Leaning Land (4 page)

Wager nodded. It was what he intended anyway. “Do you think the militia group’s involved, too?”

Henderson considered before answering. “Well, they have made a lot of noise about defending their rights against the federal government. And where there’s smoke, there’s fire, you know? But Durkin hasn’t told me he’s got any concrete evidence—that’s one of the things Del Ponte was supposed to find out: if anybody in the group said anything about the killings. That, and if the Constitutional Posse really was trying to branch out onto the reservation.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Don’t know if or why. Just that the killings and one of the bombings took place on or near the reservation. No killings up in the mountains in the eastern part of the county or on the Uncompahgre Plateau up north, not yet, anyway. But we did have two vehicle bombings in the national forest land east of La Sal township.”

“How much has Sheriff Spurlock been dragging his feet on this?”

“Well, since Kershaw and Holtzer were killed on federal land, and that’s not Spurlock’s jurisdiction, he hasn’t been all that involved in those investigations. But Durkin did ask him for any information he might come up with on them, and Spurlock says he don’t have none. My guess is, even if he did know something, he wouldn’t be likely to give it to us if it might cause any trouble for somebody he knows. The Del Ponte death is the one Spurlock’s really dragging his feet on.”

“Where was he killed?”

“Alongside State Road 181, down in Squaw Canyon. That’s where he was found, anyway. About a mile and a half before you reach the reservation.”

“He might have been killed somewhere else and dumped there?”

“Couldn’t tell. He’s the one the animals got to before we did.”

Wager remembered. “So it could have been natural causes?”

“Could. Or couldn’t. Ruled a suspicious death.”

Which was the normal label for a death that had not been sworn to by a doctor or coroner as natural. The location of the corpse made Spurlock the primary investigator on that one—his jurisdiction, his case—despite Del Ponte being an informant for the FBI. It also sounded like the case that could provide Wager with the clearest legal basis for his own involvement. “He’s not copying you on his reports?”

“Hasn’t yet. Far as I know, he’s not doing enough work to generate any reports. Moreover, the state district attorney just shrugs and says it’s the sheriff’s job and there’s no evidence it was a homicide, and even if it is, there’s no statute of limitations in Colorado for filing charges on a homicide, so there’s no rush either way.”

“Are you saying ‘cover up’?”

“No. No, I’m not accusing anybody of that, so don’t go saying I am. All I am saying is that Sheriff Spurlock is taking his own sweet time about doing anything, and what little he has done, he’s not telling us about. Just why he’s moving so slow is something else, and I don’t make any guesses as to that.”

“What’s his name? The DA?”

“Medina. Betty Medina. She’s down in Montezuma County but acts for La Sal county, too. There’s not enough people in La Sal County to support a DA’s office. Hardly enough to pay for their own sheriff’s office, and was I Spurlock I’d worry about any one of my taxpayers getting killed off.”

Talking to the DA would mean going back to Cortez, the Montezuma County seat. Wager might get by with a phone call and save that long trip—depending on what he would have to ask District Attorney Medina. And how he might have to ask it. Some things, like a person’s eyes, you just couldn’t read over a telephone. “There’s a Colorado Highway Patrol office in Dry Creek, isn’t there?”

“I think so, yeah. But they’re not involved in any of this. Thank God. All we need’s another agency to cooperate with.”

“Just drop me off there; they’re supposed to have a vehicle for me,” Wager said.

A courier had driven it down from the state motor pool branch in Grand Junction. As plain as Henderson’s federal vehicle, the state vehicle was an old dull-white Plymouth Caravelle with official Colorado license plates and antennae mounted on the roof and on the slope of the rear deck. The boxy sedan’s engine was still making little noises as it cooled from the long run along State 141.

“You want to sign this, Officer Wager?” Trooper Shonsey held out a Bic pen. Its point hovered over the line for “Receipt of Vehicle.” He was lean and tall and his uniform had been tailored to fit snugly and without wrinkling. It reminded Wager of the skintight khaki uniform shirts he’d invested in when he’d finished boot camp. The Marine Corps’ regulation issue, given his wide shoulders and short legs, looked baggy on him, so he’d had his shirts tailored. Along with the modifications to his dress blues, it had cost him almost a month’s pay, and he’d only had a chance to wear the dress uniform for two weeks on leave before being sent to the Pacific. But he could remember the special feel of that stiff blue cloth with its scarlet-and-gold PFC stripe on the sleeve, and the sliver glitter of the expert marksmanship badges on his chest. He would, though he didn’t know it then, soon rate cheery little campaign ribbons to place above those badges. That spasm of vanity had cost a lot, but it had been worth it.

