Out of Season

by Steven F Havill

  “Cut to the chase,” Costace said impatiently. “What are you guys telling me?”

  “That fence we just crossed is designed to keep antelope in,” I said.

  “How can it? It’s not high enough.”

  “Antelope don’t jump fences,” Torrez said.

  “What do you mean, they don’t jump fences? ’Course they do. There’s fences all over this country.”

  “They duck through…or under,” I said. “They don’t jump.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Costace said. “Fast as they are?”

  “Fast has nothing to do with it. Remember when you watched them running yesterday?” I asked. “Remember what they looked like? A nice flat sprint, back flat like a horse’s. Not like deer. Deer bounce and leap, sometimes even doing that ridiculous gait where they go on all hooves at once, stiff-legged like some goddam four-legged pogo stick. Deer and elk jump. Antelope scoot.”

  An entire row of pieces fell together for Neil Costace at that moment. “The only reason I can imagine to bother containing game animals is to make them easy to hunt. This is Finnegan’s land?”

  “Yes.”

  “So if he’s herding antelope, maybe someone complained. That would explain Martin Holman’s wanting to put questions to the Department of Game and Fish. And it might explain why Martin Holman wanted to see the area from the air. He could wander around here forever on the ground and not see what he needed to see.”

  “Photos,” I said. “Lots of pictures of fencing.”

  “None of which show the wire close enough to make it obvious,” Costace said.

  “No, but no one ever said that Martin Holman was a brilliant investigator. His intentions were on track, though.”

  “Are there any antelope in those pictures? If we blow them up enough, maybe we’ll see something. You have a couple of the photos with you, don’t you?”

  “Yes. But let’s find that intersection before we blow our night vision all to pieces. If we’re right…if that’s what Holman was after, and if he saw the antelope from the air, I’m sure he’d try for a picture. Maybe it’s there, now that we know what we’re looking for.”

  “And if Finnegan saw that airplane fly over, he might spook,” Costace said.

  “He might if he saw the registration numbers and thought they were on an official airplane,” Torrez said.

  I realized I had a fair crop of goose bumps on my arm. “Let’s find out,” I said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  By the time we reached the next gate, we had ghosted our way through three more herds of antelope—and one small group of thin, uninterested cattle. This time Torrez didn’t stop at the gate, but swung to the right, driving along the fence line, the hummocks of close-cropped bunchgrass jarring his vehicle this way and that.

  We followed. I noticed that whoever had strung the fence had done a workmanlike job. The four barbed-wire strands were tight and uniform, and the sheep fencing was taut and smooth, its top wire laced to the barbed-wire strand behind it.

  “He knows where he’s going?” Costace asked as we jounced over a hummock of rotting vegetation that had once been a yucca. The flower’s hard stalk cracked under our tires.

  “I certainly hope so,” I replied.

  Costace grunted something that told me he wasn’t too happy with my answer. “If he’s been out here before, didn’t he see the wire?”

  “You’d have to ask him,” I said. “I’m not sure he’s actually been in this particular spot.”

  “He said he knew where the corner was.”

  I laughed. “I think he looked at the map, Neil. Sergeant Torrez is one of those rare people for whom a topographical map holds no mysteries. And in this part of the country, most fences follow section lines—or at some point, connect to them. It’s all very logical, most of the time.”

  “I know all that. And in ten minutes—no, make that two—I’d be so goddam lost I’d have to sit and wait for the sun to come up to figure out east from anything else.” We jounced over another hummock and Costace added, “You people have forgotten what the hell headlights are for.”

  “They make you go blind before your time,” I said, then held up a hand that Costace probably couldn’t see anyway. “Hold it.”

  Torrez had stopped, and I could make out the looming structure that blocked his path. He walked quickly back to us and leaned down. “This is it.”

  I picked up the radio. “Three-oh-three on channel three.”

  Silence followed. “Three-oh-seven, do you copy?” When Mitchell didn’t answer, I dropped the handheld on the seat. “Out of range. Robert, give them a try from your unit on the main frequency. I want to know where they are.”

