Privileged to Kill (22 page)

35

“We can’t let an off-balance teenager walk around with a loaded firearm just to make it convenient for us to find out who she wants to kill,” I said, and Officer Tom Pasquale nodded as if he’d thought the same thing, even though seconds before he had suggested that we let Vanessa Davila go about her business, leading us to her intended target.

If Vanessa had looked out the curtained window of her trailer, she would have seen a fair-sized convocation. We waited in the darkness for fifteen minutes while elsewhere in Posadas Judge Lester Hobart scribbled his signature on an appropriate warrant. When the paperwork arrived via Deputy Eddie Mitchell, we kept the performance low-key. No lights, no sirens, nothing to disturb the neighbors from their dinner tables.

Vanessa never looked out, and her mother appeared genuinely surprised when she opened the door. Sergeant Bob Torrez was so tall he nearly had to duck going in, but he didn’t wait for an invitation.

He snicked a set of handcuffs on an already blubbering Vanessa and helped her to the living room sofa. Her mother stood in the kitchen, wringing her hands. If I had been in a worse mood, I would have suggested snapping a set of cuffs on her, too. But it had been Vanessa who had done the burglary, and I fervently hoped that the awful sound of handcuffs would frighten her out of any last resolve.

“Vanessa,” Estelle Reyes-Guzman said, “where’s the gun?”

“I ain’t got no gun,” she said, and it was the first time I had heard her voice—low, husky, and really quite pleasant. She would have made a good announcer for an airline.

“You were observed breaking into a residence on Escondido just a few minutes ago,” Estelle said. She sat on the sofa beside the cuffed Vanessa, and she was just about half Vanessa’s size.

“Just a few minutes ago,” she repeated. “Do you understand that you will be charged for breaking and entering and for aggravated burglary? When you broke into that house and then armed yourself with a stolen weapon, you got yourself in considerable trouble.” Vanessa Davila didn’t react with any great contrition, but I got the impression that Estelle made the speech more for the mother’s benefit.

“I didn’t,” Vanessa said.

“We got you on video,” Tom Pasquale said from the doorway, and I turned, surprised to see him holding one of those small video cameras that’s not much bigger than a sandwich. I tried to keep the surprise off my face.

“Well, I didn’t take nothin’.”

“We saw you remove a handgun from the premises, Vanessa. Now before you get into more trouble, play it smart,” I said.

Vanessa shook her head, still crying.

Estelle took a deep breath. “Mrs. Davila, do you know anything about your daughter’s activities?”

“What?” Mrs. Davila said, and Estelle glanced at me and then heavenward. She stood up.

“All right. Begin with the girl’s room,” Estelle said. Torrez, Mitchell, and Pasquale clumped down the narrow hallway, back into the dark confines of the trailer. Estelle turned back to the women.

“Do you understand that if we find stolen items in a search the penalties are more severe than if you cooperate?” she said, but Vanessa was playing her last cards, figuring that maybe we’d go away.

But we didn’t go away. It took ten minutes before I heard Bob Torrez say, “Okay, here we go.”

He walked out into the living room holding an enormous stuffed kangaroo. In its pouch, a small stuffed joey snuggled up beside a semiautomatic pistol. By this time, Mrs. Davila had made her way over to the couch, where she sat on one of its arms and hugged her daughter.

“Oh, Vanessa,” she said. That about covered it.

Sergeant Torrez slipped his pen into the weapon’s barrel and lifted the gun out of the pouch. Thomas Pasquale was at his elbow, holding a large evidence bag. “The cocking indicator says it’s hot, so handle it gently until we get prints off it,” Torrez said, and Pasquale nodded as if he’d thought of that, too.

By this time, Vanessa had sagged sideways into her mother’s arms and rocked and quaked with sobs. Estelle reached out a hand and put it on top of Vanessa’s, just holding it, a slight contact that told the girl she was there.

“Vanessa,” she said finally, “did you take anything else from your cousin’s house?” It was the first time I’d heard that connection, but it didn’t surprise me. Half of Posadas was related in some fashion to the other half. Vanessa shook her head and for the first time turned and looked squarely at Estelle. I saw the muscles of Estelle’s forearm flex as she squeezed the girl’s hand and said, “You took just the gun?” Vanessa nodded, and Estelle turned to look up at Bob Torrez.

“Would you please uncuff her now?” Estelle had a handcuff key somewhere on her person, but Vanessa didn’t know that. Torrez nodded and bent over, removing the cuffs none too gently. That helped, too. Estelle kept her hand on Vanessa’s.

