Estelle turned and regarded the house and driveway toward the east. “Mr. Acosta, you said that the county manager’s truck was not there when you left to walk uptown?”
“It sure wasn’t. I’m sure of that. I went out that side door, you know. It wasn’t there then.”
“But it was parked there when you returned?”
He nodded and turned to look at the small white county truck. “He’s not home, though.”
“We hope not,” she almost said, but Freddy Acosta’s assumption was a natural one to make. If the peripatetic Kevin Zeigler had stopped home for a quick nap-and he would have had to be incapacitated with the flu, or worse, to do something like that-the hubbub next door would have rousted him out of bed. She shot a glance at Sheriff Robert Torrez. He was jotting something down in a tiny notebook.
“I’ll give Judge Hobart a call,” he said to Estelle, and then turned back to Freddy. “You’ll take the kids to Armand’s?”
“I guess so. They’re going to need some things from inside…”
Torrez shook his head quickly. “Nobody goes inside, Freddy. Not until we’re finished. Maybe by later this evening. We’ll keep you posted. Right now, you need to go get the kids settled and then make arrangements to meet your wife at the hospital. They might let both of you ride up to Albuquerque on the plane. If not, you’ll need the car.” Juanita Acosta had parked diagonally, the older-model Fairlane’s massive rear end blocking much of the street.
“I got my keys, I guess,” Freddy said. He glanced at the house and Estelle saw his eyes flick to the yellow crime-scene ribbon. “You’ll let me know?” he asked.
“Of course,” Estelle said. “Right now, you need to be with Juanita and your daughter. And you need to find the boys.”
He nodded and set off toward the car.
“What?” Sheriff Torrez said when he saw the expression on her face. The sudden question jerked Estelle’s head around. He tapped the side of his head and lifted his chin at her in question.
“Where’s Zeigler?” she asked.
“That’s a hell of a good question,” Torrez said.
Chapter Seven
With the Acostas’ home cleared of the hubbub of paramedics and members of the family, Estelle stood for a moment at the kitchen door, looking across the side yard toward Kevin Zeigler’s neighboring house. There might be a perfectly simple explanation for the truck’s presence. But the key ring, loaded with not only ignition keys, but a wad of other county keys as well-office, gates, who knew what all? People didn’t go far without their keys.
Estelle forced her attention back to the evidence directly in front of her: the Acostas’ kitchen door. A tear in the screen immediately beside the latch looked as if someone had punched through to flip the flimsy lock, but there were so many tears, so many dents and buckles in the door’s aluminum frame that it was impossible to tell what was recent and what was simply the result of several seasons’ worth of rambunctious children.
The inner door had been flung open so hard that the cheap brass doorstop had broken, and the doorknob had slammed into the wall. A spattering of paint and Sheetrock dust marked the floor below the strike.
“I think she was tryin’ to lock the door,” Torrez said. With the cap of his ballpoint pen, he touched the brass lock in the middle of the doorknob. It was one of those smooth, difficult-to-grasp things that projected a bare minimum from the knob. “I got one of these that’s a real pain in the ass…it hangs up all the time. I can see old Carmen struggling with it, and whoever’s on the outside just busts right through.”
He turned and pointed at the small table that sat askew, far too close to the kitchen range. “That got scooted back.”
Estelle looked from the kitchen toward the small dining room. “And then she headed for the telephone,” she said. The telephone answering-machine combination rested on one wing of an impressive oak hutch in the dining room, but the wireless receiver was in the bedroom, where Freddy had left it when he called 911.
“Lemme show you something,” Torrez said. He stepped through the doorway into the dining room. “I think she got to the phone,” he said. “Either that, or they struggled in that doorway between the dining room and living room, right about where the phone was. That’s the direction she was headed.” He knelt down and touched a gouge in the wallpaper beside the doorway that led into the living room.
While the kitchen was smooth-plastered Sheetrock painted in ubiquitous eggshell white, the dining room was mid-’40s fancy, with paneled wainscoting below a painted wood-trim strip. Above the strip, the wallpaper was dark Victorian, the dense curlicues and floral patterns stained in several places from roof leaks.
Estelle knelt beside the sheriff and peered closely. The overhead light fixture wasn’t much help, and she pulled a tiny flashlight from her jacket pocket and snapped it on, examining the gouge. The mark began three inches above the wainscoting trim, digging through the wallpaper into the Sheetrock behind it. The gouge stopped abruptly with a diagonal bruise across the horizontal painted strip.
“Took a pretty good lick,” the sheriff said.
Going to her hands and knees, she bent low, playing the flashlight beam on the old carpet, her face so close she could smell the musty fibers. She could imagine a dusting of gypsum from the wallboard. If so, that trace was mixed with a fair coating of dust, lint, human and cat hair that the vacuum cleaner had missed.
“The only thing I see in the living room is that busted TV,” Torrez said. “One of ’em got into the TV somehow, but I didn’t see anything else broken except the busted glass.”
Estelle straightened up, trying to imagine Carmen’s path through the house. Freddy Acosta had said that he entered the kitchen door, then walked through toward his daughter’s bedroom. It would have taken his eyes a while to adjust to the dim light after time spent outside, but he had seen, or almost tripped over, the telephone on the floor, and he would have had to be blind to miss the shattered television.
And Freddy’s intrusion had been only the beginning of evidence trampling. Beyond the dining room, traffic had complicated matters further. After Freddy’s discovery of his daughter’s battered body in the bedroom and his call to 911, half a dozen emergency personnel had mobbed through the place.
“Seein’ this mess, he’d head right for the bedroom to check on her,” Torrez said.
“Maybe so.” Estelle avoided the glass as she crossed the small living room and stood in the doorway of Carmen’s bedroom. On the nightstand beside the bed, a much-loved teddy bear leaned against the lamp base. The bed had been bumped toward the wall, and other stuffed animals had scattered as the bedding and pillows were thrashed. A thick, dark stain marked where the blood from Carmen’s cracked head had puddled.
“I called Mears, Abeyta, and Taber to give us a hand,” Torrez said. “We’re going to have to spend a good bit of time combing this place.”
Estelle nodded. “I want that,” she said, pointing at the telephone receiver. It lay beside one of the pillows where Freddy had tossed it. “Did you find anything outside?”
The sheriff shrugged. “There’s about a thousand prints in the dirt. Could be that half the neighborhood’s gone in or out that door in the past twenty-four hours. And half a dozen Acostas.”
“We need to make sure we don’t add any more,” Estelle said as she turned from the bedroom. “His tracks are out there somewhere.”
“His or hers,” Torrez said.
“His.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Someone slammed the back door open hard enough to punch a hole in the wall? Then swings something and puts a deep gouge in the plaster of the dining room? And on top of that, Carmen Acosta was a tough little girl. She probably weighs, what, a hundred and thirty or forty pounds? And an attitude to match. This wasn’t some tussle with another kid.”