Prolonged Exposure (5 page)

Chapter 8

The sunshine that morning had been a false promise, a tantalizing little blast of morning light squeezed through a thin rent in the clouds just above the horizon. The rest of the sky was dull lead, with the bottoms of the clouds torn and fragmented by winds aloft. It was going to be a cold, miserable day, the kind that duck hunters love, where the targets show up nice and black against the uniform background of the sky, with no sunshine in the shooters’ eyes.

We took my Blazer so that Estelle could use a child’s seat for Francis. Camille cheerfully sat in back with the kid, no doubt thankful that she didn’t have to stare out through a cop car’s backseat security grill.

Radio traffic was intense by Posadas County standards, and dispatcher Gayle Sedillos was handling the various agencies effortlessly. Search and Rescue operations were generally a mess anyway, since no one except the National Guard got enough practice, and everyone wanted to be lead dog. In this particular SAR episode, Sheriff Martin Holman was the commander—his first stab at that kind of interagency organization.

Just before the landfill north of town, Estelle turned west on State Highway 78. A mile farther and the chain-link fence along the airport property grew out of the red sandstone. Enough junk plastered itself to the fencing that it could be mistaken for the landfill.

A Huey chopper in sober New Mexico National Guard colors waited at the end of the runway. The Huey was probably older than the kid who was flying it, but the young pilot was having a good time despite the seriousness of his mission. He held the aging helicopter in a hover a foot off the ground, rock-steady, its wide blades thumping the air so hard, it shook the Blazer.

A second Huey whumped out from the apron in front of one of the hangars, nose slightly down as it followed the taxiway toward its waiting buddy.

“The heavy guns,” I said, pointing. Just in front of the hangar, a third chopper crouched, its blades just beginning to spool into motion. A couple of generations separated it from the two fat old Hueys. I didn’t recognize the model, but it had enough gear hanging off and poking out to make it as menacing as anything out of Hollywood.

“Lookit,” a small voice said, and I turned, to see young Francis straining against his belts, eyes huge as he stared at the show of airpower. I glanced over at Estelle and wondered if she was thinking the same thing. If I were three years old, lost and scared, and that thing arrived over the trees, blowing down a rain of dead leaves, sticks, nuts, even squirrels, I sure as hell would dig a hole and stick my head in, hoping that such a nasty monster would go away.

With the airport safely tucked behind us, we had a thousand yards of peace and quiet. And then Estelle said, “Here comes Robert.” She was looking in the rearview mirror, and even as I twisted in my seat, one of the Posadas County patrol cars shot past us so fast, I could feel its wake.

I recognized the hulk of Sgt. Robert Torrez’s shoulders, and our radio barked twice as he keyed the mike.

“Three oh eight,” the small voice behind me said soberly.

“How do you know that?” Camille asked. She was sitting skewed sideways, her hand resting lightly on the kid’s left shoulder. I wondered the same thing. The three-inch squad car numbers were displayed high on the back fenders. If Torrez had been parked and I’d had a pair of binoculars, I could have read them, too.

“’Cause,” Francis said. “
Ese es quien es
.”

“In English,
hijo
,” Estelle said, but in English or Spanish, that was all the kid wanted to say on the subject. “He knows the car numbers of all the deputies,” Estelle added. “Valuable information every three-year-old needs to know.”

In another two miles, we turned north on Forest Road 26, a road that was wide, smooth crushed stone for the first hundred yards and then narrowed to ruts, rocks, and dust for its climb up into Oria National Forest.

There wasn’t much forest in the Oria. Why the U.S. Forest Service wanted the acreage, I had never figured out. A sparse fringe of trees softened the jagged prow of Cat Mesa north of Posadas, mostly junipers and slow-growing piñons. There wasn’t a tree worth either managing or cutting for anything other than firewood within a hundred miles.

I didn’t know any rancher foolish enough to want that country for his livestock, although once in a while cattle did wander up into the jagged escarpments that locals called “the Pipes.”

With a commanding view of prairie, mesas, and dry riverbeds all the way south to Mexico, the rim of Cat Mesa was a favorite camping spot, despite the twenty miles of kidney abuse it took to get there. We took our share of that abuse as the road snaked up the face of the mesa, then turned sharply west, cutting through a meadow with several abandoned water-catchment structures. As we started to turn toward the edge of the mesa, we heard helicopters in the distance, and our radio came to life.

“Three ten, three oh eight.”

I reached forward with a grunt and pulled the mike off the dashboard clip. “Three ten.”

“ETA, three ten?”