“Let us talk for a while, Officers,” she said, and Torrez nodded, ushering Tom Pasquale toward the door. Deputy Mitchell followed, the ghost of a smile crinkling around his eyes when he glanced at me as he went by. I closed the door and made my way toward a chair that looked like it would hold me.

“Vanessa,” Estelle said, “we know you’ve been upset since your friend died. Since Maria died.” She brought her other hand over and held Vanessa’s. “And you have every reason to be. But you can’t try to settle things by yourself.”

Vanessa sniffed and Estelle handed her a tissue. “Do you understand what I’m saying?” Vanessa nodded. “Was it Denny Wilton, Vanessa? Was that who you were going to go after?”

Vanessa nodded again, and the relief of knowing at least one small answer swept over me.

“Vanessa, were Ryan House and Denny Wilton with Maria the night she died?” Vanessa had experienced good luck with the nod, and she stuck with it. “Were you with them?” This time she shook her head. “Did you see them together?”

“Yes,” Vanessa said. “I saw them drive in to where Maria stayed.”

“How did you happen to see them?”

Vanessa shrugged. “I was walking over to see if Maria wanted to go downtown for a while.”

“And did they see you?”

“No.” Vanessa heaved a great breath and sat up a little straighter, shrugging off some of her mother’s weight. “I don’t think so.”

“Was it Denny Wilton’s truck that you saw? The dark blue one?”

Vanessa nodded.

“Did you see them again that evening? Thursday night?”

She shook her head.

“When did you hear about Maria?”

Vanessa took another shuddering breath. “Next morning at school.”

“You didn’t try to see her again that night? Thursday night?”

“No.” This time the reply was small and faint, as if Vanessa realized she’d made a mistake by letting her friend go off with the two boys that night.

“Why didn’t you come forward and tell someone, Vanessa?”

The girl shrugged and her lower lip thrust out. “’Cause.”

“Were you afraid?”

Vanessa shook her head. She didn’t look like the type who was afraid of much.

“You left school on Friday, didn’t you? Right after homeroom, when you heard the news? When you saw all the commotion?”

Vanessa nodded.

“Where did you go?”

“Home.”

“She was here all day,” her mother barked helpfully, apparently forgetting our earlier visits.

“Did you go to the football game Friday night?” I asked, and Vanessa leveled expressionless eyes at me and didn’t respond.

“Did you?” Estelle prompted.

“No.”

“Where did you go? You weren’t home most of the day, and certainly not that evening. We stopped by and talked with your mother a couple of times. You didn’t come home at all Friday night.”

“I was sitting up by the highway, watching cars.”

“By the interstate, you mean?” I asked, and she nodded. “All day and most of the night?”

She nodded again. “Until I walked uptown. When I thought everybody would be coming back from the game.”

“Were you trying to decide what to do, Vanessa?” Estelle asked, and on the surface it sounded like a monumentally dumb question…a rarity for Estelle Reyes-Guzman. Why else would a fourteen-year-old sit hidden in a bunch of elm brush, I thought, watching others travel on with their lives? Vanessa nodded, and Estelle patted her hand. “And when did you decide to go after Denny Wilton?”

“After I heard about him killing Ryan.”

“Who gave you the idea that he killed Ryan, Vanessa? It was a truck crash. They had just passed a school bus. The bus driver thinks that Denny fell asleep.”

“He killed him. I know he did.” She said it with simple finality.

“Who told you about the crash, Vanessa?” I asked.

“They were talking about it at Portillo’s.”

“The convenience store, you mean. You went there?”

“For a little while.”

“Why would Denny want to kill Ryan House, Vanessa?” Estelle pressed gently. “Why would he want to do that?”

“’Cause Ryan woulda told on them sometime about Maria. He couldn’t keep quiet very long. And somebody was saying how he’d heard that somebody had killed that old bum that was in town…the one that got arrested when they found Maria.”

The grapevine was a marvel of efficiency if not accuracy, I marveled.

“And you think that Denny Wilton killed Ryan House because he was afraid that Ryan would tell someone about Maria, and about the old bum, is that right?”

Vanessa nodded with absolute certainty.

“But Vanessa, Maria choked to death. She wasn’t killed by anyone. The boys may have panicked and run, but they didn’t kill her. And the old man wasn’t hurt badly. Don’t you think Denny Wilton might have known all that? Is that a reason for him to kill his best friend?”

Vanessa choked back a sob. “He don’t have best friends,” she said, and the venom fairly dripped.

“Do you think he would risk crippling or killing himself, just to get at Ryan? Why would he do that? They were friends.”

