Scavengers (2 page)
“What, did some wetback get lost?” Deputy Collins said as he started to step past Estelle. She reached out a hand and caught him by the sleeve of his uniform jacket, gently bringing him to a halt. He shot a puzzled glance at her, but she waited until Perrone, Deputy Taber, and the two EMTs had joined them.
“Nothing’s been disturbed, sir,” she said to the physician.
“Just my Sunday morning,” he replied. “Who’s this?”
“I have no idea.”
Perrone nodded and surveyed the landscape. “Huh,” he said at length. “How’s little Carlos, by the way?”
“A miserable little kid,” Estelle said. “And now mother is down with the same crud, I think.”
“She wouldn’t get a flu shot. That’s what your husband said.”
“Nope. She wouldn’t. Last fall when we were still up in Minnesota, Francis even threatened to stick her with the shot while she was asleep. That didn’t work, either. Stubborn to the end.”
Perrone chuckled. “Let’s see what trouble this one got into,” he said, and ambled toward the corpse. He stood with his hands still in his pockets, looking down at the body. “He sure as hell is dead,” he said. Deputy Collins circled around to the other side and bent down, reaching toward the pocket of the victim’s jacket. Perrone held up a hand. “Not yet, Dennis. Nothing gets moved yet.”
Collins took a deep breath of exasperation, and Perrone added, “Once the body is disturbed, that’s it. You never get a second chance.”
“I know,” Collins said, the reply an automatic reflex rather than the truth. “I was just going to check for some identification.” Estelle watched him closely to make sure that his hands didn’t stray, glad that it had been the formidable Perrone who’d spoken up. Collins was scheduled to attend the next session of the law enforcement academy in Santa Fe. Until then, he was an uncertified gopher—spending his time delivering unglamorous civil paperwork and champing at the bit.
“That can wait,” Perrone replied. For the next twenty minutes, they worked the area without touching the body. It was Perrone who froze in his tracks, looking down.
“And what’s this,” he said, beckoning Estelle. He knelt and pointed with his chrome pen. “Good-sized chunk of skullcap, is what I’d guess,” he said. He turned and regarded the corpse, fifteen feet to the east. “So we know one thing,” he added as Estelle silently examined the fragment of bone. “He wasn’t killed somewhere else and dragged here. My first guess is that he was shot, and dropped in his tracks. Either this flew over here, or some critter toyed with it for a while, cleaning off all the good stuff.”
“Gross,” Linda Real said again. Collins looked expectantly at Estelle, as if waiting for her to pronounce some profundity that would lead directly to someone’s arrest. The undersheriff remained silent, after a minute handing the bagged skull fragment to Collins for labeling.
“What do you want me to put on here?” he asked.
“Just fill in the blanks, Dennis,” Estelle said. “Date, time, location. Use ‘skull fragment’ for description.”
Linda continued with an array of cameras, photographing in color, black-and-white, and finally with video—close-up and panorama. Jackie Taber methodically collected samples of the stained gravel under the man’s head and shoulders and passed them to Collins, whose printing on the evidence bag labels turned out to be so neat and precise that at first glance the lettering looked as if it came from a word processor.
Perrone’s interest focused on the head wound, but he was noncommittal. “Interesting,” he allowed. “Maybe gunshot, maybe more than that. Really interesting.”
He reached out and lifted the corners of the black jacket. The V-necked white T-shirt was bloodstained near the collar but otherwise showed no evidence of intrusion. “Huh,” the physician said. “I don’t see evidence of any other wounds other than what I’d expect from the ravens. Let’s roll him over.”
Estelle nodded. Linda crouched off to one side, the video camera watching the process.
Deputy Collins put a hand on the man’s shoulder while Perrone lifted at the hip. With the body rolled just far enough that it rested on its side, Perrone stopped, frowning. The small of the victim’s back had been resting on a football-size rock, the sharp corners of the limestone digging into the skin where the T-shirt was hiked up.
“Huh,” Perrone murmured.
Clare Parker, one of the EMTs who had been standing patiently to one side, stepped forward and added his leverage so that Perrone could free his hands.
“Linda,” Perrone said, “Get me a picture of this, will you? A still, not video.” He crouched, head close to the earth. When Linda joined him, he pointed with the eraser end of a pencil. “I want this area right here. It looks like the rock caught him on the back when he fell.” Collins’ face was pale, but he and Parker held the body in place as Linda Real fussed with her light meter.
