I didn’t trust the guy. He’d be bugging Cookie the first chance he got, and I knew it.
And make a note to buy Ubie a bottle of Acqua di Gio.
Okay. Is there something I should know?
Yes, his taste in cologne sucks.
I started to put my phone back in my bag when Ozzy yelled out, his accent so thick, I was only half certain he said, “Where the foock are ya goin’?”
Unlce Bob jumped. I must’ve turned on my GPS.
“You have to tahn the foock around. You’re in the middle of foockin’ nowhere.”
“What the hell is that?” Uncle Bob asked, almost swerving off the road.
“Sorry, it’s Ozzy.” I grabbed my phone and turned down the volume. “He’s so demanding.” I pushed a few buttons to turn off the app, then put the phone to my ear. “Sweet buttermilk pancakes, Ozzy, you have to stop calling me. You’re a married man!” I pretended to hang up, then rolled my eyes. “Rock stars.”
Uncle Bob blinked and stared ahead, not sure what to think, a moment I would cherish forever. Or as long as my ADD allowed me to.
12
Life is short. Buy the shoes.
—INSPIRATIONAL POSTER
We pulled onto a private road and drove another half hour, easing through gates and over cattle guards until we came to the burial site. Uncle Bob parked beside a bulldozer, then handed me his handkerchief.
“This could be bad, pumpkin.”
“The bodies?”
He shook his head, his expression one of sympathy. “No, the remains they’ve found so far are at the morgue. The smell.”
“Oh, right.”
I jumped out of his SUV filled with a sense of dread. The site itself had been taped off. There were a dozen official vehicles including several state cars, a couple of local law enforcement, and one with federal plates. I recognized it. Looking around for Special Agent Carson, I spotted her and her partner talking to the sheriff. She waved me over.
“Hey,” I said, surprised at how normal the area smelled. Then the air shifted, and I gulped and bit down, trying not to gag.
“Good to see you,” she said, struggling through a similar reaction. She held a kerchief to her nose and mouth as well. But the smell wasn’t what I’d expected. It was gaseous and oily, not so much of death as just an odd, heavy smell.
The entire site was covered in slick oil, thick and dirty. I bent and rubbed some between my fingers. “This is it,” I told Uncle Bob under my breath. “This is where the women are from.”
He nodded an acknowledgment. “They’ve found the remains of five possible bodies so far, but they aren’t intact. They brought out an archaeologist from the university, and a forensics expert from New York is on his way to assist the investigators as well.”
I stood and looked out over the area. It went on for miles, a gorgeous display of New Mexican desert with earthy colors punctuated with splashes of violet. “There are more. Many more. Is this oil coming from underground?”
“We don’t think so,” a sheriff’s deputy said. He walked up and handed the sheriff some kind of report. “It looks like it’s been dumped here. Hundreds if not thousands of gallons of oil.”
“Why would anyone do that?” I asked, frowning. “Where would they get that much oil from?”
“We’re checking into it. We’ve sent samples to the state lab to determine exactly what kind of oil it is.”
“What about the land?” I asked. “Who owns it?”
“First thing we checked,” Agent Carson said. “This is the Knight Ranch. Mrs. Knight, an elderly woman, actually owns it now. Her husband died a couple of years ago and she’s been in a nursing home ever since, but she ran the ranch for years by herself.”
“Could it have been the couple? Perhaps the woman’s husband?”
“Not likely,” the sheriff said. “Doyle had an accident while branding cattle and used a wheelchair the last thirty years of this life, which is why Alice, Mrs. Knight, took over the daily operations. There’s just no way he could have dug those graves. It could have been anyone from relatives to ranch hands to a random stranger using their land as a dump.”
I shook my head. “It just doesn’t seem random to me. There were too many obstacles to get to this point. Too many locked gates. And it happened over too long a period of time. If I had to guess, I’d say our killer was at it for more than twenty years.”
“Can I ask how you know that?” Agent Carson asked.
She was much too savvy to lie to, so I evaded the question. “You certainly can. In the meantime, I would love a peek at your case file as well as a list of all of the Knight’s relatives, ranch hands, anyone else who had access to this land.”
Since we’d worked together on a couple of other cases, Agent Carson knew to trust me. So where another agent would balk at such a demand, she just shrugged. “That’s a pretty long list.”
“I’m a fast reader. What was a construction crew doing out here anyway?” I asked, surveying the cleared land. “Of all the places on this two-thousand-acre ranch, why here?”
“The Knights’ son retired from the rodeo circuit a few years ago and took over operations. He decided to build a new house out here.”
“Can’t say as I blame him,” Uncle Bob said. “The view is incredible.”
I wondered if the view was why the killer chose that spot. I also wondered if the son found it as incredible as Ubie did. But if the son was doing the killing, why would he send a construction crew to this very site? Maybe he wanted his victims found. Maybe he wanted to be captured. Or chased. Serial killers loved the chase. Maybe no one was paying attention, so he decided to make them.