by Bart Paul
We got the animals secured and the packs unloaded. The two FBI folks gave the dead guy and Erika a quick look then picked a semi-dry spot and set to work making camp with down bags, bivy sacks, and bear-proof food storage. I could see why they got assigned this job. It was just another day at the office for those two.
I walked with Aaron over to the pond. Buddy hung back. The woman was floating just like I’d left her, but even a couple of days in the oxygen and half-sun had begun to restart the decomposition and alter her look.
“How the hell do people end up like this,” Aaron said. He put on latex gloves and bent down to pick up a crumpled twenty. “I’ve been with the Bureau twelve years and never came up with a good answer.”
“Greed?”
“Kind of simplistic for a student of human depravity such as yourself,” Aaron said. “Mister Hornberg, can you come up here please?”
Buddy slopped through the bogs and wet grass not really watching where he was walking. He hung back, stopping before he got too close.
“Is this your sister?” Aaron said. “Is this Erika Hornberg?”
Buddy just nodded. The lady agent walked past him. She took off her windbreaker and squatted down, looking at the body. She was dark-haired and olive-skinned and thirtyish, and in a tee shirt looked strong as hell. Buddy watched her put on her gloves. She introduced herself as agent Alicia Castile and gave him a latex hand to shake.
“So what’s the drill?” he said.
“You ID the body,” Aaron said, “and our team secures the site. People are curious, and we can’t have treasure hunters and sightseers disturbing the evidence looking for a missing fortune that may or may not exist.”
“Well, sure it exists,” Buddy said. “You just got some. I saw you.”
“Maybe,” Aaron said, “maybe not.”
“Why’d you drag me up here, anyway?” Buddy said. “I coulda done this once you’d choppered her back to town.”
Agent Castile stood up. “Because this is the last time your sister is going to look anything like your sister.”
“I don’t get it,” he said.
“This water is more stagnant than you’d expect,” she said. “It’s cold and acidic and lacks the oxygen to aid in decomposition. So your sister’s corpse has been somewhat preserved. Until now.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” he said. “When I was a kid I fished the beaver ponds here. I found a totally intact marmot in these bogs when I was digging for night crawlers. Big deal.”
“So you’re familiar with the process,” Aaron said.
“It’s kinda cool, actually.” The woman was cheerful as could be.
“Now it’s like she’s frozen in time. Like Joaquin Murrieta’s head in a bottle of alcohol back in the gold rush days. They pull her out of the drink, she’ll fall apart and start decomposing fast.”
“Sergeant Smith is exactly right,” Alicia said. “The visual identification would be harder for you tomorrow. In more ways than one.”
Buddy walked back toward the horses. “Like I give a shit,” he said.
She watched him go. “What a dick,” she said. She said it like he wasn’t even there.
Buddy turned when she said that and sized her up. Then he kept walking like he didn’t want to tangle with her. Aaron laughed, but not loud enough for Buddy to hear.
“We’ll start with our gunshot guy,” the other FBI man said, “then you gentlemen can pack him out of here.” I saw him pick up the dead guy’s Mini-14. He looked it over, noticing the missing magazine. Then he tagged it and bagged it.
I looked at Aaron. “So, Fuchs—do you tell everybody about my military career?”
“Pretty much,” he said.
We were in the long afternoon shadows by the time Aaron’s team had given the guy and the death site the once-over, the sun dropping towards the head of the canyon. He and I watched the two wrestle the dead man into a body bag and zip it up.
“The jostling on the mule won’t mess up your evidence?”
“Nah,” the guy said. He was closer to Buddy Hornberg’s age than he was to his partner’s, but real fit, just like the woman. She called him Vinnie, but I never caught his last name. “We got what we need till the lab refrigerates him. You’re good to go.”
“What happens later?” Buddy said.
“We’ll either recommend a full autopsy for your sister, or not,” Vinnie said, “then the powers that be will decide.”
Buddy started to say something, then didn’t.
