Out of Season (25 page)
“How did they discover that? It’s not a cancer that you’d see, like a big tumor or something, is it?”
“Francis said that the protein levels in the blood test tipped off Alan. They had done a preliminary screening in the lab here at the hospital. And then they did a series of X rays of bone samples, and I suppose that confirmed whatever it is that they look for.”
“Christ.”
“Do you suppose he knew, sir?”
“I don’t think so. Martin was something of a hypochondriac, so if he’d been under medical treatment for cancer, he would have found a way to say something. And with as much time as I’ve spent in the hospital for various wonderful things, I think he would have mentioned it to me. I don’t think he’d keep it to himself.”
“Francis said that the average prognosis is two or three years after diagnosis.”
“I think he would have wanted those years,” I said. “And Janice didn’t know, or she would have said something to us earlier, when we were over at the house.”
“Francis said he was going over there this evening,” Estelle said. “He thinks that Janice ought to know.”
“Of course she should,” I said, and at the same time, felt a selfish wash of relief that someone more talented than I at breaking news of that nature was taking the initiative. I saw a small head appear in the living-room window of the house. A hand lifted and offered a sober wave.
“Are the kids okay?” I asked, returning the greeting. It seemed weeks, not the short day or two it had been, since my two godchildren had used me as a target for their energies.
Estelle nodded. “Francisco asked me if Erma was going to Minnesota with us.”
I grinned. “And what did you say?”
“I said she can if she wants to.”
“How does she get along with your mother?”
“Mama calls her
hija,”
Estelle said.
“And that’s what she calls you too, so I guess it’s settled,” I said. “All you have to do is break the news to Erma.” I shrugged and gestured forward. “Let’s go find Buscema and get some details.”
By the time we arrived at the airport, it was dark, with the wind still fitful out of the west. Buscema’s team had done an amazing job of assembling the wreckage, but it looked like a caricature of its former self. Everything was in generally the right place, give or take a foot. The resulting jumble resembled an airplane as it might appear if six blind ladies had tried to make a patchwork picture quilt.
A folding table had been set up off to one side, and five very weary men sat around it, eating from an enormous tub of fried chicken. The size of the mess told me that others had come and gone, leaving just the bones picked clean behind.
Vince Buscema looked up as Estelle and I came through the door. He waved at us and shouted, “Pull up a chair!”
“We ate, thanks,” I said and stopped at the end of the table. Tom Pasquale had a plate in front of him with a pile of chicken bones ten drumsticks high. The others were working hard to catch up. “What did you find out?”
Buscema gestured toward a second table on the opposite wall, near the front of the shattered fuselage. “Lookee here,” he said and got up, a chicken breast still in hand and a smear of grease on his chin. We followed him over to the table.
Three large schematic drawings of the airplane were taped to the table, one that included both left- and right-side views, another including top and bottom, and the third showing front and rear. Over the top, Buscema had laid a transparent plastic sheet. The black marker lines clearly told the story.
“In order to enter through the outer skin here”—he tapped the circled X on the bottom view of the fuselage just ahead of the wing’s trailing edge—“and then exit here”—he pointed at a second X on the left side of the aircraft, approximately a foot above the left wing root, just behind the vertical line of the pilot’s-side window frame—“and send a fragment into the pilot, we’re talking about a trajectory that would be approximated by this back line.”
“Shooting steeply upward,” I said. “Just a few degrees off of vertical.”
“The old duck shot,” Buscema said grimly. “Almost over the blind.” He tapped the paper again. “The bullet fragmented against one of the frame members and secondarily against a portion of the seat framework.”
“Did you find any other pieces of the bullet?”
“We’re not going to be that lucky.”
“And no evidence of other shots? No other holes anywhere that don’t belong?” He shook his head. “What are the odds of intentionally making a shot like that?”
“Depends on the marksman, of course,” Buscema said. “But if the plane was flying low, it was a pretty big target.”
“But moving fast,” I said.
I sensed someone standing right at my elbow, and I turned to see Bob Torrez. The sergeant smelled of sweat and fried chicken.
