Ariel Gore - Santa Fe Noir

I went back to my truck and called it in. After Alicia confirmed that she was getting help out my way, I snapped on my nitrile gloves, headed back, and tried not to get too near the body. I didn’t see blood anywhere. Maybe the guy had a heart condition and hadn’t prepped for the elevation. I didn’t bother to check for a pulse; the skin was that gray color bodies turn when left alone for a while. Also, I’m not a forensics guy, and touching the body would piss them off when they got here.

Probably I should have stopped there, but I have a curiosity problem, so I kept looking around. I figured the guy had a midlife crisis, decided to do some hiking and all of that after divorcing the wife, thought he had a handle on the rugged lifestyle, and didn’t prep enough. It’s sad, but stories like this are more common than people think. I haven’t exactly come across a lot of bodies in the forest, but, you know, it happens. It took some careful stepping around, but I was able to look into the backpack, and that’s when things settled into place.

There was a change of clothes, the plastic maps they sell down at the ranger station, and a copy of Where Glory Waits by Eric Katzenberg. Shit. A treasure hunter .

You know about Eric Katzenberg? Born in Florida, inherited a bunch of real estate money, lost a lot of it in the stock market, and went to jail for three years in the nineties for running a pyramid scheme. After he got out, he moved to New Mexico and bought a bunch of recently released federal property, old homestead stuff, down by Clovis. Ever since then, he’d been shoving his way into the amateur archaeologist scene, complete with a website where he sold artifacts that he discovered on his property.

Then he published his memoir. Most people would have skipped it, except the last chapter of the book held a sketch of a site with three aspen trees, a big boulder in the middle, and a creek running through it. The boulder has an X sketched on it, and in this chapter, Katzenberg claims to have buried a box of gold and silver worth $1.5 million — somewhere north of Santa Fe. And just like that, his book sold out, and we started getting a lot more activity in the forest. It’s not really a bad thing, but you get a lot of folks who haven’t been hiking in thirty years suddenly passing out as they rummage off the trails looking for these three trees. It was a real nuisance for a few years, before things slowed down.

This copy of the book was worn, and the owner had scribbled notes in the margins throughout. It looked like the book in the Evil Dead movies, although printed in paperback. The only page in the whole book that was pristine was the page with the infamous sketch. Most of the things scribbled on the page were this guy’s thoughts, or references to other pages, but the last thing written in the book was an address on Canyon Road.

I put the book back in the bag and hefted it. It seemed a little heavier than it looked, so I dug into the bottom of it, and felt my hand brush cold metal. I grimaced as I pulled back his change of clothes and saw a 9mm Glock at the bottom of the pack. At that point, I heard an engine coming up the road, and looked over to see the medevac crew out of Pecos coming for the body.

They cleaned him up, did their forensic analysis, and hauled him into the ambulance to get him down to the morgue. They told me the gun was loaded, and I let one of them pull out his wallet and hand me his ID; better if they mess something up moving the body than if I do. The ID read, Charles Redmond , and he was apparently from Blanding, Utah.

“Sorry, Charlie,” I said under the deepening shade of the trees. “Rough luck.”

Of course, I was done being out in the field for the day. Normally I’d put on some music and drive back to the ranger station, but this time, in silence, I hit the highway and headed toward Santa Fe. It felt good to get out of the forest and under the sun for a little bit. He wasn’t the first body I’d found out here, but it had been awhile, and most times we were actively looking for one. Stumbling across the guy, about my age, stiff and blue in the face. . well, it wasn’t exactly how I wanted my week to start. I slugged some more coffee, and spent the next thirty-five minutes trying not to think about dying in the forest.

I was headed into the main office. I had paperwork to hand in and sign off on, a report to fill out, and it was often easier to do that in the city itself. Besides, their coffee’s nicer than the pot we’ve had since the seventies in the Pecos ranger station. After I got my paperwork, I sat down in the break room and started to work on the report. My curiosity got the better of me after a couple of minutes, though. It happens. I get an idea on loop in my head, and there’s not much I can do other than scratch that itch. So I pulled out my phone and spent a few minutes searching for that address on Canyon Road.

It pulled up an old listing on a realty website — $2.8 million price tag — but it had apparently been sold. The realty website was last updated in 2015, though there was a website that listed it as the address for Heron Ridge Dealers, an online Indian artwork and artifacts operation... run by Mary O’Shaughnessy née Katzenberg.

The treasure-planter’s sister was in the body’s book. That was weird. Weird enough that I stuck the report in my mailbox and grabbed my keys to go for a drive.

Technically speaking, I was supposed to leave it alone and wait for a cop to take over the investigation, but I knew this wasn’t going to get a lot of attention. Old dude dies in the woods . Unless they found out that the body was poisoned or something, they were going to write it off and not pursue anything, no matter how much I pestered them about it. I figured it was worth at least checking to see if this woman knew anything before handing it over.

Canyon Road starts right off of Paseo de Peralta, and it’s as ritzy as you get in Santa Fe. Most of the lower road is lined with the kind of modern-art galleries that sell a few million worth of art a year. People say Santa Fe is the second best city for art, but they usually leave out the “for its size” part of that ranking. In any case, that’s where a lot of the city’s money comes from. If you go farther north, there are some homes up there that are the most expensive in the city limits. Some are historic, some are glitzed up, but all of them have the feel of rustic hospitality, combined with more money than I’d made in twenty-nine years.

I parked my truck down the road where I’d be able to get it out when I was done here, and hoofed it up to the address. There was a flagstone path that led up the hill to the house; it wasn’t big, but the stucco on the wall at the outside was impeccably maintained, and the garden path to the door was lush and green, despite the fact that we hadn’t had rain in three weeks. Standing in between two vines that crawled up the wall and pressed in over me, I knocked on the door.

It opened on a woman in her midfifties, in a tight blue tank top and yoga pants. Her hair was held in a slightly messy bun, her skin well-tanned, and she was very clearly in the middle of a workout.

Part of me wanted to suck in my gut, but man, it was too late. I’m not exactly a cougar hunter, but she looked damn good. I put on my best “Officer of the Law” voice. “Mrs. O’Shaughnessy?”

“That’s me. Are you with the police?” she asked, head cocked to one side, evaluating me. She knew I wasn’t, but I do have a badge.

“Forest Service, ma’am,” I said, “may I come in? I have a few questions about a Mr. Charles Redmond.”

She stared at me as I tried to read her face. She clearly recognized the name, yet she took a second to think before saying, “Sure, come on in,” and turning and walking away. “Can I get you something to drink?”