by Rex Burns
“My hometown,” said Yates. “Actually I got an A-frame up on the side of the mountain there—gets a lot more sun than down here.” He waved a hand at the shaggy mountain flank that still caught the lowering glow.
“How in hell do these people make a living?”
“Some work for the county—road crews, school-bus drivers. Some of them take in each other’s wash, I guess. And we got some goddamn hippies that live off food stamps and rich parents. A couple of them are okay, but most ain’t worth a damn.” He pointed to the shadowed mountainside, where tongues of broken rock spilled down the slopes, and sagging mine buildings crumbled slowly. “Used to be a pretty big place in the 1890s—ten, twenty thousand people working the mines and services. Some of these people were born here and never left. God alone knows why.”
To Wager, the remnants of the town were more lonely than the empty forest surrounding it. There, in the sprawling national forest, you expected isolation; and anyone found there was a transient fragment of humanity, with ties to someplace else where there were people. But here, the pitted stone foundations poked like rotted teeth above the weeds, and the time-stained cabins that remained were like stray seeds that cling to the poorest soil simply because that’s where chance dropped them and they took hold. “You like living here?”
“Tell you the truth, Gabe, I’d a hell of a lot rather be down in Loma Vista. Me and the wife both. But here’s where I’m stationed, and God knows the rent’s cheap. Besides, it ain’t as empty as it looks—there’s maybe eighty, a hundred people in all, counting the ones back in the woods.” Yates swung the vehicle roughly across a stony lot and headed back down the valley. “And this place might come back again, too.”
“You mean the mines?”
“No, I think they’re pretty much played out. They’re mostly silver, anyway, and the price isn’t that high. No, I mean oil shale—they found oil shale not too far away on the benchland, and this is the closest town if they ever start to develop it.”
“Any Mormons around here?”
“They’re mostly over the pass on the desert side. I don’t know, there may be a few in this valley. No Mormon stake house, though. That’s what they call their meetinghouse. No church of any kind, as a matter of fact.” The deputy pushed the vehicle through the gears. “Let me get you back to Loma Vista before dark.”
CHAPTER 4
THE DEPUTY’S JEEP pulled away into the early dusk. Wager stood a moment outside the cinder-block sheriff’s offices and watched the boxy vehicle go down the single main street. Two traffic lights shone brightly on the almost-vacant avenue, and over it all the wide sky was dark with evening cumulus clouds and a green twilight. In Denver, Wager didn’t often get a chance to see a sky like that, and this minute of stillness reminded him of when his father had died. When he had learned that neither trees nor earth nor sky nor anything beyond would give him the slightest answer. This absolute indifference had frightened him when he first discovered it; now it was simply another statement of the isolation that all shared until, still alone, one faced death. But if every man’s death would come when it would, it was Wager’s job to hunt down those who hastened death for others. He wasn’t being paid to stand in the street and gaze at a darkening sky, or to feel this embarrassing return of some forgotten childhood fear.
Nonetheless, he gazed a moment more; but the twilight had drained of meaning and become just a fading color.
Centuries ago some Anasazi—some local cliff dweller—had probably stood and watched the same shading of green into purple and black, and heard the same raucous squawk of the wheeling nighthawks. And perhaps the Anasazi asked the same questions—and received the same silence in return. It was nothing new.
Inside the now-quiet sheriff’s offices, a different woman sat at the radio console, the clipboard of logged calls propped in front of her, a photo-filled National Enquirer spread on the desk beside it.
“Hi,” she said. “Can I help you?”
“Is Sheriff Tice around?”
“He’s home, but I can get him on the radio if it’s an emergency.” She peered closely. “Are you Detective Wager? From Denver?”
Wager nodded.
“I’m D.L.’s daughter-in-law. He told me to tell you that he reserved a room at the Mesaland Motel if you need it—he was worried they’d be filled up before you got back. Do you want to talk to him? His home number’s right here.” She pointed to a sheet taped to the desk top.
