Nothing but Trouble (16 page)

Under the overcast sky the expanse of the valley yawned as far as the eye could see to the faint outline of the Animas Mountains, which hovered at the edge of the basin like a misty mirage. In the dull gray light the colors of the desert were muted and the sands took on a soft, pearl-white sheen.

The agenda for most of the day had the crew working on locations in and around Playas, which made for less traveling. By late morning the wind had subsided and the sun broke through the clouds, only to dim and fade as a gentle rainstorm moved across the hazy valley, creating a gray sky that bled yellow shafts of light through the patchy cloud cover.

The work for the day had nothing to do with police procedure, and consigned to the role of onlooker, Kerney followed the crew around from location to location as they discussed the specifics of what would be needed for each scene. Earlier in the morning Johnny had driven off to Duncan, Arizona, some seventy miles northwest, to arrange to use the rodeo arena on the county fairgrounds. As a result of his absence the work of the production crew seemed to proceed at a more rapid and relaxed pace.

Kerney used his time to talk to some of the town residents who’d assembled to watch the filmmakers. Those he spoke with knew about the death of the Mexican on the highway, and several people wondered if it meant that smuggling activity along the border was on the upswing. Kerney probed a bit deeper and learned that over the past six to eight months, border-related incidents had dropped. One man recounted stories of how half-starved migrants had once routinely wandered into town, and speculated that they now avoided Playas because it was an anti-terrorism training center. While the man’s argument made sense, Kerney wondered if the fall-off in immigrants passing through the town was also tied to the smuggling operation Fidel’s undercover agent had infiltrated.

A woman he spoke with criticized the Mexican government for handing out desert survival pamphlets to the illegals who were planning to cross the border, calling it nothing less than an attempt to flood the United States with undocumented workers. Her husband, an older man with a U.S. Navy anchor tattooed on his arm, thought the problem was tied to not having enough Border Patrol agents assigned to the Bootheel.

When Kerney asked about drug trafficking, he was told that the unmanned drones the Border Patrol had put into service to track aircraft crossing from Mexico hadn’t reduced the number of nighttime flights by any significant degree. Rumor had it that large amounts of marijuana, cocaine, and heroin were still being flown in on a regular basis, off-loaded at remote locations, and trucked north.

Kerney wondered if his take on the death of Fidel’s agent was all wrong. Was it possible that the murderers had had no intention to leave their victim in the middle of the highway with ligature marks on his wrists? Had he fallen out of the van, as Officer Sapian had suggested? And if so, did the driver fail to stop because he or she had seen Kerney rubbernecking at the side of the road almost within shouting distance of where he would find the dying agent, and didn’t want to chance turning around to retrieve the body?

The more Kerney thought about it, the more he seriously questioned his initial analysis of the crime. Why would the killers deliberately dump the body of a man they knew to be an undercover cop on a highway to be found? Wouldn’t it be better to simply make the agent disappear altogether and avoid becoming hard targets as cop killers?

Agent Fidel had told him a corrupt ex-policeman in Mexico ran the immigrant smuggling operation, possibly aided by some dirty Border Patrol officers. Bringing the feds down around his head by dumping the agent’s body would be the last thing a coyote would want to do.

There were two ways to test the theory: either find and take statements from the people who were in the panel van, or inspect the rear door latch on the vans owned by Walter Shaw and Jerome Mendoza, the motor transportation officer, to see if either was defective. Locating the smuggler’s clients might be hard to do, but checking out the rear door latches to the panel vans shouldn’t be difficult.

Services ended at the Baptist church on the outskirts of town, and the number of onlookers swelled, bolstered by ranch families and a few folks from nearby Hachita who’d come by to watch the happenings. One of the people was Ira Dobson, the water works manager Kerney had met at the smelter. He was dressed in his Sunday-go-to-meeting best: a pair of blue jeans with razor-sharp creases, a starched white long-sleeved Western shirt, and a pair of polished black cowboy boots.

“Have you signed up to work on the film?” Kerney asked.

“Not me,” Dobson replied. “I’ve got enough to do without taking on any more responsibilities.”

