Death Song (27 page)

Tire tracks on the road to Cañoncito told Clayton that a good foot of snow was on the ground but motorists were getting in and out. He kept his unit in low gear with the four-wheel drive engaged and steered gently through the curves as a precaution against any hidden ice patches. The western sun turned the snow-covered mesa behind the settlement into a massive monolith, and the houses along the dirt lane that led to Tim Riley’s driveway were thickly blanketed with snow. Horses pawing the ground in the adjacent corrals exhaled billows of steam that sparkled and then dissipated in the frigid air.

The snow-covered driveway to the Riley property showed no sign of fresh passage, either by vehicle or by foot. Clayton turned in and drove toward the double-wide with his driver-side window open, listening intently for any sound above the rumble of his engine that might signal someone was nearby. He was halfway up the driveway when the distinctive roar of a motorcycle engine came to life and cut through the air. He shifted quickly, floored the unit, and almost crashed into the Harley bearing down on him. The rider veered off the driveway and gunned his machine up a slope toward the base of the mesa behind the double-wide.

Clayton geared down and followed, slaloming around trees, the tires of his unit digging through deep snowbanks. He plowed into a hidden boulder and high-ended the vehicle. He threw the unit into reverse, the rear tires burning rubber on the frozen ground, and realized that he was hopelessly stuck. He bailed out of the unit, grabbed the wadded-up blanket the trucker had used, wrapped it over his shoulders, and started following the motorcycle on foot. Up ahead he could hear the whine of the engine. He ran toward it, and through a break in the tree cover he saw the rider unsuccessfully trying to force his machine up a steep rock-face incline, once, twice, three times.

From a good fifty feet away, Clayton yelled at the cyclist to stop. The man turned, and Clayton for the first time got a good look at Brian Riley in the flesh. The boy’s expression was wide-eyed, frozen with fear.

“Police,” Clayton shouted, throwing off the blanket. “Don’t run. I’m here to help you.”

The boy spun the Harley around, spraying an arc of snow behind the rear tire, revved the engine, and headed down the slope away from Clayton, zigzagging through trees, ducking over the handlebars to avoid low branches.

Clayton followed on foot, scrambling down a rock-strewn slope, quickly losing hope that he’d catch up with Riley as the sound of the Harley’s engine began to fade in the distance. He broke free of the trees at the base of the mesa and followed anyway at a fast jog.

Up ahead he could see the railroad tracks that cut through the narrow valley and followed the course of a shallow streambed. The railroad right-of-way was fenced, but at a track siding where new railroad ties were stacked, a gate had been left open. Running into a stiff breeze that turned his ears and nose painfully cold, Clayton followed the path the motorcycle had taken across the railroad tracks and through another open gate. When he could no longer hear the sound of the Harley’s engine, he slowed to a walk and listened. Riley was long gone.

As he walked on, he tried to call the Santa Fe S.O. on his cell phone, but the call kept getting dropped. He jumped a fence, walked in the ruts of a snow-covered lane, approached the first house he came to, knocked at the door, and got no response. Two houses farther on, he encountered an elderly Hispanic man breaking the ice in a water trough at a horse corral. He showed the man’s shield and asked if he could borrow the man’s phone.

The old man gave him a thorough once-over before speaking. “Was that you yelling in the woods?” he asked.

Clayton nodded.

“Were you chasing that motorcycle rider that just passed by?” the old man asked.

Clayton nodded again.

“On foot?” the man asked incredulously.

Clayton nodded for the third time.

“That’s loco.”

“Can I borrow your telephone?”

“Come inside,” the man said, leading the way to a back door.

The toasty warm kitchen of the old man’s house smelled of freshly baked bread and had framed pictures of saints and a hand-embroidered copy of the Lord’s Prayer on the walls. Using an old wall-mounted, rotary-dial phone straight out of the 1950s, Clayton called Don Mielke at the Santa Fe S.O. and reported his sighting of Brian Riley.

“I’ll put out an APB and BOLO immediately,” Mielke said.

“I crashed my unit. I need a tow truck and a ride.”

“What’s your twenty?”

Clayton covered the telephone mouthpiece and asked the elderly man for his name.

“Francisco Ramirez,” the old man replied.

