“He would have had to leave after his parents both went to work,” Estelle said.
“Certainly, unless the Arnetts were so numb they didn’t bother to check the boy this morning-or open the garage to see that the car is gone. I think it’s likely that he left after they did, though. Mom and Dad go off to work this morning, and the boy is home…we assume.”
There’s a limit to how long you can park at an intersection, even when it’s a cop car. I pulled 310 out of my lane and idled to the curb. Two cars-what amounts to a traffic jam in Posadas-slid by, both drivers looking over at me curiously. Or perhaps my passenger.
“It’s now five forty-five,” I added. “To guess at an answer to your question, the boy could have a nine or ten hour head start. How scary is that. He could be…” I shrugged. “You name it. He could be anywhere.”
“I’m wondering why he waited so long before taking off.”
“Well, think about it. For a while, maybe he thought he’d pulled it off. Keep mum, just like a school kid. He didn’t even have to say, ‘I didn’t do it!’.” I shrugged. “There’s also the possibility that he didn’t know what he did, that somehow, he didn’t even see Larry Zipoli inside that grader. He didn’t walk over to check, and later in the day, when he heard what happened, he’s petrified. He doesn’t know who knows what. We started talking to his buddies today, right? This morning, in fact. We stopped Tom Pasquale out on West Bustos. What time did we do that?”
Damned if she didn’t know right where that particular notebook page was. “Nine fifty-five, sir.”
I reached for my aluminum clip board and scanned my own log for verification. She was right.
“You think young Mr. Pasquale called Mo? I mean, he got stopped by the cops-that’s news, right? That’s good stuff. Call a friend and tell ’em you got stopped for rolling a stop sign on a bike. How cool is that. But Tommy didn’t say that he reached Mo this morning, or that he talked with him.”
“Very likely, sir. If he knew that Mo had not gone to school either.”
“Well, shit. There’s that.” I frowned. “But regardless, by Thursday morning, Mo would have to be living under a rock not to know about the death. Time to split. Time to run. Five or six hours ago, maybe. Sixty-five miles an hour in that Pontiac, and he’s three hundred miles away.”
“To where, sir?”
I laughed. “That’s why we need your woman’s intuition, sweetheart.” I didn’t know Estelle Reyes well enough to excuse calling her “sweetheart”, but what the hell. I was impressed. Let her sue me.
Back at the office, we spent fifteen minutes with Sheriff Eduardo Salcido, who looked like shit after his doctor’s appointment. He wanted nothing more than to go home to bed, and I encouraged that very thing. I would have done the same if sleep was my friend. He listened as I filled in the informational chinks.
“He’s only seventeen,” Eduardo observed. “He’s not going to get far.”
I didn’t argue, since there was no predicting what the kid would do, and history had proven that teenagers could accomplish all kinds of things, nefarious or otherwise.
At 7:15 p.m., we were assisting State Police Officer Mark Adams with a roll-over accident on the interstate seven miles west of Posadas. Life goes on. Just because we had a mess on our hands with Zipoli’s killer, the rest of the world didn’t slip into suspended animation. The rolled car was totaled, but four occupants inside, including two little kids, were just shaken. It took some soothing to convince them that their luck hadn’t run out. The family all rode in one ambulance to Posadas General for a check up. The two little kids needed Teddy Bears, and Adams had only one. I don’t know why Estelle looked surprised when I hauled another out of 310’s trunk.
Adams and I made sure the family had arrangements at the Posadas Inn via a courtesy car from the motel, and I left them with my card and assurances that the Chavez brothers at Chavez Ford-Lincoln Mercury would take care of them the next morning.
I was jotting in a log notation before I left the hospital parking lot when one of the county Broncos pulled up beside me. I hadn’t seen the vehicle turn in off the street, and it stopped with a jolt after circling to approach head on, driver to driver.
“Evening, sir,” Bob Torrez greeted. “You all set here?”
I nodded. “Nothing serious except a totaled car. The family is going to spend the night at the Inn. Did you see the sheriff?”
“For a little bit. He headed home. He said the doctor wanted to admit him, and he refused.”
“That’s smart,” I scoffed, feeling a sympathetic twinge. “What did you find out?”
“Mears and me worked on the computer and the case match.” He managed a small grin-hysterics by his standards. “The firing pin and bolt face of Arnett’s.32 Winchester Special matched the impressions on the base of the blown out.30–30 casing.” Torrez sounded as if he were reading a prepared statement. “It’s all packed up to go to the FBI tomorrow morning for confirmation.”
“Of course it matched,” I grumbled. “It was Arnett’s gun, and Arnett’s shell casing. The kid was careless and grabs either the wrong rifle or the wrong ammo. It’s a long shot that Mark would make the mistake himself.” I thumped the steering wheel. It was one of those things that we needed to know for sure, but I would have been astonished and flummoxed and stuffed in a quandry if it hadn’t matched. “A cartridge taken from Arnett’s ammo box, fired in some other gun, and then returned to the box? Not damn likely, Bobby. What else do you have?”
“Nothin’ on the computer. I mean nothin’ we need to know.” Torrez pulled two large black and white photos from an envelope. He handed them across to me, and it took a while for me to recognize what I was looking at. Enlarge something umpty-ump times, and it loses some focus. The cannalure-that criss-crossed channel around the circumference of the bullet into which the shell casing crimps-showed clearly enough. The body of the bullet was a mass of fine scratches, dings, and dents-almost microscopic marks most of which could be explained by the manufacturing process.
“That’s the slug from Zipoli’s brain,” Torrez said.
“I see that.” The hugely distorted tip ran off the right side of the photo margin. I held the second photo just above the first. The second photo was a different bullet, one that still showed some distortion from firing. “Where’d you do this?”
“They got a water tank over at maintenance,” Torrez said. “Kinda messy, but it works to trap the bullet.”
“Nice photos.” I lined up cannalure to cannalure. “What am I supposed to see?” I held the photos so Estelle could see them, although the car’s lame dome light made it difficult.
“The scuffs where the shell casing crimps the bullet are in exactly the same place,” the deputy said. Sure enough, they were.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that in all likelihood the same reloading die reloaded both bullets. What are the odds that two different people set two different reloading dies so that the crimps are identical?”
“I have no idea. And in all likelihood, that’s what a defense attorney is going to question.” I looked across at Torrez. “What do you think?”
“I think the bullet in Zip’s head came from one of Arnett’s cartridges, sir. I think that’s obvious.”
“We think it did. What did the sheriff say? You told him all this?”