Scavengers (9 page)
“From the bar across the street, you mean?”
Estelle nodded.
“I saw you talking to the one who was driving. The fat one? That was Marvin? What did his partner do to attract your attention?”
“He didn’t do anything.” Estelle pushed the tea to one side, rested her chin on her hand again and gazed out the dirty window. “He didn’t even get out of the truck.”
“Why should he?”
“Tom Pasquale walked around the truck and talked to Eurelio. He said that the boy was nervous.”
Francis chuckled. “Tom Pasquale has never impressed me as the most keenly observant type,
querida
. ”
“Exactly. If the boy’s behavior caught Tom’s attention…” She shrugged. “Loose ends, is all,” she added.
“Things to keep you awake at night.”
She nodded, almost imperceptibly.
“Did you run all this by Jackie? To see what she thinks?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Well, you should,” he said. “
Padrino
’s right when he calls you inscrutable, you know. The deputies can’t read your mind. And Jackie’s pretty savvy.”
“Yes, she is. But she has other things to think about just now,” Estelle said. She pushed her chair back and sighed. “Sometimes, until I know the direction I want to go, it’s easier if I don’t muddy the water. I’d hate to send somebody off on a wild-goose chase.” She smiled at Francis. “Anyway, I did tell someone. I told
you, mi corazón
. ” She pushed herself to her feet. “You ready?”
“Sure.”
Lucy Madrid hovered near the aging cash register, and Francis handed her a five dollar bill and waved away the change. “What do you do?” she asked.
“I’m a physician,” Francis replied.
“Well, that’s good,” Lucy said. She nodded at the old man who still sat quietly, smoking and stroking his coffee cup. “He’s deaf, you know.”
“I didn’t know,” Francis said. Lucy looked at him expectantly, as if he was supposed to produce a pocket cure for deafness on the spot. “You have a nice day,” he said.
Lucy snorted. “Ain’t they all?”
Outside, Francis waited while Estelle unlocked the car, and then he slid into the passenger seat. “So…Eurelio’s nervous, and on top of that, he lives right over there?” He pointed at the tavern, its adobe bulk visible beyond the corner of the service station. “He’s sure in the neighborhood, isn’t he?”
“The thought had crossed my mind.”
“Well, now you can lie awake all night long, tossing and turning.”
Estelle smiled as she pulled the car into gear. “You catch me, okay?”
Estelle looked at the vast mess in the middle of the kitchen linoleum with satisfaction. The original four colors of the modeling clay bricks were fused into one amorphous brown hue through long sessions of mangling, and were now sculpted, carved, and twisted into shapes that would have made Dalí’s head spin.
Five-year-old Francisco built upward, squishing the clay into columns that supported odd creatures who lurked atop their pedestals. Carlos let his creations fan outward, preferring the horizontal line. The clay smashed into roadways along which strange vehicles gouged their way toward destinations unknown. The two youngsters chattered constantly to their father as they built. Francis presided over the vast conglomeration, lying on his side on the floor, his pager mercifully silent.
In her favorite spot in the north corner of the living room, engulfed by the wings of the overstuffed chair, Estelle’s mother dozed, her hands folded in her lap. To the right of her chair within easy reach, her incongruously high-tech aluminum walker waited. On the end table to her left was a small brown thing Francisco had fashioned from the clay. Looking like a prairie dog who had tried to stand up on his hind legs to whistle and then had begun to melt in the sun, the creature’s two eyes guarded the old woman while she slept.
Irma Sedillos, convinced that each member of the family was finally on the mend, had gone home after dinner, first to tend to her cats and then to spend time with her patient boyfriend, Manny Garcia. Manny, a math teacher and three-sport middle and high school coach, could count the number of his free evenings each week on one finger—and Monday was it.
Estelle sat at the kitchen table with a yellow legal pad in front of her. Over her right shoulder on the wall behind her were the three ancient
retablos
of
los Tres Santos
from whom the tiny village had taken its name, and that Estelle’s mother had refused to leave unattended in Mexico.
Los Santos
Mateo, Ignacio, and Patricio, each carved in cottonwood that had cracked and polished over the decades, watched in silence as Estelle sketched on the pad.
