Before She Dies (18 page)

“No broken glass?”

“No. And that Suburban had a hell of a burglar alarm screamer on it. The Weatherfords say they made sure it worked, too. The kids had made it holler more than once.”

“And no one other than the trucker heard it?”

“That’s right. So either it didn’t work the one time it should have, or…”

“Or someone had a key.”

“That’s right. Or something sophisticated. Some kind of gadget.”

“Is Mrs. Weatherford there?”

“She’s standing right at my elbow.”

When Donni Weatherford came on the line, she sounded like a good sport whose sportsmanship had been stretched to the limit.

“Sheriff? This is Donni. Can you believe this? I mean, can you believe it?” She spoke as if our acquaintance had been seasoned by years instead of hours. “I mean, I can’t believe it.”

“I’m certainly sorry, Mrs. Weatherford,” I said lamely. I wasn’t about to drive up to downtown Oklahoma to pick up the family and chauffeur them to Davenport, Iowa…and that’s about the only offer that would have done them any good.

“Well, I just thought I should call you, sheriff. I thought maybe you might like to know. You folks were all so kind to us, and then your deputy, the one who was so helpful, was killed later that very night. Have you caught them yet?”

“No.”

“This world is full of wretched people, I’ll tell you that.”

“Yes, ma’am. Are you absolutely certain that the alarm on the Suburban was set properly?”

“Absolutely.”

After assuring Mrs. Weatherford that Sergeant Judge would take care of the family’s immediate needs, and countering another round of thank-you’s, I hung up. In less than a heartbeat, the line two light blossomed and the phone buzzed. With my fingers resting on the receiver, I contemplated not bothering to answer. After another two buzzes, I picked it up.

Herb Torrance’s gravelly voice was loud. “Sheriff? That you?”

“Herb, how you doing?”

“Not so damn good. The wife and me are about worried sick. Listen, I just got a call from Patrick.” My heart skipped a beat. “He went and got himself arrested.”

“Where’s he at?”

“Well, let me read it. He’s…hold it still, Adeline…he’s being held by the Campbell County Sheriff’s Office. Now, that’s in Gillette, Wyoming.”

“What the hell’s he doing up there?”

“Damned if I know, sheriff. He didn’t want to talk over the phone too damn bad. He just wanted me and his ma to know he was all right, and we was to call you.”

“Patrick said to call me?”

“That’s what he said.”

“All right. I’ll get right back to you, Herb. Sit tight.”

Chapter 29

I punched in the number for long distance information, listened to the robot recite the number, and then dialed the Campbell County Sheriff’s Office. The circuits between Posadas and Gillette popped and clicked, and another throaty-voiced robot came on the line to patiently tell me that she was sorry, the number I had dialed was no longer in service.

I doubt that she, or it, really was sorry in the least. Annoyed, I peered more carefully through my bifocals at the number information had given me, and tried again. This time, I was rewarded with a real human, a man who sounded like he was talking between tightly clenched steel dentures.

“Campbell S.O., Whittier.”

I introduced myself and then said, “I understand you may have one of our best and brightest in custody.”

“Who’s that?”

“A young fella named Torrance. Patrick Torrance.”

“Lemme check.” The line went dead and I spent several long minutes pencil shading in the square for February first on my desk calendar. A voice startled me.

“This is Lieutenant Brennen.” The voice was husky and soft. I wouldn’t have placed bets on gender.

“Lieutenant, this is Undersheriff William Gastner of Posadas County, New Mexico. I need to speak with someone about one of your detainees. A Patrick Torrance.”

“What do you need to know, sir?”

“First of all, is he in your custody?”

“Yes, sir.”

“When was he arrested?”

I heard a faint rustle of paper. “Five-thirty-six A.M.”

“That’s today?”

“Yes, sir.”

The lad had wasted no time leaving Posadas County in his dust, and he’d flogged the horses all the way north. “What was the charge?”

“Driving while intoxicated.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, sir.” The voice was about as flappable as the telephone company’s robot.

“Apparently he telephoned his parents?”

“He did make a telephone call. Yes, sir.”

“Let me tell you what we’ve got, lieutenant. We’ve had a homicide down here. One of our deputies. Did you receive the information?”

“Yes, sir. We got the teletype on the homicide earlier. The deputy who arrested Torrance remembered the name of the county and brought it to my attention. I was going to telephone your office this morning. But we had a family dispute an hour or so ago that was settled with a shotgun, so we got kinda busy ourselves.”

