Steven Havill - Scavengers

The stocky deputy pushed her Stetson back on her head and squinted up into the sun, now harsh and winking on the power lines overhead. The wind was strong enough to touch the expanse of power lines between each tower, flexing them slightly, making them moan.

“I was sitting in the unit, right there,” she said, indicating where the department Bronco was still parked. “I was waiting for Linda to come out. We were going to walk the tracks that showed up in the aerial photo. I saw where they took off to the west, right here, so this is where I parked. I was watching the changes in light, and I was getting ready to do some sketching. And that’s when I saw the pattern.”

Estelle regarded the grave expressionlessly. Scant as the vegetation was, there were an infinite number of places where a dedicated gravedigger could find a patch of earth two feet wide and five feet long without disturbing any plant life. Of all the places in Posadas County likely to remain undisturbed, and thus be suitable for an unmarked grave, the eastern Posadas prairie should have topped the list.

The transmission line service road, nothing more than a rude two-track in the best of places, paralleled the power lines just to the east of the tower’s legs at this particular point. The grave was across the two-track, its northwest corner forty-five feet, nine inches from the tower’s eastern support leg.

Estelle clasped her hands together and rested her chin on her intertwined fingers. “The pattern,” she repeated.

Jackie Taber’s were the eyes of an artist, Estelle knew. Why the young woman chose to spend her time as a graveyard shift deputy sheriff instead of using her GI bill money to attend a university and pursue her art was a question only Jackie could answer-and so far she had kept her reasons to herself. But the large eleven-by-fourteen sketch pad that was the deputy’s habitual companion included detailed pencil or pastel drawings that often revealed more than the impersonal wink of a camera’s lens.

“When the sun’s low, just when it starts up over the horizon,” Jackie said, holding her hand flat, palm down, “the way the light trips over things is really interesting.”

“Deputy Picasso,” Pasquale said.

Linda Real was standing within striking distance with her elbow, and did so. “She’s right, bozo.”

“I know she’s right,” Pasquale said easily and with a touch of admiration. “I tried one of those matchbook art contests once. It was so bad that when I tried to mail it in, the Post Office refused to deliver it.”

“What’s interesting is that this prairie is covered with rocks, all sizes and shapes, but uniformly covered, you know?” Jackie said. “If you want to sit down, you’re going to have to nudge a couple of rocks out of the way, no matter what. You look at Linda’s panoramic photos when she develops them, and you’ll see the grave, too. Whoever did it didn’t bother to take the time to kick the dirt smooth, so there wouldn’t be a hump. And they sure didn’t go back and duplicate the pattern of rocks.”

“Did you do a sketch?” Estelle asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’d like to see it.” She pushed herself upright and waited, one shoulder leaning against the steel support while Jackie walked to the Bronco. She returned with the pad, opening it carefully so that the wind wouldn’t grab the pages. She extended it to Estelle, who shook her head. “My hands are dirty,” she said. Jackie held the pad while the undersheriff scrutinized the drawing.

“There’s even a sort of windrow of rocks that got left after the construction crews went through, isn’t there,” she said. “Whoever dug the grave disturbed some of them.” She looked up at Jackie and smiled.

“Yes, ma’am. And it looks like whoever dug this grave didn’t take much time with it. They didn’t go a millimeter deeper than they had to.”

“So you saw this first? The grave?”

“I saw the disturbance of the ground, and that kind of tickled my imagination. I mean, this is a big prairie. To have an out-of-place feature of any kind…I mean, we’re interested in the tracks that lead over this way from the MacInerny site, and so that’s what I was looking for. Any kind of mark on the ground, any kind of disturbance. But I didn’t make the connection at first. I mean that it might be a grave.” She shrugged. “I mean, it could have just been a spot where one of the line crews parked a Bobcat or something. They let the blade down and made a mark.”

“A neat two by five,” Pasquale said.

“Well…” Jackie shrugged again. “And then I saw the shovel. The sun caught the blade. At first I thought it was just a tin can or something, then I saw the handle.” She grinned and flipped the sketch pad closed. “The handle makes a nice, hard straight line that’s really out of place. My first thought was, ‘Ah-ha, I’ve got me a nice new garden shovel, free of charge.’ And as I was getting out of the unit, it felt like somebody came up behind me and whacked me upside the head with a billy club.” She tapped her forehead with the palm of her hand. “I’m thinking, whoa! Over here’s what looks like a grave, and over there’s a shovel. And a mile or so due west, if we maybe follow a vague set of vehicular tracks, is a corpse that didn’t get buried at all…” She stopped and looked at Estelle. “It all hit me at once.”

“He’d still be comfortable under the dirt if they’d picked up their tools when they were finished,” Pasquale observed.

“Likely so,” Jackie said. “When Linda got here, she took a bunch of pictures, and then I dug down as carefully as I could, at one corner. You know, maybe somebody just buried a bunch of garbage or something. Or maybe it was nothing at all. I took about five little bites with the shovel, and uncovered the tip of one of his shoes. With my fingers, I dug down just far enough to determine that there was a foot inside the shoe, and stopped.”

The phone in Estelle’s pocket chirped, and she fished it out. The conversation was brief and one-sided. She snapped the phone closed. “They just turned on the service road down in Maria,” she said. “That’s what…almost eleven miles? So we’ve got about twenty minutes if they’re really hustling.” She turned in place, head down. With the toe of her boot, she loosened a small mound of sand and watched the wind rearrange it. “Any tracks have been obliterated long since,” she said. “And that’s too bad, because we’ve got some questions here.” Without moving, she turned and looked at the grave. “Forty-five feet, nine inches from here to the grave,” she said, tapping the vertical steel of the tower. “And how far in the opposite direction to the shovel?”

“It’s sixty-one feet from the tower’s northwest leg.”

“And so we’ve got more than a hundred feet between the grave and the shovel that dug it…if we want to make the logical assumption that the two are related.”

“That’s a far toss,” Linda Real said. “But it doesn’t make sense that they’d throw the thing in the first place.”

“No, it doesn’t. Did you check it for blood or anything like that?” Estelle asked Jackie.

“Not yet. I haven’t touched it. Linda took pictures of it in place, and I flagged the bush. I didn’t touch the shovel. There were no tracks in the immediate area, nothing but the shovel. And the way it’s caught in the bush, it sure looks like it was thrown.”

“But from where?” Estelle said. “No one’s going to dig a grave way over here, and then when they’re finished, wind up and hurl the shovel about a hundred feet west, assuming that they’d miss the framework of the towers. And assuming that they could throw it that far in the first place.” She thrust her hands in her pockets. “Why throw it at all?”