Chapter 23

THE THREE MEN FILED OUT FOR the bunkhouse. Eliana went for her bedroom down the hallway and shut her door with a click. I drummed my finger on the table near Ivy’s folder of receipts, her calendar, and the enlarged photo of the thermos.

“Can I use your phone?” I asked. “I need to tell Guy I’m having truck trouble and may have to stay another night.”

Ivy flipped one delicate wrist in half a wave. “Sure.” But then she motioned me to join her at the other end of the great room as she sank onto a white leather couch. “I’ve got to figure this out.”

I nodded and sat beside her. “Okay. What did Vicente do in his time off?”

“Other than go to a massage parlor?” Ivy smirked. “I’d drop him off in town on my way to the store, pick him up on the way back.”

“Did he go to bars, friends, the bank?”

“He didn’t use a bank. He usually wanted to go to the library. He liked to read in there.”

That surprised me. I don’t know why. I should figure that people are way more interesting and confusing than they seem at first.

“Wait a minute,” I said, harking back to the sight of the dead man’s wallet contents spread out on the tarp in front of the cops. I snapped my fingers. “Let’s go look at your photos again.”

We went back to Milt’s office. With a few clicks on the computer, countless thumbnails filled the screen.

Ivy asked, “What are you looking for?”

I paged through her shots until I spotted one that showed Pleasures massage parlor as one of the three cards from Vicente’s wallet.

“Can you blow this up?” I asked.

Ivy frowned, clicked and tapped, making her computer show a full-screen version of the cards extricated from the wallet, laid out one by one. There was the California State Identification for Vicente Arriaga, there was the business card for Pleasures massage parlor, there was the library card.

“Can you zoom in more, so we can read the library card?” I asked.

Ivy swooped two fingers apart on her computer monitor repeatedly then we inspected the cards one by one.

“Do you know if your local library has online access?”

Ivy pointed at the Pleasures business card. “I think the massage parlor is more important.” Then she frowned. “But I suppose the police noticed the card and are checking on that angle.”

“Get us into the library,” I said.

Ivy opened a search tab on the Internet and soon was in the library’s website.

Clicking back to the blown-up photo, we were able to enter the correct identification number and be given access, signed in as Vicente Arriaga. The library portal offered the borrower’s history right there on the screen. Ms. Computer I am not, but I can sure click a thingy.

“DNA,” I said. “And clinical parasitology. Huh. Your herder had some serious tastes in reading material.”

Ivy peered over my shoulder. “Wow.”

We gaped at the screen, then at each other.

“Okay,” I said. “Parasitology. You said he’d asked you for the microscope.”

Ivy drummed her fingers on Milt’s desk. “We missed something. I missed something.”

“Let’s go look at that microscope,” I suggested.

***

Halfway to the barn, I stopped at Ol’ Blue, unlocked it, and made Charley come give us company in the dark.

Chromey and the buckskin nickered at us from one side of the barn aisle, Decker and the Appy mare from the other.

“Indigo Eyes,” Ivy said.

I’d never known her name. As we paused in the dark, I asked, “She’s the dam of that mule?”

A hulking shape came at us in the end of the dead dark barn aisle and a male voice boomed. “What’s going on?”

I jumped. Charley was already gone, skittering out in a flash.

Ivy assumed her boss voice. “We’re looking at the forge.”

“I lost her coke shovel,” I said. “I’ll need to replace it for her, and I’m showing her what I mean.”

“It’s the little flat spade that goes with the forge,” Stuckey said.

“Go to bed, Stuckey,” Ivy said. “Go back to the bunkhouse and call it a night. Things are going to be okay tomorrow.”

“Thanks, Miz Beaumont. I was just doing a night check on the horses.”

***

We found what we were looking for in a space between cinder blocks under the forge. The dust was so thick on the two baggies of white powder, they looked brown and blended into the cobwebbed crevices.

“Oh, my God, Vicente was … ” Ivy stared hard. “I never suspected him. Never.”

