A little after eight that evening, Sheriff Salcido met with me, Sergeant Payson, and Deputy Torrez in our small conference room. We had decided to meet with Lieutenant Smith first, since he was clearly the most sober of the bunch. He had refused a lawyer. Cuffs removed, he sat carefully, gratefully accepting a cup of fresh coffee.
“Lieutenant Joseph Smith, currently on active duty at Fort Campbell, residence in Clarksville, Tennessee,” I announced for the benefit of the tape recorder.
“That’s correct, sir.”
I smiled at him. “Relax, Lieutenant.”
He took a deep breath. “I can’t, sir. Jail time does that.”
“Do you understand why you’re here?”
“I think so.”
“Let’s start with just the simple time line. The evening of June fourth.”
Smith picked at a scuff of skin raised on his wrist by the cuffs. “We spent the day out looking for good antelope habitat.”
“The ‘we’ being?”
“Artie Torkelson, Clifton Bailey, and myself.”
“Sometime during the day, you stopped by the Broken Spur to tank up?”
“Once that afternoon, and again a little after six p.m., when we had some dinner there.” He smiled ruefully. “We talked to some of the locals, and one of ’em told us about that canyon as a spot we could maybe do some shooting and stuff.”
“Stuff?”
He shrugged. “Cliff and Artie seemed determined to tie one on. I didn’t much, because I knew we were headed for Mexico the next day, and I didn’t want to be feeling lousy for that. I know what their roads are like.” He shifted in his chair. “Anyway, we tried to go in the canyon road, but it was too narrow, so we went on up a ways and drove in a two-track that Artie said belonged to one of the local ranchers. He said he wouldn’t mind. We drove in as far as a water tank and windmill.”
“What started you shooting at the tank?”
He groaned and looked heavenward. “Shit. We put up a bunch of bottles and cans on the rim of the tank and started poppin’ ’em.”
“With what?”
“I had my nine millimeter Beretta…the one I surrendered to the deputy. And a Marlin thirty-thirty. My pig gun. Stuart had his three oh eight and a forty-five. Bailey had a couple forty-four mags and a little twenty-two pistol.”
“That tank ended up with a lot of holes in it, Lieutenant.”
“Yeah, it did. Stuart was tryin’ to hit one of the bottles on the rim, and missed. This geyser of water goes up, and, I don’t know. I guess we thought that was hilarious. Then he pulls a shot at the side of the tank facing us, and that’s even more hilarious, ’cause Cliff said it looked like it was pissing, you know. This jet of water arcing out.” He fell silent.
“Things degenerated into a real shoot-fest, then?”
He nodded. “I guess.”
“Did anyone else show up? Did the rancher come down to see what all the shooting was about?”
“Nope. But we were going on toward sunset, and we did hear voices. First thing we know, here’s four kids coming up the hill out of the canyon. One of ’em has a rifle.”
“Did you recognize the weapon?”
“Sure. A little M-1 carbine.”
“Four kids, though.”
“Yes, sir. Two boys, two girls.”
“What happened then?”
“Oh, we just shot the breeze, talkin’ about the country, about this and that. Clifton offered ’em beers all around. One of the girls didn’t seem much interested, but the others took ’em. We were talkin’ guns and hunting, stuff like that. You know. Just chitchat. They were all locals.”
“Did they bring beer or other alcoholic beverages with them?”
Smith hesitated, no doubt as a cop himself recognizing that this is where the shit was going to get really deep. “I didn’t see any.”
“So you provided.”
“Cliff did, I guess.”
“You guess. And then?”
He drew himself up in his chair. “And then? The one kid—skinny little Mexican kid—he’s impressed by Bailey’s handgun…the forty-four? He says his brother has one just like it. So Bailey says something like, ‘You any good with it?’ And the kid says he is, and Bailey asks him if he wants to shoot it, and I can see what Bailey is thinking. All big talk. The recoil of that hand cannon is going to scare the daylights out of him. But the kid’s game, and he says sure.”
“So the youngster shoots the forty-four. At what?” During this whole conversation, Deputy Torrez gaze was trying to bore holes through Smith’s skull. Torrez’ hands were folded one atop the other on the table, but his knuckles were white.
“He shoots once and blows one of the cans off the rim, then turns around to look at us with this big shit-eating grin. Like ‘I did it! My ears are going to be ringing for a week!’ He was real excited.”
“At that point,” I said, “who was there?”
Smith looked puzzled. “Like I said…us three, and the kids. Well, the one girl went back down to get something out of their car. So she wasn’t there just at that moment. But the other three were…the blond kid, Chris, I guess they called him. The little Mexican kid, and another girl. The way they were talking, I guess she was his sister.”
“So one went back down into the canyon?”
“Yes. Good-lookin’ kid. I heard the Chris guy call her Dari? Something like that.”
“She left the area, then.”
“Yes.”
“Was that the only shot that the boy took with the magnum?”
“Nope. And then Bailey says, ‘Well, let’s try a movin’ target, and he points up at the windmill. It’s just kind of lazy spinning, you know.”
“Facing which way?”