“I think it’s the moon, lieutenant. Who the hell knows? What are the chances of talking with the Torrance kid?”

“No problem, sir. Give me your number, and I’ll call you back in about five minutes.” I heard voices in the background, one of them loud and angry. “Make that ten minutes,” the lieutenant said.

“It’s urgent, if that helps.”

“Isn’t it always,” the lieutenant said, and for the first time I could hear some humor in the voice.

While I waited, I dug out the road atlas from the overloaded bookshelf behind my chair. The tiny numbers blurred, and I ended up holding the damn thing about six inches from my nose. The red numbers said Gillette was sixty-nine miles east of Buffalo, Wyoming, on Interstate 90. Buffalo sat squarely on Interstate 25, that north-south express ribbon that connects the major cities on the east flank of the Rockies. I-25 dove all the way south through Las Cruces, east of Posadas.

I flipped pages until I found the mileage chart, its type designed to be read either through a microscope or by a ten-year-old with 20/10 vision. Las Cruces wasn’t listed, but El Paso was, and I followed the column over until I was under the one for Cheyenne, Wyoming. Seven hundred and ninety-two miles. Cruces was 50 miles north of El Paso, so that made it 742. Add 60 coming in from Posadas to the west. That was 802. Cheyenne was still a far stretch from Gillette.

I flipped to the page for Wyoming. “Jesus,” I said, and jotted down the 326 miles the map said it was from Cheyenne to Sheridan. Give or take 50 miles, that figure would apply to Gillette, too, if my eyes could stay focused long enough to add the tiny red numbers. The grand total was 1,128, give or take. At a steady 60 miles an hour, that was almost nineteen hours. Nobody averaged 60 over that kind of distance, no matter what they might tell you. One stop for fuel killed the average, and there were too many radar traps to allow sustained speeds to make up time.

But Patrick Torrance hadn’t let the moss grow. Sometime between twenty and thirty hours before, he’d left Posadas. I glanced at my watch. He’d been arrested at five-thirty. Some eight and a half hours before, his father had mentioned to me that he hadn’t seen his son since the previous day. And fourteen and a half hours before the Campbell County deputy pulled Torrance over, Estelle Reyes-Guzman had spotted Tammy Woodruff’s mangled pickup truck.

Tammy had been wadded up in the crushed cab for God knows how long—perhaps as many as twenty-four hours. I frowned and dropped my pencil on the desk. The time window was plenty wide to accommodate the young man’s panic.

“Shit,” I said aloud. I tossed the atlas back on the bookcase.

Seven minutes later the telephone buzzed.

“Sir, this is Lieutenant Marjory Brennen from Gillette.” Marjory. I tried to form a mental picture, but her personality was perfectly guarded by that soft, neutral voice. “We’re on conference.”

“Patrick?” I asked. I picked up the telephone recorder and pushed in the record buttons.

“Yes, sir. I’m here.” He sounded relieved.

“Patrick, this conversation is being recorded, just for the record. All right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your dad called me a few minutes ago. Are you all right?”

“Yes, sir. I’m fine.”

I didn’t see any point in mincing words. “What are you doing up there, Patrick?”

There was a silence. I pictured Patrick Torrance sitting at an old oak conference table like every sheriff’s department in the world has had at one time or another and staring at the dark, oiled wood in front of him as if the answers might coalesce before his eyes.

“I got scared.”

“I see. Of what?”

“Of what Tammy was doing. Have you talked to her?”

I ignored his question and instead asked, “And what was she doing?” I realized then with both relief and certainty that Patrick didn’t know of the girl’s death.

“I ain’t sure, sheriff. The night the deputy was killed, she stopped at the Broken Spur, all excited like. She came in and she was askin’ me to go along with her.”

“Go along where?”

“She didn’t say. Like I said, she was all excited. Said she had the chance to make more money in one night than I’d ever see in a year.”

“She didn’t say how she was going to make the money?”

“No, but she wanted me to come outside with her, like maybe that might change my mind. She showed me this fancy truck she was drivin’. She said she was deliverin’ it for somebody.”

“Delivering it where?”

“She didn’t say, but she kinda smiled in that way she has, you know. Like maybe I didn’t need to know.”

“What kind of truck was it?”

