The Invisible Dead

Chapter 1: The Fence Post

The call came at 5:47 in the morning, while the sky over the Chihuahuan Desert was still the color of a bruise.

Bill Mayfield had been awake for twenty minutes already, sitting at the kitchen table in his boxers and an undershirt, drinking coffee that June had set to brew on a timer the night before. He'd been watching the window above the sink turn from black to deep purple, thinking about the irrigation pump on the Bledsoe property that had been vandalized for the third time this year, when his cell phone buzzed against the Formica.

He picked it up and saw the name: Ray Ontiveros.

"Ray."

"Bill, you need to come out to Rincon Road. Mile marker nine, give or take. There's a man on a fence."

Bill set down his coffee. "On a fence?"

"Tied to it. Strung up on the wire. I don't—" Ray's voice cracked. Ray Ontiveros was a ranch hand who worked the Bledsoe spread and a dozen other properties across Doña Ana and Luna counties, a thick-armed man of fifty who had seen calves born dead and horses put down and every kind of hard thing the desert offered. The crack in his voice told Bill everything he needed to know about what was waiting at mile marker nine. "Bill, I think he's still alive. I called the ambulance already. But you need to see this."

"I'm coming."

Bill dressed in the dark bedroom while June stirred but didn't wake. He pulled on his khaki uniform trousers, the brown shirt with the county seal stitched on the shoulder, his boots. He buckled his belt and holster, checked his sidearm from habit, and grabbed his hat from the hook by the door.

The drive from his house outside Deming to the stretch of Rincon Road where Ray had called from took thirty-eight minutes. Bill drove his department-issue Ford Explorer with the windows down, letting the predawn air fill the cab. It was October, and the mornings had finally turned cool after a summer that had baked the county into submission. The road unwound ahead of him in the headlights, straight and flat and empty, flanked by creosote bush and the occasional cluster of mesquite. He passed no other vehicles.

He'd been a constable for Luna County for fourteen years, and before that he'd done eighteen years with the Las Cruces Police Department. He was sixty-two years old. He'd seen bodies before — car accidents, domestics, a shooting at a bar in Hatch that had left two men dead on a Tuesday afternoon. But Ray's voice had carried something new, a frequency of distress that Bill couldn't place, and it kept his hands tight on the wheel.

He saw the flashing lights before he saw anything else. The ambulance from Deming had beaten him there, its red and white strobes painting the desert in alternating washes of color. Ray's truck was parked at an angle on the shoulder, its headlights aimed at the fence line.

Bill pulled up behind the ambulance and stepped out. The air smelled like dust and sage and something else — something copper-edged and wrong.

Ray was standing by his truck, his arms folded across his chest, his face the color of ash. He pointed toward the fence without speaking.

Bill walked past him.

The fence was standard ranch wire — five strands of barbed wire strung between cedar posts, the kind that ran for miles along every ranch road in the county. At the third post from Ray's truck, a man hung.

He'd been lashed to the post with baling wire, his arms spread along the top strand, his wrists wrapped so tightly that the wire had bitten through the skin and into the flesh beneath. His feet were off the ground by about six inches, his weight pulling against the wire at his wrists. His shirt had been removed, and his torso was a map of cuts — shallow, deliberate, precise. Not slashes. Incisions. Someone had taken time with this.

The man's head hung forward, his chin on his chest. Bill could see that his hair was dark and matted with blood. He was breathing, but barely — thin, wet sounds that came at irregular intervals.

Two paramedics were working to cut the baling wire. One of them, a young woman Bill recognized as Patty Sandberg, looked at him with wide eyes.

"He's alive," she said. "Barely. We need to get him down and get him on fluids. He's lost a lot of blood."

"Do it," Bill said. "Do whatever you need to do."

He stepped closer while they worked. The cuts on the man's torso were arranged in rows, almost geometric. Some were deeper than others, but none appeared to be immediately life-threatening on their own. It was the cumulative blood loss, combined with exposure and dehydration, that was killing him. Bill guessed he'd been out here for hours — possibly since the previous evening.

The man's face, when they tilted his head back, was swollen and bruised but recognizable as someone in his forties, maybe early fifties. He had a thick neck and the kind of heavy forearms that came from manual labor. His wallet was missing, his pockets empty.

"Any ID?" Bill asked.

"Nothing on him," the male paramedic said. "No shoes, either."

Bill looked down. The man's feet were bare, and the soles were cut up — he'd walked on rough ground before being strung up, or been made to walk on it.

They got him down and onto a stretcher. Bill watched them load him into the ambulance, start an IV, cover him with a blanket. The man's eyes fluttered once, and his lips moved, but no sound came out.

"Which hospital?" Bill asked.

"Mimbres Memorial," Patty said. "If he makes it that far."

The ambulance pulled away, and Bill was left standing in the growing light with Ray Ontiveros and a fence post stained dark with blood.

"Tell me how you found him," Bill said.

Ray unfolded his arms and refolded them. He was wearing a denim jacket over a flannel shirt, and his boots were dusty. "I was headed out to check the stock tanks on the south section. I come this way every morning, usually around five-thirty. I saw something on the fence. Thought it was a deer that got tangled — happens sometimes. Then I got closer and—" He stopped. Swallowed. "Bill, who does something like that to a person?"

"I don't know yet."

"Those cuts on him. They weren't random. Somebody took their time."

"I saw."

Ray looked at the fence post, then looked away. "I've been driving this road for twelve years. Nothing like this has ever happened out here. Nothing even close."

