“Hard to imagine.”
“Well, it’s true. Go figure.” Casey blew her nose on a bright blue handkerchief.
“Freddy liked horsepower, but more than one, maybe,” Estelle said. “My two little boys worshiped him. There were plenty of opportunities for Carlos or Francisco to ride double with him or his little brother on all manner of crazy machines, but their mean old mom wouldn’t let them.”
Casey bit her lip and wadded her handkerchief against her eyes. “Will Butch be all right?” Her lips quivered. “Mr. Romero said Butch was in a bad way, but he couldn’t talk about it on the phone.”
“It is bad. He’ll lose the eye, maybe with other complications. It’s a bad time for them.”
“I like Tata.”
“She’s a good person.”
“She doesn’t deserve any of this.”
“We don’t always get what we deserve.” She reached out and stroked the mare’s velvety nose. “Will you show me the cave, Casey?”
“If I have to.”
“I’m not asking you to go into it,” Estelle said. “Just where it is.” She glanced at her watch. “Would you take me there now?”
“We won’t see where Freddy… ”
“No. We won’t go that way.”
“Did Freddy do something wrong? I mean when he took the skull?”
“It just doesn’t matter, Casey. Technically, it’s like taking an eagle carcass that you might find, maybe so you could use the feathers. Or even picking up an elk skull with rack. But his retrieving the skull is not the issue.”
With the handkerchief crumpled into a ball and held over her nose, Casey regarded the undersheriff. “What is the issue? Did Freddy do something else?”
“Whenever there’s an accident, we try to find out all the answers,” Estelle said, and she could see that Casey caught the evasion. “Can I meet you back at the house, then?”
Casey nodded. “Flory doesn’t want to go up into all those rocks, do you, lady.” The horse muttered another huh, huh, huh. “She was bitten by a snake last year right here on her pastern.” She bent and stroked a hand down the mare’s left leg, stopping near a bald spot on the hide above the hoof. “She gets skittish sometimes.”
Estelle stepped back as the girl swung effortlessly into the saddle. “I take short cuts.” Casey managed a full smile. “I’ll let mom know.” With no apparent movement of the reins, the horse wheeled and charged off past the Expedition, following the two-track for only fifty yards or so before veering off through the scrub.
Back at the truck, Estelle thumbed the cell phone, and it rang half a dozen times before Sheriff Robert Torrez picked up.
“Bobby, I’m out here with Casey Prescott. It looks as if Freddy Romero made up the story about the cat’s skull. He didn’t find it above Borracho Springs at all.”
“Imagine that,” Torrez muttered. “I said there weren’t no caves up there.”
“Casey is taking me to the spot, but it’s over near the canyon, not far from where he crashed.”
“Pasquale’s out there now,” the sheriff said. “Does she know why Freddy lied?”
“No, she said she doesn’t, and I believe her. Other than that maybe there’s something more to the cave. That’s the logical assumption. She did say that Freddy was excited about bringing out the entire skeleton. He didn’t want anyone else to find his stash. That would be enough for him to play it clever.”
“You ask her about the gun?”
“No. I wanted to wait a bit on that. Until we found out a little more about what she knows.”
“Just as well. We’re still over at the garage. Got interesting stuff going on. Mears is dead-on sure that we have a bullet fragment.”
“A fragment…”
“In the tire. Left front. And there’s a little scuff on the fender panel. Looks like it lines up.”
“Ay, ” Estelle breathed. “The fragment was enough to make the tire go flat right away?”
“No way of tellin’.”
“So it might have been from some other time. Something that didn’t cause a flat, at least not right away. Maybe Freddy got careless with his own rifle.”
“Nope. Twenty-two slugs are lead. This is brass. Mears is goin’ over the tire inch by inch. We’ll see.”
