Prolonged Exposure (21 page)

Estelle reached out and touched a neat, tight pack of empty hangers at the end of the rod.

“Maybe,” I said.

The smaller bedroom, where I would have assumed Cody Cole slept, included a single bed, a chest of drawers, a floor lamp, and a pillow with the New Mexico Zia symbol embroidered on the cover.

The closet contained a winter jacket and a single pair of shoes. The chest of drawers was empty.

“They’ve split,” I said. “It’s as simple as that. They took most of their clothes and left.”

“I don’t understand any of this,” Estelle said. “If I packed in a hurry and took everything I could think of, my house would still look like two hurricanes lived there, in addition to my husband and myself.” She put her hands on her hips and surveyed the small bedroom. “There’s no sign of the child.”

She stepped to the bed and pulled down the bedspread, a neat no-pattern blue. Underneath the spread was another blue blanket, and then white sheets. She bent down and examined the pillow closely, then bent even closer and inhaled deeply.

“Not for a while,” she whispered. “Let’s try the other house.” She glanced up at me. “And then the RV.”

We turned off the lights and made sure both doors were locked, leaving the Cole house a dark, looming shadow.

We could have jogged in less time than it took to climb in the car and drive. I swung into the oncoming lane, easing the county car close to the west curb. No lights were on at 407 North Fifth. I swiveled the spotlight and washed the area in the beam’s harsh white glare.

Andy Browers’s truck with the camper in the back was parked on the concrete driveway, where the boat and trailer had been.

“Where’s the boat?” Estelle whispered.

I stopped the car and switched it off. “Good question. Maybe in the garage.”

“Wait,” Estelle said. “Pull forward just a bit.” I did so and heard her suck in a sharp breath.

“The RV is gone.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. It’s gone.”

I leaned forward, hunched over the steering wheel. “Son of a bitch.”

“Yes,” Estelle said softly. She opened her door.

Halfway across the front lawn, it occurred to me that we might have been smarter to wait for some backup, since I didn’t have a gun or my badge, or even the correct pair of glasses. And, like the two veteran officers that we were, with a combined total of half a century of experience, we hadn’t even bothered to alert Dispatch.

Estelle reached the front of Browers’s truck first and stood in the darkness, listening. I stopped beside her. The place was so quiet that our footfalls on the grass sounded amplified.

She walked around the corner of the garage, turned on her small black flashlight, and bent down to examine the ground where the RV had been parked. “No marks,” she whispered.

“What do you mean?”

“No jack marks. Remember before? It was up on jacks—or at least looked like it was. But if the leveling jacks were actually supporting that thing, they’d be driven into the ground enough to make permanent marks.”

An uneasy tension began to coalesce in my gut. My own flashlight was about as handy as a small baseball bat. I touched her on the arm. “Let me have your gun.” She didn’t argue, just swept her hand under her jacket and pulled out the small automatic. It felt awkward in my hand; I was so used to decades of holding the rounded contours of a revolver. “Go back to the car and get another unit down here,” I said. “And bring the shotgun.”

While Estelle padded back to the car, I slipped along the side of the house to the first window and peered inside. I couldn’t see well enough to make any sort of judgment. I heard the door of 310 close, and I returned to the front steps.

“No lights,” I said, “and with that thing gone, very likely no one here. If I was a gambler, I’d bet that we’re going to find the same thing here as down the street.”

Estelle nodded. “The keys are in the truck,” she said.

Sure enough, a large wad of keys hung from the ignition of the GMC. It took a full minute to find the one that fit the front door’s lock. Finally, it turned with a solid click. I took a deep breath, twisted the key, and applied gentle pressure. With Estelle’s small 9-mm in one hand and the flashlight in the other, I nudged the door ajar with my elbow.

The air inside a confined space accumulates its own bouquet, a mixture that, if it could be analyzed in a laboratory, would astonish by its complexity—the personality of all the woodwork, the smells produced by the electrical system, even the chlorine in the treated water. Hundreds of faint aromas would mix with the more massive odors—a dirty T-shirt left hanging over the back of a chair, a carton of past-date milk, carpet mildew, human sweat.

The air from inside Andy Browers’s house drifted out through the two-inch crack I’d opened and hit the cool, still night air. I recoiled a step and held out a hand to stop Estelle.

She didn’t need the warning. The odors that wafted out were heavy and unmistakable—the smells that human beings create when they die.

Chapter 35

“Sir…” Estelle Reyes-Guzman groaned, and I felt her touch on my right arm, featherlight.

“Stay here,” I whispered. Instead of doing as I asked, she started to move forward, as if to squeeze by me to reach the door. “No,” I said, and blocked her way. “Now do as I say and stay away from the doorway.” Even in a close-quarters whisper, my voice sounded as if it would carry for blocks.

She stopped, holding the shotgun awkwardly in both hands. “Here,” I said, taking the shotgun and handing her the pistol. “Put this away.” When she had done so, I said, “Move back.” When I was satisfied that she wasn’t going to charge ahead of me, I touched the edge of the door with my flashlight and swung it open. What was required was something no more complicated than putting my boot across the threshold and stepping inside. It was just a house.

