Before leaving for his class, Richard Bingham provided Kerney with his friend Nancy's full name and address.
The girl lived in a dormitory on the college campus.
A private institution with a small enrollment, the school was situated in the Santa Fe foothills. The nearby mountains, million-dollar homes, and an adjacent private prep school insulated the campus and its carefully tended grounds.
Kerney found Nancy Rubin in her dorm room, introduced himself, and asked a few questions. No more than nineteen years old. Nancy had a slim, lanky body, short curly blonde hair, and a heavy New York accent.
She wore three diamond studs in her right earlobe.
The girl confirmed Richard's version of the events at the ranch involving Luiza, and Kerney left feeling fairly certain that he'd gotten candid answers. m Las Vegas, Kerney stopped at the county sheriff's office and got directions to the Box Z Ranch, where Luiza San Miguel had once been employed. The route took him along a state highway that cut through high, rolling plains and onto a narrow two-lane road that provided a panoramic view of the mountains. Where the dun-colored plains ended, massive, dark opal peaks swept beyond the limits of perception and faded into a rippling, mirage like vagueness.
The road curved away from the view and Kerney saw the first sign of a deep trough that pierced the hilly grasslands. Soon he was hugging the lip of a canyon that cut a thousand feet below the plains and opened out in a widening valley flanked by red-rimmed tabletop mesas.
The pavement turned to dirt, and the road crossed and recrossed a rocky, shallow river, and then rose to expose an expanse of rangeland that seemed to push back the mesas. After navigating a boulder-strewn bypass bulldozed around the remnants of a washed-out wooden bridge, Kerney topped out at a small rise, and stopped to take a look around.
Ten miles south, a lone butte towered where the canyon lands ended.
Stands of pifion and juniper trees peppered lush pastures filled with blue stem and Indian rice grass. Patches of spring wildflowers threw color against the foot of the mesas.
Kerney drove toward the butte, taking it all in. Here the land dominated, making the small herds of cattle moving across the valley look like dots; turning the ranch road into a vague incision that faded away to nothing in the distance; putting fences, windmills, feed troughs, and stock tanks into a perspective that made man's efforts seem inconsequential.
Sheltered at the foot of the butte, the Box Z headquarters was surrounded by groves of cottonwood trees. The houses, barns, sheds, outbuildings, and corrals were made of rock and in perfect condition.
Behind the barn stood a pitched-roof garage with a red 1930s gasoline pump off to one side. The main ranch house was a two-story Queen Anne "Victorian. The roofline was broken by two shingled dormers, and round columns supported the deep front porch.
The man who opened the front door wore a straw cowboy hat pushed back to reveal a high forehead and eyeglasses with plastic frames. Somewhere in his sixties, he had straight lips beneath a pudgy nose and deep creases in his cheeks mat ran down to his chin.
Tm looking for the owner," Kerney said.
"You found him," the man replied, glancing at Kerney's open badge case.
"I'm Arlin Fullerton. What brings you out this way, Officer?"
"I have a few questions to ask you about Luiza San Miguel."
"Is something wrong?"
"I just need to find her," Kerney replied.
"She took a job last year at Horse Canyon. My wife sure hated to lose that girl," Arlin said.
"If she's not there, I don't know where she's working now. We haven't kept track of her. Have you checked at Horse Canyon?"
"Yes. What was her reason for leaving the Box Z?"
"She just decided to move on, I guess."
"Did you hear from her after she left?"
"We got a card from her sometime back."
"What did it say?"
"Just that she liked her new job."
"How did you come to hire her?"
"I pay a fair wage, but not too many locals-especially the younger ones-want to work six days a week on a remote ranch. So most of my employees are Mexican.
They've got their own grapevine when it comes to finding work. My wife was looking for a housekeeper when Luiza showed up."
"How did she learn about the job?"
"Word of mouth would be my guess."
"Not one of your employees?"
"She didn't know a soul when she started here."
"Did Luiza talk about herself or her family in Mexico?"
Fullerton shook his head.
"Not much. She's a shy girl.
Quiet. Keeps to herself."
"Did she have any dashes with other employees? Any friction, disagreements, dissension?"
"Not that I know about. She was pretty even tempered.
Got along with everybody."
"Everybody?"
"Except when she got pestered."
"Who pestered her?"
"Well, it wasn't pestering to start; it was more like skirt chasing.
One of the neighboring ranch boys took a shine to her. Luiza didn't like him at all. But the kid wouldn't take no for an answer. It really got Luiza's back up."
"What's the kid's name?"
"Bernardo Barela. He works on the next spread over with his uncle."