I led a mule over and checked its rigging. The two agents picked up the body bag and carried it over to me and set it down. I knew Buddy to be a hunting fool, so I motioned to him to give me a hand. We hoisted the body and set it across the sawbuck just where it needed to be. I started to lash it down.
“This sonofabitch was light as a feather.”
“He’s been on that buzzard-coyote-raccoon weight-loss program, Sergeant,” Alicia said. “Guaranteed to reduce ugly belly fat.”
“Gutted like a deer,” Buddy said. Hearing his own voice seemed to surprise him, and he didn’t say anything else.
I finished securing the body bag on the mule while he watched. It actually was a lot like packing a dressed-out buck.
The FBI folks wanted another full day to examine the scene and Erika’s body, so I didn’t want them to have to deal with horses in camp for a couple of nights if they weren’t used to it. I checked Aaron’s cinch for him, and we got mounted and headed back down the trail with me leading the two mules and one of the saddle horses. I had Buddy lead the other horse. I figured he was still hunter and rancher enough to handle that little chore. I could’ve led all four easy enough, but I wanted to make that contrary bugger work, even a little bit. After all, it was his sister down there in the bog. When I looked back, the two agents stood in their waders, working in that icy water on either side of the body. Just two pros getting to it. I saw Buddy sneak a look backwards, too. Then he straightened around in the saddle, eyes forward.
“He didn’t exist, y’know,” he said. “Joaquin Murrieta? That was just a folk legend. There was no such guy.”
Three days in a row of riding back in the twilight or dark, the setting moon always a bit later, a bit brighter. Tonight it shined on the FBI forensic van waiting to receive the first body. Sarah was off duty by then, but always busy as usual, chatting up the FBI crew, working on a dinner of backstrap venison she’d thawed, and helping me unsaddle as fourth generation Paiute Meadows cattleman, Buddy Hornberg, just stood there like a tourist with his hands in his pockets. She told Aaron he was having dinner with us or else, and told me to hurry up and drive Buddy back to his ranch. She said she’d run off with Agent Fuchs if I wasn’t back in an hour.
I could see the cookfire burning and smell the venison as I walked up from my truck fifty-five minutes later.
“… he took the army money he’d saved for college and put it into this place. New mules, new packs, a new home for his new baby where there was nothing left standing just a year ago. That’s when I knew he’d finally figured it out. That he didn’t have to take the same road I’d taken for us to—”
“For us to what? You spillin’ my inner-most secrets to the Man?”
Sarah turned and looked at me. “For us to grow old and cranky together,” Sarah said. “And hey—you’re halfway there, baby.” She got up and kissed me and handed me an enameled cup from the jug of Basco red she and Aaron Fuchs were drinking around the fire as they dug into venison, fire-baked potatoes, garlic bread, and roasted corn on the cob. Lorena sat bundled in her baby seat next to Sarah. It was cooler than usual and felt like rain coming. Sarah handed me a plate. We were quiet for a few minutes while we ate.
“I never had venison before,” Aaron said. “It’s really good. Different, but good.”
“It’s freezer meat from last fall.”
“You like to hunt?” he said.
“I was a hunting fool when I was a kid. This was my first buck in half a dozen years.”
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br /> “Probably nice to shoot at something that doesn’t shoot back,” he said.
“Aaron,” Sarah said.
“If you didn’t shoot the guy in the canyon,” Aaron said, “then why not? And if he wasn’t a threat, why did someone else take him out with such a well-placed shot?”
He stared at me like he expected an answer.
“Okay,” Sarah said. “I’m changing the subject. What did you mean when you said the embezzled money might not exist?”
He didn’t answer for a second. I put my plate down and picked Lorena up and set her on my left knee, wrapped up in my arms.
