“Are there any other angles you want before we go back down?”
“Ah, no,” Linda said. “I have the whole thing six ways from Sunday.”
Estelle nudged the control and the bucket sank to earth with a faint hydraulic sigh. Bucky Sanchez, the county worker who had driven the bucket truck out to this lonely spot, met them as they stepped off.
“You guys done with me?” he asked hopefully.
“We are,” Estelle said. “And thanks, Bucky.”
“Anytime,” he said, glancing nervously to the west. He managed a weak smile. “And I don’t really mean that, either. You think you know what happened out here?”
“No,” Estelle said. “But every little bit that we can learn is bound to help.”
“Worst thing I ever saw,” he said. “When I drive out back to the county road, do you want me to stay over to the side of the runway, same way I came in?”
“Perfect.” Estelle nodded. “And if someone asks you what’s going on out here, just plead ignorance.”
“That ain’t hard,” Sanchez said. “Why somebody’d do a thing like this is beyond me. Way beyond.”
She turned at the approach of Tom Mears. “We’re finished,” she said to the sergeant.
“Inspiration from above?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” Estelle said. “But it’ll give us some overview pictures to ponder.”
Mears looked down at the trowel in his hand as if the answers might lie there. “One of us needs to run out to the airport to talk with Jim Bergin. I’m kinda curious to see if there’s a standard wheelbase measurement that’s of any use to us.” He pointed across the pavement. “We’ve got a good measurement between the main gear in any number of places. It’s right at ninety-seven inches-más o menos. It’s hard to be exact, but it’s a start. By the way, if you look right there,” and he pointed at where a small yellow plastic evidence marker rested beside the runway, “you can see where he cranked the nose wheel over when he knew he was getting hung up on the edge of the pavement. I’m guessing that’s what happened. That gives us an idea of the distance and geometry between the main gear and the nose gear. Again, nothing exact, but it helps.”
“It’s interesting that he did that,” Estelle said. “And you’re right. Jim might have some ideas. He might have seen a plane pass through that didn’t mean anything special to him at the time.”
“Sure enough. We’re not talking a large plane, I’m guessing. The footprint of even a light twin-engine plane would be substantially wider than a single engine, I’d think.”
“We have a starting point,” she said. “But you know, I’m curious why they walked where they did.” She looked off through the brush, her gaze following the trail of yellow flags that had been thrust into the desert. Why not just fly to Posadas and get off there, she wondered. Most of the time, Posadas Municipal was untended at night, even deserted. The facility was a comfortable six miles from town, far enough that a conservative landing wouldn’t even be heard except by a handful of folks who wouldn’t care about casual air traffic in the first place.
“The possibility exists that the three were brought to this spot to be executed,” Estelle said. “That simple.”
“Interesting,” Mears said cryptically. “That’s what Bobby thinks, too. And they were shot here, not somewhere else and dumped. Execution is the one scenario that explains a lot of what we’re seeing. There was no scuffle, no fight. Nothing that left any tracks, anyway.” The lift truck started and they watched it trundle back down the runway toward the gate and the county road beyond.
“Tomás, we need the long tape,” Mears said, and Pasquale held up the reel. “Let’s get some numbers.”
He hesitated and turned back to Estelle. “Apropos of nothing, are you ready for Saturday night?”
“I haven’t been so nervous in a long, long time.” She laughed. Her son’s first recital, in which he would be performing along with nearly a dozen other music students, added another dimension to an otherwise already hectic weekend. Tom Mears’ fifteen-year-old daughter Melody would also play, but she was a veteran of half a dozen such performances.
“This is a new experience for us,” she added.
Sheriff Torrez made his way carefully through the vegetation, walking back to the runway. He greeted them with a heavy sigh, and Estelle didn’t know if that was because of the ugly crime, or the nagging pain in his hip irritated by all the walking. During another magic moment two years before, his rump had gotten in the way of a.223 bullet, and the recovery had been long, slow, and painful. “Hey,” Torrez said.
Estelle held up her hands in frustration.
“I know what you mean,” the sheriff said. “Nothin’ except three bodies. All shot one time. Pop, pop, pop. Hey, look-do we need to cancel the race?”
“Cancel the race?” Estelle looked at the sheriff blankly. As if the young man going airborne into the rocks off the mesa rim had been from another lifetime instead of just hours before, Estelle hadn’t given the race a moment’s thought. In just a few days, 150 cyclists would be pounding down County Road 14 during the second half of the Posadas Cyclo-Cross 100. They would ride as far south on County Road 14 as Bender’s Canyon Trail, and turn east, the rough and broken two-track roughly paralleling the state highway. There would be no reason for the cyclists to ride another mile farther south to this remote place.
“I don’t think we can do that,” she said.
“The hell we can’t,” Torrez said.
“No, I mean there’s no reason to. We’ll have someone posted at the intersection of the canyon trail and the county road to make sure no one strays.” She glanced across to where Deputy Tom Pasquale was recording numbers from their measurements. “Tom will be one of the cyclists, and that’ll give us another set of eyes.”
“Bad time to be spread so thin,” Torrez said, then held up a plastic evidence bag containing three empty shell casings. “Niners,” he said. “I figured as much. It’s something, but it ain’t much.” He turned and waved at Linda Real. “Hey? Needja.” He lowered his voice. “Interesting thing is that it looks like the killer didn’t move much.”
“How so?”
Torrez hefted the bag. “Every empty case we’ve found was within a fifteen-foot circle. Like he stood in one spot and just pivoted with the target.” He hefted the bag thoughtfully, then reached out a hand toward Linda, touching her lightly on the shoulder as if to make sure that she was listening. “I need pictures of the brass locations,” he said. “Follow me over.”
“Yep,” Linda said, and dropped her voice an octave, rending a fair impression of the sheriff. “Pictures.”
“Oh,” Torrez said, stopping in his tracks. “No belts.”
“Belts?”
“None of ’em had belts on.”
“Were they tied with them, maybe?”
“No evidence of that. They just weren’t wearin’ ’em. Maybe they were, at one time. You can see the upset in the loops on their pants. But no belts now. The boy not wearin’ a belt don’t surprise me. Maybe even dad. But mama’s got a little belly…. She’s gonna need something. Think on that.” He shrugged. “Where you headed now?”
“Sarge is going to swing by the airport to talk with Jim Bergin. Maybe there’s a profile of the aircraft we can conjure. I’m going to put together a pack of faces.” She gazed across at the bodies. “Someone knows these people, Bobby. They’re somebody. You can’t just pluck them out of the world and not have somebody notice.”
“They ain’t wetbacks,” the sheriff said. “That’s for sure.”
“Someone knows them. And that’s an advantage for us. The faster I can get a set of faces online, the better.”
“See what Naranjo thinks. My money is on Mexico.”
“Exactly.” Capitán Tomás Naranjo of the Mexican Judiciales could probe far more dark corners south of the border than the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department. Location, Estelle thought. Did the pilot see the landing strip far below, deserted and inviting? Not at night, he didn’t. Did he know beforehand that it was there? If he could read an aeronautical chart, yes.