“I got the keys right here, soon as you sign.”

Wager traded his name for the keys strung together with a paper identification tag and asked the trooper for the local radio channels used by police and emergency units. “Do you work closely with Sheriff Spurlock?”

“Close? No—not unless it’s a pursuit or a road block. Sometimes a medical call. My job’s the state and federal highways, he covers the county roads.”

“How about Deputy Morris? Do you know him?”

“Howie? Sure. Lives over near Egnarville. That’s in his sector: southwest corner of the county. Sector four.”

Wager placed the town on the Colorado highway map he held in his memory. It wasn’t difficult because in this part of the state there weren’t many dots with names to them. “It’s near the reservation?”

“Squaw Point Reservation, yeah. About eight miles.”

“Did you work on that body they found out there?”

“Del Ponte? I answered the call along with the sheriff’s office—it was a state highway they found him on. But Howie and the S.O. cleared the scene. The death didn’t involve a vehicle, so the only part I had was traffic control: a pick-up truck and two stray cows. Couple of nosy rabbits.”

Wager wasn’t certain if the man was joking, but he didn’t see anything funny in it. “Have you worked closely with any of the FBI or BLM agents?”

“Not closely or otherwise.” Shonsey carefully filed the vehicle release form in a manila folder and slid a metal drawer closed. “But you ought to know, Officer Wager, there’s some hard feelings around here toward federal agents. That was Henderson who dropped you off, wasn’t it? The BLM man?”

Wager nodded.

“Well, it doesn’t matter to me either way. But like I say, people here don’t put any trust in anything to do with the federal government.”

“That includes Sheriff Spurlock?”

“Matter of fact it does. He and that FBI agent—Durbin? Durman?—traded some hard words. The way Spurlock tells it, he and Henderson came in here from Denver or Washington, D.C., or somewhere and begun to tell Spurlock how to run his county and what he should do on the Del Ponte case and I don’t know what all. The upshot was one hell of an argument, I understand, and Spurlock told both of them he didn’t want to see either of their ugly faces in his office again. Ever. So if you’re thinking of getting some help from the S.O., you might want to think twice about palling around with Henderson anymore.”

“I’ll remember that.”

A shrug. “Like I say, it doesn’t make any difference to me—as long as it doesn’t have anything to do with the state highways.”

T
HE
S.O.
DISPATCHER
told Wager that Deputy Sheriff Howie Morris was on patrol somewhere out of reach of their radio equipment. She would have to relay his request to meet the next time Deputy Morris made his hourly check-in. In theory, “on patrol” could mean anywhere in the approximately 350 square miles that made up the southwest quadrant of La Sal County and which was Morris’s sole responsibility seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. Studying his topo map, Wager saw that most of the local vehicle lanes in the flat, western edge of the county were made up of section roads. On the map they made a dozen or so clusters of short, straight lines and right angles that tended to end in the dark tan of tightly bunched contour lines, indicating steep canyon walls and washes impassable for vehicles. Three or four of those county roads turned into stray squiggles that managed to link various clusters together before they disappeared across the state line into Utah, and a couple more angled into remoter corners of the Squaw Point Reservation before stopping. The mountainous, eastern portion of Morris’s quadrant was colored green for national forest land and was just about empty of any roads at all. Only two paved highways crossed the western side of the entire county. One was U.S. 666, which Wager and Henderson had driven up from Cortez; it angled northwest toward Monticello, Utah. The other was State Highway 181, which was the main road west from the county seat of La Sal township, down Squaw Canyon and into the reservation. Its pavement ended at Dark Mesa Village, which is where the government offices and the tribal council center were located. All the other roads on the reservation were the parallel dashes that indicated unimproved dirt. Along those two paved highways were three settlements big enough to have names and to be shown as clusters of tiny black squares marking the towns’ buildings. Two of the towns were in Morris’s quadrant, and Wager figured that if he drove slowly along State 181 toward one of the clusters—Egnarville—he would be reasonably close when the man made his hourly contact with the dispatcher.

