“Sure he is. And I’m not here all the time, either.”
“Just so.”
“Who could do that? Well, I could. Jerry, there. He could. He wouldn’t, but he could. There’s maybe half a dozen at most.”
“In Posadas.”
“Here in town. Now, you include Deming and a few other towns, there’s more. But if what you’re sayin’ happened the way you think it did, that’s…well, I don’t know.” Bergin groped for words. “That’s something kind of different.”
“Yes, it is. Very, very different. That’s why I want the ride.”
“That’s not one of your better ideas, Madame Undersheriff,” he said.
She regarded Jerry Turner’s Cessna 206 critically, trying to push commonsense agreement with the airport manager out of her mind. “There’s nothing that says this isn’t the plane that landed out on the gas company’s strip, Jim,” she said. “The wheelbase measurement is consistent.”
“Hell, that could change,” Bergin said. “Loaded heavy, your tire track is going to be one thing, empty and it’s going to be somethin’ else. I don’t see how you can measure that close.”
“May we can’t-but it’s close enough to suggest a match.”
“Look,” Bergin said, and his fingers groped for a cigarette. It was half out of the pack before he remembered that he was standing near an aircraft hangar, in close proximity to a full load of volatile fuel. He thrust it back and patted his pocket closed. “I don’t think anybody ought to be flying this airplane until we have a chance to really go over it, nose to tail. If she’s got auto fuel mixed in with avgas…and I realize that ain’t no big thing. But just the same…”
“Whoever used it didn’t have any qualms,” Estelle said. “Would he necessarily know the difference?”
Bergin laughed dryly. “Yes, he’d know. And we ain’t him. Havin’ a few of those qualms keeps us alive. Not to mention that it’s the middle of the goddamn night, with a short unlighted airstrip that has a fence at either end. Besides, what’s the difference? Maybe this is the plane…maybe it is. So what? What’s flyin’ it out there in the dark going to tell you?”
“I don’t know what it’s going to tell me,” Estelle said. “It’s just helpful. What I know is that it’s a link we need to explore-the sooner the better.”
“Helpful,” Bergin repeated. “Seems like it could at least wait till light.”
She nodded, not knowing how to explain what she felt. “It could. But they landed at night. I’d bet on it.” In her mind’s eye, she could see the Cessna sinking downward, with the apprehensive eyes of the passengers glued to the windows, staring out into the inky blackness of the desert. The landing lights would cut a swath, making the desert seem all the more ominous. The plane had touched down solidly, no bounces, no swerving-a perfectly executed landing followed by a long, straight rollout. And then the drift to the right, slowing more, swinging hard left perhaps with a burst of power-and then the first sign of a miscalculation, so out of place with the rest of the command performance.
“We can’t jump to easy answers,” Estelle said. “We’re so far out of the loop it’s pathetic, Jim. We don’t even know for sure where the three victims are from-most likely someplace south of the border, but we’re not sure. We haven’t found any paperwork, no personal belongings. The plane could have flown five hours south, and that would have put it pretty deep in Mexico, but where the passengers were actually picked up might just be a staging area.” She shrugged. “If I can put myself in the same situation, it might tell me something about the pilot. About the way he thinks.”
“You think the pilot is the killer?”
“I don’t know. He would almost certainly be involved somehow. He would have to know. And if the pilot did the shooting himself, that means the plane had to be parked for a few minutes untended while he got out to do his business. Right now we have no way to tell if that’s what happened. If the victims had any personal belongings, those stayed in the plane-we didn’t find anything scattered in the desert. I’m hoping you can help me with that.”
“Huh,” Bergin grunted. “And parked is parked, Estelle. When he stopped to let out passengers, he was parked. Whether for thirty seconds or five minutes don’t matter much.” He looked at the floor thoughtfully. “This airplane don’t have any seeps. No oil puddle from bein’ parked. So you can’t tell from that.” He heaved a sigh. “Tell you what. You want to fly out that way, let’s take my plane.”
“There’s no point in that.”
Bergin almost smiled. “I was afraid you’d say that.” He fumbled with his cigarettes again and laughed. “I don’t know why I let you talk me into these things.” He sighed. “Okay, tell you what. If Turner says it’s okay, fine. You got to give me a couple hours to check this bird over real good. Maybe even drain out the gas, if that’s in question. I don’t want any surprises.”
“Done. I’ll talk with Jerry.”
The big man turned a shade more pale as Estelle recited a short version of events to him. As she described the victims and how they were found, she saw his shoulders slump and his weight sag onto the fender of the BMW.
“Why would someone do something like that?” he asked finally. He looked quickly first at Bob Torrez and then at Estelle. “I hope to heaven you folks don’t think I had something to do with all this.”
“Someone used your airplane, sir. That’s what we think. If we can have your cooperation, we’d appreciate it. We’ll fill it up when we’re finished.”
“With avgas,” Turner said, trying to smile.
“You bet.”
“I don’t want to go, if that’s all right. For one thing, I’d have to put the seats back in.”
“That’s fine, sir. We won’t be gone long.”
She checked her watch. “Midnight straight up?” she asked Bergin.
“That’ll work. It’s crazy, but it’ll work.”
Chapter Eleven
Sheriff Torrez agreed to meet airport manager Jim Bergin and Estelle out at the gas company’s airstrip. “Somebody’s got to be there when you two crash through that barbed-wire fence,” he said. With the sheriff coordinating the search of local gas stations and fuel dumps, Estelle took a moment to prepare a brief statement for the media. Word of the triple homicide would certainly leak out, and the city papers and television stations would be calling, if they hadn’t already.
Each police agency would have its own spin on events, and she couldn’t count on the Border Patrol or the State Police or the INS to suggest that reporters call the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department for information. Some of them would anyway, and she didn’t want Gayle Torrez, who would be taking over from dispatcher Brent Sutherland at six the next morning, to be blindsided.
Without doubt, Frank Dayan, publisher of the Posadas Register, would be calling, searching for some angle to put his small weekly newspaper ahead of the metro media.
The cyclo-cross bike race, in its first year and just hours away, didn’t offer much news value-certainly not enough for metro news teams to travel to Posadas, wherever that was, to shoot footage of a crowd of spandex-clad people pedaling laboriously up Cat Mesa. But throw in a multiple homicide on the same turf, and the attraction would escalate.
The media interest would be sparked until everyone made the easy assumption that the three dead people were just another unhappy statistic-Mexicans whose drug deal in the desert had gone wrong, or migrants who had been ill-prepared for a long trek in the wilderness. That would lead to more sidebar stories in the Sunday papers about the growing problem of the border drug trade, or of illegals running afoul of border vigilante groups, or the push to finish the transcontinental border fence, or to a dozen other takes on the “border problem.”