He frowned and looked off into the distance at nothing. “The breeze, what there was of it, was comin’ down off the hill behind us. So the tail of the mill would be pointin’ southwest, maybe.”
“You didn’t make an effort to talk them out of it? The vandalism to the mill?”
“No, sir.”
“Why not? You must have known that this whole mess could be big trouble for you.”
“Just a…shit, I don’t know. I could have said something, but I didn’t.”
I slid a piece of clean copier paper across to him. “Sketch it out for me.”
He did, with a few erasures to make corrections. Sure enough, it would have been easy to draw a little ‘x’ in a line downhill from the windmill, where Darlene would spend her last night. I left the drawing with him. “So the kid shoots at the spinning mill?”
“Yeah. He let go three or four rounds, trying to shoot real fast? But the gun jumps so bad he has to change his grip each time. Then Chris says something like, ‘Well, I can do that,’ and he racks that little carbine and lets fly. He had to try a couple times, because he kept getting jams. Finally, he empties it, and Bailey asks if he can have a go. With the kid’s gun, I mean. Chris says that he’s out of ammo, but he’s got some down in the truck, down in the canyon. He’ll go get it. So off he goes.”
“Did he take the carbine with him?”
“I think he did.”
“And in the meantime?”
“Cliff shot some more. He punched the tank a few times, to see if the forty-four would go through both sides.”
“And did it?”
“No, it didn’t. Only one or two places above the waterline. And that’s when the kid looks like he’s gettin’ sick.”
“The kid?”
“The youngster who shot the magnum. I don’t remember his name. But he’s startin’ to wheeze, like he can’t get any air. His sister asks him if he’s got his inhaler with him, and he starts with that. At one point, she turned to me…I don’t know why me, you know…and she says, ‘We gotta go.’ And she starts down the hill with her brother
. He was in bad shape.”
“So you saw them walking away, toward the canyon? In the same direction as Chris went when he was looking for more ammo?”
“Yes. Artie says we should give ’em a ride or something. Make sure they get back to town. I mean, they’d had a lot to drink.”
“And did you?”
“Well, at one point we heard lots of screaming…shouting, more like. Artie says something like, ‘You think they’ll be all right?’ I said we ought to check, so I jogged down toward the canyon, to make sure they were okay—not getting stuck in the arroyo bed or something like that.
“Were you able to make out what was said?”
“No.” He shrugged. “Then they drove off. I saw the ass end of the Suburban as they went out past all those rocks.”
“Could you tell who was in the truck?”
“No. The light was bad by then.”
I sat back and looked across at the other officers. Sheriff Salcido rose, went to the coffee urn and filled his cup. “You know, I’m confused on something,” he said softly. He returned to the table, set the cup down carefully, and leaned forward on his elbows.
“You tell us that this one girl went down to the Suburban to ‘get something.’ She didn’t return?”
“No, sir.”
“So you don’t know if she ‘got something’ or not.”
“No, sir. I don’t.”
“I want to be clear,” the sheriff persisted. “The girl—Dari, you called her—left the group. When was the next time you saw her?”
Smith looked puzzled. “I didn’t We didn’t. She didn’t come back.”
“So you assumed…”
“Well, she had to have been in the Suburban when they left. When the kids left the canyon.”
“Had to have been,” Salcido said softly.
“When you gentlemen left the area, where did you go?”
“I was riding with Artie, and Cliff took his own truck. He wanted to drive up the dirt road a ways to make sure the kids got to the interstate all right. Artie and me went down to the Spur, where Cliff was going to meet up with us.”
“And that’s what happened?”
“Well, sort of. Cliff said he slid off the dirt road at some point and took out a tree or something. He came back to the saloon with a bent truck, all dirty and pissed at himself.”
“What did he say about the kids?”
“Just that he guessed they’d be all right. They took off to the north.”
I reached out and popped the tape out of the recorder and slipped in a new one. “All right. Let’s listen to this tale of woe again.” I nodded at Sergeant Payson. “You do the honors this time.”
We listened to Lieutenant Smith’s tale about four times, and nothing much changed. By the time we were finished, both Torkelson and Bailey were snoring so loudly it sounded as if they might blow their cell doors off.
“Seven o’clock, tomorrow,” I announced. “Same time, same station. They’ll both be sober by then.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
District Judge Lester Hobart was sixty-three years old, and looked ninety. “Wizened” could have been the word invented just for him. Maybe his favorite pastime was sun-bathing. He had to know that we lived in the UV capital of the Western Hemisphere, but his skin was bronzed beyond metallic, damn near to mummy. Wrinkles had become crevasses. Freckles had morphed into sludgy scabs along his jawline, and across the wide band of unprotected scalp on the dome of his skull.
Still, he was irascible enough that melanoma probably went elsewhere to pick on easier prey.
The black judicial robe hung like a pole-less tent on his spare frame, and because he also hosted the early stages of Parkinson’s Disease, he held the court papers in both hands, plastered tight against his desk, his rheumy gray eyes absorbing every word. He plodded through all depositions, including the one Clifton Bailey had recited after a change of heart come dawn.
