Alvarez Family Murder Mysteries Boxed Set: Books 1-3 (The Alvarez Family Murder Mysteries)

by Heather Haven

  “Just me,” I said quietly. “I’ll take the bike and go by myself.”

  “Liana,” Mom protested. “I think—”

  “No, Mom. I work better alone. You should start looking around the ranch while I’m gone. See if you can find anything. I’ll take the sat phone with me and put it on ‘track.’ This way you’ll know where I am every moment. The mine is only about two and a half miles from the house, right?”

  Mom looked at Tex and Tex looked at Mom. “You’re the boss, hon,” Tex said. It was settled. “But about your bike, se mureo. Rusted clean through. I had to take it behind the barn and put a bullet through it last summer. How about I tell Paco to saddle up Lupita for you? I know you don’t mind her.” Tex dialed the number. “Unless you want to take the Hummer. That’s fine by me.”

  “I don’t want to attract attention to myself, so I’ll just take the horse. By the way, have either of you noticed the car following us?” Both women whipped their heads around. In the distance, what looked like a black Jeep shadowed us on the dusty road.

  “Hey, hey. Watch where you’re going, Tex,” I said, as the car started to swerve.

  Mom put on her distance glasses, studying the Jeep. “It looks like the same car I saw in the parking lot of the restaurant. The one covered in mud.” She shuddered.

  “Right now I’m more concerned about the fact it’s been behind us for the last fifty miles or so rather than it needs a wash.”

  “It’d be hard to lose someone on this dirt road,” Tex muttered. “Too much dust and ruts. But you want me to try?”

  “Oh, don’t sweat it,” I answered. “Our front is that we are here visiting the overwrought mother.”

  “I’ll try to sob in the appropriate places and at the appropriate times.” Tex grinned. I was glad to see her sense of humor hadn’t totally abandoned her.

  “When we get through the gate, Tex, slow down. I’ll hop out and see if I can get the license plate number.”

  Fifteen minutes later, we arrived at the gated entrance to the cattle ranch that Bart purchased back in the early seventies. Tex removed a remote from her sun visor, punched in some numbers, and the white, heavy wrought-iron gate, emblazoned with the skull of a steer the size of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, swung open. Twenty feet overhead, a matching wrought-iron arch held the words Los Pocitos de Oros—“the veins of gold”—in large, sweeping letters.

  We passed through and Tex screeched to a bumpy stop, while the automatic gate closed behind us. I got out, hiding behind one of the oak trees lining each side of the drive and watched her pull away. Amid the backdrop of settling dust, I glanced around the trunk of the tree, catching sight of a grimy black Jeep zipping by on the larger road. The last three numbers were obscured by caked-on mud, but I pressed the ones I could make out to memory and fired up the sat phone. Richard answered on the first ring.

  “Hey, Lee, you got there.” He could have been across the street, his voice was that clear.

  “Baby Brother, I need a favor.”

  “Name it.”

  “I’ve got the partial numbers of a Mexican license plate. I think it’s from Guanajuato, but I can’t swear to it. I’d like you to check it out.”

  “How soon do you need the info?”

  “Yesterday. The first number or letter is a ‘one’ or an ‘L,’ I couldn’t tell which with all the gunk on the plate. That’s followed by ‘U’ ‘V’ and ‘seven.’ Those I’m certain of. I couldn’t get the last three numbers.

  “That’s too bad. Mexico’s a large country, so there could be a lot of possibilities. Just a heads up. I’ll get back to you.”

  ”Counting on it.”

  We disconnected, and I started the two-mile hike to the ranch house only to realize I was wearing four-inch stilettos already hurting my feet. Just as I was about to take them off and walk barefoot, I rounded a corner and saw Tex and Mom waiting for me in an idling Hummer, nicely polluting the environment. Swallowing any reprimands I might have had, I yipped and tottered toward them, glad for the ride.

  The ranch and bunk houses sit about two miles in on this single lane road, filled with enough spine jostling ruts and gullies to send you to your local chiropractor. The main house dates back about one hundred years, with additions made more recently by the Garcias. It is now a sprawling single-story, eight bedroom, five-bath, wooden structure, with lots of windows and a wrap-around porch decorated with cattle horns.