“It’s not that important. Can I use this phone? For an official call?”
“Sure.” She watched him settle behind one of the secretaries’ desks with a polite smile of approval until he started to dial; then she turned back to her gossip sheet to show Wager that she wasn’t at all interested in what he had to say.
Max should be awake by now. Eating, probably. He went on duty at midnight, and when Wager had that shift he was always up and messing around by seven. He gave the operator his Denver office number and the code that let him charge the call to DPD, then waited while the line clicked and finally rattled.
Polly answered, a strain of cautious anxiety in her voice.
Wager asked for Max, and the anxiety went up half a note. “Yes, Gabe, he’s up. I’ll get him.”
And, a moment later, Max’s voice. “Gabe! How you doing out there? Anything helpful?”
He told Max about the avenging angels.
“Mormons? You think the victims have something to do with the Mormons?”
“I don’t know, Max. Most of the people here think the drawing means the avenging angels. The one found with Mueller is identical to the one we found.”
“Well, it’s an approach we haven’t tried. There’s still no missing persons on either victim. Or identification. The dental charts have been sent around here and in Pueblo, but you know how that goes.”
The dental charts were circulated when other means of identification had failed. Usually it went slowly, and sometimes not at all, because response by the dentists was strictly voluntary, and some didn’t feel like wasting their time. “Mueller had no known connections with the Mormons or any other church group,” Wager told Max. “And the method wasn’t the same.”
“How’s that?”
“He was shot in the back of the head instead of the chest. He wasn’t robbed. He was known. He was left in his home.”
After a pause Max asked, “So the only real similarity is that sketch?” Then, “What about the slug? Ballistics finally matched the two from Denver and Pueblo—their report came in today: same weapon.”
“They can’t find a slug.” Wager dropped his voice, glad for the brief spurt of radio traffic that drew the girl’s ears away from him as she responded to a deputy’s query. “The training out here is amateur—almost as bad as the rent-a-cops.”
“The sheriffs office doesn’t have a detective?”
“Hell, no. The county can’t afford one. I don’t even know if his deputies are certified.”
“Was the trip a waste then?”
Wager didn’t know that either. “We found out about these avenging angels. Maybe something will come out of that.”
“I hope so … but it’s a hell of a long drive just for that. Listen, I’ll see what I can turn up when I go in tonight. You driving back tomorrow?”
“No reason not to.”
“Okay, I’ll see you tomorrow night.” Max added, “Kolagny’s settling for a reduced plea on the barbed-wire killing.” His voice masked his disgust; only the fact that he mentioned it told Wager his disappointment.
“What the hell for?”
“He thinks he’ll have trouble with intent. The defense is claiming they only wanted to scare Ellison, not kill him.”
“They made threats!”
“They claim they didn’t.” Wager heard a shrug in Max’s voice. “It’s their word against Linton’s, Kolagny says, and he wants a sure thing. What the hell, he’s the prosecutor. And a sure thing makes the stats look better. Say, Gabe, can I tell Polly you’
ll be coming to the barbecue?”
“I—ah—haven’t asked Jo yet. I’ll ask her when I get back.”
“Sure, Gabe. See you tomorrow.”
Damn Prosecuting Attorney Kolagny and damn the barbecue. He hung up the telephone and, without seeing, gazed at the closed door of the sheriff’s private office. What Max said was true: the only real similarity between Mueller’s shooting and those in Denver and Pueblo was the angel drawing. But it was also the only tie they had to anything at all, and even if it made no sense it was better than nothing. Maybe. He hoped it was better than nothing.
At the edge of his hearing the radio popped and Deputy Yates voiced a message for the highway patrol: “I got a 10-50, a pickup rolled into the barrow, mile eighteen, state highway 173. No injuries.”
“Ten-four,” said the daughter-in-law. “I’ll tell him.”
