The Big Gamble - Michael Mcgarrity [4]
“It’s your case, Deputy,” Hewitt said. “Call in the team.”
Clayton stripped off his plastic gloves. “I’ll get them rolling.”
Ray Bonnell watched Clayton walk to his unit to make the call. “I think you hired yourself a good one, Paul,” he said.
“I do believe you’re right,” Hewitt said.
“How come I’m all dirty and you’re all spick-and-span clean?” Ray asked, brushing dirt off his pants and eying Hewitt’s freshly pressed shirt.
Paul Hewitt smiled. “You do look a mess, Ray. How about you wipe the dirt off your face, wash your hands, and I buy you some biscuits and gravy?”
“I could use some breakfast,” Bonnell replied.
Sergeant Oscar Quinones and Deputy Von Dillingham arrived in a hurry. Clayton briefed them, paying particular attention to how the men reacted to the news that he’d been assigned by the sheriff as lead investigator. He didn’t need an attitude flashed at him for being placed in charge.
Quinones didn’t even flinch. A retired border patrol supervisor who’d been with the department for five years, he’d worked on many task forces, investigations, and multiagency operations run by lower-ranking officers.
“Where do you want us to start?” Quinones said when Clayton finished.
“We’ll work it as two separate crime scenes,” Clayton said, looking at Dillingham for a reaction, “starting with the male victim. Search the body and the backpack, and bag and tag all evidence. Then we’ll do a field search around the perimeter.”
Dillingham pulled a toothpick from his mouth and smiled. “What about the female victim?”
“We treat it as a buried body and do an excavation,” Clayton said. “But not until victim number one is removed and all evidence recovered.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Dillingham said.
The crime scene techs appeared as they were finishing up the perimeter search. Motorists passing by slowed down to check out the emergency vehicles parked just off the highway, creating a potentially hazardous situation. At Clayton’s request, another deputy was sent out to keep traffic moving and the curious locals at bay.
The officers and the techs worked deep into the night. Piece by piece, they brought out an accumulation of trash, broken pieces of old wooden fruit baskets, bits of rope, a rotting ball of twine, and several cracked glass gallon jugs. In the cellar, they used tweezers, paint brushes, magnifying glasses, trowels, and other small tools to dig around the female victim for evidence. The most surprising discovery came when the female skeleton was finally unearthed. Patches of leathery skin showed that the dry cellar had caused a certain degree of mummification. Bits and pieces of apparel still covered parts of the trunk and lower extremities. Earrings lay next to the skull, and a turquoise and silver ring loosely encircled a finger bone.
By the time the search concluded and the bodies were removed, midnight had come and gone. Another hour passed doing some preliminary paperwork. Clayton released Quinones and Dillingham and drove home feeling fairly certain, based on a missing-person report in the computerized National Crime Information Center’s files, that the dead woman was Anna Marie Montoya, who had disappeared from Santa Fe without a trace eleven years ago.
A match of the victim’s teeth with dental records would make the identification conclusive. The state police tech supervisor promised to track down the dental records first thing in the morning and call him with the results.
The Istee family lived on a dirt road just outside the tribal village of Mescalero. Nestled in tall pines at the end of the lane, the house had two bedrooms and only one bath, which was woefully inadequate for a family of four. Soon his son and daughter would need their own rooms, so next up on Clayton’s home improvement list was a master bedroom and bath off the living room, away from the children, which he would build himself. He’d spent hours drawing up the plans and figuring out a budget with his wife, Grace. Financially, he could swing it. But