As if the two sips of awful tea at Lucy’s had destroyed the last vestiges of pathogens in her system, she felt a deep sense of contentment and well-being. Part of that contentment was being able to glance up and see every member of her inner universe at once—the boys and her husband playing on the kitchen floor, her mother napping peacefully across the living room. Her contentment, she knew, also was familiar to people addicted to jigsaw puzzles when they first broke the cellophane wrapping from around a new challenge and dumped the pieces out on the table.
The first five pieces of the undersheriff’s puzzle lay in front of her. In neat black ink, she had drawn the transmission line support tower, the service two-track, Juan Doe’s grave, the shovel, and far to the left edge of the paper, the site where the first victim, John Doe, had been found. In a tiny bracket, she had written the measured distance between the two victims—1,740 yards, give or take a detour or two around bushes and cacti. John Doe had managed to race just shy of a mile across the dark prairie before his pursuer had caught him.
Jackie Taber, Tom Pasquale, and Linda Real had walked along the faint trail across the prairie that afternoon. Jackie had taken the walking wheel, clicking off an accurate measurement. Other than the yardage, their hike had revealed nothing. But it was more than assumption that linked the two victims, and Estelle frowned, staring at the schematic diagram. One set of smudged prints from the shovel handle had presented three points of positive comparison with those taken from John Doe, enough to establish reasonable suspicion. A defense attorney would laugh five points out of court, but it was a start.
Perrone had said that it was likely that the two men had died at roughly the same time.
Likely. Roughly
. How long did it take to run a mile across the prairie, driven by panic?
The two men were dressed in casual clothing, equally innocuous in style. They were more or less the same age, although each lacked any form of identification.
Despite a lack of firm ballistic evidence, it was a logical assumption that somehow the two men had also shared a similar fate. It was easy to assume that they had, for a brief terrifying moment, both stared down the same gun barrel.
Estelle drew a neat compass rose in the upper right-hand corner of the diagram, and Francis happened to glance up at her in time to see the faint trace of a smile touch her lips.
“You making progress?” he asked.
“No.”
“Too much distraction?”
“No, that’s not it,” she said, and sighed. “I just have movement problems, that’s all.” She rested the pen on the pad. “Jackie walked up the service road along the transmission line to the north, well beyond the grave site. There’s no indication whether the vehicle—the vehicle we
think
had to be there—came in from the south or the north.”
“I didn’t think you had hard evidence of a vehicle in the first place,” Francis said. “Other than the tracks on the prairie, and there’s no way to tell about those.”
“These are tracks,” Carlos said, and used his fingernail to trace two lines in a section of clay that swerved around a smooth depression reminiscent of a dry cattle tank.
Estelle laughed. “
What do your children do?
” she said, mimicking an invisible audience. “Oh, they mold crime scenes out of clay.” She pushed her chair back and reached for the telephone that had rested all evening, uncharacteristically silent. As her hand touched the instrument, it rang—and Estelle jerked back as if stung.
“A little stressed, are we?” Francis chuckled. He handed her the pen that had launched from the table at the same time as she lifted the receiver. “And I’m not home.”
“Guzman residence,” she said.
“Estelle, this is Jackie. I’m sorry to bother you, but I thought you’d want to know.”
“It’s no bother,” Estelle replied. “What do I want to know?”
“Dr. Perrone did some preliminary tests for us on the shovel before we packed it up. The blood is human, and doesn’t match either victim.” Estelle’s eyes widened as she stared at the diagram in front of her. “Estelle?” Jackie said after a moment.
“I’m here.”
“John Doe was AB negative. The victim in the grave was O positive.”
“And the blood on the shovel?”
“AB positive.”
“Perrone is sure?” Estelle knew the question was unnecessary.
“I think so. He’s going to let the lab double-check his results. But he’s willing to bet.”
“And the hair?”
“Human. No match with either victim, although he’s less sure about that. Eyeballed through a microscope, it’s easy to make a mistake. He did a DNA quickie with markers, and didn’t get a match. It’s dark brown, almost black. And curly. No record of any treatment for a head injury at any of the area hospitals, though.”
“We should be so lucky. Any other injuries on either victim other than the obvious? Did Perrone say?”
