Prolonged Exposure (12 page)

Chapter 20

Camille was silent on the short drive home, and I was grateful for that. I hadn’t been ready for Estelle’s curveball, and my mind was a wallow of ridiculous thoughts that bordered more on self-pity than anything else.

Estelle had never mentioned the possibility of her physician husband accepting a position elsewhere, but I realized I was foolish to assume that a young, talented surgeon would set his sights on nothing more than a career in Posadas, reaming varicose veins. Somehow, I’d allowed the assumption to grow and flourish in my head that Estelle, Francis, and my two godsons would always be a part of my existence in Posadas.

But goddamn Minnesota? Even before I had pulled into my driveway on Escondido, I had transferred my worry to Estelle. What was
she
going to do in that bleak, cold, chililess land? I hadn’t asked, either, and that irritated me even more.

I didn’t know anything about the state, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to, but common sense told me that Minnesota probably had just as many counties as New Mexico, if not dozens more—and each one had a sheriff’s department. And there was the state police, and the city police, and village constables—and any department would jump at the chance to hire an experienced female minority officer who was bilingual, and talented to boot.

“We’ll have to send them care packages full of sand, green chili, and piñon smoke,” I muttered as Camille and I went inside. Standing in the foyer of my rambling home, I realized just how scruffy the Gonzalez place was. My daughter didn’t respond to my lament, heading for the kitchen instead.

I tossed my jacket on the bench by the front door and ambled down the hall, eyes locked on the polished Saltillo tile floor, old and buffed to a gleam like polished saddle leather. In the living room, I found my road atlas and idly turned the pages, pausing here and there without really looking until I landed in Minnesota. The city of Rochester was in the southeast corner. By squinting and shifting my glasses, I could almost read the fine print.

It looked like Olmsted County included the city. I wondered who the Sheriff of Olmsted County was, and if he was a former used-car salesman like Marty Holman. “Posadas, where?” he’d ask, and he probably thought that he would need a visa to visit.

“You want a snack?” Camille called from the kitchen, and I closed the atlas and slid it back on the shelf.

“Sure,” I mumbled.

“You know, I had a thought,” Camille said. I stopped beside the table, looking at the array of hors d’oeuvres she’d assembled. “You’ve got plenty of room here.”

“Here? For what?” I asked, and sampled a miniature nacho—a nuked chip with cheese and a slice of jalapeño on top. It was so hot, it made my eyes water.

Camille stepped to the kitchen door and looked out toward the five-acre jungle. “You’ve got enough room for horses right here, Dad. All it would take is hiring some kids to clean out the undergrowth.”

“What a job that would be,” I said.

“Less than what you’ve got in mind for the Gonzalez place,” my daughter replied. “And the biggest job is finished. You’ve got a marvelous home here.”

I shrugged. “Yep.”

She hefted the coffeepot and poured two cups. I could tell from the aroma that it was the real thing. “I wonder if Sheriff Holman knows yet,” she said. “That she’s leaving, I mean.”

“Well, if he doesn’t, he will soon enough. And he’s got until June first to do something about it. When Estelle leaves, so does our entire detective division.”

“Is there anyone you’d care to move into her place?”

“I’m not sure. Probably Eddie Mitchell. When he and Skip Bishop work together, they make a pretty good team.”

“What about Bob Torrez?”

I shook my head. “He runs the Patrol Division. We’ll ask him, but he’s never shown any inclination to move out of uniform.” I ate another nacho. “Our problem is that we’re a tiny department. I mean, I say Patrol Division, but that means only a handful of uniformed deputies. We’re up to seven now, to cover three shifts, seven days a week. Plus Martin and myself. That’s nine of us, and that’s hardly a ‘division’ of any kind.

“You and Martin Holman, then.” Camille said.

I grimaced. “The halt and the blind. You’re too kind.” I ate another nacho, particularly savoring the cheese. “Despite everything, Marty Holman is doing a fair-enough job. He doesn’t know much, but he’s a fast study. He’s been sheriff now for nine years, and already he’s learned that if he rubs a latent fingerprint off a piece of evidence, there’s no way we can put it back.”

