The Bisti Business

by Don Travis

  “Can’t,” I heard Lonzo Joe’s deep voice answer. “I’ve got to get this money over to the chapter house, and then I’m heading north of town on the trail of those dog fighters.”

  “Don’t let them get the drop on you,” Dix said dryly.

  ABOUT FORTY miles south of Farmington, Aggie and I turned off Highway 371 onto a gravel road, which looped back north. Six miles later we parked on a stretch of ground that faintly resembled a parking lot near a bunch of tumbledown, rotting buildings. There were no other vehicles in sight. In fact, we appeared to be the only two people on the planet.

  “You sure this is the right place?” Aggie climbed out of the car and looked around.

  I nodded to a modest sign and what looked to be a register for tourists. “According to that, it is.”

  “Man, this place is deserted.”

  “Yeah, they don’t get much traffic out here.”

  “Hope we can find our way to the right place.”

  Forewarned by Dix Lee and Lonzo Joe, we hoisted packs stuffed with water bottles, energy bars, and a compass. Feeling like I was provisioned for a week in the wilds, I clapped a broad-brimmed floppy hat on my head as protection against the sun and glanced at Aggie. He looked a good deal more comfortable with the situation than I was, but then he would be. He hiked and climbed mountains and conquered deserts more or less as a matter of course.

  We set off across the rocky ground, following the map Dix had sketched for us. She was supposed to be trailing along behind with someone from the Farmington BLM office. Almost immediately we were swallowed up in a fantastic landscape—not magnificent like the Grand Canyon, but spooky. Weird. Like a moonscape. Mysterious, as if some omnipotent sculptor had capriciously balanced massive, flat sandstone rocks atop slender necks of eroding clay in order to see how long they would stand. I wished Paul were here to share this with me. He’d be blown away by the pure craziness of the landscape.

  “Damn,” Aggie said in a near whisper. “I’ve never seen anyplace like this. What the hell’s keeping those damned rocks from toppling over?” He indicated one of the distant capped pink-and-gray striated clay towers wearing what looked to be an outlandish stone beret at a rakish angle. “I wonder what the Good Lord was thinking when he did all of this?”

  “Probably did it to watch all of us stand around with our mouths open.”

  We were almost diverted from the gravity of our task by the multicolored stones, petrified stumps, washes filled with wacky shapes, and the silent menacing hoodoos towering uncertainly over us. In one moment our surroundings were whimsical, in another, ominous. The Navajo considered this sacred ground, and I could understand why. We trod forbidden territory, or at least that’s the way it felt. There were no footprints in the dry washes or anywhere on the stony ground we traveled, and I felt ours would disappear with our passing, as if we walked an alien planet subject to different natural laws. I glanced behind me to check and took false comfort when I saw my shoe prints still existed.

  We had barely started our trek, and already sweat was staining my shirt. Following Dix’s hand-sketched map, we plodded on, taking frequent gulps of rapidly warming water, barely able to resist rushing off to explore some fascinating structural gem: thin spires of sandstone rising toward the sky like frozen tongues of flame; piles of mudstone carved by wind and water into ugly, fascinating gargoyles; specks of amber crystal winking in the hot sun; and those endless columns of sculpted, gravity-defying capped rock.

  Eventually we reached our target, a broad wash holding clusters of flattened, broken round rocks streaked with wind- and water-carved wrinkles. I’d seen color prints of the Cracked Eggs, but the startling reality was greater than the image. The stones appeared to be gigantic dinosaur eggs broken open and abandoned to the elements—dozens and dozens of them. They weren’t, of course; they were merely clay and stone fashioned by that same capricious Hand. In the photos they’d appeared in a dazzling array of color, influenced by the time of day, the intensity of the light, the influence of the clouds. Now, as the sun beat straight down upon us, they were a flat gray with rosy highlights.

  Aggie looked around. “Don’t see anyone with a cell phone for sale.”

  I glanced at my watch. “It’s early yet. Didn’t take us as long to find the place as we thought.”

