Blood Sweep (10 page)

“Seems so. They requested that I play the
Appasionata
tonight. That's a big favorite down here.” The powerful, complex Beethoven sonata was a pianist's challenge, Estelle knew. She had heard the twenty-four-minute beast several times in her own living room, and often glanced toward the ceiling to see if the crashing notes had jarred loose the plaster. Her mother routinely listened with her hands delicately covering her ears. But the piece was more than just dramatically loud in places…it was
passionate,
and it always brought tears to her eyes to see her young son interpreting that emotional chaos of the sonata with such depth.

“You'll do fine.”

“Thanks. I'd better let you go, huh. Everyone else is okay?”

“Just fine. And you be careful.”

“Oh, sure. I have no choice. In fact,
mi capitán
is standing right at the end of the piano, watching me talk to you.” The boy laughed away from the phone. “He says hello.”

“I'm proud of you, Francisco,” she said. “Call often.” She disconnected, and with a start realized she had no recollection of driving the last five miles.

Chapter Twelve

Sheriff Robert Torrez often had marveled privately about Bill Gastner's sleep habits. True torture for Gastner would be lying on his back in a hospital bed, any movement more serious than picking his nose impossible. Double that torture when an efficient, well-meaning nurse would bustle into Gastner's room at midnight to check his tubes and deliver “something to help you sleep.”

Torrez, on the other hand, had never had a moment's trouble slipping into a deep snooze. Rarely had he lain in bed, staring at the dark ceiling, listening to the sounds of the night, alert for the telephone imperative, chewing at the troubles of the previous day, or concerned about what morning would bring. For years, he had enjoyed the four to midnight shift at the Sheriff's Department for its occasional adrenalin rush, never minding the odd hours. Sleep came easily when the work was done. He had become a master at keeping other people's troubles at a distance, never adopting their misery.

Since his election to the top spot in the department, Sheriff Torrez had avoided working an administratively logical day shift, when he might be available to talk with interested civilians. He avoided the tedium of county commission meetings where he fought the urge to doze off, or confabs with the county manager, or private moments with the press. He even avoided anything remotely resembling electioneering. He didn't speak at service clubs. He didn't grant election year interviews. He didn't trudge door to door with hand-outs. The dedicated band of volunteers who made sure he was elected every four years—now counting three elections under the belt with a fourth coming in only months—worked in a vacuum as far as Robert Torrez was concerned.

Instead, he roamed around the clock and the county, reminiscent of what he considered the most important lesson he had learned from Bill Gastner—know the turf better than anyone else. There was no highway, road, or two-track in the county that Torrez couldn't bring instantly to mind. His understanding of the county, if it could be transferred from his mind to paper, might resemble nothing so much as a detailed topographic map. On top of that, he knew the names, habits, and schedules of every rancher, and where domestic disputes were most likely to erupt. A personal benefit of his prowling was that he had a fundamental understanding of where the game herds were and what the wildlife population levels might be. He did not have to wait for surveys from the Department of Game and Fish.

His hunts were frequent and unannounced, and most of the time legally licensed. And alone, always on foot, never with the snarl of a four-wheeler. He had no “hunting buddies.” He never offered to take a friend or relative hunting, and never accepted any of the frequent invitations to do so. In an emergency, if someone needed to bend his ear, the Sheriff's Office dispatcher usually knew where he was. Usually.

Such behavior might have been hard on even the most patient wife. Bob Torrez had solved that challenge by marrying, after a quiet, ten-year courtship, his first passion—the Sheriff's Department office manager and chief dispatcher, Gayle Sedillos Torrez. By the time that ceremony was finally marked on the calendar, Gayle knew her husband's habits well, and was expert at living comfortably with his idiosyncratic behavior.

On this particular Thursday morning, as the clock came up on 3:15, Torrez lay wide awake on his back, staring at the ceiling. Beside him, the whisper of Gayle's breathing was regular as a metronome. From across the room, two-month old Gabe explored the mysteries of his baba, slupping and twisting and shaking his tiny hands, content in the dark. The infant slept in short spurts like a well-fed pup, with stretches, gurgles, and happy little noises punctuating his waking moments.

