Blind Descent Page 23

  “Blackmail, you think?” Anna asked.

  “Either that or an old statutory flame fanned into a sudden blaze.”

  Anna remembered the conversation she’d overheard as she lay squashed in the long passage out of Tinker’s Hell. Sondra said she knew things about Peter that could get his medical license revoked. Had she been talking about a twelve-year-old rape case? Anna doubted it. Those charges were dropped. Given that Sondra had taken his money, then married the man, if she made a stink it would be she, not the doctor, who would end up looking the fool.

  Sondra, at seventeen. Frieda at twenty-three or -four. Zeddie at the same age. Dr. McCarty had a history of seducing his young patients. If Sondra had discovered she wasn’t the only one, that McCarty was continuing the pattern, and she had gotten her hands on proof, that might do it. Whether or not McCarty lost his medical license, the publicity would damage his practice or lose him his position if he wasn’t in business for himself. As Rhonda had said, this was good. Anna assured her she’d receive absolution for the sin of gossiping.

  An impatient wail cut over the phone line. “Oops. Gotta go,” Rhonda said. “Andrew is awake.” The line went dead. Anna wasn’t done talking. She needed to bounce these new thoughts off another brain. Expose the obvious flaws. Air out her thinking lest it become circular and self-perpetuating.

  The empty house, so recently a boon, began to chafe on her nerves. Where was Curt? Had he made the calls? Where was Iverson? What had he done with the rifle shell? Had there been an autopsy of Brent Roxbury? Anna was out of the loop, out of her park, out of her jurisdiction, and possibly out of her league.

  For a quarter of an hour she stalked from room to room, gazed out over tracts of desert, of street, of employee housing. Able to stand her own company no longer, she put on a coat and limped down to headquarters to see if she couldn’t mooch a ride into town.

  Jewel was typing furiously as Anna let herself into the chief of resource management’s office. Her face was screwed up as if she went for a speed record. Loath to break her concentration in case she was training for the secretarial Olympics, Anna closed the door softly and walked soundlessly across the room on moccasined feet. She was at Jewel’s desk before the secretary noticed her.

  With a start and a squawk, Jewel banged the screen button and blacked out her computer. She wasn’t fast enough, and Anna smiled. “Aren’t you the sneaky snake,” Jewel said, and tried to regain her composure by preening hair-sprayed wings with porcelain nails.

  “Sorry,” Anna said.

  “You here to be chewed out too?” Jewel asked with evident satisfaction.

  “Too?”

  “George told me Oscar was in hot water, messing over at Big Manhole. Seems you’re a girl who can’t resist hot water.”

  “Not this time,” Anna said, and told her why she’d come. A few phone calls, and Jewel found a maintenance man who was driving into town to get machine parts. He picked up Anna on his way out of the compound. Being a pariah had its upside; Anna doubted Jewel would have been so forthcoming had virtue’s reward not been the removal of Anna Pigeon.

  Sixty-five minutes later she was outfitted with a Dodge Neon the color and stature of the average aphid, along with a full tank of gasoline. Credit cards were wonderful things. Anna drove to the BLM building on the eastern edge of town and again presented herself to the receptionist. Sans blood and dust, he didn’t recognize her until she asked for Holden. Without bothering to phone ahead, the young man walked her back to Tillman’s desk. On the way he asked questions about the shooting: How loud? How much blood? Color? Texture? Just as Anna was writing him off as a ghoul, he explained he was an amateur filmmaker—documentaries, mostly—but he wanted to make movies à la the Coen brothers in Minnesota. He was studying visual images. Anna laughed, not because she found his ambition amusing but because with that information she’d instantly forgiven him his prying. He was an artist not a busybody—as if that mattered one whit in the giant scheme of things.

  Behind the fabric-covered partition that marked out his work space in a room of like spaces, Tillman was packing to leave. “Hey, Anna,” he said. He was pleased to see her. It took her by surprise. She’d begun to think she’d alienated every living soul in New Mexico.

  “Bad timing,” he went on. “You caught me on my way out the door. What with one thing and another I got swamped. I’m in the field this afternoon.”