I could not move. I didn’t know if I was breathing at all, but I could hear Estelle behind me, her exhalations coming in little choppy bursts.

After what must have been a full agonizing minute, I clicked on my flashlight, keeping it off to one side. “If prayer does any good…” I murmured, and stepped inside.

Across and down the street I heard a door slam and I froze in place, listening. Whatever had happened, the neighbors were blissfully ignorant. The houses on either side of Browers’s were vacant, with
FOR SALE
signs in both yards. He could have had a screaming brawl in his living room and no one would have been bothered as long as he kept the front door closed.

And that’s apparently what had happened. The floor of the foyer was vinyl tile, and a blood streak extended from the doorway toward the hall, which turned at right angles and led back to the bedrooms.

I moved a step forward, to a panel of four switches, and turned on the second one. The foyer light came on directly over my head.

Estelle stood in the doorway, looking down at the blood. “It looks like someone dragged a bloody mop across the floor,” she said.

“Stay here,” I repeated, and advanced to the hallway. There was blood on the floor, smeared in wide swathes. In one spot just beyond the access door to the gas furnace, a bloody hand had reached out and hit the wall, streaking a stain upward, as if when the hand made contact, it had been knocked upward.

The bedroom door was closed, and I tried to flatten my girth against the wall as I pinched the knob carefully between two fingers at three and nine o’clock positions and turned it. If the house had been built like a hundred others just like it, the light switch would be at chest level on the right as the door swung open in the opposite direction.

I could see the empty bed, shadowed by the light that flooded down the hallway from the foyer. I turned on my flashlight and saw the blood.

Estelle had followed me and she heard my curse. I heard her quick footsteps then as she advanced down the hallway.

With the tip of my flashlight, I tipped the bedroom light switch up and the place became as cheerful as any bedroom can be that’s a bloody nightmare.

“Let me check the rest of the rooms,” I said, and backed out. The remaining two bedrooms were empty and stainless, and I allowed a sigh of relief to escape. The master bedroom’s bath was empty as well, but the three-quarter bath opposite the first bedroom still had water puddled in the sink and a blood-soaked towel flung in the bathtub.

I returned to the first bedroom. Estelle stood by the bed, frowning.

The pool of blood had saturated the mattress, covering an area nearly two feet across. Two other towels, both saturated, were flung on the other side of the bed.

“Someone was hurt, and dragged in here,” Estelle said. “His bloody hand hit the wall in the hallway.” She reached out with her pen and hooked a corner of the nearest towel, lifting it from the bed. “Someone tried to save him.”

“Or her,” I said. “And then what happened?”

She shook her head. “We need blood comparisons. If this is a match with the blood down in the motel room, then we’ve got our connection.” She bit her lip.

“What?”

“We still don’t know for sure if any of this is related to Francis, sir. We have a child’s sock print that can’t be matched. And that’s all.” She sagged against the wall. “We’re running around in circles, and we don’t know where he is.”

I put my arms around her shoulders and pulled her close. She was shaking. “We’ll find him, sweetheart. Just hang in there.”

She said something so quietly, I couldn’t catch it, and I directed her toward the hall. “You called for some help?” I asked.

“Yes, sir,” she replied, adding, “And we need to go through the camper outside,” as if she was forcing some direction and purpose on herself.

I could hear a siren in the distance, and no sooner had I uttered a curse about them running loud than the siren died. Still, in the quiet night, I could hear the big engine working overtime. The patrol car turned onto Fifth and the driver finally pulled his foot out of it, letting the car coast, almost silent, to the curb in front of 310.

I brushed past Estelle and made my way to the door, reaching the step just as Eddie Mitchell worked his way across the yard, keeping in the shadows. He held his service automatic, and I held up a hand.

“It’s all right, Eddie.” Even after he heard my voice, he didn’t drop the stealth pose, just stayed close to the side of the pickup truck, weapon at the ready.

I stepped down. “Here’s what we need you to do,” I said. “There’s evidence in here that someone was badly injured, brought here for treatment, and then taken somewhere else. We don’t have a clue where. The big RV is gone, so we need an all-points put out for that. It shouldn’t be hard to find. We need someone here, and we need someone to collect some blood samples and run them to the lab.”

“That’s all there is?” Mitchell asked. “Blood?”

“No other signs.” I hesitated as Estelle walked toward the back of the camper. “No sign of the boy yet.”

Deputy Mitchell looked at me thoughtfully. “You’re figuring that Mrs. Cole and Browers have the children?”

“That’s what we’re assuming right now. Somehow, there’s a tie-in to the homicide down at the motel. A blood type will bring us closer. But for right now, if we find Tiffany Cole, Andy Browers, or Paul Cole, we’ll have some answers.”

The door of the camper on the back of Andy Browers’s truck was closed but not latched. As soon as we swung it open, we could see the rich brown of dried blood—on the door, the floor, spread between the two small bunks on each side.

