Prolonged Exposure (4 page)

Chapter 6

“Do they know you’re here, do you suppose?” Camille asked. I watched Sheriff Martin Holman walk across the parking lot toward the restaurant’s entrance, head down, hands in his pockets. At five ten, the same height as I am when standing up straight, he was a head shorter than Sgt. Robert Torrez, who walked beside him.

Torrez was explaining something to the sheriff, and with Holman, it could have been something as simple as the time of day. The sheriff nodded, then nodded again, then shook his head.

“He knows all right,” I said. “He would never eat here, given any kind of choice. The country club is more his style.”

And sure enough, within the minute, JanaLynn appeared around the salad bar’s divider, followed by Holman and the towering sergeant.

Martin Holman pasted on his widest smile, stuck out both hands, and shook mine like a long-lost brother. I didn’t bother trying to get up by scrubbing my belly through my burrito. “Back in the real world,” he said. He waved a hand at my dinner. “And this figures. A safe bet that it’s the exact opposite of what the doctor ordered.”

I shrugged and had the courtesy not to say something nasty about his preference for embalmed chicken and green beans. Instead, I said, “Sheriff, this is my eldest daughter, Camille. From Flint, Michigan. I think you two knew each other, back in the dark ages.”

Martin pumped her hand, too, maybe for just a little too long. Camille’s smile was radiant. “I’ll be darned,” she said, as if I’d never talked to her about the current sheriff of Posadas County. “You aren’t that scruffy little kid that sat in front of me in Mrs. Dutcher’s American history class.”

“Not anymore,” Holman said. He feigned mock hurt. “And I don’t think I was ever scruffy.”

I glanced down at his polished boots, still mint after a day up on the mountains, and the sharp crease of his gabardine trousers. Even the raindrop circles on his leather jacket were placed just so. “I don’t think so, either,” I said. “Join us.” I pushed myself over closer to the wall, taking my burrito with me. “Robert, it’s good to see you. Camille, this is Bob Torrez, the department’s senior patrol sergeant.”

Torrez nodded at me, then at Camille. He was handsome enough that he probably could have landed a Hollywood job, but instead he had settled into place, keeping tabs on his eight younger brothers and sisters. I’d suspected for years that the long-term arm’s-length love of his life was our senior dispatcher, Gayle Sedillos. Maybe the two of them figured there was no hurry, since they saw each other as regularly as shift work.

Holman sat down beside me, and Torrez balanced his huge frame on the edge of Camille’s bench seat, careful not to slide too close.

“You’re still eating that stuff,” Holman said.

“I’m still breathing.”

“Uh-huh.”

JanaLynn had sidled back around the divider and now looked at the sheriff expectantly. “Just coffee,” he said. “Decaf.”

“Bobby?” she said to Torrez.

“Nothing, thanks.”

She left, and Holman leaned forward, his voice low. “
Bobby
? What’s with
Bobby
?”

“She’s my cousin,” Torrez said without a trace of fluster. “They all call me that.”

“I think he’s related to half the county,” Holman said, and he then turned to me, his arm on the back of the booth. “So. What do you think?”

“About what?”

“About being back.”

I chuckled. “Long overdue.”

“I should say so. What’s first on the agenda for you?”

I looked sideways at Martin, wondering what he really wanted. “First, we’re going to clean up the mess in the house. Camille made good progress today. And by the way, thanks for covering that window, Robert.”

Holman leaned forward and folded his hands on the table. “Yeah. That was a hell of a welcome home for you.”

I nodded. “What’s the news on the youngster?”

Holman shot a glance at Torrez, then shrugged. “I just don’t know. I really don’t. That’s one reason we stopped by. You weren’t home, and at dinnertime there weren’t too many other places you were apt to be.” He grinned and craned his neck, looking around at the other booths in that section of the restaurant. They were empty.

“Are they going to go with a night search?”

Holman nodded. “The National Guard’s going to keep after it, along with Search and Rescue. It looks like the weather is holding stable enough that they might be able to use the choppers with spotlights. And I’ve sprung all the personnel the county can afford. Bernie Tafoya even has his dogs up there. This will be the second night. I don’t know. It looks grim.”

“That’s rugged country,” I said.

