Before She Dies (8 page)

“He’s got all kinds of pet names for you, doesn’t he?” I asked. “What’s
chinita
mean?”

Estelle smiled wearily. “Around here, you’d translate it about like, ‘little half-breed darling.’”

“Cute. He’s a sweetheart, isn’t he?”

“He’s known my family for generations, sir. He knew my Great-uncle Reuben. In fact, Reuben built one of the fireplaces in the barroom for him. Years ago.”

“I should have known. You asked about the patrol car. You don’t seriously believe that the killer thought that Paul Enciños was someone else? Bob Torrez told me earlier that he was thinking the same thing.”

Estelle shook her head. “No, sir. I don’t think anyone would notice the number on a patrol car. I just wanted to see the look on Victor Sánchez’s face. That’s all.”

“No connection?”

“No connection, sir.”

I sighed. “You want to go down to the hospital with me for a bit?”

“If you’ll stop on the way for something to eat, sir.”

I laughed. “I didn’t think you ever stopped to eat, drink, sleep…”

Estelle grinned. “No, sir.
You
need something to eat. I saw you watching that soup. And I want to show you something.”

My spirits lifted. Earlier, while parked behind the highway department’s gravel pile, Estelle hadn’t just been ruminating about Victor Sánchez. There was something else brewing in her mind.

Chapter 12

I was too tired and depressed to care much about eating, and that alone said something about my condition that evening. Because she wanted to talk on the telephone privately with her husband, Estelle suggested we meet at her house.

Francis Guzman’s aunt met us at the door. She frowned hard at Estelle and muttered something in Spanish that I didn’t catch. I recognized the word that had something to do with sleep, and true enough, we both had ten-gallon bags under our eyes. But that wasn’t unusual. The entire department would be operating on fumes if something didn’t break quickly.

Señora Tournál wore a tailored blue suit of casual cut, the white blouse fluffed and lacy at the throat. Her black shoes were mirror-perfect. She was not the image of the perfect nanny. Rather, she looked like she was waiting for a tardy junior partner to arrive so that she could begin a board meeting.

Sofia Tournál had no children of her own. I wondered if, behind that handsome face that registered only concern for her niece, Mrs. Tournál really enjoyed being corralled as a baby-sitter.

As if she could read my mind, Sofia Tournál glanced at me and offered a half smile. “The
kid
is asleep, Estellita.”

Estelle nodded. “We’re going to be in and out. I’m sorry.”

“No tengas lástima,”
Sofia said, and ushered us toward the dining room table—Estelle’s office.

“No tú invitamos para ser nana para el niño, Sofia,”
Estelle said, and hugged the older woman.

She waved a hand in dismissal.
“Por un día o dos.”
Sofia Tournál may not have minded baby-sitting the kid for a day or two, but spending those days near a hot stove wasn’t in her plans.

Her favorite solution to immediate food problems was American fast food—and her particular passion was fried chicken, the higher the cholesterol the better. She didn’t even cast a second glance at my girth as she vanished out the door, Estelle’s car keys in hand, headed off to fetch a barrel of the crunchy stuff. She knew where my heart was.

I settled in one of the chairs near an uncluttered spot on the table and heaved a sigh.

“Are you all right?” Estelle called from the kitchen.

“Yeah, I guess,” I said, not convinced.

She reappeared and set a tall glass of orange juice in front of me. I grimaced. “You got anything to put in this?”

She grinned and ignored my request. Instead she opened her briefcase and drew out a large, clear plastic evidence bag containing what looked like a streamlined socket wrench with no handle. “I found this off the shoulder of the highway,” Estelle said, and handed it to me. While I looked at the wrench, she fished a piece of graph paper from her briefcase. “Right here.”

She had drawn the deputy’s patrol car and then labeled everything else with distance flags. The wrench had been lying sixty-five inches from the edge of the pavement, thirty-five feet in front of patrol car 308.

“You want to tell me how anyone missed this?” I asked. Estelle shrugged and I added, “We all walked through that area a hundred times. This thing is what, about a foot long?”

“Nestled in a clump of rice grass,” Estelle said. “The way it was lying, it was obvious that it was dropped recently.”

“How so?”

“Nothing on top of it. Not even dust.”

I held the bag by the zipper lock and turned it this way and that. “It’s brand-new.”

“Just a few scratches. Do you know what it is?”