“I understand the Granite Pass Ranch borders the company’s property,” Kerney said.

“Pretty country,” Dobson allowed. “It runs for a far piece along our eastern flank.”

“Do you know the Jordans?” Kerney asked.

“Good people,” Dobson said with a nod.

“Yes, they are,” Kerney replied. “I grew up on a ranch outside of Truth or Consequences that neighbored their old spread.”

“Then you know that Joe’s a smart old boy. He’s had me over for supper a number of times, mostly to pick my brain about water conservation. I’ll tell you this: He may be long in the tooth, but he sure keeps up with the latest ranching practices.”

“What has he done?”

Dobson described how Joe used solar power to pump water at his remote wells, covered stock tanks with evaporation barriers, used almost indestructible truck tires as water troughs in his holding pastures, and had protected several artesian springs in the foothills by fencing off the streambeds and restoring the riparian habitat.

“He’s saved hundreds of thousands of gallons of water every year,” Dobson added, “recharged the aquifer, and has reduced his pumping costs. He hasn’t had to dig deeper wells, install larger pumps, or spend a lot of money on erosion stabilization. It’s damn smart ranch management.”

Dobson looked over at Usher and his team standing in the middle of the baseball diamond next to the empty outdoor swimming pool. “What are they going to be filming here?” he asked.

“A country music concert,” Kerney replied. “Free to the first five hundred or so people who show up.”

“Now, that I’ll have to see,” Dobson said, breaking into a grin.

“Do you know Walt Shaw?” Kerney asked. The motor vehicle and background check he’d asked for on Shaw had come back clean.

“Walt is as solid as a rock,” Dobson said. “He showed up in the Bootheel about the same time I did. Grew up in Virden on the Gila River Valley near the Arizona border. It’s a Mormon ranching and farming community. He once had kin living there, but they’ve all passed away. He owns a house he inherited that he uses as a getaway, mostly during hunting season. I spent a weekend with him up there tracking mule deer bucks in the Big Burro Mountains. Neither of us had a darn bit of luck.”

Kerney had half a mind to ask Dobson about Mendoza, who worked as a part-time security guard at the smelter, but decided to leave that to Ray Bratton, the young Border Patrol agent who was scheduled to go undercover as a film-crew apprentice when shooting began. Instead, he talked about deer hunting with Dobson.

When Dobson finished reminiscing about a more recent, successful hunt, he made his excuses and left. If Kerney had his geography right, Virden was just a few miles east of Duncan, Arizona, where Johnny had gone to check out the rodeo grounds for the film.

Earlier, Johnny had called from Duncan with the news that the location was available and could be rented for the film. To fit in a change to the scouting schedule, Charlie Zwick had arranged for the caterer to pack sack lunches so the team could eat while they traveled to the rodeo grounds, which were about an hour away by car.

Kerney caught Usher’s attention as he was leaving the ball field and asked if he was needed for the remainder of the day. In a hurry to move on to the next shooting-script location, Usher shook his head, thanked Kerney for his help, and said he would see him when filming got under way.

In his truck Kerney located Virden on a state highway map. A secondary road that branched off from the main highway to Duncan led straight to the settlement along the Gila River Valley. He decided to make a quick run past Mendoza’s house to see if the panel van was there, before moving on to the Granite Pass Ranch and then to Virden.

At the house a man he took to be Mendoza was washing the Motor Transportation squad car in the driveway. As Kerney drove by, a younger-looking man exited the house and climbed into the driver’s seat of the panel van parked at the curb. Kerney waved at the men and kept going, wondering who the young man was and whether or not he should just drop the whole thing and leave it all up to Agents Fidel and Bratton to figure out. The cop in him said no.

On the highway to the ranch Kerney thought about the Jordan family. Joe and Bessie came from frontier stock. Bessie’s ancestors had arrived soon after the Civil War to take up ranching along the Rio Grande River near the military outpost of Fort McRae, now submerged under the waters of Elephant Butte Lake, a man-made reservoir built in the early twentieth century. Joe’s grandfather had migrated west to El Paso in the 1880s and made his money in banking before buying a huge tract of land on the Jornada, east of the Caballo Mountains.

