“So this is private property?”she asked. “Action Trail Adventures isn’t situated on state or federally owned land?”
“Yes,”Ernie said. “That’s my understanding. It’s privately owned. Robbins told me he pays an annual fee that gives him access through a card-activated gate. That way he can let himself in or out as needed. There’s also a keypad where you can punch in an entry code to open the gate.
“Anyway,”Ernie continued, “Robbins got in last night. This morning, when he took his ATV out for a ride, he found the body lying facedown in the sand with the dog standing guard over it. Once we finally managed to drag the dog away, Robbins was able to take a closer look at the victim and give us a tentative ID. He says the guy’s first name is Lester. He had no idea about his last name, or any next of kin, either.”
“Lester’s last name is Attwood,”Joanna said, but she was thinking about the number of times so-called good citizens calling in reports of a homicide turned out to be perpetrators.
“Do you think Mr. Robbins might be involved in whatever happened here?”she asked.
Ernie shook his head. “Not to my way of thinking. At any rate, as you said, the name we got back from Animal Control on the dog’s license is Lester Attwood. According to Records, Attwood’s driver’s license is suspended. His rap sheet shows six DUIs, two criminal assaults, two driving without a license.”
“So we’ve got a photo then?”
“On the computer,”Ernie said. “Not one I can print right now. Any idea when Dr. Machett will bother getting his butt out here?”
“All I can tell you is that he’s on his way,”Joanna said.
“I’m not holding my breath,”Ernie grumbled. “He always takes his own sweet time about getting to a crime scene, and we’re left standing with one foot in the air until he does.”
Following a fairly smooth gravel road, the Yukon wound down into a steep wash. When they roared up the far side, they came out on the boundary of a breathtaking landscape. Even though Joanna had been warned about them in advance, seeing the tawny-colored dunes in person took her by surprise. Starting with a line of demarcation just to the left of the gravel, the dunes stretched off into the distance in a series of rounded hills. Here and there the rippled surface of the sand was marred by a series of tire tracks.
Gripping the steering wheel with both hands, Ernie swung the Yukon off the road and into the dunes along a course that included several of those tracks. Even with four-wheel drive, he had to maintain a fair amount of speed to keep from getting bogged down.
As they jolted along, Joanna checked her seat belt and then held on to her armrest. “How can this be?”she said over the laboring sound of the engine. “I’ve lived here all my life and never knew these dunes were here!”
“Think about Kartchner Caverns,”Ernie replied. “Lots of people knew about that before it ever came out in public. This is all on private property. As far as I know, it’s only been open to ATVers in the last few years. Now that I think about it, I think some environmental group or other was trying to buy it up a few years back, but the owner wouldn’t sell.”
Kartchner Caverns, a series of limestone caverns on the far side of Benson, was Cochise County’s most recent tourism hot spot. The caves had been discovered in the late seventies by a pair of hikers who had been exploring the countryside at the base of the Whetstone Mountains. When they had first located and started exploring the caverns, they were located on private land owned by a family named Kartchner. It had taken another ten years to make arrangements to transfer the property to the state of Arizona and turn it into a state park people could actually come visit. Now Kartchner Caverns is a genuine tourist home run. Joanna wondered if something similar was going on with Action Trail Adventures. People in the ATV community seemed to know all about it. No one else did.
Is that what this murder is all about? Joanna wondered. Have we wandered into some kind of environmental range war?
The Yukon crested a dune. In the cleft between that dune and the next, Joanna caught sight of the crime scene. The debris field included an upright ATV as well as a second one that had been tipped over onto its side. Yards away from the vehicles in a tangle of tire tracks lay something that, from this distance, might have been a pile of loose laundry.
The victim, Joanna thought. “Stop for a minute, please,”she said to Ernie. “Let me take a look from here.”
Ernie stopped abruptly, allowing a towering plume of dust to blow past them. When it cleared, Joanna could see the victim again. He looked like a crumpled rag doll, lying facedown in sand. Around him ranged a complex scribble of vehicle tracks that resembled the Etch-a-sketch doodlings of some giant-sized child.
Joanna glanced at her detective. “So what do you think happened?”she asked.
Ernie shrugged. “I don’t know,”he said. “It looks to me like several vehicles were involved.”
“And several people?”
Ernie nodded. “We’ve got tracks of that one wrecked ATV and at least two others, four-wheel-drive pickups, most likely, one with dual rear tires. I’m guessing the dead guy rode up on the wrecked ATV right through there.”
Ernie pointed casually off to his left, where a pair of tracks emerged from the cleft between the dunes and then disappeared into the tumult of disturbed sand.
“Once he got here, I’m guessing there was an altercation of some kind. There may have been some gunfire.”
“What makes you say that?”
“For one thing, somebody evidently took a shot at the dog. There’s an empty scabbard on the ATV. I doubt the owner would have shot his own dog. But if there are weapons or shell casings out here, we’ll need metal detectors to find them.”
“Okay, so all these guys meet up. What do you think happened next?”
“At some point, I think, our victim, the guy on the ATV, may have tried to leave. One of the larger vehicles T-boned him and knocked him ass over teakettle. Once the victim was on foot, the other guys ran him down. Not just once, either—several times over.”
“Sounds cold-blooded,”Joanna said.
Ernie nodded. “It was cold-blooded. I suspect he died from internal injuries. Machett should be able to tell us for sure, if and when he bothers to show up.”
Despite being in agreement with Ernie’s disparaging remark about Dr. Machett, Joanna let it pass. “What about that single track?”she asked, pointing to a track in the sand that disappeared over the top of the next dune. “The one that leads off to the right from the body?”
“Looks to me like the dog made that one, either going or coming or maybe both,”Ernie said. “The bad guys probably ran him off, but he came back as soon as the coast was clear. I have to give the damned dog credit,”the detective added grudgingly. “Even though he’d been shot, he was downright fierce about not letting any of us near that body. After he offered to tear me limb from limb, I was a little surprised to see Natalie Wilson with him on a leash, walking around just as nice as you please.”
Which is why you work homicide and she’s animal control, Joanna thought.
She studied the expanse of disrupted sand around the body. “You said you thought one of the vehicles had dual tires. How do you know that?”
“This isn’t the shortest way to and from the gate, but it’s the most passable. If you look carefully, you can see the dips left in the sand by the dual wheels even though you can’t make out the treads on the tire.”
Joanna looked down and saw that he was right. The tracks were there, but the fine grade of the sand left behind no visible tread.
“The victim didn’t bother following the road when he came here, and he didn’t take a direct route from the gate, either,”Ernie said. “It looks to me