by M. K. Wren
Finally, he saw Laura exit by the back door and go to her house. He followed her, but stayed only long enough to tell her he wasn’t going to the funeral, explaining vaguely that he was expecting an important call. The pretext seemed of no interest to her, nor did she seem hurt or surprised, but he doubted anything he said registered, or that she’d had an hour’s sleep that night.
She didn’t even ask what had happened between Linc and Ted at the dance, although the scars of that encounter were obvious. That, Conan had ascertained from a distance; the brothers seemed to be avoiding him as much as he was them, and he managed to stay out of Aaron’s way until the family was getting into the car to leave for the funeral. Aaron wasn’t as indifferent as Laura to his refusal to attend the funeral, considering it sacrilegious if not treasonous. But there wasn’t time to argue.
With Gil Potts at the wheel, the black Continental moved toward the gate in ponderous dignity, a flotilla of cars and pickups in its wake; the ranch employees, trussed in suits and ties, sunburned faces suggesting sober embarrassment. Except for Ginger and Mano Vasquez, Conan would have the ranch to himself for the afternoon, and he intended to take advantage of it.
He began with Aaron’s bedroom.
It was a peculiarly impersonal room; Aaron kept few mementos. Conan did find a faded sepia portrait of Carlotta McFall. Her dark hair and the sensitive contours of her mouth reminded him of Linc. Perhaps she hadn’t belonged here, either; at least, she didn’t survive bearing Aaron’s third son. He wondered if Aaron had ever forgiven Ted that.
But the room contained nothing pertinent to George’s death or the feud. As the sun moved past zenith, making the windless afternoon an echo of August, he extended his search to George and Laura’s house. It was a time-consuming and distasteful process, but invasion of privacy was part of the job; murder was too often a private affair. But this house, so rich in civilized and civilizing objects, offered as little as Aaron’s room in the kind of answers he sought.
His next exercise in futility was the machine shop. He found it necessary to pick the lock on the explosives storage room. Tate’s deputy had already checked the dynamite inventory, and Conan expected to find everything in good order. Wil Mosely’s careful records agreed in every respect with the inventory. Over the past year, dynamite had been taken from stock and signed for by Aaron, Linc, Ted, and Gil Potts, but there was no way of verifying whether the stated amounts were used for the stated purposes.
His search of the bunkhouse was equally perfunctory and futile. The worst that could be said of the buckaroos was that they smoked, chewed, drank, and indulged in poker and calendars depicting incredibly endowed, air-brushed females.
He ignored the Moselys’s house; Irene and Wil Mosely had worked at the Black Stallion for twenty years, and nothing he’d observed or learned suggested their loyalty to the McFalls had wavered in the last year. The Vasquez trailer he ignored because of the brevity, rather than length, of service. They had been hired only six months ago.
At any rate, searching their trailer was out of the question today. Ginger was busy in the cookhouse, but Mano, as general maintenance and yard man, worked outdoors, and Conan was well aware that his activities were under suspicious scrutiny all afternoon.
That was why he put Potts’s trailer off until last. It was between the cookhouse and bunkhouse, facing the yard separating the barn from the main house, and exposed to view from a number of vantage points. But finally he found a moment when Mano was working in the branding corral behind the barn. Potts’s door was locked, but that delayed him only briefly.
It was typical working-man bachelor’s quarters—bed unmade, clothes, beer cans, copies of Argosy, the Police Gazette, and Sir scattered negligently; a place where a man slept rather than lived.
Potts wasn’t a sentimentalist, either, but he was a collector of sorts. Weapons. Guns and knives. Two shotguns and three rifles adorned the walls, and Conan found five handguns in a drawer, ranging from a serviceable Colt .45 revolver to an exotic Italian 9mm automatic. The drawer also contained an assortment of hunting knives and a battered bayonet. There were no switchblades, and the collection wasn’t unusual for a man of Potts’s background.
Conan continued his search, methodically and painstakingly, but only one other item attracted his attention. It was in a packet of letters from Potts’s mother and sister in Spokane. A newspaper clipping, the same one he’d found in Linc’s room headlining the death of Chari Drinkwater.
