Death Song

by Michael McGarrity

  “Can I drive it?” Patrick asked.

  “You sure can,” Jack said, getting a nod from Kerney.

  Patrick’s eyes lit up. He jumped off Jack’s lap, ran to the mudroom, returned with his boots and cold weather gear in hand, and started getting ready to go back outside.

  “Guess I’d better hurry up and finish this coffee,” Jack said with a grin.

  “We have to go as well,” Kerney said, gesturing toward Clayton. “Thanks for plowing our road.”

  “No need for thanks,” Jack replied. “I like driving that big old grader about as much as Patrick does.”

  Bundled up and ready to go, three men and one excited little boy trooped out into the fierce glare of sunlight bouncing off the thick layer of snow.

  In the truck, Kerney lowered the visor, honked the horn, waved at Patrick and Jack, and started down the road. Even with the plowing Jack had done, it was slow going. Kerney made the turn onto the highway, looked at Clayton, and grinned.

  “What?” Clayton asked.

  “I was just thinking that you look a hell of a lot better once you get a good night’s sleep.”

  Clayton smiled slightly. “Too bad it didn’t make me any smarter. Maybe then I’d have some ideas of what we should do to solve the murders.”

  “Sometimes the solution is in the little details.”

  Clayton nodded. He’d slept hard until just before he woke, when the dream of Tim Riley dressed as an Apache warrior and the faceless, laughing woman had returned. What did it mean? Why couldn’t he shake free of Riley’s ghost? Today he’d worn black jeans and a black wool sweater to protect himself from ghost sickness. But maybe it was too late.

  “Are you okay?” Kerney asked, noting the dark expression on Clayton’s face.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” Clayton replied, forcing a smile, trying to make himself believe it.

  At the Cañoncito double-wide Ramona Pino and Matt Chacon found an empty fifty-five-gallon oil drum in the stables and rolled it over the snow to the well house. At the woodshed they gathered up and carried armloads of kindling and firewood until they had enough to keep a good fire going for several hours. Matt got the fire started with blank paper from a writing tablet, and soon the warmth from the drum had noticeably raised the temperature under the improvised canopy that had been put up hastily during yesterday’s storm to protect the area from additional moisture contamination. But the canopy kept the smoke from rising, and after deciding the extra warmth wasn’t worth smoke-filled lungs and watery eyes, the two detectives cut it down.

  Once the smoke had dissipated, Ramona crawled into the well house and turned on the battery-powered camping lantern. The partial roof on the structure and the temporary canopy had helped to keep deep snow from covering the dirt floor, but with a probe she could tell there was still a good twelve inches to dig through.

  With the lantern instead of a flashlight and the morning sunlight streaming through the damaged roof, illumination inside the well house was much improved. Ramona did a careful visual inspection of all the surfaces that might have been touched by Brian Riley or anyone else who’d entered the structure, paying particular attention to the door, walls, and the metal parts of the old well motor and pipes that were exposed.

  A good investigator knew that a person coming in contact with anything could leave a trace. Knowing what to look for could turn up a critical piece of evidence. It could be a hair, a fiber, a drop of blood, a mark left by a tool, a fingerprint, a footprint, or a toothpick with dried saliva on it. Cases had been solved and murderers convicted based on plant life, insects, and soil samples found at crime scenes.

  On the rough-cut boards to the door there were what looked like some short dark hairs, quite possibly from rodents, stuck to the wood. It would be up to the lab to decide if the hairs were human or not. Using tweezers, Ramona removed each hair and bagged it separately.

  She dusted for prints on likely surfaces and lifted several good ones from the metal door latch, the old motor, and one of the broken roof joists that hung down five feet above the dirt floor.

  The snow accumulation behind the motor had an uneven indentation that Ramona closely examined. There were several scoop marks in the snow, made possibly by gloved hands. Brian Riley had come here yesterday looking for something, and this looked to be the likely spot.