“He started hangin’ out with Ryan House this year ’cause Ryan broke up with Julie Hayes. That’s all. And…” She hesitated, as if she was afraid to give away too much. “Even last year, he and Ryan got into a fight right during class. So they weren’t no best friends.”

I heaved a sigh myself, not ready to try analyzing the why of teenage relationships. And from my own experience with my two sons and their friends, I knew that kids could be sworn enemies on Monday and best buds on Tuesday.

“Why do you think Ryan and Denny Wilton wanted to go out with Maria, Vanessa?” Estelle asked.

“’Cause.”

“Because why?”

“Her and Ryan were in Spanish together.”

“That’s all? They shared a class?”

“She had this crush on him. One day her and me were in the hall, and she tried to say something to him. She talked Spanish at him, and Denny Wilton was there and called her ‘the truck girl.’ He was real mean.”

“And yet they all went out together,” I said.

“A bet, maybe,” Estelle said quietly. “That and the fact that Ryan House didn’t have a car. Vanessa, do you know anything else about that night? The night Maria Ibarra died?”

She shook her head.

“And you still think Denny Wilton killed his best friend? You don’t think that the crash was an accident?”

Vanessa nodded. “I know he did.”

“How do you know, Vanessa? He could just as easily have been crippled or killed as well.” Estelle didn’t bother to mention the functioning air bag and seatbelt–shoulder harness.

“’Cause he killed my brother, too. And he didn’t never get caught either.”

36

By the time we had pried the story out of Vanessa—and tried and failed to pry corroboration from her mother—it was after seven that Saturday night.

Estelle argued vehemently against charging the girl. I didn’t think that formal charges would be such a bad idea, but I certainly balked at the idea of jailing an emotional basket case like Vanessa in our crude, outdated lockup, and Judge Hobart balked with me. After a brief preliminary hearing, both the girl’s mother and the old judge agreed that we could transfer Vanessa to the juvenile facility in Las Cruces, where she’d be properly cared for.

With that compromise, I agreed with Estelle. If Vanessa’s story held water, there was no point in pressing any kind of charges for burglary…and Toby Romero didn’t care, as long as he got his gun back and his window fixed. He and his girlfriend came home from a day trip to Albuquerque to find a yellow crime scene ribbon tacked across the window and a deputy parked out front. Deputy Tom Mears said Romero shrugged when he heard the story and said, “Whatever you want to do, I mean, you know.”

It was the part about the girl’s story holding water that bothered both Estelle and me.

Back at the office, we spread out every scrap of paper that we could dig from the files that was remotely related to the death four years before of Rudy Davila, Vanessa’s brother. The event had occurred during a brief period when Estelle Reyes-Guzman had been working for a sheriff’s department in the northern part of the state…a period I preferred to forget.

It was the same summer that Sheriff Martin Holman’s house had burned to the ground, a summer he no doubt would have liked to have forgotten as well.

When the school principal, Glen Archer, had mentioned Vanessa’s brother as being cut from the same cloth as his sister, he had been guilty of understatement if anything.

The file told us that Rudy Davila had been a real piece of artwork. Some of the arrests I remembered clearly. His first arrest had come at age nine, when he’d helped a friend break into a car dealership to steal several expensive tools. He’d been caught, much to his dismay, when a neighbor saw and reported them.

That lesson lasted for almost a year, until he was arrested for assaulting his school-bus driver. The details were sketchy, but the incident apparently involved something about a lunchbox being knocked off a seat. Young Rudy had lost his bus-riding privileges for the remainder of the school year. That wasn’t much of a penalty, since Rudy attended more sporadically than did his younger sister, Vanessa.

The string of petty events continued pretty much unbroken until he was apprehended during a paint-sniffing incident under the interstate overpass…and I tapped the report.

“Maybe that’s why Vanessa likes her troll spot,” I said.

“No doubt,” Estelle replied. “He almost killed himself that time.”

A year later, in October, Rudy Davila took a bottle of pain pills to school—pills taken from his aunt’s medicine cabinet—and during an eighth-grade social studies class downed the whole mess. He popped the pills like candy, so quietly that no one noticed until he fell out of his chair with his eyes rolled back in his head. Posadas General pumped his stomach and sent him home, suggesting at the same time that the school counselor might take a whack at the kid.

Rudy’s middle-school career managed to last another six months, during which time he cut his left wrist once and drank himself into oblivion on numerous occasions. By the spring of his eighth-grade year—the last time school officials saw him—he was a scrawny, vacant-eyed little hoodlum.

At that time, the Davilas were living at 198 North Fifth Street in the back apartment of a three-unit, story-and-a-half rental. Mrs. Davila was still working, although only part-time, at a grocery store down the street. Vanessa was in fourth grade.