“Awesome.”

“Indeed.” We sat in comfortable silence for a while. “The hardest part,” I finally said, “is remembering that an institution functioned perfectly well before we arrived on the scene, and that it will probably function perfectly well long after we leave.”

Camille nodded but didn’t respond. I rested my elbows on the table, folded my hands, and rested my chin on them, gazing across the kitchen toward the window that looked out on the backyard.

“That doesn’t make it any easier, sweetheart. Holman keeps telling me that I should take up golf.”

“Ugh,” Camille said.

“You can’t see me doing that?”

“More important, I don’t think
you
can see you doing that. I think you were on the right track before.”

“What’s that?”

“You saw those draft horses and it lit a passion, that’s for sure,” Camille said. “I saw your face. Everyone will think it’s silly, of course, because it involves a lot of work and time and money. But what everyone else thinks doesn’t matter. The work is good for you; you’ve got the time, and you’ve got the money. What’s silly is feeling that you have to give up this place.”

“I don’t feel I have to. I just thought that it made sense, that’s all. Estelle and Francis need the space a lot more than I do.”

“And they’re moving, so that’s no longer an issue,” Camille said. “You have a housekeeper who comes twice a week to keep the place spotless for you, so it doesn’t matter if the building itself is a thousand square feet or five thousand. Just enjoy it.”

“Maybe so.”

“And out back, those five acres are big enough that you could have a neat two-acre paddock, a small barn and arena, and still have enough space left over so that the whole complex would be hidden on all sides by whatever strange things are growing out there.”

“And a small cemetery to boot.”

Camille laughed. “And with everything here, you’d have room when company came to visit.”

I looked at Camille in mock horror. “Visit? Who’s coming to visit?”

“You never know when a grandchild might want to come and spend a week or so with his crazy grandpa.”

“They never have before,” I groused.

“That’s because you’re always working,” Camille said, and she looked at me as if to add, “So there.”

I took a deep breath, eyeing the nachos. “I’ll think on it,” I said.

I was about to reach for the tempting morsel when Camille reached over to the counter and picked up the pill organizer. “Here,” she said. “Have some. It’s time.”

Chapter 21

I was walking across the foyer in my stocking feet when I heard the crunch of tires on gravel. I glanced out through the single slender window beside the front door and saw Martin Holman and Eddie Mitchell climbing out of a county car.

“What the hell would they have done if I’d stayed in Flint?” I said, and opened the door.

“We were in the neighborhood,” Holman said affably as he climbed out of the car. He was holding a clear plastic evidence bag and wearing another of his enormous smiles. His days were clearly marked by the joy of small individual victories. “I was hoping we’d catch you.” He held up the bag. “How about this?”

He handed the bag to me, and I took it by the closure. “Well, well,” I said. “Come on in.” I shut the heavy door with one hand, holding up the bag with the other. The revolver inside was a Smith & Wesson, a perfectly run-of-the-mill .357 Magnum, four-inch-barreled Model 19. The letters PCSO were engraved on the rightside plate, just under the manufacturer’s logo.

“Mine, I assume,” I said, and Holman nodded. I turned the bag and saw the deep scratch across the bottom of the left grip where I’d snagged a barbed-wire fence a year before.

“Where was it found?”

“Well, that’s the interesting thing,” Holman said. “You know Deann Black?”

“Sure. She runs that day-care center, over behind the hospital.”

“That’s right. She found this in her son Jason’s sock drawer.”

“Under the socks,” I said, and looked at the Magnum again. It was fully loaded. “Maybe that’s where I should have kept it. How old is Jason?”

“He’s ten,” Eddie Mitchell said, and I glanced up at the deputy. He was no taller than I was, and probably weighed nearly the same, little of it fat.

“A ten-year-old? Well, that explains the brilliant hiding place. Was the little terrorist in on the burglary, or what?”

Mitchell shook his head slightly. “I don’t know. His mother discovered the weapon this afternoon when she was sorting laundry. She called us right away. And she’s pretty smart. She didn’t move it, or touch it. Dispatch sent me over there. Then she went and checked her kid out of school so he’d be there, too.”

