“I’m working my ass off, sheriff,” Posey said. “If you don’t think talking to a class of second graders is scary, you can take the next round. That’s what I did this afternoon, for starters.”
“Ain’t gonna happen,” Torrez said.
Posey’s expression turned serious. “I heard about what happened to the Romero kid. Shit, his fifteen minutes of fame didn’t last long.”
“Bender’s Canyon arroyo,” the sheriff said.
“Son of a gun, that’s too bad. I liked him. Real wild hares, those two boys. How’s Butch coming along, anyway?”
“He lost the eye, but will recover otherwise. Probably,” Estelle said. “He’s up in Albuquerque.”
Posey grimaced. “What’s with the Smith?” He leaned over Estelle’s desk and peered at the gun without touching it.
“This was wrapped in a cloth inside the carrier of Freddy Romero’s ATV,” Estelle replied.
“No kiddin’. May I?” Estelle nodded, and Posey hefted the gun, racked the slide back and inspected the empty chamber and magazine. “Never used one of these. What’s the deal?” He looked across at the sheriff.
“Don’t know,” Torrez said. “We’ll talk with George tomorrow, maybe. See what he knows.”
“It’s been cleaned up some,” Estelle said. “When we found it, it was loaded and cocked, and looked like it had been out in the weather. Or a loft up in someone’s barn or garage somewhere. Covered with all kinds of nasties.” She opened a folder and pulled out an eight by ten print of the gun as it had first appeared, cradled in the oily cloth. Posey looked at it, turning it this way and that.
“Huh.” He turned it again, then pointed at one spot on the forward portion of the gun’s slide. “What’s that, bat guano?”
“Guano of some sort.”
“Huh.” He handed the photo back and leaned on the desk, staring at the automatic. “Prints?”
“Only Freddy’s.”
“Gun like that shouldn’t be hard to track down,” Posey said. He straightened up, not taking his eyes from the Smith and Wesson. “You guys got a minute?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll be right back. Let me go out to the truck and get something.” In no more than two minutes, he returned and handed Torrez a small plastic evidence bag. “Coincidences make me really uncomfortable,” he said, and waited while Torrez read the tag and then handed the bag to Estelle.
The single bullet was discolored and hugely mushroomed, its brass jacket peeled back around the lead core so that the resulting projectile was nearly twice its original size.
“From?” Torrez asked.
“I picked it out of the cat skull. I talked to Underwood over at the high school this afternoon, when I finished up with the little ankle biters.” He put a finger to his own skull. “There was that hole right behind the right orbit? This was wedged into the bone low on the other side.”
“Bill Gastner was talking about that,” Estelle said. “The bullet hole, I mean.”
“He mentioned that. I was on the phone with him for about an hour this evening. He wanted to know what sort of records we had concerning jaguar reports.” Posey grinned. “That part was easy. We don’t have squat. Nobody’s seen one in these parts, or any parts north of the border, for that matter. Not in years and years.” He looked at Estelle. “He’s going through some old Spanish records from your uncle?”
“Great uncle. He might have seen one, and if he did, he’d mention it in his journals.”
“Well, neat-o. The US Fish and Wildlife Service is interested in spades, I can tell you that,” Posey said. “We’ll be cooperating with them. They’ll give the school a permit to keep the skull in the school’s permanent collection, but they want to know more about this. But…”
He dropped the evidence bag containing the single bullet down beside the automatic. “This is way, way bizarre. I’m willing to bet that this is either a forty, a ten mil, or a forty-one mag.”
Torrez reached across and retrieved the bag again. “Too short to be a forty-one mag,” he said. “You were talkin’ about coincidence?” He held up the bag of ammo recovered from the automatic.
“Freddy finds a skull,” Estelle offered, “and it looks like Freddy maybe found a gun, too. There’s a hole in the skull with the slug still rattling around inside.” She reached out and touched the evidence bag. “And it could be the same caliber as the gun Freddy had in his possession.”
“Could be,” Posey said. “Wild.” He pulled out a pen and used it to point carefully to the undistorted rear portion of the fired bullet. “Not going to take much to come up with a comparison.”
“Mears can do a preliminary comparison for us first thing in the morning,” the sheriff said. “No point in waiting on the state.” He frowned. “Ancient history, though. You got a cat that’s been dead for what, five years? Ten? Fifteen? There’s nothing left but some bones and bits of hide.” He shrugged. “It’s no big deal now.” He looked across at Posey. “It’d be like finding the remains of a bald eagle somehow. They get themselves killed all the time-sometimes by ranchers, or whatever.”
“And if the Fish and Wildlife Service can dig up enough evidence to bring charges, it will.”
“Don’t doubt it,” Torrez replied.
“We have three events going on here,” Estelle offered. She leaned back in her chair and rubbed her forehead wearily. “The skull with a bullet recovered from inside it. That’s one. A few days later, the guy who found the skull crashes his ATV into an arroyo and breaks his neck. That’s two. In his ATV, we find a loaded handgun that all bets say wasn’t his. We’ll find out more about that tomorrow when we can think straight. But that’s three. Now, if that handgun,” and she reached across and tapped the relic through the bag, “happens to be the one that fired the bullet that killed the cat…”
“Fish and Wildlife is going to want to know,” Posey said. “A jaguar skull is kind of a big deal, you know. If it’s legit, then it’s an important find. The feds are going to send one of their field biologists down to take a look probably by the first of the week. They’re real interested in dating it, if they can.” He shook his head in frustration. “They sure would have liked to talk with Freddy.”
“Wouldn’t we all,” Estelle said.
Chapter Twelve
By Saturday morning, Estelle was reasonably sure that the entire community had heard of Freddy Romero’s death. The timing of events had shut out coverage by Frank Dayan’s Posadas Register, of course, but other newspapers would report the incident with a paragraph or two. The Romeros themselves would have spoken to friends of the family, and from there, like a wildfire roaring across the prairie, the news would sweep through the community.
That grapevine could be a powerful tool, Estelle knew. If there was a relationship between the discovery of the handgun and the bullet hole in the cat’s skull, someone besides Freddy Romero knew about it. It made sense to her that Freddy had found the handgun only recently. Otherwise, he likely would have let someone in on his secret-Freddy actually turning the gun in to authorities was too much to expect-and he likely would have cleaned it up…at least wiped off the grime and guano.
Early Saturday morning, Linda Real and Sgt. Tom Mears had taken the Smith and Wesson for a comprehensive series of macro-photos, documenting the condition of the gun before it was cleaned and prepared for a comparison firing. Even scrapings of the dust and droppings had been sampled and preserved for analysis should that become necessary.
Estelle had agreed to meet with George Romero at nine, and ten minutes before that time, she looked out from her office and saw her neighbor standing at the dispatcher’s island talking with Sheriff Robert Torrez. George looked as if he had tried for sleep while crumpled in a hard plastic waiting room chair. Dense stubble darkened his face, and his eyes were sunken with fatigue. When he saw the undersheriff, he slumped a bit more, as if hit with the awful news for a second time. He shook Torrez’s hand and approached Estelle, surprising her with a powerful hug.