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“There you go,” Wright said.
Hawkins: “We need to find out who he was visiting.”
“Maybe Carol-Ann Oaks can tell us,” Letty said.
—
The house withyellow shutters was a wood-frame, unlike the other houses they’d seen—they’d all been real or simulated tan adobe—with a corrugated red-steel roof. A gray-haired woman was in the side yard, working a flower garden with a hoe and a garden hose, and turned to look when the patrol car’s headlights swept across her.
Letty led the way across the front yard to the garden; the hose had been turned off at the nozzle, but hissed at them when they passed, like a fifty-foot-long snake. “What happened?” the woman asked.
She agreed that she was Carol-Ann Oaks; Letty identified herself, Hawkins, and Wright, and asked her the question about life-threatening illnesses.
“Haven’t heard about anybody being sick, but…I haven’t seen Joe Cross for a month or more, and I usually see him most days. He lives over on the other side of the tracks, but he comes over here to take pictures and so on. He’s a hobby photographer. Black and white only. I thought about checking on him…but I didn’t.”
She went in the house, came back with a spiral notebook, put it on the hood of Wright’s patrol car, and drew a complicated map of the back-country roads around Lamy, and pinpointed Cross’s house. She looked at Letty’s photos of Scott and Catton, touched Scott’s photo and said, “He came through here quite a few times, starting last spring, right up until a while ago. I can’t tell you how long, exactly.”
“Was he on the road to the Cross house?” Hawkins asked.
Oaks nodded: “Yes. Could have been going there, but I don’t know if he did.”
—
They got backin the patrol car, followed the dirt trail along the railroad tracks, crossed them, followed the dirt track on the other side until they got to Cross’s driveway. The driveway was marked with a white ten-gallon bucket from Home Depot that was filled with sand and said “Cross” on the side, in hand-lettered black paint.
The driveway disappeared through anonymous shrubbery, and they followed it two hundred yards or so, and found what looked like a prefabricated farmhouse, or cabin, with a red steel roof like the one on Carol-Ann Oaks’s house, and an attached garage. An open-front machine shed stood in the back and they could see a compact Kubota tractor and a Kubota utility vehicle parked inside.
The house was dark and felt abandoned. Hawkins banged on the door and tried the doorknob, but it was locked. The back door was locked, and looking through the windows, they couldn’t see much at all inside, except the expected furniture. They could see a yellow Jeep in the garage, but it hadn’t been moved for a while—there was a layer of dust on the short concrete apron outside the garage door, but there were no tracks in the dust.
Night was coming, and Wright got a Maglite from his car; they poked around the machine shed without finding anything of interest until Hawkins noticed a drag harrow, sitting behind the building, that looked like it had been recently used, with loose dirt on the chain and frame.
“Odd time of year for that, you’d use it in the spring. Any rain at allwould have knocked the dirt off,” he said. They were losing light, but Wright spotted what seemed to be a patch of barren earth a hundred feet or so behind the shed, that circled around piñon trees.
“Why would you do that?” he asked.
Letty was looking around at the sparsely vegetated earth—yellow weeds and some short wildflowers between piñons. “If you’d dug a grave, in this dirt, it’d look a lot like a grave and for a long time. Maybe…”
“Nice to have an optimist with us,” Wright said to Hawkins.
“I saw some rebar in the shed,” Letty said. “C’mon, we gotta hurry.”
They each got a rebar stake from a pile in the shed and hustled back to the disturbed ground. Walking in a line, they began pushing the rebar into the disturbed surface. Underlying the dirt was a layer of caliche that would stop the rebar; but halfway across the circle of harrowed earth, Wright hit a soft spot and pushed the rebar rod down a full two feet.
“Damnit, I wanted to go home—but there’s something here. Or not something. I’m not hitting the caliche.”
They probed the soft area and found it grave-like in shape—or a little more than one grave, a little wider. Wright suggested that they call the Santa Fe sheriff’s department and get some crime scene lights and help digging.
“We’re going to need a lot more than that,” Letty said. “We need to get to a place where I can make a cell phone call.”
Lamy was in a deep desert valley south of the town of Eldorado. They left the Cross house, drove out the road past Oaks’s house and up the valley wall to the highway from Eldorado. It was now fully dark. Letty had Wright pull to the shoulder of the road, and she and Hawkins walked away from the car to make a call to Greet.She was still at her desk, though it was close to eleven o’clock in Washington.
Letty told her about the possible grave site. “Scott was here, apparently frequently, until about a month ago. We think he might have been visiting this guy, the guy hasn’t been seen for weeks, the house looks abandoned, and if it was an experiment that killed Cross…it probably would have been a test of the full hybrid virus. I can’t think of any other reason.”
“Then we need to have the Detrick crew do the excavation to see if there are bodies there,” Greet said. “We’re flying more people out now—a military crew this time. They’ll be there in the morning.”
“People in Lamy know we were asking about Cross,” Letty said. “Do we watch the place overnight, or just leave it? I mean, I gotta get some sleep sooner or later. This has been a heck of a day.”
Greet: “I’ll get you a car at the Santa Fe airport and a couple of rooms in Santa Fe. Have the highway patrol guy sit in the driveway until we can get somebody there to relieve him—probably another highway patrolman. Warn him not to go near the possible gravesite.”
