*
Deputy Virgil Tulley hoped he would never get used to real depravity. There was only so long a decent man could stare into the chasm of horror before he got dizzy. On such occasions it was his habit to pick up his cell phone and call his ma in Ohio. Today was no exception.
Ma Tulley had important information to impart. “Your brother Billy lost his right testicle last week while they was dehorning.”
“No kidding.” Tulley crossed his legs.
“They sewed it back on, but Marybeth says that’s just for cosmetic appearance’ sake. He won’t be a Daddy again.”
“They don’t need any more kids, Ma.”
“If I’d took that attitude you’d have never been born.”
Tulley squinted up at the ceiling fan. One of the blades was lose. With each drunken gyration, it clicked like a cricket in the mating season. His skin prickled. Sweaty nausea had dried in a thin film all over his body. Lucky he kept a change of shirt at work.
“I got that Chinese sow,” his ma said. “There’s money in pet pigs nowadays. They walk ’em on a leash in L.A., you know. Get bored and it’s always a good meal, I guess.”
“Ma, people don’t eat their pets.” He glanced at the case file in front of him. “Most people, anyways.”
“They got that Union County grand champion boar servicing gilts over Harper’s place. We’re next. Weighs seven hundred eighty pound.”
“That’s a shitload of bacon.”
“Owner reckons he can do four sows in an hour.”
“Who? The hog?”
A long-suffering sigh. “If you think you’re gonna get a rise out of me with your trash talk, you’re mistaken, boy.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Tulley snickered. He was a grown man. He didn’t have to fear the pig paddle anymore.
“We’re getting them snout coolers,” his ma continued. “Had a farrowing decline last summer. Heat stress. That’s what the vet says. What you got to do to prevent that is keep their noses cold.”
“Like dogs,” Tulley noted.
“What you call for, anyways? I got better things to do than listen to you bragging on that hound of yours again.”
*
A few feet away, Detective Jude Devine cracked open a can of ginger ale and rocked her chair back, legs crossed, feet on the corner of her desk. She surmised Tulley had been reading the Pohlman case file. Made it as far as the dog-burger bit, then called his ma. Nothing like a debriefing on hog husbandry to hustle a sensitive soul back to mundane reality.
Tulley was the youngest of eleven and had something to prove. The impressive trappings of a career in law enforcement were made to order for him. No one polished his badge like this kid. Not so long ago he’d applied to the sheriff’s office for permission to have an exact replica cast in solid fourteen karat gold. Concerned about setting a precedent, they’d turned him down. Jude had to talk him out of taking the matter up in writing with Governor Owen. Gold scratches like hell anyway, she’d pointed out. Why not spend the two thousand bucks on something more practical?
Tulley had taken her advice. Within days he’d plunked his money down on a bloodhound described in the
Lawman’s Best Friend
as “a true gallant descended from a line of champion cadaver hounds and felon trackers.” The dog was surplus to requirements at Georgia State Penitentiary, where fancy new security was putting fine animals like him out of a job.
Jude had rustled up some not-exactly-kosher cigarette company sponsorship and persuaded her superiors to approve six weeks of handler training for Tulley at the Advanced Canine Academy. When he graduated, a posse of Marlboro executives hit town to stage-manage the occasion. They lured the Channel 9 people out of Denver to cover the story, and the front page of every local rag from Grand Junction to Cortez ran a picture of the suits benevolently awarding Smoke’m a monogrammed collar and five years worth of Purina lamb and rice. In exchange for this largesse and the price of a K-9 vehicle, a Marlboro Man billboard—minus the brand logo—now dominated the vacant lot next to the Montrose & Montezuma County Sheriffs’ outpost in Paradox Valley. The executives called this a “subtle artistic tribute” to their one-time icon, now banned across the land of the free.
Every time Jude looked at the twenty-foot cowboy’s chiseled jaw, she reminded herself that this
homage
was a small price to pay for the full service status deeply coveted by remote offices. No longer would she and Tulley wait in vain for the deputies of Cortez to mark their dance card. No longer would they be passed over in big-ticket cases because someone supposedly had to be on hand in the canyon area to investigate petty campsite thefts, hiker disputes, and cattle rustling. Jude was a sheriff’s detective, even if she was only a woman, and her substation now operated one of just four K-9 units in the region. As far as the dispatchers were concerned, that meant Paradox could pursue and detain upon their own initiative.
So, when the 911 call came in about a suspicious discovery in a garment bag, Jude tapped Tulley on the shoulder and said, “Tell your ma good-bye and get that hound on a leash. We’re not wallflowers anymore.”
*
By the time they reached the Slick Rock Bridge, an impressive lineup of silver and blue Ford Crowns were parked at the scene, lights flashing. Several state patrol troopers were directing the scant traffic and preventing guys with kayaks from heading down the riverbank. Another was taking statements from two males in their twenties. The shorter of this pair looked like the adult version of the fat kid everyone teased in school. Hands crammed into the pockets of his too-tight jeans, he stared at the ground as his cool-dude companion did the talking.
Jude parked her Dodge Dakota alongside Tulley’s K-9 Durango, located her camera, and bailed out. Gesturing at the flashy Silverado parked in front of the local café, she asked her sidekick, “Recognize that truck?”
“Bobby Lee Parker.” Tulley opened the back of the Durango so Smoke’m could dangle his dewlaps in the fresh air. “DUI. Served eighteen months for assault with a deadly weapon. Suspect in a couple of gas station robberies. Fond of the ladies, ’specially those in uniform.”
