“Hi,” Iona said, and offered Estelle her hand. “I’ve seen your picture in the paper.”
“Central Office tells us that Glen Archer is over here today,” Estelle said.
“They’re all down in the gym,” Iona replied. “Did you need to speak with the superintendent?”
“Yes.”
Iona turned and looked at the clock on the back wall of her office. “They should be out of there in another ten minutes or so.”
“We’ll just go on down,” Torrez said.
“You know the way,” she said with a smile. “Good to see you again.”
They walked down the empty polished hallway toward the intersection where the battered school seal adorned the wall, then turned toward the swelling cacophony of voices. Thirty yards ahead, a sea of students appeared through the double doors.
“It’s like swimmin’ upstream,” Torrez observed as they made their way along the right-hand wall while the flow of chattering middle-schoolers flowed past, for the most part oblivious to their presence. One gaggle of five girls, lost in conversation, cruised down the wrong side of the hall. Torrez stopped and waited, forcing the girls to change course or collide. The bottleneck of oncoming traffic reached critical proportions at the double doors, and Torrez slowed, letting the tide of youngsters figure out for themselves how to either maneuver around or bounce off him.
School Superintendent Glen Archer was standing near the gymnasium doorway, beaming at the flow of children and talking with a short, chubby woman with close-cropped hair and enormous dangling earrings. Archer was the first to see the officers. A quick frown touched his open, kindly face.
Archer reached out to touch the woman on the elbow, mouthed “Excuse me,” and walked across the foyer to meet the two officers.
“You missed all the excitement,” he said, stretching out his hand. “They sure get wound up, don’t they? Like to break my eardrums.”
“What’s the occasion?” Estelle asked.
“End of the first marking period,” Archer said. “We gave away four bikes for perfect attendance.” He nodded at a straggling gaggle of students as they filed out of the gym. “Good group of kids.” He turned back to the officers. “What can I do for you?”
“We need to talk with you for a few minutes.”
“Sure.” He turned and caught the eye of the pudgy woman with the earrings, raising his voice just high enough to carry across the foyer. “Use your office for a minute, Mrs. Dooley?” The woman nodded and made a you-go-right-ahead shooing motion with her hand at the same time that she reached out with the other hand and stopped a harried-looking student who was trying to stuff papers back into a rumpled manila folder and walk at the same time.
“Follow me,” Archer said. He grinned at the two officers. “Been a while since you guys wandered the halls, eh?”
“Not long enough,” Torrez said.
Archer laughed. “Robert, all we ever had to do to find you was figure out which hunting season it was.” He led them up the hall, through the crowd of kids, each of whom seemed to be slam-testing locker doors. In the front office, Iona Urioste was back on the phone, and Archer paused at the corner of her desk until she put a hand over the receiver. “We’ll be using Mrs. Dooley’s office for a few minutes,” he said, and Iona nodded. He pushed the inner door open, and Estelle glanced at the large spot marked on the wall, labeled STRESS RELIEF: BANG HEAD HERE.
The superintendent closed the door securely behind them, blocking out the hubbub. “Let’s use this,” he said, indicating the long conference table. “Now…which of our kids do you have in jail?” He managed to make it sound like a joke. “And by the way, when do your kiddos start school?” he asked Estelle.
“Francisco starts kindergarten next year.” she said.
“Wow.” He shook his head. “How the years go by.”
“Glen,” Bob Torrez said, eager to halt the reminiscing, “we need to know some details about the trips down to Acambaro.” His heavy-featured face was impassive, eyes heavy-lidded.
“You mean last year?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” and Archer drew a circle on the polished table. “We go twice a year, as I’m sure you’re aware. Once in early December, once on the Cinco de Mayo. And I gotta tell you, it’s a really big deal for the kids.”
“On both sides of the border, I would imagine,” Estelle said.
“Oh, sure. You wouldn’t believe…well, I guess maybe you would, eh? What exactly did you need to know?”
Estelle slipped the small recorder out of her pocket and slid it across the table so that it faced Archer. “Do you mind?”
“Of course not.” His forehead furrowed. “This is about George Enriquez, isn’t it.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Wow.”
“Mr. Archer, what adults went on the trip in December?”
“Well, it was the same crew both times, actually.” He drew another circle that linked with the first. “I’ve been going now for eighteen years. I wouldn’t miss it. Usually, the middle-school principal goes. At least in the past. This is Mrs. Dooley’s first year. She didn’t feel that she could take an entire day, so she didn’t go along. I told her to plan for next year, though. It’d be good for her.”
“Who else?”
“Let’s see. Barry Vasquez went, of course. He’s the student-council sponsor, and the program is his baby, so to speak. Do you need to talk with him?”
“Not just now.”
“Okay. Let’s see. Me, Barry, George Enriquez from the chamber of commerce. You wouldn’t believe the load of stuff that group got together to take on down. George and our other buddy, there. Owen Frieberg. Both with the chamber. We couldn’t do it without them, let me tell you.” He grinned. “For one thing, we were really short of bus drivers last year. I ended up driving one, and Frieberg the other. He got his bus driver’s license a couple of years ago, when he was helping out with the track team.”
“That’s four,” Torrez observed dryly.
“Let me think. Am I missing someone?” He regarded the ceiling tiles for an instant. “Well, sure. Joe Tones. He’s with the chamber, too. In fact, I think he’s president this year. Can’t leave him out.” He nodded vigorously. “That was the crew. Me, Barry, Joe, Owen, and George.”
“Two buses?”
“That’s right. We took the two new activity buses. Two buses and the van.”
“Which van is that?”
“George Enriquez borrowed the van from the senior citizen’s center. That big twelve-passenger thing. We had a whole bunch of computers, and he suggested using the van. A whole lot easier to load and unload from that than trying to lug all those components up into a bus. Plus we had about a hundred sacks of food, clothes, and toys, so we needed the room.”
“You drove one bus, Owen Frieberg drove the other, and George Enriquez drove the van.”
“That’s correct.”
“Joe Tones rode with the van, or in one of the buses?”
“He rode down and back with me,” Archer said. “That way Barry covered the other bus with Frieberg. Not that there was going to be any kind of problem. Not with the twenty-two best kids in school.”
“They were all on one bus?”
“We had most of them with us. There were three, I think, on the other bus. It was kind of crowded, with all the groceries, gifts, stuff like that. You wouldn’t believe how much stuff went down there. We even had an older-model copier shoved in the back of my bus. I wasn’t sure we’d clear the border checkpoint there at Regal, but we had no trouble. If you looked in the van or the bus, either one, it looked like we had a used-electronics ring going. But we’ve been doing these trips long enough that we’ve got some friends on both sides of the border.”
“What time in the morning did you clear the border crossing?” Estelle asked.
“Let’s see. We got out of here about nine, so we hit Regal what, at about nine forty-five or so? Maybe a little before.”