Wager waited as she dialed the CHP frequency and relayed the message to a laconic voice somewhere in the dark. Then, the excitement over, she logged the calls and turned back to her National Enquirer with a glance at Wager to see if he had noticed how efficient she was.
“Is your husband with the sheriff’s office too?”
She nodded. “He’s a jailer. We got it fixed so we work the same shifts. No kids yet.” She smiled.
If the county commissioners didn’t mind the nepotism Wager wasn’t going to sweat it. There were few jobs to be had in this corner of the state anyway, and fewer still that brought in any kind of hard cash. Apparently Tice, like everyone else, grabbed for that stray dollar with both hands and with those of all his relatives, and no one thought the worse of him for it. In fact, if he didn’t grab, they’d probably think him a damned fool and not worth voting for in the next election.
“Any other relatives working for the sheriff?”
“Sure—his wife fills in here on weekends, and his other boy’s the animal control officer.” She grew suddenly cautious. “We took a test for it—all the candidates take a test. The highest score gets the job. And all the scores are posted.”
Wager believed her; and he had a good idea who wrote the test. “Are all the radio calls logged in?”
Her voice became businesslike. “We try. Sometimes when it gets real busy we have a hard time keeping up. Daryl—Sheriff Tice—tried to get the commissioners to buy a tape recorder. A lot of times the officers will need to know what they radioed in—a name or license number. But the commissioners said not this year. So we do what we can.” Holding up the clipboard, she showed him the mimeographed form with its columns filled with abbreviations under Time, Sender, Message, and Disposition. Most of the entries were in the Uniform Ten-Code and were routine.
When she had talked herself out of her defensive mood, Wager asked what he really wanted to know. “Do you think there are any avenging angels around the county?”
She giggled nervously. “No!” Then she thought a moment. “I mean I didn’t—not until I heard about those killings in Denver and Pueblo. And then Mueller got shot. But I don’t think I believe in them.”
“Are there a lot of people who do?”
“I don’t know…it’s not something you talk about much. Cynthia was scared after Mueller got killed, I know that.”
“Who’s Cynthia?”
“Cynthia Moreles. She works the day shift.”
Wager remembered. “The pretty one?”
“The young one.”
“Why’s she afraid?”
“I’m not really sure. I just know she heard about Mueller and she just shuddered.”
“But she didn’t say anything?”
“No. Not to me.”
Wager filed the item in his memory; it was a card to be pulled when he got the chance. “Is there a restaurant open this late?”
She glanced at the twenty-four-hour clock, whose hands pointed to 20:00. “The Mesaland restaurant should still be open. They don’t close until nine, unless there’s no business. Ten on weekends.”
Thanking her, Wager headed his Trans-Am toward the steady wink of green-yellow-red in the distance. He found himself driving much more slowly than he did in Denver; there was no place to rush to, and not much to do once he got there. Even the traffic lights seemed to be slower, stopping him for a long time at an empty intersection to look at a gas station closed for the night; at a rambling block of one-story shops with dim lights here and there behind the cluttered windows; at another corner gas station converted into a drive-in curio store, lightless now, and perhaps even out of business judging from the sun-faded signs for real Indian turquoise jewelry.