“The police would probably like to know about that stuff.” I wasn’t going to get my fingerprints on the baggies. I was in enough trouble for digging up a body on the ranch and didn’t need to add possession of the white powder—cocaine or heroin?—to my rap sheet. During the few dozen days of high school that I managed to attend, baggies of white powder were something I stayed away from. Those dope users were some of the hardest-to-figure kids I’d ever known, or never come to know.

“It doesn’t look right.” Ivy opened both baggies and sniffed the white powder. She tasted them. And then she asked, “Why would he have salt and sugar in baggies?”

“Huh?”

“This isn’t coke,” Ivy said.

Smacking my forehead helped me think. I did it twice. “I get it.”

“I don’t,” Ivy said.

“You have to make a special saline solution, a salt solution. With sugar in it, too, to do a flotation test at home.”

“Flotation test?” Ivy asked.

“To do a fecal,” I said, “To examine manure for worm eggs and count them. You know, flotation. You said Vicente was learning to do flotation tests. That’s just another name for the fecal counts.”

I tried to remember the Internet tutorials I’d read and watched on making the sugar-saline flotation solution and doing the fecal tests. How I’ve coveted a microscope like the one Vicente had talked Ivy into buying.

“Look at this,” Ivy said, kneeling below the forge where the baggies of salt and sugar had been stored. She pulled out a folded wad of papers, blew the dust off them.

Just a dozen sheets of beat-up paper. Maybe he’d printed them out at the library. A complete set of directions on how to make the saline-sugar solution for a fecal float test, set up the slides, and do the count.

Ivy nodded. “He was learning to do fecals for the ranch.”

I considered that. So, Vicente had printed off material at the library on how to do fecals. He’d ordered a book on veterinary parasitology. He’d asked Ivy for a microscope and slides.

But that wasn’t all. I shook my head and looked at Ivy. And thought about white powder, and a police drug dog showing interest in Ol’ Blue. And being where I should not be.

Missing something.

I frowned, fingering the knobs that change which eyepiece was centered under the microscope’s viewer, and considered the strength of the optics, the textbooks Vicente had requested on his library account. DNA? We couldn’t look at something as small as an intracellular double helix with this hundred-dollar machine. What else had Vicente been doing?

“The sequence of events,” I said, deciding as I spoke, “is Stuckey kills Fire not long before the breeding to Reese Trenton’s female, they cut Charley’s ears and use him to breed, Vicente tries to prove it, someone kills Vicente. Vicente wanted to study DNA. I think that’s what he really wanted to do with the microscope, but he didn’t know it wasn’t powerful enough.”

He’d been trying, I decided. Vicente had been trying to honor Charley, or rather, Flame.

***

To cover a counterfeit dog breeding didn’t seem like a good enough reason to murder someone.

“What did Vicente spend his money on?” I asked Ivy when we were back under the stars, out of the dark barn and forge room.

“I have no clue.” Ivy tossed the baggies of salt and sugar in the air beside me, her other hand holding the sheaf of papers Vicente had printed off on how to do a fecal exam.

“But you paid him in cash?”

“Right.”

“So, he didn’t have to use a bank.” I stopped at Ol’ Blue and told Charley to come with me though a part of me thought about climbing in the cab with him and sleeping there, locked inside. It was late at night, and my truck wasn’t going anywhere. But maybe Ivy would give me some space to talk to Guy in privacy. I grabbed the big paper bag on the floor’s center hump, wrapping the rest of my recovered tools in it as I followed Ivy back to the big house. Charley followed me. When we went inside, it was the first time I’d seen her lock the front door.

And it became the first time Ivy told me to use the kitchen phone if I wanted to make a call. I showed her my tools. She wasn’t impressed but still shook her head over what Stuckey had done to me. As I handled the rasps and crease nail pullers and nail cutters one by one, I felt something small and squishy inside the paper bag. I’d assumed it was an empty bag wrapping my tools, but when I looked inside for the first time, I knew what Stuckey had been warning me about earlier.

Though I still didn’t know who’d done it, or why, I now knew how Vicente Arriaga was killed. I was holding the murder weapon.