“Sure. It’s a lug wrench…or part of one. The ratchet part. And you’re right. No dust, nothing. You could have one of these stowed in your vehicle for years, and never use it. But it would collect dust and dirt with the passage of time. This one is clean as a whistle.”

“Brand spanking new,” Estelle said.

“So, you found a lug wrench,” I said. “Or half of one. This part fits over the lug nuts…or the jackscrew.” I made little twisting motions with my hands and the tiny crow’s-feet at the corners of Estelle’s eyes deepened ever so slightly. “There’s another part, the actual ratchet handle, that slips over this end.”

“General Motors has been using those since about 1988,” Estelle added. She pointed with the tip of her pencil. “There are a few marks on the black paint where the handle was attached, sir.”

I frowned. “So…we’ve got half of a lug wrench. It may have been dropped recently. It’s from one of the major manufacturers, which means that we’ve narrowed the vehicle down to one in a couple billion.”

Estelle nodded. “Since we’re starting with nothing, this,” she said tapping the bag, “is more than we had.”

“I won’t argue that,” I replied. “You’re going to run it for prints?”

“Tonight.” She leaned forward. “Sir, this might be connected.”

“It might be.”

“If someone had a flat tire and stopped to change it, it’s easy to imagine that in the dark, one piece or another of that wrench could be dropped, or kicked, or misplaced somehow. If the person was unfamiliar with the equipment, it’s even more possible. If that person was in a hurry, or nervous, it might be even more likely.”

I leaned back in my chair and Estelle watched me, as if what I would have to say might make a difference. I reached out and toyed with the glass of orange juice. “The shots came from across the highway, Estelle.”

“I think there were two vehicles involved.”

“Two?”

“Yes. I think that Deputy Enciños parked behind what he thought was a disabled vehicle.” She nodded at the wrench. “It was disabled. It’s too desolate out there for it to be coincidence, sir.”

“All right. You’ve got a vehicle stopped.” I gestured at the wrench. “Flat tire. The deputy comes along. Yes, he would stop. It’s automatic.”

“Automáticc”
Estelle mused.

“That, too,” said. “And the second vehicle?”

“Either across the road…”

“Facing east, back toward town?”

“I have no way of knowing that, sir. It could have been. Or it could have been parked with the disabled vehicle, and the killer could have ducked across the highway when he saw headlights coming.”

I frowned. “Or just passing by at the wrong moment. I don’t buy lying in wait. That seems a little far-fetched. As Paul’s car approached, the killer would have no way of knowing it was a cop, in the first place. And to dart across the road and hide, deliberately waiting, would mean that he had reason to believe that a cop was in fact coming and would have reason to be suspicious. And we know that he didn’t know Paul was coming, because Paul never said anything on the radio after he left Bustos Avenue. Other than that, someone with a scanner wouldn’t have known much about the deputy’s location.”

Estelle gazed at me from across the table, her chin resting in her hand. She slowly shook her head from side to side, as confused as I was.

A car pulled in the driveway and the few rapidly evaporating gastric juices I had sprang into action. “She’s back,” I said, and grunted to my feet. I opened the door and saw not Sofia Tournál with fried chicken but Sheriff Martin Holman, a grin splitting his face from ear to ear.

“I got it,” he yelped, and bounded up the steps.

“Come on in,” I said as he charged past into the house. I tried to keep the disappointment out of my voice.

“Gayle said you’d be here, so I figured that I’d…”

“Good, good,” I interrupted him. “Come on in.” I directed him to the dining room. “Now, what have you got?”

“The tires,” Martin Holman said. He straightened his shoulders, pleased with himself. “The cast taken in front of the patrol car? Easy as can be.” He dug a paper out of his pocket. “LT235/85R by 16E all seasons.”

“Brand?”

“A good match to General, Bill.”

I sat down with a thump. “Well, that’s too bad,” I said, and was amused at Sheriff Holman’s immediately crestfallen expression.

“No, I mean it’s great that you’ve got a positive ID. I was hoping that maybe it’d be a brand that someone here in town sells. Maybe some neat little local thread like that.” I shrugged. “No such luck.”

Holman shook his head. “Generals are one of the tires that come as standard equipment on dozens of vehicles.”

Estelle leaned across the table and Holman handed her the paper. “A big tire,” she said. “From a truck of some kind. Like the lug wrench, sir.”