“What's on your mind?” Gayle's voice was warm breath against his ear. Earlier, he had told her about the day. There was no point in trying to gloss over the details. With intense concentration, she had inspected the shattered remains of his rifle scope, had examined Sergeant Jackie Taber's skillful map of the incident area, had listened to her husband's clipped description of all the rest…temperature, wind velocity, time of day, details of his own antelope shot.

She knew that her husband mulled a fundamental question: did the shooter miss on purpose, or had all the tricks that terrain and weather could play on a high-velocity bullet fired at long range been responsible for the ten or twelve inches deviation from skull to scope.

He had refused even to consider that the shot had been an accidental discharge—perhaps someone reacted to a flash of reflecting sunshine in the distance and scanned the country with a scoped rifle, carelessly doing so with his finger on the trigger. That scenario made sense to Gayle. After the accidental round was fired, the shooter would have fled in panic. Doing such a hare-brained thing was so foreign to her husband's training and expertise that he couldn't imagine anyone else being so stupid—although he wryly admitted that he dealt with stupid people on a daily basis.

Thinking about the day had stirred an awful hollow darkness in her gut, and knowing that her husband couldn't drift off to sleep meant he had no satisfactory answers either.

Bobby took his time answering. “Just thinkin'.” Gayle had never heard her husband whisper—she didn't think that he even
could
, but his voice was soft and restrained, just enough to prompt a gurgle and squirm from Gabe.

Gayle said nothing for a moment, choosing her words carefully. “I want to know,” she whispered finally, “
how
the shooter knew you were out there. Out there in that one spot, where he must have
known
how to angle around you from the rear, finding a spot for a clear shot.”

“Don't know.”

“Did you tell anyone at the department where you were headed?”

“Nope. I guess I mentioned it to Miles one time or another. He told Bendix, the foreman.”

“And so the grapevine grows. You didn't see anyone following you out?”

Torrez remained silent, loath to admit that he hadn't paid much attention to what was in his cracked rearview mirror. “Keep it simple,” was the old adage, and that he'd been followed was the simplest answer of all.

“Did you stop and talk to anyone while you were out there?”

“Nope. Not before. I saw Carl Bendix afterward. That's when he told me that Waddell had mentioned I'd be out there sometime. I never told nobody just
when.
”

“Did you see anyone else on the county road when you were driving in to Waddell's place?”

“Nope.” Would he have noticed a plume of dust behind him on that busy county road, even if there had been one? Contractors and vendors came and went with a traffic volume long unthinkable in that quiet section of the county.

She let her breathing settle, let the rise of panic settle. “Somebody is an opportunist. He saw your truck, and decided to take a chance.”

“Yep. That's what I'm thinkin'.”

“That's the connection, then.” She rested a hand on his chest, rocking him gently from side to side. “We'll all have to work on that.” Her hand paused. “You have a signed landowner's letter of permission from Mr. Waddell.”

“Yep.”

“So as you said,
he
knows. That's a start.”

Across the room, Gabe uttered a little grunt of satisfaction.

“That's his take on the whole deal,” Gayle laughed. “Whose turn is it?”

“It'll give me something else to think about,” Bobby said, and heaved himself to a sitting position. Barefoot and wearing only his boxer shorts, he swung out of bed and padded across the room. “What you up to,
cachorro?”
The infant gurgled and flailed his arms. “You smell like shit,” the sheriff said. “We gotta get you housebroken.”

He had unpinned the first side of the fragrant diaper when the phone rang, a muted buzz on the nightstand. “Trade you,” he said, but Gayle had already slid across the king-sized bed and picked up the cell phone.

“This is Gayle Torrez.”

“Good morning, Gayle. Mike Sands at the S.O. Sorry about the hour, but is the boss man available?”

“He is. Just a sec.” Torrez exchanged infant for cell phone.