  “Uh-oh.” Aggie nodded over my shoulder.

  I turned as four young men walked over a small rise and headed our direction. They fanned out, putting some distance between themselves as they neared. I’d seen gang members perform this maneuver a hundred times. It was designed to intimidate more than anything else. This crew looked deceptively unthreatening despite the fierce scowls. Young, sixteen at the most—and one looked to be no more than twelve. Three were slender, one stocky. All were Native American. Navajo, probably. They halted as a single unit ten feet away from us.

  “Yo, you Vinson?” That was the stocky one.

  “That’s me.” I stepped over to offer a hand. “You Honcho?”

  “Yeah.” He leaned forward at the waist to accept my shake. He kept his fingers straight, allowing me to do all the gripping. It’s a clasp I find repulsive. There’s no warmth, no return of camaraderie. “You got my money?”

  “I’ve got your phone. The money’s at the chapter house as we agreed. You have Dana’s phone?”

  “Dana. That the dude lost the phone?”

  “He’s the one.”

  Since Honcho obviously held little trust in or love for strangers, I tossed him the package I’d been carrying. He tore it open.

  “Cool. A Razr.” He held it up for his companions to admire. Then he reached into his shirt pocket and pitched a small silver fold-up cell to me. “Deal’s a deal,” he declared.

  “Show me where you found it.”

  “Right over yonder.” He pointed to the west. “Bottom of that hoodoo. It was just laying in the sand. Almost stepped on it.”

  “Was it still working?”

  “Naw. Battery was flat. My buddy’s got a whatcha call it—a charger—and we got it going again.”

  I turned the cell phone over in my hand. “Are any of the original messages left?”

  “Dunno. I didn’t do nothing to them. Just started using the phone, man.”

  Hopefully some of Dana’s messages still remained in the phone’s memory chip to give us a clue as to what happened. It all depended upon how busy Honcho and his pals had been; these phones had a finite storage capacity.

  “Okay,” I said, “show me exactly where you found the phone.”

  Honcho led us a hundred yards over rocky terrain and pointed to the spot where he claimed to have found the telephone. He’d done a little thinking and figured he’d stumbled across it the previous Tuesday. I took out my calendar and noted the fact under August 21.

  I held up Dana’s phone. “I’ve been calling this number every day for a couple of weeks. How come you didn’t answer it until yesterday?”

  “Already told you, man. Battery was dead. Just got it juiced up when you called.”

  There was enough power in the new battery for Honcho to call the chapter house, and I dutifully instructed the woman on the other end to give the youngster his money when he came for it. The four kids took their leave, vanishing behind the nearest rock formation the moment Dix Lee showed up with a man in tow.

  I nodded in the direction of the retreating teens. “Where did they come from? They’re not headed for the parking lot—unless there’s another one I don’t know about.”

  “No,” Dix answered. “There are two or three private Navajo holdings inside the Wilderness. They probably belong to one of those. They’re within walking distance.”

  “And that’s why they stumbled on Dana’s phone?” I took another slug of water as she spoke and offered her some. She declined with a shake of her head. I wiped a sheen of sweat from my face with a sodden handkerchief.

  “Probably.” She turned to the man with her. Blond and blue-eyed and handsome in a chiseled features wa
y, he was J. Edgar Hoover’s ideal FBI agent—except that he was a Bureau of Land Management man. “BJ, this is Larry Plainer, a Special Agent for the BLM. As I told you, they administer the Bisti Wilderness.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said and introduced him to Aggie.

  I knew that the BLM had its own law enforcement arm, but didn’t know exactly how they worked. Some rangers regularly carried firearms and handled criminal cases such as vandalism, theft, and the like. A special agent was new to me. Perhaps they handled the “heavier” crimes. Plainer’s fair features labeled him an inside man, not a working ranger. Despite the heat, he wore navy dress pants and a pale blue, long-sleeved shirt, although he had foregone a coat and tie. A black baseball cap with BLM stenciled on it was all that protected him from the sun. It made me wonder how he’d walked the same route I had without staining his clothing with sweat.

