“We didn’t mean to do anything wrong,” Jack began in a self-effacing whimper, but his mother wasn’t having any of it.
“Cut the excuses and tell him,” she snapped.
“Me and my friend Randy went out hunting,” he began.
“My friend and I,” June corrected. “And you need to get real. They weren’t out hunting—they were out poaching. They ditched school, made off with Randy’s father’s shotgun without permission, and then went after quail without either one of them having a hunting license! Their harebrained plan was for Randy to shoot and clean the birds while Jack was supposed to cook ’em. What a joke! The most this dork has ever managed to cook in his life is mac and cheese—and he only makes that work because it comes straight out of the box.”
“We looked up how to do it on the Internet,” Jack whined. “We watched the video and everything.”
“Hah,” his mother snorted. “Sure you did.”
“Besides,” Jack continued, “we didn’t get anything. We didn’t see any quail. In fact, Randy never even fired the gun.”
“Tell him why,” June urged.
Jack hesitated for a moment before he answered. “Because we found something else,” he said meekly.
“When did all this happen?” Tom asked. “Today?”
“No,” Jack said. “It was early in October during quail season. We thought there would be other hunters out there, and the place we went was so far out of town we didn’t think we’d get caught.”
“Did you get caught?” Tom asked.
“No,” Jack answered.
“Then what’s so urgent about talking to me today?” Tom asked.
June butted in with an answer before her son had a chance. “My husband works for the Border Patrol,” she explained. “He’s being transferred to Tucson. He lives in an apartment up there during the week while Jack and I stay on here in Douglas so he can finish out his senior year and I can get the house ready to sell. We were planning on painting his room this weekend. This morning when I went to clean out his closet, that’s what I found.” She nodded accusingly toward the offending bag.
“And that is?”
“Well,” she urged her son, “what are you waiting for? Open up the damned bag and show him.”
“Do I have to?” Jack whined.
“Yes, you have to,” June snarled back at him. “You don’t have the option of going all squeamish on me now. It’s a little late for that.”
Reluctantly, Jack leaned forward, unzipped the bag, and dug inside with both hands. What he pulled out was a human skull—or at least what was left of a human skull. Even from across the desk, Tom could see the single bullet hole in the rounded back of the sun-bleached bone. The front of the skull was a shattered mess—entrance wound, exit wound. The victim, whoever he or she was, had been shot in the back of the head at what was likely point-blank range.
“Where the hell did you get that?” Tom demanded.
“We found it,” Jack said miserably, carefully returning the skull to the bag. “Out in the Peloncillos east of Douglas. It was just lying there out in the open, all by itself. I thought maybe we’d stumbled on an old Apache burial ground or something. I didn’t think anyone would care about some old dead Indian, so we brought it home—sort of like those steer heads people put on their fence posts sometimes.”
“You kept it as a trophy, you mean?”
“I guess,” Jack admitted, squirming uncomfortably in his seat.
“Do you realize that in the state of Arizona interfering with a human corpse is a class-C felony?” Tom asked.
Jack nodded. “I do now,” he said. “Mom told me.”
Tom glanced back toward June Carver. “Are you an attorney?” he asked.
“Hardly,” she said. “I looked it up on the Internet. But I’m a mother, and I know a little something about how this game is played.”
“What game?”
“Long ago, on a planet far away, I used to be a stripper, so I know how law enforcement works. Jack’s already signed up with a recruiter to join the army once he graduates from high school next May. His grades aren’t good enough to get him into college right now. His father and I are hoping the military can help him get his act together.
“The problem is, if he ends up with some kind of juvenile conviction hanging over his head, that’s not going to happen. We’re here. We brought you evidence of a homicide. You haven’t read Jack his rights, so none of what he just said to you is admissible. And if you want him to show you where this skull came from, you won’t be charging him, and you won’t be charging Randy, either. Deal?”
Tom looked back and forth between June Carver and her son. Jack sat with his head bowed and in such a state of abject misery that Tom couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. His impression was that there was nothing the justice system could hand the kid that would come close to measuring up to what his mother was prepared to dish out, and with June Carver, Tom suspected, there would be no room for legal loopholes or appeals.
“I think I can live with that,” he said. “So where was this?”
“On the far side of the San Bernardino Valley in the Peloncillos, on the way to Paramore Crater. I can’t tell you where we were exactly, but I can show you.”
Tom glanced out the window. The Peloncillos, the “Little Baldies,” were a forty-mile-long mountain range standing astride the Arizona–New Mexico border. Getting to that remote area of the county would take the better part of two hours at least and would entail driving on extremely primitive roads.
This far into November, it was already nearly sunset—much too late to send a group of investigators on a nighttime trek out into the desert in search of human remains. Had the homicide been recent—one that had occurred this very day, for instance—there would have been a need to track down valuable evidence before it was lost. In that case it would have been easy to justify hauling in generators and light stanchions. But this crime had been cold long before Jack Carver and his pal stumbled across that skull.
Hadlock turned away from the window and focused on the boy. “Did you have anything to do with what happened to this individual?” he demanded.
“God n-no,” the boy stammered in an anguished whisper. “I wouldn’t do something like that. I couldn’t.”
The poor kid looked as though he was going to puke on the spot, but Tom waited a little longer before putting him out of his misery.
“I think there’s a good chance you’re telling me the truth,” Tom said after a pause, “so here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to take charge of this bag and drop it off where it belongs—which happens to be at the M.E.’s office up in Old Bisbee. Tomorrow morning I’ll have one of my homicide investigators come by your place, pick up both you and your mother, and we’ll all take a little field trip out to the Peloncillos. Since you’re a minor, you can’t be interviewed in any fashion without a parent present. Your mother will be along in the car with you as a safeguard for her and for us—so we can demonstrate that there was no wrongdoing on our part or on yours.”