“When was the last moisture out here?” Perrone asked.
“Three weeks, at least.”
He pushed his glasses back up his long, slender nose and turned his attention again to the wrecked face. “The ravens and a coyote or two could account for most of the soft tissue damage to the face and neck in just a day or two. But that’s after the body is ripe enough to attract their attention. With the condition of the rest of the body, my guess is that he hasn’t been here too long. I’m not talking months. Two weeks, three maybe. If a vehicle left tracks, they’d still be here.” He drew a pair of surgical gloves from his pocket and snapped them on. Collins looked eastward, his face paling a shade or two, as the physician gently probed around what was left of the victim’s lower face.
“His jaw’s been pulverized,” Perrone said. “I’m guessing somebody really pounded on him. Several really hard, sharp blows.” He held up a splinter of white. “This is part of a healthy tooth, Estelle. He’s been hit so hard that his teeth and jaw bones are just splinters. Nothing much on the ground, though, except blood. So he was lying pretty still when they worked him over.”
He gestured with his right hand. “Let him go on over.” Collins let out a sigh of relief as he released his hold on the corpse and stood up. “Now you need to check his pockets,” Perrone added.
The search didn’t take long.
“No wallet, no money, no nothing,” the deputy said. “Not even an inspection label.” He looked up, shaking his head. “Black hair, though. Small stature. I’ll bet he’s Mexican. He got himself crosswise with somebody.”
Alan Perrone looked up at Collins and grinned. “Black hair and small stature sure narrows it down, doesn’t it?”
“Well, it’s just most likely, is all,” the deputy said. “Out here, I mean. The border’s just a few miles south of here.” He stood up, hands on his hips, and turned his attention ninety degrees to the west. “The MacInernys’ is closest, though,” he said. When he noticed that the undersheriff was looking at him with interest, he added, “I mean, that’s a place to start, wouldn’t it be? The closest, most obvious place?”
“Yes, it is,” Estelle agreed. “While Jackie finishes up here, I’d like you to go have a chat with them. They should be home on a Sunday morning. See if they remember anything unusual in the past few weeks. Get back with Jackie as soon as you find out.” Almost as an afterthought, she added, “And Dennis, they don’t need to know the specifics of any of this.”
“You think we ought to tip our hand with them?” Collins asked. “I mean, if they’re involved somehow…”
“That’s unlikely,” Estelle said.
“I mean, it could be someone who works for the MacInernys.”
“Think about that when you’re talking to them,” Estelle said. “Use a light touch, as an old friend of mine likes to say.”
Perrone stood up and stripped off the rubber gloves. “There’s enough blood soaked into the ground or dried on the rocks to be consistent with this kind of injury, but that’s always kind of a puzzle. It’s just hard to tell. Although with this kind of head wound…” He frowned and glanced at Estelle. “Could have happened any number of ways, I suppose.”
“That brings us back to the problem of vehicle tracks,” Deputy Taber said. “Something has to show.” She turned at the waist, scanning the prairie.
“That’s right,” Collins said, a light suddenly dawning. “There aren’t any tracks out here from the gravel pit, are there?”
Estelle Reyes-Guzman glanced at her watch, ignoring Collins’ revelation. “Jackie, I’m going to run home for a few minutes, and then go down to the airport. I’d like to talk to the pilot before she flies off into the sunset.”
“Huh,” Alan Perrone said suddenly, and he reached out toward Estelle as if to hold her in place. “No, forget it,” he said with a shake of his head. “Let me talk to you later, all right? We’ll do a preliminary and see what it turns up.” He nodded at the two EMTs. “You can go ahead and pack him up,” he said. “I’ve seen all I’m going to be able to until we take him apart.”
“I keep thinking that we’re missing something,” Jackie said.
“You are,” Perrone agreed. “A whole lot of somethings. Find the weapon that bashed in his face. That’s a good place to start.” The physician grinned without much humor. “And the one that blew his skull to pieces. And while you’re at it, a current driver’s license would be nice.”
Estelle shouldered her camera bag. “You’ll give me a call?” she said to Jackie, and the deputy nodded.
“I wanted to look around a bit more,” Taber said. “Then I’ll be in.”
“Look for a fist-sized chunk of rock with blood and tooth fragments,” Perrone said holding his hand as if cradling the weapon. “It takes more than one blow to cause that kind of skull damage. You’re talking about repeated blows to the face. Half a dozen or more.” He nodded at Estelle. “I’ll walk back with you.”