“Yes, it is. About the worst in the county.” He paused, then traced one of the patterns in the plastic tablecloth with his right ring finger. “And I get the impression that there’s something about the whole thing that Estelle doesn’t like.”

“Meaning?”

Holman shrugged. “I don’t know what I mean. She asked Bob here to coordinate things for our end. So he’s been working with the Guard and SAR.”

“Who’s up there now, by the way,” I asked, “coordinating things?”

“Eddie Mitchell, and he’s got Tom Pasquale keeping him awake.”

“He’ll love that,” I said. Eddie Mitchell had been with the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department for nine years, after an unhappy stint with one of the big metro departments. I knew that the taciturn and efficient sergeant delighted in assigning young Pasquale to every dull civil-law job that came along, but I agreed with him—that was one way to keep the youngster out of trouble until he aged a bit.

“Estelle had a family emergency,” I added. “That’s going to be her first priority for a while. There’s no problem with that.”

Holman waved a hand. “No, no. I know her mother took a header. I know about that. No, what I mean is before that. Everyone is working out of a base camp, like right here, just east of the tip of the Pipes.” He drew a little circle on the table, close to the edge. “That’s about where the hunting camp was that the kid strayed from.”

He turned and rested his head in his left hand as he looked at me. “I was hoping that being a young mother herself, Estelle’s intuition might tell her where the kid went, right away. But she’s got something else on her mind. She’s not communicating with us.”

I frowned and put my fork down. “She’s not communicating with you? What do you mean?”

Holman shrugged. “Just that. You know how you used to joke that Estelle was half Oriental or something? She gets so damn inscrutable that no one knows what the hell she’s thinking? Well, at a time like this, it just seems like she sure as hell should be talking to us. That’s a little kid out there. I’d like to hear her ideas.”

“Did you talk to her?”

“You bet. Her stock phrase for anybody in the search is ‘Just cover every square foot.’”

“Well? Good advice, seems to me. What else is there to do?”

“Sure. But for most of the afternoon, she’s off on the back side of the mesa, well out of the search area, doing who the hell knows what. Just before she got the call about her mother, I happened to catch sight of her standing off about fifty yards from the family’s campfire site, leaning against a tree, staring off into space.”

I chuckled. “That sounds familiar.”

“I thought maybe you’d have a talk with her when she gets back.”

“Of course. But I tell you, Marty, it’s been my experience, and yours, too, that Estelle does things in her own good time.” I took another forkful and chewed thoughtfully. “I’ve spent many a time waiting for her to decide what she wants to do. And she usually isn’t wrong, either.”

“It’s not just my imagination, then.”

I laughed. “No, Sheriff, it’s not your imagination. So tell me about this family. Pasquale told me their name, but I’ve forgotten already.”

“The Coles,” he said, and looked at Torrez. “Tiffany, right?” Bob nodded. “Tiffany Cole is the mother’s name. She moved here about a year ago.”

“They were hunting?”

“No. Just camping. The campsite looked more like it was just a place to blow off a little steam.”

“And just the three of them? Mom, her boyfriend, and the boy?”

“I assume so. She’s a wreck, so it’s hard to get any kind of answer out of her. Bob, you talked with her some.”

“Just those three,” Torrez said, his voice almost a whisper.

Camille looked puzzled. “It’s hard to imagine a three-year-old covering enough distance to get himself lost.”

“Yes, it is,” I said. “But he doesn’t have to travel far, as the sad experience we had about ten years ago with the Culpepper boy proved to us. That youngster was eleven years old when he walked away from a hunting camp over by Regal, and they found his bones six months later. He’d curled up under a rock snag less than two hundred yards from the camp.” I shrugged. “Now he was eleven, and two hundred yards is close enough, on a still night, to hear normal voices.”

“It wasn’t a still night, though,” Martin said.

“No, it wasn’t. It was a goddamn blizzard, and the youngster apparently fell and fractured his skull. And it was so cold that he probably froze to death the first night, if the injury didn’t kill him first.” I put down my fork and pushed back. “And that’s that. If this little tyke is only three, and this is his second night out, with the possibility of freezing rain, then he’s had it. And a little body is just terribly easy to miss, even if you’ve got a thousand troops combing the place.”

Holman sighed.

“And that’s probably exactly what’s bothering Estelle, Sheriff,” I said. “Remember that her oldest boy just turned three himself. So this is up close and personal.”

