On top of the cologne, she smelled the unmistakable odor of tobacco smoke.
She motioned at Tom Mears, and he gently shut the passenger door. Estelle swung her legs into the truck and pulled the driver’s door shut. With her eyes closed, she sat quietly for a moment. The cloying odor of cigarette smoke was faint but obvious, layered with something else. She sat quietly for a couple of minutes until a knuckle rapped on the window.
“You usin’ Zen or something in there?” Torrez said when she opened the door.
“Sit in here a minute,” she said.
“What?”
“Sit in the truck with the doors closed,” she said. “Tell me what you smell.”
Torrez looked skeptical, but he took off his cap and then folded himself into the small truck. He left one leg out, obviously loath to pull himself fully inside.
She reached down and slapped his knee with the back of her hand. “Go ahead. Fold yourself up inside. Close the door.” Torrez did so with evident distaste. She watched his face settle, though, and he remained motionless for a full minute. He lowered his head, and Estelle saw that he had closed his eyes in concentration.
He opened the door abruptly, looking up at Estelle. “Same perfume as in the house. And butts. And somebody’s had happy hour.”
“You smell booze?” Torrez didn’t reply immediately, but Estelle knew that there was more than a kernel of truth in the department joke that Robert Torrez could smell an open beer or whiskey bottle from across the county, upwind, with his head sealed in a plastic bag. The sheriff had no need to ask if a motorist had been drinking.
“I think so,” he said. “Butts, for sure.” He reached out and pulled the ashtray open. It was clean. “It’s going to be a long night,” he muttered.
Chapter Nine
The painstaking process of combing inside and outside the Acosta household continued until Estelle Reyes-Guzman’s eyes teared from concentration…a few grains of Sheetrock dust here, a hair there.
Although there was no road map, it became clear that the struggle had progressed from the kitchen door, through the house, to Carmen’s bedroom-and nowhere else. That in itself puzzled Estelle. Nowhere else on the Acostas’ property was there a single sign of something out of place, of something tampered with. The backyard was littered with the “stuff” of an active family that didn’t put picking up after itself high on the priority list.
Estelle stood beside the bed, trying to imagine how the battle had progressed. It wasn’t a fight between equals, that was clear. Despite her combative experience, youthful strength, and Acosta temper, Carmen had retreated, perhaps even bolted, toward what she had thought was sanctuary. Maybe at one point she had ducked behind the entertainment center and its television. A flailing lug wrench would make quick work of the wide screen. Carmen had tried for the telephone, too-to call her mother, to call the police-who knew.
A spatter of blood flecked the burlap shade from the shattered bedside lamp, and after Linda Real had photographed it from every conceivable angle, Estelle bagged the entire lamp. That went out to Deputy Jackie Taber’s vehicle, along with the comforter from the bed and the small throw rug from the floor, both soaked with the blood that had gushed from Carmen’s battered head.
The blood flow on the bed and rug had been profuse, most likely from the blow to the back of Carmen’s head that had laid open her scalp. The blood spatter on the side of the lamp shade away from the bed had been tiny, just a couple of drops. Maybe Carmen had gotten in a couple good licks of her own.
“What do you think?” Jackie said at one point. She had her broad back turned to Estelle and was examining the wall to one side of the door. Palm toward the wall, she swept her arm slowly along, covering an area nearly twenty-four inches long, as much as three inches wide, approximately five feet off the floor.
The wall was a pink-tinged white, latex paint over gypsum wallboard. Estelle stepped close, looking over Jackie’s shoulder. Soiling the otherwise clean wall was a swash of discoloration.
“It looks as if someone scrubbed something big and dirty against the wall,” Jackie said. She extended a tape measure. “Too big for a dirty hand.” She glanced down at the floor. “Too high off the ground for a kid to put his dirty feet on the wall.”
“You’d be surprised,” Estelle said. “Even the little ones put crud in the most amazing places.” She slipped a small, folding hand lens out of her pocket and handed it to the deputy. After a moment, Jackie handed the magnifier back.
“I can’t tell. Dirt, maybe.”
“Can you get that?” Estelle asked Linda, and the photographer nodded cheerfully. She started to position herself, and Estelle touched her on the arm. “After you finish the close-ups, I need some that show this entire side of the room, including that smear. I need the position relative to everything else. If you can get the corner of the bed, the table, and this, so much the better.”
Even as Linda was maneuvering to position the camera, Officer Mike Sisneros appeared in the bedroom doorway. “You got a visitor, Undersheriff,” he said. “A William Page? He’s waiting outside at the tape. You want me to let him through?”
“No, I don’t,” Estelle said quickly. “I’ll be out in a minute.” She turned to Jackie. “When you take the sample of that”-and she nodded at the wall-“don’t do a scraping. I don’t want whatever it is mixed with the base paint of the Sheetrock. Go all the way under so that you lift the plaster and paint and whatever that gunk is, all intact.”
“I think the paper layer of the Sheetrock will peel right off,” the deputy said.
“Even better.” Estelle made her way out of the house. With another roll of yellow tape, deputies had isolated Zeigler’s county truck next door, and Estelle paused to look at the area once more. Nothing beyond supposition tied the lug wrench that had been found under the little pickup with either the truck itself or the violence in the house next door-but no other assumption made sense.
Somehow, Kevin Zeigler was involved in the incident, but Estelle refused to entertain the idea that Zeigler had attacked Carmen Acosta. There was no way to predict what trouble would come Carmen’s way; she’d proved that over and over again since she’d been old enough to punch out schoolmates. But Zeigler? In trying to inventory what she knew about the man, Estelle could count only a handful of qualities, first among them that Zeigler outworked anybody in his sprawling office.
The only scenario that made sense was that Kevin had come home for lunch and walked into the middle of something. Had he come home alone? He wasn’t a smoker, but someone recently had been in his truck who was.
Across the street a small crowd of spectators had clustered, with Deputy Dennis Collins in the middle of them, pad and tape recorder in hand. True to form, few of them would be neighbors. Most would be the idle curious who had heard the scanner traffic.
A charcoal-colored Lexus was parked at the curb, nosed up close to the yellow tape. Estelle recognized the man standing impatiently on the street side of the car; at various times she had seen him with the county manager.
As she crossed the yard, Estelle glanced at her watch. If William Page had left his office in Socorro immediately after her telephone call, he had made the trip in just over two hours…a distance of 192 miles. As she neared the tape, she could hear an occasional cooling tick from the automobile’s engine.
Page’s head was shaking as he strode toward Estelle. Without breaking stride, he said something to Sisneros as he passed, ducking under the yellow tape with quick grace.
“Mr. Page?” Estelle asked.
“William Page, yes,” he said. He extended his hand, his grip firm and in no hurry to release. He lowered his head, fixing Estelle with a hard stare, his extraordinary cobalt blue eyes unblinking. “I’m guessing that you’re Sheriff Guzman.”