  Directly across the road is the bunkhouse, where wranglers sleep and eat, complete with a hitching post to tie up the horses. As there are about eight hundred head of cattle grazing somewhere on the fenced-in property at any given moment, there are usually six or seven vaqueros or cowhands riding herd and living at the bunkhouse. Right off its kitchen door hangs the loudest triangle I’ve ever heard in my life, used by Olaf, the deaf transgender cook, to call the ranch hands in for meals. He makes one mean tostada.

  At the end of the dirt road looms an enormous three-story red barn. Four horses, hitched up in pairs, can pull a train of hay wagons through one set of double doors, unload the bales of hay for storage on the second and third floors then pull the empty wagons out the matching doors on the other side. Meanwhile, milking cows and calves stay undisturbed in their stalls. Any hay not consumed by the Garcia herd or the Aztecas, is sold to nearby ranchers. As a kid, I loved coming to what I considered the Wild West, Mexican style.

  Once we came to a stop, I jumped out and ran inside to the small but sunny room in the back of the house I call mine when I’m here. I reached into the closet for my jeans and Gortex all-weather boots. After a quick trip to the kitchen where I made a couple of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, I headed out to the barn. I remembered to bring carrot sticks, a treat for old Lupita, the sweetest and most docile horse I’ve ever ridden. She was tied to a post and ready to go. I called her name and proffered the vegetables in my open palm. A mottled grey and white mare, small in size but large in heart, she whinnied softly as I approached and took the treat in a very lady-like manner.

  Stowing the sandwiches in one of the saddlebags, I mounted hesitantly, talking myself down from the experiences I’ve had with horses of yesteryear. I concentrated on the fact that Lupita was a sweetie pie. Besides, she was my only mode of transportation to the mine from here unless I wanted to walk it. I didn’t.

  I attached the sat phone to my belt, and we trotted off toward the abandoned mine. About thirty-five minutes later, we arrived at the sealed entrance. I dismounted with a creepy, crawly feeling that someone’s unseen eyes were boring into my back. I looked around. No one.

  With Lupita grazing by my side, I tried to shake off the feeling and turned my attention to the concrete blocks cemented into the sides of the entrance and the locked, chain link fence at the center. I went closer and noted there was another stack of blocks behind the fence, too, piled up and filled in here and there with rocks of varying sizes. The ground inside and around the fence was undisturbed and looked like it had been so for decades. Even small nesting animals were at peace in their makeshift condos. I was sure that whatever was going on around here had nothing to do with the mineshaft entrance. I walked back into the brush, surveyed the mine from a distance, and decided to give Richard another call.

  He answered on the third ring, booming, “Yo, Lee. What now? You can’t think I’ve gotten those license plates for you yet.”

  “Richard, I’m out here at the mine and, I swear to you, it looks like it’s been sealed up for the past fifty years.”

  “Thirty, actually.”

  “Well, why? I never knew for sure.”

  “Carlos told me the government had his dad seal it off for safety reasons. Besides, the mine was played out.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Lee,” he chided me, “don’t you remember? Five or six years ago Carlos hired a piloted helicopter with aerial x-ray equipment. This was after the geological survey the year before. I fed the combined data of both findings into a supercomputer that anal
yzed the physical properties and the probability of any gold being left in that mountain.”

  “What did you find?”

  “Zero probability.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Don’t you think Carlos would like to own a working gold mine? It got played out before nineteen-fifty. That mountain has so many unsupported tunnels in it, the whole thing is going to collapse in on itself during the next sizable temblor.”

  I chewed on my lower lip the way Lupita was chewing on the grass. “So whatever’s going on around here has nothing to do with gold.”

  “Nothing to do with gold,” he echoed.

  “Whoa. I think I see somebody.” I strained my eyes. “There’s a glint of something on a hilltop.”

  “Aim the sat phone at them and take a picture. Send it on to me, I’ll enlarge it and see what you’ve got. It shouldn’t take more than a few seconds.”