“I mean we don’t have the solid evidence people around here assume we have,” Aaron said. “We’ve got a huge discrepancy of funds according to bank examiners and my forensic financial guys. We’ve got cranky bank customers who say they were shorted. We’ve got lax administration at a rural branch not prepared for an accounting shit-storm. And we’ve got a missing bank manager. But if Erika Hornberg was alive, we might not have quite enough to base an indictment on. Until we sort it out, it’s all circumstantial—coincidence and conjecture.”
“So this dead woman’s name is trashed for good with no proof yet.”
Lorena was wide awake and full of beans after I picked her up, chattering and waving her arms. Aaron stopped talking a sec to watch her.
“Pretty much, Thomas,” he said. “She looks good for this, all right, but the cybercrime guys are still working to present concrete evidence of an illegal funds transfer into a secret account that they can tie to her. Maybe she’s just super-crafty. Or maybe she took that info to her grave.”
“Meanwhile, everyone around here thinks there is a huge stash of cash just waiting to be found,” Sarah said.
“Those bills scattered near the body’ll clinch that.”
“It’s a little too pat,” Aaron said. “People don’t steal over a million by dipping into the till anymore.”
“So how was the whole theft pulled off?” Sarah said.
“Let’s assume it’s Erika. She did her stealing in two phases,” he said. “The first was a lot of small stuff that didn’t get caught right away—about thirty-eight thou and change. Then a few months later, just as the bank got hip to the small stuff, she went for a big haul—over a million.”
“How the hell does that work?”
“It looks like she started shorting deposits from local businesses,” he said. “Motels and fishing cabins and travel trailers here get rented by advance reservation, lots of times by checks from older customers who come every year. Opening day of fishing season, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, hunting season—all those. Merchants deposit bundles of checks all at once. A bank employee pulls out one or two smallish checks, maybe a few grand worth from different customers and deposits them in dummy accounts. If anyone notices or complains, the thief transfers the money back where it belongs. No biggie, just a clerical error. But during a busy season, sometimes the business owner thinks maybe it’s their goof—a case of crappy record keeping. They look for the short. They blame their customers and tell them to look in their pants pockets. But if it’s two or more checks from different customers and the amounts don’t jibe, then it gets confusing as hell.”
“How do you set up a dummy account?”
“A lot of times they’re under the name of an existing customer,” he said, “except the customer has no clue. Hey, Tommy, big New York banks just got caught doing the exact same thing. Millions of fake accounts.”
“Then?” Sarah said.
“Then from the dummy account, the thief sends a little cash offshore to some account we can’t trace so easily. So the bank doesn’t get wise, they use another transaction from the offshore account back to Paiute Meadows, but the amounts are never what might be missing from any individual depositor. It’s like a puzzle game to a smart thief. What we think Erika did was to lay low for a while after that first thirty-eight grand. The bank was getting the picture, and she was definitely in their sights, but they still were trying to figure the details. We even hauled her in to question her, but she was super smart and asked questions right back at us. She had it wired.” Aaron looked beat. “Then one day last fall—bam. The million-plus gets transferred from a dummy account here to a new dummy account, then to an offshore account, and Erika Hornberg is gone like a cool breeze.”
“And you can’t track her?”
“If there’s no further transactions, it’s hard.” he said.
“Damn smart.”
“Then my department finds her car at the trailhead,” Sarah said.
“Yeah,” Aaron said. “So everything pointed to her.”
“Why would someone who had access to that much money go hide in the back-country—if that’s what she did?”
He shrugged. “No clue as to why. You get away with stuff once, you get reckless or greedy.”
“With Erika dead, the bank will write it off and you Feds will lose interest and wrap this up. The trail will be too cold.”
He held his arms out and I handed Lorena to him. He looked pretty awkward. “Harsh but true. The case will stay open, but that’s pretty much how this will go. New cases will move to the head of the line. And like Sarah knows, there’s always new cases.”
“Guilty or not, her remains’ll get buried and her reputation with it.”
“Why do you sound like you think she’s innocent, babe?” Sarah said.
“I have no goddamn idea. I’m just asking questions.”