  The blast of light when we opened the doors made me flinch. As I got out of the Suburban, I took along my heavy flashlight and the folder that included the photo of the fence corner.

  “Mitchell says that he’s just on the outskirts of town. Boyd stopped at the American Legion Hall on Pershing. Pasquale is parked behind the hospital down the street, with a clear view of his truck. Boyd’s been inside now for about three minutes.”

  “Good. Let’s see what we’ve got here.” The walking was mercifully easy. The ground had been beaten flat over time by the countless hooves of cattle. The windmill tower loomed in front of us, rising thirty feet above the abandoned well.

  “This didn’t show in the photo,” Costace said.

  “Nope.” I held the folder against my leg and fished out the print. “If we’re in the right spot, this tower is just out of the picture—by no more than a dozen or so feet.” I handed the photo to Costace and stepped away, flashing my light up the tower. The mechanical head of the mill had been removed, as had the steel stock tank at the bottom, and the sucker rods that would have hung down in the middle. Only the old weather-scarred wood of the tower remained.

  The ground was slightly dished on the north side of the tower, where the tank probably had been at one time, and where Boyd said Finnegan had thought briefly about digging a dirt tank. I swept the light in an arc. “Nothing,” I muttered. The beam reached out to the corner of the fence, and sure enough, another fence took off to the north, this one a four-strand barbed-wire line without the sheep fencing.

  I walked over to it, fifty yards of dusty, hoof-rumpled dirt. At each step, the aroma of prairie sod and old manure wafted up. Costace followed, sweeping his flashlight this way and that.

  “So we’ve got a three-way corner here,” he said, and put a hand on top of one of the steel posts, rocking it. “So what?”

  “This is the northwest corner of the antelope enclosure,” Torrez said. “That’s what it looks like to me.”

  I turned the flashlight on the eight-by-ten photo. “And this is the corner in the picture. Holman didn’t catch the windmill tower in it. Maybe he intended to, maybe he didn’t.” I slapped the print against my thigh in frustration. “Goddam it, why the hell didn’t he tell us what the hell he was doing?”

  “The sheriff, you mean?” Costace asked.

  “Yes, the sheriff. It’s almost like he was trying to make this big coup…lay all the pieces out in front of us when he had it all figured out. Do it all by himself.”

  “That may have been exactly what he was doing,” Costace said gently. “Ego’s a wonderful thing,” he added. “Reyes-Guzman is leaving. You said that Sergeant Mitchell has a standing job offer. This guy here”—he reached out and touched Bob Torrez on the elbow—“is getting himself married off, or so I’m told, and who the hell knows where he’ll end up? And you’re rumored to be retiring. You think it’s unusual that Martin Holman felt just a little bit pressured, Bill? What was the last major case he worked by himself? Or even led the way?”

  “None,” I said.

  “Well, there you are, then. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or a psychiatrist to figure out Martin Holman’s motivation. The brainstorm hit him that he could get aerial photos—and that’s a pretty good idea in itself. The chance came up when hi
s brother-in-law arrived for a visit. Martin just ran out of luck.”

  “All this goddam tragedy for a handful of goddam mangy antelope,” I said. “Somebody told him that there were impounded antelope somewhere around here. He could have just asked where the antelope were and then driven out to the Finnegans and asked, ‘Are you impounding wildlife on your property?’ If the man said no, then he could have driven out here with Bob Torrez or any of the other deputies and taken a million photos from the ground and—

  Costace interrupted my diatribe with a wave of his flashlight. “Bill…that’s what you would have done. And in retrospect, that’s what Holman should have done, or just turned the complaint over to the Game and Fish folks—and there’s some evidence that he might have been trying to do that. But the opportunity came along to fly over the site. That’s not so unreasonable. I don’t guess he thought about the possibility of being shot down.”

  “There’s still a problem,” Torrez said calmly. “The antelope are over in this area. The aircraft was two miles north of here when it was hit.”

