Eventually she waved a hand and the sound of the vacuum died.
“The bats now have the absolutely cleanest quarters in the entire southwest,” she said.
“You think they’ll appreciate it?” Linda’s voice sounded oddly metallic through the earphone’s electronic boosters.
“I doubt it. It’s just not as homey as it was.” Estelle lay quietly for a moment, letting the ache subside in her shoulders. “Would you ask Bobby for his Kel-lite? I want to check one more thing.” In a moment the large, black flashlight tapped her leg lightly. With the light, and moving with exquisite care, she wormed her way forward.
“How far are you going to go?” A note of worry crept into Linda’s voice. She rested a hand on the back of Estelle’s right boot.
“Just a bit.” Her target was the vent, the chimney, toward the back of the little cave. The opening was a body-length from the rise where she had earlier balanced the laptop and the spotlight. To reach the vent and be able to peer into it, to face the rush of air from somewhere deep in the earth, meant she would have to squirm all the way in, heading slightly downward. And there was no room to turn around, even if she rolled onto her side and hunched herself into the smallest ball possible. She would have to edge in on her elbows and toes, and back out the same way.
“This is not a good idea,” Linda whispered, and Estelle laughed in spite of her absurd position. Linda was right, of course. But short of systematically dismantling the mesa ton by ton, she could think of no other way to convince herself that she’d probed whatever secrets this little spot guarded.
“What a calendar shot, eh, hermana? ” Estelle said.
“Oh, you betcha,” the photographer said. Her calendars had become treasured possessions each year, with one of the department staff featured each month. The portraits were always wonderfully comical or a pull on the heartstrings, taken during the year when opportunity presented itself.
“Just give me some warning when you’re going to pop that thing. I don’t want to crack my head against mother rock.” As Estelle crawled forward, her breath coming loudly in the respirator, she discovered that the downslope was uncomfortably angled. What had first appeared as an insignificant grade now registered on the muscles of her forearms. The slope wasn’t enough for her to slide forward, but it was going to be a difficult squirm to climb back out. She paused, her belly resting on the entry hump of rock.
“You know, if a body was lying here,” she said, “it wouldn’t be real hard to push it the rest of the way in.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Linda replied.
“That’s about as far as you need to go,” Bob Torrez said, his voice boosted by her electronic headphones.
“Almost.” By the time her thighs rested on the entry, she could almost touch the rim of the vent with her fingers. The flow of air was a constant wash, cool enough that it felt wonderful against her sweat-tickled forehead. She edged the flashlight forward and switched it on, amplifying the unfocused illumination from the spotlight. The vent, really little more than a yawning crack in the limestone, narrowed quickly to just inches, a little passageway of sharp edges not much wider than a the wingspread of a small bat.
The top of her hardhat touched the rocks, and she flattened a bit more, spreading the bipod of her arms, wincing as the rocks dug into her elbows and forearms. The sheriff mumbled something, but Estelle ignored him. In another eighteen inches, she’d squirmed in as far as she could, the roof sloping down to block her passage. Her face was within a foot of the vent, and she reminded herself that any bats snoozing in that protected spot might burst out past her in an explosion of little leathery wings. She had no room to startle without cracking into the rock.
The flashlight beam showed nothing except limestone, the minerals in the rock twinkling through eons of dust. The vent angled down out of sight.
“Turn on the vacuum,” she said, and in a moment Linda did so, the hose jerking with the suction. Estelle worked it forward, shoving the nozzle as far into the vent as she could, feeling for the trickle of particles as they shot down the hose.
She moved slightly, repositioning the hose. Covering the stone surface a centimeter at a time, she toured with the flashlight beam, looking into each small cranny. It was the wink of bright brass that attracted her attention. Wedged into a tiny crevice to the left of the vent, its position hidden by a projection of rock but announced by a tiny swatch of gray splashed on the limestone, the mangled piece of metal had come to rest.
Pulse now pounding, she signaled that the vaccum be switched off.
“Go ahead and pull out the hose,” she said, and as it snaked past, she forced herself to breathe slowly, methodically. “Linda, you there?”
“Sure.”
“I need your camera.”
“If you come out, I can get in there.”
“No need. Just set it on auto and macro. And I’ll need the tissue for the flash.”
“You got it. Hang on just a second.” Linda’s hand didn’t leave her boot. “You all right?”
“Perfecto, ” Estelle said.
“What did you find?”
“The puzzle piece,” the undersheriff said.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Sheriff Robert Torrez held the plastic evidence bag so that full sun caught it, his eyebrows knit with concentration as he turned the bag this way and that.
“We don’t know if this is the bullet that passed through the victim’s skull,” he said.
“No, we don’t.” Estelle hunched her shoulders. “But it’s consistent. ” To even consider that it might not be the projectile in question was unthinkable, but she forced herself to remain patient and explore doubts.
“We need more’n that,” Torrez said.
“Yes, we do. But it’s a start.”
“Let’s assume it is the one,” Bill Gastner agreed. He took the bag handed to him by the sheriff and then knelt beside the tarp. He held the little bag close to the frontal bone of the skull. “It had just enough energy to do that, because that exit hole isn’t very big.”
“You’re right about that,” Torrez said. “It ain’t like a magnum shockwave blew off his face. The exit is about the size of a nickel.”
Gastner held the bag up for the gathered officers to see. “The hollow point is mushroomed pretty thoroughly, but it isn’t broken up.”
“So it wasn’t movin’ too fast by the time it busted out of his head.
“So…that’s consistent. ” Torrez observed. “And for it to end up where it did, he would have had to be in the process of entering that little cave. At least lying on the slope of rock so he could see in.”
“Why would he have been doing that?” Torrez asked. “What’s he lookin’ at? The dyin’ cat?”
“I don’t know. That, or curiosity at the air flow, maybe.”
“If the same gun killed both the cat and this guy,” Bill Gastner mused, “that’s an interesting scenario. Really interesting.”
“Damn confusing, is what it is,” the sheriff muttered. “Cat ended up over by the packrat nest, not in that cave.”
“That’s where it ended up,” Estelle offered. “But it could have crawled into the deepest corner of the cave and died. Our victim went in after it, maybe. When he was convinced that it was dead, he hauled it out. Or somebody did.”
“Would you do that, Madame Spelunker?” Gastner asked. “Intrepid explorer of the earth’s bowels?”
“No, I wouldn’t. But a hunter would, right?” She looked at Torrez.
“Sure,” he said. “No big deal. Jaguar’s a hell of a trophy. He sure as hell wouldn’t just leave it.”
“But he’d sure have to be convinced that it was dead, dead, dead,” Gastner said. “Imagine being trapped in that tiny space with 180 pounds of wounded cat?”
“Freddy would have done it if he’d thought that the cat was dead.”