A Killing in the Valley (7 page)

That makes two of us, Kate thought. She had to find a way off this treadmill.

Sophia grabbed her backpack. “See you later. Do you have school tonight?”

“Afraid so,” Kate said apologetically.

“No big deal,” Sophia assured her. “You’ll be home by nine. I’ll wait to eat with you.” She kissed her mother on the top of Kate’s head. “You need new shampoo, Mom. I’ll stop by the mall later and get you something that doesn’t have a ton of chemicals.”

She walked out the door, closing it behind her. Kate luxuriated for a moment in her daughter’s lingering aura before getting back to her workload.

Keith Morton crisscrossed Rancho San Gennaro in his vintage Jeep Wrangler. He was beginning his biannual survey of the ranch. It would take weeks to cover the entire property, but that was all right, there was no hurry.

Keith was the ranch foreman. He and his wife, Esther, lived in a small house on the opposite side of the property from Juanita McCoy’s house. Keith had the right personality for running a ranch—he loved rural life, he was patient, he was comfortable with his station in life. He was good at fixing almost anything that needed fixing on a ranch: machinery, fences, painting, plumbing, working with livestock. A good rider, and good with weapons.

Esther complemented his skills with her own—canning, gardening, animal husbandry. A childless couple in their mid-forties, they had been living and working on the ranch for over two decades; first Keith by himself, then Esther with him, after they got married. They were throwbacks to an earlier time, when a cowboy could have a life living on a ranch. Juanita was thankful to have them; not many people wanted this kind of life anymore.

Keith’s Jeep maneuvered over the bumpy ground. As he came over a low rise, the ancestral ranch house came into sight in the distance, its west-facing windows reflecting the late afternoon sun. Off to the side, about half a mile from the house, he spied some turkey buzzards circling overhead, their small, ugly, naked red heads protruding from their bony shoulders. Keith hated buzzards. They were disgusting creatures, flying hyenas feasting on rotting meat. Usually when he saw a flock hovering like this, he would get a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach, because it almost always meant one of their calves had been killed by coyotes or wild dogs. Or a mountain lion. Five years ago, a rogue puma had gone marauding on the ranch, killing off two calves before he tracked it down and shot it. You were supposed to notify the state Bureau of Fish and Game if a predator killed your livestock, but nobody did. You killed them, then reported it. Maybe.

He stopped twenty yards from where the buzzards were clustered on the ground. Grabbing his shotgun from behind the seat, he got out and walked toward them. When he had halved the distance between his Jeep and the carrion-eaters, he fired a shot into the air. The sound reverberated across the hills. The buzzards flew up in a flurry of beating wings, cawing raucously, angry at having their meal disturbed.

He approached the spot where the birds had congregated—a low ravine, overgrown with thick mesquite brush. Thousands of flies, a black, living cloud, were swarming the area, their buzzing as loud as a chain saw. The stench filled his nostrils with a sharp, acrid smell that made his eyes tear.

What a mess, he thought in disgust, covering his mouth and nose with a hand to try to ward off the smell, which was overwhelmingly putrid. What was it? A deer? Another wild pig? Hopefully, not one of their livestock. He couldn’t see it clearly; whatever they were feasting on was half-hidden under the clumps of dense brush.

Surmounting his revulsion, he walked a few steps closer. Using the barrel of his shotgun, he pushed the bushes aside to get a better look. For a few seconds, he stared at the remains, which were covered with writhing maggots, trying to figure out exactly what they were feasting on. Then he recoiled, violently.

“My God!” he blurted out, a hand going to his mouth to hold back the retching.

He sprinted back to the Jeep and grabbed his cell phone from the glove box. Fumbling with the buttons—they were small and his hands were shaking almost uncontrollably—he punched in 9-1-1.

All the entrances to the ranch were sealed off. Detectives from the county sheriff’s department, led by head forensic detective Marlon Perdue, a twenty-year veteran, secured the remains. They also began a search of the area, on the chance that some evidence had been left behind by whoever had dumped the body; it was assumed that she (the victim was a woman—they could barely tell, the body was in such poor shape) hadn’t gotten here on her own.