So many possibilities, Estelle thought. A well-placed shot and a suddenly exploded tire, sending the four-wheeler into the rocks. A sudden startle by the rider, maybe when he saw someone or something in the two-track just as he crested the hill, sending the ATV slightly off course to graze the rocks. The way Freddy rode, pell-mell and airborne half the time, any slight distraction could lead to a disaster. And just as easily, the fragment might have been picked up by the tire in normal running-a scrap of something in the roadway, then carried for miles before the tire went flat.
“You be careful out there.” Torrez didn’t need to remind her that some possibilities were uglier than others.
Chapter Sixteen
Rather than driving from the Prescott’s back out to the state highway and then heading south to the Broken Spur and that access to the back country, Estelle took a rough two-track north from the ranch, intersecting the oldest patch of pavement in the county, State 17. Ten miles west, across a dilapidated cattle guard, they turned onto the northernmost terminus of Bender’s Canyon Trail, and for at least two miles, the two-track was relatively smooth, cutting through a few hundred thousand acres of state-owned prairie. They reached the intersection that took them to Miles Waddell’s gate north of the mesa and turned east.
More than once, Estelle saw Casey Prescott lean forward in her seat. They plunged into deep shade on the east side of the mesa’s flank.
“Just up there.” The girl gestured and Estelle slowed the SUV. “We parked right under that big old juniper there.” Estelle recognized the spot where she and Bill Gastner had paused earlier.
“This is where we were on Sunday,” Casey said. “We hiked up the mesa a ways.”
“Tell me something.” Estelle opened the door. “What was the attraction here in the first place?”
Casey bit her lower lip. “Freddy was talking to a friend at school about the canyon? That there were a lot of fossils in that area just south of the window where the bottom of the arroyo is washed clean down to bedrock?” She nodded at the memory. “He’d been pestering me to go with him, so,” and she shrugged. “I did. We took a picnic lunch and made a day of it.” She blushed. “I know…my mother told me that I wasn’t to ride with Freddy on the four-wheeler. But she and my dad went into town, and the weather was perfect and I thought…”
“What did you think?” Estelle prompted gently.
“Freddy was talking about not bothering to finish the year, you know. At school? He’d had a job offer down in Deming and was thinking of just getting it on. Soooooo stupid, Sheriff. I mean, just one year to graduation, and he’s going to drop out? That made me so mad.”
“So you hoped to talk some sense into him?”
“Yes.”
“Freddy drove out to the ranch to pick you up?”
“Yes. In that awful old truck of his. The oil fumes make me sick.”
“And you parked it where?”
“Over on the trail just off the county road. We drove into Bender’s just a little ways and unloaded so we could ride up the canyon road.” Her expression ran the gamut from vexation to sadness. “Way too fast. We rode up to the spot where the fossils were supposed to be, and poked around for a while. Freddy got impatient, which doesn’t take much.”
“So you left that spot and rode here. What prompted stopping and then climbing up the mesa?”
Casey hesitated, the memory obviously painful. Her hands wadded the handkerchief, and she showed no inclination to open the door. “I got mad at him.” She shook her head. “You know, it could be really nice out here, just putting along and enjoying the ride. But Freddy always has to careen along like he’s trying to win a race.”
“So you yelled at him to stop.�
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“Sort of. He ran through a bunch of ruts, and I cracked my elbow on that stupid plywood tool box he has strapped to the back of the ATV. He laughed, and I punched him and told him to stop.” She pointed at the juniper. “We pulled up under the tree there.”
Estelle stepped out into the center of the two-track and looked up the steep slope of the mesa. The approach to the rim was a rugged jumble, with no single attractive feature that called out, “Climb me.”
“Where did he go, exactly?” Estelle asked.
“The first thing he wanted to do was run all the way up to the top,” Casey said. “I told him he was crazy…it’d be after dark by the time we got back down. And we had all this food and stuff that he bought at the Handi-way. We’re like really going to lug all that up the mesa? I don’t think so. So he charges up saying that if we climb up just a little ways, we could see the ranch.”
