Chapter 7
My shirt stuck to my back between my shoulder blades where the sweat had soaked through. The asphalt was soft under my boots, soft enough that it gave a little when I shifted my weight, and the air tasted like dust and something sweet and wrong coming from the truck bed behind me.
He'd been two days dead in a hundred and four. The smell was the kind that crawled up into your sinuses and stayed there for a week. I kept my breathing shallow and my mouth open and tried not to think about what I was going to taste in my coffee tomorrow morning.
Ransom leaned against the truck ten feet away with his arms crossed and his hat pulled low. He hadn't looked at me since we'd left the ranch.
The Truth or Consequences morgue sat behind the funeral home, a cinderblock addition with bars on the windows and paint that had blistered off in sheets. We'd been waiting fifteen minutes for the sheriff.
A dust plume rose on the highway and grew closer.
The cruiser pulled into the lot and parked.
The sheriff climbed out slowly. He had thirty pounds on him he didn't used to and the kind of mustache that said his wife had stopped having opinions on it about twenty years ago.
He took one look at the tarp-covered body in the truck bed, and the corner of his mouth pulled down like he'd just bitten into something sour.
"Hear you got a body," he said.
Ransom pulled the tarp aside without a word.
Roy Castillo lay in the truck bed with his hands folded across his chest, his skin gone the color of old wax.
The sheriff stepped back. "Jesus. Judge Castillo?"
"Found him on Pae Saco land yesterday," I said. "Winston Valverde, Texas Rangers. I'm working the case." I pulled my badge and let him look at it long enough to count the points on the star.
He didn't ask which case file or which captain, or whether I had jurisdiction outside Texas.
He didn't ask any of the questions a man could've asked.
The badge was real and the star was bright, but he wasn't looking at the badge.
He was looking at the body like he'd already heard it was coming and hoped it wouldn't.
"You got a medical examiner on staff?"
The sheriff pulled a handkerchief and wiped his forehead. "We contract with the state office up in Albuquerque. Send the bodies up, get the reports back in a few months. Sometimes six, depending. Budget cuts."
I looked at the body, the cinderblock building, the sheriff who clearly wanted to be anywhere else.
"You got gloves and an apron?" I asked.
The sheriff blinked. "What?"
"Gloves. Apron. Scalpel, if you've got it." I pulled my hat off and set it on the hood of the truck. "I'll do it myself."
The sheriff looked at me like I'd just offered to perform surgery in the parking lot. "You're joking."
"I've done field autopsies before. Worked cattle country long enough, you learn to do your own detective work." I glanced at Ransom. He stood there with his eyes on me. He didn't look away this time. "I can wait for Albuquerque to maybe get around to it, or I can do it now. Your choice."
What I didn't say was that if he sent the body to Albuquerque, the body went into a system.
Names and case numbers and chain of custody, and somewhere in that paperwork chain a Ranger captain in El Paso would get a phone call asking why one of his men was investigating a New Mexico judge without authorization.
The body needed to stay out of the system.
The autopsy needed to happen in this storage room with this sheriff who wanted to be anywhere else.
The sheriff looked at the body, then at me, then at Ransom.
"Fine," he said. "But you're signing the paperwork. And if anyone asks, I advised against this."
Good, I thought. Sign whatever you want. Nobody's going to ask.
He walked toward the morgue entrance, keys jangling. "I'll get you set up."
I looked at Ransom. "You coming?"
"Somebody's got to help you get him inside." He pushed off the truck and pulled the bandana down from his face. The sun caught the line of his jaw, two days unshaved. "Might as well be me."
The sheriff unlocked the morgue and disappeared inside. He moved around in there, opening cabinets and muttering to himself.
Ransom climbed into the truck bed and crouched beside the body. I joined him. We stood there a moment, looking down at Roy Castillo.
"You take the shoulders," I said.
Ransom nodded.
We got our hands under him. The body had stiffened some, but the heat had loosened it again, and when we lifted him he moved in ways that made my stomach turn over.
Something shifted inside the chest cavity that wasn't supposed to shift.
Fluid had pooled along the underside, and a slow, dark seep came through the back of the dress shirt as the weight redistributed onto our forearms. I'd done this before. It never got better.