Joe had inherited not only the ranch but a majority ownership of the bank his grandfather had established in Truth or Consequences. Why had Joe sold both interests, taken a job as president of a savings and loan in Deming, and bought a ranch in the Bootheel?

Until now Kerney hadn’t given it any thought. He’d been away from his boyhood home for so long, the comings and goings of people he’d known in his distant past hadn’t concerned him. But in retrospect the question had importance. The Jordan family had been part of the social, political, and economic fabric of the Jornada for generations. What would have prompted Joe and Bessie to pull up stakes from a place where they had such deep roots?

Did it have something to do with Johnny or Julia? Kerney doubted it. Both had been long gone from home at the time of the move to the Bootheel, Julia finished with college and living on her own, and Johnny competing on the pro rodeo circuit.

At the ranch the gate was closed but unlocked and no one was around. As the son of ranching parents Kerney knew that Sunday wasn’t necessarily a day of rest. There were simply too many chores that needed constant or immediate attention: salt licks and feed to be put out, broken machinery to be repaired, cattle to be moved to new pastures, a calf with a broken leg that needed to be tended to-the list was endless. It wasn’t all that unusual for a rancher to send the family off to church services, if he could spare them, and stay behind to get the work done.

He decided to drive to the new corral to see if Shaw had his day hands working. He arrived to find Joe Jordan supervising the men, who were nailing galvanized wire mesh fencing to the corral. Kerney was familiar with the product; he’d used it for his paddock at the Santa Fe ranch. It kept horses from damaging legs or hooves on the posts and cross poles and absorbed the animals’ impact without cutting their coats or causing abrasions.

Shaw was nowhere to be seen, nor was his panel van. However, Bessie sat in Joe’s pickup truck, reading a book. She saw Kerney, smiled, and motioned him over.

“Will you go and tell that husband of mine to stop working and take me to Las Cruces like he promised?” she asked.

“Where’s Walt Shaw?” Kerney asked.

Bessie closed the book and put it on the dashboard. “I suspect he’s in Virden. He tries to get up there once a month to check on his property. Normally, Julia fills in for him when he’s gone, but she’s on her way to Tucson to attend a bull sale tomorrow morning. But these boys have worked for us before and they certainly don’t need any supervision.”

Kerney tipped his hat. “I’ll see what I can do, ma’am.”

Bessie touched him arm before he could walk away. “Back when you and Johnny were young, I’d hoped he would go to college with you and Dale Jennings.”

“I guess it wasn’t what he wanted.”

“What he needed was to be with friends who were steady and reliable and not so easily swayed by his shenanigans.”

Kerney smiled. “That’s kind of you to say, but I don’t think anyone could have held Johnny back when he was feeling his oats.”

“You’re probably right,” Bessie said, patting Kerney’s hand. “Go tell Joe Jordan if he doesn’t get over here soon, I’m going to Las Cruces without him.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He stepped off toward Joe, who was busy watching the hands stretch out a two-hundred-foot roll of wire.

“Is the boss getting restless?” Joe asked, as he shook Kerney’s hand and nodded toward his wife.

“You could say that,” Kerney replied. “She’s threatening to leave without you. When does Walt Shaw get back?”

“Probably late evening. Why, do you need him for something?”

“I was hoping to get a tour of the water conservation measures you’ve put in place on the ranch. Ira Dobson told me a bit about what you’ve done, and I’d like to profit from your experience.”

“I’d show you around myself,” Joe said, “if we weren’t going to town.”

“Perhaps some other time,” Kerney said. “It’s generous of you to give Shaw the day off with so much work to do.”

“Walt takes maybe a day a month to himself,” Joe replied. “I’m not about to say no when he needs to get away.”

“Will he stay on after Julia takes over the ranch from you?” Kerney asked.

Joe looked a little surprised by Kerney’s question. “She told you that? Well, I guess it’s no secret. She pretty much has taken over already, but I like to kid myself that I’m still in the ramrod of the outfit. Walt will stay on. Otherwise Julia would have to give up her place in Tucson, and she’s not about to do that. She likes her city life too much to let go of it completely.”