“I’m at Francisco Ramirez’s house,” Clayton said. He gave Mielke directions and added, “Look for a Cattle Growers sign on the garage that’s opposite the house.”

“Ten-four.”

“And ask Ramona Pino to meet me at the Riley crime scene,” Clayton added.

“Are you on to something?” Mielke asked.

“Riley came back here for some reason. I want to take a look around the property to see if I can find out why.”

“What do you expect to find with a foot of snow or more on the ground?”

“Tracks,” Clayton replied. “Tracks that might lead me somewhere.”

“I’m coming out there,” Mielke said.

“Come along,” Clayton replied. “Bring a couple of deputies with you. We might as well do another full search of the double-wide, horse barn, corral, and horse trailer. Tell them to dress warmly.”

“Whatever you’re looking for, Riley may have already taken with him.”

“Yeah,” Clayton said, “and that would be par for my day. But let’s look anyway.”

He disconnected. If he’d just passed by the jackknifed semi on the Interstate and reported it to dispatch, he might now have Brian Riley in custody and be finding out what had caused the murder of two police officers and two civilians. But failing to render aid and assistance to Bailey Mobley would have been the wrong thing to do.

Clayton sighed in frustration. So far, the only good to come from his marathon effort to find Brian Riley was that he’d crashed the Lincoln County S.O. unit, which meant he wouldn’t have Tim Riley’s ghost hanging around him anymore. That was a burden lifted, but only a minor one.

He joined Francisco Ramirez at the kitchen table and looked over at the stove, where a coffeepot was slowly percolating over a low flame. “Is that coffee I smell, Señor Ramirez?”

“
Sí,
and from the way you look I believe you need some.”

“I look that bad?”

Francisco Ramirez pointed to Clayton’s forehead. “You’ve been bleeding.”

Clayton touched his head. At the hairline he felt a thick glob of congealed blood. He couldn’t remember bumping into anything. “Mind if I clean up?”

Francisco pointed to the passageway. “Go ahead, Sergeant. I bake my own bread and have two loaves in the oven. Would you like some with your coffee when you return?”

Clayton’s stomach rumbled in hunger. “That would be great.”

After getting away from the cop, Brian Riley ground the Harley to a stop on the paved road that led to Santa Fe and considered his options. If he drove to town on the frontage road or tried to get on the Interstate, chances were good the police would swarm all over him. That was if the guy who had chased him really was a cop.

Brian decided he couldn’t risk finding out. He turned left and took a country road that climbed the mesa, wound through woodland and pastures, and hooked up with a highway miles south of Santa Fe. At the top of the hill, the pavement turned to dirt, and Brian had to downshift the Harley to power his way through wet snow two feet deep.

A few miles down the road, where the forest gave way to rangeland, Brian paused. Up ahead he could see snowdrifts piled four feet high against the fences. If he made it to the highway south of Santa Fe, it would be a long, cold ride, and he wasn’t sure he could do it without warmer clothes and maybe some food and water to carry with him.

Last year when he’d stayed with his father and stepmother, Tim had let him use the truck to explore the mesa, and Denise had let him ride one of the horses along some of the lightly traveled Forest Service roads. On this stretch of the country road there was a good deal of privately owned land. On horseback Tim had investigated some of the ranches that were hidden away and posted to keep trespassers out. If he remembered correctly, there was one such ranch house deep in the woods where the rangeland ended.

He rode on, fighting to keep the Harley upright as the tires sought traction through the drifts. He found the turnoff and kept going through the virgin snow. His dad had told him the small ranches were summer operations only, and so far there was no sign of any recent traffic on the ranch road. The last rays of a weak sun were at his back and the forest had dimmed to dusk when the small ranch house, closed up and dark, came into view.

Brian skidded to a stop near the steps to the front porch and got off the Harley, his muscles aching from the exertion of riding the bike through the deep snow. He took a long look around before knocking on the porch door. An old truck parked by the barn was covered with snow, the sliding barn doors were padlocked, and there were no animal tracks in the empty corral.

He looked carefully at the house. In the gathering dusk he couldn’t see anything behind the windows. The porch door was locked. He thought about using his elbow to break the glass and decided against it. He found a wrench in the glove box of the old truck and used it to smash the glass.