“How hard would it be?” I asked him. Torrez spent every hunting season in the field, and I couldn’t recall when he’d ever come close to running out of venison, elk, or antelope steaks. He hunted duck and geese along the Rio Grande bosque and chased quail all over New Mexico and a few prized, secret spots in Arizona.
“I mean, I suppose it doesn’t matter,” I said, “because the shot was, in fact, successfully made. But what are the odds?”
Torrez shrugged. “Who’s got a calculator?” Buscema reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out one of those little things that looks like a case for carrying business cards. He handed it to Torrez. “If we use a hundred and fifty miles an hour for the plane, that means that…” Torrez punched the tiny buttons with the eraser of his pencil “…that it covers two hundred and twenty feet each second, give or take.”
“Give or take,” I said, amused.
“Right,” Torrez said. “A good average to use for a rifle bullet’s velocity is about twenty-seven hundred feet per second.” He punched more keys. “So it takes the bullet a third of a second to fly nine hundred feet, or three hundred yards.”
“And in that third of a second, how far does the plane travel?”
He shrugged. “A third of two hundred and twenty feet. About seventy-three feet.”
“Or about three times the aircraft’s length, if his math is right,” Buscema added.
“And that’s if you’re trying to lead the target for a single shot,” Torrez said. “If someone were firing an automatic weapon, it’d be simpler to just put up a string of bullets and let the plane fly into one or two of them.”
“Huh,” I said, and shoved my hands in my pockets. “I certainly don’t doubt that the math is right. But I think it’s just goddam dumb bad luck.”
“The Boyds shoot a lot,” Torrez said. “Or at least the boy does. They’ve got that little range a few hundred yards off the main county road into their place. I drew Eddie a map so he could take the agents out there without getting lost. I think he’s been there only once or twice before.”
“And they should be back in a few minutes,” I said, looking at my watch. I glanced at Estelle, who was leaning on the table gazing at the aircraft diagrams. “What are you thinking?”
She didn’t look up, but her frown deepened a bit more. “We’ve been trying to come up with a reason for all this,” she mused. “I’m thinking it may be staring us in the face.”
“Meaning what?”
Estelle straightened up, still looking at the schematic. “If we assume that the shot wasn’t just a freak accident, if we assume that it was actually fired at the aircraft with the intent of hitting it, what makes the most sense?”
“That whoever fired the shot knew who was in the airplane, and that whoever was in the plane posed a threat of some kind,” Buscema said. He hooked a chair with his toe and pulled it over, sitting down so he could rest his arms on the back.
“And unless Martin Holman broadcast to the community beforehand that he was going to be making an aerial survey of that area, who could have known it was him?” Estelle continued.
“No one,” I said flatly. “Everything points to its being a sudden whim…an opportunity of the moment.”
“Right. So that means that whoever fired the shot saw this aircraft and made some assumptions.”
“The way it was flying made its intent pretty obvious,” Buscema said. “An organized back-and-forth track, fairly low-level.”
“And the big question is, so what?” I said.
“Seeing something on the ground was the threat,” Estelle said. “It had to be.” She reached out and tapped the schematic. “And it’s an aircraft that locals wouldn’t recognize, unless they’d been down at the airport during the past week. And”—she tapped it again—“look at the registration.”
I took a step closer. “There isn’t anything on the diagram,” I said, but Estelle was already turning away from the table.
“No, but over there—” She pointed at the remains of the Bonanza’s aft fuselage. The large black lettering, torn and bent, was still clear.
“Gulf Victor Mary Alpha,” I said. “With a hyphen between the Gulf and the Victor.”
Estelle nodded. “And even someone without any particular knowledge of airplanes would see a registration number on the rear of an aircraft and assume that it was, in fact, the registration.”
“And so?” I asked.
“Sir, I think that whoever fired the shot saw the one thing that was unique about this aircraft—the large lettering on the fuselage—and made an assumption about who was in the plane. He saw letters, maybe inaccurately, and made an assumption that the aircraft posed a threat to him.”
“It would be easy to think the V was an N—that would make part of the registration NM, or New Mexico,” Buscema said. “And if Detective Guzman is correct, the assumption might have been that the aircraft was an official one. A state plane.”
