Prolonged Exposure (19 page)

Chapter 33

“Any other blood anywhere else?” I asked.

Holman beckoned, and we followed him out of the room. “First of all, there’s a small smear right here, on the doorjamb,” he said. He pulled out his ballpoint pen and pointed with it. The smear was about five feet up on the jamb, as if someone had leaned there for support.

“And then he turned and went left, out the side door,” Holman said.

“Less risk being seen,” I said. “If he went back up the hall, he’d risk that intersection where other patrons come down to visit the ice machines.”

Chief Eduardo Martinez eased away from the wall as we approached. Eduardo was round and comfortable, given to good humor and easy smiles. He had an endless repertoire of jokes for any occasion. He wasn’t smiling. With him was George Bohrer. If straight, square shoulders counted, Bohrer was a winner. Unfortunately, good posture is about all Bohrer had going for him.

“Chief,” I said. That was about all I could manage, even though I liked Eduardo. He never presumed to be more than he was—the grand marshal for the Posadas Fourth of July parade. Rumor had it that eons before, he had actually spent a year with the Texas Department of Public Safety.

“Say, it’s good to have you back home,” Eduardo said, and extended a hand. His grip was warm and friendly. “This is sure a hell of a deal.”

“Yes, it is.”

“No one’s been in or out since you left, Sheriff,” Bohrer said. He had a thick Texas drawl and nodded with every syllable, as if each sound needed hatching by the physical motion of his head. I could guess what instructions Holman had left for him.

“The killer went out this way,” Holman said. “If you look here, you can see a faint smudge on the door. I’m sure it’s blood, but the lab will tell us for sure. And then,” he said, toeing the door open with the tip of one polished boot, “it appears that he fell.”

“Don’t touch the door, George,” Estelle said as she saw Bohrer reaching out to hold it open for us. He jerked his hand back as if struck.

Chief Martinez bent down and slid a pebble into the crack between door and jamb.

The man had made it down the carpeted hall successfully, then collapsed on the concrete just outside the door. Blood was puddled thick and dark, as if the man had rested there, catching his breath, taking time to wish that this day wasn’t going to be his last. A hand-print had smeared blood on the cement, as if the man had slipped while trying to push himself up.

“There’s no sign of a child’s tracks out here,” Holman said. “None at all. We don’t know what happened.”

“Did someone process this boot print?” Estelle asked. She knelt and, using the small black flashlight from her purse, bounced light off the print. Just a small curve of featureless sole had broken the margin of the bloodstain.

“We missed that,” Holman said. He knelt beside her. “Looks like just a smooth leather sole. Not enough to be sure.”

“It could be one of the officers,” I said. “There’ve been people milling around here for an hour.”

“Not milling, Bill,” Holman said, sounding a little testy. “Anyway, this is as far out from the building as the blood went. Either there was a car waiting or one drove up just then. Or maybe he was able to hold himself together and limp off somehow.”

I turned and looked back at the hallway. “This amount of blood means someone is hurt pretty badly. He’s not going to go far. You’ve got everyone who’s not sitting a roadblock or checking door-to-door working this?”

Holman managed a trace of a smile. “We don’t have anyone else, Bill. We’ve got some help coming, but it’s going to take a couple of hours.”

I grimaced. “Who’s working the blood typing for us?”

“Skip Bishop. He took about eight doubles from inside the room, and a couple from out here. One set went to the ME’s office in Cruces. Dale Kenyon ran it over for us. Skip took the other set to the hospital lab here to get something quicker. Unofficial, but quicker. He’ll stay with it until he’s got an answer.”

I nodded, thankful that Skip worked faster than his older brother, Sgt. Howard Bishop. Howard had finally agreed to attend one of the FBI seminars in Quantico. I knew the sheriff had pressured him into it, figuring that late November was a good, slow time of the year and that we’d be able to spare him for three weeks.

“So tell me about Roberto Madrid,” I said, turning back toward the doorway.

“We know nothing about him except what a car-rental paper tells us. He was thirty-four years old. He’s a Mexican national, driving a car he rented in Douglas, Arizona. He had a receipt in his suitcase that shows he paid cash for the car rental but used a Banco Central de México credit card as collateral and as secondary identification.”

