“Just a few.”
“We don’t know if any of this,” she turned to frame the three bodies with both hands, “has anything to do with the airstrip, or the plane. We need to establish that.”
“Common sense says it does,” the sheriff said. County Road 14, passing by the entrance to the small airstrip, was the nearest byway, but it ran north-south, teeing into State 56. That state highway, heading northeast toward Posadas and southwest to the Mexican border of Regál, was a full mile south of this lonely spot in the desert. The border was eight miles by air, eleven by road. “For one thing, nobody’s tampered with the gate, near as I can tell. I didn’t find any tracks where they walked in across the desert….You can’t hide the tracks of three people.”
Estelle knew that to be true-as far as Robert Torrez was concerned. Hunting was his passion, whether pronghorn, deer, peccary, coyotes, or people.
“At least four,” Estelle corrected. She turned in a complete circle, trying to conjure a scenario in her mind that made sense. “They have nothing with them, though. No water bottles, no extra clothing, no weapons no…nothing.”
“Got to be a simple answer,” Torrez said.
“I think you’re right about the airplane,” she said. “That makes sense after a fashion.” She stood on her tiptoes, as if adding an extra inch or two would give her the panorama that she needed. “I’d like to have the county’s cherry picker down here. An overview might help.”
Torrez nodded. He looked at his wristwatch. “It’s three fifty-five. It’ll take an hour to get the maintenance crew out here with a bucket. In the meantime, I want Perrone to establish a TOD just as quick as he can. I don’t think these folks have been camped out here more than a couple of days, three or four at the most. Don’t smell like it.”
Estelle knelt, looking south. “Why here?” she mused. “Why here?”
“’Cause that’s where it was convenient,” Torrez said.
“It’s like real estate,” Estelle said. “Location, location, location.”
Chapter Three
Within two hours, the area surrounding the gas company’s runway looked like a movie set, complete with a Posadas County utility truck’s cherry picker hoisted aloft into the gusty late afternoon sky. Each time she shifted position, Estelle felt the bucket’s gentle sway. Her commanding view, with the lift truck parked fifty yards from the end of the runway and the bucket hoisted thirty feet high, told her nothing new. The three bodies lay in pathetic isolation on the prairie, a few tantalizing yards from the spot where they had apparently deplaned.
Sergeant Tom Mears worked with Deputy Tom Pasquale, and the “two Toms,” as the sheriff’s wife, Gayle Torrez, called them, had established that the pilot had stopped the aircraft just as the right tire sank into the sand, off the macadam and sixty-five feet from the end of the runway. Swinging wide to turn, the pilot had misjudged by mere inches, dropping first a main and then the nose wheel off the pavement. An odd mistake, Estelle thought, for someone who had landed a loaded aircraft on a short runway, most likely in the dead of night.
A night landing made sense to her. The risks of trying to cross the border and then land in this isolated place would escalate in daylight-State 56 was a busy highway, and a plane parked on the airstrip would be in plain view.
With tires precariously in the sandy gravel, it appeared that the pilot had elected to stop the aircraft, perhaps to off-load extra weight. The passengers had deplaned, their feet creating a welter of scuffed prints.
“That’s one question answered,” Estelle said aloud. Linda Real, the Sheriff’s Department’s photographer and Deputy Pasquale’s roommate, didn’t move a muscle. She hung on gamely as the bucket rocked and dipped like a stuck carnival ride.
“Which one?” she asked.
“The trail of shoe prints. I can see them from here.” Estelle swept her arm to indicate the route the three victims had apparently taken, and just that small motion bounced the bucket. Linda flinched. The trail was marked with a row of small wire-stemmed surveyor’s flags.
“We know-well, we’re close to knowing-that they came here by air. We know that in all likelihood they climbed out of the plane right there,” and she pointed to where the two Toms worked to pour plaster casts of the vague footprints and the one reasonably clear aircraft tire print. “The trouble is that when the pilot gunned the engine to pull the plane forward out of the sand, the prop wash obliterated most of the prints. That’s what I’m thinking right now. We’re not going to be able to tell much from the casts. But when he did that, he gave us a sequence of events.”
“You mean the footprints first, then gunning the engine to obscure them.”
“Exactly. That’s a start.”
“Are any of the shoe prints clear enough for a comparison?” Linda asked.
“Probably not. Even if we had some notion about what to compare them to. Maybe, maybe. That’s what we have right now. A big ‘maybe’ that they came in by plane, a big nothing beyond that.” She rested both forearms on the rim of the bucket, a posture so relaxed that Linda cringed. “So if they got off the plane right there, where was the killer? On the plane? Waiting in the bushes? Why did they do this?” Shifting position slightly, she felt the bucket sway gently under her. “Where were these people from, Linda? And where were they headed?”
“Mexico is an obvious choice,” Linda said.
“Sure enough. But they’re not migrants, Linda. This isn’t just a family headed to Hatch to pick green chile-not in May, anyway. His hands? The roughest thing he’s touched in years is a pencil. She hasn’t mopped her own floor in decades. I’d bet on it. Don y doña. And hijo…number-one son. That’s what I think. Where would people like that be heading after an illegal entry into the United States in the dead of night?” She looked off toward Posadas, and the slight motion of her turning rocked the bucket again. “And if not Mexico, then where? L.A.? Phoenix?” She turned to look east. “St. Louis? Chicago?”
“I’m betting on the killer being a fourth passenger-or the pilot,” Linda said. “It’s too complicated to think that he was waiting here. That doesn’t make sense to me. For one thing, there are no vehicle tracks other than the airplane’s, so we know he wasn’t just sitting there in a van, supposedly waiting to pick up a load of illegals. But why would he walk? And all the way to this end of the runway? How did he know this is where the plane would stop?”
“The wind, maybe,” Estelle said. She lifted her head and let the soft air play against her face. “What little there is feels like it’s from the southwest. If the pilot landed into the wind right now, right this minute, this is where he’d end up. But we don’t know what the wind conditions were when this all happened.” She thumped the side of the bucket. “If there was no wind, why didn’t he land eastbound, so the passengers could get off close to the road?”
“Or turn around and taxi back to the gate,” Linda said. “I think the killer was on the plane. For one thing, I don’t think someone intent on bumping off three people would walk across the desert for miles and miles, then hope he had the right spot. I think he was on the plane.”
“And that leaves us wondering, doesn’t it.” Estelle looked through the wide-angle lens of her camera again and for a moment watched Sheriff Torrez, Coroner Alan Perrone, and State Police Lieutenant Mark Adams working the area around the third victim. “If the killer did his business and then got back on the plane, was he the pilot?” She turned and looked at Linda. “Were there four on the plane originally, or five? Or more?”
The photographer shrugged carefully. “And if he didn’t get back on the plane, where is he now?”
“It’s a big desert out there,” Estelle said, and she sighed. How large the desert must have seemed for the three victims, how incomprehensible for a few awful minutes. None of this fitted the usual pattern-no plastic bags stuffed with cheap clothing, no plastic water jugs, none of the trappings of a desperate trudge across the desert for migrants seeking American minimum wage, a fortune for them.