He was preoccupied as he finished his search; still, he remembered to look out the window for Mano before he left the trailer. But his timing was bad, and he swore under his breath as he closed the door at exactly the same moment Mano emerged from the barn.
When he reached the house, he realized the afternoon was nearly gone, and hunger did nothing for his temper. He took time for a sandwich and coffee, and thus restored went upstairs for his briefcase and took it down to the office.
There was no evidence that the room had been entered since he’d left it. The air seemed stale and dead; he opened the window, then settled at the desk with a cigarette, the topographic maps, a notebook, and the telephone. The call went to Cliff Spiker’s home in Burns.
A quarter of an hour later, he hung up and lit another cigarette while he studied his notes, eyes narrowed with a subtle excitement he refused to recognize consciously, as if recognition might blight the budding hope.
Spiker had been given the rock—the murder weapon—the soil sample from the muddied hooves of George’s horse, and the sample Conan had taken from the reservoir. The rock, Spiker assured him, did not come from any outcrop within a mile of the reservoir, but lava formations of its type were too common in the county for him to guess its source.
It was the sample from George’s horse that kindled the hope. It was diatomaceous earth, which was easily differentiated from the clays, sands, and volcanic ash composing most of the soil in the area. The sample from the reservoir was of the latter type, and there was no trace of it in the mud from the horse’s hooves.
That meant the horse hadn’t been near the reservoir. George and the sorrel had parted company before he reached the reservoir, and it was unlikely the parting was voluntary; a man didn’t willingly put himself on foot in this country.
And Spiker had more to offer. Because diatomaceous earth was of high commercial value in pure deposits, the location of known outcrops was recorded and mapped in some detail. So were water sources in this arid land, and mud implied the presence of water. Thus, Spiker could pinpoint several locations in the immediate area where George might have ridden through wet diatomaceous earth.
Conan checked the locations on the topo maps, quickly eliminating most of them because of distance. Between approximately eight and eleven o’clock, George had ridden to or through a wet deposit of diatomaceous earth, and then been taken, probably after the blow that smashed his skull, to the reservoir. He didn’t ride there; at least, not on his own horse. At a walk, a horse could cover perhaps five miles an hour; less at night, in spite of the full moon.
There was only one place on Spiker’s list that was close enough to both the Black Stallion and the Spring Creek reservoir to satisfy the limits of time and distance.
Dry Creek Pasture.
Conan took a slow drag on his cigarette as he studied the battlement of escarpments around the basin, counting seven box canyons or narrow defiles which could be fenced off easily. Finally, he reached for the phone and placed a person-to-person call to Johnnie Moss at the Ten-Mile.
“Johnnie, this is Conan. Any plans for tomorrow?”
“Nothing important. I don’t have to pick Avery up at that convention till Tuesday. Why? You need a ride home?”
“No, not yet I need a helicopter.”
Johnnie laughed. “Okay, but maybe you’d better have a pilot, too. Remember that time you took the Cessna—”
“I remember, Johnnie. How can I forget with you to keep the memory fresh?”
“Sorry,” he
said, with no hint of apology. “Anyway, where are you?”
“The Black Stallion, but don’t come here. I’ll meet you at the Burns airport at five tomorrow morning.”
“Are you sure you mean morning?”
Conan smiled at his incredulous tone.
“I’m sure. I want to check something, and it can only be done in the dawn’s early light, or it might attract too much attention.”
“Okay. Mind telling me what it is?”
“No, but not on the phone. I’ll tell you about it in the morning.”
“All right, I’ll be there.” He sighed audibly. “Damn, five A.M.”
CHAPTER 18
It was a classic rosy-fingered dawn, fragile streamers of cloud pink against a deep, transparent blue sky. Conan looked down from the roaring, Plexiglas capsule of the helicopter at a serrated landscape molded by the warm rose of the clouds on the eastern slopes, the cerulean of the sky in the western shadows, and resolved to make this flight someday just for the pure pleasure of it. He couldn’t fully enjoy it now, and he found that annoying.
