“Oh…” the woman sighed. “Thank you, Sheriff. Thank you so much.” She hesitated. “I hope that Richard understood.”
“No, ma’am, he didn’t understand,” Estelle replied, and broke the connection. In the distance, she heard sirens, one of them from the direction of Sheriff Bobby Torrez’s home on McArthur, another from far to the west, where Sgt. Tom Mears had been working traffic on State Route 78. As she walked across the lot toward the Expedition, she saw that Ryan was standing on the back seat, peering through the side window. With the security screen between front and back seats, the child looked like a small, caged animal.
As Estelle approached, he backed away from the window and sat down on the seat, both hands clasped tightly between his legs. She opened the door.
She extended her hand toward the child. His eyes were wide and frightened. “Come on, Ryan. You don’t want to ride back there.”
He didn’t move, but both hands came up and cupped under his chin, his tiny, thin arms tight against his chest as if warding off a ripping, cold wind. In that moment, Estelle knew that Ryan Parker realized exactly what had happened. She gathered him up off the seat and felt the shaking through his tiny frame.
Chapter Thirty-five
“Posadas, three ten.” Estelle made a notation in her log as she waited for dispatcher Ernie Wheeler to respond. Ryan Parker sat silently, a blanket wrapped around his tiny shoulders, shaking so hard that his teeth chattered.
“Go ahead, three ten.”
“Three ten will be ten six at seven oh nine Third Street. Ten five, one juvenile that location.”
“Ten four, three ten,” Wheeler replied. “And three ten, ten twenty-one 4570 when you have the chance.” Estelle recognized Bill Gastner’s home phone number. She glanced at her passenger. The little boy had focused his attention first on the complexities of the child-restraint system that held him securely in the front passenger seat-the same device that drove five-year-old Francisco Guzman wild when he was forced to use it-and then had stared wide-eyed at the array of unimaginable things that filled the front-seat compartment of the patrol car.
“You talk f-f-f-funny,” he stuttered soberly. Estelle could hear his teeth chattering.
“Yes, we do,” she said, and tried to smile. The number jabber on a police radio had been the source of more than one stand-up comedian’s routine.
“My daddy’s car is fast,” he said matter-of-factly, and squirmed against the straps of his seat. “Are we going back to grandma’s now?”
“Yes, we are, Ryan.” She found the cell phone and selected the speed dial for former Sheriff Bill Gastner’s home. He answered on the second ring, and she could picture him standing in the kitchen while he watched a fresh pot of coffee brewing. “Gastner.”
“Hey, there,” she said. “It’s me.”
“Hey, you,” Gastner said. His gruff tone softened a little. “You okay?”
“I’m all right,” she said. “I’m taking a small passenger home right now. After that, it’s going to be a long night. Things didn’t go well.”
“If you need me for anything, you holler, all right?”
“Thanks, Padrino. ” She knew the former Posadas County sheriff hadn’t called to commiserate. “Is Francis still there?”
“Oh, yes. He and I were up to no good, I’m happy to report. You got thirty seconds?”
“Sir, I need to take Ryan home and then get back to the scene.” She lowered her voice. “I fired one of the shots, so there’s going to be a lot of questions.”
“Shit,” Gastner said. “You shouldn’t be leaving there now, then. And this’ll give you something else to think about, sweetheart. This is what comes of leaving two delinquents to their own devices,” Gastner said. “Here’s Francis. Give him a couple of seconds to fill you in. You need to know about this.”
Before she could protest, Dr. Francis Guzman came on the line. “Querida? Is the boy all right?”
She glanced at Ryan again. “Yes. I’m taking him home.”
“Thank God for that, at least. We heard all the sirens.”
“It didn’t go well, Oso. I’m going to be a while.” Francis Guzman read the tone of her voice correctly.
“You have Kenderman in custody, or…”
“I’m afraid it was ‘or,’ Oso. ” She glanced at Ryan. He didn’t appear to be listening, but she lowered her voice a bit anyway and turned away. “He pointed a weapon at the chief.”
“Uh oh.”
“Yes.” She slowed the large vehicle to a walk as she turned left at the end of Pershing Park. “I’ll talk to you later about it. But it’s going to be late, Oso. The D.A. isn’t going to want to wait until morning.” After the boy was safely home, she would spend hours in the alley until every scrap of evidence involved in the shooting of Richard Kenderman was recorded, photographed, and collected. The rest of her night would be filled with the ceremonial paperwork that would make Richard Kenderman’s death an official statistic: reports, depositions, and not the least of all, answers to District Attorney Dan Schroeder’s questions. Francis Guzman knew the drill.
She paused at the Stop sign at Third and Pershing. “What have you and Padrino been up to? I’m almost afraid to ask.”
“And I almost wish I hadn’t looked,” Francis said.
“Looked where?”
“We were standing in Bill’s kitchen, and you can see the clinic parking lot from the window over the sink. That’s where I’m standing now. Anyway, about thirty minutes after you dropped me off here, I saw Louis’ Mustang pull in, along with another vehicle.”
For a fraction of a second, Estelle almost asked, “Louis who,” before the mental gears meshed. Her taste testing on the flavor of counterfeit Daprodin seemed an episode during some other lifetime.
“Start over,” she said.
“Louis Herrera showed up at the pharmacy,” Francis repeated. “Not that that’s unusual. Then the other car arrived, and we got curious.”
Estelle slowed the car in front of Barbara Parker’s home. “Oso, I’m just pulling into Parker’s now. I’m going to have to go.”
“Sorry, querida. I’ll cut to the chase. It was Owen Frieberg. It was too far away for us to see who it was, but we got lucky with the license.”
“Ay,” she sighed. “It’s not possible to see a license plate in the clinic parking lot from Bill’s house, either, Oso. ”
“True. We kinda went on over there. Discreetly, so to speak.”
“Uh huh. Los dos Osos. ” She could picture the two bears sneaking through the bushes.
“And then after about fifteen minutes, Frieberg…I guess it was him, we couldn’t tell for sure…Frieberg came out carrying a bunch of stuff. Three guesses what it probably was.”
She stopped the car. “Give me about ten minutes, Oso. Don’t go anywhere. And tell Padrino not to go anywhere, either.”
“We’ll be here, querida.”
“While you’re waiting, give Irma a call, okay? Make sure the kids haven’t…” She drifted off, realizing that Carlos and Francisco were no match for their nanny, Irma Sedillos, even on her worst day.
“I did that,” Francis said. “Everything is fine.”
“Ten minutes, then.” She saw Barbara Parker’s front door open. “Love you, Oso.” Ryan scrambled to climb out of the harness as his grandmother approached the car. “There you go, hijo,” Estelle said as she popped the last buckle restraining the youngster. She reached across and pulled the door handle to turn the small hurricane loose. His grandmother staggered backward at the rush of the little boy into her arms, and Estelle remained in the car to give Barbara Parker a few moments’ privacy with her grandson. She took the opportunity to finish her log notations and stowed the clipboard. Everything boiled down to numbers and notations, she thought wearily.