After Aaron left, Sarah took Lorena into the cabin, and I walked down to the tack shed to lay out what Sarah and I’d be taking to a branding at her dad’s the next day. I reached into my saddle pockets hanging behind the cantle of my rig looking for my whetstone. Instead, I got my hand around a fistful of paper. It was slicker than newspaper but not as slick as a catalogue. I pulled it out and put my phone light on it. There was about eight hundred dollars in new twenties, all wrapped up with a new rubber band.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I shoved the cash back into my saddle pockets and went up to the cabin. Sarah was in bed but awake, and I didn’t mention the money. I didn’t know what to think of it or who left it there, and didn’t want to waste the night talking about it.
The next morning early, the four of us saddled a horse apiece and loaded them into the gooseneck. Then we piled into the Silverado—Harvey and May and me—while Sarah and the baby followed us down the mountain in her sheriff’s SUV. Watching them in my rearview, I thought of my daughter lashed down in her car seat behind the steel screen that kept the deputies safe from the perps, the kid only three feet behind the 12 gauge locked upright between the front seats. That’s just how our life was then.
We had no trips that day, and Sarah’s dad had sixty head of calves to brand. The two of us helping him on the ranch was part of our plan when Sarah and I got married. Her dad had heart problems but wanted to keep the family place productive. Besides, Sarah had always been his good right hand since she was a kid, and sheriff’s department or no sheriff’s department, she wouldn’t have it any other way. We left the SUV in town. Sarah cinched down Lorena in the pickup for the rest of the forty-mile drive up the Reno Highway to the Cathcart ranch in Shoshone Valley, about six miles south of the Nevada line.
Sarah wanted her dad to take it easy, so she divided the rest of us into two bunches of three each, one bunch to rope, the other to do the groundwork. After a bit we’d switch off.
“It’ll be you boys against us girls,” she said.
I worked with May every day at the pack station and knew how tough she was, but since Dad died and Mom had to move off the Allison ranch, I’d forgot what a hand Mom could be with a rope, catching her share of heels and razzing us guys when we missed, a ranch woman from top to bottom. She’d had her arm operated on after a propane explosion the year before, but looking at her take her dallies you’d hardly notice. Harvey and I were teamed with Mom’s boyfriend, Burt, who was a Marine packer. He wasn’t as good a roper as
Harv, but he was a big guy and a working machine on the ground. Lorena was in her baby seat in the shade outside the corral and Audie tended her like the kid was there just for her amusement.
Dave left the branding fire and spelled her, holding his granddaughter so Audie could watch the action up close. Jack Harney showed up with a bandage over his ear and a sheriff’s ballcap tilted to fit plus a cooler of Genuine Draft. He sat with Dave and took a turn bouncing Lorena on his lap as they hard-assed each other.
“Since the goddamn accountants made the Flying W sell all their damn Santa Gertrudis,” Jack said, “you’re the only one left in this country contrary enough to run these rank old cows.”
“The day some accountant knows shit about the cattle business,” Dave said, “is one day too many.” He spit. “‘Sides, in hard country I’m a guy that likes to see a cow with a little ear on ’em.”
Even fifty feet off, Sarah kind of laughed. She’d heard it all before.
After a bit, the girls took their turn doing the groundwork. Mom steered Audie to the branding fire and explained the drill, so when I roped and dragged a bull calf to the hot irons, Audie was right there next to Mom with the bawling cattle and smell of burning hair, the antiseptic spray in one hand and the nut bucket in the other.
Before noon Becky Tyree drove into the yard with her half-Paiute son Dan. He built a mesquite fire in Dave’s barbecue to broil flank steak, then borrowed my gelding to rope and drag a couple of calves to the fire while the coals burned down. He was a stout guy, so when he took a turn on the ground our pace picked right up. Becky handled the iron on a few, then I helped her set out the tortillas and guacamole and watermelon and such. She and her late husband had been big friends of my folks, and at sixty she was still slim as a kid and could outwork most men. I asked her about her heifers pastured at Hornberg’s.