I glanced at my watch. “About four minutes.”

“Three oh one requests that you meet him at the cattle guard.”

I acknowledged, and almost as soon as I slid the mike back in the clip, I caught a glimpse of white through the trees. Sheriff Holman was parked just off the road, next to the fence. Estelle idled the Blazer to a halt without pulling off the road, just over the steel rails of the cattle guard.

Holman stepped out of the county unit and leaned on my door. “Brought the whole family, eh?” he said, and nodded at Camille. “He’s got you running around already?”

My daughter shrugged good-naturedly and remained silent. He looked at Francis and then at Estelle. “I kinda wondered what was up when Torrez said you were bringing your son out here.”

Estelle nodded, but she didn’t offer an explanation. Holman raised an eyebrow. “Nasty weather and a nasty place,” he said, and I half-expected him to add, with an official rap of his class ring on the door, “Keep the kid in the car.”

If the good sheriff had spent the early hours of the morning in the nasty weather combing every cranny of the nasty place, he hadn’t collected any scuff marks. Holman was dressed in his mail-order outdoorsman’s clothes, with neat waffle-soled boots, expensive chino trousers, and a down vest over a conservative wool shirt.

“Any news?” I asked.

“Nah.” Holman wrinkled his face in disgust and pushed the brim of his Stetson up off the bridge of his nose. “The Guard has a high-tech unit in this morning that’s shooting with infrared. They claim that if there’s anything living on the hill, they’ll find it. Or anything that hasn’t been dead more than a day or so.”

“Really. It would have been nice if they’d brought that up the first day.”

Holman glanced at me, skeptical. “I guess we have to get desperate first. And maybe the thing works like they say it does. One of the troopers was telling me that they can trace anything that’s been dead as much as a week, but I don’t believe that.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Technology is amazing. But I’d rather find him alive on the first day than be impressed that we could find him dead a week later.”

“It’s not for lack of trying, Bill.” Holman waved a hand in the general direction of the mesa edge. “Bernie Tafoya has his dogs up there, but they haven’t found anything. In fact, we’ve had dogs since day one, and not a trace.”

“How many troops are searching the area?”

“About two hundred, give or take. All the vehicles are parked just down the road a little bit, off in one of the pastures.” He leaned down and looked across at Estelle. “We’ve been pretty successful at keeping people out of the original campsite. It’s cordoned off, and I’ve got somebody from the auxiliary there all the time.”

“What about the youngster’s family?” Estelle asked.

“That’s what I wanted to talk with you about, off the air,” Holman said, and I nodded with satisfaction. During his first years as sheriff, he was so enamored with the damn radio that he forgot that half of the county was listening at any given time. Now he’d swung the other way, so tongue-tied that he preferred to relay messages in person whenever he got the chance.

“Both the mother and her boyfriend are up at the site. The mother—”

“That’s Tiffany Cole?” I asked.

Holman nodded. “And her boyfriend is a guy named Andy Browers. I don’t know him, but Torrez says he works for the electric company. And I gotta tell you, Ms. Cole is a basketcase. I don’t think she’s gotten any sleep in the last forty-eight hours. One of the nurses who works with Search and Rescue is trying to keep her quiet, so maybe she’ll drift off for a while.”

“And the boyfriend?”

“He’s about to drop himself, but he wants to be out there, looking under every rock. I put Deputy Pasquale with him. That should keep him busy.”

“What about the boy’s real father? Have we heard from him?”

Holman shook his head. “We know the father’s name is Paul Cole. He and the mother have been divorced for almost three years—since shortly after the child was born.”

“And where is he?”

“He’s a coach up in the northern part of the state somewhere. Bernalillo, I think. Or maybe southern Colorado. I’m not sure.” He ducked his head and looked across the truck at Estelle. “You checked him out, didn’t you?”

Estelle nodded. “He coaches in Bernalillo.”

“Have you talked with him?” I asked.

“No, I haven’t,” Holman said. “You think we should?”

I shrugged. “Depends on what happens in the next day or so, I guess. Someone should have called him in any case.”

“I guess I assumed Tiffany Cole would take care of that,” Holman said.

“She might,” I said. “When she can think straight.”

“Well, anyway, Sergeant Torrez said you were headed up this way, and that he thought you had Francisco with you.” He nodded toward the sober-faced Francis. Holman’s accent made the little boy’s name sound like someone from Cleveland running the California city’s name through his nose. “I wanted to intercept you before you wheeled in. If mama catches sight of him, she’s going to go ballistic.”

