The Scorpion's Tail Read online

  This elicited nothing. The man continued to look at her, his face betraying neither emotion nor interest. She waited a moment, mentally going over the course of questioning she’d laid out for herself.

  “Your charge is attempted murder of a peace officer, with specific intent. And you did it on our turf, which makes it a class B felony. A federal felony. You did this with a deadly weapon—specifically, a .357 Smith and Wesson—which is an aggravating factor that will be taken into consideration when your sentence is determined. In short, you’re looking at some serious time in prison. And as you probably know, there’s no federal parole system, so you’re going to do the full stretch. I’ve looked over your history, Mr. Rivers. I know you spent a couple of months in county lockup. But where you’re going now is going to make that look like nursery school.”

  She paused to see what effect this speech had had on the prisoner cuffed to the bed. As far as she could tell, there was none. The man had run his eyes up and down her body—but that was all.

  She took a few steps closer, so he’d know that his silence was not intimidating her. “But there may still be some things you can do to help yourself. Answering my questions, for one. Why were you digging up at High Lonesome?”

  No response.

  “Was anyone else involved, or were you working on your own?”

  Still, silence.

  “Did you have any reason to believe that you’d find a body there? Or did you come across it by chance?”

  Still, only silence.

  “You’ve cleaned up your act these last few years. What was so important about this discovery that it was worth attempting to kill a cop for?”

  Rivers used his free hand to eject the contents of one nostril into a cup beside the bed, but otherwise kept quiet.

  His cocky silence was becoming annoying. Corrie took another deep breath, careful to keep her tone even and unmodulated, her face expressionless. “You’ve got one chance to help yourself, right here, right now. Otherwise, you’re looking at some hard, hard time.”

  At last, the man’s eyes showed a flicker of interest. For the first time, he spoke. “Hard time?”

  Corrie tried not to show the excitement she felt at getting even two words out of the suspect. That was two more than anyone else had managed. “That’s correct.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what,” he said, his voice gravelly. “Maybe we can come to some kind of—accommodation.”

  “That would be smart.” She pulled a digital recorder from her purse, turned it on in full view of Rivers. “You’ve been Mirandized, but just to remind you, anything you say can be used against you.”

  Rivers shook this off as if it were a gnat. “You mentioned hard time,” he repeated, his voice unmodulated, confident.

  Corrie nodded, glancing down to make sure the recorder was running.

  “Well, that’s a coincidence, because I’ve gotten kind of hard myself—a cute little bitch like you coming in here, me in bed and all. So I’ll answer your questions…after you’ve sucked me off.”

  Corrie stared at him, temporarily speechless, mortified that the blood was rushing to her face. She made a huge effort not to show her anger, to remain cool.

  “Oh, and uncuff me, so I can work your head with my hand.” And now at last he began to laugh—quietly, provocatively.

  He was still laughing a few seconds later when Corrie left the room, gestured for the ranger to lock the door, and strode briskly down the hospital corridor.

  5

  SOCORRO TURNED OUT to be not as bad as Corrie expected, with the Rio Grande flowing along one side, irrigated fields, and some dry mountains rising at the other end of town. But it was still a flat, hot grid of streets—damned hot, in fact—and as she approached the sheriff’s office the desert wind bounced a couple of tumbleweeds across the street in front of her, as if to remind her where she was. As she picked up her gear bag and got out of the car in the parking lot of the office, the long wail of a train whistle underscored the feeling of desolation. This was exactly the kind of place she imagined FBI agents who fucked up were sent to. For the hundredth time, she reminded herself she’d been given a case that had some promise.

  The sheriff’s office, on the other hand, was an attractive adobe building, surrounded by a parking lot of cracked asphalt that had been dribbled on by more asphalt, forming a spiderweb pattern. Even though it was late September, her hiking boots stuck on the tar as she entered the building.

  Sheriff Watts came out right away, and Corrie had her first shock of the morning. Instead of the jowly, mustachioed good old boy she expected, Watts was around her age—twenty-three—tall, fit, and handsome as hell, with curly black hair above a smooth brow, brown eyes, and a movie-star smile. Accentuating the look were the two antique revolvers he wore, one on each hip. A fat bandage was affixed to the bottom of one ear. He wore a fancy cowboy hat with a woven horsehair band, and he seemed as surprised at meeting her as she was at him.