“Nothing at all. Not a bruise, not a cut.”
“Are you at the office now?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Did Linda take a facial of Juan?”
“She’s printing it now. I’ll run copies soon as I can.”
“Good. We might get lucky. I’ll be down in a couple of minutes,” Estelle said. “Good work.”
She hung up, letting the phone settle gently, eyes already back in the diagram, her mind out on the prairie.
“What did they find?” Francis asked. His wife didn’t answer, and he pushed himself to a sitting position, careful not to kick any of the creations spreading around him. He rose and leaned on the table. “Something unexpected?”
Estelle looked up quickly, as if surprised to see him. With a little sigh of apology, her hand strayed to cover his. “Sorry. I was off in orbit somewhere.”
“What did they find?”
“The blood and hair on the shovel are both human. And don’t match either victim.” She stood up. “Some interesting possibilities with that.”
“That supports what you were thinking earlier, then. You have a third party walking around somewhere, holding a bandage to his head.”
“Maybe.”
“And now you have a set of tentative prints that link—which one is it? John Doe to the shovel? Maybe it’s just like you said. He dug, he swung, he ran.”
“And he died,” Estelle murmured.
“So was it just the three of them, or was there somebody else who just stood around with his thumb in his ear, watching all this go down?”
“That’s an interesting image,
querido
,” Estelle said. She drew a small, neat question mark on the diagram halfway between the shovel and the grave. “We don’t know.” She looked up at her husband. “At least not yet.”
A series of muffled thumps came from the living room, and Estelle’s mother appeared, maneuvering the walker. She stopped, blinked at them, and then poked Carlos in the rump with one of the aluminum walker legs.
“
Hace rato que deberías estar durmiendo, chinches,
” she said. Her voice was small and raspy, but still carried the melody of her native tongue. “
Y yo también.
”
“Abuela is right, bedbugs,” Francis said in English. “Past bedtime, past time to get this mess cleaned up.” He watched with the assessing eye of an attending physician as the tiny woman started down the hall, gnarled knuckles wrapped around the cushions of the walker.
“Good night,
Mamá
,” Estelle called.
“
Debes cuidarte más, mija,
” she added without looking back. “
Manaña, voy a ir a casa
.
Puedes ser que vaga.
” She didn’t wait for an answer, didn’t offer any explanation of how she was going to go to her home in Mexico the next day if Estelle didn’t accept the invitation to go along as chauffeur.
Taking a day to relax and stroll the property in Tres Santos, a day to spend with her mother without interruptions or nagging puzzles, was appealing…and impossible.
“I don’t think tomorrow’s the day to go back to Mexico,
Mamá
,” Estelle said more to herself than anyone. She stood, staring at the sheet of paper. Her finger traced an invisible line southward. No other direction made sense.
The darkroom’s red safety light illuminated the prints that had been spread out on the counter. Estelle Reyes-Guzman felt a twinge of sympathy for the man whose face stared up at her through the yellowish haze of darkroom chemicals.
“Hang on a second,” Linda Real said. She transferred the print to the rinse tray, and then shuffled boxes, securing the black foil wrapping over the unused print paper. “Okay,” she said, and snapped on the overheads. Estelle flinched against the burst of light and then tapped the tray in which floated the head and shoulders portrait of Juan Doe, his swarthy complexion and black hair sharply contrasting with the polished stainless steel of the morgue table.
“We need to make copies and fax them out,” she said, and Linda Real nodded. “Every county agency first, including Texas and Arizona. And the
Judiciales
in Juarez, Agua Prieta, and Nogales. I’ll be talking with Captain Naranjo tomorrow, and I want him to have a look, too. Copies to the Feds, the Border Patrol, the whole nine yards. Somebody has to have seen this guy. Somebody, somewhere, knows him. And maybe we’ll get lucky with the fingerprints.”
“You’re thinking they were from Mexico, then?”
“Maybe. Right now, one place is as much a possibility as another.”
“I’ve never worked with the
Judiciales
before,” Linda said. “I was impressed when Captain Naranjo came up for Bill Gastner’s retirement dinner last November. That was the first time I’d ever met him.”