“What did the kid say?”

“He claims he found the weapon over behind Guilfoil Auto Parts on Bustos.”

“Sure, that’s likely,” I said. “And mom?”

“She’d like to believe him, but I don’t think she does. She gave me permission to search the kid’s room. I didn’t turn up anything else.”

“And the kid maintains that he just found the gun lying in the alley?”

“Behind one of the Dumpsters. Right.”

“Prints?”

Mitchell shook his head again. “I haven’t run anything yet. Might be interesting, though.”

“Unless the kid’s watched too many movies,” Holman said. “Then he’s wiped it clean.”

“We’ll see,” I said. “Eddie, in the meantime, give mom a call back and tell her that we want to have the kid come down to the office for a chat. Ask her to come along, as well. Who is Mr. Black, by the way?”

“They’re separated. He works over at Posadas General. I think he’s a custodian.”

“You might get ahold of him, too. Maybe the kid relates to him better than he does his mother. You never know,” I said. I glanced at my watch. “Set something up for three-thirty. That gives us half an hour. We don’t want this kid having too much time to think. It’ll be interesting to see how creative he can get.”

“By then, prints might tell us something,” Mitchell said.

“Were you going to go to the office today?” Holman asked. “I mean, other than at three-thirty?”

“I wasn’t planning on it. Why?”

“There were a couple of budget matters I wanted to talk over with you, but they can wait. And by the way, Estelle’s checking out a report from Alamogordo about a youngster someone saw in a white van. Apparently the kid was in some kind of distress, and someone got suspicious and tipped off the police. I don’t know more than that.”

“Well,” I said, “we’re going to hear all kinds of things. She’s right to check it out, though. We can’t let anything slip by.”

“It’s interesting to see how it works,” Holman said. “There aren’t very many members of the search party who really believe that Cody Cole is up on that mesa.”

“Except Mrs. Cole,” I said. “A mother’s intuition is a powerful thing.”

Holman nodded, then held up an index finger. “I almost forgot. We got some really interesting information from the Wyoming Department of Fish and Game. Paul Cole is not on record as holding an elk license from that state, or any other kind of license, for that matter.”

I frowned.

“And I guess we should have expected that,” Holman added. “All the licenses are awarded in drawings, and those take place early in the year. It’s something he would have had to have been planning for months and months.”

“Maybe he has been,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

I shrugged. “Remember what Camille said? It sounds like there’s some kind of war going on between Cole and his new wife. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.” I held up a hand in resignation and handed the bagged revolver to Holman. “Wherever he went, he didn’t go alone,” I said.

“How do you know that?”

“Because both his vehicles are parked in his driveway, Martin. When we find him, it’s going to be interesting to hear his story.”

“His wife’s going to be interested, too,” Holman said.

Chapter 22

Jason Black was a slender kid, tall for his age. He moped into the Posadas Public Safety Building, walking a step or two behind his mother, as if it she was the one who had business there and he’d just been forced to tag along.

His reddish blond hair was slicked back from his forehead, lying flat on his skull, thanks to liberal applications of something shiny that stuck it all in place. The sides were cut short, up to the tops of his ears, though, making his hair look like some kind of bizarre helmet slipped over his head.

I watched from my office as mother and son presented themselves at the window that separated our dispatchers from all the weird folks who showed up at all hours of the day or night. The woman’s jaw was clenched tight, and she spoke to Gayle Sedillos in monosyllables.

Gayle was used to handling parents who had reached their limit of stress, and she greeted Mrs. Black graciously, then pointed across the hall at the closed door marked
CONFERENCE
. The woman marched her son across the hall.

Jason Black managed to look indifferent and bored, but I saw him hesitate just a bit before following his mother into the conference room. He was trying his best to get an early start into the bizarre world of teenagers. Interesting times lay ahead for his mother, I mused.

The door closed behind them, and I elected to let them sit and stew for ten or fifteen minutes. It took that long to shag Deputy Mitchell back in off patrol.