Bill nodded. He walked back to the fence post and crouched down, studying the ground. The soil was hard-packed caliche and sand, and it didn't take prints well, but he could see disturbances — scuff marks, drag marks leading from the road to the post. Two sets of footprints, one bare. The shod prints were from boots, the tread pattern sharp and clear in a few patches of softer dirt. Bill took out his phone and photographed everything.

He followed the drag marks back to the road. On the shoulder, he found tire tracks — a vehicle had pulled off here, recently. The tracks were wide, like a truck or SUV. He photographed those too.

The sun was coming up now, a thin line of gold along the eastern horizon. The desert stretched away in every direction, flat and brown and enormous. There were no houses visible, no structures of any kind. The nearest ranch headquarters was the Bledsoe place, four miles north. To the south, the land belonged to a patchwork of ranchers and the Bureau of Land Management.

"Ray, does anyone live within a couple miles of here?"

Ray thought about it. "There's the old Perea place, but that's been empty since Hector died. Three miles south, maybe. And there's Doverman's ranch — that's east, off the county road. Maybe two miles as the crow flies."

"Doverman?"

"Lewis Doverman. Leases about four sections from the BLM, runs a few head of cattle. Keeps to himself. Polite enough when you see him, but you don't see him much."

Bill wrote the name down. "Anyone else?"

"Not really. This is about as empty as it gets."

Bill stood and looked at the blood on the fence post. In the early light, it was almost black. A fly had already found it.

"Go on about your morning," he told Ray. "I'll need a written statement from you later today. Come by the office when you can."

"Sure, Bill." Ray hesitated. "You think that man's going to make it?"

"I don't know."

Ray got in his truck and drove away, and Bill stood alone on Rincon Road with the sun rising and the blood drying and the vast, indifferent silence of the desert pressing in from all sides.

---

Mimbres Memorial was a small hospital in Deming, built in the 1970s and expanded twice since then, still never quite large enough for the county it served. Bill arrived forty minutes after the ambulance and found Patty Sandberg in the emergency department, filling out paperwork.

"He's in surgery," she said. "The cuts aren't the main problem — it's the dehydration and the blood loss. His organs are shutting down."

"Did he say anything on the way in?"

Patty hesitated. "He was in and out. Mostly out. But he said a word a few times. I thought it was a name."

"What name?"

"It sounded like 'Doverman.' He said it maybe three or four times. 'Doverman.' Then he went under again."

Bill felt something tighten in his chest. He wrote it down, though he'd already written it once that morning.

"Anything else?"

"No. Just that name. Over and over, like he was trying to make sure someone heard it."

Bill thanked her and went to the waiting area. He called the Luna County Sheriff's Office and spoke to dispatch, then to the sheriff himself, Tom Padilla, who was at home eating breakfast.

"Crucified?" Tom said.

"That's the only word for it. Strung up on a fence post with baling wire, arms spread. Cut up across the chest and stomach. Deliberate cuts, Tom. Patterned."

There was a pause. "Jesus."

"I need to get the state police crime scene unit out to the location. I've got photographs, but the site needs a proper workup."

"I'll make the call. You know who the victim is?"

"Not yet. No ID on him. I'm at the hospital now."

"All right. Keep me posted."

Bill hung up and waited. He sat in a plastic chair in the waiting area and watched people come and go — a woman with a child who had a fever, an old man with chest pains, a teenager with a broken wrist. The ordinary emergencies of ordinary life. He thought about the man on the fence post and the geometric cuts on his torso and the name he'd repeated in his delirium.

Doverman.

Two hours later, a nurse came out and told him the victim was out of surgery but in critical condition. He was not conscious and was not expected to regain consciousness soon. The surgeon had counted thirty-seven individual incisions on his torso, none deeper than a quarter inch. The cuts had been made with something very sharp — a scalpel or a razor blade. The man's wrists were severely lacerated from the baling wire, and there was nerve damage in both hands.

Bill asked if they'd been able to identify him.

"He had no ID, but we ran his fingerprints through the system," the nurse said. "His name is Edward Galloway. Goes by Ned. He's a long-haul trucker out of El Paso. Forty-seven years old."

Bill wrote it down. "Family?"

"We're working on contacting his emergency contact. An ex-wife in El Paso."

"When can I talk to him?"

"Constable, I'm not sure you'll be able to talk to him at all. He's in very bad shape."

Bill nodded. He drove back to Rincon Road.

The state police crime scene unit had arrived — two technicians in a white van, methodically documenting the scene. Bill walked them through what he'd found, showed them his photographs, pointed out the tire tracks and footprints. They worked for three hours in the growing heat, collecting samples, measuring distances, photographing everything from multiple angles.

Bill stood off to the side and watched. He was thinking about Ned Galloway, a long-haul trucker with no criminal record, no known enemies, no reason anyone could think of for someone to string him up on a fence and cut him thirty-seven times with a razor blade. A man whose only connection to this stretch of empty road was that his truck route took him through the county on Interstate 10, twenty miles north of here.

And the name he'd said, over and over, in the ambulance.

Doverman.

Bill looked east, toward the low hills that separated the valley from the next drainage. Somewhere out there, two miles as the crow flies, Lewis Doverman was going about his morning on his ranch.

Bill decided he'd pay Mr. Doverman a visit. But not yet. First, he wanted to know more about both men — the victim and the name the victim had given him.

He drove back to his office in Deming, a small room in the county building on Spruce Street, and began making calls.