“You think there’s a chance he was killed somewhere else and dumped?” Collins asked. “What about the tracks, then?”
Perrone shrugged. “I’m glad all I have to do is tell you what killed him.” He reached out and patted Deputy Collins on the arm. “Have at it.”
Irma Sedillos, known simply as Nana to little Carlos and his five-year-old brother Francisco, had arrived at the Guzmans’ at seven that Sunday morning, ready to cope. It was the third day of the siege. Under normal conditions, the usual frenetic schedule imposed on the household would have been sufficient challenge, with a surgeon father, an undersheriff mother, and an elderly grandmother whose English was fluent on those rare occasions when she chose to stray from her native tongue.
With illness settling like a gloomy blanket on the Guzman clan, Irma set out to brighten the house on Twelfth Street in Posadas, beginning in the kitchen, where she excelled. Irma was not the least concerned that she might catch one of the rampant flu bugs herself. If she thought of the possibility at all, it would be dismissed with a sunny shrug. She saw herself simply as a sixth member of the Guzman clan.
When the family had moved to Minnesota the previous spring, Irma had been encouraged to go along—but hadn’t. For months after the family left Posadas, she had felt that some portion of her insides had been torn away. In early December, just in time for the Christmas holidays, the Guzmans had moved back to New Mexico. Francis and Alan Perrone began plans for a new clinic, and newly-elected Sheriff Robert Torrez named Estelle as undersheriff of the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department. Irma glowed. Things were as they should be. A little illness went with the turf.
“Carlos is messy,” Francisco announced loudly when Estelle returned home shortly before ten that morning. “
Corriendo de las dos puntas.
”
“But he’s asleep now, so be quiet,
niño
,” Irma called from the kitchen.
After being awake most of the night “running from both ends,” as his older brother had been pleased to announce, three-year-old Carlos Guzman had finally fallen into a fitful sleep, sprawled across his bed like a little, fragrant beanbag—a sorry little
sacito
, as Irma Sedillos was fond of saying. Estelle touched his forehead lightly and then rearranged the feather-light blanket to cover the back of the little boy’s neck.
In her own bedroom down the hall, the boy’s favorite companion in conversation, Estelle’s frail, tiny eighty-two-year-old mother, had also spent a long night, racked by aching joints and a dry, painful cough. She too now slept, curled on her side.
Dr. Francis Guzman appeared in the kitchen door, a cup of coffee in hand. He had decided years before that blue hospital scrubs were the ideal Sunday morning lounge-around-the-house garments. He regarded Estelle over the top of the cup as she gently closed her mother’s bedroom door.
“How did it go?” he said.
“Bizarre,” Estelle replied. “Adult male, no ID, no
nada
. Misadventure out in the middle of nowhere.” She shrugged. “
Mamá
seems a little more at ease.”
Francis nodded. “She finally let me give her something to calm things down so she could get some sleep. I told her it was either that or the hospital where none of the nurses would listen to her.” He extended the cup toward her. “Something hot?”
Estelle sighed. “When I come back, maybe. I need to stop out at the airport for a little bit.”
“Someone else can’t do that?”
Estelle reached up and traced two fingers down her husband’s cheek, across the silky hair of his beard. The dark circles under his own eyes were pronounced, the reward for working with the designing architects for the new clinic, his own practice, and the demands of being on the lowest rung of the hospital’s primitive on-call system. “It’ll just be for a few minutes. If
Mamá
is resting, I don’t want to disturb her. I really need to talk to the young lady who first spotted the body. Then I’ll let Jackie take it from there. I’ll be back in half an hour.”
Her eldest son bolted into the kitchen and latched onto his father’s hand.
“I’m going for a hike,” Francisco announced. His father refused to budge away from his comfortable leaning spot against the kitchen doorjamb.
“You’re going to eat some breakfast before you do anything,” Irma said over her shoulder. “Come help me.”
“Big help,” his father said, and thumped Francisco gently on top of the head with a closed fist. “And by the way,” he said, turning back to Estelle, “Bob Torrez called a little while ago from Virginia. I told him that as far as I knew, things were going fine, and that you were out in the boonies, collecting bones. He’d like you to call him later this evening when you get the chance. The number’s by the phone.”
