said it’s the kind of place you only go if you have a particular reason…”
“Ned ain’t wrong. And that particular reason, often as not, is something illegal. We found about six bodies there over the years, but we’ll never know how many we didn’t find.”
We drove in silence for a while. The tops of the hills were bathed in sunlight, but the road was in deep shade. After a while I asked him, “What can you tell me about Greg Carson? You said he was part of the gang.”
He chewed on his cheroot for a while, then said, “Good man. Known him all my life. Solid, like his daddy and his granddaddy before him. Tough man. Works hard. I never had no complaint about him. Why d’you ask?”
“Where does he live?”
He turned his head to look at me and raised an eyebrow that said he wasn’t used to people not answering his questions. I waited.
“He’s got a ranch outside Gold Hill. I’ll point it out to you as we go by. You got a reason for asking?”
“Yeah. Isaac thought she might be coming to visit him, and not her in-laws. That make more sense?”
Round about the junction with route 83, the blacktop had been replaced with beaten earth, and for about five minutes we’d been rattling along, leaving a dust trail behind us. Now we crested a hill and began to descend toward a small town that hadn’t changed in the last two hundred years. Every house and store I could see was made of logs. The only things that looked out of place were the cars and trucks that dotted the dirt roads. Sheriff Watson slowed as we approached a junction and pointed to his left.
“See that hill over there? That’s where Greg has his ranch. Pine Ranch. Take the first left up ahead, and you can’t miss it. We’re going down here on the right, Lickskillet Road. It’s pretty steep. It’ll take us down to Lefthand Canyon.”
We bumped down the track for five minutes, descending in a steep zig-zag. Finally we came to the bottom, to a broad, dusty road bordered by steep, heavily wooded hills.
“I notice you didn’t answer my question, Sheriff.”
“Does it make more sense her coming to see Greg than Ingrid and Alfredo?” I nodded and he shrugged. “To be honest, Detective, none of it makes any sense to me.”
SEVEN
He pulled off the road onto a patch of dirt in the shade of some pines, opened the door and climbed out. I glanced into the back seat and Dehan was watching me. She smiled and we both swung down after the sheriff. He glanced at our shoes and said, “It ain’t an easy climb.”
He pointed up into the forest. You could just make out an overgrown, beaten track.
“Couple of hikers had been camping in the valley other side of this slope. ’Bout five miles that way is Seven Hills, where we just come from.” He shrugged with one shoulder. “Like I said, we drove twelve miles to get here, but it’s only five miles away. So they was comi
ng down along this track and they saw what looked like a bundle of rags in a clearing through the trees. C’mon and I’ll show you.”
The hill was steep, and under the pine needles the ground was soft and damp from what I guessed had been recent rain. It was a difficult climb. It would have been difficult even for somebody who knew the terrain. After about a minute I called ahead, “Is this the only approach? There is no approach from above?”
“Not for a vee-hicle, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He paused for us to catch up. His voice had a strange echo under the dense foliage of the tall trees. “She’d been out here about a week, so it was hard to be sure. But I think there were drag marks. I figure he parked down there where I did and dragged her up, using a tarp. He’d never’ve got her here from up top.” He shrugged, looking up the slope. “Not ’less he came by mule, or horse.”
He jerked his head off to the left. “That’s the spot where they seen the body, that clearing over yonder.”
I drew level with him and peered among the trees. Dehan came up by my side. The ground leveled off for maybe fifteen or twenty feet and, beyond a fallen tree, there was a broad patch, maybe thirty or forty feet across, where there were only deep ferns, but no pines.
“Back in July, the ferns were less dense. The kids was coming down this path and they seen a bundle, beyond that fallen pine there. We don’t get a lot of litter ’round here, folks are mostly respectful of nature, so they decided to go and have a look.”
Dehan spoke for the first time since the Wagon Wheel. “Can we go and see?”
“Be my guest.”
He led us across the brown carpet of needles under the high green canopy. The only sound aside from the crunch of our boots was the sigh of the breeze in the branches up above. There was no bird song, but there was the occasional brief flutter of wings.
We made our way around the great, fallen pine and he pointed to a large bush. “See that shrub there? That’s creeping Oregon grape. Her body was partially under that bush.” We trudged across till we were standing around it. “He’d obviously covered her in pine needles, but wild animals, the wind, whatever, they had come off and she was mostly exposed. There was no blood.” He pointed at the bush again. “Her neck and shoulders were underneath the foliage, and her head had rolled down into that hollow, at the foot of the slope there. According to the medical examiner, decapitation was postmortem, and most likely on site.”
Dehan said, “No hoof prints?”
He shook his head and smiled. “I did look for ’em, in case you’re wondering. But there weren’t none. Don’t mean he didn’t use a horse, or a mule. Like I say, a week had gone by, and being summer, the ground was hard.”
We stood in silence for a while. I tried to visualize the scene. It was probably night, and under the canopy of dense branches above, it would have been very dark. I made a mental note to check if there was a moon that night.
“How difficult would it be, Sheriff, for an experienced horseman to ride up and down these slopes in the dark?”
He nodded, still smiling. “Hard. Much easier to bring her up in a truck, wrapped in a tarp, and drag her in. At night, ain’t nobody gonna see you.” He shrugged. “That’s what the Mob do, all the way from Vegas!” He laughed, creasing up his eyes and chewing on his cheroot.
Dehan raised her eyebrows at me. “So, unless the crime is dumping a body, we haven’t even got a crime scene.”
The sheriff nodded at her. “You see my problem. It’s like I said to you back at the Wagon Wheel, this place is used for just that purpose. That’s why you won’t catch me kickin’ up no fuss about jurisdiction. I’m grateful to have you take this darn case off my hands! I can’t figure what happened!”