  I shrugged. “There are a couple of ways to explain that,” I said. The cellular phone in the Bronco rang shrilly before I had a chance to proffer even one explanation. It continued to ring while Bob Torrez jogged the considerable distance back to the truck.

  “Whoever fired the shot could have watched the plane making passes and just gotten nervous. When it passed overhead, he let fly.”

  “He, meaning Richard Finnegan,” Neil Costace said.

  “Odds are good,” I replied.

  “Sir!” Torrez shouted from the vehicle, and I turned. He waved his flashlight urgently. By the time I reached the Bronco, Torrez had already turned the unit around and was waiting with his foot on the brake pedal, passenger door open.

  My first thought as I approached the truck was, “What the hell has Pasquale done now?”

  “They’ve got a man down at the Pierpoint,” Torrez said as I slid into the seat. He pulled the Bronco into gear, and Neil Costace just managed to sidestep the door.

  “Now what the hell—” I started to say.

  “Richard Finnegan got himself stabbed,” Torrez barked, and Neil Costace turned with an oath and sprinted toward his own vehicle. “Follow us on down.”

  I yanked my shoulder harness around me and snapped the buckle, pulling the belt very, very tight. The Pierpoint Bar and Grill was in downtown Posadas, twenty winding miles away.

  In a handful of half-airborne seconds, we reached the gate and Torrez slid the Bronco to a stop, leaping out the door before I could even find my seatbelt buckle. He tore open the gate, sprinted back to the truck and we shot through, leaving the range etiquette of gate closure to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  As we charged down the hill that night, I didn’t have much time for reflection, and I certainly didn’t want to distract Robert Torrez with conversation. The county road into town was twisting, gravel-strewn on the corners, and populated with dimwitted deer and skunks, and an occasional drunk who strayed out from town.

  The Bronco handled about as well as any truck, and it didn’t take much imagination to picture us somersaulting down the mesa face in a pile of smoking, groaning metal.

  We shot past the old quarry and I keyed the mike.

  “Three-oh-three, three-ten. Ten-twenty.”

  If he was where he was supposed to be, I knew exactly what Tommy Pasquale was doing when he heard my call for his location. With a homicide just two blocks away, he was chafing at the bit. For the second time that night, he was being asked to sit off on the sidelines while something interesting was happening just out of sight. As he heard my voice, I could picture his hand flashing up to the gearshift of his patrol car, ready to pull it into drive, and his foot poised, ready to mash the accelerator to the floor.

  “Three-oh-three is on Pershing at the Legion Hall,” Pasquale said, and I could hear the tension in his voice. He had the discipline not to add, “Just where Sergeant Mitchell told me to be.”

  “Three-oh-three, ten-four.” I knew there was no rear exit that Boyd could slip out of to return to his vehicle. If he left the building, Pasquale would see him. “Stay on him,” I said, “and let me know the instant he moves.” And when Pasquale responded with an audible twinge of impatience, I could picture his hand slipping off the gear lever.

  “Three-ten, three-oh-seven. ETA?”

  I could hear excited voices in the background, and Eddie Mitchell’s tone was brusque.

  “Three-ten is just passing Consolidated. About six minutes out,” I said.

  By the time we roared into the village, down Grande Avenue, past Pershing Park and across Bustos, the main east-west village street, I could see a fair collection of winking red lights up ahead, a couple belonging to one of the village units.

  The Pierpoint Bar and Grill was a narrow, dark little building that shared the South 100 block of Grande Avenue with the Posadas Register’s modern, metal-sided and uninteresting plant. Tucked well off the sidewalk, its parking lot fronted Rincon Street, a dead-end lane that snaked back behind the newspaper building.

  Torrez braked hard, skirted a group of spectators and turned into Rincon, damn near rear-ending Chief Eduardo Martinez’s bargelike Oldsmobile. The old car was parked with its massive butt out in the street as if Eduardo had been too flustered to know what to do with it.