We carried him down out of the truck bed. Ransom walked backwards, steady, his face blank. His eyes were on me and not on the body, and we both knew it.
My boot caught on the edge of the tailgate, and I stumbled.
Ransom's free hand shot out and caught me by the elbow before I fell. "Careful," he said.
He let go. I didn't look at the place his hand had been because I knew if I did, he'd see me do it.
We carried Castillo across the parking lot toward the open door, the sun beating down on us.
The smell got worse with every step, riper, and the slow seep through the back of the shirt warmed my forearm.
I didn't want to put words to it. Flies had found us.
They circled, landed, and lifted off again.
One walked across the bridge of my nose, and I shook my head to get rid of it because my hands were full of dead judge.
The morgue smelled like old bleach trying to cover up rot and a musty basement cooler.
The sheriff had turned on a single overhead light above a steel table in the center of the room, and the rest of the place fell off into shadow.
The table had a drain at one end and rust stains that had been scrubbed at but never quite came clean.
We laid the body down. The shirt made a wet sound against the steel that I would hear in my sleep.
Ransom stepped back and wiped his hands on his jeans. He looked at the table, at the body, at the single high window with bars across it, his jaw set tight.
"You good?" I asked.
"Fine." He didn't look at me when he said it.
The sheriff came back with an apron, gloves, and what he called a tackle box. Inside were scalpels, forceps, a bone saw that had seen better days, and a collection of tools I couldn't identify but probably didn't want to.
"Best I can do," he said. "We mostly use this room for storage now."
"It'll work."
"I'll be in the office doing paperwork. You need anything, holler."
He left before I could answer.
The latch caught behind him, and the room got quiet except for the hum of the overhead light and the flies that had followed us inside.
The mask the sheriff had brought was thin paper, and it smelled like dust. I looped it over my ears and pulled it up.
It cut about a third of the smell. The other two-thirds I was just going to have to live with.
I pulled on the apron. The gloves were a size too small. I worked my fingers in until the latex pulled tight across the webbing of my thumbs, and across the room Ransom watched me do it. I let him. I took my time with the second glove.
When I looked up, he'd moved his eyes to the body.
"My captain thinks I'm taking time off," I said to the body, not to Ransom.
I picked up the scalpel and turned it over. The blade was lighter than it ought to have been. They always were, the first time you picked one up after a while away.
"Third one of these I've done without a morgue, judge.
The first two were on cases I was supposed to be working.
This one isn't on any case file in any state.
So whatever you tell me, you're telling a man who isn't here.
" I looked at the body's still face. "I figure that's about the best deal you've gotten in a while. "
I pulled the small leather notebook out of my back pocket and the pen from inside it and held them out to Ransom without looking at him.
"What?"
"Take it."
"I'm not your secretary, Ranger."
"You are today, darlin'."
The word landed in the quiet room the way I wanted it to land.
Better, even. His head came up like I'd put a hand on the back of his neck.
The flush started at his collar and crawled up under the two days of stubble, and he couldn't stop it from getting to his ears.
He looked at the wall behind me a second too long before he could look back at my face.
"You don't get to call me that," he said. The growl was there. Underneath it was something thinner.
"Why not? Afraid you might grow to like it?"
"I don't like it."
"Mm." I let that sit. "Whatever you say, darlin'."
The flush got worse. He flipped me off and reached across the body to take the notebook out of my hand, and his fingers were not as steady as they had been a minute ago.
He flipped the notebook open, clicked the pen once, and stood there with the notebook on his thigh like he'd been doing it his whole life. He wouldn't look up from the page.
"Go," he said.
I pulled the scissors from the tackle box and started on the clothes. The shirt came away in pieces. Two days in the heat had done unpleasant things to the fabric.
"White dress shirt, black slacks. No jacket, no shoes, no wallet. Soiled with mud and what looks like road debris. Oil stain on the back of the shirt. He didn't die clean."
The pen scratched. "You always dictate this slowly?" Ransom said.
"Only when somebody's worth taking my time over."
"You talking to the judge?"
"Sure," I said. "Let's say that."
The shirt peeled away, and I got my first real look at what the heat and time had done to him. I'd seen worse. Not by much.