Perdue walked over to the old house, Keith Morton in tow. Impressive, Perdue thought. A real piece of history. He noticed that there were wrought-iron bars over the windows, and that the place, in general, appeared secure. He tried the front door—locked.

“Do you usually keep this locked up?” he asked Keith.

Keith nodded forcefully. “Hell, yes. There’s a lot of valuable stuff in there. Impossible to replace.”

Perdue looked the house over again for a moment, then walked back to where the remains were being handled. Overhead, helicopters from the tri-county area television stations circled like the vultures Keith Morton had found devouring the remains. A body discovered in the wild was always good television, the more grisly the better—this would be the lead story on tonight’s local news. If it turned out that the yet-unidentified woman had not died from natural causes, or if she came from a well-known family, or if one of several other juicy factors came into play, so much the better, certainly for ratings. There was already a good hook to this story, because of the location of where the body had been found—Rancho San Gennaro was the oldest operating ranch in the county, and the McCoy family was one of its most socially prominent clans.

The corpse was placed in a body bag and put into a waiting ambulance. Sirens blaring, lights flashing, the ambulance, escorted by a covey of motorcycle officers, headed toward Highway 154, which would lead them over the pass and into the city.

The remains were brought to the lab at Cottage Hospital, in Santa Barbara. Peter Atchison, the county’s pathologist, positioned the remains on the stainless-steel examination table. After taking several photographs of the corpse, he snapped on a fresh pair of latex gloves to begin the autopsy. I don’t even need a saw or knife, be thought with dark, grisly humor, I could almost do this one with a spoon.

He turned on the tape recorder.

“These are the remains a woman who I would roughly calculate to have been in her mid-teens to late twenties,” he began. “The amount of decomposition makes a more specific calculation impossible. This ambiguity also applies to time of death, as the high summer temperature has accelerated the normal pace of decomposition. She seems to have been fully developed physically and sexually, but again, the remains are too poor to tell with any certainty.”

He began probing what remained of her torso. Almost immediately, he saw the reason for this corpse’s demise. “Ah, damn it!” he cried out involuntarily.

Marlon Perdue, who was witnessing the procedure, looked up sharply. “What?” he asked, alerted to trouble by the tone of Atchison’s voice.

Atchison reached up to the supply shelf to get a sterile pair of tweezers. Using them as a spreader, he pointed to a small piece of metal in the chest cavity. “There.”

Perdue bent over to get a closer look, “Shit on a stick,” he exclaimed flatly.

As Atchison plucked out the foreign object and dropped it into a ziplock evidence bag, Perdue dialed the sheriff’s direct emergency line. “Sheriff Griffin,” a man’s impatient voice came from the other end of the line.

“Marlon Perdue here, John,” the detective said. “I’ve got preliminary results of the cause of death for the body we took from Rancho San Gennaro.”

“What do you have?” the sheriff asked warily.

“Dr. Atchison found a bullet in the corpse,” Perdue told his boss. “This victim was shot to death.”

Atchison managed to lift a partial thumb print. It was sent to the state’s regional Department of Justice forensic lab in Goleta. Within an hour, the cause of Maria Estrada’s disappearance had been solved.

S
PRAWLED OUT ON HER
sofa, Kate, exhausted from a long day’s work, watched the youthful woman newscaster on the Channel 3 evening news. The reporter was in front of the county courthouse, a popular venue for television stand-ups. Behind her, reporters from other stations, some from as far away as Los Angeles and San Diego, were talking into their stations’ cameras. Sunlight shone on the façade of the massive, Spanish-style courthouse; the report had been recorded earlier that day.

Sophia, busy with her homework at the kitchen table, looked up when she heard the reporter say “Maria Estrada.” She turned away from her laptop and sat next to her mother.

A photograph of Maria from last year’s high school yearbook came up on the TV screen. “…The missing girl was last seen eating lunch after school at a local taco stand,” the reporter spoke into the camera.

The shot changed from the picture of Maria, a frozen smile on her face, to overhead helicopter footage of sheriff’s investigators at the crime site. The camera zoomed in to the remains being placed into the body bag and followed the ambulance as it began driving away.