The Mesaland Motel sat at the west end of town, where the state highway swung south toward the Four Corners region and a main county road aimed west at Utah. Here, where traffic was a bit heavier, there was no light and Wager had to yank his wheel hard to miss a swerving pickup truck that screeched rubber across the highway from the county road. The howl of teenage voices hung in the exhaust behind the weaving truck, the spinning clatter of an empty beer can tossed high in the air, a flashing moment of self-contained noise and excitement and speed challenging the dark indifference of the surrounding night and the silent, vast earth beyond. Wager could remember how, just before going into the Marines, he and his buddies had cruised noisily like those kids. It was as if motion and excitement and laughter could hold back the impending world of adulthood and all its plodding sterility. It had not. In fact, Wager had rushed to meet it, not knowing that the avenue he’d chosen for its excitement and challenge was no different from that of his buddy who went into insurance, or the others who became salesmen or contractors or truck drivers. He shouldn’t have joined the Marines at sixteen, but his mother had signed the papers and his sister was glad to see him go. And what the hell, if the old man had been alive he’d have been proud to see his kid in dress blues. Besides, it promised a world where excitement was not only permanent but approved, a world that turned out to be the bleak DMZ in Korea, the orange clay and green jungle of northern Okinawa, the bare crushed coral and barbed wire of Landing Zone Delta in Vietnam. There, not yet twenty-five and already wearing one hashmark, Staff Sergeant Wager saw what he had long suspected: that life was as casual as death, and that the only meaning to be found in either was what he gave to it. Which, he guessed, was what had ultimately landed him in law enforcement when he found himself bored by the kinds of jobs that an infantryman with eight years in the Marine Corps could qualify for. A cop accepted the importance of the rules that tried to order the randomness of life and death, and his job was to go after those who did not accept the rules. Usually they were merely the careless ones; on rare occasions they were the ones who were neither careless nor blind to the rules, but who knew them and chose to stay outside them. That was the real meaning of “outlaw” to Wager, and those were the ones you ruptured yourself to nail, because they were truly dangerous. They reasoned what they did and they struck like feeding sharks at those penned in by the rules; they were the ones who crossed the line between order and chaos, and who brought to their victims not only a fear of death but a terror of the soul.
Nosing the Trans-Am into a vacant slot near the motel’s canopied entrance, Wager sat half listening to an adenoidal singing group on the car radio. Those angel drawings had come from that kind of outlaw. He had killed and then left a message, to terrify and to control. To make people run for their lives or shudder with fright. And he had done it, Wager finally admitted to the stillness around and within him, from motives he considered just. He, too, sought justice beyond the law. But Wager saw a difference between himself and the death angel—Tony-O was scum, proven scum that the law couldn’t reach but Wager could. The death angel perverted all sense of justice; his reason was founded on madness—it had to be. And when Wager could discover the reason, or the madness, he’d have a clearer idea who’d left the messages and the bodies.
The motel’s night clerk was an aggressively friendly and well-scrubbed young man whose smile had not yet become professional. He said, “Sheriff Tice told me
you’d be in,” handed Wager a key and a card to fill out, and told him that, yes, the kitchen was still open. The dining room was part of the lounge, where a handful of men sat over beers and joked quietly with the big-chested girl behind the bar. Wager ordered trout and a beer from a tired woman who looked like the girl’s mother, and leaned against the squeaking plastic of the booth’s upright back. It was one of those booths designed to cave in the small of your spine while it pressed against your shoulders, and as Wager squirmed for some kind of comfort a man paused to squint through the dim light.
“You Detective Wager?”
“Yes.”
He was broad-shouldered but slim, balding, and had a plaid shirt closed at the neck by a bolo tie with a turquoise slide. The hand he held out was large, with sore-looking knuckles. “Winston—Orrin Winston. I’m the editor of the Grant County Beacon. Can I sit down?”
“That’s the newspaper?”
“The weekly, not the daily. But we have mostly news that’s not fit to print anyway.” He sighed as he slid into the facing plastic seat, and lifted the drooping corners of his mouth in a smile. “Like whose dog got hit by a car, or whose cousin came for a visit last weekend. We don’t get much in the way of murders or city detectives coming out to investigate. That’s real news.”
“I’m not here investigating. That’s the sheriff’s job. I’m just looking for similarities with a homicide we had over in Denver.”
“That’s another destroying angel killing?”
“I mean a homicide with similarities. That’s all.”
“Was that other victim a friend or relative of Mueller?”
“The case is still under investigation, Mr. Winston. There’s not much I can tell the press about it. You’ll have to talk to Sheriff Tice.” Wager half wondered if there was some odor about him that lured newspapermen. Manure, perhaps. They liked to gather like flies on any fresh shit they found.