I sat down in Sam Carter’s chair and looked out across the sea of papers on his desk. If there was some kind of order there, it escaped me. The Mexican brass trash can under the left desk wing was packed to the brim, just as it had been when Torrez and I had visited not too many hours before. If possible, more stuff had been piled on top until it looked like some crazy artist’s mixed-media bouquet.
The computer near my elbow was the same model as those in the county building, and I pushed the corner key, rewarded by the symphony of start-up chimes. Sam Carter might have been working after-hours, but it hadn’t been on the computer—unless when he’d been interrupted he’d taken time to shut down the system first.
While I waited for all the bells and whistles to do their thing, I opened one desk drawer at a time. Guessing what might have been out of place was impossible, since nothing appeared to be
in
any particular place. Sam Carter had been a fan of landfill filing—the most recent junk on top.
In the right-hand drawer, hidden under a pile of old-fashioned receipt books, was a small nickel-plated pistol, one of those cheap imported things that are supposed to make you feel safe until you actually have to use them. With the tip of my pen I lifted it out by the trigger guard. The clip was missing, and it hadn’t been fired. I put it back.
Turning to the computer, I looked at the list of the most recent files that had been accessed and clicked on the top of the list. After a few seconds a letter to QuadState Distributors appeared on the screen blistering them about dairy product expiration dates—perhaps a subject near and dear to Sam Carter’s heart. An irate milk distributor might have shot Sam Carter, but it seemed unlikely.
I heard voices downstairs as the party got under way. If they needed anything from me, the undersheriff knew where I was.
The bulk of the files were spreadsheet types of things, either inventory or ordering files or pay and time sheets—endless rows of numbers. What correspondence there was appeared to be Sam Carter taking various people to task—usually errant distributors but also a series of letters to his insurance company about their subpar performance when he had asked for a new section of ceiling damaged by a leaking sprinkler pipe.
I ducked out of the files and sat back, thinking. In the lower right-hand corner, the little trash-can icon bulged, and I grinned. It looked just like the real trash can under the desk. A click of the mouse brought up the trash file—unemptied for a significant number of bits, or bites, or whatever counted for trash to a computer.
I didn’t know much about computers, but Estelle Reyes-Guzman had once shown me that the trash can could be emptied, just like its real-life counterpart. That and the off-on switch accounted for at least half of what I knew about the electronic world.
The file names didn’t mean much, except for one titled
“commissioner: you.”
I selected it, and in an instant the pathetic little note aimed at smearing Tom Pasquale’s name—and the Sherriff’s Department’s reputation—appeared on the screen.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said, and sat back.
Sam had let the computer program name the document for him but then had trashed the file, covering his tracks. Except he’d forgotten to take out the garbage, leaving it to ripen in its little electronic trash bag.
While I waited for the printer to warm up, I retraced my tracks and pulled up the letter of reprimand Sam had written to the distributors. “Sure enough,” I muttered, and sent that, the trash file, and the trash index to the printer.
I heard steps behind me, and Tom Mears appeared in the door. “Sir, they’re going to remove the body now.”
“All right. Any other wounds?”
“No, sir. Just the one in the back of the head.”
“How about a cut on the finger?”
“The undersheriff asked Perrone to check on that first thing,” Mears said.
“And no weapon?”
“No, sir.”
“I’ll be down in a minute. Is Linda here yet?”
“Yes, sir. She and Bob are doing some measurements. Did you find anything up here?”
The printer started its whine, and I nodded. “I think so. Give me a minute.”
I sat silently, watching the pages ooze out of the little laser printer. I wanted the souvenirs for Tom Pasquale’s benefit as much as anything else. Now that I’d found the original home of the smear letters, Tom was going to feel a lot better. And when he compared the phrase
“in five instances that we have documented”
that appeared in his note with the phrase
“in several instances that we have documented”
that graced the letter to the dairy products distributor, he would feel confident that not only had the letters come from Sam’s computer, but Sam himself had written them.
My hunch was that Taffy Hines was correct: Sam Carter had been too proud of his little libel scam not to show the draft to Taffy and then had let his tendency to be a slob trip up any effort he might have made to cover his tracks. He had miscalculated in thinking that folks would be more interested in the rumor itself, rather than wondering where the note might have originated.