  I caught a glimpse of Eddie Mitchell and Tom Mears at the far east end of the narrow parking lot, standing beside Richard Finnegan’s pickup truck. One of the part-timers who made up the three-man village department was unwinding a yellow tape. There were too many pairs of legs in the way to be able to see anything else.

  It didn’t surprise me that Richard Finnegan was a patron of the Pierpoint. Many local ranchers were—their pickup trucks filled the small parking lot at any given hour, the patient dogs that were their constant companions standing in the back of the trucks or lying on the toolbox, waiting with lolling tongues marking time.

  Chief Martinez waddled over toward me as soon as he saw me disembark from the Bronco. I always got the impression that crime surprised Eduardo…that he thought of it as something that eventually would just go away if only we had enough nice parades and summer festivals in Pershing Park.

  I readily admitted that we treated his department as if it didn’t exist most of the time…which, in point of fact, it didn’t, since a combination of what Posadas could pay a certified officer, and what little area there was to patrol within the village limits, resulted in an officer turnover rate that approached the monthly.

  “What the hell happened, Chief?” I said. With the portable radio in one hand and a flashlight in the other, Bob Torrez strode past me, making a beeline for the village officer, who was doing his best to keep the spectators back. I saw a look of relief on Eduardo’s face when he glanced over and saw Torrez’s approach.

  “They found him in the parking lot, right next to his truck,” Martinez said. He put his hands on his hips. “Richard Finnegan, from up north of town? You know him, I guess.”

  “Of course.”

  “He’s got a knife stuck in him. Dead as a fish, man.”

  I glanced over toward the corner of the parking lot and caught a glimpse of the body near the back bumper of the truck. Mitchell and Mears were in discussion, and I saw Mitchell point off toward the street.

  “I think he got in a fight with somebody. I’m not sure who just yet,” the chief said.

  “A fight in the bar?”

  “I guess it started there,” Eduardo said. “Then I guess they came outside somehow.”

  The absurd image of that in Martinez’s report skirted through my mind. They went outside somehow. I shook my head, trying to focus. “Who’d you talk to?”

  “Well…” Martinez pointed off to his left, toward the side door of the Pierpoint, where a group of nervous patrons had gathered “…Lonnie Prior says he saw Mr. Finnegan leave the bar.”

  I patted Eduardo
on the elbow and strode over to Prior. He was a short, wiry man who didn’t do much of anything other than make a concentrated effort to turn his pension from the U.S. Post Office into liquid good times.

  I beckoned him off to the side and he grudgingly complied, keeping his eyes on the action across the lot. “Lonnie, tell me what you saw.”

  “Well, shit,” Lonnie Prior said. “Not much, you know.”

  One of the Posadas Emergency Services ambulances screamed to a stop on Grande, lights pulsing. At the same time, Estelle Reyes-Guzman’s unmarked unit slipped up to the curb.

  “Whatever that ‘not much’ is, I need to hear it,” I snapped, and Prior took a step backward as if I’d slapped him.

  “I saw Finnegan inside, that’s all,” he said.

  “At the bar or at a table?”

  “The bar.”

  “Where were you?”

  “At the pool table in the back.”

  “How’d you happen to notice him?”

  Prior looked nervous. “Well, he was there when I come in, you know. You know. All the regulars, and stuff. He was just one of them sittin’ at the bar.”

  “Did you speak to him?”

  “No. Nodded, maybe. Just like to all the others.”

  “And then?”

  Prior might have been thinking hard, or he might have been concentrating on Estelle’s lithe figure approaching from the street.

  “And then?” I prompted.

  “He left sometime,” Prior said. “I glanced up and saw him go out the door.”

  “With anyone?”

  “Now that—” He stopped as Estelle walked up to me.

  “Richard Finnegan,” I said to her. “He walked into someone’s knife. I haven’t been over there.”

  She nodded and didn’t pursue the vague “someone’s knife.” Instead, she walked back out onto Rincon Street and circled around the crowd of people to reach the scene.

  “Did you see him talking with anyone? Arguing? Anything like that?”

  “Nothing that drew my attention,” Prior said finally.