“Anyone with information about this case is urged to contact the county sheriff’s department,” the reporter said into the camera. An 800 number came up on the screen. Then the number faded out, and the reporter announced, “With us is Santa Barbara County sheriff John Griffin.”

The camera widened to include the sheriff, a thin, middle-aged man in a western-cut business suit. “What can you tell us so far?” the reporter asked him. “Have you developed any leads? Are there any suspects?”

Griffin shook his head. “No one we wish to reveal at this time. We have some possible leads,” he added with a deliberate vagueness. “When we have more substantial information, we will let the public know.”

Meaning you don’t have squat, Kate thought. The police don’t go trolling their 800 number unless the cupboard is bare.

“There’s speculation this killing may be drug-related,” the announcer continued, gamely fishing for an angle.

“That’s a possibility,” Griffin replied, stubbornly noncommittal. “We’re looking into it, along with other scenarios. Which is ail I have to say for now.” He walked out of the shot. The announcer turned to face the camera again. “That’s it from here,” she chirped. “Back to you in the studio, Arlene.”

Kate hit the “off” button on her remote. “Did you know this girl?” she asked Sophia.

“Yes,” Sophia answered, her eyes still on the blank screen. “I mean, I knew who she was. We didn’t move in the same circles. She was more…” She hesitated.

“More what?” Kate asked with curiosity.

“Sociable,” Sophia said charitably. “She wasn’t into academics. We didn’t have any classes together.”

Sophia’s description of Maria confirmed the rumors circulating around the courthouse—the dead girl screwed around. Her behavior would further complicate the sheriff’s investigation; any man she had known might be a suspect. And there was the possible drug connection, which had to be taken seriously. Maria was related to Hector Torres, an activist in the Latino community who had been in the drug trade, years ago. He had supposedly gone straight, but you never knew. There was also the possibility the killer might be someone Maria had encountered the day she was killed; a transient who could be a thousand miles away by now.

This was going to be a hot case—that was a given. A high school girl with possible drug connections is murdered and the decomposed body is discovered on the property of one of the county’s most distinguished families. All the elements for tabloid sensationalism.

Sophia got up. “I have this essay due tomorrow.” She shuddered. “God, this is so horrible, mom! This girl was in my class. We breathed the same air.”

Kate stood and hugged her. “I know.” She pulled her daughter tighter. “I know, honey.”

They held on to each other for a moment, then Sophia went back into the kitchen and hunched over her computer again. Kate looked after her. That murdered girl could so easily have been my daughter, she thought with a mother’s gut-wrenching fearfulness.

Juanita McCoy ushered Louis Watson and Cindy Rebeck, the two veteran sheriff’s detectives who had been assigned to head up the murder investigation, into her living room. They sat across from her as she slowly leafed through some eight-by-ten photos of Maria Estrada.

“I’ve never seen this girl,” Juanita told them, after she carefully looked at the pictures. She handed them back to Rebeck. “I’m sorry.” She sighed. “That poor child. Her family must be going through hell.”

Rebeck, a tall, leggy blonde wearing a short skirt, a light cotton blouse, and low heels better suited for desk-jockeying than fieldwork, slid the pictures into a manila folder. She understood the old lady’s tenderhearted attitude toward the victim’s family, but she personally could never indulge in sympathy—she had a job to do, emotions got in the way.

“The security gate at the road-head?” she said. “That leads to the section of your property where the body was found? Do you keep it locked?” They had noticed the gate on the drive up.

Juanita nodded. “Yes, we do. We have concerns about theft, and vandalism. The original family homestead at the end of that road contains artifacts that are valuable and sentimental to our family. You don’t want people coming onto your property that you don’t know about,” she said proprietarily.

“How many people normally come and go to that area?” Watson, a beefy man in his forties, asked.

“Only my foreman and his wife have unlimited access. They’re my only full-time employees; everyone else who works on the ranch is seasonal, and they don’t use that road.”

Watson and Rebeck had already interviewed the Mortons. They didn’t know anything, and they had solid alibis for the time frame when the girl had gone missing.

“Although if anybody wanted to get onto the ranch, they wouldn’t find it very hard,” Juanita continued. “The property is big, and remote. And there are ways to skirt around the gate,” she added. “But the gate does help—some deterrent is better than none.”