Kerney changed his tack.
'I know you gave Gillespie excellent performance reviews, but did you ever have to discipline him for failure to perform his duties?'
'No.'
'He was never late for work? He never had to be corrected about policies and procedures?'
'Sure, occasionally. It wasn't a big enough deal to require any official action.'
'There was no evidence of conduct unbecoming an officer? No citizen complaints lodged against him?'
'No.'
'Did Gillespie show signs of having a drinking problem?
Was he close mouthed about what he did on his free time? Did he have a pattern of calling in sick after his days off?'
'I never saw him under the influence, either on duty or off' 'Did he have money problems?'
'You've seen his financial records. He lived within his means.' Ordway shook his head and stood up.
'You know what? I think this case has got you stumped, and you're looking for a way to save face. Questioning Paul's character isn't going to get you spit or make you any friends in this town.'
Kerney got to his feet.
'It sounds like Gillespie was a perfect cop.'
'He did his job.'
'I've heard that the town council isn't very happy with your performance.'
'The hometown hero, who took their high school football team to the state finals way back when, was murdered. They think I should have made an arrest the day he got shot. They don't give a tinker's damn about the lack of a suspect.'
'That puts you under a lot of pressure, I bet.'
'Not anymore. I've resigned. I'm out of here at the end of the week.'
He turned on his heel to leave.
'Chief Ordway,' Kerney called out.
Ordway stopped at the door and looked back at Kerney. 'What?'
The waitress stood anchored behind the counter at the far end of the dining room, tilted slightly forward, intent on every word.
'If you find Robert Cordova, don't mess with him.
Tell me where he is and I'll pick him up.'
'Sure thing, hotshot.'
Kerney watched him leave, thinking Ordway had been a cop long enough to know that without a suspect, the victim became the prime focus of attention. But politics in small towns were played based on blood ties, and Ordway was the outsider, imported because Gillespie hadn't met me state training and experience qualifications for the chief's position. What if Gillespie had been a bad apple and Ordway had turned a blind eye to it, not wanting to fire the hometown ex-hero of the high school gridiron? It would be really stupid to admit that he let an unethical or crooked officer remain on the job in order to keep the town council placated.
Such an admission would end Ordway's career in law enforcement.
From what Kerney had seen of Ordway during the past four weeks, he would be no great loss to the profession.
He dropped some bills on the table to cover Robert's meal and the tip, and smiled at the waitress. She lowered her gaze and got busy wiping down the immaculate countertop.
A railroad town established in the early part of the century, Mountainair sat among the foothills to the Manzano Mountains. A state highway dissected Main Street, curved in front of the local elementary school, and continued past a gas station, motel, and some abandoned commercial buildings before making a straight run west toward the mountains. Main Street, a two- block-long strip with some retail stores, a post office, and a National Park Service building, boasted no trees, no traffic lights, and no pedestrians. Some of the buildings were vacant, and barren display shelves behind plate-glass windows created a rhythm of continual decline.
Kerney drove the strip several times looking for Robert, who was nowhere to be found. He stopped next to the post office and spotted Neil Ordway's police car parked in front of the town hall and police station.
The police station, which housed the police dispatch office and the magistrate court, had a concrete front with a thunderbird design perched above an ornamental pillar that separated two entry doors.
Ordway's office took up the second floor of the adjacent town hall.
Kerney wondered if Ordway had snagged Robert in spite of his warning to leave the man alone. He switched his police radio to Ordway's frequency. If Robert was in custody, Kerney would know it when Ordway left to take him back to Las Vegas. He would keep looking until then.
Mountainair had no distinct neighborhoods to speak of, except for a string of middle-class, ranch-style houses and a few restored Victorian cottages near the high school. Even there, scattered between neat yards and tidy homes, an occasional empty lot with an old foundation or a sagging, weather-beaten house open to the elements broke any impression of a well-defined neighborhood.
Kerney did a slow patrol and checked each empty house before heading across the main drag, where the pavement quickly turned to dirt, and a string of houses, several churches, some shacks, sheds, and uninhabited cabins sputtered to a stop at a fence to an unused pasture.
Kerney kept looking, found nothing, returned to the main drag, and stopped at the grocery store to buy two packs of cigarettes. Ordway's cruiser was still parked outside city hall when he came out. He headed east on the state highway in the hope that Robert might be hitchhiking out of town. He drove to the Estanda cutoff before giving up and turning around to scout the road west of town. He shut down the hunt near the Abo Ruins National Monument and made his way back to the village.
He topped out at the hill on the outskirts of Mountainair just as a small herd of pinto horses swooped up a shallow arroyo and trotted along the highway fence. It was a pretty sight, and Kerney slowed to watch until the horses disappeared into a draw.
Mountainair had faded with the demise of dry land farming and the decline of railroad traffic. But its beautiful setting pulled tourists in and kept the place alive. It was a gateway to the wilderness that spread over the southern end of the Manzano Mountains, which were brushed at the summits with the first dusting of snow.
To the south a heavily forested mesa sheared off half of the horizon, and thick, slow-moving clouds in me blue gray November sky rolled toward the village. Kerney had been taught by his ranching father to read the weather, and the day promised moisture sometime soon.
Mountainair was not completely unfamiliar to Kerney. After finishing a brief stint as the interim sheriff of Catron County in the southwest part of the state, Kerney had looked at a section of land for sale in the high country outside Mountainair. It was summer grazing pasture infested with cocklebur, hound's-tongue, and prickly pear cactus-sure signs of overgrazing. It would take years to bring it back, and Kerney needed land that he could put to use immediately to produce income and make the mortgage payments, if he was ever going to get back into ranching.
With only enough money for a modest down payment, everything else he'd looked at was either way out of his price range or too small in size for raising cattle.
Kerney's parents had lost their ranch in the Tularosa Basin when White Sands Missile Range, a top-secret testing facility in the heart of south-central New Mexico, had expanded. The day they moved, military policemen and federal agents escorted the family oS the spread to the Rocking J Ranch, where Kerney's father had taken a job as foreman.
That was the day Kerney's dream of owning a ranch was born. He had kept his hopes alive for almost forty years. While living on the Rocking J, during his college years, in 'Vietnam as a platoon leader near the end of the war, and throughout his career in law enforcement, Kerney had never let go of the dream.
He wondered if he would ever be able to achieve it.
It didn't look promising.
He pulled up in front of Pop Shatter's hotel to find Ordway using a side-handle baton in a wrist lock on Robert to force him toward the squad car. The waitress watched the action through the plate-glass window of the dining room.
'Let him go,' Kerney ordered, slamming his car door to get Ordway's attention.