  As they exited the office, Watts suggested that they ride in his cruiser. He moved to open the Jeep’s door for her, then appeared to think that might not be appropriate and backed off to let her open it herself. It was pretty clear she’d overturned all his preconceptions of an FBI agent.

  “Agent Swanson,” he said, sliding behind the wheel, “before we head out there, I’m going to swing by and pick up a fellow named Charles Fountain. He’s a lawyer who knows a lot about local history—a real encyclopedia. I thought he might be able to shed some light on things, maybe answer a few questions.”

  Corrie hadn’t expected a civilian to ride along, but she was hardly in a position to object. “Thank you, Sheriff.”

  He nodded and started the Jeep Cherokee, which was painted up and decaled as a cruiser with a big sheriff’s star on it. Corrie wondered if she should invite Watts to switch to a first-name basis but decided against it. Better to keep it formal.

  “I hear you spoke to Pick,” the sheriff said as they drove slowly through town.

  “I’m surprised you can call him by his first name, after he tried to kill you.”

  “Well, he didn’t succeed, and I’m not one to hold a grudge,” Watts said with a laugh. “He’s a pretty poor shot. Guess he just got lucky.”

  “I’ll say. Lucky he didn’t get killed.”

  “Oh, that wasn’t luck. If I’d wanted to hit the center of mass, I would have.” This was said in an offhand way, with nothing of a boastful tone in it. Corrie considered this for a moment. Did it mean that Watts had actually let Rivers shoot first? She decided it would be impolitic to ask him directly. Instead, she said: “Speaking of gunfights, I couldn’t help but notice those ivory-handled revolvers of yours.”

  Watts nodded again, this time with a touch of pride. “Colt .45 Peacemakers. Single-action, black powder frames. From 1890 or so. They belonged to my granddad. He refuses to tell me where he got them from.”

  “Why do you wear two?”

  Watts shrugged. “They came as a set.”

  “And what’s with the backward holsters? The handles are pointing forward.”

  “You never heard of a cross-arm draw? Guess they don’t teach you everything in FBI school.”

  Corrie didn’t answer. She’d take her own semiautomatic Glock over those relics any day—but she wasn’t about to say so.

  “I still can’t figure why Rivers drew on me, though,” Watts said. “He’s had a spotless record for a couple of years now. Can’t imagine what was so special about that corpse that would make him risk everything like that.”

  They pulled up in front of a modest, neatly tended house, and before Watts could get out, a man burst through the door. Looking at him, Corrie got yet another surprise. Instead of the devil-and–Daniel Webster country lawyer she’d expected, with a corncob pipe and red suspenders stretching over a capacious gut, Fountain was tall, perhaps sixty years old, and only slightly heavyset. He wore a dark green Barbour jacket—probably the only one within a hundred miles—so rumpled he might have
slept in it. His face was clean-shaven, and his luxuriously thick salt-and-pepper hair was parted in the middle and hung down almost to his shoulders. He glanced from one of them to the other with faded blue eyes that sparkled with intelligence from behind gold, round-rimmed glasses.

  Watts got out and shook the man’s hand, and Corrie followed. The sheriff made the introductions.

  “You’re a lawyer, I understand,” she said.

  “Semiretired at present,” Fountain replied in a quiet, melodious voice. “Probably for the best.”

  “Don’t let him kid you,” Watts said. “He’s got a reputation that stretches across the state, and beyond. You won’t find a sharper legal mind anywhere. Never lost a case.”

  “Is that true?” Corrie couldn’t help asking.

  “Only partly,” Fountain said. “I lost a couple when I worked for the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”

  “But none since he became a defense lawyer,” Watts said. “It’s the voice. They never see him coming.”

  “You might as well say it: voice and appearance,” Fountain said with a laugh. “I prefer to call it a ‘disarming presentation.’”

  “He wears that disheveled look like a work uniform,” Watts said. Being in familiar company seemed to have relaxed him, because this time he held the car door open for Corrie without thinking.