“What?” Torrez palmed the phone in a huge hand. Sands, who had worked midnight to eight dispatch for only a month, hadn't finished his study course in Sheriff Robert Torrez 101. He immediately assumed the monosyllabic greeting meant he was on thin ice with the sheriff.

“Sir, I'm sorry to bother you.” He paused, waiting for some assurance.

“What's up?” Torrez said. His tone was matter-of-fact, almost gentle.

“Sir, we have a situation down just past the overpass. Deputy Sutherland says he has one apparent victim in a parked vehicle.”

“Apparent?”

“I mean he is, sir. Dead, I mean.”

“Where's he at?”

“Go past the motel, under the overpass, and turn right on that little dirt access road. Maybe a hundred yards down that, Sutherland says.”

“One fatality?”

“Yes, sir. He says so, sir.”

“Then get everybody on it.” Sands had learned in the first week what either the sheriff or undersheriff meant when they ordered, “Everybody.”

“I'll be there in a few minutes. Tell Sutherland to keep his eyes open.”

“Yes, sir.”

Torrez disconnected. “I didn't want to sleep anyway.” Gayle had heard the word “fatality” and knew better than to waste her husband's time with questions. She finished up with the infant, who thankfully didn't have a clue about how ugly his world could be.

Five minutes later, Torrez left the house, this time taking the county's Expedition. Two blocks from his home on McArthur, he turned south on Grande, the interstate just ahead. Braking hard, he jolted a hard right onto the dirt frontage road, a narrow lane that allowed service to power lines.

Deputy Brent Sutherland's county vehicle marked the spot with its own lightshow. Parked just ahead of him, half off the lane, was a dark-colored Jeep Wrangler. Sutherland was busy unwinding a yellow crime-scene tape.

Chapter Thirteen

Curled up in a stiff lounge chair tucked in the corner of Bill Gastner's hospital room, Estelle Reyes-Guzman had managed fitful naps, awakened most often when the old man broke out in a string of colorful curses.

At one point, he raised his head slightly, heavy brows furrowed with annoyance.

“What the hell time is it?”

She stretched, taking her time unfolding stiff legs. “A little after three.”

“So why are you here?
I'm
sure as hell not going anywhere, but there's no sense in you wasting your time.”

“I like hearing you snore,
Padrino
. Anyway, it feels good to sit in one spot for more than five minutes.”

“You have something going on? Did I manage to interrupt the flow of justice in Posadas County with my stunt?”

“Yes.”

He didn't look especially contrite. “You're holding that damn cell phone as if it's your lifeline to someone.”

She touched the screen to wake the gadget up. No new messages. “My mother got a scam call that worries me.”

“Teresa did? Hell, I didn't think that she ever answered the damn thing.”

“I suppose Addie was out of the room for a minute, and
Mamá
picked up. Anyway, the caller said that the boys are down in Mexico, in Mazatlán. Supposedly Mateo was in trouble with the law, and needed eight thousand dollars to spring him from jail.”

“Oh, for Christ's sakes,” Gastner whispered, and cleared his throat. “That one's as old as the hills.”

“Not to
Mamá
it isn't. What makes it interesting is that the caller claimed to be Tomás Naranjo. He called
Mamá
by name.”

He motioned impatiently. “Come over here for a while. Trying to see you is breakin' my neck.” When she stood by the bed, he continued, “So what did the Colonel have to say? Hell, he doesn't even work over on the West Coast.”

“Just the point, sir. I can't reach him, and he hasn't returned my calls. I finally got through to Francisco, and he says everything is perfectly normal. But on any level, I can't imagine Naranjo doing such a thing. If the boys needed bail money, he would have called
me,
not
Mamá
. And Teresa's description of the way he talked didn't sound like him one bit—fast, no preliminaries, hard sell.”

“Hell, with Naranjo, you could be on the phone for half an hour just with the preliminaries.” He closed one eye and said through a horrible Mexican accent, “So tell me, how is the family…” He made sure to give each syllable its full due. “Look, this is one of those things. It's got to be. The scammer hopes to set off an unthinking panic attack. Especially if he can get to an elderly relative.”

