officer of the company, and that the ranch operation was headquartered on the east side of the Capitan Mountains, where her parents, Morris and Lily Tully Seton, were staying while the spring works, a semiannual cattle roundup and calf-branding event, took place.
Clayton also learned that Hiram Tully's stroke had not hampered his ability to communicate. He decided to interview Tully first and then swing by the ranch on the back road to Capitan. In his unit, a four-by-four Ford Explorer, Clayton keyed the microphone and checked dispatch for messages. No calls had come in from either the Santa Fe PD or Chief Kerney, but the state police crime scene supervisor reported that a match had been made with the skeleton found in the cellar and Anna Marie Montoya's dental records.
Clayton's interviews with Hiram Tully and Morris and Lily Seton served only to confirm what Page Seton had told him. He came away thinking that he'd accomplished nothing more than eliminating some highly unlikely suspects. The chances of solving an eleven-year-old homicide were slim at best. If no creditable leads materialized, background investigations on everyone in the Tully family would need to be done.
He looked over the list of family members Page Seton had provided. Excluding the four people already interviewed, another eight would need to be contacted. He'd ask Quinones and Dillingham to start the ball rolling if they came up empty on the field interviews near the crime scene.
Even without any tangible progress, Clayton remained pumped about his assignment. He was particularly eager to go to Santa Fe and do some real digging into Anna Marie Montoya's past. Besides, it would be a kick to clear a case that had stymied Kerney. He smiled at the prospect of it.
The day was more than halfway gone. With all that was left to do, Clayton figured he had another full day or two of work before he could leave for Santa Fe. He called the tribal day-care center where Grace worked as a teacher and told her that he wasn't going out of town right away.
'When will you go?' Grace asked.
'I'm not sure yet,' Clayton said. 'Maybe the day after tomorrow.
'Sometime soon, I think all of us should go to Santa Fe.'
'I can't take you and the kids with me.'
'I know that,' Grace said. 'I'm thinking of a weekend family outing.'
'If we left early in the morning, we could make it a day trip,' Clayton said, thinking about how pricy Santa Fe could be.
'That wouldn't be enough time,' Grace replied.
Since neither Clayton nor Grace worked in high-paying professions, Clayton constantly worried about family finances. 'I thought we were saving money to build the addition,' he said.
'A weekend trip to Santa Fe won't bankrupt us, Clayton.'
'Yeah, you're right.'
'Will you be home for dinner?'
'I don't see why not.'
'I'll see you then,' Grace said before hanging up.
He checked in with dispatch. Kerney still hadn't called back. He gave his ETA to Carrizozo and told the dispatcher he'd be at John Foley's real estate office when he got into town.
The office was in an old building where Central Avenue curved and became E Avenue. One of the town's first permanent structures, it had started out as a tin shop in the early part of the twentieth century. Foley's late-model Cadillac was parked at the side of the building.
Inside, Foley pressed a cup of coffee into Clayton's hands and sat with him, making small talk. A big man in his late seventies, Foley had slightly hunched shoulders and carried some extra pounds around his midsection that spilled over his tightly cinched belt and showy turquoise and silver buckle.
With some difficulty, Clayton guided Foley to the topic of the fruit stand. After talking about the fire, he got a short history of Foley's failed attempts to sell it. He asked if Foley had records on any prospective buyers that went back eleven or twelve years.
Foley shook his head. 'I only keep information about potential clients who are solid prospects. I don't recall ever showing that property to a serious client. It's too far out of town to have any commercial value and there's no water, phone, or electricity to the property line.'
'When was the last time you were out there?' Clayton asked.
'Let me think,' Foley replied. 'Two, three years ago. I showed it to a fella who was interested in starting a flea market and living on the property. But he didn't want to invest any money in extending the utilities and digging a well.'
'Did you ever go into the fruit stand?'
'There was no need to,' Foley said. 'According to the Ruidoso newspaper, you found a murder victim in that fire.'
'I didn't realize that information had been released.'
Foley handed Clayton the newspaper. Sheriff Hewitt had not only briefed the press about the homicide, but had gone on at some length about assigning his highly qualified Apache deputy, Clayton Istee, as lead investigator.
Clayton folded the newspaper, gave it back to Foley, thanked him for the coffee and his time, and left the office. He understood the sheriff's decision to go public about the homicide, but he would have liked to have been forewarned. He also wondered when all the sheriff's self-congratulatory public and private back-patting about hiring an Indian cop was going to end. Soon, he hoped. It was getting tiresome.
He sat in his unit and wrote up some notes before checking in with dispatch. Kerney still hadn't returned his call, and Quinones and Dillingham were reporting that no useful information had been gathered so far in their field interviews. But on a more positive note, there weren't any anxious messages from the sheriff asking for a status update.
He reached Quinones by radio and got the names of people who still needed to be contacted. If he hurried a bit, he could finish his part of the canvass, go back to the office to finish his paperwork, hold a quick team meeting, and call it a day.
Chapter 2
Back late from an all-day meeting in Albuquerque, Kevin Kerney sat in his office and paged through the Anna Marie Montoya missing person file. Until yesterday Montoya had never been found and the investigation had remained officially open, although not actively worked for some time. There were periodic entries by various detectives summarizing meetings and phone conversations with family asking if any new information about Montoya's whereabouts had surfaced, along with unsuccessful query results from other law enforcement agencies regarding the identification of human remains found elsewhere.
Notations in the record showed that every year on the anniversary of Montoya's disappearance, her parents met with a detective sergeant to ask about progress in the case. One supervisor had scrawled in the margin of the supplemental contact report, 'These sweet people foolishly refuse to give up hope.'
Kerney shared the detective sergeant's sentiments. Based on what was known about Montoya, she was an unlikely candidate to go missing, so foul play was the only scenario. He scanned the woman's personal information. Born and raised in Santa Fe, Anna Marie, age twenty-nine, was about to earn a master's degree in social work when she disappeared. She lived in an apartment with a roommate, her best friend since high school. She was engaged to be married to a young, up-and-coming businessman, had a good job lined up after graduation, and worked as a part-time counselor at a youth shelter. She had strong ties with her family and a tight-knit circle of friends.
Montoya's roommate reported her missing on a day when the major crimes unit was busy busting a burglary ring, so Kerney, then serving as chief of detectives, handled the call. Montoya had failed to return overnight from an evening reception for graduating students held near the university campus in Las Vegas, fifty miles north of Santa Fe.
Kerney had run his inquiry according to the book and come up empty. Montoya's car, which was found at a shopping mall parking lot in Santa Fe the day after her disappearance, provided no clues or evidence of foul play.