I turned off the printer. They’d be bundling Sam’s corpse up, and nothing I’d found pointed to his killer. Maybe he had interrupted a two-bit money snatch…That was the simplest scenario.
Even as I was pushing myself out of Sam’s comfortable chair, I heard steps coming up to the office. Don Jaramillo appeared, face flushed. Behind him were Tom Pasquale and Frank Dayan.
“My God,” Jaramillo said, “what kind of mess is this?”
“Are you talking about the office here, or downstairs, or the world in general, Counselor?” I asked, and cocked my head in Dayan’s direction. “And who called you? And better yet, who the hell let you in the door?”
“I told him that if he walked right behind me, he could come as far as here,” Deputy Pasquale said.
“If you want me out, I’ll go,” Dayan said. “I happened to see all the cars and lights and came on down. But I’ll stay out of the way. I’m holding my front page. It’s really Sam Carter?”
“What’s left of him, yes,” I said. “Sam’s got you on a deadline. He would have liked that.”
“So what the hell happened?” the assistant district attorney asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Beyond what’s obvious.”
“And what’s that?”
“You haven’t been in the store yet?”
“Well, yes, I was in the store. Torrez is busy mucking around trying to establish the trajectory of the bullet that broke the beer bottles.”
“Mucking around?” I looked at Jaramillo, trying to keep the expression on my face pleasant.
“Well…”
I stepped up close to Jaramillo and lowered my voice. “I think in a murder investigation it’s interesting to know where the bullet might have come from and where it went, don’t you?”
“Well, of course.” His eyes darted around the office, and then he lit on a new topic. “The money bag didn’t contain any cash…just checks and stuff. So it looks like robbery. We have no way of knowing how much they got unless Carter had the deposit slip already filled out.”
“Did you check for that?”
Jaramillo frowned as if the thought of him actually doing some of the fieldwork was a foreign idea. Perhaps that was just as well for us. “No,” he said. “I think Tom Mears was working that angle.”
“That’s good,” I said, wanting to add,
“Now you just stay out of the way.”
To Dayan, I said, “You know about as much as we do, Frank. The deputies arrived after-hours to discuss certain other matters with Sam Carter and discovered his body down in the store, lying on the floor by one of the beer coolers. He’d been shot once in the back of the head. Money is apparently missing from the bank bag. Whether Sam was carrying the bag or not, we don’t know. It would appear that the shooting happened very close to closing time. Deputies will be interviewing the store employees to determine who might have been the last one to see Sam alive.”
Dayan had a small recorder in his hand. “Any other leads? Suspects, that sort of thing?”
I exaggerated my enunciation, eyes locked on the recorder: “In-ves-ti-ga-tion is con-tin-u-ing, Frank. Period, thirty.”
Dayan hesitated. “And what was going on down at the motel a little bit ago? Was that a related incident? Someone said that every cop car in the county was there.”
“That would be about three units,” I said. “No big convention. We had a tip that a minor who had been reported missing might be holed up there. She was. End of story.”
“Who was it?”
I grinned at Dayan and motioned him back out of the doorway so I could pass. “You know I’m not going to tell you that, Frank. The key word is
minor
.”
“And was, is, there any relationship between that incident and this shooting here?”
I stopped on the top step. “Frank, I’ll make you this promise. I’ll let you know the minute we have something significant. All right?” He was smart enough to notice that I’d ignored his last question and in so doing had supplied an answer of sorts. “The big scoop.” I thumped the railing for emphasis. “What’s your absolute deadline?”
“I’ll hold,” he said with a shrug. “The big morning dailies aren’t going to get anything this late, so I’ve got some time.”
I nodded. “Fair enough.” I glanced at my watch. “Hunt me down around midnight. That gives us five hours. I think we’ll have something by then.”
“Now what direction are we going with this?” Jaramillo asked, and he pulled a slender fancy leather memo book from his suit coat pocket.
“Give us until midnight,” I said again.
Annoyance flashed across Jaramillo’s pudgy face. Midnight would also give me plenty of time to find Daniel Schroeder, the district attorney. His office was in Deming, and I considered it a cruel twist of fate that most of the time we had to deal with his assistant rather than him.