“Then do us a favor,” Estelle said. “Take Mrs. Cole down to the SAR headquarters and get her involved looking at maps or something. Or sleeping. We’ll be at the campsite for about fifteen minutes.”

“Doing what?” Holman frowned.

“I’m not quite sure yet,” Estelle replied.

“Not a return of
Tom Sawyer
, I hope,” the sheriff said, and when he saw the puzzled look on my face, he added, “Remember the missing marble? Wasn’t that what it was? A marble? A cat’s-eye?”

I looked askance at Holman, who pushed himself away from the Blazer’s door and straightened up. “See, now you should read some of the classics, Bill. Tom Sawyer and his buddies lose a marble, and Tom’s heard this old wives’ tale about how they should throw another one after it, saying, ‘Brother, go find your brother.’ The idea is that the second one will land next to the first, and you’ll find ’em both.”

“Did it work in the book?” I asked.

“I don’t remember,” Holman said.

“It took three tries,” Camille said quietly from the back.

“We’re not sending Francis out to look for another three-year-old, Sheriff,” I said, and he nodded. He still glanced at Estelle again, ever hopeful that she’d tell him what was on her mind.

Chapter 9

Yellow marker tape was grotesquely attractive mingled with the deep browns and greens of evergreen trees, with the plastic snarled in the mistletoe-stunted limb wood and looping from trunk to trunk.

The camper had long since been moved, but one of the deputies had strung the plastic tape so that the area where their truck had been parked was included within the boundaries. If the auxiliary officer Holman had mentioned was on duty, he was invisible.

Estelle stopped the Blazer on the two-track road and leaned forward on the steering wheel, hands clasped together, frowning out through the windshield. If we didn’t turn and look out the rear window, where we could catch glimpses of half an acre of parked vehicles two hundred yards down the road, we could have imagined that we were alone on the mesa.

“What are you thinking?”

She grimaced. “Beautiful spot, isn’t it?”

“No,” I said. The ground was strewn with trash, from yellow plastic oil jugs to the ubiquitous beer cans to part of an old sofa that was nestled between two piñons. Several scrap pieces of lumber had been nailed between two other trees close by, forming a crude shelf. I could picture myself trying to shave while standing in front of that shelf on an icy morning, dipping my frosted razor into a blue enamel pan water was beginning to sport a frozen skim on the soapy surface. “I haven’t seen too many hunting camps that were things of beauty.”

Estelle climbed out and walked around to my side to unleash the kid from the backseat. I grunted my way out and leaned against the Blazer.

“Smells good, though,” I said. And it did. The juniper was rich, especially where the truck had brushed against the limbs. Through the trees, I could hear dogs and voices where the searchers combed the Pipes just to the north. Farther away, a dull thudding marked where one of the Huey helicopters worked the edge of the mesa.

“Do you need your jacket, Dad?” Camille asked.

I don’t know why that irritated me, but it did. She sounded like she was taking care of some old man who was convalescing and fragile, sure to come down with a fatal something if an errant breeze tickled him the wrong way. That was unfair, of course, since she’d been pretty good so far—a quiet traveling companion and not too pushy about my habits.

She held out the jacket, and I shook my head.

“This is where they were camped,” Estelle said. She had unbuckled the kid, and they stood hand in hand, Francis looking tiny and helpless framed by those ancient gnarled trees. Estelle walked forward a few steps and knelt by the ring of campfire stones. “Just far enough in from the rim that they had some protection from the wind.”

I walked up and stood beside Francis. He was exactly the right height for me to rest my hand on the top of his head without bending down. When I did that, he shifted his weight so that he leaned against my leg, and I grinned.

Francis was as brave a three-year-old as I’d ever known, including four of my own at various times in the distant past. And his first reaction to this spot was to snuggle close. Whether or not Estelle had other reasons for bringing the youngster along, his behavior was certainly enough to feed her intuitions.

I took a deep breath and went down on one knee, the kid between me and Estelle. I heard a small click behind me and turned my head, to see Camille winding her camera.

“Oh, that’s nice,” I said, and she made a face.

“Tiffany Cole said that this is just about where they were sitting,” Estelle said. She stretched out an arm. “The truck was over on that side, between the fire and the two-track. That means that little Cody was playing over by those trees.” She stood up, keeping Francis’s hand in hers. “The truck tracks are clearly visible.” She walked slowly away from the fire circle, her son in tow.

After ten yards, she stopped and looked back at me. “This is a nice soft spot, under this grove of junipers,” she said.