  “I’m just coming along to add some background as an amateur historian,” Fountain said as he got into the back seat. “I won’t get in your way.”

  Watts put the A/C on full blast, and they headed out of town. “Where we’re going,” he said, “is a ghost town up in the Azul Mountains named High Lonesome. It’s an old gold-mining town abandoned when the color played out in the early 1900s. One of the prettiest ghost towns in the state—but hell to get to. We’ve got a two-hour ride ahead of us. It’s not that far as the buzzard flies, but the roads are torture.”

  Two hours? Corrie thought. She’d be lucky to get back to Albuquerque before midnight.

  “Music?” Watts asked, pulling out his phone and plugging it into the stereo.

  “Ah, sure,” Corrie replied.

  “Any preferences?”

  “As long as it’s not Gregorian chants or rap, I don’t care,” said Fountain from the back seat.

  Corrie didn’t think Sheriff Homer Watts would have the music she liked. “You choose.”

  “You two can veto this.” He fiddled with the phone and the sound of the Gipsy Kings came floating out of the car’s speakers. It wasn’t the music Corrie would have selected, but it wasn’t bad, either, and it kind of fit in with the landscape.

  Watts drove south toward a jagged line of mountains rising out of the tan desert. The Cherokee turned off on a Forest Service road. Corrie quickly lost track of the bewildering maze of dirt roads, one turn after another, with each more rutted and washed out than the last. The vehicle eventually slowed to about five miles an hour, bucking up and down, Corrie holding on to the ceiling grips to keep from getting thrown out of her seat. As they climbed higher into the mountains, the piñons gave way to ponderosa pines, which in turn gave way to Douglas firs and spruce trees. At the top of a pass, stupendous views opened up.

  Watts halted the car for a moment and pointed.

  “South of us, that’s the Jornada del Muerto desert and the San Andres Mountains. That’s all part of the White Sands Missile Range, where the army folks play with their weapons.”

  Fountain said, “In Spanish, Jornada del Muerto means ‘journey of death.’ The old Spanish trail from Mexico City to Santa Fe crossed that desert, over a hundred miles. The trail was paved with bones and lined with crosses.”

  Corrie looked in the direction he indicated, the tan desert, streaked with red and brown, stretching southward.

  “Farther south and over the mountains,” said Watts, “are the White Sands. Ever been there?”

  “No, I was only assigned to the Albuquerque office eight months ago. Have you?”

  “Many times. I grew up in Socorro; Dad’s a rancher. When I was a kid I rode our horses all over the place. White Sands is one of the most amazing places on earth: dunes as white as snow, stretching for hundreds of thousands of acres.”

  “You grew up here?”

  Picking up on her tone of incredulity, Watts laughed.

  Fountain said in a pleasant tone, “Some people do manage it.”

  Corrie felt herself redden. “Are you from here, too?”

  “Just north of Socorro,” Fountain replied. “Place called Lemitar.”

  Corrie, not knowing where this was, simply nodded.

  “It’s not as bad as it might seem,” the lawyer went on. “There’s a lot to explore. On our right is Chimney Mountain and over there is Oso Peak, where Black Jack Ketchum and his gang used to hide out. He terrorized Socorro in the old days, robbed the railroad many times. When they hanged him, they botched the job and he was decapitated. They say he landed on his feet and stood for a while before falling down.”

  “Impressive sense of balance,” said Corrie.

  Fountain laughed. “And to the southeast of us is the Mescalero reservation. Beautiful country. That rez is where the last of Geronimo’s Chiricahua Apache band finally settled. Geronimo, Cochise, Victorio—those great chiefs used to roam all through these mountains.”

  Corrie could hear a strong love of the land in Fountain’s voice, and oddly, it made her envious. She had no love for her own hometown of Medicine Creek, Kansas, and never planned to go back. She’d rather go to hell.

  Watts eased the Jeep forward and over the pass, the road dropping down through switchbacks to a series of desert mesas projecting from the southern end of the mountains. They lost most of the altitude they had gained, winding down one bad road after another, until they were back in a piñon-juniper desert cut with arroyos and mesas. And then, suddenly, the ghost town appeared, perched on a low mesa above an immense plain, stupendously isolated. Watts drove down a few more eroded switchbacks, and in five minutes they were coming into town.

