She shook her head but stopped. It must have hurt. “I don’t have any idea. I mean I was tied up with a pillowcase over my head and was on the floor. I couldn’t see anything.”
“How long did he drive after he put you in the car?”
She thought about it. “I don’t know.”
“Ten minutes?”
“No. More.”
“Twenty?”
“Yeah, about twenty. Twenty minutes.”
“He didn’t go anywhere else, just straight up the mountain?”
She focused her eyes on me, sad that she couldn’t help. “I don’t know.”
“It was a V6 Jeep. Was the motor straining to go up the mountain?” She nodded. “Then maybe it was the pay phone at the South Fork Lodge. Did you hear any other voices while he was stopped?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah.”
It was only a little better than nothing.
When I got back out to reception on my way to room 31, Saizarbitoria was still asleep, but Vic was waiting for me. She’d gotten the pillow under his head and held the Basquo’s duty belt and Beretta.
I spoke in a whisper. “He wake up?”
She whispered back. “Yeah, but then went right back out.”
“Give you any fight about surrendering his sidearm?”
“No.”
It was state law that after a shooting, the officer had to hand in his/her weapon until a formal review had been completed. I sat beside her, and we both looked at him. “Just what he needs, to be on temporary leave right now.”
She shrugged. “I figured I’d save you at least one shitty job.”
“Thanks.”
She unsnapped the safety strap on Sancho’s semiautomatic. “At the risk of cheering you up?” I looked at her. “He came through.”
“Yep.” I smiled as I watched him sleep. “He did.”
“How close was it?”
“Very close.” I croaked a nervous laugh. “How stands the kingdom?”
“Amazingly quiet.” She glanced out the window and into the maelstrom—it looked like heaven’s comforter had ripped loose. “It’s Saturday and snowing like a bitch, so the citizenry has shown a noteworthy amount of common sense in staying home.”
“I love Saturday blizzards.”
“Me too.” She sighed. “We do have one visitor back at the office.”
“Who?”
“Gina Stewart. She says she wants to talk to Duane, and she wants you there.”
“Great. I get to hold her hand while she tells her husband that she’s having somebody else’s baby.” I yawned. “I’m going to need you to call up South Fork Lodge and see if Wayne or Holli Jones spoke with Felix Polk or overheard the conversation he might have had there last night.”
“Anything else?” She leaned toward me, bumping her shoulder against mine. “The ME is probably parked at the rest stop near Pryor Mountain, but his office says he’s on his way as of about an hour ago and just think, we get to reintroduce Felix Polk to his thumb.”
“It’s the little things on the job that make it all worthwhile, isn’t it?”
She smiled up at me with the wolflike tooth evident. “You know, I think I’m rubbing off on you.”
About forty comments leapt to mind, but I let them all pass. “Could you call Ruby and ask her to make sure Gina stays in the reception area? After that, if you want to tag along, Isaac’s doing a pre-examination on Polk.”
“Oh, joy.”
I stood. “I need to talk to Duane before Gina does.”
She increased the wicked smile she reserved for special occasions and stood beside me. “Well, he’s remarkably available.”
One of the pre-mort procedures consisted of examining the body externally and getting the clothes cut off before rigor, if possible; consequently, Felix Polk now lay on the metal tray with no thumb and no clothes.
“What do you make of that?” The Doc folded his arms and stood by the small parts dissection table.
“He’s hung like a fucking cocktail sausage.”
The Doc and I looked at her as she shrugged Sancho’s duty belt farther onto her shoulder. “Well, he is.”
What Isaac Bloomfield was referring to was the amount of intricate tattooing that covered the majority of the man’s body. “Prison tats?”
The Doc gripped his chin. “I’m no expert, but I would say yes.”
I turned to Vic. “Go get the Basquo.” She departed without further comment, and I turned back to Isaac. “Anything else abnormal that you can see?”
He shook his head. “Textbook center shot. I would imagine his death was relatively instantaneous. Why?”
I studied the tattoos on Felix Polk. “We didn’t take photographs, and we transported the body. I just don’t want there to be any abnormalities that might lead anyone to be asking questions about the action Sancho took.”
He nodded. “You’ll get a clean bill from me. You have the weapon Polk was holding when Saizarbitoria dispatched him?”
“I do. An antique Luger, locked and cocked, and if he hadn’t done what he did it would be me lying here on the table, unsuited and unbooted.”
The door opened, and Saizarbitoria followed Vic in. He was yawning but stopped when he saw the body of the man he’d killed.
“I wouldn’t bring you in here, but with your time at Rawlins you’re the closest thing to an expert that we’ve got.”
He stood there for a moment more. It may very well be the case that confronting the body of someone you’ve killed is the hardest thing on earth to do. I watched him as he stood there, his foot on the gas but not moving. You convince yourself that what you did was the right thing, but there’s that hard, cold fact that of all the things you can do as a human being—this is one you cannot undo.
He stepped closer, swallowed, and leaned over the corpse. “Definitely state, possibly federal.” He peered at the numerous shapes and designs. “Some of these are freehand, others are machine.”
Isaac looked at him. “I didn’t know that they have tattoo parlors in prison.”
The Basquo shook his head. “They don’t. The inmates make them out of a toy slot car motor, a hollowed- out ballpoint pen, a guitar string, and a nine-volt battery. It’s a crono, 115.” He looked up at us, aware that we had no idea what he was talking about.
Vic, of course, asked. “What the fuck does that mean?”
“A written infraction to give or get tattoos inside.” His eyes returned to the body. “These things can tell you everything about the man if you read them correctly.”
“Such as?”
“Who he is, where he’s from, what he’s done . . . Everything. I’ve seen guys stupid enough to put their DOC numbers on themselves.”
There was a particularly extravagant heart with flames and three-leaved shamrocks, unfortunately near the bullet hole in the man’s own heart. “Does the AB stand for what I think it does?”
He nodded. “Aryan Brotherhood, the white supremacist gang.”
“What about the spiderwebs with the FP?”
“Those are his initials, and the webs represent doing time. The tombstones on his chest stand for the years he was inside.”
I pointed at another one with a star and more tombstones. “That one?”
“Huntsville, Texas, the numbers mean from ’78 to ’83.”
“SWP ?”
“Supreme white power.”
“SB ?”
The Basquo shook his head. “I don’t know, but we can cross-check the online systems.” He indicated another batch of symbols. “The stone wall with railroad tracks here means San Quentin. Again, the numbers mean he was in from ’85 to ’97.”
Vic chimed in. “Thank you, Johnny Cash.”
I studied the dead man. “That’s a long stretch.”
The Basquo continued. “That’s where and when the Aryan Brotherhood began, so I guess we have a founding member here.” He shrugged. “They don’t take to wannabes. If you bullshit your tats, they skin them off you with a razor-blade and a pair of pliers.”