“You said that the youngster was digging? Digging with a stick was how you put it.”

“Right. That’s what his mother said. Just on the other side of the truck. And there are plenty of marks around here, even after all the adult feet stamped things flat.” She swiveled at the waist, gazing off into the trees. Francis leaned against her, still tightly clutching her hand. “Come here, sir,” Estelle said, and beckoned me.

I trudged over and she indicated the ground under the nearest piñon, soft and inviting with the thick scatter of needles. It
looked
soft and inviting anyway. Before I had a chance to remind her that those cussed things could be as sharp as carpet tacks and as sticky as old gum on a hot sidewalk, she sat down, cross-legged, and patted the ground. “If I get down there, I’m going to need a crane to pick me back up,” I said.

“It’s a good place to rest,” Estelle said. I glanced back at the Blazer. Camille was rummaging in her voluminous handbag, no doubt for more film. I took the plunge before she could record the episode on film.

Estelle encircled her son at the waist, hugging him close. As she talked to me, her breath whispered right beside the child’s ear.

“Suppose he’s playing right here. This is the only spot that makes sense, and this is where his mother remembers him being.” She lifted one of Francis’s arms as if he were a rag doll and pointed with it off to the left, past the Blazer. The youngster giggled and squirmed closer. “That’s the direction of the fire.” She swung Francis’s arm and pointed off into the woods. “In the dark, it would be just about impossible to walk in that direction.”

I ducked my head and looked past them at the dense limb wood. Both piñon and juniper were the kind of evergreens that went for the tender parts of the body, with sharp prongs, wild shapes, and lots of dead limb wood to cut, grab, and scrape.

“He wouldn’t have gone far, that’s for sure.”

Estelle nodded, hugging Francis. “That’s for sure.” She lifted the kid’s arm once more, pointing in the direction we’d come in the Blazer.

“Now, that way, it’s easy walking,” she said, bending her head close to her son’s. “Look way down the road,
hijo
. Do you see where we turned the corner by those trees? See where the fence comes in and then crosses the road?” Francis nodded. The fence was no more than thirty yards away.

Estelle pushed her jacket cuff back and held up her watch. “Show
padrino
how fast you can run down to the fence and back.”

Francis straightened up and turned to look at me, his dark eyes big and round, as if I’d made the strange request, or at least as if it was my fault. “Better him than me,” I muttered, and Francis heard me.

He held out a tiny hand, as if his thirty-five pounds could hoist my two hundred-plus to my feet. I grinned, seeing the same gesture mirrored that his mother had used with him earlier.

“You go,” I said. “You’ll be there and back before I even get up.” He didn’t buy that one. I turned my head to see what Camille was doing. She was reloading the camera, forehead furrowed in concentration. “Camille, take a picture of Francis.”

That was a miscalculation. Showing off his track-and-field skills wasn’t on the youngster’s agenda, especially in front of a camera. He said something in Spanish and collapsed against his mother’s knees, head down behind, out of sight. Estelle rubbed his back. I found it hard to believe that this was the same perpetual-motion machine whose standard speed setting at home was set at “Cyclone.”

“I don’t think so, sir.” She craned her neck, looking up at the canopy of contorted branches. “Especially in the dark. I can’t imagine him straying
away
from the campfire, especially if there was something going on, like music. Fire attracts. Children can’t ignore it. I’m sure you’ve seen the looks on kids’ faces when they’re staring into a bonfire. Every spark is a fascination.”

Francis pushed himself up and leaned against her knees. He regarded me soberly; then I saw his eyes shift. He giggled and ducked his head a fraction of a second before I heard the click of Camille’s camera.

“Estelle’s right, Dad,” she said.

“I’m not arguing,” I said. “It’s just that we don’t know everything that went on that night. For instance, if the fire had been burning for a couple of hours, the youngster might have just gotten bored and wandered off.”

“At that time of day? Wandered into the dark? I don’t think so. He’d have just gone to sleep,” Camille said.

“Maybe.” I turned and looked at Estelle. “What are you thinking?”

She frowned. “The easiest thing that could have happened is that someone picked him up.”

“How is that easy? It would be impossible not to hear another vehicle.”

“Unless they parked down out of the trees, maybe even down by the cattle guard where Sheriff Holman was.”

“All right, suppose they did that,” I said. “They sneak through the trees, or up the two-track, trip over the Cole youngster in the dark—he’s playing fifteen feet from his mom. He’s not going to utter a word?”

