Nightzone (4 page)

The undersheriff would have
her
reasons to invite me in, and I had the sinking feeling that the answer was obvious. I had known Perry Kenderman for years. Odds were good, in a county this small, that I would also know this pathetic figure lying here, under the black plastic.

Chapter Four

Maybe Curtis Boyd's final fading vision was the great Milky Way spreading across the desert sky. Maybe he had struggled for a few seconds to ponder his lot in life, and what he'd leave behind. All maybes that didn't concern Dr. Alan Perrone. What
did
concern the medical examiner was how a veteran Posadas County rancher's youngest son came to rest in this particular spot, dead as dead can be.

I'd known the dad, Johnny Boyd, for thirty-five years. He had already become a Posadas County institution by the time I first met him. Service as chairman of the County Fair Board back when the economy allowed fairs, member and then president of the school board for a decade or more, active on the livestock board—he and his wife had raised four kids with all the usual family triumphs and catastrophes. His older bachelor brother, Edwin, had lived at the main house too, and he'd kept the sheriff's department busy from time to time.

Curt Boyd, the rancher's youngest son, had attended his share of rodeos and county fairs as a tyke, sporting the little cowboy boots and oversized hat that scrunched down on top of his ears, so cute, cameras clicked when he scampered by. Years later, I had watched the track meet when the Posadas Jaguars took state, and it had been Curt Boyd who had hammered the pole vault, anchored the mile relay, and set a state record in the 440. He'd dominated the 4-H livestock classes at the county fair as a teenager, but with all of his big fish in a small pond success, Curt had never taken to the ranching life, hadn't beaten himself lame like his daddy with a life of livestock, barbed wire, post-hole diggers, and recalcitrant windmills.

The last I'd heard, he had settled in as a social studies teacher in Las Cruces, coaching track on the side. I couldn't remember when I'd last seen him, but this poor battered corpse bore enough resemblance to the living Curt Boyd that I had no doubts it was him.

Dr. Perrone muttered something, scrunched down and manipulated the victim's head and neck. “Is Linda here yet?” He looked up at Estelle, whose own camera had shot dozens of images while she waited for the department's photographer, Linda Real, who should have been working for the FBI, but instead had married one of the deputies and stayed home and happy.

“She's on the way.”

“You're going to want to document this pretty thoroughly,” Perrone said. “His neck is broken right at the first cervical. Damage right on down to the fourth. There's no sign of exterior trauma from the rear, though.” He let out a long breath. “That's just about the most massive whiplash injury I've ever seen.”

“He wasn't hit from behind, then.”

“No. From this.” He traced a line along the victim's jaw, mangled and bruised. It didn't take a physician to see that the jaw bone was smashed, with teeth splintered as if some gargantuan boxer had caught him with an uppercut to end all haymakers. Perrone probed delicately with a gloved hand, holding his flashlight close. He fished a small plastic bag from his kit and deftly snapped it open. From a spot just under the jaw line he withdrew a splinter of dark wood. “Somebody clubbed him a good one under the chin.”

“Somebody or something,” I said. The memory cards were beginning their long, lazy turns around the rusty spindle of my brain's Rolodex.

“Sir?” Estelle prompted.

I glanced at the undersheriff. “All this brings back memories. You remember Morris Ferguson?” No, she didn't remember. Morris Ferguson was well before her time. But twenty-five or so years before, old Morris had won the job as Posadas' mayor. He never had the chance to lift the gavel.

“Morris went up to spend a weekend with his brother in Truchas,” I said. “They went out wood cutting, and a two-foot thick aspen tree they were felling got tangled and kicked back off the stump.” I looked up at the severed electric pole high above our heads, held suspended by the tangle of wires and the stout juniper fence post that acted as its fulcrum. Its marching partner, with the remains of the twisted transformer supports, lay flat in the dust. “Same thing. The aspen kicked back and caught him in the head.” I touched my temple.

Estelle favored me with a bemused grimace, her dark olive skin and movie star teeth spectacular in all the surrounding lights. I shrugged. “Once in a while I remember something useful.” I reached up, but stretched as tall as I could manage, the butt of the pole was still three feet out of reach, a spear of uncut wood projecting a sword's length where the pole had been jerked off its stump before the saw cut finished the job. “That would fetch him a hell of a clout.”