Holman grasped the back of one of the dining room chairs until his knuckles turned white. He rocked the chair this way and that and I looked up at him, curious. He was enjoying himself, and after a minute said, “But there was something else.”

“Oh?”

“The tires were brand-new. I mean brand-new.”

Both Estelle and I regarded Holman with interest. “You’re sure?”

“Positive. The little mold dinguses that stick out weren’t even worn off.” Holman didn’t bother reminding us that he’d spent fifteen years selling cars and should have learned enough to be able to tell a new tire from an old one.

“Wouldn’t they wear off just in a mile or two?” I asked.

Holman shook his head. “Not the ones that stick out sideways into the tread channel. Thousand miles or so, probably. I think you’re looking for a new vehicle.”

“Then it fits,” Estelle said.

“What fits?” the sheriff asked.

Estelle handed him the bag with the wrench inside. “We found this out there, sir.”

“A lug wrench?”

“Yes.”

“And it’s brand-new.”

“Yes.”

“Then that’s it. We are dealing with someone who was driving a brand-new truck of some kind. Pretty unusual to have a flat tire right off the bat.”

“But it happens. Maybe they hit something in the road.”

Holman stood up, excited. “It’d have to be something big enough to really slice the sidewall. Just running over a bottle, or board, or something like that wouldn’t do much to a brand-new steel-belted tire. It’d have to be a pretty good road hazard of some kind.” He headed toward the door.

“Martin…where are you going?”

He stopped short. “I was going to take a drive out that way, scan along the shoulder of the road.”

I beckoned him back. “If you’re going to do something like that, you need to call dispatch and see if Gayle can spring a deputy free to go with you, Martin.” His face went that wonderful blank that told me the proper synapses in his brain had failed to fire. “Until we nail this thing down, no one is roaming out in the boonies by themselves at night.”

“Oh,” he said. By the tone of Holman’s voice, a bystander would have guessed that the sheriff was a freshly hired rookie, not the top dog.

“But there’s something you need to do first. Howard Bishop was making a blanket check through NCIC for stolen vehicles or any other wants. You might shag Nick Chavez back down to his office and start him helping you on a trace of dealers in the South-west who might have had inventory stolen off the lot.”

“That should be covered by NCIC, shouldn’t it?” Holman asked.

“It should be, sir,” Estelle said. “But it’s possible that something was missed.”

Holman looked pained. “You think that the vehicle involved was taken from some dealer’s lot?”

“It’s just as likely as being stolen from an individual’s driveway,” I said. “We’ll cover all the bases.”

Holman shook his head. “I’d think those new ones, with all the antitheft devices and all, would be tough to steal.”

I glanced at Estelle and smiled with sympathy. “They got yours, right? Right out of the airport parking lot. No broken glass, nothing.” I shrugged and leaned back in my chair. “There’s a ready market for trucks, sheriff—especially the carryall class like Suburbans, Explorers, RamChargers…anything with lots of room and four-wheel drive.”

“In Mexico, you mean,” Holman said.

“That’s right. And as fast as engineers think up antitheft devices, the thieves come up with a slick solution.”

Estelle frowned. “And we might not be dealing with auto theft at all, sir. That’s just one trail we’re following. It could have been a dozen other things.”

“Like what?” Holman asked.

Estelle took a deep breath. “The deputy might have run into a felon who got nervous. Maybe on the run from somewhere else…anywhere else.” She held up her hands in frustration. “We’ve got the entire continent to choose from. Or maybe Paul stepped into the middle of something else, like a drug deal going down.”

“Out there?”

“Why not? Sir, remember that guy last year who landed his twin-engined plane on the only straight stretch of County Road Fourteen? That was two hundred kilos right there.”

“But you caught him,” Holman said, as if that settled that.

“We didn’t catch him, sir, the Forest Service did. And only then because the pilot snagged a wingtip fuel tank in a juniper thicket when he was trying to turn around. If he hadn’t been delayed with that mess, all the Forest Service would have found was a cloud of dust.”

I heard another vehicle in the driveway and recognized the wheezy exhaust note of Estelle’s little sedan. “Have you had dinner yet?” I asked Holman. He shook his head. “Then sit a minute and have a piece of chicken. It’ll help you think. It’s going to be a long night, Martin.”

Holman didn’t look happy. He had been raring to go, to gallop out into the night. He didn’t like hearing that we were operating like a frustrated posse, hunting for pony tracks after a buffalo herd had already thundered by.