“The ranch,” Estelle said. “Yours, you mean?”
“Sure. And I’m really excited about that,” Casey said dryly. “I mean, duh? I live there. I don’t need to see it from half way up this mesa.” The mesa’s shade was now comfortable, and Estelle beckoned.
“Show me where he went. Will you do that?”
Casey pointed off to the left, where a rim boulder had tumbled for a few feet and then perched, overhanging the slope like a two-story house that had slid off its foundation. “He wanted to see if he could climb that. Maybe up the back.”
“¡Caramba! ” Estelle breathed. “Interesting,” she said. “Boys seem to need to climb things. That’s where he found the skull?”
“If you want to climb up there, I’ll show you.” It didn’t look particularly far, perhaps a hundred yards. But by the time Estelle placed the flat of her hand on the wall of the boulder, feeling its rough warmth, she was breathing hard. “This is where I stopped.” Casey was not the least bit winded. She took another couple of steps and pointed behind the boulder. “Right there. Freddy went around the back there, and he hollered at me that he could feel this gush of cold air coming out of the rocks.”
Estelle followed the girl with caution, seeing altogether too many convenient flat surfaces for reptiles to coil, enjoying the residual warmth from the rocks.
The house-sized boulder could have tumbled from higher on the rim anytime in the past millennium. Stunted trees tried for purchase here and there on the slope behind the wall of rock, shaded both morning and afternoon. Estelle could see the scuff of tracks, and saw the way several rock outcroppings formed a mild overhang. The floor under the overhang was mounded with debris, the efforts of a diligent packrat.
“That’s where the skull was. See, right there?” Casey knelt and pointed up under the overhang. Estelle crouched beside her. From where she crouched to the back of the overhang was perhaps six feet, and the packrat had made the most of it. The undersheriff saw bones here and there, but nothing that she would immediately have identified as a cat. She shifted a bit, edging closer to the packrat’s nest, wary about dark corners.
By the time she’d moved so that her head was just under the upper portion of the overhang, she could feel the flow of cool air from her left. Bending still further, letting the air flow touch her face, she turned and saw the black slit of an opening, a roughly elliptical mouth no more than eighteen inches high at its extreme, tapering at the corners. Rocks had been tumbled to one side, perhaps by Freddy as he explored.
“You’re kidding.” Estelle spoke more to herself than to Casey.
“Oh, he had to explore that. He was all excited about the air coming out. I told him that he was crazy.”
“He couldn’t possibly see a thing.”
“Well, he kept chucking little rocks into it, figuring if there was a snake there, it’d rattle.”
“By then he’d already recovered the skull, though?”
“Yes. It was lying toward the back of the packrat’s nest.”
“You’d have to squirm in on your stomach to explore that hole,” Estelle said.
“Not me.”
“But Freddy did?”
“Of course. ’Cause he’s Freddy.” Casey leaned against the house-rock, eyes closed, tears brimming again.
“How could he see?”
“He had his lighter. He turned it up like a torch. I told him that if he got caught in there somehow, I wasn’t going to be the one to pull him out. He’d just have to stay stuck until I could find help. But he didn’t go very far. He moved a couple of rocks, and then said something about needing a pry bar.”
“Delightful. Is that when you went back to the ATV?”
“No. Freddy crawled in a little ways on his tummy. Not very far. I was kneeling right about where you are now, and I could hear him breathing. Then he said, ‘Whoa!’ real excited. And I said, ‘what?’ and he said there were bats roosting in there. He could see ’em up on the ceiling.”
“Bats,” Estelle grimaced. “Well, why not.”
“And I could imagine him crawling through all kinds of guano, and coming down with hantavirus or whatever. I mean, just the sort of place I’d want to be. I told him that the skull was really neat, and that we needed to take care of it. That’s when he backed out of the cave and ran back down to the four-wheeler to get one of the old towels that he had folded up in the tool box.” She wiped her eyes again. “I mean, it’s an amazing skull. You’ve seen it?”
