Fire and Ice

Gripping the steering wheel with both hands, Ernie swung the Yukon off the road and into the dunes along a course that included several of those tracks. Even with four-wheel drive, he had to maintain a fair amount of speed to keep from getting bogged down.

As they jolted along, Joanna checked her seat belt and then held on to her armrest. “How can this be?”she said over the laboring sound of the engine. “I’ve lived here all my life and never knew these dunes were here!”

“Think about Kartchner Caverns,”Ernie replied. “Lots of people knew about that before it ever came out in public. This is all on private property. As far as I know, it’s only been open to ATVers in the last few years. Now that I think about it, I think some environmental group or other was trying to buy it up a few years back, but the owner wouldn’t sell.”

Kartchner Caverns, a series of limestone caverns on the far side of Benson, was Cochise County’s most recent tourism hot spot. The caves had been discovered in the late seventies by a pair of hikers who had been exploring the countryside at the base of the Whetstone Mountains. When they had first located and started exploring the caverns, they were located on private land owned by a family named Kartchner. It had taken another ten years to make arrangements to transfer the property to the state of Arizona and turn it into a state park people could actually come visit. Now Kartchner Caverns is a genuine tourist home run. Joanna wondered if something similar was going on with Action Trail Adventures. People in the ATV community seemed to know all about it. No one else did.

Is that what this murder is all about? Joanna wondered. Have we wandered into some kind of environmental range war?

The Yukon crested a dune. In the cleft between that dune and the next, Joanna caught sight of the crime scene. The debris field included an upright ATV as well as a second one that had been tipped over onto its side. Yards away from the vehicles in a tangle of tire tracks lay something that, from this distance, might have been a pile of loose laundry.

The victim, Joanna thought. “Stop for a minute, please,”she said to Ernie. “Let me take a look from here.”

Ernie stopped abruptly, allowing a towering plume of dust to blow past them. When it cleared, Joanna could see the victim again. He looked like a crumpled rag doll, lying facedown in sand. Around him ranged a complex scribble of vehicle tracks that resembled the Etch-a-sketch doodlings of some giant-sized child.

Joanna glanced at her detective. “So what do you think happened?”she asked.

Ernie shrugged. “I don’t know,”he said. “It looks to me like several vehicles were involved.”

“And several people?”

Ernie nodded. “We’ve got tracks of that one wrecked ATV and at least two others, four-wheel-drive pickups, most likely, one with dual rear tires. I’m guessing the dead guy rode up on the wrecked ATV right through there.”

Ernie pointed casually off to his left, where a pair of tracks emerged from the cleft between the dunes and then disappeared into the tumult of disturbed sand.

“Once he got here, I’m guessing there was an altercation of some kind. There may have been some gunfire.”

“What makes you say that?”

“For one thing, somebody evidently took a shot at the dog. There’s an empty scabbard on the ATV. I doubt the owner would have shot his own dog. But if there are weapons or shell casings out here, we’ll need metal detectors to find them.”

“Okay, so all these guys meet up. What do you think happened next?”

“At some point, I think, our victim, the guy on the ATV, may have tried to leave. One of the larger vehicles T-boned him and knocked him ass over teakettle. Once the victim was on foot, the other guys ran him down. Not just once, either—several times over.”

“Sounds cold-blooded,”Joanna said.

Ernie nodded. “It was cold-blooded. I suspect he died from internal injuries. Machett should be able to tell us for sure, if and when he bothers to show up.”

Despite being in agreement with Ernie’s disparaging remark about Dr. Machett, Joanna let it pass. “What about that single track?”she asked, pointing to a track in the sand that disappeared over the top of the next dune. “The one that leads off to the right from the body?”

“Looks to me like the dog made that one, either going or coming or maybe both,”Ernie said. “The bad guys probably ran him off, but he came back as soon as the coast was clear. I have to give the damned dog credit,”the detective added grudgingly. “Even though he’d been shot, he was downright fierce about not letting any of us near that body. After he offered to tear me limb from limb, I was a little surprised to see Natalie Wilson with him on a leash, walking around just as nice as you please.”

Which is why you work homicide and she’s animal control, Joanna thought.

She studied the expanse of disrupted sand around the body. “You said you thought one of the vehicles had dual tires. How do you know that?”

“This isn’t the shortest way to and from the gate, but it’s the most passable. If you look carefully, you can see the dips left in the sand by the dual wheels even though you can’t make out the treads on the tire.”

Joanna looked down and saw that he was right. The tracks were there, but the fine grade of the sand left behind no visible tread.