“He came across legally, then.”

“Absolutely.” Holman shrugged. “There’s isn’t a clue in the room why he was here. Not a clue what his business was. His wallet has been taken, as well.”

“You’re sure he had one?”

“No,” Holman said uncomfortably. “I guess I was assuming that he had one.”

“And we have a child’s footprint,” I said. We walked back to the room, and Estelle and I meticulously searched the small suitcase that lay on the stand near the busted television. From what I could see, there were a couple of changes of clothes, toiletry items, and one paperback book.

I leaned closer and looked at the cover, a hazy blue design with what might have been the figure of a child standing under a tree. The title,
Cuentos del Soñador
, was in black script.

“What’s
soñador
mean?” I asked.

“Dreamer,” Estelle said softly. “
Stories of the Dreamer
.” She pushed open the book with the eraser of her pencil and scanned a page at random. “It looks like a collection of short stories for children. Bedtime stories.”

She looked up at Holman. “Was someone going to process this for prints? The shiny cover might show us something.”

“That’s next on the list,” Holman said. “As soon as Bob Torrez or Eddie Mitchell gets back here.”

She nodded absently. “He hadn’t been here long,” she said. “He hadn’t even unpacked his toothbrush.” She pushed at the vinyl toiletry case with her pencil and shook her head. “What time did Sands say Madrid checked in?”

“Shortly after noon.”

“How shortly after?” I asked.

Holman pulled out his small notebook and flipped pages. “Twelve thirty-seven is the time punched by the clock on his registration.”

I leaned against the door, nestling the edge of it against my spine. “He checks in at twelve thirty-seven, and then just sits here until someone comes and shoots him sometime after six.”

“Maybe he was reading,” Holman said, gesturing at the book.

“For six hours? Maybe. Maybe it’s a good book.”

Estelle stood up and closed her eyes, tilting her head back.

“Are you all right?” Holman asked.

“No,” she said. She shook her head and slid the pencil back into her purse. “If that footprint is my son’s,” she said, and paused to take a deep breath, “then that means whoever took him did so in order to bring him down here. The timing fits, if nothing else.”

“And it could as easily be a coincidence,” I said. “Unrelated. The footprint could be from any other child, or even a woman with very small feet.”

“And what if that is my son’s footprint,” Estelle said. “It could be his. It had a high arch like his.”

“If it’s his, then there are several possibilities. Maybe Madrid took the boy, and someone else came after him. Maybe there was some sort of arrangement and something went wrong.”

“Let’s look for something more obvious,” Holman said. “Madrid could have brought a child with him from Mexico. Isn’t that possible? Let’s say the occupants of the room were Madrid and his own son. They come here for whatever reason. Maybe just on a vacation.”

“In Posadas?” I said.

“Well, they might have been bound for somewhere else—you can’t tell. And then someone breaks in and takes his child.” He shrugged. “The MO fits. Someone broke into the Guzman home and took a child. They come here and do the same thing. That’s the most obvious answer. Madrid resisted, and pop.”

“The child was not Madrid’s,” Estelle said softly.

“What makes you think not? There’s even that book of children’s stories, like you said.”

She gestured toward the small suitcase. “For one thing, there is no child’s clothing in that suitcase.” She looked at Holman, her left eyebrow drifting upward. She turned slowly and surveyed the rest of the room. “Or anywhere else in this room. No one travels with a child for any distance and only takes the clothes that the child is wearing. And for another thing, if the child had on only socks, or his pajamas, when he was picked up and taken, where are his shoes now? Where are his clothes? Do you travel with a kid in socks and no shoes?”

“The intruder took them with him.”

Estelle grimaced at Holman’s train of thought, and I said, “Sheriff, if you were hurt badly enough to be leaking puddles of blood, either shot or stabbed, would you bother to stop and pick up a pair of shoes?”

Holman glanced at me. “I guess not.”

“No, you wouldn’t. I think it’s pretty obvious Roberto Madrid was in this room by himself, waiting. Just him and this small suitcase.”

“That means his assailant—”

“Or assailants,” Estelle corrected.