“He’s a good man, Linda. If he can help us, he will. He’s a master at cutting through that famous Mexican red tape.”
“Dr. Perrone said John Doe doesn’t have a single tattoo, birthmark, or scar to help us out,” Linda said. She leaned against one of the long counters in the darkroom while Estelle examined the photos.
“But they both have fingerprints,” Estelle said, and then looked skeptical. “Of course, if they’re not on file somewhere, all the prints in the world won’t do us a bit of good. If that’s the case, the killer accomplished exactly what he needed to do, regardless of his motivations,” Estelle mused. “Smashing in the dentition with a rock was either cold calculation, or done in a fit of rage. Payback time.”
Estelle frowned, pausing by the drier to scrutinize one of the eight by tens of John Doe’s shattered face. “Mexican dental records are often a whole lot less formal than ours,” she said. “Somebody from a rural community, or without the means for top-notch care, might not have any records at all—so these injuries are a puzzle. Why batter a man’s face to pieces after you’ve already blown the back of his head off with a high-powered rifle?”
Linda Real remained silent, watching Estelle sift through the photos. “Either way…” the undersheriff started to say, then shrugged. “If Jackie hadn’t found her ‘pattern,’ John Doe would be all we’d have, and we’d be stumped.”
Linda laughed. “I’m glad to hear we’re not stumped,” she said.
Estelle straightened up. “Just temporarily confused.”
“They finished sifting the grave site, by the way,” Linda said. She shook her head. “Nothing except blood-soaked prairie soil. No fragments, no nothing.”
“As expected,” Estelle said. “The bullets that killed both of them are still out on the prairie somewhere. Even if we knew to the inch where all the participants were standing when the shots were fired, it’d take a million dollars worth of man-hours to hunt for the bullets. And even then, no guarantees.”
She sighed and dropped the photo back on the counter. “And speaking of hours,” she added, glancing at her watch. Her mother and the two little boys had trundled off to bed, but Estelle’s system had refused to shut down on demand. “You’re working more tonight?” she asked.
“Tom’s on until midnight,” Linda replied. “I wanted to finish up here, so I thought I might as well come in, too.”
“And be sure that you put in for every minute that you work,” Estelle said, and when she saw the doubtful expression on Linda’s face added, “Let the county share a little of the load, even if it’s just scraping to find the money to pay you guys.”
“Mostly, I was just cleaning up my mess,” Linda said.
“Regardless,” Estelle said, and handed Linda the remaining photos to be slipped with the others into an envelope. “I need to find Tom and talk with him for a minute,” Estelle said. “Jackie is off tonight, isn’t she…or at least is
supposed
to be.”
Linda flashed a lopsided grin, as familiar as anyone with the odd hours that members of the small department chose to work. Estelle saw that the harsh light of the darkroom overheads accentuated the scar traces on the left side of Linda’s face, the last physical memories of a long night six years before when, as a newspaper reporter riding along with one of the Posadas deputies, she had caught a shotgun blast in the face, neck, and left shoulder. The deputy had been killed, and Linda Real had suffered through nearly two years of therapy and rehabilitation, face scarred and blind in her left eye. Her remarkably resilient spirit had refused to be crippled.
Instead of resuming her career as a reporter, Linda had chosen to seek employment with the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department, bringing along her considerable photographic talents.
Long before the shooting incident, Linda Real’s crush on the young, brash deputy Thomas Pasquale had been a source of department amusement. Finally, in what then Undersheriff Bill Gastner had described as “a tribute to what little common sense Pasquale possesses,” the friendship between Linda Real and Thomas Pasquale had blossomed into something more. Now, they split the rent on a small house on Tenth Street.
“By the way,” Estelle said, turning toward the strips of negatives hanging in the dust-free drying bag, “did you happen to run that roll I shot for Bill?”
“That was next on my list,” Linda said.
“A strange case he’s working on. It looks like Eleanor Pope is running a donkey motel over at her place on Escondido.”
“I know her.”
“She works at the HairPort,” Estelle said.
“No, I don’t mean from there. She and I shared a little time a couple of weeks ago waiting at the insurance company, and we got to talking.” Linda ducked her head. “She lugs around one of those oxygen tanks that emphysema patients sometimes have to have? She seemed like a nice lady.”
