“What do you suppose was The Last Picture Show they ever showed?” Page mused.
“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” Estelle said. “Labor Day weekend of 1970.”
He looked at her in surprise. “Now you’re going to tell me that you went to that very one.”
“No, I wouldn’t tell you that.” Page waited expectantly, but Estelle didn’t offer the details. She’d been five years old that weekend, a little girl enjoying the simplicity of playing among the aging cottonwoods along the river in the tiny Mexican village of Tres Santos. Posadas, and her life in the United States, was still down a long road ahead. “The Consolidated Copper Mine closed that summer,” she said.
“Kevin told me about that. It took the heart right out of the village.”
“Yes, it did.” She pulled the car into the outdoor theater’s driveway, angling in so she could look at the ground. There were no fresh vehicle tracks except for the well-worn path the four-wheelers took around the end posts. The drive-in was a favorite spot for kids to crank open the throttle, blasting across the undulations.
“We never rode in there,” he said. “Kids used it a lot, though. We’d see them there every once in a while.” He leaned forward. “I can’t even tell where the projection house and concession stand used to be.”
“Right by that little grove of elms,” Estelle said, nodding. “All they left behind were some rusty nails.” She tapped the steering wheel. Good for a slow leak, she thought. But the tracks said that Kevin Zeigler hadn’t picked up his nail here.
She pulled back out onto the road.
“We like this route,” Page offered. “Up here about a mile, just on the other side of the arroyo, there’s a dirt road that cuts over past the landfill and comes out on Forty-three, up by the mine. That hill is a real kick in the tail when you’re on a bike.” He looked pained at the memory. “Kevin always calls it the Mur de Dump. ” He glanced at Estelle. “In the European races, they like to name every hill. Mur this and Mur that.”
“Is this the route you took that day with Tony Acosta?”
He nodded. “When we ride the mesa, this is the route we always take. That way, we don’t have to ride through town, and we don’t have to deal with the traffic on the state highways.”
In another half mile, they passed the remains of a mobile-home park, and then a small adobe house. “Kevin told me that the old woman who used to live here was murdered,” Page said.
“That’s true.”
“What happened?”
“An ugly domestic thing with the neighbors,” Estelle said. “She looked out the window at the wrong time.” Just like Carmen Acosta, she almost added. Once more she slowed the car. Fresh tire tracks cut through the weeds that had taken over Anna Hocking’s driveway.
She lifted the mike. “Three oh seven, three ten.”
“Three oh seven.” Sergeant Tom Mears’ voice was clipped and efficient.
“Ten-twenty, three oh seven.”
“I’m up at the old quarry off Forty-three.”
“Ten-four. Did you check Hocking’s?”
“That’s affirmative. I was there about an hour ago.”
She acknowledged and dropped the mike in her lap. “Vacant houses are sort of pesky,” she said. “Kids from town try and use this one for parties when they get the chance.”
“I’m surprised it’s still standing,” Page said.
“So are we.” The dirt road narrowed and then forked, the route off to the left not much more than a rough two-track. It angled across the prairie, gradually winding up the eastern flank of the mesa. Several miles ahead, Estelle could see the flat bench where the county had long ago established its landfill. Beyond that, higher on the mesa, were the scars from the abandoned copper mine, great pyramidal slag piles and a fenced area where equipment gradually aged and settled into the gravel of the boneyard.
The Crown Victoria thumped and lurched as Estelle turned on to the two-track leading toward the landfill and mine.
“This gets sort of rough up here,” Page said. He shifted and stretched upward to watch the ribbon of dried vegetation that the car would straddle. The tracks from Mears’ Expedition were clear in the prairie dirt.
“You came down last weekend?” Estelle asked, and Page looked at her quickly.
“Yes. On Friday. I went back to Socorro late Sunday.”
“Did the two of you ride?”
He nodded. “Sure. We did about a hundred K on the road bikes.”
“That’s quite a ride. Where did you go?”
He shrugged, as if riding a hundred kilometers was an after-dinner sort of lark. “We went south to Maria, then circled back up and rode out west as far as the Broken Spur. We were going to go all the way down through the pass to Regal, but it was so windy it wasn’t much fun going that way.” He grinned. “Sure pushed us back to town, though.”
“Did you stop in either place?”
“We got some water at that saloon in Maria.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes. We’ve eaten a couple of times at the Broken Spur, but we didn’t stop there on Saturday.”
Estelle let the heavy sedan find its own route up the two-track, the fragrance from the dried weeds that were crushed by the tires and roasted by the catalytic converter wafting potent through the open window. “Did Mauro Acosta ever ride with the two of you?”
If the question caught William Page by surprise, he didn’t show it. “No,” he said. “Mauro’s not interested in bikes, I don’t think. Tony is. But not Mauro. He likes to work on that old Pontiac they’ve got under that tarp in the backyard.” He grinned. “He’s pretty good at talking his mother into getting the parts he needs. They have rip-roaring arguments about that old heap. She keeps telling him that they’re going to sell it.”
“It runs?”
“No. I don’t think so. I don’t know if it will ever run.” He reached out a stabilizing hand to the dash as the car waddled over two deep ruts cut diagonally across the road, the beginnings of an arroyo that would eventually obliterate the two-track.
“What was Kevin’s relationship with Mauro?” Estelle asked. “Or yours, for that matter.”
Page’s head snapped around as if he’d been punched. “What?”
Estelle repeated the question.
“I don’t follow what you’re asking,” Page said, although the flush on his face said that he clearly did.
“I’m asking if your relationship, or Kevin’s relationship, with Mauro Acosta was anything beyond what we would expect between two neighbors, Mr. Page.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“No, I’m not kidding,” Estelle said.
“Mauro is just a…just a neighborhood kid,” Page said with considerable exasperation. “I mean, what is he, fifteen years old?”
“Just about that.”
Page rubbed the side of his jaw furiously, glaring out the window. “Did you ask me to ride along just so you could talk about that?”
“In part.”
“I’d like to know what you’re getting at.”
Estelle guided the car around a sharp curve as the dirt lane swung toward the corner of the tall chain-link fence bordering the county landfill. “Mr. Page, we’re investigating a vicious assault of a teenaged girl. We’re also investigating the disappearance of her neighbor. There are enough unusual circumstances here to attract lots of attention.” She glanced at Page. “We open every door, Mr. Page. Every one. I can tell you that at the moment, the circumstances of your relationship with Kevin Zeigler are of no particular interest to the Sheriff’s Department. We don’t care what you do in the privacy of your home, or in private moments anywhere else, Mr. Page. We do know that either you, or Kevin, or perhaps both of you, had some interest in Mauro Acosta. That’s a door that we need to open.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Yes, you do. I think it’s interesting that he is the only member of that family whom you-or Kevin-photographed alone. And photographed essentially surreptitiously from behind the blinds of a window.” She looked over at Page. He was squinting straight ahead. “You might remember that Mauro is very much a minor.”