He walked back to where Sal waited beside the ambulance. All around them the foothills of the Humboldt Range rose in bristly mounds, treeless and dry. To the right the land sloped up toward a rocky cliff that threw man and boy into shadow. The wind pushed Sal’s Denver Broncos sweatshirt against his thin chest. It was cold in this high desert country in March; the tops of the mountains were still white with snow.
Sal turned and led Jake up the slope. They climbed in silence, through sagebrush that snatched at their pant legs. When they reached the top the ground dropped into a seasonal wash that ran along the base of the bluff. A cluster of acacia trees stood there, their canopies lifted to the sky like open palms. They were the only trees Jake had seen since they left Marzen, and the dense little grove spoke of shelter, of safety. Of a place to hide.
Sal stopped. The wind whipped in the sagebrush and the gray-green leaves of the acacias, and moaned as it curled among the hills. There was a smell, too, faint but insistent. Tangy, ripe, burnt. Far above, two chicken hawks floated in lazy circles, their wings tipping in, then out, then in again.
Jake looked at the boy. His eyes were closed, his shoulders drawn in tight.
“Is it down there?”
Sal nodded without opening his eyes.
“Wait here.” Jake pressed one hand against his belly, tucked in his shirt, and walked into the wash.
When he reached the grove of trees, he didn’t see the math teacher right away. He saw the careful ring of stones that made the fire pit, and the ashes piled in the center. Around it lay trees that had grown and died and fallen, their corpses blackened in the long, quiet decay of desert things. At first, Jake took the math teacher’s body for one of these. Only when he saw the empty vodka bottle and the children’s jump rope did he see what was left of the man. Then Jake, too, closed his eyes.
The Pershing County sheriff and his chief deputy drove up from Lovelock and met them at the fire station forty-five minutes later. Jake knew Sheriff Watterly by sight, and he’d gone to high school with the chief deputy, Mason Greer. Mason didn’t seem to recognize him, but Jake wasn’t surprised. Lovelock kids had never had much to say to Marzen kids.
After Jake told them how Sal had led him to the body, the sheriff turned to Sal. “How’d you find it?”
“I was on my way to the bus.” Sal spoke so quietly the sheriff had to lean forward to hear.
“Well, it wasn’t lying in the road, was it? Jake here says it’s a ways off.”
Jake gave the sheriff a sharp look. The boy wasn’t a suspect, for Christ’s sake. Sal looked at the floor. “I saw the car. And there were birds. Flying around like something was dead.” A small breath, in and out. “I was early for the bus. I went to see.”
The sheriff wrote something in his notepad, then snapped the pad shut. “Okay, let’s have a look.”
In the grove, the two policemen surveyed the corpse curled beside the firepit. Jake stood to one side as they made notes about the empty three-liter bottle of Smirnoff and the charred nylon jump rope, which was tied around the body’s ankles. He tried not to look at the body, with its blackened arms bent at the elbows like a boxer about to jab, its howling mouth, and its burnt-out eyes. In his ten years on Marzen’s volunteer fire force he’d never seen firsthand what fire did to human flesh.
Mason squatted behind a rock about six feet from the firepit and called to the sheriff. Neither officer had told Jake to keep his distance, so he came over to see what Mason had found.
It was a soft leather briefcase, black, with worn handles. Mason used his pen to open the flap, and the tips of his fingers to pull out a wallet. He flipped it open and a Nevada driver’s license faced the sky, with a photo of a pale, balding man in his fifties. Adam H. Merkel, read the name. Jake looked back at the body. At the face, tar black and screaming.
“That’s the new math teacher over at the middle school,” Mason said. His voice was shaky, and he was as pale as Jake felt.
“Call Phil,” the sheriff said. “Tell him to bring an evidence kit and call the coroner. I’ll go to the middle school, see if the math teacher showed up.”
“What about Sal?” Jake asked. Sal was in the police cruiser, back on the fire road.
The sheriff and Mason looked at each other, and Jake had the feeling they’d forgotten about their young witness. “Chief Deputy Greer will get his contact information,” the sheriff said. “Then he can go home. We’ll call his parents later about getting a statement.”
“He doesn’t have parents. He lives with his uncles.” Jake couldn’t bear to think of Sal walking back to the Prentiss place alone. “Maybe we could drop him off.”
The sheriff hesitated, and now Jake saw how far out of his depth he was pretending not to be. Jake figured the only dead bodies Bill Watterly and Mason Greer had seen were overdoses, suicides, accidents, and old people who died alone and weren’t discovered until the mail piled up. He couldn’t remember the last time anyone in Pershing County had been murdered, and this murder—the burning, the jump rope, the empty vodka bottle—was steeped in a calculated, horrifying malice that chilled him. He didn’t envy the sheriff the task of solving it.
“You could talk to his uncles about the statement,” he suggested. The sheriff nodded, and Jake fell in behind the officers as they headed back to the cruiser.
When they started up the dirt track toward the Prentiss place Sal went rigid. “Where are we going?”
“We’re giving you a ride home,” Jake said.
“No, thank you. I can walk.”
“It’s no trouble.” Jake glanced at the sheriff and Mason in the front seats. He lowered his voice. “Relax.”
The boy picked at his jeans with a dirty fingernail. The jeans were too small for him. They were probably the last pair his mother had bought him before she died, Jake thought. The sweatshirt, too, was short in the sleeves. The only things that fit were his sneakers, a new pair of white basketball shoes. At least his uncles had managed to buy him those.
The track was riven with troughs carved by the rare but violent storms that scoured the land in the winter, and the cruiser jounced and slid. After two slow miles they rounded a curve and came upon a few shabby buildings in a small valley. A sign at the top of the dirt driveway said prentiss ranch no trespassing. Mason drove past it and onto the property.
Jake had never seen the Prentiss place, though he’d heard stories about the Prentisses all his life. The first Prentiss was a con man and itinerant preacher who’d landed in Lovelock when it was still a busy stop on the California Trail. He’d married a Paiute girl from a local whorehouse and tried to make an honest living as a rancher, but eventually he and his sons devolved into rustling, herding stolen cattle from Idaho and Montana south to Denver. Their descendants ran a bootlegging operation during Prohibition, then a numbers racket, and were ear-deep in the Vegas mob in the 1980s. Or so people said. Jake didn’t know what was truth and what was myth, but he did know the current Prentisses were a surly pair of recluses who only came to town to buy supplies at the general store and drink at the Nickel, where their sister, Grace—Sal’s mother—had been the bartender.
Still, even knowing the Prentisses’ reputation, Jake was taken aback by the ranch. At the end of the driveway was a ruined two-story farmhouse, its white paint peeling, all its windows shattered, its porch smothered by a clot of sagebrush that was trying to drag it into the earth. A dense ring of garbage surrounded the house: furniture, rusted appliances, mattresses with their stuffing shredded by mice. A hundred feet to the house’s left was a beige double-wide on a concrete slab, and scattered around both buildings were a half dozen crumbling wooden sheds, a chicken run, a listing barn, an old well with a rusted winch, a water tank, a propane tank, a small set of solar panels, and a generator. There were no cars or people in sight.