“You’ll talk with her, though?”

“Sure.”

Holman put his palms on the table and pushed himself to his feet. “Did you happen to talk with old man Apodaca about the grave in your backyard, by the way?”

I grinned. “No. Camille and I walked out there this afternoon. Damnedest thing I ever saw. I keep thinking that I’m just going to tell the village to put an oxbow in their goddamn water line and leave her bones in peace. I’ll deed him the land, if that makes it easier.”

“Whatever you want to do,” Holman said, but he didn’t sound convinced. “Let me know what Estelle says,” he added.

“I’m sure Estelle will let you know herself,” I said, and Holman looked heavenward.

“Nice seeing you again, Camille,” he said. “How long are you staying?”

My daughter mumbled something noncommittal that I didn’t catch, and Holman said something about having dinner with him and his wife if we got the chance.

As they started to move away from the table, Sergeant Torrez said, in his usual half whisper, “I’ll be heading back up to the mesa after awhile, if you need anything.”

I lifted a hand in acknowledgment, realizing that Bob expected me to reply that I’d be joining him.

Chapter 7

That evening after we returned from dinner, I made a mental note to call the Posadas village office the next day to see what their updated water-line aspirations were. With that information in hand, it would be time to stroll over and talk to old man Apodaca. I didn’t really relish that idea, but it had to be done.

I suspected that Florencio Apodaca was an intensely private man, and now he had to be intensely lonely, as well. I didn’t see a whole parking lot of relatives’ cars over at his place.

What I really wanted was to hear from Estelle Reyes-Guzman, but the evening wore on and that didn’t happen. I started to dial Erma Sedillos shortly before nine to see if Estelle and Francis had made it back from Mexico. I punched the first four digits and then thought better of it. Erma didn’t need an extra phone call jangling the two sleeping terrors awake.

I walked a circle around the kitchen, stopping in front of the pillbox with all its stupid little compartments. They reminded me of just how useless I was. I turned, walked to the kitchen door, and looked outside. Gusts of wind rocked the cottonwood limbs, and the sky was starless. The thermometer tacked to the window casing read thirty-four degrees. Raw, nasty, and cold.

If anyone needed help, it was the kid lost on the mountain, and I knew damn well that I was useless up there, where the added altitude would make me wheeze, and my bifocaled night vision wouldn’t be able to distinguish between a grove of trees and a battalion of National Guard troops.

That left the puzzling burglary of my home, and my mood brightened some when I discovered that when books were jammed back on the shelves, the living room looked about like it always had, minus the VCR—and that was a dust-catcher anyway. There was no telling what evidence Estelle had gathered when she and the other deputies combed the house after the break-in was discovered. I was anxious to talk with her about that, too, but I knew that a two-bit residential burglary was a long way down the list of priorities just then.

I held out until ten o’clock, then pushed myself out of my leather recliner with a grunt.

“Bed,” I said to Camille, who was curled up on the couch, engrossed in the prime minister’s life. She glanced up at me, her right index finger drifting down to mark her place in the book. “And I may take a run on down to the office later if I wake up.” My daughter didn’t look surprised.

Over the years, I’d come to first adapt to, and then to cherish my own special brand of insomnia. Posadas County was a wonderful, dark, quiet place at three in the morning, and there was no point in lying horizontal, staring at the ceiling, when I could be in a snug car, idling the back roads with the headlights and the radio off, windows down, listening to the quiet musings of the New Mexican prairie.

Camille knew my habits, and she didn’t argue, but I saw her eyes flick toward the kitchen. I knew exactly what was on her mind, and before she could say anything, I added, “And I took my pills, all sixty-five of them.”

I damn near set my alarm for 2:30 A.M., then decided against it, knowing my system wouldn’t fail me.

Because it was my habit to grab a short snooze whenever the spirit moved, whether it be ten in the morning or five in the afternoon, my bedroom was the absolute dark of a room with two-foot-thick adobe walls and one thoroughly shuttered, curtained window.

I had about three sighs’ worth of time to appreciate the comforting smell of the fresh pillowcase before I fell hard asleep. But in what seemed like just minutes, I awoke with a start, Don Juan de Oñate’s coffee and green chili already beginning to work their magic. I got up to go to the bathroom and stopped short when I heard faint voices.