“So…if this isn’t the damnedest thing I’ve ever read.” It wasn’t—Hobart had been sitting the bench for centuries, and probably would for a century more. He’d adjudicated his share of hair-raising cases. The three shootists stood before the judge, trying to look respectable…as respectable as anyone can after spending the night in the can—even a jail as down-home as ours. It had been a long evening of depositions and interviews, with a long morning of more of the same after that.
Another warrant made it easy to swing by Stuart Torkelson’s residence and pick up the other firearms that the hunters had left there in anticipation of their trip down into Mexico. Bob Torrez was eagerly anticipating a long session comparing bullets from the tank with the various weapons.
Judge Hobart glared at the trio, his old head oscillating from right to left. Being bothered on a Sunday morning didn’t add to his bonhomie. “All right. So you all have a reunion of sorts. You come over to Posadas for a little recreation with your buddy, here, Mr. Torkelson.” He nodded sagely and lifted the pack of papers we had supplied him. “I’m sure it’s in here, but tell me anyway.” He squinted at the first sheet. “Mr. Clifton Bailey. Why are you here?”
Bailey tried to stand a little straighter. “They’re claiming…”
The judge cut him off with an impatient wave of the hand. “I know what they’re claiming. What’s your connection with Posadas County? How’d you come to choose us for your handiwork?”
The man’s voice diminished to a hoarse whisper. “My brother, Leo, lives here. We’ve hunted here from time to time. That’s what we were doin’, is scouting some country for a fall hunt.”
“Are you in the news business, too?”
“No, Your Honor.”
“Then what do you do?”
“I’m a district sales manager for Griffon Home Products. They’re a hardware wholesaler.”
Hobart nodded abruptly. “Mr. Torkelson, you’re a native of sorts. How do you come to know Mr. Bailey?”
“Oh, I’ve known him for years, Your Honor.”
Hobart almost smiled. “I don’t think that’s what I asked,” and Torkelson looked confused. “How did you two meet?”
“I guess the first time was when we shared a campground down in Carlsbad. We got to talking of an evening, and you know. One thing led to another.”
“Where are you working now?”
“I work for my brother’s real estate firm, here in town.”
“How nice.” Hobart drew a deep breath. “Lieutenant Smith?”
“I was married to Mr. Bailey’s wife’s sister, sir.”
“Was?”
“No longer.”
“And what do you do for Uncle Sam?”
“Military Police, Fort Campbell, out of Clarksville, Tennessee.”
Judge Hobart picked up the paperwork and leafed through. The corners shook in his unsteady hands.
“Well, this is a mess, gentlemen. Now, we could pontificate all day about how stupid your behavior was, but I think you already know. At least it’s refreshing that all of your stories are substantially the same. Substantially.” He paused, surveying the various forms of contrition on the three faces. “So, let’s not waste any time. This is the way it’s going to be.” He laid down the paperwork and folded his hands on top of it.
“The most important thing, the most grievous thing to me, is that this community is still struggling with the tragic loss of four of its best and brightest. Now it seems to me, Mr. Torkelson, Mr. Bailey, and Lieutenant Smith, that as adults you should have provided some guidance for these four youngsters, rather than engaging them in this,” and he looked at the paperwork, and then several of the photos, “this outrageous and nonsensical behavior.
“Hell, I’m not sure who, if any of you, is telling the whole truth. So we’re not going to engage in a lawyer fest at this arraignment. Four youngsters have died as the direct result of you
r actions.” He rapped the desk with his gavel. “I set bail at fifty thousand dollars each, cash only, and turn this over to the Grand Jury for consideration. Let those good folks figure all this out. You’ll be receiving target notification from the Grand Jury in due course, along with a court calendar of their proceedings. That letter will inform you that you may testify during that process, but I strongly suggest that you do not. This is a good time to talk with your lawyers. Otherwise, just continue with your lives as best as you can.”
“Your Honor…” Artie Torkelson started to plead, but Judge Hobart cut him off.
“This isn’t a question-and-answer session, my friend, nor the time for legal advice. Find a lawyer, and find a good one.” He rapped his gavel, then looked at me. “Our taxpayers are hosting this crew at the moment?”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“Good. Let ’em make as many phone calls as they need to get the job done. Have any of ’em started the process of finding a lawyer?”
“It’s my understanding that they have, Your Honor.”
“Well, good. The sooner the better. We’re going to be pushing Schroeder to get rolling with the Grand Jury. Let them try and sort out this mess. You all are dismissed.” He waved his fingers as if shooing flies away. “Undersheriff Gastner, stay for a moment, please.”
The three men, again cuffed and escorted by Deputy Torrez and Sergeant Payson, left chambers looking as if they’d been whipped. Judge Hobart leaned back in his chair and watched them leave.
“Bill, it’s my understanding that most of this happened on your watch?”
“I guess so.”
He smiled. “You guess so. I’m also told that the young deputy started his first day on the job by responding to the accident that killed his brother and sister?”
“That’s more or less correct, Judge. Deputy Torrez was riding with Sergeant Payson the night of the crash. He had been scheduled to officially start work the next day. He was just doing a community familiarization run with the sergeant.”
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