have a spooky dream startle him back into consciousness. In it, Tim Riley, wearing a kerchief headband, knee-high buckskin boots, and a painted leather war shirt, chanted a death song.
Why had he dreamt that Tim Riley was an Apache warrior singing a song no white eyes should know? And why had there been a faceless women in the dream laughing soundlessly as Riley sang?
Clayton knew that if he couldn’t shake off Riley’s ghost he would have to have a ghost medicine ceremony performed after he got back to the Rez. He turned on his flashlight, walked to the well house, bent low, looked inside, and glanced back at Ramona. “I’ll take a turn.”
Kerney gave Clayton a measured look. “No, you will not. We’ll pick this up in the morning. Go back to the double-wide with Sergeant Pino.”
Too tired to argue, Clayton yawned, shrugged, turned on his heel, and trudged away.
Kerney gestured at Ramona to follow. When both officers disappeared in the darkness, he took a peek inside the well house. There was maybe a foot of snow left to remove before any close inspection could be made. Parts of an old well motor were partially exposed under the intact section of roof at the back of the structure, and there was a rusted section of pipe leaning against a half-rotted wall. Clearly the well had been abandoned years ago.
Kerney couldn’t even hazard a good guess about what had once been secreted away in the dilapidated, abandoned structure. But whatever it was, apparently it had become a catalyst for murder. Counting Brian Riley and Denise’s unborn child, six dead so far. He wondered if there would be more.
The wind picked up and felt like a raw, icy slap against his face. It was a hell of a night to be outside for any reason at all, including murder.
At Clifford Talbott’s ranch, Don Mielke climbed off the Arctic Cat and told the snowplow driver and road- grader operator to stay with their equipment. The two men huddled together in the cab of the snowplow to stay warm. Stiff from the cold, Mielke gestured to his senior investigator, Tony Morales, to join him.
Morales killed the engine to his snowmobile and grabbed his equipment bag. After a quick look at the license plate on the Harley to confirm that the motorcycle belonged to Brian Riley, and a glance at the broken porch door glass, the two men drew their sidearms and cautiously entered the ranch house. The corpse in the easy chair was clearly dead, so they did a fast sweep of the premises before returning to the front room.
The slug from a hunting rifle, which was on the kitchen counter just where Talbott said he’d left it, can do lethal damage to a target several hundred yards away. From a range of less than ten feet, the results were lethal and god-awful. The entry wound above Brian Riley’s eyes from the round of Talbott’s bolt-action Remington .30–06 was almost perfectly cylindrical. But the exit wound in the back of his head was an explosion of blood, brains, and bone that had penetrated and saturated the upholstery of the easy chair and blown a pulse of blood splatter onto the far wall.
Riley’s bowels had released at the time of death, and the stench of Talbott’s vomit still lingered, so the room smelled as bad as it looked.
Mielke gave the body a careful once-over while Morales took photographs. Riley’s hand was wrapped around the pistol grip of the revolver, and an empty, handmade leather-tooled holster was in his lap. He was wearing a heavy wool sweater at least two sizes too big and had an old faded barn coat draped over his shoulders. On the floor to his right, next to a leg of the chair, was a backpack.
Mielke left the backpack untouched and made a thorough search of the small house. In the bedroom, dresser drawers had been pulled out and left open. In the kitchen cabinets, dust on the shelves had been disturbed. A dirty plate, a gummy fork, and a pot with the remains of gooey macaroni and cheese stuck to the sides sat on the counter. In the bottom of the trash bucket was the empty macaroni and cheese box. A pot of water that had boiled down to almost nothing sat on the woodstove, and an empty coffee mug was on the lamp table next to the easy chair.
On the front porch Mielke found an adjustable wrench that Riley had likely used to break the glass to the door. Back inside, Tony Morales was busy bagging and tagging the cookware, plate, utensils, and trash.
“Have you finished photographing the body?” he asked.
Morales nodded.