“None of this can be published yet,” Jaramillo said to Dayan. “This is an ongoing investigation.”
“Indeed,” I said as I let them go past me on the stairs. I started down after them, saying, “And the sheriff just gave a statement to the press. Use your own judgment, Frank.”
Tom Pasquale closed the office door, and I turned and handed him the printer pages. As Dayan and Jaramillo continued on out of earshot, I said quietly, “You might read those and see if you see any similarities.” He took the papers, and before he had a chance to read more than a couple words I added, “Both were on Carter’s computer. He could have taken the file on a disk to any printer, I suppose, but I doubt that he was smart enough to do that.” I reached out and punched Pasquale lightly on the arm. “Did you get more than two lamps and a bookcase moved?”
He grinned, more with relief at seeing the documents than at the question.
“No, sir. But we’ll get to it.”
“Other things take precedence right now, Thomas. I’m sure Carla Champlin will understand.” I pointed at the documents. “Don’t lose those. Put ’em in your briefcase. When you get a moment, start a file. I’ll write a formal deposition about where I obtained them…all that sort of thing. As soon as he gets breathing space, I’ll get Tony Abeyta to come up and make a copy of that computer’s hard drive, just to be double sure. I would think he can do that. If he can’t some computer guru can tell him how. Just in case at some later date someone wants to make an issue out of all this.”
“Yes, sir.” He folded the papers and glanced at the doorway leading to the crime scene. “It’s all too bad, though.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Any ideas about who might have done this?”
“Yes,” I said. Frank Dayan was headed out the back door, stepping carefully around Howard Bishop and Tony Abeyta, who were working prints. Don Jaramillo followed, apparently preferring the fresh air outside to the smell of spilled beer and blood.
County Commission chairman Sam Carter would have cringed at the rate at which we emptied the county’s coffers during the next several hours, but he would have swelled at the attention. Of our dozen or so Sheriff’s Department employees, ten were on duty that evening.
Deputy Taber got to shake out the kinks when she drove to Las Cruces, hand-delivering a briefcase full of evidence for processing by the state’s regional crime lab. Among other things, we had requested a DNA test that would compare the blood from the metal brace on the backhoe with a sample from Sam Carter. I didn’t bother to voice my skepticism about that sort of high-tech testing: Maybe it would produce results, maybe not. But if it could weld a direct link to Sam Carter’s presence in Jim Sisson’s back yard, that was a major step.
If that was Sam’s blood on the machine, what would still be missing is the
when
—the smear could have been made anytime, even out on the job site before Jim brought the beast home.
Part-timer Brent Sutherland took over the odious, deadly boring job of keeping an eye on the Sisson household from a new position a block farther down the street. I wasn’t ready to cancel the surveillance, as unproductive as it had proved so far, but I wanted a wider view—all of the neighbors included.
Sam and Grace had been hip-deep in an affair, and people had been murdered for a lot less than a hundred-thousand-dollar life insurance policy. Whether or not Grace Sisson was a coconspirator was one of our large, neon, nagging questions. I couldn’t believe that Sam’s dalliance with Grace had been so discreet that it had been witnessed only by Buddy Chavez, the nosy manager of Burger Heaven across MacArthur.
And who the hell knew what little Jennifer was capable of in her own darker, introspective moments—if, in fact, she had such.
Four deputies were down at the store with Bob Torrez, meticulously combing the crime scene and trying to reconstruct exactly what had happened. By 8:00 p.m., we knew that Sam Carter had most likely spun around after the impact of the fatal bullet through the base of his skull. His hand had spasmed and grabbed one of the polished chrome door handles of the glass cooler. The door had swung open as he fell away, allowing the ruptured beer bottles to foam and spit across the smooth tile floor.
A .38-caliber half-jacketed hollow-point bullet was recovered from the insulated wall of the cooler, stopped dead by the appliance’s outside metal casing. The slug was mushroomed and missing fragments of lead, but there was plenty of rifling visible and what must have been bits of Sam’s brain stem and skull embedded in the hollow-point tip. All of that went to Las Cruces as well.
