Dang Near Dead (An Aggie Mundeen Mystery Book 2)

by Nancy G. West

  Sam laid the bags on the table. “Aggie found these on the trail where the girl’s horse threw her.”

  Joaquin picked up two bags that contained pieces of wire. “These look like 26- and 30-gauge wires—pretty common on a ranch. Can’t tell much, though. You can connect a suspect to these wires?”

  “One possible suspect uses the thinner wire to make sculptures. But we don’t know if he handled the piece we have here,” Sam said.

  “We’d need DNA samples from this wire and from wire you know the suspect handled. You’d have to send both pieces to forensics to check for a match. It would take a while.”

  Sam nodded.

  Wearing a sterile glove, Joaquin retrieved the piece of rope from the bag. “The rope is a common variety,” he said. He saw a snip of thicker wire stuck to it. “The rope and wire could have multiple uses. To connect a suspect to this sample, you’d have to have a piece of matching rope. The suspect’s prints or DNA would have to be on both samples.”

  Joaquin’s evaluation didn’t surprise Sam. Sam knew he couldn’t send the wire or rope to forensics. Not yet. The items I’d found were, by themselves, insignificant.

  Sam handed Joaquin the bag containing the red-splattered rock. Joaquin removed the rock and placed it under the microscope. “Some of the marks are paint. Some are blood.” He looked up.

  “I think Vicki hit her head there,” I said. “Can you tell what kind of paint that is?”

  “No. I’d have to compare it to other samples.”

  “Could any of it be face paint?” Sam asked.

  “Could be.”

  “Could it be grease paint like clowns use?” I asked.

  “Could be.”

  I handed him the plastic bag with flecks of paint I’d scratched from Sunny’s face. “Do these flecks match the paint on that rock?”

  He moved them under the microscope and compared my paint scrapings with the red splatters.

  “They match.”

  Sam and I looked at each other.

  He handed Joaquin another bag. “What can you tell us about this snatch of hair?”

  Joaquin slid it under the scope. “It’s animal hair. It’s consistent with hair from a cat…probably pulled out of the animal. There’s a small piece of wire on it, too.”

  I thought about the bobcats hanging from the dining room ceiling. Wire, looped around their necks and under their hind legs, tied the cats to the ceiling. “The hair you’re looking at that’s consistent with cat hair, was the cat alive?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so. If this hair was yanked from a live animal, there would be traces of blood on the scalp end.”

  We thanked him. As I gathered up our samples, Joaquin pulled Sam aside and showed him a file. “These are the autopsy reports.”

  Sam found an empty table at the other side of the room, grabbed a stool and bent over the stack of papers.

  Joaquin and I made small talk about his job while I watched Sam from the corner of my eye and ignored my itching feet. He took forever perusing the documents and scribbling notes on his pad. He finally came over and handed the papers back to Joaquin. “I appreciate your getting these for me. It’s good information. Before we leave, would you check to see if anybody at the ME’s office received notification of the death of Vicki or Victoria Landsdale?”

  Joaquin dialed and asked about the girl. He listened, then hung up. “No death notice has been received. She must still be at a hospital.”

  I sighed with relief. “Can you call the hospital,” I asked Sam, “and find out how she is?”

  “They won’t tell me her condition. Only whether or not she can talk. The health privacy act Congress enacted last year, HIPAA, prevents the hospital from releasing information. But I’ll call the hospital from the car and see what we can find out.”

  We thanked Joaquin, returned to the parking lot and sat in the car while Sam dialed University Hospital. I leaned my head against the seat while he asked the charge nurse on Vicki’s floor about her, thanked the nurse and clicked the phone closed. When he turned toward me, I opened my eyes.

  “They say she can’t talk. She must still be in a coma.” When my eyes grew moist, Sam reached over and grabbed my hand. “When she lay on the ground,” he said, “I thought I saw a trickle of blood seeping from her ear. That usually indicates a swelling brain…not a good sign.”

