“Help yourself,” Hocker said. “In fact, take it with you. Everything in that folder is a copy.”
“Here’s the deal,” I said. “It makes perfect sense to talk to Johnny Boyd. The one condition is that I want to go with you when you do. You saw earlier what kind of a temper the man has. And he’s entitled to that temper, up to a point. If he’s guilty of something, I want him nailed every bit as much as you do. Martin Holman was a friend of mine. But if Boyd is innocent, I don’t want him to run the gauntlet through holy hell.”
“I appreciate that,” Hocker said. “But I want my ducks in a row. I want to talk to Sergeant Mitchell first. And I want to talk to the dealer where the weapons were purchased, too. And I want to see all of the photos.”
“That’s easily done.”
Hocker nodded and stood up. “When?”
“Now’s fine,” I said. “Mitchell’s on duty. We were headed back to the office anyway. Follow us on in.”
Hocker turned to go, then stopped. “Do you happen to know where Boyd does his banking?”
“No, Walter. I don’t.”
Hocker nodded and followed Neil Costace back to their vehicle. I watched them go in the rearview mirror.
“Sir?” Estelle said, seeing the expression on my face.
I shook my head wearily. “You know what my trouble is?”
“I think I can guess, sir.”
I looked across at her. “My trouble is that I can’t bring myself to believe that Johnny Boyd would do something so stupid. I want those guys”-I nodded toward the rearview mirror-“to flush out some worthless, foreign terrorist who’s hiding in a barn somewhere, not one of my neighbors.”
Estelle pulled the Bronco into gear. “Johnny Boyd’s got a barn, sir. And I don’t think Posadas is a hotbed of terrorists.”
“You’re starting to think he’s involved somehow? Boyd, that is?”
She shook her head quickly. “I’m not saying that at all, sir. I don’t know what to think. But I tell you what would help. We all need to sit down around the conference table and put our various puzzle pieces together. That’s what you always drummed into my head. And now’s as good a time as any, before someone does something we’ll all regret.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
I suppose Walter Hocker would have been happier if some grizzled veteran had emerged from the basement darkroom, perhaps wearing an eyeshade, perhaps muttering an acerbic, cynical reply to every comment. I don’t think that he was prepared for Linda Real.
Linda was excited, and an excited Linda bubbled. She nodded rapidly as Estelle told her what we needed to see, her excited, lopsided grin getting wider and wider. When she was introduced to the two FBI agents, she barked a quick, unimpressed, “Hi,” as if they were merely in the way, and turned to Estelle and me.
“You won’t believe what I found, sir,” she said.
“I’m waiting,” I said. “Let’s use the table in the conference room.”
“When Sergeant Mitchell arrives, do you want me to send him right in?” Gayle Sedillos asked, and I nodded.
“She been working for you long?” Neil Costace asked as he followed me into the new conference room-one of Martin Holman’s pride and joys. The fancy maple-veneer table was twelve feet long. The black fake-leather chairs were almost comfortable. Costace glanced after Linda’s departing figure.
“Linda? About thirty-six hours, give or take,” I said. “We tend to lose track of time around here.”
Costace barked a staccato laugh and glanced at Hocker. “She’s got all the negatives from the sheriff’s camera?”
“She’s got one roll,” I said. “That’s all there was. Just the one in the camera itself. A single twenty-exposure roll.”
“She processed it here?” Hocker asked.
“Yes.”
“Color?”
“No. Black and white.”
“Is that what you usually use? Black and white?”
“It depends,” I said. “Most of the time, yes. We can do our own processing, and we’ve found over the years that color didn’t add much. Her husband”-I nodded at Estelle-“does most of the medical photography for us in color. Bruises don’t look like much in black and white.”
“I’m aware of all that,” Hocker said impatiently.
“And now that Officer Real is with us, if we can afford a color lab in next year’s budget, we’ll get it. One step at a time.”
In less than two minutes, Linda Real returned with a hefty manila folder.
“Let me lay all these out in the order they appear on the negative,” she said, and like a card dealer, she snapped out a set of sixteen eight-by-ten photos. I was delighted that she was taking complete control of the show-and-tell, not waiting to be prompted, not deferring to authority.
That done, she pointed at the photos that corresponded to the film’s negative numbers one, two, five, six, eleven, and twelve. “These are blurred because the camera was jarred.” She swirled a finger over number five. “Everything is uniformly blurred, but it’s the kind of blur you get from motion, not from being out of focus.”
She moved over to number thirteen. “This is the windmill picture, and Estelle already has a copy of it. Number fourteen is a line of fencing, or what appears to be a line of fencing, and a bunch of open grassland. There’s a hint of a road, or path, here in the left corner.” She paused for breath and tapped the next picture. “Number fifteen is a photo of a small stone building. Estelle also has that one. And then number sixteen is another shot of fence and pasture, with a grove of trees. You also have that. And it’s the last photo on the roll.”
She straightened up and looked at me. “Then what I did was to blow up each readable negative into four quadrants. That seemed a logical next step…sort of a survey process.” She started to slide number three up and out of the way, but Hocker held up a hand.
“By ‘last photo on the roll,’ what do you mean?”
Linda glanced at him, her crooked left eyebrow dancing just a bit. “The last one,” she said. “The last photo that the sheriff took.”
“No exposures followed that one?”
Linda frowned, no doubt thinking that Hocker was simple. “The last time his camera blinked,” she said and smiled. “The end of the negative is clear, unexposed film. There were no more exposures after this one.”
Hocker nodded, satisfied. Linda waited for a couple of pulse beats, and when it was clear that Hocker was finished, she reached out and placed four eight-by-ten enlargements underneath the third photo.
“Huh,” Hocker muttered. I stood beside him, leaning over the table. Estelle and Costace went around to the other side.
“Right,” Linda said in response to Hocker’s grunt. “I don’t see much there, either. It looks like the top of Cat Mesa, if I had to guess. All trees, one stretch of roadway just visible in the center. Now, number four is looking off to the north, from somewhere over the top of the mesa.” She placed the four quadrant enlargements underneath the photo.
“In this enlargement, you can see what might be ranch buildings way off in the distance to the north.”
“Boyd’s ranch,” I said. “I recognize the way the buildings are grouped.”
“Okay,” she said and plunged on. “Photos seven, eight, nine, and ten are all of the same area, sir. I don’t know where it is, or what it is, but apparently Sheriff Holman was taking a picture of this fence line.” She touched one of the photos. “There’s a characteristic spot where three fence lines meet, and another spot that looks like it could once have been a small pond. No vegetation of any sort. It appears in each one of the four photos.”
“Huh,” Hocker said.
“What’s interesting is that in each of the photos, no matter what the angle was between the airplane and the ground, the intersection of the three fences is in the center. That’s where he was aiming the camera.”