Steven Havill: Scavengers

“Eleanor works three days a week at Price’s HairPort, today included. So far I haven’t been able to establish what her son does. I’m assuming he’s home.”

Estelle adjusted the exposure and frowned. “What I can get is a sea of brown, fuzzy backs and a bunch of ears,” she said. “Even with the sun shining into the stalls, there’s just too much shadow and obstruction for much else.”

“That’s good, though. Two ears per beastie.” Gastner chuckled softly. “That gives us a good count.”

“It’d be easy with a flash if we were closer.”

Gastner shook his head. “I don’t want to be closer. I don’t want them to know I’m interested. I just want to find out what the hell they’re up to.”

“The donkey source,” Estelle said.

“That’s it.”

“They’re cute little beasts. At least their ears are.”

“Yes, they are. That’s why the market for ’em is so strong. They’re cute and small. You can keep one in the backyard. Use him to kick and bite the crap out of the neighbor’s poodle.”

Estelle snapped several more photos of each stall. “That’s the best I can do, without going into the yard. I think you can get an ear count, though.”

“That’ll do nicely.”

“I’ll have Linda develop the film today.”

“Wonderful. Cliff Larson’s giving me a hand watching the place. There’s only the one driveway out onto Escondido Lane, so they’re not going to slip away on us.”

“How’s he doing, by the way?”

“Cliff? Not well.” Gastner grimaced. “He’s dying, and he knows it. Something like this gives him something to do with his time, I guess.”

Larson had become an institution as the district livestock inspector, and had asked Bill Gastner to fill in for him “on a temporary basis” after the November elections and Gastner’s retirement from the Sheriff’s Department. The filling in had become permanent as Larson’s illness blossomed.

“You ready for some breakfast now?” Gastner asked as Estelle stepped down from the truck’s frame.

She grinned at him. “Sure.”

Walking back toward Gastner’s truck, Estelle could smell the metal, grease, and oil as the sun gradually warmed the sea of car hulks around them. The inside of the state truck was warm, and she could cheerfully have settled back into a nap. With no place to turn around, Gastner backed the truck half a football field before a nook presented itself and he could swing into a space between a rusted Plymouth Valiant and a crushed Jeep Wagoneer.

Cameron Florek was standing by his Airstream as they approached. He crossed the driveway and Gastner opened his window and pulled the truck to a stop.

“You find the parts you was after?” Florek’s beard bobbed as he talked, and the deep crow’s-feet at the corner of his eyes crinkled. “That kinda worries me, I’d have to say.”

“Sure did. Thanks for letting us look,” Gastner said.

“Anytime, Sheriff.” He glanced across at Estelle, letting that suffice as acknowledgment of her presence.

Gastner laughed. “God, don’t say that,” he said. “I’m not sheriff anymore.”

Florek flashed a smile and jerked his beard toward the inside of Gastner’s truck. “You got your scanner turned on?”

Gastner glanced at the radio slung under the dash. “Nope.”

“Didn’t think so. You wasn’t in any hurry.” He rested both hands on the door of the truck and rocked it gently. “You might want to give your office a jingle, ma’am,” he said to Estelle.

“What’s going on?” Gastner asked.

Before Florek could answer, and even while Estelle was pulling her small cell phone out of its belt holster, the gadget chirped urgently. “There ya go,” Florek said. He patted the door of the truck and stepped back as Gastner pulled it into gear.

The second corpse lay in the shallow grave with his feet pointing south. Estelle stood with her hands in her pockets, gazing down at what no doubt had once been a young man who had entertained all manner of exciting ideas about his future. Those ideas had been cut short when a heavy caliber bullet had smashed through the xiphoid process on the lower end of his sternum and then minced the internal organs that bone was supposed to protect.

“Juan Doe,” as Deputy Thomas Pasquale had dubbed him, was no more than twenty-five years old, slight of stature with a lean, swarthy hawklike face, and long, black hair pulled tight behind his head in a short ponytail. He was dressed in blue jeans and a heavy denim shirt. A brown windbreaker had been tossed into the grave, perhaps as an afterthought, and lay across the man’s knees. Other than laboriously removing the dirt using first the small short-handled spades that the deputies routinely carried in their units and then by hand, the body hadn’t been touched or moved.

The grave was no more than eighteen inches deep, just enough to frustrate all but the most diligent coyotes. Estelle stood with her hands on her hips, surveying the distant horizon. Whoever had chosen the spot had worked at it. They had bounced along the rough service road that paralleled the power lines north from Maria for eleven miles. Five miles north of where she stood, the transmission lines crossed the interstate-and it was conceivable that the killers had gained access to the service road and driven south to this point. From whichever direction they’d come, this spot had served their purpose. They’d gouged out the young man’s final resting place under the hum of commerce overhead.

Estelle turned and looked west to where a shovel lay a couple dozen yards out on the prairie, partially concealed by a runty creosote bush-marked now by a bit of red flagging tied to one of the bush’s brittle limbs.

At a glance, it appeared to be a standard issue contractor’s shovel, long of handle with an elliptical blade and good, sturdy blade shoulders that would take a beating from heavy-soled work boots. The shovel was new enough that portions of the label still clung to the hickory handle.

Following Estelle’s gaze, Deputy Tom Pasquale said, “World class dumb. Somebody goes to all the trouble to dig a grave and then leaves the shovel behind.”

“Let’s hope so,” Estelle said. “If the shovel and grave are related in the first place.” She backed up half a dozen steps until she could lean against the eastern most upright of the huge transmission line support. It had taken nearly two hours to meticulously uncover the corpse, one careful scoop of desert soil at a time. She slid down the warm steel until she was resting on her haunches, arms comfortable across her knees.

“The crossroads,” she murmured, and pointed west. “I can make out the tracks that head out from here.” The sparse grass, bent and broken by the vehicle’s tires, would remain so for months, until summer rains hastened the decay of the vegetation, and new sprouts took their place. “And Perry MacInerny told Collins that he heard shots on the evening of Friday, February second. He’s got a parts receipt from the next day to lock in the date. All the way from here, you think?”

“Easily,” Tom Pasquale said. “Unless the wind was howling from the west.”

“MacInerny said it was calm.”

“Then he could have heard gunshots from miles away…especially heavy caliber artillery.”

Estelle nodded. “If the two killings are related, then Perry would have heard this shot first,” and she nodded toward the grave, “followed by the ones that killed number one, way over there to the west.” She turned, scanning the prairie. “I wonder how long.”

“How long?”

“MacInerny doesn’t remember an interval between the shots. If this one was first, and then”-she pointed to the west and stopped, brow furrowed-“that could be five minutes, ten minutes…almost anything.” She shook her head in frustration. “We’re going to have to work on Perry’s memory a little bit.” Turning to Jackie Taber, she said, “Tell me again what you saw.”