“You're saying that the
pole
hit him?”

“I'm
guessing,”
I said. “That's all.” I pointed upward. “Check that butt of the pole for tissue and blood, and that'll confirm it. But in order for that pole to end up so far in the air…see there? It jacked over that juniper corner post and boom. That would be the sucker punch of all time.”

Perrone grunted something as he pulled clothes out of the way and then hiked Boyd's T-shirt up. He found not a mark on the ghostly white skin, not a bruise or nick. Rolling the corpse over, an examination of the back found only some faint scuffing, most likely from landing back-first in the gravel. One elbow had found a patch of cacti.

“And where's the saw?” I asked. “Have you had the chance to walk the line back east to the first cuts? If we stick to the tracks of the service road, we can do that without wrecking the scene before daylight.”
We, we, we.
But hell, I wasn't the one who had invited me out here.
“
See, this whole thing makes me nervous.” I turned in a semi-circle. “We have six poles down. Three sets of two. Now, you cut the first one,” and I waved toward the east, “and they're just going to hang there, maybe all crooked and saggy, but they won't go down. I'm willing to bet on that.”

“It takes a special kind of crazy to chain saw a major power line,” Estelle said. “That's a lot of voltage hanging overhead. And you couldn't possibly predict which way they'd fall…or sag, or whatever.”

“True. And even worse with the second set. You already have the weight of one pair hanging out of place, their weight on the wires. You whack a
second
set, and something is going to give way. And a third set?” I shook my head, and touched a toe of my boot to the stump. “What do you think?”

Estelle remained silent as she knelt down, holding her flashlight to illuminate the back side of the power pole's fourteen-inch diameter stump. After a moment, she turned and let the light track the few feet over to the county road. “This pole has been hit a number of times.” Her voice was so quiet and husky that I could hardly hear. Maybe the thought hadn't been intended for me, but I barged in with my two cents anyway.

“You got this pull-out on the county road,” I said. “A handy turn-around after the cattle guard. Miscalculate a bit and the stock trailer takes a chunk out of the pole. Or somebody backs into it trying to do who knows what.” With a crackle of joints, I knelt beside her, letting my hand run over the rumple of scarred wood on the back side of the pole. “Huh. With all the damage over the years, there isn't as much wood as maybe our guy thought there was.”

Estelle stood and beckoned to Linda Real, whose plump figure had materialized out of the shadows. “We need portraits of this every way you can, Linda.”

“Absolutely.”

“Ditto all the others. Both the stumps and the downed poles. Number them starting at the eastern-most set, one-two, three-four, and these five-six. Northern member of each pair is odd—one, three and five. And I'm more interested in the backside of the cut, how much was left when he jerked the saw out of the wood.”

“You got it.”

“Good close-ups of the saw cut and the break point.”

Linda nodded, but she was already selecting a lens from her camera bag as well as some gadget for the strobe to mute the burst of light.

The undersheriff applied some upward force to my left elbow, and I tried to remain graceful as I rose to my feet.

“Are you up for a little walk, sir?”

“Of course,” I said with feigned enthusiasm. For years, various doctors like Alan Perrone and Francis Guzman had been cajoling me to walk, walk, walk. My nature was to sit, sit, sit. It was easier to think when I was motionless. But this intense young lady always brought out the best in me. I glanced toward the county road where a fair crowd had collected—cops who wanted in, Posadas Electric crews ready to assess and repair the damage, rancher Miles Waddell still patiently supported by the fender of his truck, firemen finished with their half-acre burn. The crowd remained stationary, though. They apparently understood that if they started milling about, any semblance of crime scene would be stamped into oblivion.

Taking the damaged power poles in order, we visited each saw cut, crossing first to number five, nearest the tarp-shrouded figure of Curt Boyd, the pole that had kicked across the cattle guard as the whole mess tilted and twisted.

The initial cut was a neat job, the saw ripping through the creosoted pole to within an inch or two of completion.

“That's not much to support the pole,” I said. “The least little breeze would do it.”

