Tax Assassin by Claudia Hall Christian Page A

strong backs.
    “ Do you have one of those
fancy phones?” she asked.
    He shook his head.
    “ Well, you can look up the
photos online,” Jocelyn said. “They lined up the wagons and
shoveled snow into them.”
    “ And the tax agent?” Seth
asked. Rachel said, “Bah!” and waved her fist.
    “ Yes, ‘Get to the point Ms.
Jocelyn,’ Rachel says,” Jocelyn chuckled at the baby. “Your
grandmother used to say, ‘Oh Jocelyn can go on and on.’”
    Seth smiled.
    “ The tax agent set out from
Denver on the first of November. His goal was to work his way
through the larger ranches and end up in Trinidad by Thanksgiving.
His family met him at the Columbia Hotel downtown.”
    Seth had the sense that these little details
were important. He leaned back to take it all in.
    “ His name was Paul Bradley.
He was the younger brother of Peter Bradley. Heard of
him?”
    Seth shook his head.
    “ Peter Bradley was an
industrialist who specialized in fertilizer, lumber, and heavy
machinery. He was the silent partner in importing and breeding
Arabian horses in the US. Lived in Boston,” Jocelyn said. “He sent
his brother out to Colorado to buy timber and grazing land, get in
good with the mining operations to sell machinery, and see what
else he could invest in. That’s officially why he sent his
brother.“
    “ His letters indicate that
he actually sent his brother to Colorado to create a pipeline for
his horses. Paul Bradley took the tax agent job as a way of getting
to know ranchers all over the state. As you can imagine, no one was
all that happy about having foreign horses here in
Colorado.”
    “ As a tax man, he would be
out on the ranches,” Seth said. “He’d know what ranches were ready
to fold, where the virgin timber was . . .”
    “ And which ranchers were
willing to raise Arabian horses.”
    “ That’s smart.”
    “ Brilliant,” Jocelyn said.
“On this trip, he bought a couple of ranches outside of Walsenburg
before meeting his family for Thanksgiving. His family took the
train and lingered until the first of December. His wife’s letters
indicate that she sent him off in his buggy around the first of
December.”
    “ At the start of the
blizzard,” Seth said.
    “ There wasn’t a national
weather forecast then,” Jocelyn said. “Like a lot of Colorado
snowstorms, the blizzard started with just a little snow. Paul
Bradley was from back East. He wouldn’t have known how things can
change on a dime here. He set out from Trinidad. His records, the
ones they found on him, indicate that he made slow progress up the
valley. The last notation is the fourth of December 1913, the day
eyewitnesses say all hell broke loose. When they found Mr. Bradley,
they assumed his buggy had gotten stuck and he had frozen to death
out there.”
    “ When did they find
him?”
    “ About two months after he
disappeared,” she said. “It wasn’t until he thawed out that they
saw the bullet hole.”
    “ Where did they find him?”
Seth asked.
    She opened the heavy map book and began
flipping the pages.
    “ There.”
    Jocelyn pointed to a small town off a
railway line that ran up the center of the valley. Seth pulled his
reading glasses from the breast pocket of his sports jacket and
leaned over to look.
    “ In between Tyrone and
Thatcher?” he asked.
    “ It’s called Houghton,
now,” she said. “All of these railway towns were named after valley
cattlemen – owners of the big ranches. Thatcher, Model, Louden,
Tyrone, Bloom . . . Most of these families
homesteaded this land in the late 1880s and early
1900s.”
    “ Why do those names and
this land sound familiar?”
    “ The U.S. Army has a large
training facility there.”
    “ Piñon Canyon.”
    “ They bought and took the
land in the 1980s,” Jocelyn said. “Opened the maneuver site in
1983.”
    “ Tried a land grab some
years back?”
    “ The Army?” Jocelyn nodded.
“It’s these people, the Loudens, Thatchers, Tyrones, and Blooms –
people