  I pressed down the “capture” button and heard nothing. “It didn’t go ‘click,’ Richard, so that better mean that all the functions are silent. I’d hate for this thing to be broken.”

  “Of course, they’re silent. Even the phone doesn’t ring. It vibrates. Do you know how to send the picture to me? I knew we should have gone over this before you left.”

  I ignored him. “After I take the picture, I punch the thingy underneath the ‘send’ button. When I see your phone number in the external display, then I hit the send button. That automatically sends the digital picture to you. Correct?”

  “Except for the word ‘thingy,’ it is correct.”

  “Where’s the flash? Just in case I need it later on.”

  “The lens is super-sensitive and automatically adjusts. It has a form of night vision, similar to what the Navy Seals use underwater. Now, back to the ‘thingy’ button,” he said. “It sets the coordinates. At this time, only D.I.’s number is programmed in, but you could ostensibly send information to anyone in the world.”

  “Okay, here goes.” I pressed the button.

  In less than five seconds, I heard Richard say, “I’ve got it. Now I’ll transfer it to the computer and enhance it. Yes, yes,” he said more to himself than me. “Not so good.”

  “What’s not so good?”

  “It’s a person wearing a large hat, sitting on a dark horse. That’s all I can make out. That’s enough to tell me you’re being watched.”

  “Maybe not. Maybe it’s one of the vaqueros on the property riding by.”

  “Take another picture in the same place and send it to me,” Richard said in a worried voice. “Let’s see if he’s still there.”

  “You sure like to play with this thing, don’t you?”

  “Take another picture, Dufus,” he demanded. I obeyed and this time the man and horse were gone.

  “See?” I said, “Nobody’s there. It was just someone riding by.” I was uneasy but didn’t want Richard to know. After Dad’s death, he’d become such a worrywart that I didn’t want to alarm him.

  I made a mental note though, to check the saddlebags for the usual emergency kit Tex kept in each one of them. Aside from water and a flashlight, there should be an extra round of shells for the rifle tied to the saddle, in case of a recalcitrant rattlesnake. They come in all sizes and shapes.

  “I should go, Richard,” I said impatiently. “I have work to do.”

  “Call me if you need me. Mom, too. I’ve got this phone and my laptop with me at all times. I’m right here, sis.”

  “Well, take a break. Or get me those license plate numbers. We’re fine.” I hung up and sat down on the cool grass under a tree about fifty feet away from the mine’s entrance, thinking. About twenty minutes later, I had a plan.

  “Come on, Lupita,” I said. “Let’s take a little walk around this mountain. It shouldn’t take us more than five or six hours.” I grabbed her reins and she plodded along behind me, while I scrutinized the terrain looking for something, anything out of the ordinary.

  Into the fourth hour, I was hot, sweaty, tired of brushing flies away from my face and developing a whopper of a blister on one of my big toes. My repeated check-ins with Mom were becoming annoying, and I would have killed for a cold shower. In short, I was cranky.

  I neared the far side of the mountain and found a section of dead or dying flora. I stopped. I had to think about what it meant because I was not the sharpest tack in the pack at that moment. Eventually I got it.

  Being the tail end of spring, there were still frequent showers. We hadn’t reached the parched stages of summer yet, where many of the plants wilt or die under the unrelenting sun. Vegetation was green and healthy everywhere else except for here.

  I dropped Lupita’s reins and watched her amble over to a nearby patch of grass to do more munching while I stepped off the trail and into the brush, some fifteen yards away. Close up, I could see the foliage had been cut or broken off and then stacked one on top of the other to create pseudo shrubbery. Newer limbs were still greenish but all were in various stages of death. Behind this first row, small trees and larger limbs were propped up with stones to give a more normal look to unsuspecting eyes that traveled this trail. But there was nothing normal about what was going on here.

  While stepping in between some of the larger branches trying to get closer to the mountain itself, instinct told me to move as quietly as possible. From behind the tallest level of camouflage, shrubs and trees came the faint sounds of a radio playing popular Mexican tunes. I followed the music and found another narrower trail snaking to a four or five foot high opening inside the mountain. Standing at the cave’s entrance for a moment, I strained my ears and heard the rhythmic sound of snoring accompanying the music. I ducked down and cautiously went inside, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the lack of light.