“I saw it when I talked to Mr. Underwood earlier today. It’s impressive.”
“He told Freddy that it was illegal to keep it-even for the school to keep it without getting a permit for it.”
“All true. So you two had the skull, wrapped in an old towel.”
“Freddy wanted to go home and get one of his dad’s big shop lights-he said it’s one of those big battery-powered floods on one of those little tripods?”
“A simple flashlight wouldn’t do?”
“Well, that’s Freddy,” and she flinched as if the name was a knife twisting in her heart.
“But he didn’t come back right away, then?”
“No. He packed the skull as carefully as he could, and he kept talking about the rest of the skeleton. I told him that he should take the skull in to show Mr. Underwood… I mean, he’s really up on things like that. And then there might be a proper way to collect the rest of the skeleton, instead of just jumbling it all in a big mess. You know, like an archeological dig, or something? Freddy didn’t want to take time to do all that, but I told him that it was too important to ruin.” She shrugged. “I don’t know why. I mean right then we both thought it was just a mountain lion. But even a mounted lion skeleton would be a fun project, don’t you think? I mean, there are lots of those old musty stuffed lions around, but not an articulated skeleton. That’s what Mr. Underwood talked about.”
“It would be neat. So Freddy agreed to that?”
“Sort of. He didn’t want to, but I can be fairly persuasive.” Her pained smile came at considerable price, Estelle guessed. “When I told him there was probably even a right way and a wrong way to clean the skull so it wasn’t ruined, he understood that. So that’s what we did. We packed it up as best we could, we had our lunch back down in the shade in Bender’s Canyon where the fossils were supposed to be, and then…just kinda hung out.”
“But Freddy did come back out by himself. And he brought a flashlight with him.” Estelle pointed at the opening. “Rocks have been moved recently. Freddy might have done that?”
“I don’t know. If he did, he didn’t tell me. I know he talked to Mr. Underwood a lot on Tuesday morning. And then we went to the bio room during lunch, even, and Mr. Underwood showed us what he’d found out…that it was for sure a jaguar, not a mountain lion. There was still a little cape of fur left on the back of the skull, right where it would join the neck?”
“Had he called the Fish and Wildlife Service at that time?”
“No. He was going to, that afternoon. He wanted to know if Freddy would agree to talk with the newspaper, and Freddy thought that was sort of n
eat. They did that after school on Tuesday. Mr. Dayan came over.”
“You’re sure all of this was on Tuesday?”
“Yes. And this past week, I was buried in work, so I got Freddy to agree to come back here on the weekend…I mean, like now? I said I’d go with him and help…whatever he needed.”
“And he agreed to that.”
Casey nodded. “So much for promises.”
“As far as you know, he didn’t tell anyone else about this location? He stuck with the Borracho Canyon story?”
“Yes. I told him that I thought that was silly. I mean, who’s going to find this spot, anyway? But he said just to let it be. He knew what he was doing. Oh, sure.”
“You were both in school Tuesday and Wednesday, but you didn’t see him on Thursday?”
“No. I don’t know where he was…I mean,” and she gulped, “I didn’t know. His stupid phone was broken, so I didn’t reach him. And then I tried to call his house Thursday night, and nobody answered. I didn’t know about the deal with Butchie until yesterday in school. So I thought that Freddy probably was with his family up in Albuquerque.” She thumped the boulder with her fist. “And all that time, he was out here somewhere, so hurt…”
Estelle squeezed Casey’s shoulder. She thought about her conversation with Bobby Torrez. If something, or someone, had been responsible for Freddy’s losing control of the ATV, then just as surely there was someone who had looked down into that arroyo after the crash…perhaps had even clambered down to the arroyo bed and approached close enough to see the aftermath of the wreck, to witness Freddy’s final struggle.
Casey Prescott didn’t need to be haunted by that possibility.
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