He handed Morales the wrench to bag and tag, went to Riley’s body, took the Smith & Wesson revolver out of the dead boy’s hand, and opened the cylinder. The handgun was fully loaded. Mielke held it up for Morales to see.
“I think this is just what it appears to be, Major,” Morales said. “Straightforward self-defense.”
“Apparently so.” Mielke reached down, picked up the backpack, opened it, dumped the contents—which looked to be only clothing—on the floor. He searched through the smaller side pockets, found a large envelope containing currency, put the envelope aside, and pawed through the wadded-up, dirty, smelly clothing looking for anything in the pockets. All he found was a pack of matches advertising a nightclub in downtown Albuquerque and a plastic bag with a small amount of grass. He dropped the empty backpack on top of the pile of dirty clothes.
“Nada?” Morales asked.
“Nada.” Mielke flipped open his cell phone. Although Talbott had told him it wouldn’t work, he tried to call out anyway, but there was no signal. He keyed his handheld, got dead air on the S.O. frequency, and switched through the remaining police and emergency channels with the same results.
“Are we cut off from radio contact?” Morales asked.
“That’s affirmative.” The room had cooled down quite a bit since their arrival. Mielke checked the woodstove, opened the vent to increase the airflow, and added some wood to the bed of hot embers. “You’re going to have to stay here while I go back and report in. If the medical investigator is there, I’ll send him to you right away. Meanwhile, dust for prints. Make sure you get the handgun, the rifle, and the wrench.”
“Ten-four, Major.”
Morales had used both a digital camera and a 35mm Pentax to photograph the crime scene. Mielke asked Morales for the digital camera so Kerney and Clayton could see what the crime scene looked like. With the camera safely zipped into an inside pocket of his parka, he stepped over to the kitchen cabinet that contained foodstuffs, reached to the back of the top shelf, pulled out a full pint bottle of whiskey he’d spotted earlier, unscrewed the top, and took a swallow. It felt good and warm going down. He held the bottle out to Morales. “Go ahead, we’ve earned it.”
Morales hesitated, took the bottle from Mielke’s hand, tilted it to his lips, and let the liquid run down his throat, wondering if the major would be taking the whiskey bottle with him. On more than one occasion he’d watched Mielke down eight shots in a row at the FOP and get totally stinking drunk.
Morales held the bottle out to Mielke.
Mielke shook his head as he went to the door. “Clean off the fingerprints and put it back in the cupboard. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
After returning to the double-wide with Ramona Pino, Clayton forced himself to stay awake. He wanted direct confirmation from Don Mielke that the dead man in Clifford Talbott’s ranch house was truly Brian Riley.
In the mobile command vehicle, he talked with Ramona for a while until she left to go home and get some sleep. Then he spent some time with Kerney filling him in on how close he’d come to finding Riley in Albuquerque, and how an Albuquerque cop had let Riley waltz right into the Minerva Stanley Robocker crime scene and drive away on the Harley.
Kerney, in turn, told Clayton about his analysis of the letters Denise Riley had written to her sister during the years she’d supposedly lived far away from Santa Fe, at times in foreign countries.
“When will you hear something?” Clayton asked.
“Tomorrow, hopefully.” Kerney looked at his wristwatch. “But maybe not. With all this snowfall, except for essential personnel, the governor will probably shut down all state offices. I imagine the mayor and the county commission will do the same.”
Clayton suddenly remembered he’d high-ended the Lincoln County S.O. unit on a boulder and had asked Mielke to send a tow truck to free it. “Do you know the status of the vehicle I was driving?” He wasn’t about to claim Riley’s assigned S.O. 4?4 as his own.
“It’s at the county yard in Santa Fe,” Kerney said, “and not going anywhere for a while. It has a broken front axle, a leaking radiator, two flat front tires, and a bent wheel. Paul Hewitt told me you ran into a deer recently and put your marked unit in the shop. Seems you’re rather hard on your assigned vehicles.”
