Chapter 14

IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE THE fellas’ day off, but Stuckey and Gabe were lined up like schoolboys on the bunkhouse porch in front of the pudgy cop, who held a tape recorder. Gabe and Stuckey both had their cowboy hats snugged down hard. Stuckey looked half-whipped and plenty scared, in jeans, a denim shirt, cowboy boots, and the beginnings of a good bruise on the left side of his jaw. Gabe wore an openmouthed stare as he listened to the cop. It occurred to me that just rolling out of bed, they’d both been caught unawares by police on the ranch.

I wanted to observe them but had no time. Another police SUV had joined the cluster of vehicles, this one towing a small, open, empty trailer with two ramps coming off the back. I realized the four-wheeler we’d heard from inside Ivy’s house had been a police machine, not one of the ranch’s rigs.

The ponytailed woman cop was leaning in the driver’s window of that unmarked car, talking to a man in a plaid shirt behind the wheel who was holding an extra-large cell phone in his right hand. He was looking at me through the windshield and obviously mentioned my presence to the uniformed cop. Ponytail pressed the button on her shoulder mic and whatever it was she said made Pudgy, over on the bunkhouse porch, press his radio button and say, “Ten-four.”

I caught parts of what Ponytail and the plainclothes dude in the unmarked car were debating—whether to have me go to the station for a video interview right then.

Plaid Shirt said, “Let’s do the preliminary in one of the residences if we can.”

“I was going to put her in my front seat,” Ponytail said.

He shook his head half an inch. “Not in a police car.”

I cleared my throat hard and walked toward them. “Y’all wanted to talk to me.”

A look passed between them, then Plaid Shirt started talking on his bulky phone again. Beside him on the front seat was a machine our local vet back home carries into a few barns on special call-outs—a portable X-ray unit. These were not the kind of people who looked at horses’ bones inside a hoof capsule. I hadn’t figured on them using an X-ray machine for anything.

Ponytail gave me a big smile and jerked her head toward the three men outside of the bunkhouse’s front door. “I’m going to grab something from my car. Meet you over there.”

I toddled to the bunkhouse. On the porch, I said, “Um, fellas, Ivy wants you up at her place.”

Stuckey ducked his head down an inch as he asked Pudgy, “Can we go?”

When the cop gave an okay, Stuckey pretty well bolted for the big house.

“There’s no one else inside this house?” Pudgy asked Gabe.

“Nope.”

“Mind if we look, just for our safety?”

“Fine by me.”

“Well, do you live here, sir?”

“Yeah,” Gabe said, “I live here.”

“Great, then you can give us permission to go inside. And you’re giving that consent now, right?”

Gabe leaned without moving his feet and swung the bunkhouse’s front door wide open. “Be my guest.”

I looked from Gabe to the cop and back again. All sorts of conflicted feelings rose in me. I didn’t have a dog in this fight. I didn’t want to interfere with the police and whatever lawful doings they had on tap. Ivy had been good to me and she wasn’t inclined to have the police tromping through her property. Oscar seemed like a real good fellow.

Pudgy walked in and kept going, room to room, with momentum.

In front of the open door, barely moving my lips, I said to Gabe, “Ivy didn’t want the po-lice inside at all.”

“Zoo monkeys having a shit fight are more organized than these cops.” Gabe matched my super-quiet speech, eyeing the police inside, all the cars outside. “It would only make them suspicious to keep them out.”

“But what happens if—”

Gabe walked into the open living room of the bunkhouse, removing his hat. I followed his lead.

Pudgy strolled back from his wander around the rooms and spoke loud into this radio. “That’s a ten-four. It appears unoccupied in a quick search.”

Then Pudgy turned away from us, fading back into the bunkhouse living room and turning down the volume on his radio when a couple of different voices came back on the channel. I didn’t catch a word of that static-clipped code. Ponytail stepped onto the porch and joined us, walking in through the open front door like it was an invitation.

Pudgy pivoted in front of an open bedroom door and asked Gabe, “What’s in the trunk, sir?”

“My personal stuff.”

“That’s your bedroom?”

Gabe nodded and folded his arms across his chest, then immediately unfolded them and tucked his thumbs in the front pockets of his jeans.

“And the other rooms?”