“One, two, three, however many. His assailants brought the child with them. If Madrid didn’t have the child to begin with, the only thing that makes sense is that someone brought the child with them.”

“And left with the child, as well.”

“For what?” Holman asked.

“Roberto Madrid knew. And he died at the hospital, without talking,” I said.

“Sir?” Estelle said, and I turned. She was looking at me, one hand over her mouth. Her face was pale, and at first I thought the cloying smell of blood mixed with room deodorizer was making her sick. “I need to go home.”

I ushered her out of the room. To Holman, I said, “You’ll let me know the instant Bishop has some information on the blood types?”

“Of course.” He smiled sympathetically at Estelle. “And in another hour or so, there’ll be so many FBI agents crawling all over the county that no one will be able to hide a thing. Just hang in there. We’ll find your son.”

Estelle nodded, but it wasn’t the nod of someone seeking either sympathy or help. She set off down the hall, and I hurried to catch up. She remained silent until we reached the car, slid inside, and started the engine.

Then, just as I was reaching for the gearshift lever, she reached a hand over and rested it lightly on my right wrist.

“Sir, we have to consider that the same person—or persons—who took Cody Cole took Francis, too.”

I slumped against the door, resting my arm along the window. Estelle was sitting with her eyes closed, and I could imagine the anguish she was going through. The cool, analytical detective side of her wanted answers—straightforward, correct, prosecutable answers. The mother in her simply yearned for a simple, quick solution that would see little Francis safely back home.

And I knew that the real agony of it was that we didn’t have time for the mother’s side just then.

“I don’t see how it could be any other way,” I said, and Estelle looked up sharply, surprised. “Until tonight, I was convinced that Cody Cole’s disappearance was just a tragic set of circumstances where two hundred searchers had been overlooking one small thing—the smallest little thing. I would have been willing to bet that come next spring, some hiker would have found his bones.”

I looked out through the side window into the darkness. “And found them in a spot that would prompt about a hundred searchers to say, ‘Why hell, I walked right over that ground at least a hundred times.’” I watched Estelle’s reflection in the glass and saw a hand drift up to rub her left eye. “We’ve both seen cases where someone was lost close to their base camp, or to the search parties.” I shrugged. “But it’s too much of a coincidence to believe that the two cases aren’t related in some fashion. At the very least, it could be an opportunist, copycat sort of thing. The Cole search has been in the papers. Maybe someone decided to try their hand. Until today, I was even willing to believe that there was a logical explanation for the Cole youngster’s jacket turning up where it did. Not anymore.”

Estelle looked away, out the window toward the lights of Posadas.

“We’re not finding anyone sitting here,” I said, and pulled 310 into gear.

“If Madrid was involved,” Estelle said, still looking away, “then the boys were headed to Mexico. That’s the only thing that makes sense to me.”

“And something went wrong.” I drove out of the motel’s parking lot, trying to think of an easy solution. I knew that Estelle wasn’t naïve—she knew as well as I did that children abducted from parents who weren’t wealthy were taken not for ransom, but for other reasons. And every one of those reasons was enough to jerk a parent awake in the middle of the night in a cold sweat.

“Cody went missing almost four days ago—sometime Saturday evening. Roberto Madrid checked into the motel today, Wednesday, shortly after noon. If there’s a connection, what is it?”

The shake of Estelle’s head was just the tiniest of motions.

“I want to talk to Tiffany Cole again,” she said.

“Right now?”

“Right now.”

We drove north on Grande, and just about at the point where dispatcher Ernie Wheeler could have looked out the front door of the Public Safety Building and seen our headlights, the radio crackled.

“Three ten, PCS. Ten-twenty.”

“PCS, three ten is at the intersection of Bustos and Grande.”

“Ten-four, three ten. Ten-nineteen.”

Martin Holman was fond of summoning people into the office, but he was busy at the motel, making sure Bohrer and the chief didn’t ruin evidence.

In less than a block, I turned into the parking lot.

“I’ll wait here for you,” Estelle said. “I need some time to think.”

“You might give your husband a call and tell him we’re on the way,” I said, and then I trudged up the back steps into the building.

“Ah, line two,” Ernie said, gesturing toward the phone.