Puzzled, I opened the bedroom door and was hit smack in the face by a shaft of bright light that bounced down the hall from the living room. The sun was pounding the east side of the house, but I knew it couldn’t be morning, since there was no smell of coffee. I retreated into the bedroom to find some clothes.

I put on my glasses and saw that it was a quarter after eight.

“Christ,” I muttered, and quickly got dressed.

A couple of minutes later, I strode into the kitchen as if I’d been somewhere important. Camille was dressed and appeared to be fussing with things that looked like vegetables. The coffeemaker was silent, its one red eye blank, its pot empty.

“Good morning, sir,” Estelle Reyes-Guzman said. She was leaning against the counter by the sink. I stopped short and glared at her.

“When did you get here?”

She smiled, but fatigue lined her dark features. “Just a few minutes ago. Camille said the smell of a green-chili omelette would wake you up.” She pushed herself away from the counter, crossed the room, and hugged me so hard, I almost lost my balance.

“She’s right,” I said, and then stepped back, keeping my left hand on Estelle’s shoulder. “You look beat, sweetheart.”

She nodded. “It’s been a long night.”

“How’s your mother?”

“She’s a worse patient than you ever thought of being, sir,” Estelle said. Estelle and I had known each other for more than a decade, and I could count on one hand the times that she had called me anything but “sir.” Her physician husband had been able to break the habit now and then, and what it was that their two boys screeched as a name for me, I had no idea most of the time.

“She’s here now, though? In Posadas?”

“Against her will.”

“I can imagine that. What happened, exactly?”

Estelle took a deep breath and shook her head. “She went outside to toss a pan of water into the garden. She thinks she just planted a foot crooked when she went down that little step behind the kitchen. She busted her hip into a million pieces. Francis has her lined up for hip-replacement surgery on Monday morning.”

I grimaced. “They’re going to do it here?”

Estelle nodded. “Francis thinks it will go just fine. She’s really in pretty good health, all things considered.”

“And then afterward?”

Estelle ducked her head and gazed off in the general direction of the green chili that Camille was slicing on the counter. “I don’t know, sir. We’ll have to take it one step at a time.”

I grunted and plugged in the coffeemaker. To my surprise, Camille didn’t squawk. Instead, she pointed at the cupboard with her knife. “Coffee’s in there,” she said. “Toward the back.”

“Maybe tomorrow,” I muttered, and she glanced at me quizzically. “Tomorrow, no coffee. Maybe,” I said. “One step at a time.”

And in a few minutes, I felt better than I had in weeks. The green chili in the omelette was real, even if the eggs weren’t. And the coffee even made the battalion of pills easier to swallow. I popped the last capsule and frowned at Estelle. “I need to ask your husband how many of these things are really necessary,” I said. I poured a final cup of coffee, set the pot back on the machine, and added, “So tell me what’s going on up on the mountain.”

“You saw Sheriff Holman last night.” It wasn’t a question, and I just nodded. “He’s pretty sure we’re doing everything that can be done.”

“But you’re not so sure,” I said. “Martin says you’re being your Oriental self again.”

Estelle smiled at the departmental joke. “Is there any chance you can come up sometime this morning?”

“Sure. What are you thinking?”

Estelle frowned, gazing down into the coffee. She cradled the cup in both hands. “I don’t think he’s up there, sir.”

“Who, the youngster?” She nodded and fixed me with those bottomless black eyes of hers. “What makes you think that?” I asked.

She took a deep breath and held up her hands, tapping one index finger against the other. “For one thing, the search hasn’t turned up anything except rumors. That happens when there aren’t any traces, anything to provide a lead. Not even a scent for the dogs.”

“What rumors?” Camille asked.

“For instance, yesterday someone said that they’d found a child’s shoe print about two miles farther down the road.”

“Two miles? We’re talking about a three-year-old, aren’t we?” I said.

Estelle nodded. “When that report came in, a whole sea of people flocked down that way. It wasn’t a child’s print at all. In fact, Bob Torrez said that the print was made by a woman’s shoe, about size five or five and a half.”

“It could have been someone on the search team, stopping for a break,” I said, “or a hundred other possibilities.”