“Maybe she is,” Estelle stepped out of the darkroom and ducked around one of the furnace ducts. “I’m not sure about the pictures, though. A bizarre setup she’s got going there. The light was really hard, so I’ll be interested to see if anything came out. If they didn’t, we’re going to have to reshoot. Bill wants them to twist a warrant out of Judge Hobart.”
She climbed the stairs slowly, feeling the stuffy basement air lighten as she reached the well-lighted first floor. Ernie Wheeler looked up as she emerged from the Hole.
“Sheriff Torrez called a few minutes ago,” he said. “He didn’t want me to interrupt you, but he asked that you call him back when you have a chance.” He held up a Post-it note with the Virginia telephone number.
“He’s homesick,” Estelle laughed.
“He sounded like it,” Ernie agreed. “And Bill Gastner was just here.” He nodded toward the back door. “He walked out that door about ten seconds ago, so you can probably catch him.”
Estelle stepped quickly toward the door, saying over her shoulder, “Would you find Tom Pasquale for me? I need to talk with him if he’s not in the middle of something.”
Without waiting for a response, she stepped outside and saw her old friend’s stout figure moseying toward the white pickup truck parked in the spot reserved for Judge Hobart.
“Sir?”
Bill Gastner turned around at the sound of her voice and stopped, hands thrust in his pockets. “Hey, there,” he said.
“We were in the darkroom. You should have come on down.”
“The less time I spend in the Hole, the better,” he said. “Too many stairs, for one thing. I need to save my knees for the Boston Marathon, or something equally important.”
“Linda is going to process your roll of film tonight.”
He nodded. “Good. You heard that Bobby called?”
“Yes. Did you happen to talk with him?”
Gastner scratched his scalp and then resettled his cap. “As a matter of fact, I did,” he said. “He was wondering if he should take an early exit from his school and fly home.”
“I hope you told him to stick it out, sir.”
He chuckled. “He thinks he’s missing all the fun stuff. But I told him we’d save some for him. He didn’t believe me. He wanted you to give him a call.”
“So Ernie said. Are you in the middle of anything right now?”
“Do I look like I’m rushing off somewhere?” Gastner grinned. “I would have stayed for coffee, but there wasn’t any. The goddamn
tea
generation has hit this place.”
“You’ll learn to like it, sir. It’s good for you.”
“No, I won’t. And no, it’s not. And you’re looking better, by the way. You homeward bound now, or is something on the wind?”
She nodded. “I was about to track down Pasquale. I think he’s got one of the pieces to the puzzle. And I’m not sure he knows it.”
Gastner smiled broadly at that. “Sometimes Tom Pasquale can be a surprise,” he said.
“That’s for sure. Would you like to ride along?”
“Let me check my social calendar,” Gastner replied. He glanced quickly at his wristwatch. “Sure. Why not?”
Estelle turned toward the door in time to nearly catch it in the face as Ernie Wheeler thrust it open.
“Pasquale is down near Maria,” he said quickly. “He’s got a vehicle stopped on Sixty-one, and wants a female officer.”
“Tell him we’re on our way.”
Gastner remained silent as they settled into the unmarked Crown Victoria that Estelle favored. They were just pulling out of the parking lot when the radio crackled.
“Three ten, three oh six.”
Estelle gestured at the mike, and Gastner picked it up. “Three ten is just leaving the parking lot,” he said. “ETA about eleven minutes.”
“Ten-four.” Pasquale’s perfunctory reply. “We’re at the junction of the power line service road and Sixty-one. PCS, I need wants and warrants on New Mexico one three three Echo Baker Nora.”
By the time Ernie Wheeler repeated the number, the underpass of the interstate loomed ahead of them, with the sharp left-hand curve to State 61 just beyond.
“No telling what HotRod Pasquale is up to,” Gastner commented. “Although he’s never let the gender barrier slow him down before.”
“No telling,” Estelle said. She nudged the accelerator and they shot under the interstate.
“Maria has gotten to be a popular place all of a sudden,” Gastner said. “It lies comatose since the day Coronado walked through, and now all of a sudden it’s the center of the universe.”