The Big Gamble - Michael Mcgarrity [10]
With some difficulty, Clayton guided Foley to the topic of the fruit stand. After talking about the fire, he got a short history of Foley’s failed attempts to sell it. He asked if Foley had records on any prospective buyers that went back eleven or twelve years.
Foley shook his head. “I only keep information about potential clients who are solid prospects. I don’t recall ever showing that property to a serious client. It’s too far out of town to have any commercial value and there’s no water, phone, or electricity to the property line.”
“When was the last time you were out there?” Clayton asked.
“Let me think,” Foley replied. “Two, three years ago. I showed it to a fella who was interested in starting a flea market and living on the property. But he didn’t want to invest any money in extending the utilities and digging a well.”
“Did you ever go into the fruit stand?”
“There was no need to,” Foley said. “According to the Ruidoso newspaper, you found a murder victim in that fire.”
“I didn’t realize that information had been released.”
Foley handed Clayton the newspaper. Sheriff Hewitt had not only briefed the press about the homicide, but had gone on at some length about assigning his highly qualified Apache deputy, Clayton Istee, as lead investigator.
Clayton folded the newspaper, gave it back to Foley, thanked him for the coffee and his time, and left the office. He understood the sheriff’s decision to go public about the homicide, but he would have liked to have been forewarned. He also wondered when all the sheriff’s self-congratulatory public and private back-patting about hiring an Indian cop was going to end. Soon, he hoped. It was getting tiresome.
He sat in his unit and wrote up some notes before checking in with dispatch. Kerney still hadn’t returned his call, and Quinones and Dillingham were reporting that no useful information had been gathered so far in their field interviews. But on a more positive note, there weren’t any anxious messages from the sheriff asking for a status update.
He reached Quinones by radio and got the names of people who still needed to be contacted. If he hurried a bit, he could finish his part of the canvass, go back to the office to finish his paperwork, hold a quick team meeting, and call it a day.
Chapter 2
Back late from an all-day meeting in Albuquerque, Kevin Kerney sat in his office and paged through the Anna Marie Montoya missing person file. Until yesterday Montoya had never been found and the investigation had remained officially open, although not actively worked for some time. There were periodic entries by various detectives summarizing meetings and phone conversations with family asking if any new information about Montoya’s whereabouts had surfaced, along with unsuccessful query results from other law enforcement agencies regarding the identification of human remains found elsewhere.
Notations in the record showed that every year on the anniversary of Montoya’s disappearance, her parents met with a detective sergeant to ask about progress in the case. One supervisor had scrawled in the margin of the supplemental contact report, “These sweet people foolishly refuse to give up hope.”
Kerney shared the detective sergeant’s sentiments. Based on what was known about Montoya, she was an unlikely candidate to go missing, so foul play was the only scenario. He scanned the woman’s personal information. Born and raised in Santa Fe, Anna Marie, age twenty-nine, was about to earn a master’s degree in social work when she disappeared. She lived in an apartment with a roommate, her best friend since high school. She was engaged to be married to a young, up-and-coming businessman, had a good job lined up after graduation, and worked as a part-time counselor at a youth shelter. She had strong ties with her family and a tight-knit circle of friends.
Montoya’s roommate reported her missing on a day when the major crimes unit was busy busting a burglary ring, so Kerney, then serving as chief of detectives,