  I brought Dix and Plainer up to date on the situation while Aggie wandered off somewhere on his own. A few minutes later, a shout attracted my attention.

  “BJ, over here!” Aggie yelled.

  I hurried over to a hoodoo, one of those sculpted toadstool formations that threatened to collapse momentarily. Aggie slowly walked the rocky ground around the base, as if searching for something.

  “What is it?”

  “You smell anything?” he asked.

  And then I caught a whiff of it—the faint, cloying, unmistakable stink of death.

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  Chapter 13

  IT TOOK only minutes to find the source of the odor, a rubble-filled hollow on the south side of the hoodoo. Aggie was on the verge of open rebellion when Plainer insisted on notifying the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office before probing what was obviously a grave.

  “He’s right,” Dix weighed in. “The sheriff has jurisdiction over all homicides on BLM land.”

  “With our assistance, of course,” Plainer added.

  Aggie tried an end run. “We don’t even know this is a homicide. Might be some animal buried down there.”

  Plainer leaned back, leveled his blue eyes at my companion, and indicated the grave, if that’s what it was. “Long enough for a man. Wide enough for a man. Somebody went to the trouble of digging it and covering it up. Chances are good it’s a homicide.”

  If Dix and Plainer hadn’t restrained him, Aggie would have excavated the pit with his bare hands. I didn’t blame him; it could be his brother rotting away beneath those rocks. Had Aggie chosen to defy authority at that point, I’d have supported him.

  He didn’t, so the four of us beat a hasty retreat to the shade of a towering stone phallus while Dix and Plainer both got on their phones. Our water and energy bars, which we shared with the two law officers, were almost exhausted by the time Lonzo Joe made his appearance.

  “Hey, I see you got the call,” Dix said. There was an obvious bond between the two.

  “Yeah. My dog-fighting investigation got put on hold again. You don’t suppose the fact one of our undersheriff’s cousins runs one of them has anything to do with that, do you?”

  We led the county detective to the suspected grave.

  “Oohee,” he said, breathing through his mouth. “The crime scene boys are on their way, and there’s not much we can do until they get here. We notified the medical investigator, but no telling when he’ll show up.”

  Lonzo got on the phone and asked the Navajo reservation police to detain Honcho and his buddies when they showed up at the chapter house to collect his $500. After that we waited—again.

  The crime lab technicians arrived shortly thereafter and ordered Aggie and me off the property, or at least banished us from the immediate vicinity. Without being told, Dix joined us in the shade; Plainer stayed with Lonzo and the technicians. The three of us watched from afar as they shot several rolls of film. They had finished opening the gravesite by the time the medical investigator showed up. A heavyset man with a graying beard got down on his hands and knees and did something we could not see.

  As the medic got to his feet, Aggie started forward, but Lonzo intercepted him and remained at his side while the CS specialists shot some more film. At last the doc gave the okay, and the team removed a body from the shallow depression at the base of the towering hoodoo. A few minutes later, Lonzo led us forward. Aggie’s carefully composed features began to crack as he approached the body bag on a gurney.

  “Too short,” he muttered when we were within a dozen feet. “Not tall enough to be Lando.”

  Rational conclusion or rationalization? Rationalization. The black bag hid the proportions of the thing it contained. Aggie nodded when Lonzo asked if he was ready to view the body. He swayed unsteadily as the face was revealed.

  Rocks covering the victim had prevented major damage from predators. The wilderness is a dry, hot area, so decomposition was not too bad. Nevertheless, the viewing was not easy.

  “It’s not my brother,” he said.

  “Are you sure?” Plainer asked. “Sometimes it’s hard to be sure. They change, you know.”

  “Let me see the clothes,” Aggie said in a clipped tone.

  A medic unzipped the bag to expose a shirt.

  “Hands,” Aggie said. “If there’s a small tattoo of a Greek delta on the back of the right hand, it’s Dana. If not, then it… it might be my brother.” He shook his head as the man opened the bag all the way. “No, hair’s too light.”