He patted her hand with the one of his that wasn't a pin cushion. “The jerk saw posters for the concert, maybe read something in the paper, if he can read in the first place. Forget about it.” He frowned. “Although you gotta wonder how he knew about your mother, how he knew about Naranjo. The concert is the easy part. That shows a little more effort than usual in these deals.” He raised an index finger. “So yeah, sweetheart. I guess you get to worry a little. When do the boys head home?”

“The group flies back on Sunday morning.”

Gastner nodded slightly and closed his eyes. “I guess you can hold tight, then. If you're talking with the kid on a regular basis, everything is all right.”

“And then Carlos tells me that my
uncle
called.” She watched Gastner's broad, bulldog face grimace as he digested that. He knew almost as much about Estelle's unique past as she did, and he'd been involved with plenty of escapades with her great uncle, Reuben Fuentes, now dead for a dozen years. “Have you ever heard of a fellow named Benedicte Mazón?”

He regarded her with half-closed eyes.

“Are you all right?”

“Be patient. I'm marshalling my incredible memory reserves.” Estelle could see that what he was actually doing was trying to twist away from the insistent pain in his hip—even with the IV potion dripping in his vein. She slipped a hand into his right, and he clenched hard.

“Benedicte…that sounds like some Latin scholar or monk or something. He's the uncle? If he's related to you somehow, your mother will know. What did he want?”

“Carlos was the one who talked with him. I wasn't home. He left a message that I wasn't supposed to worry about Mazatlán. I took that to mean the eight thousand-dollar episode.”

“This is bizarre,” Gastner said with relish—admittedly
tired
relish. “You know, I was sort of surprised that you and Francis didn't go down for the concert. I mean, a big deal. Would have made a nice vacation. I was even thinking along those lines for a while. It's been years since I've been there.”

Estelle could feel a flush working up her cheeks. “I didn't read the conservatory bulletin carefully enough,” she said. “The whole thing took me by surprise. With what that city's reputation has become here lately, I might not have let
hijo
go.”

“Oh, come on.” He shifted painfully again. “You let the thugs run your life, what's the point?” He took a long, slow breath. “You know, I read
my
conservatory newsletter, and I saw that Mazatlán listing. That's a beautiful place, most of the time. What a time they'll have. And the way those guys will be chaperoned, everything's going to be fine. Trust your son on this one, sweetheart. If he says that he's fine, then he is.”

“He talked about all the security efforts,” she added. “Apparently he has a police captain who doesn't let him out of his sight.”

“That's good, then. But hey, what about the concert in Chicago after Labor Day? Eh?” He nodded at her.

“Camille reminded me. She and Mark are thinking of going.”

“Uh oh.” Gastner tried to smile. “I'm thinking seriously about that.”

“If you go, we'll go,” Estelle said.

One finger lifted off the bedding in a slow wag. “No deals like that. You and hubby…don't let these things pass you by.” He closed his eyes. “And that's my wisdom for the moment.” His eyes sagged closed again. “Go home and get some sleep.”

“In a little bit.”

“If you're still here wasting time when they trundle me off for surgery in a few minutes, I'm going to be pissed, sweetheart.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “What's Roberto say about this scam thing?”

“I haven't discussed it with him. He has his own concerns at the moment.” She briefly recounted what she understood of the shooting incident, and Gastner listened with closed eyes. “At the moment, he doesn't know why or who.”

For a time, Gastner lay quietly, and she thought he might have fallen asleep. But eventually, when he opened his eyes, they were clear and bright. “Some creep with a grudge saw the chance to remove the man from office.”

“For what reason, sir?”

“Who knows what secrets this Robert Torrez person is harboring.”

Estelle laughed. “Bobby
has
no secrets,
Padrino
. I thought that when little Gabe came along, he'd soften up some. Not a chance. He treats everyone the same. You break the law, you get arrested. Period.”

“Like I said.” The half smile held for a moment, and then Estelle realized that the old man had fallen asleep.