  Using a small trowel, Ramona began removing the snow by scraping away a thin layer at a time. When her trowel scratched something solid, she brushed the snow away to expose some wooden boards frozen to the dirt floor. Gently she pried the frost-covered boards loose and inspected them. There looked to be the outline of fingerprints on one of them. If so, when the frost on the board melted, the prints would mostly likely vanish.

  Ramona quickly dusted the impressions, photographed the prints, and then examined the shallow pit the wooden slats had hidden. The earth had been disturbed, as though something had been dug out. A rectangular, dimpled outline around the edge of the pit suggested the object had been about the size of a briefcase.

  Ramona photographed the pit, and the flash from her camera reflected off something shiny at one corner that was almost completely covered in dirt. She tried to pick it up with tweezers but couldn’t pull it free. Using the trowel, she pried it loose, slipped it off the trowel into a clear plastic bag, and zipped it closed. It was a gold coin, a 1974, one-troy-ounce South African Krugerrand. She put it in her coat pocket along with the other evidence she’d collected and went outside.

  “Is it my turn?” Matt Chacon asked, standing next to the fire in the oil drum, looking warm and dry.

  “Look at this.” Ramona handed Matt the bagged coin.

  “A one-ounce Krugerrand. First produced in 1970. The obverse depicts Paul Kruger, the first president of the South African Republic, and the reverse shows the springbok, the national animal. During the apartheid years in South Africa, Krugerrands were banned from the United States.”

  “I didn’t know you were a numismatist.” The heat from the fire felt wonderful. Ramona edged closer to the oil drum.

  “Hardly that. I earned a coin collection merit badge in Boy Scouts.”

  “I’m impressed. So how much is it worth?”

  “If I remember correctly, Krugerrands contain exact amounts of gold, so the value of each coin is equivalent to the current market price of gold.”

  “Which is?” Ramona asked.

  “You’ve got me. The price of gold can change daily. It’s somewhere over five hundred dollars an ounce, I’d guess. Maybe way over.” Matt laughed. “I wish the pennies in my Lincoln collection were worth that much. I’d probably get seventy-five bucks for all of them, max. I like to think of the collection as my emergency cash fund. That’s pretty sad, isn’t it? Do you think there are any more Krugerrands in there?”

  “I don’t know,” Ramona said, “but it does raise my curiosity to know what else might have been hidden here and why.”

  “I’ll take a look. Finders keepers, right?”

  “Get real, Detective,” Ramona replied with a smile.

  Matt gave the coin back to Ramona and ducked inside the well house.

  Using one of the tarps that had served as part of the canopy, Ramona assembled her collected evidence, tagged everything, and filled out the evidence log. She’d just finished up when Matt emerged from the well house holding another bagged coin for her to see. It was contained in a clear plastic sleeve, which had some letters and numbers on it in permanent ink.

  “It was buried just a little bit deeper in the pit,” he said. “This one is a twenty-dollar U.S. gold piece. It’s called a Saint-Gaudens after the man who designed it. These are highly collectible and usually sell way above the value of the gold content.”

  “What do the numbers and letters on the plastic sleeve mean?” Ramona asked.

  “They have nothing to do with the grading of the quality of the coin, which looks to be uncirculated to me.”

  “Uncirculated is good?”

  “About the be
st there is. It’s one step down from brilliant uncirculated. I’m thinking the numbers and letters represent an inventory designation given to the coin by either the owner or a dealer who sold it.”

  “So give me a guess on its value.”

  “It could be thousands,” Matt replied. “It depends on rarity and condition.”

  “From the evidence Don Mielke collected at Clifford Talbott’s ranch house, Brian Riley was down to his last five thousand dollars in cash,” Ramona said. “Do you think he may have come back here for the coins?”

  “Maybe, but there were no gold coins listed in the evidence inventory from the ranch house.”

  “Riley could have hidden the coins in the house before Talbott arrived and shot him. Ask Mielke to send an investigator out there to look.”

  Matt keyed his handheld and made the request just as Chief Kerney and Sergeant Istee came into sight.