  I swallowed the tears in my throat. “I need antihistamine to stop my face from swelling anymore,” I sniffed, “and Kleenex…low fat yogurt…and a fashion magazine that doesn’t show boots and jeans.” I’d spotted a drugstore across the street. “I need to walk. Will you pick me up over there?”

  I walked to the store, made my purchases while blowing my nose, and got back in Sam’s car. He studied my face but didn’t say anything.

  As we drove back toward IH 10, I spotted a sporting goods store and asked him to stop. “We have that long trail ride coming up. I better get some riding gloves.”

  He waited outside while I shopped.

  Feeling better, I trotted back to the car and threw my package on the back seat. I’d bought long Neoprene gloves that covered my arms. I didn’t want to worry about getting scratched up on the ride. The gloves wouldn’t be much hotter than wearing a long-sleeved shirt.

  He entered the freeway and drove west, climbing back into the Hill Country. “What did you learn from your research?” he asked.

  “Nothing new.” I looked out the window, feeling useless. As houses grew scarce on the hills, I noticed the cenizo plants had sprouted flowers from the recent rain. “I read that students from Wisconsin College took veterans from Milwaukee’s Clement Zablocki VA Medical Center to the rodeo. Zablocki went to high school and college in Milwaukee and was a US Representative from 1949 until he died in 1983. So they named the hospital after him.”

  Sam looked over dully. “Is there a reason we need to know that?”

  I shrugged. “That’s what I learned.” I hated not having discovered significant information.

  I saw a dead animal roadside…couldn’t even tell what it had been. “Tell me about the Vernons’ autopsies.”

  “They died from dehydration and heat stroke, like you said. There were no abnormal substances in their systems and no evidence of trauma, except for a few bruises from where they fell.”

  “How could that be? How could they both just die like that?” We kept hitting dead ends.

  “That’s what I wondered. Their family physician’s name was on the report, so I called him while you were shopping. He told me Max was diabetic. That’s why he drank so much water. Billy Sue exercised a lot, so they were probably both dehydrated when they started out. It’s not uncommon for healthy people to die of dehydration, especially in a hot climate during summer.”

  “Did examiners check their lunches and thermoses? Maybe somebody added diuretics.” I remembered seeing diuretics, two different kinds, among pill bottles in Bertha’s medicine cabinet.

  “They checked stomach contents, food remnants and thermoses. Didn’t find anything unusual. The doctor said they routinely took diuretics, her for weight control, him for diabetes.”

  I told Sam that Maria confirmed Herb had been at the ranch the night before they died. “He had plenty of time to dilute diuretics in their thermoses before he left the next morning,” I said. “The question is, why would he do that? Maybe the Vernons told him something that night, something that made him decide to kill them.”

  “Maybe the Vernons told Bertha they intended to leave the ranch to her, and Herb overheard,” he said.

  “Examiners didn’t find an unusually high level of diuretics in the Vernon’s bodies or thermoses?” I had to verify this critical point.

  “No, but the Vernons’ usual doses would make death from dehydration even more likely.”

  �
��Did police question everybody who was at the ranch in the days before the Vernons died?” I asked.

  “Yes, but when the autopsies showed death from dehydration and heat stroke, they had no reason to hold anybody as murder suspects.”

  I thought about the Vernons’ activities near the time of their deaths. “Maria told me that the day before they headed out to drive over the ranch, the Vernons drove to San Antonio on business.”

  “Their family doctor gave me their attorney’s name,” he said. “Maybe he can tell us what was on their minds.”

  “Maybe they wanted him to change their wills,” I said. “Either that, or something they found at the well site precipitated their deaths, something the authorities overlooked.” I just wasn’t convinced their deaths were accidental.