“The victim didn’t bother following the road when he came here, and he didn’t take a direct route from the gate, either,”Ernie said. “It looks to me like he approached the scene by zigzagging in and out between the dunes.”

“Trying to stay out of sight, maybe?”Joanna asked.

Ernie nodded. “Could be,”he said.

“In other words,”Joanna said, “it’s possible the victim realized something was amiss and came out to investigate.”

“Maybe,”Ernie agreed.

“What about the trailer back by the gate?”Joanna asked. “Any sign of breaking and entering?”

“Lots,”Ernie said. “The front door is smashed and the inside is a mess. No way to tell from looking at it if anything was taken. We’ll need to dust it for prints, but with Casey away at that conference, that’s problematic. Jaime said he can collect the prints, but we won’t be able to run them through AFIS until Casey gets back.”

Jaime Carbajal was Joanna’s third homicide detective. It was unusual to have Joanna’s entire homicide unit focused on only one case, but for right now she was glad that was possible.

“By the way, where is Jaime?”Joanna wanted to know.

“I asked him to stop off and pick up a search warrant for the trailer.”

“But the guy who lived there is dead…”Joanna began.

“I know, I know,”Ernie replied. “But what if he isn’t the owner? What if the trailer actually belongs to Action Trail? The owners of that might have an objection.”

“What are you thinking?”Joanna asked.

“Look,”Ernie said, “I know this is all supposition on my part, but what if Action Trail Adventures is being used as a cover for a drug-smuggling operation? Maybe the victim was in on it; maybe he wasn’t. But supposing we end up finding out that the owners of Action Trail Adventures are somehow involved in what went on. We’d better be damned sure we have a valid search warrant in hand before we ever set foot inside that trailer. Otherwise, whatever we find there could end up being ruled as inadmissable.”

“Good point,”Joanna said.

“And I noticed what looked like the remains of a surveillance camera near the gate,”Ernie added. “The killers probably took that down as they were leaving.”

“Makes sense to me,”Joanna said. “But if there’s a camera, there’s probably also a tape. We need to find that, too.”

“Yes, we do,”Ernie asked. “Seen enough?”

“I think so,”Joanna said. “Let’s go talk with your witness.”

I’M JUST an ordinary guy, and it’s taken me a lifetime to learn that we all exist in a world of unintended consequences. For me that’s more than just a slogan. It’s life itself. My unmarried mother had no intention of getting pregnant with me, but she did. And when her fiancé, my father, died in a motorcycle accident prior to my birth, my mother had choices. Even though abortions were illegal back then, she could probably have found a way to make one happen, but she didn’t. And she could have given me up for adoption, but she didn’t do that, either. In spite of her family’s opposition, she had me and raised me and, if you ask me, she did a damned fine job of it, too.

I lost Karen, my first wife, twice. The first time was as a result of the divorce and that was an unintended consequence of my years of drinking. I usually claim it was caused by working and drinking, but you need to consider the source. That’s how alcoholics work. Even when we finally sober up, we try to rationalize things away and minimize the impact our love affair with the bottle had on ourselves and the people around us. When I lost Karen the second time, it was to cancer. Not my fault. I didn’t cause it, and I like to think that, before she died, I managed to make amends for some of the heartache I caused her, and I’m very fortunate to have lived long enough to have a chance to get back in my kids’ lives.

And then there’s Anne Corley, my second wife. When I think of Anne now, I can still see her, striding purposefully through that cemetery on Queen Anne Hill in her bright red dress. And that’s pretty much all I remember, and maybe it’s better that way. Of course, I was still drinking then, so a lot of my forgetfulness may be due to booze, but there’s no arguing with the fact that what happened between us in the course of those next few dizzying days was astonishing—both astonishingly good and astonishingly bad. Thrown together, we were a fire that burned too hot and bright to last—like the brilliant flash from a dying lightbulb just before it goes black.

What I do know about those few interim days was that we didn’t talk about money. We never talked about money. We had far more important things to think about and do, but the money was there all the time. The fact that Anne had plenty of money was plain to see in everything about her: in the car she drove—a Porsche 928; in the hotel where she stayed—the Four Seasons Olympic in those days; in the clothing she wore; in the way she carried herself.

At the time I was far too wrapped up in being with her to wonder what she could possibly see in a hard-drinking homicide cop. And once she was gone, I was too devastated by losing her to have any grasp on what she had given me. It turned out I wasn’t so much a fortune hunter as I was a fortune finder. The money she gave me was there, but for a long time I didn’t pay much attention to it. (Thank God, Anne also left me under the wing of her very capable attorney, Ralph Ames, who was paying attention to it. He’s also the one who finally helped force me into treatment, but that’s another story.)