“Sir?”
I looked up with a start. Gayle Torrez stood in my office doorway. “Sorry, sir. But the undersheriff asked if you would come over to the county maintenance barn.”
“I can do that,” I replied, and tossed the book of statutes on my desk. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know, sir. He just called and asked for you. And by the way, Catron County returned my call. Edward Johns quit that department in March, ’99. Ortiz said that if he could have found an easy way to fire him, he would have. But Johns just quit. Sheriff Ortiz said that he had an attitude problem.”
“It’s hard to picture Eddie Johns working for Lorenzo Ortiz anyway,” I said. “What’s he doing now, did Ortiz say?”
“The last he heard, Johns was working for University Real Estate in Las Cruces. I called and confirmed that.”
“Real estate?” I frowned, trying to picture Johns showing a two-bedroom bungalow with white picket fence to a newly married couple. Warm fuzzies all over the place. “That’s a start. Thanks, Gayle. And now I need some wheels.”
The only vehicle remaining in our parking lot was an aging Bronco whose transfer case sounded as if it were full of gravel and whose windshield sported a fascinating pattern of cracks. I took it, figuring that if three was a charmed number, the old Bronco was a good choice for something to wreck.
The county barn one block south of Bustos on Fifth Avenue was a bulky Quonset building that overlooked the vast bone-yard of equipment, both functional and long-dead, that kept the county in business.
Puzzled, I parked the Bronco so it joined the lineup of other department vehicles. The confab apparently had moved from Regal to here. The massive roll-up door was closed, so I entered the shop through the white steel door with the single word OFFICE stenciled at eye level.
The office included three desks and a variety of bookshelves, with every available flat surface covered in a vast avalanche of junk, from empty coffee cups to reams of computer verbiage to a case of oil filters with an invoice that, before the next week was over, would probably be filed by the gravity system. All of it was untended, but I heard voices out in the shop.
I stepped through the side door that sported the eye-level warning AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Perhaps there were a surprising number of people who wanted to tour the place, hoping to catch a tantalizing glimpse of a county road-grader having its blade changed.
The unmarked county car in which I had been transporting Matt Baca during those almost surrealistic early morning hours was parked in the far west rear corner of the building. It was snuggled between the sorry remains of the marked unit that had been T-boned earlier through young Baca’s efforts, and an elderly dump truck with its uncovered differential in a thousand pieces.
Skirting the yawning lube pit that had been built long before the county could afford a decent hydraulic lift, I made my way across the dark, oily concrete floor. A burst of light exploded inside the unmarked car, followed by another. Undersheriff Robert Torrez saw me and broke away from the party. I saw Tom Pasquale leaning inside the car, and could make out the top of Linda Real’s head where she manipulated the camera.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Sir,” Torrez said. “A couple of interesting things. First of all, did Alan get a hold of you?”
“Alan Perrone? No, why?”
Torrez glanced back toward the two cars. When he turned back, he lowered his voice. “He’s got some interesting preliminaries for us. In a nutshell, he thinks that Sosimo was struck, maybe more than once.” He put his hand on his own belly, just under the ribs. “And he thinks that at least one of those blows may have contributed to the rupture of an existing aortic aneurysm.”
I frowned. “He’s sure?” It was a pointless question, since I knew damn well that the sober, methodical Dr. Alan Perrone didn’t make wild guesses or jump to unfounded conclusions.
“Yes, sir.”
I took a step backward and leaned against the rear tire of one of the county’s tractors parked beside a set of welding tanks. I regarded the polished brass valves of the welder, but my mind wasn’t there. “So very likely there was a struggle in the kitchen, like you said. They bang around, smash the window in the back door, and somehow Sosimo breaks away and plunges outside, taking part of the screen with him. And by that time, if the aneurysm burst, he’s already dead on his feet.” I held out my hands. “And that’s it.”
“Could be.” Bob Torrez’s face was its usual, noncommittal mask, and he waited while I fumbled with the pieces of the puzzle.
“You have thoughts otherwise, Roberto?”
He shook his head. “That’s the way I see it. We just don’t know who was there.”
I thrust my hands in my pockets. “Let me ask you something. I know they’re family and all, but Clorinda and the other ladies…they’re quite a crew. Could one of them be involved somehow?”
A faint smile cracked Torrez’s face. “Sir, my aunt Clorinda can make up some of the wildest stories. But it’s against her nature to hide things, or try and cover-up. I think that if she had to hold a secret for any length of time, she’d explode.” He shook his head. “No, if Clorinda knew anything, she’d tell me. And she’d tell everyone else, too. I really think that what she says happened is just about what did happen, as far as she or the other ladies know. Sosimo left the house to find his truck, or just to get away from them…and when he did that, they left the house, too. There was nothing else for them to do there, with everyone else gone. And that’s all they know. They didn’t see Sosimo return. The next time they plug into events is when Elva Lucero telephoned them with the bad news.”
“We’ve got a goddamn fifteen-minute gap, maybe half hour,” I said. “A gap when nobody knows what the hell went on.” I pushed myself away from the tractor and nodded across the building where Linda Real continued burning up film. “And you didn’t call me over here to tell me about Perrone’s findings. What gives with my car?”
Torrez beckoned and I followed him through the litter of hoses, tools, and cartons full of who knows what.
“Deputy Pasquale had an idea,” Torrez said as we reached the front of the car, and he looked sideways at me.
“Oh-oh,” I said.
Pasquale heard us and turned around. He’d been using the roof of the car as a desk, filling out the plastic evidence bag label with a black marker. Surgical gloves clad his hands. He grinned at me and stepped away from the car. The backseat cushion had been removed and leaned up against the wall.
Torrez didn’t add to his explanation, and I looked quizzically at Pasquale. “So tell me,” I said.
“Sir, we were searching the residence down in Regal, and I was going through the couch in the living room, looking under the cushions and what not. It was at that time that I realized that none of us had turned the car.”
“Turned the car,” I murmured, amused at the young deputy’s tendency to turn to Hollywood for his phraseology. The brief flash of amusement was replaced by the familiar sick, hollow feeling of seeing the broken window and having my mind replay the events of the night before. “So what did you find?” I leaned inside. Lying amid five years’ worth of dust and litter was a shiny, plastic laminated driver’s license. Catching the light, Matt Baca’s photo looked up at me.
“I’ll be damned,” I said and glanced up at Linda. She stood by the left rear car door, camera at the ready. “You were able to get all this?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Thomas, you knew this was here before you moved the seat?” I straighted up with an audible popping of joints.
“No, sir. But I got to thinking. It made sense to look every place that Matt Baca had spent some time. We knew that he had some sort of fake ID, and that he had to stash it somewhere. It wasn’t in the house, unless he plastered it inside one of the walls. And he didn’t have time to do that.”