  “Good morning,” Kerney said as he entered the small clearing. He handed each detective a thermal mug of coffee that had been freshly brewed in the mobile command vehicle. “Bring us up to speed.”

  Coffee in hand, Ramona talked about their morning finds and showed them the two coins. “It will probably take all day for Detective Chacon and me to finish up here,” she added.

  “Not if the four of us take shifts,” Clayton said.

  “That’s a good idea,” Kerney said. He turned to Ramona. “Why don’t you and Matt head back to the S.O. command vehicle and see what you can find out about any open or cold cases involving stolen gold coins while we take a turn inside the well house. Take the fingerprint evidence with you and run it through any computer database you can think of while you’re there.”

  “Will do,” Matt said.

  “Have you told her?” Kerney asked Matt with a nod in Ramona’s direction.

  “Told me what?” Ramona asked.

  “No, I haven’t,” Matt answered.

  “Shall I?”

  “Go ahead, Chief.”

  “Sergeant Pino, meet Sergeant Chacon, effective the first of next week. You’re losing him to the Property Crimes Unit.”

  “And you didn’t tell me?” Before Matt could answer, she swung around to face Kerney. “Do I get to pick his replacement?”

  Kerney nodded, laughed, and slapped Matt on the back. “See how soon you’ll be forgotten?”

  Grinning from ear to ear, Matt faked a sad head shake.

  As the two left the clearing, Ramona continued chewing out Matt for not being forthcoming.

  “I’ll take the first shift,” Clayton said.

  “There could be footprints in the frozen ground underneath the hard-packed snow in front of the entrance,” Kerney said. “I’ll start on that.”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  Kerney threw some wood onto the fire and picked up a small shovel. “Let’s get to it.”

  The two men worked steadily for an hour without uncovering anything of value. There were no footprints under the packed-down snow in front of the well house door, and the buckets of snow Clayton had removed from inside the well house and melted over the fire contained no trace evidence visible to the naked eye.

  As they warmed themselves by the fire, Clayton asked if anyone had inspected the exterior of the well house for evidence.

  “Not that I know of,” Kerney replied.

  After a careful but futile up-and-down look at the exterior walls, they returned to the fire burning in the oil drum.

  Clayton threw another log on it. “We’ve been assuming that Riley followed a path to the well house when he came here yesterday. What if he didn’t? What if it wasn’t a path to begin with and he simply went cross-country.”

  Kerney looked back through the trees in the direction of the double-wide. “If he did go cross-country, he took a fairly direct route from the residence to the well house.”

  “This well house hasn’t been used in years,” Clayton replied. “It was abandoned long before Tim Riley bought the land and moved his double-wide onto the property. Maybe there’s an old path. That’s where we have the best shot at finding any footprint evidence.”

  Kerney made a three-sixty scan. The clearing and the well house were in a slight depression on the downslope of a mesa. Below, through a break in the trees, he could see the narrow canyon floor where the railroad tracks followed the creekbed. He looked up at the mesa. Near the top, a quartet of deep arroyos converged into one and snaked down to join with the creek within fifty feet of where he stood.

  “What are you thinking?” Clayton asked.

  “I’m thinking this well was drilled here to tap into the groundwater supplied by that nearby arroyo. In its time, it would have been a more reliable source of water than the creek. I’m betting it once served a homestead that probably sat below us on the canyon floor.”

  “The old electric motor inside the well house is stamped with the maker’s name and a patent date of 1936,” Clayton said.

  “I doubt that rural electrification would have reached Cañoncito before then.”

  Clayton looked at the treetops. “I don’t see any electric lines or poles running up here.”

  “Scavenged long ago,” Kerney suggested.

  Clayton walked to the edge of the clearing, squatted down, and gazed through the trees at the canyon. “There’s a snow-covered mound on the flat just to the left that doesn’t fit with the topography. It’s just behind a fence. That could be the rubble from the old homestead.”