He’d found a great deal to be annoyed about this morning, beginning with the alarm that woke him at three, and had been unusually short with Johnnie Moss when he gave him his instructions. But Johnnie’s equanimity seemed unassailable, and he didn’t ask Conan to elaborate on his brief explanation that he was investigating the possibility that cattle rustling was involved in the feud. Johnnie knew all about the feud; since George’s death, every front page and TV newscast in the state was a textbook on that.
Johnnie kept the ’copter at a relatively high altitude until after they crossed Stinkingwater Mountain. Much of this land fell under BLM jurisdiction, and residents were accustomed to helicopters and planes overhead embarked on endless government surveys. Conan was hoping his own survey, and his interest in Dry Creek Pasture, would escape notice.
“There’s the county road,” Johnnie shouted, pointing ahead. Conan only nodded. He’d already recognized it; the topo maps covering this area had been committed to memory. He also recognized Dry Creek. Apparently, it had been named at some point further down its course or in a drought year; the rising sun flashed on sparse threads of water. Where the creek turned north, he looked ahead to a wide basin; Dry Creek Pasture. Johnnie took the ’copter down to a thousand feet and shifted course, approaching the basin from the southeast, where Basco Gap provided the easiest approach from the road on foot or horseback. There were tire tracks skirling off the road and disappearing in the sage up the canyon, but in themselves they meant nothing; in the era of the ORV, even the most remote hills were tire-scarred.
The canyon narrowed, its walls rushing past uncomfortably close, then suddenly opened into the basin, a spectacular vista with the hills on the eastern rim casting blue shadows across a plain gullied by Dry Creek and its ephemeral tributaries. The soil bared in its course had a pink cast, but at noon would be glaring white, and Conan smiled. Diatomaceous earth. The ridges to the east and north were rust-black lava, but to the west and south they were snow white where the cover of grass and sage was tom by erosion.
Johnnie glanced at him questioningly, and Conan pointed to the eastern rim.
“Counterclockwise, Johnnie, low and slow.”
The ’copter’s shadow skittered over the ragged escarpments as he studied the terrain sliding under them. But the search was brief. Within half a minute he shouted to Johnnie to turn back and circle the box canyon they had just passed.
It was perfect.
The single outlet was narrow and cliffbound, but the floor of the canyon was wide and cut by a running stream, which meant a year-round spring that provided the grass and water vital to the cattle confined there; at least thirty head. It wouldn’t be unusual to find a few strays missed in the fall roundup, but not this many in one place. If that hadn’t caught his attention, the two horses pastured with the cattle would have demanded a second look.
“You want me to set her down?” Johnnie asked.
“Make one more turn.” Conan was getting the Minolta out of its case. “I want a couple of pictures, then put it down outside the mouth of the canyon.”
Johnnie found a flat spot a few hundred yards from the opening; the rotors whipped up a dust cloud as they beat to a stop, and Conan scrambled out of the cockpit.
“Come with me, Johnnie. I’ll need a witness.”
The cessation of the ’copter’s roar left an aural vacuum. Their footfalls crunched in an absolute silence that made rational the feeling that they were the only human inhabitants of the world. Their breath came out in white puffs in the chill air, and Conan appreciated the sheepskin jacket, a leftover from the Ten-Mile, like the boots. The latter weren’t designed for walking, but he accepted their shortcomings. The odds were high against any rattlesnakes showing themselves at this time of year and in the dawn cold, but he would feel uncomfortable without that leather armor.
And if any rattlers were out, it would be here among these volcanic ridges. Iron-stained black burst through the grass and sage as if drought had split the velvet skin. If the pocked rock he’d seen on Joe Tate’s desk were left here, no eye could differentiate it.