Torrez could now establish a trajectory, lining up the hole in the door with the hole in the cooler’s cabinetry. The distance between the two was less than eighteen inches, but that was enough.
The entry wound in Sam’s skull was on the left side, and the trajectory of the bullet was consistent with his facing the back of the store, the beer coolers on his right and the killer behind him and to his left.
The complete lack of any other evidence suggested to us that Sam hadn’t been caught in a struggle. Shoe soles would scuff that polished tile floor easily, and any flailing of arms would scatter chips and canned dip off the shelves opposite the glass coolers.
The zippered bank bag produced lots of prints, and sorting those out became Tom Mear’s task.
If Jennifer Sisson hadn’t been Sam Carter’s major concern just then, the robbery scenario made sense. I could picture Sam Carter walking toward the back of the store, away from the cash registers up front, bank bag in hand, full of the afternoon’s receipts. The killer could have entered the store through the back door if it had been unlocked at the time, or he could have been waiting anywhere in the store at closing time. As Sam walked down the aisle, the killer came up behind him, and that was that. One bullet, down goes Sam, grab the bank bag, stop to remove the cash, fling down the useless paperwork, and it’s over.
A simple script, and not remotely close to what must have happened. Sam Carter was in the process of arranging some specialized medical treatment for his fifteen-year-old girlfriend. He’d taken the time to reserve a room for her, doing so the day before. He’d picked her up at Burger Heaven when she’d slipped out of the house, heading supposedly for a simple hamburger and some quiet time-out from her mother. Sam had been slick. He knew his wife was busy chasing bowling pins, and he used his son’s Jeep—a nice touch by a caring father.
After making Jennifer comfortable in the motel room, he’d headed back to the store. And that’s where the puzzle remained. Why he hadn’t used the telephone at the motel maybe only Sam knew. It could have been as simple as where he’d placed—or misplaced—the note with the proper telephone number. The puzzling half hour included Sam leaving the motel and arriving back at the store to close up—and keep his appointment with a .38-caliber slug.
Shortly before 9:00 p.m., Linda Real handed me what I wanted to see. I took the eight-by-ten glossies from her and settled back in my chair. She came around the desk to narrate over my shoulder.
“Nicely done,” I said.
In good light, with my bifocals held just so, I could see the distinct shoe sole patterns in the thin film of liquid coating the tiles.
“There are just four of them that were still damp enough to photograph,” Linda said. She looked tired, the dark circles under her eyes pronounced. “But the first two are really clear.”
“Clear enough to match for size, I suspect,” I said. “And an interesting tread pattern. A woman’s shoe.”
“I think you’re right, sir. That’s a utility tread with the diagonal cleats,” Linda said. “More like something a nurse would wear. Not so much a child’s shoe.”
I leafed through the set until the background changed. “And these are the others that I asked you to take.”
“Yes, sir. It’s been a day or two, and there have been people walking through the area, but it wasn’t hard to find a couple that matched what you wanted.”
I took a deep breath and sighed. The dried mud had locked in two sets of prints—the prints of the big, flabby-footed chow, so eager for some exercise and not minding a romp in the fragrant mud after a summer shower, and the shoe prints of the chow’s escort. Taffy Hines had been much more careful than the dog about where she’d stepped. The mild waffle soles of her shoes had left distinctive prints, captured easily on the film.
“No match, sir,” Linda said. “Not even close.”
I got up, tapping the pile of prints into order. “No, the pattern’s not even close.” I slid out one copy of each shoe print and handed the remaining pile back to Linda. “Outstanding work, Linda. Thanks. I’d appreciate it if you’d stay close, in case someone needs your help.”
I found Robert Torrez in the small room that we used as a lab, in close conversation with Tom Mears.
“Can you break away for a bit?” I asked, and Torrez nodded.
“So far, a good set of Sam’s prints from the bank bag. We’re workin’ on the others. But it’s going to be almost any store employee, first of all.”
“Yep,” I said. “If you’ve got a few minutes, I’d like you and Gayle to take a ride with me.” The undersheriff looked at me sharply, and I nodded. “We need to make a stop at Judge Hobart’s. I’ll fill you in on the way.”