“That may have been exactly what he was doing,” Costace said gently. “Ego’s a wonderful thing,” he added. “Reyes-Guzman is leaving. You said that Sergeant Mitchell has a standing job offer. This guy here”-he reached out and touched Bob Torrez on the elbow-“is getting himself married off, or so I’m told, and who the hell knows where he’ll end up? And you’re rumored to be retiring. You think it’s unusual that Martin Holman felt just a little bit pressured, Bill? What was the last major case he worked by himself? Or even led the way?”
“None,” I said.
“Well, there you are, then. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or a psychiatrist to figure out Martin Holman’s motivation. The brainstorm hit him that he could get aerial photos-and that’s a pretty good idea in itself. The chance came up when his brother-in-law arrived for a visit. Martin just ran out of luck.”
“All this goddam tragedy for a handful of goddam mangy antelope,” I said. “Somebody told him that there were impounded antelope somewhere around here. He could have just asked where the antelope were and then driven out to the Finnegans and asked, ‘Are you impounding wildlife on your property?’ If the man said no, then he could have driven out here with Bob Torrez or any of the other deputies and taken a million photos from the ground and-
Costace interrupted my diatribe with a wave of his flashlight. “Bill…that’s what you would have done. And in retrospect, that’s what Holman should have done, or just turned the complaint over to the Game and Fish folks-and there’s some evidence that he might have been trying to do that. But the opportunity came along to fly over the site. That’s not so unreasonable. I don’t guess he thought about the possibility of being shot down.”
“There’s still a problem,” Torrez said calmly. “The antelope are over in this area. The aircraft was two miles north of here when it was hit.”
I shrugged. “There are a couple of ways to explain that,” I said. The cellular phone in the Bronco rang shrilly before I had a chance to proffer even one explanation. It continued to ring while Bob Torrez jogged the considerable distance back to the truck.
“Whoever fired the shot could have watched the plane making passes and just gotten nervous. When it passed overhead, he let fly.”
“He, meaning Richard Finnegan,” Neil Costace said.
“Odds are good,” I replied.
“Sir!” Torrez shouted from the vehicle, and I turned. He waved his flashlight urgently. By the time I reached the Bronco, Torrez had already turned the unit around and was waiting with his foot on the brake pedal, passenger door open.
My first thought as I approached the truck was, “What the hell has Pasquale done now?”
“They’ve got a man down at the Pierpoint,” Torrez said as I slid into the seat. He pulled the Bronco into gear, and Neil Costace just managed to sidestep the door.
“Now what the hell-” I started to say.
“Richard Finnegan got himself stabbed,” Torrez barked, and Neil Costace turned with an oath and sprinted toward his own vehicle. “Follow us on down.”
I yanked my shoulder harness around me and snapped the buckle, pulling the belt very, very tight. The Pierpoint Bar and Grill was in downtown Posadas, twenty winding miles away.
In a handful of half-airborne seconds, we reached the gate and Torrez slid the Bronco to a stop, leaping out the door before I could even find my seatbelt buckle. He tore open the gate, sprinted back to the truck and we shot through, leaving the range etiquette of gate closure to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
As we charged down the hill that night, I didn’t have much time for reflection, and I certainly didn’t want to distract Robert Torrez with conversation. The county road into town was twisting, gravel-strewn on the corners, and populated with dimwitted deer and skunks, and an occasional drunk who strayed out from town.
The Bronco handled about as well as any truck, and it didn’t take much imagination to picture us somersaulting down the mesa face in a pile of smoking, groaning metal.
We shot past the old quarry and I keyed the mike.
“Three-oh-three, three-ten. Ten-twenty.”
If he was where he was supposed to be, I knew exactly what Tommy Pasquale was doing when he heard my call for his location. With a homicide just two blocks away, he was chafing at the bit. For the second time that night, he was being asked to sit off on the sidelines while something interesting was happening just out of sight. As he heard my voice, I could picture his hand flashing up to the gearshift of his patrol car, ready to pull it into drive, and his foot poised, ready to mash the accelerator to the floor.
“Three-oh-three is on Pershing at the Legion Hall,” Pasquale said, and I could hear the tension in his voice. He had the discipline not to add, “Just where Sergeant Mitchell told me to be.”
“Three-oh-three, ten-four.” I knew there was no rear exit that Boyd could slip out of to return to his vehicle. If he left the building, Pasquale would see him. “Stay on him,” I said, “and let me know the instant he moves.” And when Pasquale responded with an audible twinge of impatience, I could picture his hand slipping off the gear lever.
“Three-ten, three-oh-seven. ETA?”
I could hear excited voices in the background, and Eddie Mitchell’s tone was brusque.
“Three-ten is just passing Consolidated. About six minutes out,” I said.
By the time we roared into the village, down Grande Avenue, past Pershing Park and across Bustos, the main east-west village street, I could see a fair collection of winking red lights up ahead, a couple belonging to one of the village units.
The Pierpoint Bar and Grill was a narrow, dark little building that shared the South 100 block of Grande Avenue with the Posadas Register’s modern, metal-sided and uninteresting plant. Tucked well off the sidewalk, its parking lot fronted Rincon Street, a dead-end lane that snaked back behind the newspaper building.
Torrez braked hard, skirted a group of spectators and turned into Rincon, damn near rear-ending Chief Eduardo Martinez’s bargelike Oldsmobile. The old car was parked with its massive butt out in the street as if Eduardo had been too flustered to know what to do with it.
I caught a glimpse of Eddie Mitchell and Tom Mears at the far east end of the narrow parking lot, standing beside Richard Finnegan’s pickup truck. One of the part-timers who made up the three-man village department was unwinding a yellow tape. There were too many pairs of legs in the way to be able to see anything else.
It didn’t surprise me that Richard Finnegan was a patron of the Pierpoint. Many local ranchers were-their pickup trucks filled the small parking lot at any given hour, the patient dogs that were their constant companions standing in the back of the trucks or lying on the toolbox, waiting with lolling tongues marking time.
Chief Martinez waddled over toward me as soon as he saw me disembark from the Bronco. I always got the impression that crime surprised Eduardo…that he thought of it as something that eventually would just go away if only we had enough nice parades and summer festivals in Pershing Park.
I readily admitted that we treated his department as if it didn’t exist most of the time…which, in point of fact, it didn’t, since a combination of what Posadas could pay a certified officer, and what little area there was to patrol within the village limits, resulted in an officer turnover rate that approached the monthly.
“What the hell happened, Chief?” I said. With the portable radio in one hand and a flashlight in the other, Bob Torrez strode past me, making a beeline for the village officer, who was doing his best to keep the spectators back. I saw a look of relief on Eduardo’s face when he glanced over and saw Torrez’s approach.
“They found him in the parking lot, right next to his truck,” Martinez said. He put his hands on his hips. “Richard Finnegan, from up north of town? You know him, I guess.”