  “Welcome to High Lonesome,” he said.

  6

  THIS PRONOUNCEMENT WAS greeted with a brief silence.

  “It really lives up to its name,” Corrie murmured. “What a view.”

  A single dirt street ran the length of the town, with ruined adobe and stone buildings on either side, some still roofed, others exposed to the elements. “That was the hotel,” said Fountain, pointing to a two-story structure of rough-cut stone with crooked wooden portals wrapping around its façade. “Saloon, stores, miners’ houses, church—this was a bustling town after gold was discovered down in the basin, back in the early 1880s,” he continued. “At first it was a dangerous area, with Geronimo’s Apaches roaming around. When they finally surrendered, prospectors came in and followed an epithermal deposit. The mine is actually in the cliffs below. Single horizontal shaft, hard rock. With the Geronimo Campaign over, there were plenty of discharged soldiers willing to work as miners. They processed the ore at a stamp mill back in the mountains, near a stream.”

  “How is it that a town like this could survive so long undisturbed?” she asked. “It could be a movie set.”

  “You saw the road coming in,” the lawyer said. “And the town was built mostly with stone and adobe, instead of wood, so it isn’t likely to burn. The whole place was abandoned rather abruptly, which ironically also helped preserve it.”

  Corrie saw the two men exchange a glance.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  Fountain cleared his throat. “Well, the history of the place ended up as ugly as its surroundings are attractive. When the gold mine started playing out, the owners pushed too hard to follow the dwindling vein. They didn’t shore up the shaft properly. You can probably guess the rest: the shaft collapsed, trapping a dozen miners.”

  “Trapped alive, by all accounts,” Watts added. “It must have been a slow and horrible death.”

  Fountain nodded. “If you walk far enough out of town, you’ll come to what’s left o
f the cemetery. A dozen tombstones with the same date are all in one corner. Of course, there are no bodies in the graves.”

  They passed through the town and came to a scattering of buildings nearer the edge of the mesa, with worn adobe walls and vigas lying splintered on the ground. Watts brought the vehicle to a halt beside one, and they all got out.

  “I followed a pillar of dust to that cellar hole over there,” Watts told them. “Can you see, beyond those other buildings, where the opening is?”

  He walked in the direction he’d indicated, and the other two followed.

  “After I’d cuffed and stabilized Rivers,” he said, “I crawled in to see what was important enough to shoot me for. He’d cleared off the top of a skull, along with a hand. Another fifteen minutes, and he’d probably have yanked everything out of the ground and driven away.”

  Corrie pulled a headlamp out of her gear bag and put it on, along with nitrile gloves and a face mask. “I’m going to take a look in there, if you don’t mind—alone.”

  “Be our guest,” said the sheriff.

  Corrie got down on her hands and knees and peered in. Splinters of sunlight striped the dark space. The cellar was still roofed, although it was caved in on the left. The basement had half filled with windblown sand. She could see where Rivers, the relic hunter, had crawled in, leaving his footprints everywhere. Quite obviously, he had dug a number of holes. Up against the wall to the right, where the most serious digging had taken place, she could see the cranium the sheriff had mentioned, along with the bony hand and the withered sleeve of a shirt and, partially covering that, a duster or oilcloth raincoat.

  She crawled down and removed her camera, shooting a full set of images in the interior space. There was just enough headroom to walk around while hunched over. Approaching the bones, she knelt again, took a fresh set of pictures.

  The first thing she noticed on closer observation was that the remains consisted of more than bones; there was still a lot of mummified flesh adhering to them. She pulled out a brush from her kit and whisked away the loose sand from the cranium and exposed the arm, with its ropy beef-jerky muscles that rattled like dry corn sheaves as she brushed. She could even see a downy coat of hair on the forearm, which, despite her training, she found faintly disgusting. Further brushing exposed more of the clothing, including a gingham shirt underneath, falling off in strings. The hand sported a gold ring on its pinkie finger. Peering closely, she saw the letters JG engraved on it. Clearly this was an item Rivers hadn’t been able to take before the sheriff caught him.