“Exactly,” I agreed, and Hugh nodded sagely. “You heard the shot, checked the time, and walked over to the fence?”
“Yes. And I saw one figure-I would guess it to be a man-walking back to a car by the intersection.”
“The grader was sitting still at the time?”
“It was.”
“Running?”
“I couldn’t swear that it was.”
“Couldn’t see an operator moving around?”
“Hell, I couldn’t even tell if there was anyone on board. My eyes aren’t what they used to be.”
“Ain’t that the truth. As the man-woman, whoever-walked back to the vehicle, how would you describe his pace, Hugh. Hustling, trotting, sprinting?”
“Walking. As best I could see. Just walking along.”
“And carrying…”
“Nothing that I could see. ‘Course, if he was right-handed and held the rifle in that hand, it’d be hidden mostly by his body.”
“True enough. You watched him get into the vehicle?”
“Well, sort of. I mean, it was a small car, you know. We got a lot of weeds and desert shit between here and there. Couldn’t see much.”
“Heard one door slam?”
“Didn’t hear any door slam,” Hugh corrected. “Too damn far for that.”
“You watched him drive off?”
“I did. He turned around in the intersection and drove back down Hutton into town.”
“Speeding? Big dust plume?”
“Nope. Just normal.” He looked askance at me. “You thinkin’ that wasn’t the shooter, then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, like I told Eduardo, I don’t see how it couldn’t be. And that says to me that you’ve got one cool cucumber.”
I turned around and regarded the house. “Where was Tody, then?”
“At the kitchen sink, right inside.” He pointed. “See that window that’s a little higher than the others? That’s right over the counter top beside the sink.”
“She has a minute?”
“’Course she does.”
Tody Decker looked like the nurse that she’d been for thirty years, neat and cool in shorts and polo shirt, fighting the battle of the waistline with a moderate paunch, legs a little heavy from years spent working on both the hospital and the high school’s unyielding concrete floors.
“This is just the most awful thing,” she announced after pumping our hands. “I mean in our little neighborhood. I told Sheriff Salcido the same thing. I just can’t believe it.” She leaned forward and stared at Estelle Reyes as if maybe she’d missed her at the handshake. “My word, you’re a gorgeous young lady,” she blurted. “And we know each other somehow.”
“Mrs. Decker, you were our school nurse when I was at the high school.” Estelle offered a warm smile.
“Well, that hasn’t been so long. My word, my old memory is so full of holes.”
“Tody,” I said, not wanting to settle into a round of reminiscence, “after you heard the shot, you looked outside?”
She pointed back at the kitchen. “I heard the shot and then Hugh got up and I heard him say, ‘Now what the…are they shooting at?” She smiled demurely and glanced affectionately at her husband. “I won’t tell you what he actually said. And then I looked out across the field. I remember that there was a road grader out there. That’s all I saw.”
“No car, no one walking?”
“Sheriff, I’m not saying there wasn’t someone. It’s just that the screen over the window makes it hard. I think that I saw the car, but it was a little thing.”
“A compact, maybe?”
“No, I mean at that distance, it’s just too far to see clearly.”
“Well, I saw the Goddamn car and the guy walking back toward it.”
I gazed off to the north, trying to form the image. “So…and this is important, Hugh.” With one arm, I pointed at the spot where the car would have been parked. With the other, I made an angle back toward the road grader. “I want to know how far the man was from the car at the very first instant you saw him. How far did he have to walk to make it back to the car?”
Hugh frowned, the expression producing a rumple of his massive forehead. He turned, and held up his own arms, mimicking my geometry. “My guess…my guess is that he was maybe a hundred feet from the car when I caught sight of him. And he was already walking back toward it.” He swept one arm to the east and sighted along it. “So right about there. Yeah, that would be about right.”
I wondered what he could see through his thick and not entirely clean glasses.
“See there’s a good-sized group of tumble weeds just past the little dip there?”
The “tumble weeds” could have been long horn steers as far as Hugh was concerned. “So he actually had to walk a little bit to reach the car. I mean, as much as twenty or thirty paces.”
“That’s a fact. I had time, thinkin’ about it now, to watch him walk for a little bit. I was wondering if he was the one who had fired the shot, and at what. See, the road grader was way the hell over there,” and he nodded eastward.
“And you couldn’t hear it or see the operator.”
“That’s right. You know, sheriff, it don’t sit just real good with me knowing that Larry Zipoli was just lying out there, shot dead, while I sat here drinking iced tea.” He shook his head. “What time was he found?”
“He’d been there a while,” I offered. “But that’s the way these things go. Someone might have driven by and never noticed him.”
“Could have, I suppose.” He slid one huge arm around his wife’s shoulders, waiting for the next question. But I didn’t have any. The Decker’s portrait of events did nothing to alter the chilling image of the scenario that I imagined. Step out of the car, maybe walk as much as a hundred feet or so, take aim and fire at a defenseless man. And then stroll away.
Chapter Nineteen
“You see the problem?” I asked Estelle Reyes. She’d been taking a slew of notes in a small spiral notebook. I didn’t wait for her to read my mind. “On the one hand, Hugh Decker hears one shot, and then sees a man…a person…walking back to a parked car.” I held up an index finger. “If we take him to be the shooter, then he’s as cold and calculating as they come. No rush, no fuss. He shoots once, doesn’t check his target, and saunters away. Once he’s back in the car, he doesn’t even drive down Highland to see what damage he’s done.” I shrugged. “Now tell me how that jibes with Bobby Torrez’s experiments.”
“Do you trust what Mr. Decker claims to have seen, sir?”
“Now that’s a question.” I swung the car onto Hutton, and we approached the intersection with Highland at a sedate ten miles an hour. For a moment, neither of us said anything, both of us looking off to the east along Highland, trying to imagine circumstances on that quiet day. To the south, I could see the back of the Deckers’ house, squat and secure among a half dozen other homes, the big cottonwood dominating their double lot.
“Let me put it this way. Were I a defense attorney, I’d be ecstatic to see Hugh Decker as a prosecution witness.”
I stopped the car, hunching forward over the steering wheel, linking the fingers of both hands. “Most of the time, something breaks for us. Some insignificant little thing pops its head up. If we stay receptive, maybe we see it.” I shrugged philosophically. “We’re coming at this thing from several directions. We keep at it, and something will break.”
The young lady was an easy passenger to talk with-well, to. She didn’t blab pointless theories, or push an opinion based on nothing. She appeared to absorb, but who knew when she would factor everything out.
“I tell you what,” I said, looking for a rise of some sort-a comment, an impression, something from behind those inscrutable black eyes that had been watching us all day. “Tell me what happened, and you’ll make detective sergeant by tomorrow morning.”