All four of the bedroom doors were open, revealing small rooms, each with a twin bed, a footlocker, and a small dresser. One looked so clean and tidy, it had to be the unused bedroom that I’d been offered for the night. A fifth door showed a plain, single bathroom.

“Other hands stay here,” Gabe said. “Some seasonal workers, some more permanent, like myself.”

“I’d like you to make a list of all the people who work here.” Gabe did an angled tilt with his head. “Respectfully, officer, that’s something you should see my boss about.”

“I’d like your cooperation.”

“I feel like I gave it to you, sir.” Gabe redonned his cowboy hat. “If you’ll excuse me now, I’ve got chores to see to.”

With Pudgy’s curt nod, Gabe headed for the front door and was out in a flash. I started to follow him but heard the mutter behind me.

“This could work,” Pudgy said.

“Yeah,” Ponytail agreed. “Noncustodial. That’s how they want it done.”

I wondered if I’d remember what they said long enough to ask Melinda about it the next time I had a cell connection or a land-line. Or the next time I was home. I stepped out the front door and ran into Gabe, who was suddenly striding back across the porch, hatless. Almost touching him, I leaned in and asked, “Where’s Oscar?”

“In your truck.” Gabe’s comment was so quiet, so low, only I heard, especially over his heavy footfalls as he continued stomping across the bunkhouse porch, jumped off, and made for the barn.

Between the two houses sat Ol’ Blue. I realized how close my truck was parked to one of the bunkhouse windows and that Gabe and Oscar had made use of the convenience.

Now the creak of one of my truck’s cab doors opening caught my attention. I was looking at the driver’s side. Its door was closed, so the passenger side had been used this time. Over the topper, I barely made out the back edge of a cowboy hat slipping away, making for the flagstone entry to the big house.

“Excuse me, sir? Ma’am?” Gabe’s holler made both deputies come to the door and look his way as he headed for the barn. I walked a couple steps back on the porch to give them room. And I suppose my body blocked their view of the big house.

Gabe waved toward the barn, the opposite direction from that flagstone entryway to safety, the other side of Ol’ Blue. “I have to go into the barn to feed the horses. I can be quick about it. Just throwing hay. And of course, you’re welcome to come with. Is that okay?”

“That’s fine, sir,” Ponytail called then shot the potbellied cop a look.

“Yeah, I’ll go,” Pudgy mumbled to her, and followed Gabe to the barn.

That hadn’t been Stuckey ducking for Ivy’s house, I decided. It was Oscar, wearing Gabe’s hat. I didn’t like the feeling of deception, of taking sides, of conflict, but I didn’t know where I stood in all this mess.

***

“So, Rainy Dale.” Ponytail held a palm-sized recorder between us. “Can we sit down and talk? Maybe in here? Because your nine-one-one call this morning is a little unbelievable.”

She stepped back into the bunkhouse. I hesitated only a second before following. Ivy had as good as invited me to stay there tonight, after all. I could be in the bunkhouse with the cop.

Ponytail plugged an ear bud into her left ear and her radio. The irregular squawks of police radio communications stopped.

She started her recorder and said some official-sounding stuff about how I was free to leave and that I was there of my own accord, then said, “I’d like to understand exactly what happened this morning that led to you calling nine-one-one.”

“Oh. Right. Well, like I mentioned I figured out from the way my dog was behaving …” Again, we fleshed out what I’d quickly told the nine-one-one operator and the cops as they arrived on the scene when I’d been riding down from the hill, what, a half hour ago? I told again how it came to pass that I’d dug where I had and unearthed the body, just like I’d explained it to Ivy a few minutes ago, a hundred feet away.

My cop rolled her eyes, pointedly looking at Charley curled up beside my leg. “Should we dig up the floor where he’s laying now?”

“Um, no I don’t reckon so.”

“I have a pit bull,” Ponytail said. “Sometimes he lays down in the same spot in my backyard. I’ve never thought that maybe I should dig up the ground underneath him just in case there’s a corpse where he lies down.”

“Well, a pittie isn’t a shepherd, is all I can say. If you’re not into sheepherding, then you’ve never seen that painting of The Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner.”

She exhaled, inhaled, then blew out a long time again. “You’re serious? You figured out that this dog of yours, that you found two years ago off the interstate, used to belong to a Vicente Arriaga who worked on this ranch, and the dog lay down yesterday a couple of times on one spot at the top of that big hill, so you decided that his previous owner was buried there and today you dug him up?”