Once inside, Brian realized how really cold he was. He stumbled over a chair and ottoman, found a lamp on a side table, and turned it on. The front room served as a kitchen, dining, and sitting area. It had a wood cookstove next to a kitchen sink that got water from a hand pump. The place looked like something straight out of the old two-reel Western movies that were sometimes shown on late night television.

In a wall cupboard above an empty refrigerator that had been turned off for the winter, Brian found a good stock of canned and packaged foods. He went to the kindling box next to the cookstove and got a fire started before looking around the rest of the house. There was no telephone or television, but a tabletop radio sat on a shelf next to a stack of
New Mexico Stockman
magazines.

An old but serviceable heavy barn coat with a good pair of insulated gloves stuffed in the pockets hung on a wall peg in the small back bedroom. In a rickety handmade chest of drawers next to a twin bed on a cast iron frame were some rolled-up socks and several tattered wool sweaters. Underneath the sweaters Brian found a pistol in a holster. It was a loaded Smith & Wesson revolver. He put the holstered gun in a bundle made up of the barn coat, the gloves, a pair of socks, and a heavy sweater and carried it into the front room, which had started to warm up. In front of the cookstove he stripped down to his underwear, hung his wet jeans, shirt, and jacket over the two wooden chairs near the small kitchen table, put his shoes close to the stove, and dressed in the dry socks and the wool sweater with the barn coat draped over his shoulders.

At the sink he used the hand pump to fill a pot with water and put it on top of the wood stove to boil. In the food cupboard he found a package of macaroni and cheese, a jar of instant coffee, and some restaurant-size sugar packets. In another cupboard there were mugs, plates, several pots, and some eating utensils.

As soon as the water boiled, Brian cooked the macaroni, mixed in the cheese sauce, and wolfed it down, sipping heavily sugared coffee with each bite. When he finished, he put the dirty dishes in the sink and looked out the window. Snow pelted against the glass. He could hear the wind howling, and the sky was a sheet of solid leaden gray.

It was no time to be traveling. He added some wood to the cookstove, mixed up another cup of instant coffee, and settled into the overstuffed chair. If he hadn’t gotten up early at Beaner’s and turned on the television, he wondered what would have happened to him. It had been a shock to see his Harley in the parking lot of Stanley’s apartment building as a TV reporter talked about the double homicide. In that instant, he knew Stanley was dead and he was next, so he packed and bolted.

What Brian didn’t know for sure was why somebody wanted him dead, or why Tim, Denise, and Stanley had been killed. Inspired by the spy novel at Beaner’s, he’d told him and his dealer friend Duffy that he was being chased by foreign spies. But who was it really?

He’d found the money by accident in an old well house on his father’s property where he liked to go to smoke dope in the evenings when Tim and Denise were home and keeping an eye on him. It was in a locked briefcase hidden under some boards behind a rusted water pump.

After breaking the case open, he had stared openmouthed at the stacks of U.S. dollars, a pouch containing gold coins, and three passports issued by foreign governments to Denise under different names.

He had inspected the old coins but had taken only the fifty thousand U.S. dollars. Counting on the snowstorm for cover, he’d come back today to see if the briefcase was still in its hiding place, to get the coins. But it was gone, which meant someone was killing anyone who might have known about it.

But why murder Denise? After all, the foreign passports in the briefcase had been issued to her under false names, which meant she’d probably hidden it in the well house in the first place. Was she some kind of government agent his dad had met when he was in the air force? Had he been killed because he knew about her past or had helped her do something illegal? And why had Stanley and a police officer been murdered? How did the killer even find out about Stanley?

Brian checked his clothing. His jeans and shirt were dry enough to wear. He dressed in front of the stove, thinking he’d spend the night and then figure out what to do after the storm passed. He still had almost five thousand dollars left from the fifty and that could get him to Mexico, where he could hide out.

He sat back down in the easy chair, with the holstered pistol in his lap. The old house was creaky and drafty, and there were mice scurrying in the walls. He was half-asleep when he heard the sound of footsteps on the porch. He raised his head, opened his eyes, and saw a man standing in the doorway holding a rifle.