Estelle handed the shotgun to Mitchell and stepped up on the first aluminum step. She swung her flashlight around the interior. “A child’s been here,” she said. “There’re some clothes and a partial bag of chips. Even a couple games and toys.”

“Anything that belongs to Francisco?”

“No.”

“Small child? Like Cody?”

“Yes,” she said, and held up a tiny blue-and-yellow-striped T-shirt. Even in the uneven light, I could see the stain on the lower hem. “And we don’t know who’s hurt,” she added. “We need blood tests on this.” She held the small shirt in her hand.

I knew there was nothing I could say that would make much difference, but I leaned inside the camper and lowered my voice to the faintest of whispers. “Estelle, you never jumped to conclusions before. Don’t start now. Let’s go.”

“You’ve got your radio with you?” I said to Eddie.

“Yes, sir.”

“We’ll be right back.”

Every officer we had was on call was occupied in some fashion. Now we had another avalanche of evidence that deserved careful sifting.

There was no one to do the sifting.

By the time I reached 310, Estelle was on the radio.

“PCS, this is three-ten. Have three-oh-eight and three-oh-seven meet this unit at Four-oh-seven North Fifth Street. Silent approach.”

“Do you know what Torrez and Abeyta are doing right now?” I asked.

“No, sir. I don’t. But I know what they need to be doing. If we find that RV, we find the answers.”

“And you can’t hide something that big,” I said. Even as the words came out of my mouth, I knew they were untrue. With enough head start to carry them out of the initial roadblock area, the RV would blend in with the rest of the snowbird traffic that flowed from one end of the Southwest to the other.

“Why,” Estelle said, a statement rather than a question. “If we can find something that tells us why, then we’ll know which way to turn.”

“Three oh eight, three ten,” I said, and then waited, microphone in hand.

“Three oh eight.” Torrez sounded as if he’d just come off dinner break on a routine night.

“ETA?”

“I’m there.”

As he said that, his county car glided around the intersection of Bustos and Fifth. His headlights were off.

“Three ten, three oh nine is two minutes out.” By the time Torrez’s car had sidled to a stop nose-to-nose with ours, Tony Abeyta’s unmarked Caprice entered Fifth from eastbound Bustos.

“Lights,” Torrez said, and instantly Abeyta’s headlights winked out. The five of us, exactly half of the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department, assembled on the sidewalk in front of Andy Browers’s house.

“We need to establish when the RV was last here,” I said. “As nearly as we can. That gives us some kind of time frame. If we know what kind of head start they had, we know the search-area radius.”

“That vehicle could have gone through any of the roadblocks,” Mitchell said quietly. “They’re looking for someone in company with a three-year-old Mexican child. And they weren’t on the lookout for Baker Echo zero zero one, since it was sitting right here when we put out the bulletin.”

“It’s possible they drove right through,” Estelle said.

“All right, all right,” I snapped. “Let’s assume that there’s a connection with Madrid’s death. That’s too much of a coincidence not to fly. He was killed sometime shortly after six. If Cole and Browers were involved, and drove back here, maybe one of them hurt, then they could have pulled out anytime between six-thirty and ten minutes ago. That’s two hours.”

“And two hours at just sixty miles an hour is a hundred and twenty miles already,” Mitchell said calmly. “That puts them in Mexico, or Texas, or Arizona. And if they’re smart, they’ve dumped that monster for something else.”

“Browers is from Texas,” Estelle said quietly.

“But Roberto Madrid is from Mexico, by way of Arizona,” Mitchell countered.

“Christ,” I said. “All right. Let’s do it this way. Eddie, I want you to handle the blood work. Make sure things stay organized. As soon as you can, I want blood-type matches so we can start piecing this mess together. Take a sample from inside, from the puddle on the bed. Take that child’s T-shirt, the one that Estelle just bagged. We need a preliminary match with the blood from the motel bathroom. Do it anyway you can, but get back to us ASAP.”

“Yes, sir.” He spun on his heel and jogged back to his patrol car for his field kit.

“Tony, I want you to go get Jim Bergin and get an airplane. That’ll give us some speed and distance advantage. You know what we’re looking for, so you fly with him. Take a phone with you so you can stay off the radio.”

“We need to track Madrid,” Torrez said. “He’s the key to this. The sheriff’s been on the phone with Captain Naranjo of the
federales
. What he was able to establish so far is that Madrid parked his own car on the Mexican side of the border, came across, and then rented another vehicle.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” I said. “Under normal circumstances, his insurance may not have covered him in this country. A dozen reasons. A Mexican license plate draws more attention than an Arizona plate does. Maybe he wanted a car that blended in more. What was he driving?”

“Holman didn’t say.”

“Well, push him that way, Robert. He speaks Spanish about as well as I do. We’ve got to know what Madrid’s connections are. See if you can get Captain Naranjo in high gear.”

“That’s a trick,” Torrez said.

“Perform it,” I snapped. I watched him fold his enormous frame into 308.

“You need to talk with your husband,” I said to Estelle.

“Yes, I do.”

I glanced at my watch. It’d been several lifetimes since we’d dashed out of the Guzman house.