I nodded, whole and honest. “That’s how it seemed to me.”

Her gaze attained a canny glint. “Suicide, you think?”

“I guess I don’t … well, I mean, someone must have buried him for him to be buried.”

Her expression dulled as I finally articulated the point, apparently trying her patience. “How do you think he came to be buried up there?”

“I have no information or knowledge about that,” I said. “None.”

“Are you willing to sit down with our detective and also take a polygraph on your story?”

“Sure,” I told her. “I’m not lying.”

“What can you tell me about drugs here?”

Whoa, I thought. “Drugs?”

“As in illegal, recreational drugs.”

I’m not brilliant or experienced on such matters, and I said as much with, “I don’t know anything.” But something pestered at the back of my brain. What had I missed?

“It’s okay to tell us what you suspect,” Ponytail said. “This is between you and me right now.”

“I don’t know anything about drugs. Why are you asking me that?”

“Oh, you know,” my ponytailed chatty new friend continued, “you had a traffic stop yesterday, talked to a CHiP. We share information. He was aware of a couple other interesting issues.”

“Like, drugs?” I asked, because I am so very quick on the uptake if it has nada to do with horses.

Ponytail gave me a bland expression. “You told the CHiP that you’d been assaulted and kidnapped, and he asked you about your work here. He was aware of a missing persons case, too.” She held out her notepad with a case number written on it. When she cocked her head, I realized she was listening to something on her earpiece. The radio on her hip no longer blurted intermittent messages.

I asked, “Missing person?”

“Sort of.”

“Sort of?” I cleared my throat.

“Missing person ’til the body’s found. The fact is, there’s a man named Sabino Arriaga who comes around asking about a missing person case and where it’s leading. You’re the first new witness or info in over a year, and you dug up a dead man!”

Assuming that it was Vicente Arriaga I’d unburied, I didn’t envy the police going to talk to the nephew of the dead man. I shook my head. “I’m no witness to something that happened here a year ago.”

“More than.”

“Okay, more than a year ago. I got here Saturday morning.”

“And what are you going to do now?” Ponytail asked. “Where will you be when we need to contact you?”

“I’d like to go home as soon as …” The sound of a four-wheeler and at least one vehicle coming and going distracted me. “Soon as I do a couple-three shoeings.”

“Shoeings?”

“Horseshoeing. Ivy’s been more than kind to me. I offered to get her horses caught up on shoeing before I hit the road.”

“Our detective will need to talk to you. He’ll have some preliminary autopsy results by tomorrow. And our polygrapher will be working then. This isn’t like the old days when cops would tell you not to leave town, but with you being from out of state, you can see how inconvenient it will be to reinterview you if you’re on the road or up in Oregon. And it’s a little incredible, this digging up a body where your dog lays down.”

“He used to be Vicente Arriaga’s dog.”

“So you said.” She made a friendly, accommodating face, like we were buddies and surely I’d understand the pickle the law was in.

I did understand.

She concluded our interview with nothing much settled, and we went to the front door of the bunkhouse together, the three of us, Charley panting in anticipation of what might come next as we stood on the porch and pulled the door shut after us.

“Can we count on you?” Ponytail asked, handing me a card. “I’m Deputy Steinhammer. This is my cell number. And I wrote Detective Orvell’s number on it, too. He’s the homicide investigator. If it comes to it, can we count on you?”

Her quiet question shook me. “What do you mean?”

“I think you know.” Ponytail cocked her head and studied my dog, then looked me square in the eye. “And by the way, Ms. Dale, I understand about the mourning.”

“About this morning?” I said.

She eyed me, steady and solemn as a wolf. “There was a guy from Black Bluff who was killed in Afghanistan. And the last one at his funeral, the picture they carried in the paper, was his German Shepherd downed, alone, in front of that flag-draped coffin.”

There were other kinds of shepherds, I reflected, than the little herders I love.

And I realized one thing I’d missed before. Billowing in my brain was the memory of yesterday’s traffic cop and his pointy-eared, black-faced dog hesitating in Ol’ Blue’s cab. I remembered how the police dog paused right where a package from this ranch had been set in my cab.