Before She Dies (5 page)

Chapter 8

Sunday slipped into Monday morning. Roadblocks on State 56 just north of the border at Regal produced nothing. Throughout most of the morning, deputies and troopers stopped just about everything with wheels in an area whose radius grew with the day. Our best efforts produced nothing. We had no idea what we were looking for.

At ten that morning, I sat morosely at my desk, staring across my small office at the chalkboard in the corner. I’d just left the hospital, where any extra people were just a nuisance. In an effort to clear my weary brain, I’d holed up in my office for a few minutes, trying to think of anything we’d missed.

On the chalkboard I had drawn a representation of the shooting scene. It was simple enough…a child could have drawn it. One section of empty two-lane highway and a patrol car—and two victims. That was all.

We didn’t have a single set of tracks that we could conclusively link to the crime, although Bob Torrez had made a plaster of paris cast of the tracks in the sand in front of the county car. We had another set from across the highway, imprints no more than three feet long before they’d been obliterated by one or more of the sightseers. Torrez had cast those, too.

The killer had left behind no shell casings. From hurried conversations at Posadas General Hospital, we knew that the weapon that had killed Paul Enciños and desperately wounded Linda Real was a shotgun. The odds-on favorite would be a 12 gauge, statistically the most common by a wide margin. The killer’s weapon had sprayed them with number 4 buck, lead pellets roughly .24 caliber in size and 21 to the ounce. A 12-gauge three-inch magnum would blast out 40 of the things at each jerk of the trigger.

We did not know where Paul Enciños had been standing, or even if he was, when the first shot was fired. Our guess was that Linda Real never moved from her seat during the incident…and certainly didn’t move once the killer started pumping shots into the patrol car.

Gayle Sedillos appeared in the doorway. “Sir, Lionel Martinez is on the phone.” I waved a hand in dismissal and Gayle smiled faintly. She was tired, too, but I needed her expertise for a few hours more. “He wants to know when you’re going to open the highway.”

I sighed and reached for the phone. “What’s up, Lionel?”

Martinez was a man of infinite patience. He ran his State Highway Department District with good humor and tact, even when overloaded semis beat his new, expensive pavement to rubble and tourists constantly complained that there were no shaded, plumbed, padded rest areas out in the middle of desolation.

We’d put a cork in one of his highways and left it there.

“Sheriff, I need to know when your department is going to open Fifty-six.”

I took a deep breath, trying to think of something tactful to say. “I don’t know, Lionel.”

“You can’t give me some idea?”

“Not yet.”

“We’ve got a flock of angry snowbirds who aren’t takin’ kindly to using Herb Torrance’s road to go around you folks.” I could imagine the gigantic, waddling RVs trying to negotiate the narrow, dusty, rutted county road that would take motorists around our roadblock.

“They’re going to have to stay angry, Lionel. Tell you what. Don’t take any shit from anybody. If they want to bark at someone, send ’em to see me.”

Lionel chuckled and then his voice grew serious. “Is there anything else we can do for you?”

“I wish there were.”

“No progress yet?”

“No.”

“Is the young lady going to make it?”

“I don’t know. She was in surgery all night. Last word I had is that she’s still out.”

“I never would have thought something like this would happen here, sheriff.”

“Yeah…well,” I started to say, then stopped. I let it slide.

“You know, Paul Enciños was family.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Sure. He was second cousin to my wife. You know Rosie Salazar?”

“Yes.”

“Rosie’s sister Celsa was Paul’s mother. She died here not so long ago.”

I wasn’t in the mood to pursue the complicated lineage. Paul Enciños had lived in Posadas County most of his life and I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn he was related in one way or another to half the county. It would make for a hell of a lynch mob when we caught the son of a bitch who killed him.

“I had forgotten that,” I said, and glanced up as Gayle Sedillos appeared in the doorway again and tapped her ear.

“I’ll keep in touch, Lionel,” I said, and as soon as I started to hang up Gayle said, “Estelle needs you out on Fifty-six. And she asked if you’d bring the county’s cherry picker.”

“The cherry picker?” I looked at Gayle stupidly.

