The Big Gamble - Michael Mcgarrity [96]
“So it’s a place where rich guys can play house,” Vialpando said.
Fowler smirked and blew smoke through her nose. “Yeah, along with their favorite sex games. S and M, domination, fetishes, bondage—whatever they want, including drugs.”
“Where is this place?” Ramona asked.
“Outside Ruidoso,” Fowler replied. “I’m not sure where. It’s on a ranch.”
“How do the finances work?” Ramona asked. “Who pays the bills? Where does the money go?”
“I don’t know. We get paid in cash weekly, plus any expenses. Tips and gifts we get to keep.”
“What about drugs?” Vialpando asked.
“Whatever you want, but just for the girls and clients. There’s no street selling or dealing. Mostly it’s coke, crack, and pot, along with some meth. If a girl uses, the cost is deducted from her pay.”
“Are you a user, Stacy?” Ramona asked.
“Sometimes.” She stubbed out her smoke. “It makes going to work a whole lot easier.”
“Are you strung out now?”
“A little bit.”
“We’ll get you into detox,” Ramona said.
They wound up the interview and turned Fowler over to detectives who’d been waiting for their call. Jeff drove Ramona back to her unit.
“Next time we spend a night together, let’s not do it in a car,” Jeff said with a smile as he wheeled in behind Ramona’s vehicle.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Sergeant,” Ramona said.
“I’m just suggesting a change in venue, nothing more.”
Ramona laughed. “I’ll see you in Santa Fe at the meeting.”
Clayton woke to an empty house and checked the bedside clock. It was after nine. Either he’d slept hard or Grace had tiptoed around, keeping the kids quiet before taking them off to day care and going to work. He put in a call to Paul Hewitt only to learn that the sheriff was out of the office until noon.
He went to the local newspaper’s office and searched through back issues for anything that mentioned Tyler Norvell. There were plenty of stories on normal political activity: speeches he’d made, legislation he supported or opposed, positions he took on social problems. The guy was a right-to-work, anti-abortion, three-strikes-and-you’re-out conservative. Judging from the voter sentiment discussed in the articles, he drew a lot of support from middle-class Texans who’d moved to Ruidoso looking for a less expensive Southwestern version of the Aspen lifestyle.
Clayton dug deeper and found a news item in the business section. A year before running for the state senate, Norvell had bought the Bluewater Canyon Ranch, a twenty-thousand-acre spread outside the small settlement of Arabella on the east side of the Capitan Mountains.
In his short time with the department Clayton had been to Arabella twice on routine patrols. There wasn’t much to the place: a few whitewashed, shuttered adobe buildings, several old barns, a vacation cottage or two, maybe a half-dozen year-round residences, and some outlying ranches along the paved road that ended at the village.
It was a pretty spot, a good seventeen miles off the main highway to Roswell, in rolling country against the sharp backdrop of the mountains.
In his unit Clayton consulted a government reference map that highlighted all publicly and privately owned land in the state. It was a useful tool for determining the boundaries for law-enforcement jurisdictions. He found Bluewater Canyon on private land a bit south of Arabella. There wasn’t time to drive up and look around before the sheriff returned to the office, so Clayton decided to see what he could learn through official records.
If Norvell had turned the Bluewater Canyon Ranch into a secret sex playground, as Clayton suspected, then he had probably spent a pile of money on the project.
In the county assessor’s office at the county courthouse, he located the file for the Bluewater Canyon Ranch. Since the date of purchase, Norvell’s property had