“Looked like a brand-new Chevy extended cab. Four-wheel drive, the works.” I heard him take a deep breath. “It don’t take a genius to sort out where that truck was headed, sheriff. I figured that’s why she wanted me to go with her, ’cause she knew that me and my brothers go on down to Mexico all the time.”

“She didn’t say where she got the vehicle?”

“No, sir. But she was all excited, like it was some sort of big, important deal. Like she was doin’ me some kind of favor by cuttin’ me in on it.”

“Then what?”

“She got all mad at me, ’cause I wouldn’t go. She said all kinds of things I figured she’d forget later. She’d been drinkin’ kind of heavy, too. I could smell it on her. I just had me a feelin’, is all. I mean, I knew what she was doin’ wasn’t legit. No car dealer operates like that. The truck had to be stole.”

“And then she left?”

“Yeah, she left. In an all-fired hurry, she left. Fishtailed all the way across the parkin’ lot. Bounced out on the highway, and away she went.”

“And you went back inside the saloon?”

“Yes, sir. And it wasn’t too long after that when all the commotion started, with the deputy getting killed and all.”

“Do you remember how long?”

“Maybe five, ten minutes. Fifteen at the most.”

“Patrick, when the detectives talked to you the first time that night, and again on the following Monday morning, why didn’t you tell them all this?”

Again a silence, and I could hear snatches of a conversation on some other circuit, the voices distant and tinny.

“I had a feelin’ that Tammy was involved somehow, sheriff. I mean, she lit out in that truck and all, and just a few minutes later I hear there’s a shooting. There ain’t all that many cars on that road that time of night, sheriff. It’s a hell of a coincidence if she didn’t know anything about it.”

“And so…?”

“And so I tried callin’ her place later that night, and the next day, and I couldn’t get no answer. I was really worried, you know, ’cause if she’d gone and done something, then I hated to see her end up in jail. She’s just harebrained enough not to think things through and get herself in all kinds of trouble. So I didn’t say anything about her and the truck. And then I got scared, ’cause I knew that if I covered for her, that pulled me right into it, same as if I was ridin’ in the jump seat.”

“And so you headed out to Wyoming.”

“No, sir. Not right then. I was gonna drive by her apartment around noon on Monday. Just as I was turnin’ off Bustos Avenue I saw her and some other guy drive by in her truck.”

“In her truck?”

“Yes, sir. I know she saw me, but she didn’t wave or nothin’. They just drove on by.”

“She was driving?”

“No, sir. He was.”

“Did you recognize him?”

“No, sir.”

“Could you identify him if you saw him again?”

“I think so.”

“And then you left?”

The words came in a rush, the way people talk when what they’ve got to say doesn’t make any sense to anyone, including themselves. “Yes, sir. I just got to feelin’ like I was caught up in something, you know? I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t want to say nothin’ about Tammy, ’cause I didn’t know nothin’ for sure. And then I got to thinkin’ that maybe she’d be mad enough at me to say somethin’ she shouldn’t, and pull me in, too.”

“That wasn’t very bright, Patrick.”

“No, sir.”

“And you got yourself arrested for DWI as well.”

“Yes, sir. I drove straight through, and got to this place west of Gillette where the two interstates meet…”

“Buffalo?”

“Yes, sir. I stopped at this little place and bought me some sandwiches and a six-pack. They didn’t card me or nothin’. I was thinkin’ that if I had something to eat, it’d keep me awake. I guess I drank one or two too many. The deputy stopped me and said I was speedin’, and then he had me take a sobriety test, and I guess I flunked that, bein’ tired and all.”

“All right, Patrick, I want you to listen to me very carefully. You say you don’t know who the man was with Tammy on Monday, is that right?”

“No, sir, I sure don’t.”

“Did he see you?”

“Sure. He looked right at me.”

“Did you wave at them, or anything like that?”

“I kinda waved at Tammy, ’cause I was surprised to see her.”

“And he saw you do that?”

“I suppose he did, sir.”

“And you could identify him?”

“Sure. But sir, have you been able to talk with Tammy yet? I mean, what’s she say?”

I told him about Tammy Woodruff. His end of the conversation went dead, and Lieutenant Brennen spoke for the first time.

“It’ll be a few minutes, sheriff.” While I waited for Patrick Torrance to come to grips with the curve ball life had thrown him, I tried to figure out the fastest way to ship the boy south to Posadas. I knew, as surely as I knew anything, that if we worked the boy’s memory just right, we’d have ourselves a face.