She held out her right hand, palm up, and raised her arm. “You know, the cherry picker they use to fix electric lines and things like that.”

“I know what it is, Gayle. I was just trying to imagine what Estelle would want with it. There’s not much higher than cholla cactus out where she is.”

Gayle shrugged. “That’s what she said.”

“Then that’s what she’ll get.”

Twenty minutes later I was driving west on 56 with the county’s utility truck rumbling along behind me. One of our reserve officers met us at the roadblock, and five hundred yards after that I stopped, the county truck edging up behind me so that its massive front bumper was only inches from the back of 310. The driver, Nelson Petro, sat patiently with both hands locked on the steering wheel while I got out to confer with Estelle.

“I need to show you what we’ve found, sir,” she said. I caught the eagerness in her tone. I looked toward Enciños’s patrol car and saw the webbing of heavy nylon fishing line attached to the car in several places. The nylon lines stretched from the car across the highway, converging to a single spot five feet above the ground, tied to the top of a wooden pole driven into the hard soil of the highway shoulder. A camera tripod rested on the north side of the highway’s center line, and several more nylon lines ran from points inside the car to it.

Ignoring the spiderweb of lines, Estelle walked quickly to where her briefcase perched on the hood of Bob Torrez’s patrol car. Torrez leaned against the car, his arms folded. “First, we got lucky,” she said, and handed me a plastic bag. I looked at the attached evidence tag and then turned the bag so I could see the shell casing inside clearly.

“Twelve gauge,” Sergeant Torrez said quietly. “Winchester-Western, number four buck.” He straightened a little, towering over me by a head. “Recently fired.”

“Has to be it, then,” I said. “Where was it?”

Bob indicated the south side of the highway where the dense rabbitbrush and kochia choked the shoulder. “Twenty-eight inches from the pavement.” I saw the small red flag off to one side of the wooden web-stake.

“Sharp eyes,” I said.

“Luck, sir,” Estelle said. “I almost stepped on it when I was adjusting the camera tripod.”

“Sharp eyes,” Bob Torrez added. He was right, of course. Estelle rarely did anything by accident.

“Any others?”

“No, sir. Just the one,” Estelle said.

“But at least three shots were fired, maybe more.”

“That’s right, sir. But this tells us something we didn’t know. Number one, the killer probably picked up the spent shell casings that he could find. The other two may have landed on the macadam. They would be easy.”

“In the dark, it would have been a tough search to find this one,” I said, and dropped the plastic bag back in Estelle’s briefcase.

“He…or she, maybe…took the time to pick up spent shells, but missed this one, because it was kicked out to the side.”

“And that eliminates any shotgun that ejects its shells straight down, sir,” Torrez said.

“In all likelihood,” Estelle added quickly. “Let me show you.” I followed her across the macadam to the far shoulder. The red surveyor’s flag was nestled in the midst of a thick, healthy rabbitbrush. The wind was cooperating and the spiderweb of fishing lines stretched silently, reflecting the sunlight.

“If the killer had been standing here,” and she pointed at the wooden pole, “off the shoulder of the highway, a shotgun that ejects downward wouldn’t have flung the casing more than seven feet to the right, into the bush,” she said. “And if the killer inadvertently kicked it, it wouldn’t have flown around here, to land nearly at the back side of the bush.”

“Unlikely that it would. So, you’ve got a casing. Maybe we’ll be lucky and be able to lift a readable print. And if you’ve got a side-eject shotgun, that eliminates only about one percent of the shotguns on the market.” I looked at Estelle thoughtfully. “It’s a good start.”

I turned and gazed at the strings. I imagined the muzzle of the shotgun pointed across the road, and my eye followed the shimmering strands of fishing line as they angled across the highway.

“Let me show you what I want to do,” Estelle said, and I followed her back across the road. She stepped close to Enciños’s car and pointed at the roof. “One of the pellets glanced off the roof, right here, just above the center pillar between the front and back doors.”

I saw a four-inch scar—at first only a faint lead mark on the paint and then becoming deeper until it actually showed a trace of bare metal. The end of a piece of nylon line had been carefully taped to the roof of the car so that it lay in the missile track.