  A moment later he gave a shuddering sigh as a faded tattoo on the back of one hand came into view. I noticed something else. There was a watch on the body’s left wrist and a small diamond on its right ring finger. This man hadn’t been killed in a robbery. Lonzo rummaged around in the filthy clothing and came up with a slender wallet.

  “Dana James Norville,” he confirmed. “So it’s not your brother.”

  “It’s his friend. The man he was traveling with.”

  “We’ll need to talk to you and BJ in the office. Dix, can we use your facilities?”

  “You can use ours,” the BLM special agent said.

  “Okay. Can you tell me where your brother is, Aggie?”

  “No. I haven’t seen or heard from him since he left California on vacation.”

  “Agent Plainer will ride back to Farmington with you, Mr. Vinson. Mr. Alfano can ride with me. Sergeant Lee, you need transportation?”

  “Uh-uh. My unit’s in the parking lot.”

  Lonzo had gone formal all of a sudden. Understandable, under the circumstances.

  I knew what to expect, but Aggie was about to be blindsided. I would have warned him, but Detective Joe split us up before I had a chance.

  THE BLM’S Farmington field office was located in a two-storied stucco building the color of desert sand on the La Plata Highway. The place was virtually deserted, reminding me this was Sunday, as Plainer led us through a maze of cubicles and walled offices. The interrogation room could have been lifted out of APD back home—small and uncomfortable and filled with cast-off government furniture. I was apparently a minor player because the BLM agent handled my end of things while Lonzo Joe talked to Aggie elsewhere.

  Plainer was pedantic. He asked every question he could think of in about three different ways—all of them unimaginative—in a virtual monotone. It was probably by design, his form of water torture. When he finally left the room with orders for me to sit still, I settled back for a lengthy wait. He would organize his notes and huddle with Lonzo before returning to me. I wouldn’t miss him. Half an hour later, Plainer returned to lead me to a marginally larger interrogation room where a red-faced Aggie Alfano was about to blow.

  “BJ,” he sputtered as I entered the room. “They think Lando killed Dana. They claim it was a lover’s quarrel.”

  “It’s a logical place to start, Aggie.” I watched Lonzo lean back in his chair with his hands clasped behind his head, no doubt intrigued by my line of reasoning.

  Aggie came up out of his seat. “Wait a minute!”

  “Settl
e down. I said it’s a logical place to start. That doesn’t mean it happened that way, but these fellows are professionals.” It never hurts to stroke the official ego. “They’re going to eliminate the obvious before they go charging off in all directions. Besides, at this point, it’s to our advantage for them to pursue that line of reasoning.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re going to be as interested in finding Lando as we are. And once they do, we’ll all learn what happened. Give them all the cooperation you can, Aggie. It’ll benefit your brother in the long run. Unless….” I let the word hang.

  “No way,” Aggie interjected. “Lando’s not a killer.”

  “Very smooth, BJ.” Lonzo returned to informality for the moment. A good sign?

  “Look, right now we all want to find Orlando as quickly as possible. The only thing we don’t want to do is panic him and push him into a corner. That would benefit none of us.”

  “I don’t intend to do that. If Lando Alfano is not the killer, his disappearance could mean he’s being held hostage. I understand his father is quite wealthy. Has there been a ransom demand?”

  “As of early this morning, there had not been. Or at least,” I added, “I haven’t heard of it.”

  “How about you?” Lonzo turned to Aggie. “Are you aware of any ransom demand?”

  “No. And my father would have called me if there had been one.”

  I shrugged my shoulders to relieve tense muscles. My shirt clung to me uncomfortably. The sweat had dried, but I needed a shower. I also experienced a powerful need to talk to Paul. I missed my partner terribly right at the moment. But that wasn’t convenient, so I merely asked if Mr. Alfano had been advised of Dana Norville’s death. “Has the man’s family been notified?” I added.

  “Not yet,” Plainer answered. “We want to collect all the information we can before word of this gets out. My Los Angeles office will notify his family tomorrow.”