Estelle knew that Sheriff Robert Torrez had been loath to spend two weeks in Virginia at the FBI’s seminar for newly elected county sheriffs. Torrez considered anything east of the Pecos River to be one big housing development full of people with strange accents. His sojourn in Virginia hadn’t coincided with any of that state’s big game seasons, either—a screwup that he contended the Federal Bureau of Investigation could have avoided if they’d used half a brain when putting their seminar calendar together.
Estelle glanced at her watch. “I’ll be back by lunch,” she said. “Irma, do you need anything?”
“No, ma’am,” Irma said. “Did you remember to tell
Padrino
not to come for lunch today?”
Estelle groaned. “No. I didn’t. And that’s all he needs, to be exposed to this crew.” She smiled ruefully at her husband. “Would you give him a call, when you get a minute?”
“Sure.” Dr. Guzman scooped up Francisco, holding him upside down. “We’ll walk you out to the car.” He carried the boy outside, draped over one arm like a sack of potatoes. The wind had stopped, and the high February sun had pushed the temperature above sixty. Despite Irma’s ministrations inside, Estelle welcomed the clean, fresh winter air with a comfortable sigh. She settled behind the wheel and pulled the door of the Expedition closed.
“I could go,” Francisco said. “You could take me to
Padrino
’s.”
“Not today,
hijo
,” she said and kissed him in the middle of the forehead as her husband held him up against the door. She glanced at Francis and held up her hands in surrender. “I know the look,” she said, and grinned at her husband’s scrutiny. “I’m fine. Really. And this will only take a minute.”
“Okay,” he said, sounding skeptical.
“And Alan said he’d probably want to talk to you this afternoon when he’s ready to do the prelim on the body.”
“How come
Padrino
isn’t coming today?” Francisco asked, and Estelle looked down at him.
“When we’re all better, Francisco. He doesn’t want to see a bunch of stinkies.”
“Carlos is a stinky,” he said. “I’m not.”
Dr. Guzman laughed and stepped back with his hands locked under the little boy’s armpits as Estelle pulled the Expedition into reverse. “Hurry back,” he said.
Estelle drove north on County Road 43, then west on the state highway that ran past the airport at the base of Cat Mesa. As she turned into the airport parking lot, she saw the small white-and-blue Cessna parked on the painted doughnut around the fuel pumps. Jim Bergin, the airport manager, was standing on a short aluminum ladder, topping off the left wing fuel tank.
He glanced around when he heard the crunch of tires on gravel. By the time Estelle had left the truck and walked across the tarmac to the pumps, Bergin had tapped the last drops of gasoline from the nozzle, screwed on the cap, and stepped down.
“Hey there,” he said. With a deft pull, he activated the recoil, and fed the hose back onto the spool. His motions were economical, almost graceful. With his leathery, wrinkled face, perpetual careless facial stubble, and ice-blue eyes, Estelle could picture him in a movie about World War I aces, wrapped in leathers and flying a Spad. “Did you find it all right?” He didn’t elaborate what the
it
was.
“Yes,” Estelle replied. “Jackie said that you flew the young lady out there to spot for her.”
“Yep.”
“Thanks for taking the time to do that.”
“You’re entirely welcome. One of my great pleasures in life is watching the county commissioners blanch when they get my bill for flying county charters.” He grinned at Estelle, showing a mouthful of colorful teeth that had seen better days. They both knew that the “blanching commissioners” was wishful thinking. Jim Bergin rarely billed the Sheriff’s Department for anything.
“Have at it,” she said. “Is this her plane?”
Bergin rubbed a smudge from the Cessna’s white propeller spinner. “Yep. She’s inside, talking with Flight Service.” At that moment, the door of the mobile home that served as Bergin’s FBO office and the airport terminal opened. The young woman who stepped out looked as if she’d be more at home on the ski slopes—long blond hair in a single Heidi braid down her back, bulky white Scandinavian sweater with blue reindeer cavorting across the shapely chest, tight black nylon stretch pants, and flashy multicolored jogging shoes—the expensive kind.
With her logbook in one hand and dark glasses in the other, she strode across the apron toward them.
“Terri Keenan,” Bergin said, “This is Undersheriff Estelle Guzman.”
“Hi,” the girl said. Her smile was a tribute to either the right genes or an orthodontist’s skill. She extended her hand, and her grip was brisk. “You’re not exactly what I expected when they said that the undersheriff wanted to talk to me.” Her smile widened and her green eyes flicked over Estelle’s tan pantsuit. “I met Deputy Taber earlier. Are all the officers in your department women?”
