Estelle looked again at the clear plastic evidence bag that Mears had handed her earlier. The fragment of brass was about the size of a snapped-off pencil tip-no more than half a centimeter long, and irregular in shape. Eyes concerned with seeing only a flat tire would have missed it.
“If this is from a rifle bullet…” She looked across at Sheriff Robert Torrez.
“It is a rifle bullet,” the sheriff said as if she were somehow contradicting him. “Nothing else it could be. There’s no brass in the wheel assembly or anywhere else on that ATV.”
“From earlier?”
“Now, we can’t be certain yet, but I don’t think so,” Mears offered. “That’s not much of a hole, but it is a hole. It’s nothing compared to what colliding with the rock did, but that’s enough of a hole to let air out over time.”
She turned to the ATV, now sitting on the concrete floor with a triangular jack supporting the left front suspension.
“Right here,” Torrez said. He knelt and took a mechanical pencil out of his pocket, pointing at a gouge in the soft plastic margin that formed the very front of the machine’s bodywork. The gouge in the colored plastic was just a touch, a faint scar that could have been caused by any number of things-a breaking tree limb, the pickup truck’s tailgate, a dropped tool. Mears maneuvered the shop light closer so Estelle could look through the five inch magnifier.
“It’s fresh,” she said. The film of grit and grime on the rest of the fender had not been disturbed by whatever had made the mark.
“And then here.” Torrez hefted the wheel. A small gouge marked the margin of the rim.
“You got the folder?” Torrez asked Mears, and the sergeant nodded. He retrieved a manila folder from the bench and handed it to Estelle. The digital photos were wonderfully clear. In the first, the wheel and damaged tire had not yet been removed from the ATV. The gouge in the plastic fender, where the fender swept over to join the bodywork, was aligned with the wheel and tire. A metal pointer aligned the scuff in the fender with the gouge in the rim and the tiny rent in the sidewall.
“How definite is this?” Estelle asked. So many things could have caused the ding in the plastic skirt. It didn’t appear difficult to rotate the damaged tire until the spot on the rim and in the sidewall were approximately opposite the mark on the fender, no matter what had caused either.
“Not one hundred percent,” Mears said. “Maybe a long way from one hundred percent. But it’s possible. I don’t see how the bullet could even strike the inside wall of the tire except from the front.”
“Would the one shot cause an explosive flat?”
“I would guess not.” Mears scratched his shoulder. “Those ATV tires aren’t inflated real hard.” He reached across and pushed his fist against the tread of the other front tire. Estelle could see it flex slightly. “They’re stout enough that they’d actually run flat for quite a ways. What you’ve got going into the tire are fragments.”
“If you’re talkin’ about an explosive blowout that would cause a swerve into the rocks, the odds are slim and none,” Torrez said.
“So, then.” Estelle leafed through the portfolio of photographs. She paused at a macro enlargement, shot through the stereo microscope in the downstairs darkroom in the Public Safety Building. Torrez reached past her arm with the pencil and indicated a portion of the photograph.
“That’s a rifling groove,” he said. “Part of one, anyway. There’s no doubt in my mind about that. That’s a bullet fragment. We’re lookin’ at part of the brass jacket.”
“That won’t tell us much, except that if it is a bullet, it’s a small caliber, high-velocity job. The sort of thing that just explodes when it hits something hard.”
“You got that right,” Torrez said. “Something big and lumbering like a pistol bullet would just stay in one piece, more or less. And if it was a big bore, high velocity rifle, the damage would be significant to the wheel rim and the tire both.”
“Could it have happened before Freddy rode out from the truck, then?”
“No.” Mears looked at Torrez for affirmation.
“Nope,” the sheriff said. “Unless he’s so numb that he rides several miles and doesn’t notice he’s got a flat tire. Ain’t going to happen.”
“Then somebody took a shot at him,” Estelle said. “By accident or intent.”
“Maybe,” Torrez said. “It’d be a hell of a shot to pot a tire intentionally when the target is movin’ at thirty miles an hour, up, down, sideways. Just not likely. More likely the shooter was tryin’ for something else.”
“To hit Freddy, you mean?”
“Maybe. Could have been shooting at something else entirely.”
Estelle envisioned Freddy Romero’s ATV blasting along the two-track, the snarl of its marginally muffled engine carrying for a mile or more. A hunter would have heard him coming. So would a coyote. That a hunter was poised to take a shot at a varmint, and shot in such a way that suddenly the four wheeler leaped into the bullet’s trajectory…
She shook her head. The country around Bender’s Canyon didn’t lend itself to long shots-too many scrubby trees, undulating hills, the buttress of the mesa itself. The odds were good that if someone had struck the four wheeler with a bullet, he’d meant to do it.
“Linda’s going to have a long day.” She rapped the folder of digital prints. “When we go out to take another look at the cave, I want her to take photos before anyone crawls in there.”
“That’s a trick,” Torrez said.
“I know that Freddy crawled in at least part way, and probably more than once. There’ll be marks from that. I think he found the pistol in there, maybe on a second trip. The first time, Casey held his ankle.” Estelle smiled sympathetically. “She didn’t want him going in at all. I don’t think he could have seen much with just the flame from a cigarette lighter. That’s all he had with him.”
“The first time,” Torrez amended.
“Exactly. When I slid in there, I had to scoot over a bit before I saw the holster and belt fragment. Freddy would have seen that too, if the pistol was in the holster. But I don’t think it was.”
“Wouldn’t have been all covered with shit if it was,” the sheriff added. “You didn’t go farther than that?”
“No, I didn’t. And I lifted the holster just far enough to identify what it was. It’s still in place, and I want photos. Once we crawl in there and disturb the cave, that’s it. Whatever evidence there might be will be ruined. So we need to take our time and do this right.”
“Posey wants to be in on it,” Torrez said. “It’s their cat, after all.”
“I don’t blame him. We’re going to need all kinds of people that we don’t have. But right now, I don’t care about a dead cat. I care about finding out what happened to my neighbor.”
Chapter Twenty
By the time Estelle Reyes-Guzman was satisfied that she’d seen all there was to see with the four-wheeler, and then surveyed the photo array of the cat skull, finally finishing up by willing herself to review for things missed, it was nearly nine o’clock that Saturday evening. Before heading home, she phoned Bill Gastner. For a moment, she thought he might have gone out on another of his night-time recons, but on the eighth ring, he answered the phone.
“Damn, you’re patient.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Have you gone home yet?”
“No. I’m about to.” She quickly filled him in on what they had discovered. “I wanted to know if you’d found a date for the cat in my great-uncle’s journals Padrino.”
“No. But I’m gradually going blind trying,” he laughed. “I’ve gone back to 1967 so far. Nothing yet. No gato, no jaguar. ”