Sheriff Holman led the assault, despite my suggestion that we wait until Estelle Reyes-Guzman could be present. I’d never met a kid whom she hadn’t been able to reduce to gelatin. But she was at the hospital with her mother, and I didn’t want to press into her time there.

Holman was in his usual good-humored form, and Jason misread that cue from the very beginning. The kid regarded him with studiously lidded eyes while the sheriff introduced everyone. Holman sounded much too reasonable, too much like a kindly guidance counselor. If the kid thought that he could get away with murder, he would elect to try it under the watchful, kindly eye of the Posadas County sheriff.

The kid sat with his shoulders hunched, part of the newfangled blend-in-with-the-crowd posture that had become so inexplicably popular. He avoided looking at Eddie Mitchell, whose expression was cold and blank, and he only let his gaze stray across to me one time. That was when I came into the room, tossed a manila folder on the table, and sat down with a scowl, obviously pissed.

The good sheriff was the only ally that the kid had in the room, other than his own mother. Jason shifted in his seat as Holman gently explained to both mother and son how deep the shit was that the boy was in.

“Jason,” the sheriff said finally, after rattling on for five minutes about responsibility and the rights of other people to own their own property unmolested, “The Posadas County Sheriff’s Department is considering filing charges against you that include possession of stolen government property. That’s a serious felony.”

If Mrs. Black had been planning to tough it out, that plan ended when she heard that. The mothering instinct was just too strong. I could almost hear her thinking, How could such a reasonable man say such an unreasonable, harsh thing as that?

“But Sheriff,” she said, “if he just
found
the gun…”

“We know that’s not what happened,” I said brusquely. “It’s that simple. Someone who walks into a particular alley,
finds
a loaded handgun, and then hides that weapon in his room obviously has plans of some kind.”

“Jason,” Mrs. Black said in her best “Son, how could you” tone.

I saw a faint quiver of the boy’s upper lip and added, “If he had been concerned with following the law, he could have simply reported what he
found
and that would have been that.” I turned to Eddie Mitchell, whose rattlesnake eyes were still making both kid and mother nervous. “What are the fingerprint results, Deputy?”

“Three sets,” Mitchell said, and his eyes never left Jason’s. “The computer is running matches now. It’ll be a few minutes. Mrs. Black said that she did not touch the weapon at any time. She opened the drawer, and in trying to reorganize the socks, she uncovered the weapon, realized what it was, and called us. Since she did not touch it, I don’t expect to find a match to her prints. When we book Jason, we will fingerprint him, as usual, and at that time, I expect to find a match.”

Mitchell droned all that out in one breath, flat and emotionless, as if we did this sort of thing on an hourly basis. No one had explained to young Jason Black that the police couldn’t just stuff unknown latent prints into a computer and be handed a match within minutes, if ever. If the kid thought that’s what we could do, so much the better.

“Obviously, one of the sets of prints is Jason’s,” Holman said, “since the only way the weapon could get in his dresser drawer is if he put it there. But maybe Jason wasn’t alone when the gun was discovered.” I almost grinned at that nice word,
discovered
, making a loaded Magnum seem like some kind of pirate treasure. “Maybe,” Holman said, “several people were involved, and several people handled it. Maybe someone talked Jason into just
hiding
the gun for a while. Is that about what happened, Jason?”

“Pete Harkins and Melody Perez,” Jason blurted, and tears came at the same time as the names. For just a fleeting moment, Marty Holman looked almost disappointed that he wouldn’t have to use any of the other tools in his arsenal of persuasion. It was like someone walking onto a car lot, pulling out a checkbook, pointing at a car, and saying, “I want that car. How much is it?”

“Pete Harkins and Melody Perez,” Holman repeated. “Just those two?”

“Yes.” The word was a miserable little bleat, and ten-year-old Jason Black’s first venture into the world of crime came to an abrupt end. Once he started talking, there was little need for prompting, and mom, bless her, just sat back and let Jason ride on alone. Holman remained the patient, kindly prompter; Mitchell and I sat silently, watching and listening.