  The source of the snores was a neatly dressed, lone youth slumped over in a folding chair. A rifle leaned against the wall and a half empty bottle of tequila lay on the ground by his side. In front of him was a rickety looking card table holding an unlit kerosene lamp, a half-played deck of cards and the radio I’d been hearing. The neat preppy pink shirt and khaki trousers he wore was in contrast to his drunken stupor.

  Fairly sure he would sleep for a while, I relaxed a little, ever listening for a variance in his breathing. I began to look around and was flabbergasted by what I saw.

  The cave was massive inside, perfectly spherical, and clearly not nature’s work. Directly across from the entrance was a rough-hewn slab of rock resting on two chiseled boulders. It looked to me like an ancient altar. To either side stood sturdy-looking, rectangular, wooden tables each more than twenty feet in length.

  Atop them, dozens of burnished statues, bowls, urns, masks, whistles, musical instruments and idols shimmered in the dimness. Dressed in the richest of colors of terracotta, red, brown, sandstone, grey and blue, some stood only inches tall, while others scaled a height of two to three feet. A riot of exotic patterns and scenic pictures seemed to mock the stillness of the gloomy setting.

  Off to one side, smaller jadeite statuettes, masks and incense burners glimmered in shades of dark to pale green. Resting on the dirt floor and lined against the cave’s walls, were ceremonial plates, many nearly four feet in diameter. Mythical creatures, gods, goddesses, and warriors jumped out at me from every direction. My eyes locked on one sand-colored clay urn, nearly a foot and a half-tall, on which was painted a realistic looking black panther. The larger animal looked almost identical to the small ornament hanging around my neck. My fingers flew to the charm, and I enclosed it in a shaking hand.

  I crept closer, keeping an eye on my sleeping friend, and noted the relics had been categorized, with a numbered piece of paper before each. Kneeling, sitting and praying warriors of all sizes banded together. Pots in the form of playing and barking dogs were herded next to ceramic lizards, iguanas, turkeys, and tortoises. If memory of college Art History served me, one section contained funereal objects, devoted to ushering the fallen into the next world. I felt as if I were in the w
orking innards of a museum.

  Overhead and surrounding me were beautiful red, black, and white wall paintings looking hundreds if not thousands of years old. Deities, animals of prey and worship, feathered people in positions of humility and power, looking vaguely Aztec, breathed life into the coarse, chiseled walls wherever I looked.

  I pivoted slowly in the half-light trying to see everything, fretting about how I could retain and report it all, when I thought of the sat phone. I removed it from my belt and, pivoting again, began taking silent pictures. I started with a pair of three-foot high black ceramic panthers, so true in detail they appeared to be breathing. I shot them from two or three angles and then moved on to the rest of the cache.

  I probably took thirty pictures before I figured I was pushing my luck with Rip Van Winkle over in the corner. I tiptoed back to the mouth of the cave, grateful for the music covering any small noise I might have made. Right before I left, and as a final gesture of contempt, I took a shot of the sleeping sentinel.

  I left as quietly as I came but was so excited I could hardly contain myself. I stepped over the brush, careful to leave the flora as I found it and made my way back to where Lupita was patiently waiting. Remembering that a picture is worth a thousand words, I hit Richard’s quick dial number and sent the pictures with a quaking hand, warning him he might not believe what he was going to see. I led Lupita a little deeper into a clump of trees, just in case my sleeping friend woke up and decided to take a stretch or do something a little more personal.

  I sat down behind a tree, filled with the wonder of it all. Accepting my father’s old adage, ‘When you don’t know what to do, do nothing,’ I munched on a peanut butter sandwich and finished the bottle of water, reluctant to move. A few minutes later, I felt vibrations coming from the phone and knew it was probably Richard calling me back. I answered the phone, while looking overhead. The sun was starting to set. I had been gone nearly seven hours.

  “Richard, what do you think?” I demanded.