I wondered if Vanessa had been an elementary school version of the oversized bully she’d managed to become since. Maybe back then, before the hormones kicked in, she was still playing with clay and cutting out paper chains and hearts and doing all those other things that elementary kids did.

On a hot August evening that year, Rudy Davila was in his gable bedroom of the small upstairs apartment. He had drunk enough cheap bourbon that he thought he felt no pain. Mrs. Davila was home, watching television downstairs in the living room. Vanessa was somewhere, Mrs. Davila had told police, but she wasn’t sure just where. According to the report taken by Posadas Chief Eduardo Martinez, Vanessa was two doors down the street, playing with friends.

A few minutes after nine that night, the report said, Rudy Davila sat down on the edge of his bed, the window open so that he had an unrestricted view of the neighbor’s garage roof. He loaded a semiautomatic .22-caliber rifle with ten rounds. The police report indicated that he might have had trouble managing the process in his inebriated state, since .22-caliber shells were scattered over the bed, some even rolling onto the floor.

Rudy had almost made a hash of the final process, too. He’d managed to shoot himself three times before he could no longer control the gun, and the condition of the room indicated that he’d thrashed around a good deal—enough to attract his mother’s attention away from the television.

He’d locked his bedroom door, though, and by the time his mother and a neighbor had gained access, Rudy Davila had made peace with this world.

Vanessa Davila hadn’t told Chief Eduardo Martinez much. He accepted her account at face value. She had come home when she heard sirens and saw police cars parked in front of her house. She was not overwhelmed with grief to the point that she cared to tell Martinez what she told us four years later…Perhaps at that time, her distrust and fear of her brother were too fresh in her mind.

Chief Martinez had accepted Mrs. Davila’s bewildered account, maybe because no one in the village had ever seriously expected Rudy to make it to his eighteenth birthday anyway. The .22 rifle was his, Mrs. Davila was quoted as saying. She’d signed the affidavit to that effect. Maybe so, but four years later, Vanessa Davila put a different slant on things. The rifle had been given to her brother, Vanessa said, by a friend.

I sat down and rested an elbow on the table, rubbing my forehead. “Have you ever heard of a youngster who gives away something like a .22 rifle? I mean, those things are next to sacred to a kid.” I reached out and nudged the bagged cassette that held Mrs. Davila’s interview. “Let’s hear what her actual words were,” I said.

And after twenty minutes of start and stop, we found the right spot on the tape recording and heard Chief Teddy Martinez ask, “Did the rifle belong to Rudy, ma’am?” His voice was soft and dripping with sympathy.

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Davila said. “I think so. I guess so.”

“Do you remember him buying it?” the chief asked.

“No,” Mrs. Davila said, “but you know, he goes about his own business. He don’t listen to me. So, maybe. I don’t know. Maybe he got it, or traded for it, or something.”

And at that point, Chief Martinez dropped the subject. The “or something” covered all the bases.

I reached over and punched off the tape player. “So we go from a resounding ‘I don’t know’ on the tape to a written, sworn statement that has her saying the gun was Rudy’s. Outstanding.”

“It won’t be hard to trace, sir,” Estelle said. “If Dennis Wilton purchased that rifle, or if it was purchased by someone else and given to him as a gift, then it won’t be hard to trace.”

“What remains is to find out who actually pulled the trigger of the rifle,” I said. “Vanessa claims that she saw the Wilton kid slip out of her brother’s upstairs window shortly after the three shots.” I held up two fingers. “She says that number one, the rifle was Wilton’s. Number two, she says that he was there when the shooting occurred.”

“That’s interesting,” Estelle mused.

“What is?”

She leaned over the table and tapped one of the folders. “There was no reason for Dennis Wilton to be friends with Rudy Davila. In fact, I’m willing to bet a week’s pay that he wasn’t, until his eighth-grade year. And if Dennis Wilton wasn’t in that same history class when Davila tried the pill trick, he would have been near by. He would have heard all the gory details from any number of kids before the morning was out. He latches onto a kid who’s teetering on the very edge. A self-destructive, violent kid who has nothing going for himself. Giving him that little extra push was easy. Wilton might even have pulled the trigger himself, figuring he’d get away with it.”

“You’re talking about a manipulative, scheming monster, Estelle,” I said.

“History is full of them,” she said. “Only I’d call him a psychotic opportunist.”

I grimaced. “I’m no shrink, but I don’t know if I buy it. None of it explains the business with Ryan House.”

“Maybe, maybe not. It might have been easy to strike up a friendship with Ryan House during their senior year. In a small school, there are endless opportunities. Also, remember that House had just broken up with his girlfriend of three years.”

