Las Vegas, New Mexico
September 23, 2010
The familiar brown delivery truck wound its way up a quiet, hilly suburban street. The driver carefully ticked off the house numbers until he found his address. He turned into the drive of a modest, neatly kept ranch house done in the Southwestern architecture suggestive of traditional adobe. He grabbed a thick manila envelope off the passenger seat and stepped out of the air-conditioned cab into the late afternoon heat. He crunched up a stone walkway to the portico shaded front entrance and rang the bell.
Moments later retired police detective Rick Ledger opened the door. He signed for the delivery, thanked the driver and took the envelope to the small office he maintained in a back bedroom looking out on a small backyard pool. He laid the envelope on the desk, took his seat and gazed out the window.
This was it. After all the years of mystery and controversy, could it be he now held in his hands another important piece to the puzzle? Had it been worth it? Had it been worth the lawyers, the courts, the public outcry, the ridicule? Soon he would have his answer. In the end they’d prevailed. Not in the quest to exhume the grave reported to be the victim’s. Their opponents argued successfully that flood damage to the cemetery had so disturbed the remains of those buried there as to render the task of identification impossible. Still they’d found another way. They obtained the necessary samples. Blood from a bench believed to be the one from the carpenter’s shop in Pete Maxwell’s home. The second sample came from an old hat they found stuffed in a box of discarded clothing and personal effects in a back room of the Pioneer Nursing Home in Prescott, Arizona. The hatband inside was inscribed J. Miller. They’d found a hair sample sufficient enough to analyze. Matching the DNA would end at least part of the mystery.
The controversy had raged for nearly a hundred and thirty years. Did Pat Garrett really kill Billy the Kid on July 14, 1881? The question gained notoriety in the 1930s, when a man in Texas, “Brushy” Bill Roberts, claimed he was Billy the Kid. Roberts’ claim on the Kid’s identity was subsequently discredited.
Rick’s grandfather, Brock Ledger wasn’t surprised. He’d heard a different story from his grandpa Ty, a rancher and deputy US marshal in the New Mexico Territory at the time of the Lincoln County War. For Rick, the controversy always centered on the story he’d heard from his grandfather.
He closed his eyes and remembered a summer night, sitting on a creaky porch step at his grandfather’s knee. He must have been eleven, maybe twelve. Summer vacations on Grandpa’s ranch in those carefree childhood years happily ran together. Those days were almost like rolling back the calendar to the last century and a time when rugged men rode these hills, taming a raw land to a new way of life. He felt a part of it back then, joining in the cowboy work by day and riding the past by night in his grandfather’s stories. This story had stayed with him. The story he heard on magical nights more than fifty years ago.
He could almost taste the chilled Coca-Cola in the little green bottle. He saw insects swarm around the bare bulb porch light. He smelled sweet hay and horse scents drift up from the corral. He listened to quiet night sounds, as he waited for Grandpa to begin his yarn. Grandpa Brock gazed into the darkness as he brought the story back from another long-ago time. He recalled the words of the tall handsome cowboy in the faded tintype, framed in filigree on a parlor end table. It was a story Great-grandpa Ty told his grandson. A story that happened some eighty years before the night he first heard . . .