It was the right idea but the wrong direction. The woman’s voice finally came up on Wager’s radio with the message that Deputy Morris would be waiting for him at the cafe in Gypsum. Wager acknowledged and turned his vehicle around, heading back toward U.S. 666 and the second cluster of half a dozen tiny black squares.

Like the other municipalities of Colorado, this town’s name signs—here mounted back to back on one post—gave Gypsum’s elevation rather than its population: 6,843 feet. Wager guessed the number of people above ground was quite a bit less than the number of feet above sea level—around 6,800 less. But even with a population of at most a hundred or so, they didn’t like living too close to each other. Two dirt section roads met the pavement to form the center of town. On one corner was the Gypsum Motel and Restaurant, a long two-story rectangle of pink stucco with a pink neon sign glowing VACANCY. Another sign said TELEPHONE AND FREE TELEVISION IN EVERY ROOM. A large receiving dish, angled to the sky and resting in a corner of the almost vacant gravel parking area beside an empty horse trailer, said the sign told the truth. Facing the motel from across the highway was a combination service station and grocery store whose dusty and sun-bleached false front said MCPHEE’S MARKET. Behind that was a small frame house that must have belonged to McPhee. A two-story redbrick building sat a few yards down the highway beyond the store. Its lower windows were covered with irregular sheets of weathered plywood, the upper windows glassless and black. The only other construction was a large metal Butler building surrounded by rusting farm machinery. Someone had printed in black paint the word “Welding” halfway across its side. A quarter mile away, tucked under a fringe of leafless cottonwoods that wandered along a streambed, were scattered a handful of mobile homes, and beyond them a two-story sandstone ranch house with a stubby silo and a barn. The rest was flat emptiness dotted with gray-blue sagebrush and broken by a swell or two of land and the occasional dark blob of a lonely cedar tree. In fact, if he’d wanted to spend half an hour, Wager could probably have counted each tree. Over it all was a vast overcast grayness streaked with wind-sculpted, low-lying clouds that leached color from the afternoon sun and turned it into a pale white disk that—to Wager, who was used to the mountains being on Denver’s western horizon—seemed strangely low in the sky.

He stood for a moment beside his car and listened to the wind. Far off a dog barked. Each yap was separated from the next by a long pause that accentuated the silence. The loose collection of weathered buildings, the line of crooked, skinny telephone poles—black against the gray sky—that paced down the vacant highway to sag wires to the few roofs, the sandy footpaths straggling on each side of the highway’s frayed asphalt, all spoke of transiency and isolation—as if the wind had blown these buildings and their people into a loose collection like trash in a corner, and would, everyone knew, one of these days blow them all away to leave the high desert empty once more.

It was an atmosphere of rootlessness, of suspicion toward community that was far different from that seen in the Anasazi ruins found in the canyons and cliffs of the surrounding deserts. There, the ancient ones had gathered together to share the stone walls and stick-and-clay ceilings that formed their honeycombed villages. They must have been happy to have their fellows busy in the fields around them during the days and gathered close beside the cooking fires in the nights, pleased to share each other’s nearness in the small rooms of the pueblos and in the secret wombs of the men’s kivas and the ceremonial buildings of the women. It was as if their sense of community—heightened by the boundlessness of canyon and plateau and mesa, where a hunting son or father could vanish into emptiness—had found focus and harmony in building, out of the very earth that supported them, the physical representation of their life together. As if, being so rooted, they might last forever. But of course they hadn’t. The wind now blew through the cold and empty fragments of their stone walls just as it swirled around this collection of flimsy and decaying buildings. And that thought made Wager wonder if the Anasazi, too, had had their murderers and thieves, their selfish violators of community. Probably—ancient ones or no, they were human, too. But perhaps, because they valued the community that was so much a part of their collective and individual sense of self, they had fewer violators. Perhaps, because they understood so deeply the threat of the waiting emptiness surrounding them, and the importance of those who joined in creating a place against all that emptiness, they were more civilized.