“And no breeze tonight,” she said. “Not until dawn, maybe. Between this,” and Estelle touched the torn fragment that the saw hadn't finished, “and the wires themselves, would the pole stand? I mean, barring a wind or a push?”

“I would think so, but I'm just guessing. You'd have to ask Dick Whittaker. But if all six weren't cut all the way through, if they're just balancing there on a little splinter of wood…”

Superintendent of this portion of the grid, Whittaker was talking to a group of his men fifty yards away.

“I'll meet up with him in a bit.” Estelle measured the wood with her fingers. “Not much left, but maybe enough.” She looked off to the east. “So. Here we have six cripples, each one held by only an inch, and along comes one little morning breeze…”

“Absolutely. And it could be that the last one they cut sabotaged the whole plan. Over they went, and that last one kicked Curt Boyd.” One at a time, we visited the other four poles, and all showed the same pattern: a clean cut that implied a powerful saw with a sharp chain and a confident operator. In each case, the saw cut stopped short of running through, leaving just a minimal tag to support the pole—a tag that had splintered when the poles toppled.

“Paul Bunyan gave this a lot of thought,” I said. “A whole bunch of power poles standing, just waiting for daytime breezes. Can you imagine that? A bunch of wobbly giants, ready to take the plunge. And by then, our cutter is long gone.”

“His scheme didn't work quite the way he planned.”

I thought about that for a moment. “It worked until the last one, sweetheart. Maybe he missed a closer look at that last one, with all its nicks and bangs. Or he got a little excited, maybe a little tired and drove the saw just a hair too far. Over she goes, and with that weight off balance, the whole set rips free. A jangled mess.”

“The truck you saw driving north? He couldn't have just been driving by here out of coincidence,” Estelle said quietly. “If he'd been a innocent witness, he would have stopped the first cop he saw to report this. If the truck whose lights you saw was the cutter, then he took off when the poles went down. And he didn't take his injured friend with him, he didn't leave the saw behind, and he didn't give Kenderman a chance.”

“And no sawdust on Curt Boyd,” I added. The undersheriff stood still, gazing at me, lost in thought. “Boyd sure as hell wasn't the saw handler. Those things spray chips and oil all over the place. And by the way,” I added, “I didn't see a
truck
driving north. I saw a set of headlights. That's all.”

“Tell me how you see it happening, sir. With Boyd, I mean.”

I took a deep breath. “I see Boyd standing a few feet behind the cutter, maybe holding the flashlight. Maybe he steps forward a little. He's done this for five poles, and so on the sixth maybe he's just a little bit cocky…a little bit off-guard. But then the pole starts to lean, to sway maybe, and dollars to donuts he just doesn't duck and run like hell. That's what the hell he should have done, of course. Instead he looks up and gapes in fascination. Maybe he tries to shout at his buddy, reaches out a hand in panic. Now in the best of all worlds, because both boys are off to one side, both poles might have tangled past them without catching either one. If the one pole gives way first, I can see the whole mess twisting before the second pole comes loose. See, they hadn't
meant
for the poles to fall just then. That's my theory. I mean, why would they? There's too much risk. But that weak pole changed all that. It crashes down on the line fence, right on that big juniper brace, and the butt end bucks up before they have time to say, ‘Oh, shit.' Bucks up and back and catches Johnny's boy right under the chin on the way up. Pow.”

“What a friend, just to leave him lying out here.”

“Nissan man? If that's him, what a friend indeed, even though I think it would have been obvious his buddy was stone cold dead. And if he has half a brain, he knows this sort of damage isn't something that would take until morning to discover. He wants out of there, you bet. He knows folks are going to be on his tail.”

I shrugged. “Seems to me that all this would explain why he didn't give Perry Kenderman a chance, didn't try to bluff his way out of a speeding ticket. He's left a corpse behind, and the death occurred during the commission of a felony—and with that half a brain of his, Paul Bunyan knows he's in deep shit. And at the same time, he had to know that no matter how fast we could respond, the odds are in his favor. He can be long gone, without a trace, if he acts quickly enough. Road blocks are a wasted effort.”