The mouth of the canyon was set an an angle so that from the ground not one cow could be seen, and it was spanned with a barbed wire fence artfully concealed in drifts of tumbleweeds. They went under it, Johnnie swearing when he snagged his jacket. Conan took pictures of the fence, and when they came into the canyon proper, some general views and close-ups of the cattle, focusing on the brands. They weren’t disturbed by the invasion, only regarding them with blinking, bovine curiosity. The total head count was thirty-four; five with Kimmons’s K-Bar brand, the rest bearing the slanted Running S brand.
Johnnie shook his head as he gazed around the canyon.
“It’s just a big holding pen, Conan. Water and feed to keep a few head until they collect enough to bring in a cattle truck.”
He nodded. “And they’d only have to trail the cattle a mile down Basco Gap to the road. Let’s get a good look at those horses; I want to see if they have any brands.”
Getting that look took some time. The horses responded as if Conan and Johnnie approached with intent to saddle, and part of the ritual of saddling was giving the rider a workout on foot before he caught up with his transportation. But finally Conan was satisfied; there were no brands.
They paused to catch their breath as the sun tipped over the eastern rim of the canyon.
“Well, Johnnie, horses mean saddles, unless someone rounded up these cows bareback, and I don’t recommend that. There must be a cache of some sort; a cave, probably.” He pivoted, studying the rock walls. “Over there where the spring comes out. That looks like a likely spot.”
It was likely, but, like the fence, the mouth of the cave was well camouflaged, and they almost missed it. Conan took pictures both before and after they cleared away the weeds, cautioning Johnnie as they entered to watch for snakes, at which he prudently let Conan precede him.
It wasn’t in fact a cave, but a deep overhang about ten feet long, tapering back to a depth of six feet. Even at the opening they had to bend to avoid hitting their heads.
Johnnie said dryly, “Well, there’s your saddles.”
There were more than saddles here. Conan recorded photographically a gallon can of gasoline, two boxes of dynamite, and four salt blocks. He took scrapings from them; analysis would undoubtedly betray a high cyanide content
The saddles had no identifying marks, but from the stirrup lengths, he judged that both riders were tall. The blankets and bridles were piled by the saddles, hemp ropes with leather hondos looped around the horns, and small toolbags containing wire cutters and gloves tied to the rawhide strings. One of the bits was a common snaffle, but the other was a spade. Still, there was nothing unusual about any of this equipment; nothing unique enough to be traced to an individual purchaser.
He found the real bonanza under one of the saddles. A small metal strongbox with a han
dle welded into the top, the hasp sealed with a padlock.
“Johnnie, I want you to watch me.”
He crouched beside him as he took his tool kit from his jacket and gingerly tackled the lock, holding it steady with a small pair of pliers to avoid adding any fingerprints.
“I’m watching,” Johnnie said. “Is this lesson number one for cat burglars?”
“No. Lesson number one for potential witnesses. Ah—” The lock surrendered with a sharp snap.
The contents seemed anticlimactic. Four carbon duplicates of receipts. He took them out and studied them, his initial disappointment turning to hope, then biting regret.
They came from the type of cheap receipt pad available at any office supply store and were written in a crude hand. Each was dated, and listed forty to fifty head of cattle, broken down into cows, steers, and calves, the total value within five hundred dollars, plus or minus, of six thousand.
He didn’t have to check his notes to know that these amounts coincided exactly with the deposits in Linc’s Boise bank account, and the dates preceded those deposits in every case by not more than three days.
Under the totals was the notation, “Paym’t on acceptance,” and the initials B.T. He could call up no name to go with them, but another set of initials at the bottom of each receipt and in a different handwriting did call up a name; one as familiar as the hand.
A.L.M.
Abraham Lincoln McFall.
Johnnie, peering over his shoulder, asked, “What does that mean—payment on acceptance?”
Conan was too preoccupied at first to respond.
“What? Oh. Acceptance of the beef at headquarters, I suppose, which is probably a certain meatpacking plant in Winnemucca.”
“Isn’t this sort of thing usually a cash-on-the-line deal?”
“Usually, yes.” He laid the receipts on the ground and photographed them. “But in this case, payment is made to a bank account in Boise. By mail, I’m sure, and in cash with a numbered deposit slip.”