Jude looked harder at the cowboy in question and it all came back. Parker had spent last New Year’s Eve in jail after a brawl over someone’s girlfriend. His mom, a local artist and president of the Concerned Citizens for Cannabis Law Reform, had bailed him out. A few days later he showed up at the sheriff’s office in Cortez with a bunch of flowers and a poem for a female deputy. The young woman had actually dated him for a time, sparking a firestorm of gossip that even found its way to Paradox. He was, the deputy told her colleagues, “real suave for ’round here.”
As she and Tulley approached, Parker snapped to and smoothed his frosted blond cowlick, presumably at the sight of a female, even one with shorter hair and more muscles than him. He was barking up the wrong tree, but Jude had no plans to advertise the fact. This was not Boulder, with its liberals and GLBT picnics. This was southwestern Colorado, a few miles from the Utah border, less than a day’s drive from Matthew Shepard’s Laramie.
After identifying herself and Tulley, she sought out the most senior of the troopers, a rangy fortysomething who introduced himself as Henson.
“What have we got?” she asked.
“DOA. Hundred yards thataways.” He pointed down the riverbank.
“Smells real bad, ma’am.” Parker flashed a grin that probably worked on females who had never been to the big city. Even standing still, the guy had a swagger. “Got a clean bandanna in my truck if you need to cover your mouth.”
“What I need is for you to talk to Deputy Tulley, here.” Jude returned her attention to Trooper Henson and invited, “Lead the way.”
They followed a well-worn track through silver-green grasses and gnarled junipers to the banks of the Dolores. The once mighty River of Our Lady of Sorrows meandered north between walls of stratified sandstone, through the open spaces of Big Gypsum, into Slickrock Canyon and on to Paradox Valley. 160 million years of history were etched along its serpentine progress, from dinosaur tracks to the ruins of Anasazi Indian villages, to homesteader graves and the poisonous dust layer that was once Uravan, a uranium mining town bulldozed when its cancer epidemic made the news.
Jude had made it her business to get to know the area since moving out here, and spent most of her leisure time exploring on horseback. It was a world like none she’d ever known, a far cry from D.C. Lack of water kept rapacious developers away, which meant you could look out across a vast, natural landscape unsullied by human presence. Jude loved that. There was nothing like sitting on a horse high on a mesa, alone in this timeless splendor, feeling like a tiny speck on the ass of Mother Nature.
The track leveled out and she stopped and gazed toward the canyon mouth where a large cottonwood stood, impossibly alive and green in a barren sea of rock. From its branches, an owl stared at her, a rare sight in the garish brightness of day.
The harbinger of death.
Jude shivered and continued along the riverbank, following the unmistakable hum of feasting insects. A few feet ahead, a squadron of flies hovered drunkenly around a vintage suiter split open to reveal what appeared to be female remains. The hair was long and the bloated facial features still vaguely identifiable. Jude pulled on some latex gloves and covered her nose and mouth with a handkerchief she’d pocketed for the occasion. The victim was young, maybe even a teen, fair haired and Caucasian, at least as far as she could tell.
Time since death was hard to guess. At a glance, Jude thought maybe a week, but submerged bodies decomposed more slowly than those left exposed, so it was more likely two or even three weeks. She did some math. The rains had struck six days earlier, so the body could not have been underwater any longer than that. Even with the August heat, the decomp rate seemed to be out of step with this time frame, which meant the killer must have hidden the body somewhere before he put it in the water. Poor planning, Jude thought.
Maybe it was a spur-of-the-moment killing and the perpetrator had to wait for an opportunity to travel to the dump site. He would probably have wanted to hide his victim some distance away from his home environment. Had he driven for a while, looking for a likely spot, or had he planned on the Dolores all along? He must have put the suiter into the river somewhere near Cahone, Jude calculated, for it to have drifted to its present location. There was no other direct access by road after that, until Slip Rock bridge.
She supposed it was equally possible that he’d dug a shallow grave right here in the muddy riverbed a week or so before the rains. The storm waters would have loosened the earth, and when the river started to flow again, the garment bag would have floated free. As a body dump strategy, it seemed like hard work and a high risk of disturbance, but maybe the killer had wanted this victim to be found. Either way, the body disposal seemed like the work of someone unpracticed.
Jude put a few paces between herself and the putrid discovery, and released the breath she was holding. Trooper Henson offered his Tic Tacs.
“Guess you’ll be wanting that hound down here,” he said.
“Not yet. We’ll have to wait till the forensic team is through.”
It was doubtful Smoke’m would have a role to play. Having been in the water, the bag wouldn’t hold the killer’s scent anymore. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to see if the sniffer hound turned up anything of interest in the general vicinity, and Tulley was desperate for an opportunity to flaunt his K-9 handler skills.
“I better call in.” Henson was clearly keen to go where the air smelled sweeter.
“Sure,” Jude waved him away. “I’ll finish up here.”
She photographed the scene and wandered along the bank a few yards toward the cottonwood. The owl kept tabs on her, its demeanor one of vague affront. She was probably disturbing some rodent it was stalking. Her eyes drifted east toward Disappointment Valley and the adobe badlands skirting McKenna’s Peak. The mountain rose silver and conical above the pomegranate landscape. Wild horses still roamed its slopes, the last survivors of human encroachment that had condemned their kind to near extinction.
The Old West no longer existed and its scars were plain to see. Yet, in the eerie majesty of this place, the untamed spirit of those times remained palpable. With an odd sense that prairie ghosts were watching, Jude returned to the body and lifted the canvas so she could see inside the suiter.