Pete Harkins, Jason Black’s best bud, lived just off Grande at the Ranchero Mobile Home Park. That put his residence less than five hundred yards from mine. Pete and Jason had recruited Melody Perez, a tough little number who lived on the other side of the interstate, on MacArthur. The two boys liked Melody, Jason said, because she wasn’t afraid to do anything.

They had busted into my house, Jason recalled, because they had heard a rumor that I owned a huge coin collection—which I didn’t—as well as a bunch of other “stuff,” which I probably did.

The three kids, all coldly calculating, chose my house because it was vacant, secluded, and scary, whatever a ten-year-old meant by that. It was simple enough to bust the bathroom window and squirm inside.

I looked at Jason Black skeptically. He was resting his arm on the table, relieved that he’d managed to talk his way out of an immediate trip to Leavenworth. I could have encircled his biceps with my thumb and index finger. I tried to picture the three of them wrestling to move my filing cabinet. Maybe Melody had carried it by herself.

“How’d you move the cabinet?” I asked.

Jason looked at me out of the corner of his eye and shifted slightly away, as if I might hit him. “We took the cart thing. The one that was right there by the garage.”

“You sneaky little bastard,” I wanted to say, but instead I settled for saying, “You mean the wheelbarrow?” He nodded. “And where did you take the file?”

Jason explained how they had managed to grunt the cabinet out of the house, into my own wheelbarrow, and trundle the whole affair on down Guadalupe Terrace until the lane ended in the arroyo that ran south, paralleling State Road 61.

“We were thinking that like if we dumped it into the arroyo, it would burst open when it hit the bottom.”

“And did it?”

Jason shook his head. “We used that old ax.”

“Old ax?” I wasn’t in the habit of leaving axes outside.

“The one that was with the wheelbarrow.”

“Ah,” I said. Ax, pickax, hoe, shovel—same thing. “So you took the pickax and busted it open.”

Jason nodded. “It came open pretty easy,” he said. “A lot easier than we thought.”

“What did you do with the papers?”

“We seen they wasn’t money or nothing, so we left ’em.”

“And the other gun?”

“Melody gots it.”

I looked at Eddie. “It’s a little Colt three eighty. It’s in the inventory I gave Estelle.” I took a deep breath, regarding Jason Black. “And you took the rifle, too? The big one that was up on the wall?” I slipped the eight-by-ten glossy of the shoe print out of the case folder and slid it across the table so it parked right under the kid’s nose. He didn’t have a poker face, and if it wasn’t his own shoe, at least he recognized whose it was.

“Melody gots it. That and the sword. She said she knew somebody who’d buy ’em from her.”

“And the VCR?”

“Pete took that. He was going to sell it to Predo Gonzales after a little while.”

“What else do you have?”

“Nothing.” He saw my eyes squint and hastily added, “Honest. Nothing.”

Martin Holman managed to sound almost helpful when he looked at a miserable Deann Black and said, “While we’re waiting for Judge Hobart, ma’am, it might save us some time to go ahead and book Jason. Get the fingerprinting process out of the way.”

She looked horrified. “But he admitted—you mean, if this is all cleared up, he’s still to be charged?”

“Ma’am, this is a serious business. We have pretty solid information that the burglary of the Gastner residence isn’t the only incident involving these youngsters.” My estimation of Martin Holman clicked up another few notches. “What happens will depend on how cooperative your son remains,” he added.

“While Deputy Mitchell takes care of that,” I said to Holman, “maybe you’d take a run out to the trailer park and bring in Pete Harkins. It’d be a good idea to have Debbie Mears go along when you pick up Miss Melody.” Debbie was the wife of one of our deputies and served frequently as an on-call matron. I got up from the conference table. “I’m going out to the arroyo and check this young man’s story. If he’s telling the truth, I’ll let Deputy Mitchell know.”

As I opened the door, I turned and said, “And by the way, don’t take any officers away from the search. We can walk through this thing if it takes all night.” I nodded at Jason Black. “And don’t let the three of them associate with one another in any way. Keep ’em separated. Separate cells.”

Jason’s face had been pale enough, but I have to admit I enjoyed seeing it go another shade lighter when I said the word
cells
.