Chapter Fourteen
The fact that Buck’s sleep proved unsettled and restless didn’t change the time his alarm went off. He rolled from bed, glancing back at Tammy’s stationary, blanketed mound. She rose later and later these days, unlike earlier times when she would already have been out milking and gathering eggs. He thought the changes in her had started after Trey’s death, but maybe it had been more gradual than that and he hadn’t noticed. She still hadn’t moved by the time he had showered and dressed, only the steady rise and fall of the blankets offering any proof of life.
His ranch, the Circle S, sprawled largely in the shadow of the Mule Mountains, so daybreak took longer to hit than it did for much of the San Pedro Valley. From the window over the sink, Buck ran water into a coffeepot and spotted Aurelio out at the barn with the ranch’s white Ford F-350. Buck left the pot on the yellow-tiled counter and walked out through the kitchen door.
Aurelio’s age was something more than sixty, but he seemed unsure of exactly how much more himself, or unwilling to say if he did know. He had worked for the ranch since Buck’s father had owned it, before it had been split between Buck and his older sister. As if knowing even before she announced it that she would sell her share and move to Las Vegas with her dentist husband, Aurelio had offered to work for Buck on his piece. Buck had taken all of twelve seconds before agreeing, and had never regretted his decision.
Aurelio wore a straw cowboy hat that had been crushed and stained and stepped on, but was as much a part of him as the apple-round cheeks that squeezed his eyes into narrow slits and the white stubble that dusted his jaw like a light snowfall. A blue denim jacket provided a layer of warmth, but it would come off, Buck knew, as soon as the sun’s presence was more than a few stray beams breaking through a pewter sky. Aurelio carried a bale of green hay toward the back of the pickup, walking with bowed legs on heel-worn work boots. When he saw Buck come out, he nodded and grinned.
“That pasture is pretty used up?” he said. His sentences often rose at the end like questions, but he didn’t expect an answer. “I’m gonna move ’em over a little.” In Arizona, Buck wasn’t required to keep his cattle fenced at all. Anyone who didn’t want Buck’s herd, or someone else’s, on his land had to fence them out. Buck preferred to keep them contained, however, and to fence off separate pastures so he had some control over where they grazed. The sixty-some animals had been confined in one pasture for a little more than a month and had denuded the grasses there. But the next pasture over hadn’t been grazed all year, and although a drought had kept the state drier than usual for a decade, the grass had responded well to the summer monsoon, growing tall and thick. Aurelio didn’t have to tell him his plans in any detail; the men had worked together and discussed their strategy long enough to know what the other had in mind.
As much as Buck’s cattle liked fresh grass, they were completely enamored of green hay. They would follow a truck bed full of it all the way to the Pacific Ocean if they could, so even working alone Aurelio should be able to move them through the gate onto the next range. He might come back to the stable—a low brick building on the other side of a wood-fenced corral from the barn—to get a horse if he needed to chase down some stragglers, or to track down any calves that had wandered away from the herd and gotten snagged in mesquite or trapped in a deep wash. Whatever he had to do he would, and by the time Buck came home tonight the herd would have been successfully moved.
Like most ranchers, Buck had hoped his son Trey would want to take over the ranch one day, and had steeled himself against the probability that Trey would have other plans. That decision had been made instead by other forces: a stray bullet and bad timing. The fact that they would never even have the conversation broke Buck’s heart every time he thought about it.
“Sounds good,” he said simply.
“Oh, and that pregnant cow? I think she’s about due.”
“Cut her out and bring her down to the barn, then,” Buck said. “Keep an eye on her. Most likely we’ll be up all night again.”
“They never want to calve during the day, that’s for sure?”
“It’s a plot. Keep us exhausted so they can take over the world someday.”
“They already think they own it,” Aurelio said, laughing. No matter what time the calf came, Buck knew Aurelio would be around. He had never married, and he lived in a cabin on the far side of the stable—one of the ranch’s original structures from the late 1890s—that he had retrofitted with insulation, electricity, and running water. He had a satellite for his TV, a library card from the Copper Queen branch in Bisbee, and a couple of prostitutes down in Nogales he visited occasionally, and he didn’t seem to want much else out of life.
Buck shared the laugh. “That’s a fact.”
Later, sitting at his desk with a white Superman mug of coffee steaming close at hand and the whistle of the wind outside, Buck read over the initial report from the crime scene investigators. The coffee was made from beans he’d bought over in Bisbee, French roast, strong and aromatic. Its smell relaxed him as much as too many cups would wire him, and after a largely sleepless night he needed some of that wiring to keep him focused as he worked through the dense pages.
The report contained—unfortunately, he thought—no major surprises. The boys had been killed by their knife wounds, Hugh and Manuela by bullets fired from a .38. The report suggested his earlier conclusion—that the boys had come first—was correct. The killer hadn’t wanted to risk awakening the parents, so had done them with the quiet weapon. By the time he reached the master bedroom he was no longer worried about making noise—and they were more capable of fighting back effectively at close quarters—so he’d pulled the gun.
What about Lulu, though? Maybe he had started with her, binding her in some way so she wouldn’t be a threat. Finished off the rest of her family, then drove away. Tire tracks the rain hadn’t completely washed away belonged to a full-sized truck. Wrangler ATs. The tracks had been compared to the Lavenders’ truck and to known delivery vehicles, with no matches. Didn’t mean it was the killer’s—pickups were as common in those parts as houseflies—but it was better than nothing.
If he had taken Lulu out first, then it indicated that she was the prime target. Buck had wondered about that—why kill everyone except her? No one had survived to pay any ransom, not that the Lavenders would have been able to afford much anyway. He didn’t want to think about the possibility of a sexual predator, but he had to consider it.
The footprints outside the house hadn’t matched those of any family members either. But Scoot’s photos weren’t much good, since he hadn’t put anything in the frame for size comparison. And the rain had hit before he’d made casts, so they were pretty much a dead end. Buck had spoken to him before about protocols for gathering evidence, and it appeared he would have to again. Likely the kid was just too shaken up by the scene to remember.
Unknown fingerprints had been found at various spots inside the house, but not necessarily in places the killer would have touched. Once they had a suspect in custody, the prints might help place him at the crime scene, but by themselves they meant nothing.
The report had come fast, less than twenty-four hours from the time the team had arrived at the scene. As Sheriff Gatlin had said, until they had a crime scene for the Lippincott kidnapping, the quadruple murder was their biggest priority. While Buck appreciated the speed, the uselessness of the sheaf of papers depressed him. He hadn’t been able to keep from hoping that something in it would point at a specific perpetrator.
Since that hadn’t happened, he would have to do some real investigating. He still kind of liked the neighbor for it. New in town, relatively, and there hadn’t been any homicides in that neighborhood before he’d come. Plus, he drove back and forth to school with Lulu on a semi-regular basis. Maybe something had happened there, some teacher/student affair turned bad. Buck would have to find out a little more about him, and maybe check that shed behind his house.