“Sure. What is true is that the print was not that of a child—at least not this particular child. And then things begin to get even more bizarre. About two o’clock yesterday afternoon, just before I came down, we got a call that someone had seen the child riding in a white Ford van, heading down the mountain toward town.”

“And let me guess,” Camille said. “A white van with out-of-state plates on it.”

I looked at her in surprise, and she shrugged. “It’s always got to have out-of-state plates,” she said. “If you watch all the crappy television docudramas, that’s a staple. What good does it do if the van belongs to weird Uncle Louis down the street? That’s too easily traced.”

Estelle smiled, and that expression lifted half a ton of worry from her pretty olive-skinned face. Except for the aristocratic aquiline nose and narrow jaw, she might have been a younger sister to Camille. “No one actually saw a van. We checked on the rumor, and it was just that. And sir, that’s what I mean. All these shapeless rumors,” and she rocked her hands back and forth, “the sort of things that surface when the search is getting desperate and there just isn’t a break of any kind.”

“And you still haven’t said why you think he isn’t up there.”

“He’s too little, sir. I listen to all the theories—”

“Everyone’s got one of those, or two.”

“Yes, sir. But they talk about a three-year-old as if he’s going to trek off across rugged country, maybe covering miles and miles, sleeping under logs, and all that sort of nonsense.”

“Stranger things have happened, Estelle.”

“Not to three-year-olds, sir. Now, an older child would walk, maybe even run. But a three-year-old? His legs are what, about this long?” She held her hands, one above the other, about two feet apart. “At most? That means a tiny little stride, if you can say that a three-year-old strides at all. And he’s got no balance, not like an older child. He just can’t manage rough terrain at any speed.”

“How did he get separated from the camp in the first place?” Camille asked. “Three-year-olds don’t go off on solo strolls at night.”

“His mother says that he was playing beside the camp trailer. He was digging in the dirt with a stick, perfectly content, just on the edge of the light from the campfire. She said she and her boyfriend had been fussing with the fire, trying to arrange some baking potatoes in the coals. Then her boyfriend went into the camper to get his guitar. The mother says that it was getting late, and she wanted little Cody by the fire, sitting in her lap while her boyfriend sang.”

“And she looked around and the child was gone,” I said.

Estelle nodded.

“Just like that.”

She nodded again.

“He never cried out?” Camille said. “A child’s voice would carry at night like a ringing telephone.”

“It was blustery, and the campfire was roaring,” I said. “And somebody was tuning a guitar.”

“No,” Camille said, and shook her head.

“No what?”

“Just no,” she repeated. “From the time she last noticed the kid playing in the dirt to the time she realized he wasn’t there, how many minutes could it have been? Two, three? Maybe ten at the most if mommy was really numb? I mean, isn’t that a rule of three-year-old ownership, that you have to pay attention every second?”

“Sure enough,” I said, “So the choices are limited. Either the tyke wandered a few yards and fell among the rocks or he wandered where the walking was easiest for his tiny legs, on the road. How far could he go?”

“Not
could
. It’s how far he
would
go, Dad. Remember, it was dark. How many brave three-year-olds do you know?”

I grinned, then reached over and patted Estelle on the forearm, thinking of her oldest, my godson. “One,” I said. “The kid would walk from here to Cleveland if there was a reason.”

“Maybe not,” Estelle said. “Francis is beginning to think that there are monsters in the dark now.” I found it hard to imagine Francis Guzman, Jr., three years old, as darkly handsome and intelligent as both his parents, afraid of anything.

“So what are the other choices?”

Estelle rested her head in her hands. “I don’t know.”

“Do you think someone picked him up?”

“I’d hate to think that, but it’s a possibility. And I guess that’s why I wanted you to go with me this morning. I’ve got some things I want to show you.”

“Sure,” I said again. “I don’t know what I can tell you that your instincts haven’t already covered.”

“You never know,” Estelle said. She frowned. “Do you mind if Francis goes with us?”

“If he can get away from the hospital, of course not.”

Estelle smiled again. “No. I mean
the kid
.” She used the nickname I’d adopted when the child was born. As Francis junior’s
padrino
, I figured I was entitled. It was a name that was easy to remember.

“That country’s no place for a child,” I said, “especially in this weather.”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” Estelle murmured. She looked at Camille. “Can I talk you into going up with us?”

“I wouldn’t miss it,” my daughter said.