“And maybe the G represented ‘Game,’” Tom Pasquale said. “And the A for ‘Agency.’”
Despite the edge on everyone’s nerves, I laughed. “Let’s not get carried away,” I said. “Maybe, maybe not. At least it gives us something to think about.”
I dragged the cellular phone out of my pocket and punched the auto-dial button for the sheriff’s office. Ernie Wheeler answered.
“Ernie, have Sergeant Mitchell and the federal agents returned yet?”
“That’s negative, sir.”
I glanced at my watch again and saw that it was pushing seven-thirty. “Have they called in?”
“No, sir. Do you want me to try to raise them? I don’t think the radio repeater carries into some of that area, and Eddie might not have taken the phone from his unit.”
“Do that,” I said and punched off. “They’ve been out there long enough,” I said to Estelle. “If they’ve collected rifle shell casings, the first thing you want to do is a preliminary firing-pin imprint comparison. You can do that with the stereoscope in Francis’ lab. First that, and then extractor marks, just in front of the rim.” Estelle nodded, far more expert with a microscope than I.
“That will give us an idea,” I continued. “In the meantime, Bob, I want you to come with me. We’re going to have a little chat with Mr. Boyd and Mr. Finnegan.” Estelle frowned, but she didn’t say anything. I stepped over to the wreckage and eyed the torn aluminum. “Vince, I want to take this with me,” I said and tried to lift the section of fuselage with the most legible registration. “You got metal shears with you? The skin’s about torn loose anyway. Just this small section. None of the framework behind it.”
“What are you going to do with that?” Buscema asked.
“A little target-recognition contest,” I said.
The instant that Sergeant Robert Torrez switched on the ignition of his unit, the radio barked into life, catching dispatcher Ernie Wheeler in mid-sentence.
“…seven, PCS. Try channel two.”
A few seconds of silence followed, and I reached forward and turned the volume up slightly. By then, we were headed out of the airport parking lot onto State 78.
“Three-oh-seven, PCS. Do you copy?”
Static followed, and I keyed our mike. “PCS, three-ten is ten-eight.”
“Three-ten, PCS, ten-four. Did you copy a transmission from three-oh-seven?”
“Three-ten, negative.”
My telephone chirped and I dug it out of the jumble of papers between the seats. “Gastner.”
“Sir, Mrs. Boyd just called.” Linda Real’s tone was clipped and businesslike, but the words came so rapid-fire that I had a hard time keeping up. “I’ve still got her on line one. Apparently her husband received a telephone call—she doesn’t know from who—and then he left the house on the run. Mrs. Boyd said he was really angry. And he took a gun with him.”
“Linda,” I said, “slow down. Boyd left the house with a weapon after receiving a telephone call? Is that what his wife is saying?”
“That’s right, sir.”
I swore under my breath. “And she didn’t know who called?”
“No, sir.”
“Ask her again.”
I heard mumbling in the background, and about a minute later, Linda came back on the line. “She has no idea. She said that her husband listened and that she heard him cuss a couple of times. And then he said, ‘Thanks a lot,’ and hung up.”
“Is Johnny’s brother home? Edwin?”
“Just a minute, sir.”
I could picture Linda with a telephone against each ear. I watched the highway in front of us as the white lines and the double yellows blended into a high-speed blur.
“Sir, she said Edwin’s not home. He went into town earlier.”
“Probably to the goddam bar,” I muttered. Edwin liked the sauce anyway, and a hurting knee would encourage him even more.
“Yes, sir,” Linda said without a trace of surprise in her voice. “Ernie has been trying to raise Sergeant Mitchell on the radio, but apparently they’re in a dead spot. And he hasn’t responded to the phone. Ernie said for me to contact you while he kept on trying the radio.”
I only half heard Linda’s explanation as my mind raced ahead. Bob Torrez had come to the same conclusion I did, because he accelerated hard. “Linda, tell Mrs. Boyd to stay in the house and to stay off the telephone. We’re going to head up that way. And, Linda?”
“Sir?”
“I don’t want any other traffic getting in our way. Tell Ernie that. Everyone stays put until they hear from me. While you’re there, give me the Finnegans’ phone number. Ernie knows it by heart.”