  “Can I ride along?” she asked on impulse.

  Holden acted glad of the company. Foot encased in a walking cast, he took a BLM truck with an automatic transmission and drove out of town on the highway Anna had taken to Big Manhole. She found it hard to believe she’d made the journey only the day before. Corpse, bullets, wind—it felt as if it had happened years ago, or perhaps in a dream.

  Holden told her everything he knew about the Roxbury Incident, as he now called it, a name to depersonalize uncomfortable memories. Along with the sheriff and the county coroner, Holden had gone out to Big Manhole. They’d arrived around eight o’clock, full dark, so there hadn’t been much to see. The coroner pronounced Brent dead of a gunshot wound. A deputy recovered the rifle slug that killed him. The shot had ripped through Roxbury at a shallow angle and emerged where jawbone met ear. Much of its power spent, the slug lodged in the limestone lip above the cave entrance. As evidence it was of little value. Rock and bone had worked on it until it was simply a misshapen hunk of lead sporting fragments of Roxbury’s flesh. Any rifling that might have been used to match it to the murder weapon was destroyed.

  Anna told Holden of watching Iverson take the rifle shell, and he nodded as at old news. “George Laymon called and told us. The shell will be fingerprinted as soon as the park gets it to town. The sheriff wanted his own guys to do the work.”

  Turning in the shell didn’t mean much. If it produced the killer’s prints, it might be telling. If it had none there would be no way of knowing whether the shooter had wiped it before he loaded his weapon or if Iverson had wiped it clean of fingerprints before turning it over to the police.

  “That’s BLM land,” Anna said as a thought occurred to her. “What was Oscar doing over there anyway?”

  “It’s only a few hundred yards from the park boundary. The superintendent wanted to know if any damage had been done, that sort of thing.”

  “Makes sense.” Anna wondered why she used that phrase whenever she was particularly confused. “Oscar really trampled the scene,” she said after a while.

  Tillman laughed. “Captain Lightfoot. We kid him that he’ll never get lost. That boy could leave tracks in concrete. Old Laymon won’t let him anywhere near the more delicate crystal formations. Scared his feet’ll hit high enough on the Richter scale it’d shatter anything within a fifteen-foot radius. He wouldn’t have found much anyway. That whole ridge is nothing but one big rock.”

  “So I discovered.” Holden didn’t ask her what she had been doing there, and in her heart, she thanked him. Justifying herself was becoming a habit she’d just as soon break.

  Because she needed to talk to someone and Holden was the only person whom she didn’t suspect and who was still speaking to her, Anna shared her ideas about Oscar and Brent working together or in tandem to effect the death of Frieda Dierkz. Oscar and Holden were friends. Metaphorically speaking, Anna trod on eggs. She kept her statements theoretical, hypothetical, intellectual, trying her damnedest to convey suspicion without offending. After she finished her story Holden was silent for so long she began to get nervous.

  “I’ll have to think on this,” he said in his slow, deliberate way. “I don’t believe Oscar’s got it in him to kick a cat out of the middle of the dinner table. But there might be something in what you say. I’ve got to think on it.”

  Anna had to be satisfied with that. She dropped the subject. “Are we going up to Big Manhole?” she asked as he turned the truck off the highway onto a gravel road that looked familiar.

  “Not unless you want to. I was headed out to the Blackta
il to go over some reports.”

  Anna had no desire to go to Big Manhole.

  THE BLACKTAIL WAS like many other gas wells dotting the landscape of the Southwest. The Bureau of Land Management was not dedicated to conservation. Like the United States Forest Service, they were a multiple-use organization. Public lands were not only used for recreation and wildlife preserves but were leased to ranchers for grazing livestock, miners seeking precious metals, lumber interests, hunters, and companies drilling for oil and gas. By some estimates, 30 percent of the gas reserves in the lower forty-eight states were located under New Mexico. It was a boom and bust economy. The doomsayers predicted the petroleum would be pumped out by the year 2040. Advocates of preservation used these predictions to push for the development of alternate energy sources. Oil interests used them to try to force Congress into opening wilderness areas in Alaska to drilling. So far the oil interests were winning. Anna had been on the fringes of the ongoing battle for so long she was more than casually interested to see the inner workings of a producing well.