It was just short of ten o’clock when the sheriff dropped us back at the motel. We watched him drive away, having told us that if we needed him, his office was in James Town—seven miles north as the crow flies, fourteen by road.
Dehan led the way inside and stood with her ass in front of the iron stove again, bouncing slightly with her hands behind her back. I said, “I’m dead beat. Let’s sleep till lunch, then we can review what we know and decide on a course of action.”
She nodded and looked relieved. I hit the bell and Ned appeared after a moment wearing his look of secret superiority.
“Ready to go up?”
“Yeah, and we don’t want to be disturbed till lunchtime.”
He winked, which made me frown, and said, “I understand,” which made my frown deepen. Then he handed me a key. “It’s the last door on the left, with glorious views of the mountains.”
There was an awkward moment when Dehan came and stood at the desk and we all stared at each other. Finally, Dehan said, “May I have my key too?”
He gaped and his eyes widened in horror. “Two rooms? I understood… I didn’t realize… I thought…”
I scowled at him. “You thought that two NYPD detectives were going to share a room?”
He went pale and swallowed. “I assumed you were the detective and madam was… When you said your partner… These days, partner can mean so many things…”
I sighed. Dehan was staring at me with a complete absence of expression, which was kind of unnerving. I said, “Look, no harm done. Just give Detective Dehan another room and forget about it.”
He was rigid. He didn’t look complacent anymore. “We are all booked up till tomorrow.”
“Is there another hotel?”
“The Saloon is full. Perhaps Gold Hill...?”
Dehan grabbed the key from my hand and moved toward the stairs. “C’mon, Stone. Forget it. If you don’t snore, I promise not to bite.”
She stomped up the stairs and I scowled at Ned again. “You get me a room by tomorrow or pal, I’m coming to sleep at your house.”
“Tomorrow.”
I followed Dehan up the stairs and down a long passage with wooden walls and a deep red carpet. She unlocked the door like she was disemboweling it and pushed in. The room was nice. It was big, with a big, solid bed and a stone fireplace with the logs set and ready to light. There was an en suite bathroom, a chair and a desk, but there was no couch.
I closed the door. “I’m sorry, Dehan. I clearly told him, you can check the reservation…”
She gave me that same impossible-to-read expression. “Hey, I’m not contagious. Just keep your shorts on and we’ll be fine. I promise to respect you in the morning. Help me take my boots off.”
We left our clothes on and climbed under the bedclothes. The last thing I remember before I slipped into unconsciousness was Dehan’s sleepy chuckle as she said, “If my Uncle Ben could see me now…”
I awoke to the sound of the shower. A glance at the window told me it was about midday. The hiss from the bathroom faded to a trickle and died. Then there were those odd bathroom noises: the rattle and slide of the shower-cubicle door, the clunk of the bathroom cabinet opening and closing, the muffled flop of a bath towel being unfurled and dropping to the floor. I smiled. For some reason I couldn’t fathom, the sounds were oddly comforting.
She stood in the door with a a white turban on her head, a white towel wrapped around her body and an idiot grin on her face. She looked shiny and scrubbed.
“How was it for you?” she said. “Did the earth move?”
“Cut it out.”
“I gotta say, Stone, it wasn’t like my girlfriends said it would be. I think you need to work on your technique.”
I threw a pillow at her and she indulged in what you could only describe as a locker room laugh. She threw it back and said, “Go shower, big boy, so I can get dressed.”
Twenty minutes later, we returned to our table by the fire and had a couple of local craft beers and a hamburger each. The peaches and cream waitress asked if we’d like some Colorado oysters while we waited for the hamburgers. Dehan frowned. “Oysters? In Colorado?”
“They ain’t really oysters, Miss, they’s…”
She giggled and I said, “They’re
bull’s balls.”
Dehan looked her square in the eye. “Oh, no, I’ve had more than enough of that for one day.” Then she grinned at me. “Huh, Stone?” Peaches and Cream flushed and scuttled away squeaking.
“Dehan…”
She pointed at me. “You know what, Stone? Here’s what I don’t get…”
I shifted uneasily in my chair. “What?”
“She’s been coming to these parts since she was a kid. She knows people here. She isn’t going to just turn up. She has to have told somebody she’s coming, right?”
“Agreed.”
“I get the impression her in-laws didn’t even know she was coming.” She shook her head and shrugged. “She came by train, but how was she getting from Boulder to Seven Hills? Bus? Car rental? Was somebody picking her up?”
I nodded. “That would make sense.”
“Because if she had arranged to be collected from the station, whoever collected her…”
“That’s our man.”
“So we need to see her credit card records, her emails, her Facebook, phone, Whatsapp… all her communication for the month of June and early July to see who was meeting her.”
I took out my phone and dialed the captain while she kept talking.
“So here’s how it looks right now. She’s unhappy in her marriage. Mo is neglecting her. She wants to confide in her mom, but we’ve seen her mom sees the world through rose-tinted glasses and she doesn’t want to know about problems. She turns to Anne-Marie, only to discover that Anne-Marie is screwing her husband, and the birth of her baby, instead of bringing Mo back to her side, seems to have driven him further away…”
The captain’s voice spoke in my ear.
“Stone. How’s it going?”
“We might be making progress, Captain. Listen, we need to see Kathleen Olvera’s credit card and phone records, Whatsapp, email, Facebook—the whole package—for the months of June and July, 2012. And any other messenger and social media she may have been using. The sheriff here is happy to give us free reign, but the deal is we take the case off his hands.”