“That’s not going to be exact,” Estelle said, “but it gives us a starting point.” She indicated another hole, this one in the top window frame of the back door. “This one is a relatively clean puncture of the first two layers of metal. Enough to establish a probable angle.” She turned and pointed back across the highway, along the stretched lines.

“How many contact points did you establish?” I asked, and then counted the lines for myself. Seven strands ran from the car across the highway.

“The rest either struck Paul or passed behind him, over the back window and trunk of the car,” Bob Torrez said.

“All right. It makes sense. That’s the first shot.” I backed away a step. “You’ve got two others.”

“The killer walked across the highway after firing the first time,” Torrez said. “He got to about here,” and he rested a hand lightly on the camera tripod, “and fired again. One round was fired downward…” He hesitated and glanced at me. “Estelle thinks Paul was on the ground, by the back tire, trying to get up.”

“That accounts for the smeared blood on the fender,” I said.

“Yes. The second shot was fired from close range.” Torrez indicated the pattern path from the tripod and then knelt down, his knee near the second bloodstain that trailed under the car. One of the nylon strands ran from the tripod to a spot actually under the rear rock guard of the patrol car, some fourteen inches behind the tire.

“This is the only pellet mark we found, sir,” Estelle said as Torrez touched the tack that had been pushed into the macadam to hold the fishing line. “From the second pattern.”

“If there are others, they’d be lost in the loose gravel there,” I said. “And the third round went into the car?”

“Yes, sir.” I walked around the other side of the car, following Estelle. “One of the pellets cut across the top of the seat.” She indicated one of the lines that attached just above where the passenger’s left shoulder would have been. “We found a total of nine pellet holes or tracks that show the shot was fired from a point two or three paces from the driver’s side door, through the window.”

“About ten to fifteen feet,” I said. “The pattern wouldn’t have been very big.”

“No, sir. The majority of the blast went behind Linda’s head, shattering the right rear window and tearing the window post. We think she was also hit by some of the pellets that deflected off the driver’s side upper window frame.”

I bent down and squinted. “So the killer was shooting a little high and to the right. Otherwise Linda Real would have taken the full charge right in the face.”

“Yes, sir.”

I straightened up with a grunt. “So the son of a bitch fired once from across the road as Paul stepped from the car. Then he walked across the road and fired once more at Paul, point-blank, while the deputy was on the ground.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And in the dark, with all the confusion of the headlights, maybe even the spotlight, he might not have noticed that Paul had a passenger until he crossed the highway. Then he saw Linda and fired a third time.”

Estelle nodded. “I think that’s the way it went, sir.”

“What did you want the picker for?”

“I’d like photographs from above, sir. The sun is just right to glint off the lines. If he parks the truck over behind the pole, then we can adjust the angle from there.”

Nelson Petro idled the truck forward under Bob Torrez’s directions. He parked in the soft sand along the side of the highway, far enough from the pole that no part of the truck would be in the photographs. He extended the truck’s hydraulic outriggers, then swung the boom out and lowered the bucket. For the first time Estelle hesitated.

“There doesn’t look like there’s room in there for both of us,” she said.

“Yeah, we’ll fit,” Nelson said. “You just tell me what you want.”

They squeezed into the red bucket and then with a whine were lofted into the air. Bob Torrez and I backed away, squinting into the sun and watching the performance. Nelson maneuvered the bucket to a point directly behind the string-post and then, with Estelle bracing the camera, lifted the bucket straight up, gradually increasing the angle of sight along the strings. Finally, hovering fifteen feet up and as many feet behind the post, Estelle found what she was looking for. A few minor adjustments and the bucket hung quietly while she burned film.

She shot photos from several other positions before nodding that she was satisfied.

“Anything else, just holler,” Nelson said a few minutes later, and then the county truck rumbled back toward town.

“You want to meet in my office in a few minutes?” I asked. “Or down at the hospital?”

Estelle looked down at the macadam thoughtfully. “Francis is going to let me know the instant there’s any change in Linda’s condition, sir. I’m going to head over that way. I have a couple of questions to ask the medical examiner, and then I want to follow up with Mr. Peña.”