  Several wells outside the town of Carlsbad were close enough to the highway that she had already seen them. They were past the drilling stage; casings were in place, and the business of draining the petroleum pockets was in progress. Little remained but pipes and tanks built low to the ground and painted a neutral grayish-yellow. As far as Anna could tell, they were unmanned. The Blacktail was still in the process of drilling. A metal tower, much like those Texas was famous for, had been erected in the middle of a pad a hundred feet on a side. Piles of pipe in various sizes were stacked around the outbuildings. One of these was a corrugated aluminum shack that might have been for storage, and the other was a trailer house. A short piece of pipe chocked with rocks served as a front step. A flatbed was parked beside the road to the well, pipe waiting to be unloaded. Two concrete mixing trucks were behind the trailer.

  “How close to the park boundary?” Anna asked as Holden drew to a stop beside the trailer. A fog of dust, churned up in their wake, overtook the truck, and they sat a moment waiting for it to clear.

  “Pretty close,” he said. “But strictly legit. They got a lease. They can sink a line straight down beside the fence if they want to. The Blacktail’s not that bad. See that beaky-looking rock sticking out?” He pointed to a wedge of limestone protruding from a slope an eighth of a mile distant. “That’s where the boundary line runs. And don’t think it’s not checked regularly. Carlsbad is a stickler. So are we.”

  For Holden it was a long speech. Anna’d struck a nerve. Land management agencies with differing goals sharing a border tended to be exceedingly careful of each other. The politicians might wrangle over use issues at a higher level. Those on the ground knew they had to work together.

  Moving to more neutral territory, she asked, “What are you checking the Blacktail for?”

  “We check all the wells every now and then. By law, they’ve got to file regular reports on the drilling. How deep. How long. Pipes. Casings. That sort of thing. The Blacktail’s last report mentioned a loss of returns. When they are drilling, the drill fluids bring up mud and rock cuttings. A loss of return means they’re drilling all right, but nothing is coming back. Could mean a lot of things. Could mean they’ve hit open space. A cavern. The Blacktail is along the same lineament as Big Manhole. There’s logic to cave formations.” Holden winked at Anna. “Maybe another entrance to Lechuguilla. I like telling George and Oscar that when we find it, we’ll sink an elevator and set up a tour concession.”

  Anna laughed. Holden would oppose the commercialization of Lechuguilla as strongly as any park ranger. Had that not been true, those might have been fighting words, if not to Anna on principle, then to cavers from love of the resource.

  A barrel-chested man introducing himself as “just plain Gus” emerged from the trailer to greet them. Gus was covered in filthy dungarees and a coat that looked as if it had survived the Exxon Valdez oil spill. He ushered them into the trailer. To Anna’s surprise it was crammed with instruments. Lighting a cigarette, he offered coffee all around; then he and Holden began to talk in a language Anna wasn’t conversant in: WOC, whipstock, dry-drilling, thribble, lost circulation, stabbing board. Boredom and cigarette smoke drove her back out of doors.

  For once she appreciated the wind. Facing north, she shook her head, letting the cold strip away the nicotine residue. Four men, bundled in layers and hard-hatted, had appeared from somewhere and were occupied unloading pipe from the flatbed. Mouths moved, orders were shouted, but the roar of the forklift engine and the whine of the wind drowned out the words.

  Anna walked to the edge of the pad, put the storage shed between herself and the wind, and looked across the wash toward Big Manhole. From here she could see the lineament Holden had mentioned as clear as a line drawn on a map. A shift in subterranean layers created a marked change in vegetation density on the surface. She traced it as far as the bald knob of hill above the cave. Always in a murder there was a reason, however twisted, why the victim had to die. Sometimes there was a reason the victim died where he did. Was Brent killed because he was at Big Manhole, or was it merely an opportune place for a spot of homicide?

  “A guy was killed up there, you know.”