  “At SAPD,” Sam said, “I asked how I could get information about that well. One of the guys called a friend at the Railroad Commission in Austin who searched for records of wells drilled on the ranch. He couldn’t find records of wells drilled anywhere in that area. He said oil and gas fields weren’t typically found in the Hill Country. The closest fields had been in Medina County, south of Bandera County. He printed out a list of those fields for me.” He handed me the paper.

  I skimmed it and read aloud: “Taylor-Ina field, near Hondo; Devine, Biry, and Irwin; Adams-Olmos field and Bear Creek field, near Devine; Chacon Lake field, four miles south of Natalia. These towns are all south of the BVSBar?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “So there was no oil well drilled on BVSBar property? Why did the Vernons say there was? Why did they go there?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “We need to find the place where they died.”

  He smiled. “The medical examiner’s report showed the map location, latitude and longitude of spots where they died.” Sam produced a map of Bandera County and pointed to two Xs. “This is where Bertha found them.”

  “Fantastic. Do you think we can find it?”

  “Do you think you can avoid poison ivy?” He grinned.

  Twenty-Nine

  We drove into Bandera on Main Street and continued past Texarita’s Grill and Cantina. Realistic looking cowboys still lounged on the roof and gazed down at motorcycles and cars parked in front of the establishment.

  “I never expected to see motorcycle riders hanging out with Texas cowboys,” I said.

  We stayed on Highway 16 through town. After we left town and crossed Highway 173, we saw the entrance to the BVSBar Ranch ahead of us in the distance. Before we reached the ranch entrance, we turned south on a country road and continued for about a quarter mile. A fence paralleled us on the right.

  “I think that fence marks the eastern boundary of the ranch,” he said. When the fence line and the road we were on turned right, he stopped the car and looked at the map. “If we veer right and follow the direction of the fence, we should be driving along the ranch’s southern border.”

  We had driven about three-fourths of a mile when the fence stopped at a corner and angled north. He slowed the car, turned right and pointed to the property inside the fence. “I think that’s where they died, somewhere in this remote southwest corner of the ranch.”

  He began looking for a place to pull off the road. He found an area where tall whitebrush would help hide the car and rolled to a stop. The small amount of rain had made the shrub blossom with white and violet-tinged flowers. As I eased out of Sam’s Caprice, I smelled their vanilla scent. We looked around and didn’t see a soul.

  He checked the map. “I’m pretty sure these corner fences border BVSBar property. This has to be the place. I’ll go first.” He walked through mesquite, tarbush and bluestem toward the fence, watching for snakes and poison ivy. He found a section of the five-strand barbed wire fence where the bottom wire was loose and motioned me to follow.

  I picked my way through the brush, careful where I stepped, and joined him at the fence. We looked around and still didn’t see anyone. He held up the loose bottom wire so I could crawl underneath it. I flattened my stomach against the dirt and scooted through like a salamander. I had to be sure none of the barbs protruding from the wire above my back scratched my ivy rash. After I wriggled underneath and brushed dirt off the front of my shirt, I held up the strand for Sam to crawl under. He slipped his Glock and cell phone under the fence, then wiggled under the wire.

  We were in a wilderness where only wild animals and livestock might come to graze. If Max and Billy Sue Vernon had come here, no one would have heard their cries for help.

  He stood, replaced his pistol and phone and brushed himself off. “If there was a well anywhere near here, there should still be some sign of it.”

  About ten yards inside the corner from where the fences met, we noticed a cluster of live oaks.

  “Look how those trees form a circle,” I said. “Beautiful.”

  “Brush and grasses inside the circle grow taller than the surrounding brush,” he said, “from the shade.”

  One particular patch of plants growing inside the circle of trees caught my attention. Some plants, growing on single stalks, were five feet tall. A foot up each stalk, round notched leaves, succulent like miniature lily pads, branched out. Higher up the stalks, differently shaped serrated leaves branched off the stem. Five-petal flowers popped off in pairs at various intervals.