I frowned. “You’re saying that Wilton might have been planning something all along?”

“No, sir. I don’t think so. At first, they might even have liked each other. Who knows? But it’s dirt common for one kid to talk another into doing things that he normally wouldn’t have considered. Maybe the date with Maria Ibarra was a bet, I don’t know. Maybe it was genuine curiosity on their parts. We’re tending to paint Ryan House lily white in all this, but maybe that’s not the way it went down. But when things went wrong, Dennis Wilton reacted in a predictable fashion, from what this evidence tells us.”

“He was afraid Ryan House would start talking, so he killed him.”

“Yes, sir. That’s what I think happened. And I think it was impulsive, when he saw that Ryan wasn’t going to go along.”

I picked up a pencil and toyed with it for a minute. “It would have been thoughtful of Vanessa Davila if she had spoken up earlier about seeing Wilton coming out of her brother’s bedroom window.”

“I suspect she was grateful to him,” Estelle said, and I looked up sharply.

“Grateful?”

“Yes, sir. I suspect that her relationship with her brother was a carbon copy of what she went through with her father before he left home.”

“We don’t know that.”

“No,” Estelle said and took a deep breath. “But I can guess. The signs are there.”

“And the rage this time? She steals a gun and sets out to ravenge a friend? Maria?”

Estelle nodded. “It’ll take a while to put a profile together, but I’ll bet the election that you’ll find the two were inseparable, Maria and Vanessa. For once, Vanessa had a pal whose life was more miserable than her own.”

“Kindred spirits,” I said. “Misery loves company.” I smiled. “And I won’t bet.”

“I’d like to have three pieces of evidence before we make a move, sir.”

“The gun?”

She nodded. “If we can substantiate Vanessa’s story by finding the origin of the rifle that killed her brother, that’s one step. After four years, the rest of that story is just her word against Dennis Wilton’s.”

“And?”

“I want the grille guard from Wilton’s truck. That would tie him to the attempt on Crocker’s life. I think he feels that Crocker might have seen something, anything.”

“And you think Wilton saw Crocker walking along an empty street and took his chance.”

Estelle frowned. “He’s an opportunist, sir. I have no trouble imagining that Ryan House was beginning to panic after the girl’s death Thursday night. Some time Friday afternoon, the Wilton kid sees Crocker walking, but it’s daylight. He can’t do anything. Later, when the two boys are together and maybe trying to decide what to do, maybe talking about Crocker and trying to guess what he saw and what he told police, they see him again, walking along Bustos Avenue.”

“And this time it’s dark,” I said.

“I can imagine what Ryan House’s reaction to the hit-and-run was,” Estelle said. “Maybe it was the last straw as far as he was concerned. Wilton might have thought first about calming him down, so he raided his parents’ medicine cabinet when they went home to take the bent grille guard off. That was logical. And then the next step was to get out of town, and the football game was a perfect cover. Maybe it was on the drive out of Posadas that he put the rest together.”

“And third?”

“I want at least a couple of points match on that thumbprint that I took from the seatbelt buckle. Ron Bucky is going to call the minute he has something.”

I shook my head. “Don’t wait, Estelle.” I stood up. “If you’re right, we don’t want to run any risk. When you talked to Wilton in the hospital last night, was there anything that led you to believe that he might suspect what we know?”

“No, sir. I got the impression that he felt entirely comfortable with his performance.”

“His performance,” I said and grimaced. “And neither he nor his parents think there’s anything unusual about the truck being impounded?”

“I’m sure that they imagine it’s because of the blood tests and litigation, sir.”

“They’re scared stiff, and young Wilton could care less, I’m sure,” I said. “Did Martin Holman talk with them?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then we’re covered. Talking with Martin Holman is enough to give any felon confidence.”

“Sir,” Estelle chided gently, “that’s not true.”

“You don’t sound much like a politician,” I chuckled, but the humor didn’t last. “We want to move fast with this son of a bitch. Based on a deposition from Vanessa, and with the gun’s record, that should be enough for a warrant. And if we get lucky and find the grille guard, that’s another piece.”

“I’m willing to make another bet,” Estelle murmured.

“What’s that?”

“The grille guard is in the Wilton’s garage somewhere.”

“You don’t think he’d be smart enough to get rid of it?”

“Oh, he’s smart enough, sir. But he’s also confident.”

I grunted in disgust. “This kid is eighteen?”

“Yes, sir. His birthday was in September.”

I nodded with satisfaction. “Good. Then the bastard won’t just pull two years in reform school. We can put him away for life.”