“Sneak?” Camille said. She stood in front of us, camera in one hand, other hand on her hip. She surveyed the stunted, gnarled caricatures of trees—little trolls compared with the towering hickories, oaks, maples, fir, and spruce of Michigan. “Cloudy as it’s been, it would have been black as pitch up here at night. And the moon’s just past quarter now anyway, even if the clouds did break. How is anyone going to sneak?”

“It’s not hard.” I looked at Estelle. Both she and I had spent more than our share of time picking our way one cautious step after another over country far rougher than this. “They could even use a light here. With the family sitting by a fire, with their backs to the camper, and the intruder’s approach behind the vehicle, they wouldn’t notice a flashlight anyway, especially if the beam was kept low.”

“I don’t think so, Dad. Someone coming to take the child just doesn’t make sense. In the first place, there’s a larger question, even if you allow that someone wanted the child badly enough to risk kidnapping. How did they know the family was camping here?”

I shrugged. “Don’t know, don’t know, don’t know.”

Camille crouched down beside me, balancing herself with one hand on my shoulder. “I think it’s something simple.”

“Like what?”

She stood up and pointed. “I think he’s somewhere close. Where’s the edge? The mesa edge?”

“About fifty yards straight ahead,” I said. “Or even less.”

“I’d be willing to bet that he’s somewhere within a hundred-yard radius of this campsite.”

I rolled to my hands and knees, then pushed myself to my feet. Francis grabbed me around my left knee and I damn near lost my balance.

“Hijo…”
his mother said, holding out a hand.

“He’s all right,” I said, and clamped my left hand on his head, using him like a small squirming cane.

“They’ve combed every square foot of the mesa face, Camille,” Estelle said. “Dozens of times.”

“What was the child wearing?”

“His mother says he was dressed in jeans, T-shirt, and a bright blue down jacket. And sneakers.”

Camille frowned, gazing off through the trees. “I admit, it’s hard to see how they could miss a bright blue coat.”

“Let’s walk out to the edge,” Estelle said, and I glanced down with more than a little apprehension at Francis.

“You stay close,” I said, and he grabbed my hand.

Matching our pace to the boy’s, we wound our way through the trees. That pace was just dandy with me. The air changed as we approached the rim, and I could hear the sweep of wind and, in the distance, the rhythmic thumping of a helicopter.

The view was extraordinary. The overcast was ragged and multilayered, with small rainsqualls breaking loose from the higher clouds and pummeling the prairie to the south. I could see the steep saddle of the San Cristobal Mountains, and the pass where State Highway 56 snaked through the mountains and then shot down to the tiny border village of Regal.

“Whoa,” I said, and pulled Francis to a halt. Directly in front of us was a jumble of sandstone rimrocks, each smooth as an elephant’s back, rounded and forming the cap of the mesa. Over the centuries, great chunks had broken loose and tumbled down, forming a jagged slope where only a few lucky junipers managed to find something to dig their roots into.

I scooped up the youngster, grunting at the unexpected weight. He hooked an arm around my neck, and we stood quietly, looking out at the valley below.

“Would you like to climb down those rocks?” I asked as I turned and looked off to the west.

“You go, too,” Francis said, and I chuckled.

“Not a chance, kid,” I said.

Estelle and Camille stood altogether too close to the edge, with that sure balance enjoyed by the young. Estelle knelt down and pointed. “The first thing they did was grid this whole area.” She held her hands to form a box. “That way, they were certain that they hand-searched every square meter. There were more than two hundred searchers on this rimrock, all day yesterday, and most of the night.”

Camille climbed down into a small crevice and stood with her hands on the broad flank of two enormous boulders.

“Slow work, I can imagine,” she said. She turned and looked at me and Francis. “I have to agree with Estelle, Dad. I don’t see how a three-year-old could even climb down here. And if he fell, he’d either holler out or they’d find him when they combed the place.” She scrambled back up. “We used to party up here when I was in high school.”

“Here and the lake,” Estelle said. “The two favored spots.”

In the distance, I could hear one of the choppers, and it sounded like he was working well in from the treacherous rim.

“Not favored by three-year-olds,” I said, and I was about to add something else when we heard a loud dull thud from the northwest. It was several seconds before I realized that I was no longer hearing the rhythmic thudding of the helicopter’s blades.

“Oh no,” Estelle said, and she turned away from the edge and dashed back through the woods toward the Blazer.

Camille stricken face told me she’d been listening, too. “Let’s go,” I said.

“Let me take Francis,” she said, and neither the boy nor I argued.

By the time we reached the truck, Estelle had the engine going and was talking on the radio.