“Let’s lock it,” he said as he climbed back in the Expedition. “You never know what bunch of kids will be out lookin’ for a place to party.” He pulled the Expedition forward. Estelle climbed down, closed and locked the gate behind them.
“Where do you want to start?”
Estelle nodded at the small shack that served as the landfill office. “Right there.” Torrez swung in close but didn’t switch off the ignition. “You know what you’re lookin’ for?”
“No.”
Torrez swiveled the spotlight to illuminate the little building, then swung the light to the left. “The bike’s not here.”
“He’s had lots of time to take it home in the back of his pickup.”
The sheriff snapped off the spot and then switched off the ignition. “Darker’n shit,” he muttered, and slid the large aluminum flashlight out of its boot in the center console. The new moon was far down on the horizon. A light breeze swirled around the shed, enough to set the symphony of landfill smells into motion.
Torrez unlocked the office door and pushed it open. “Let there be light,” he said, and snapped the switch. One of the two fluorescent bulbs flickered into dust-filtered life. The office was stuffy and cluttered. A constant flow of boots carrying mud and dirt had ground the original vinyl flooring bare, leaving recognizable patterns only in the corners, where feet never ventured.
A set of metal shelves bulged with various tools and machine parts, some boxed, some lying loose in the clutter. A single window on the east wall could open, but probably hadn’t in years. The glass was opaque, crusted on the inside from smoke, dust, and insects; on the outside from the constant clouds of landfill dirt that shifted with the wind.
Estelle opened each of the three desk drawers, lingering at the last one when she saw the half-full bottle of Canadian whiskey. “I could smell an additive in his coffee this morning,” she said.
“Don and the bottle are no strangers,” Torrez observed. “I know that for a fact.” He didn’t say how he knew, but Estelle was well aware that Bobby Torrez was determined when it came to busting drunk drivers; years before, shortly after joining the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department, he’d lost a younger brother to a weaving drunk. Other deputies swore that Torrez could now smell an open bottle of beer even before the driver lowered his window. She could not imagine him cutting Fulkerson any slack if he caught the landfill manager-county employee or not-weaving down the highway under the influence.
A computer sat in the middle of the desk, dusty and note-stuck. Directly above it on the wall was the load scale’s read-out, the glass of the digital window as filthy as everything else.
“Hi-tech operation,” Torrez said. He held a small plastic bag as Estelle transferred a dozen of the freshest cigarette butts from the overflowing coffee can that served as an ashtray. “Which ones are his?”
“Today he was rolling his own,” Estelle said, “but he had a pack of Camel filters in his shirt pocket. Kurtz was smoking Marlboros.”
“You know we’re lookin’ at a week or more for a DNA profile off these.”
She nodded with resignation. “I don’t care if it takes a month. I need to start somewhere. This afternoon, I asked Francis to find Fulkerson’s blood type for me, if it was on file anywhere over at the hospital. It’s not. Nothing’s going to be easy.”
“Could be that Bart might have had something to do with all this. That’s a possibility.”
“I’ve been thinking about that, Bobby. Maybe he’s in on it. He was the more reserved of the two when I talked with them today. I couldn’t tell if he was nervous or not. But he struck me as a little evasive.”
“Bart’s just plain dumb,” Torrez said. “He’s firing on two out of four.”
“Maybe so, but he wasn’t the one drinking whiskey at nine in the morning.”
“Fulkerson seemed confident, did he?”
“Oh, yes. Pretty smug.” She gingerly lifted a grimy jacket off the back of the swivel chair. “This is Bart’s,” she said. “It’s too small for Don.” She held out the sleeves, then checked the pockets, finding a butane lighter, a quarter, a penny, and a piece of peppermint candy minus its wrapper.
They spent another five minutes in the shed, but found nothing of interest. Once more outside, Estelle took deep breaths, enjoying the relatively clean air and letting her vision adjust once more to the darkness.
“This is Fulkerson’s trailer,” Torrez said. “I’ve seen him pullin’ it around.” He walked across to it, playing the flashlight on the contents. “Lots of good shit. Looks like somebody tore down an old fireplace or something. Old Don scarfed up the bricks.” He leaned on the side of the trailer, methodically examining the load. “I could use some of those.”
“They may end up on sale, cheap,” Estelle said, and Torrez nodded judiciously.
“Yep, they might.” He thumped the side of the trailer, turned and shined the flashlight across the landfill. “Lots of traffic since Tuesday,” he said. “That’s the frustrating part. And it wouldn’t come as much of a surprise to find out that Zeigler had a flat tire up here, either.” He walked a couple of paces away from the truck, playing his light on the ground. “Too damn many tracks since then. No way to find where he had the jack.” He directed the light toward the pit and the beam reflected off the bright yellow of the dozer. “I’d like to take a look over there,” he said. “I ain’t walkin’, though.”
As they drove across the rough, litter-strewn ground toward the pit, Torrez swung the windshield-post-mounted spotlight this way and that. “Did you walk over there?” he said at one point, holding the spot on the large pile of branches, slash, and limb wood a hundred yards away in the back corner of the landfill.
“No. I visited the appliance showroom and the tires. Then I walked across to the pit.”
“They burn that pile every once in a while,” Torrez said. “Fire department brings the marshmallows and they have a grand old time.”
“That’s a cheerful thought.”
“Next time it’ll be barbecue-flavored smoke.”
Estelle grimaced at the graveyard humor. “If I was going to dispose of a corpse, it wouldn’t be under a pile of branches. That would be both hard to do and time-consuming.”
“Me neither.” He swept the light back, and Estelle saw that the day’s pile of refuse had been dozed into the pit, leaving a neat apron for the next day’s offering. Torrez maneuvered the Expedition carefully between the parked dozer and the side of the pit, the left front and rear tires no more than a stride from the edge. He swiveled the spotlight and played it down into the depths.
With barely enough room to open the door, Estelle climbed out and walked around the front of the truck. The sheriff remained inside, and Estelle crossed through the beam of the spot, keeping a hand on the truck for balance.
“Stay away from the edge,” Torrez said unnecessarily. “That’s a hell of a first step.”
“I was over on the other side earlier,” she said.
Torrez crisscrossed the spotlight beam methodically across the bottom of the pit, pausing now and then at points of interest. After several minutes, he leaned his head on one hand, elbow propped on the doorsill. “How sure are you?” he asked quietly.
“I’m not sure at all,” Estelle replied. “It’s just that in various conversations since Tuesday, the landfill keeps cropping up. It’s the only thing that’s consistent, and that makes me edgy. Hear it one time, that’s one thing. But over and over again, things keep circling back. Tony Acosta mentioned it. William Page mentioned it. The tire shows up down at the county yard, but it’s got a paint smear on it that might match the black paint on Fulkerson’s headache rack.” She shrugged and leaned against the truck’s door. “That’s thin, I know.”
“You ain’t kidding. Like it ain’t the only rack in town. It’s going to take the state lab a week to run a match.”