  The voice at her shoulder so closely echoed her thoughts, Anna wasn’t startled at the unexpected company. A driller, shapeless in overalls and a down vest, a sweatshirt with the hood up under a bright yellow hard hat, leaned against the shed and cupped his hands to light a cigarette. Two days’ stubble covered his jaws, each coarse whisker coated with gray dust.

  “Some broad found him,” the man went on, words coming out with smoke. “Guy had got his head blowed off.”

  “No kidding?” Anna said.

  A chance to stand out of the wind and impress the girls must have been the highlight of this driller’s day. He looked pleased with himself and his situation. Taking another drag, he embellished. “I knew the guy. We all did. Brent somebody or other. He used to come around. A geologist or some damn thing. Worked for Lattimore and Douglas out of Midland, Texas. They own the Blacktail.”

  Now that her memory had been jogged, Anna remembered Brent had done freelance work for local oil companies. “What did he do?” she asked.

  “The dead guy?”

  She nodded.

  “Oh, he was a rock hound. Looked at the core samples. Stuff like that.”

  “Ah.” Anna would ask Holden.

  “Scuttlebutt was they were going to unload him. He got himself in bad odor with somebody.” The man laughed, and fine particles of dust sifted down from his beard to settle like powdered sugar on his coat front. “Maybe they ‘terminated’ him the old-fashioned way.”

  A bellow bored through the wind to their ears. “Break’s over.” The man crushed his cigarette under a steel-toed boot. “Good talking with you.” He touched the brim of his hard hat.

  “Likewise,” Anna assured him as he disappeared around the corner of the shed.

  Returning to the shelter of the truck, she waited for Holden and turned the murder of Brent Roxbury over in her mind. By the time Holden emerged from the trailer and joined her, she’d kneaded and stretched a few disparate facts into a theory.

  Holden Tillman listened with his customary politeness as she outlined it. Half a minute more elapsed while he digested her words and chose his own. “I don’t think that’s going to fly,” he said at last. By the strained edge to his patience, Anna knew he’d not quite forgiven her the attack on Oscar. She understood. She was out of patience with herself. Changing theories every ten minutes smacked of grasping at straws.

  “So now you’re saying Brent might have been shot because he was working for Lattimore and Douglas? He was shot near here. I’ll give you that.” His tone was noncommittal.

  “I was just thinking aloud.” Anna defended herself. “Couldn’t Brent have found something out that they didn’t want found out and been killed?”

  “The Blacktail is legal,” Holden told her. “
They’ve got a ten-year lease. They’re in a place it’s legal to drill. They’re drilling for what they say they are. The well could produce upwards of three to five million cubic feet of gas a day. You can like the drilling or not, but they’ve got every legal right to drill as long as they file the reports and abide by the lease stipulations. What happened to your idea that Brent and Frieda’s deaths were connected?”

  Anna didn’t have an answer for that. Frieda’s demise in a rock slide deep in a cave on park lands and Brent’s shooting aboveground on BLM land were hard to tie together. Different locales. Different causes of death. Brent was connected to the Blacktail, and the driller’s gossip pointed a finger, but Anna had no way of putting Frieda into the picture. Frieda was NPS, from Colorado. As far as Anna knew, she’d neither seen nor heard of the Blacktail or any other gas well. No more had they seen, heard, or cared about a secretary from Mesa Verde on holiday in Carlsbad.

  “Did you get your problems settled?” she asked just to end the silence.

  “Yup. They lost circulation, then weren’t getting any returns. They pumped down a little cement and pea gravel ten days ago. The drilling is about over. They hit paydirt. They’ll be moving in a completion rig soon. From the sound of it this is going to be a hot well. Good thing too. Probably saved Gus’s job. That boy ordered way too much of everything. Once pipe and gravel’s been delivered, it’s yours. Folks get real persnickety if you try and return it. Maybe that’s where Brent ran afoul of them. He’d have recommended how much, how far, how deep. Could be he was off.”

  “Would they have shot him for it?”

  “Nope. Happens all the time. Drilling is a gambler’s game. If it happened too often they just wouldn’t use Roxbury anymore. They’d get themselves a new boy. We’re barking up the wrong tree.”