“You just happened to hit us on a good day,” Estelle replied.
“Sixty-seven fifty-five,” Bergin said. He took the credit card that Keenan extended to him. “And by the way, you two are welcome to use my office if you need it.”
Estelle shook her head. “The sun feels good.”
“Suit yourself.” He waved the card. “I’ll go write this up.”
Estelle watched him stride toward the office. Terri Keenan opened the passenger-side door of the Cessna and put her logbook on the seat, snugging it down behind a leather camera bag.
“I left Las Cruces this morning at six o’clock,” she said, and slammed the door. She ducked out from under the wing. “I was supposed to fly nonstop to Lordsburg. That was the plan, anyway.” She grimaced.
“How did you happen to catch sight of the body?”
“I…uh…” She glanced toward the FBO’s office, then smiled conspiratorially, moving a step closer to Estelle and dropping her voice. “I probably wasn’t doing what I was supposed to be doing.”
“And what was that?”
The woman rested a well-manicured hand on the engine cowling. “There was this eagle? I saw him soaring just about the same altitude I was flying at? And I thought how neat it would be to take a picture of him. In flight, you know?” She shrugged. “I mean, the air was like silk. How dangerous can it be?”
“That would be spectacular.”
“Well, it didn’t work out. I tried circling around him, you know? Trying to match my speed in a bigger orbit, outside of his and stuff? I closed to about fifty yards once, and zoom! He just turned a feather and shot straight up, way out of range.”
“Wonderful.”
“And basically, that’s what happened. I was turning to head toward Posadas, and I saw the ravens down below. I still had the camera out, and the thought crossed my mind that a flock of them might make a picture too. Then something spooked them, and they all kind of took off and started milling. That’s when I saw the body.”
“How high above the ground were you?”
“About fifteen hundred feet. Maybe a little more or less. When I saw what I thought might be a body, I spiraled down some. Probably lower than I should have been.”
Estelle’s gaze turned to the airplane, a small two-seater that looked like the aircraft version of a tiny economy car. “You’re a student pilot?”
Terri Keenan nodded. “I’m getting ready to take my flight test next week.” She watched as the undersheriff stepped close to the window on the pilot’s side and peered inside.
“It must be something of a challenge to fly and take pictures at the same time.”
“I think it’s easy,” Keenan replied. “My instructor would have a cow, naturally. I don’t see why, really. I mean, it’s easy to
feel
what the airplane is doing and stuff. And my camera only requires one hand.”
Estelle smiled and stepped away from the airplane. “Did you happen to take any photos of the body?”
The young woman hesitated. “Yeah, I guess I did. It was too far away to see any detail, though. It must have been at least a thousand feet. Even with the telephoto, that’s too far. Just a dot, maybe. Basically, it was a waste of film.” She held up her hands, rethinking the framing of the photo. “Some nice shadows, though. Early morning is really neat, you know? The sun’s all at an angle on the grass and stuff.”
“I’d like to see them, Terri. Sometimes, a photo shows something that the eye doesn’t catch.”
“Sure. The only other thing on that roll are a few pictures I took at the Las Cruces airport this morning. The sun wasn’t really up yet, even. There was an old C-Forty-seven there. I think it lives over at Mesilla.” She opened the passenger-side door and lifted the camera out of the bag. “It had been to some big air show out in California. I forget where. One of the engines was blowing smoke when they flew in a few days ago, and they had it all torn apart. Beautiful old thing.”
She started to rewind the film but stopped, fingers poised on the crank. “Do you want me to have them developed and send them to you, or…”
“If we could just have the roll, that would be fine,” Estelle said. “I’ll make sure you get the negatives of anything we don’t use. We really appreciate it.” Terri nodded and rewound the film. She popped the canister out of the camera and handed it to Estelle.
“I hope it helps,” she said.
“We’ll take all the help we can get,” Estelle said. “When you flew over that spot, did you happen to notice anything else?”
“Like what?”
“Any sign of human activity. Tracks, vehicles—anything at all?”
The young woman shook her head. “Nothing like that. Just a lot of open desert. But then again, I wasn’t really looking, you know? The eagle got me all excited, and that’s where my mind was.” She grinned. “He was quite a sight.”