  “So this is where she gets it,” I said, pointing at the tall stalks. “That’s jewelweed. When Bertha gave me ice cubes made from the plant, I wanted to find out what I was rubbing on myself. I found photos online. Those plants with the greenish-white flowers are jewelweed. It usually grows in moister areas.” I thought about the bags of orange cubes in Bertha’s freezer. “Bertha must have planted the jewelweed here. She probably didn’t want everybody to know she had it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Charlatans boil it with liquid in various concentrations and sell it as a cure for all sorts of skin abrasions. It’s a good remedy, but if they don’t bother to prepare it correctly, they’re selling scam products. Bertha wanted jewelweed to treat the minor cuts and skin abrasions that people get on the ranch, but she must have concluded it was better to keep her stash private. She wanted a place where her jewelweed would thrive, and she could come get it whenever she wanted.”

  He looked perplexed. “But why would she plant it here? Near where her beloved aunt and uncle died? She apparently hated the idea that some company was drilling on this ranch. Why plant her jewelweed anywhere near the site?”

  Why indeed? The trees provided cover from the sun, but there must be similar areas in other parts of the ranch. Maybe we weren’t anywhere near the old well.

  “Are you sure this is the right location?”

  He stepped off the distance from where I stood to the property line at the fence and checked the map. “This looks right.”

  He walked back to me, and we moved closer to the jewelweed. The area where it grew was completely shaded. Nothing else outside the circle of trees looked as healthy or grew as tall.

  Sam studied the area. “Grows in a moist area,” he muttered to himself. He searched around until he found a thin, sturdy tree branch about four feet long. He used it to probe through the brush. Then he started prodding the ground around plants that had tall stalks. I inched closer.

  He moved from plant to plant. “The ground feels soft. Especially here.” He got on his knees and felt around the base of the plants. “It’s damp. I think there’s a water source here somewhere.”

  He crawled into the middle of the jewelweed plants and patted the ground. He stopped suddenly and pushed his probe down deep. He dropped one arm into a hole. He withdrew his arm, lifted up his hand and grinned at me. His hand was dripping wet.

  “This was a water well,” he said. “They drilled for water here, not oil. Water’s like gold around here. They call
it blue gold.”

  He kneeled and reached farther down into the hole. He stuck the tree branch down as far as it would go. “There’s a concrete casing inside the old well. It’s probably an old casing that will have to be replaced, but there’s a lot of water down there.”

  “No wonder Bertha didn’t want anybody drilling on this ranch,” I said. “She knew there was no oil here, and she didn’t want anybody to find this well. The paper I saw in her room about drilling a well must have been papers referring to re-drilling this water well.”

  “Demand for water grows daily,” he said. “Bertha might have something here as valuable as oil.”

  “And drilling for water is a lot cleaner than drilling for oil.”

  “This makes me understand Bertha better,” he said. “This well is her insurance policy. She does everything she can to make the BVSBar succeed as a guest ranch. But whether the venture succeeds or fails, she has this natural water source.”

  “She has to save enough money to re-drill the well,” I said. “I guess that’s why she works so hard to make the ranch succeed. Plus, I think she loves managing the dude ranch.”

  I thought about the conversation I’d overheard between Bertha and Herb. “I wonder why Herb thought his parents were drilling for oil on the ranch when he was growing up?”

  “How old was he then?”

  “Between seven and ten, I think. He must have heard his parents discussing the well, saw the tall tower the drillers used, and thought they were drilling an oil well. A young child who’d never seen either kind of drilling equipment wouldn’t know the difference.”

  “No, he probably wouldn’t,” Sam said.

  “The Vernons must have worried about survival during those drought years. They probably never thought it important to explain to their child the details of what they were doing. When Herb was twelve, Maria told me they sent him to school in San Antonio, and he was glad to go. Shortly after he left, the well dried up. Whatever he knew about it didn’t matter. I do wonder,” I said, “now that Bertha and Herb are adults, why she never bothered to tell Herb there never was an oil well.”