Steven Havill - Double Prey

“Hey,” the sheriff prompted quietly. Estelle turned to see him standing by the ATV, the two EMTs ready. “Give us a hand now?” He made a flipping motion with his hand. “Over that way. Everybody make sure they got hold of something that ain’t sharp.” The five of them managed the wreckage more easily than Estelle had imagined. It thumped back on its wheels, the one mangled and bent, both handlebars and luggage rack twisted.

“God, we’re good,” Linda Real said.

“And we’re out of here,” Mattie called. The EMTs set off down the arroyo with their burden, and Estelle watched their progress. The bagged figure on the gurney looked too small to be Freddy Romero.

“Stubby’s going to be able to get his rig in here somehow?” Linda referred to the driver of the county’s contract wrecker. The question jarred Estelle back to the task at hand. The sheriff pointed at the arroyo bank.

“Winch it right up there,” he said. “No problem.” Linda stepped back and took a series of photos of the wrecked machine. In the sunshine, the oil and gasoline were still fragrant. Torrez pulled the short.22 rifle out of the nylon boot. He popped the magazine out, and Estelle could see the bright noses of the cartridges. The sheriff jacked the bolt, but the chamber had been empty. He pushed the cartridges in the magazine, so there was no play to allow more to be added, and shook his head. “No luck huntin’. All ten still there.” He slid the rifle back into the boot, but kept the magazine, bouncing it thoughtfully in his hand.

Estelle’s attention was drawn to the plywood box that was bolted to the rear rack, its lid held in place with two stout bungee cords. The box had taken the brunt of one of the flips, but the three-quarter inch plywood out of which it was constructed had suffered only digs and gouges. The latch was secured with a twist of wire.

The sheriff loosened the wire and swung the lid back. A package of Oreo cookies had been reduced to crumbs and chunks that cascaded down into the box. Below the cookies, three bottles of water had nestled, two of them apparently exploded with the force of the crash.

“Cookies and water,” Estelle remarked. “The outdoorsman’s diet.”

“Works.” Torrez reached past Estelle. “Stop a minute.”

She had already seen what had prompted his interest. “Linda, please?”

As Linda Real stepped close, Estelle added, “Get a good close up of this in situ for me.”

“The oily rag?” Linda asked.

“Yep,” Torrez said. He stepped aside slightly, allowing the sunshine to fall fully into the battered carrier. The photographer’s camera snicked a series as she moved in and out, her last three photos taken so close that only the cloth would be in the frame.

“Got it,” she said.

Estelle gently pulled the wrapped object out of the carrier, holding it in the palm of her right hand. Through the cloth, she could feel the familiar hard steel. The cloth had once been a T-shirt, and she unwound it as if about to reveal a treasured diamond. The handgun was encrusted with a uniform coating of dust and dirt, including a liberal assortment of what looked like animal droppings adhered to the smooth metal.

“Here,” Torrez said. “Hold it still.” He slid a pencil into the bore, marked where it stopped with his thumb, and withdrew it, laying it along the pistol’s slide. “Still got one in the chamber.”

“This isn’t something Freddy was just carrying,” Estelle said. “It’s been in the elements for a long time.”

Torrez bent down a little and scrutinized the handgun. “Smith and Wesson. Not a bad piece. Be interesting to know if that bad boy’s been fired.”

“And at what.”

“Hunters, maybe. Remember the revolver that power walker found along the roadside over east of town? We had all kinds of theories about how that ended up there until we found out it belonged to some kid who’d been shooting from the roadside. He laid the gun on his jeep, and then got preoccupied with something else. Drove off and sure enough, the gun bounced off. That’s most likely with this. Some hunter got careless. If it wasn’t stainless steel, it’d be just a hunk of junk right now.”

“It wasn’t Mr. Romero’s,” Estelle said.

“Not likely. He was nervous enough about his son drivin’ around with that . ” He touched his toe to the.22 carbine in the nylon boot. “He called me to find out how many laws Freddy was breakin’ by carrying that on his ATV. Made him kinda nervous that the kid was doin’ that.”

“You need anything?” Bill Gastner’s voice interrupted them.

“If you’d find me an evidence bag for this.” Estelle held out her hand so Gastner could see the gun. “In my briefcase.”

“You got it.”

While she waited, she carefully wrapped the gun in the cloth, mindful of where the charged weapon’s barrel pointed.

“Let me take that and have Mears get started on it,” Torrez said. He strolled with no urgency to the arroyo bank and reached up to catch the plastic bag that Bill Gastner dropped to him. “How are you doin’?” he asked the older man.

Gastner knelt with one knee in the dirt, surveying the scene below him. “I’m okay,” he said. “What’s with the gun?”

“Don’t know yet,” Torrez replied. “We’re gonna know. That’s for sure. She got any masking tape in that briefcase? That and a marker.”

Gastner returned with the two items, and Torrez peeled off a long strip, wound it across the outside of the evidence bag and wrote LOADED in large, block letters.

The four-wheeler tracks crisscrossed the two-track here and there, and it soon became apparent, as they reached low spots where the sand was a perfect matrix for tracks, that more than one round trip on Bender’s Canyon Trail had been made. At one such location, Estelle stopped the Expedition and she and Bill Gastner got out.

“At least three,” Gastner said. “Now, that’s interesting.” He bent his head back, gazing at the sky. “Look, we haven’t had a drop of moisture in three weeks. If we hadn’t found the kid and his wrecked machine in the arroyo, there’d be no way we could tell if these tracks were made this morning, yesterday, last week, or three weeks ago.”

“There’s a time puzzle here,” the undersheriff agreed. “For one thing, it’s likely that Freddy rode in here maybe yesterday some time. Fair enough. Then,” and she stepped across a hummock of grass, looking down at a particularly clear, deep impression left by the knobby tires, “did he ride back and forth? In and out? And this?” She paused, a toe almost touching another track.

“Not an ATV,” Gastner said. “Truck, car, jeep, something. Ground’s too gravelly to give us an impression.”

“But it’s on top, isn’t it.”

Gastner knelt down with a loud popping of knees, one hand on the ground to keep his balance. “Sure enough. But look, like I said, out in the boonies as this might be, there’s still a fair amount of traffic on this two-track, sweetheart.”

“Interesting,” Estelle muttered.

“What is?”

“All of it. Freddy didn’t say what day he found the jaguar skull, but the school records show that he was in school all week-except yesterday. Now, if you were a teenager getting his kicks out of exploring caves, and if you found something as neat as that skull, what would you be likely to do?”

“Oh, I’d be back there,” Gastner said without hesitation. “Damn right.”

“So would I. Why would I be over here, across the valley, out on the prairie counting cow pies? And where did I find the handgun? That’s quite a discovery all by itself.”

“That could have been anywhere, even along the highway,” Gastner offered. “Things bounce out of trucks all the time. You’ve seen that collection that they have over at the state highway barns. People drop the damnedest things. Gloves, chains, jacks, hubcaps, coolers, shoes . Have you ever lost a shoe along the highway?”