  Kerney joined Clayton. “Just eyeballing it, I’d say that mound falls easily within Riley’s property boundaries.”

  Clayton stood, broke off a small dead branch from a piñon tree, walked to a point ten feet east of the tracks through the snow, and marked an X next to a large juniper tree. “The original path is here.”

  “You’re sure of that?” Kerney asked.

  “Yep. Coming up from the canyon this is the easiest, most direct route. New growth obscures it in places now, but this is the path. Riley couldn’t see it because of all the snow, so he just made a beeline straight to the well house.”

  “Let’s find out if you’re right.”

  Kerney got two shovels and handed one to Clayton. They removed most of the snow quickly, slowing the pace when they reached the last few inches, and then set aside the shovels and brushed away the last of the powder with gloved hands. At the edge of the two-foot-long trench they’d dug there was a heel print clearly visible in the frozen ground. They cleared away more snow until the entire print was visible.

  “It could be Brian Riley’s shoe print from an earlier visit,” Kerney said.

  Clayton hunkered down for a closer look.

  He’d found partial shoe prints on the porch to Tim Riley’s rented cabin in Capitan, and the print in front of his eyes looked identical. “Did Brian Riley have small, narrow feet?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “This is an impression of a boot that is no more than a narrow size eight. That’s small for a man, plus it looks a hell of a lot like the partial impression I found at the Capitan crime scene.”

  “Can you make a definitive comparison?” Kerney asked.

  “I took photographs of them. They’re in my briefcase in your truck.”

  Kerney called Ramona and asked her to bring Clayton’s briefcase to the well house.

  “Will do, Chief,” Ramona replied.

  “Also, where is Brian Riley’s body right now?” Kerney asked.

  “It’s being held at a local mortuary until tomorrow, when it will be sent down to the OMI in Albuquerque for an official autopsy.”

  “Send an officer to the mortuary ASAP. I want to know what shoes or boots Riley was wearing at the time of his death, and what the size is. Have the officer check Riley’s personal effects to see if he had any other footwear, take pictures of the soles of all left-foot shoes, and send them to me at my cell phone number.”

  “Ten-four, Chief. Anything else?”

  “What’s happening on your end?”

&
nbsp; “No fingerprint hits so far, and there are no open or cold cases we can find in the national data banks that match the gold coins we uncovered. Sergeant Chacon is querying Interpol and a number of law enforcement agencies in foreign countries.”

  “Very good. See you in a few.”

  While they waited for Ramona to arrive, Clayton photographed the impression, removed what loose material he could from around it, and then used Ramona’s casting kit to build a form. He mixed up a batch of plaster using melted snow, sprayed oil on the form so the material wouldn’t bind to it, and poured the mixture into it.

  “It should set up in a few minutes,” he said as he got to his feet.

  Ramona appeared in the clearing. They joined her at the oil barrel, where the fire had burned down almost to embers. As Clayton searched through his briefcase for the photographs, Kerney threw more wood into the barrel and stirred the flames to life with a stick.

  “We have a match,” Clayton said, handing the photograph to Kerney.

  Kerney threw the stick into the fire, looked at the photograph, nodded, and handed it back.

  “And if the impression turns out to be from Brian Riley’s shoe, that puts him at the Capitan crime scene,” Ramona said, “which makes him a very dead prime suspect.”

  Clayton waved off the possibility with his hand. “You can’t convince me that Brian Riley was a natural-born psychopath who killed his father, his stepmother, a police officer, and a young woman who had befriended him, for no apparent reason other than the enjoyment of it.”

  “He returned to the Robocker crime scene, concealed his identity, and ran from the police,” Ramona countered.

  “Okay, let’s assume for the sake of argument that he is the killer,” Clayton said. “He’s down to his last five thousand dollars and needs a lot more money than that if he’s going to disappear for a very long time. So he lies about his identity to a cop at the Robocker crime scene, jumps on his motorcycle, and drives here through a gathering blizzard to get the gold coins hidden in the well house.”

  “That makes sense,” Ramona said.