“What’s your point, Estelle?” Holman asked abruptly. He glanced at his watch.
“Dennis Wilton might not have known the road very well,” I said. “He might not have had occasion to drive it often.”
“That never stopped most teenage drivers from passing,” Holman said.
I hooked my hands behind my head and regarded Estelle. Her thought processes had always amused me, running in nice, true lineal lines from A to B to C. In the eight years I’d known her, I couldn’t recall a single incident of her engaging in idle chatter.
“True.” Estelle nodded. “And think about them passing. Maybe some of the kids in the bus were asleep, but probably most of them weren’t. They’re too wired after a conference win. And the driver said that they were noisy. He had trouble getting them to stay in their seats. So, as the pickup drives by, we’ve got kids looking out the window, probably responding to waves or honks or what have you from the two boys in the pickup truck.”
“Remember last year,” I said, “when one of the Posadas wrestlers hung his butt out the bus window and mooned half a mile of downtown Belen?”
Estelle nodded. “With all that kind of behavior that we expect, it seems odd to me that a minute or so after the pickup pulls back into its lane ahead of the bus, the kid who’s driving just simply falls asleep.”
The room fell silent as both Martin Holman and I regarded Estelle Reyes-Guzman.
“But…” Holman said when the silence stretched too long.
Estelle raised an eyebrow and waited.
“How else?” he added and held up his hands.
“I don’t know how else,” Estelle said quietly.
“What are you going to do?” Holman asked, and he sounded a bit nervous.
“I want to talk with Dennis Wilton some more,” she said. “I want to hear what he has to say. And the bus driver gave me names of some of the kids who were riding on that side of the bus, kids who would have seen the pickup go by. I suppose it’s entirely possible that the two boys were half asleep when they cruised by the bus. I just find it strange that the very act of passing a game bus wouldn’t stir the adrenaline just a little bit and keep them alert for a while longer.” Estelle pushed herself out of the chair. “I asked the parents for a blood test and they agreed. We didn’t need to go through the hassle of a court order. We’ll see what those results say.”
“You think they might have been on something?” I asked.
“It’s possible. We didn’t find anything like that in the truck, but it’s possible.”
“Do you think they were drinking?” Holman asked.
“Maybe. I couldn’t smell anything, but you never know. I don’t think the doctors would have given Dennis Wilton a sedative if he’d been drunk.”
“That would make it vehicular homicide, if he was intoxicated,” Holman said.
“Yes, it would, sir.”
He sighed loudly. “Jesus Christ,” he said and looked heavenward. “That’s all we need. First the girl, now this.”
I had been gazing at Estelle during the exchange, watching her expression. She turned and when our eyes met, I knew that she’d told us most of what she knew. Most.
The anticipation did more for me than ten cups of coffee. I pushed myself out of the chair and said, “One case at a time. Dennis Wilton isn’t going anywhere. We caught up with Vanessa Davila and she and Mama are waiting for us upstairs. Let’s go chat with them for a few minutes. Then we’ll take a look at that truck.” I turned and smiled at Martin Holman. “Then maybe we can have a domestic knife fight or two. Maybe even a rabid dog. Spice this evening up.”
Holman looked long suffering. “It’s three ten in the morning,” he said. “The evening was shot to hell a long time ago.”
“You’ll get used to that, Sheriff,” I said.
24
Vanessa Davila cried. It didn’t matter what the question was, or who asked it. She cried. Sometimes the tears leaked out from tightly squinched eyelids while she bit her lip. Sometimes her body heaved and the tears flowed openly. At one point she got the hiccups so badly that I could feel the floor jolt every time one of the spasms shook her.
Sheriff Holman fetched her a glass of water, but she ignored it.
At first I handled the tears by simply pushing the box of facial tissue close to Vanessa’s elbow and waiting. She ignored those, too. For the first ten minutes, Estelle did most of the talking, and most of it was in Spanish, between Estelle and the girl’s mother. Vanessa Davila didn’t utter a word.
She didn’t answer questions about her relationship with Maria Ibarra, nor about her activities that night. She would have known about the girl’s death, given the efficient way that word travels around a school. It was impossible to believe that she could not have known. Still, she had elected to go to the football game anyway. Perhaps that was her way of grieving for a lost friend.
She wouldn’t tell us how she got to the game, or how she got home. The list of students riding the spectator bus included fifty-five names, and none of them was Vanessa’s. I was impressed. No witness called to testify in front of a senate subcommittee ever stonewalled any better.
I watched the girl’s face closely, and what I saw was pure misery. I’d watched my own four kids grow up, and a time or two there had been an emergency when something was really wrong, not just a minor ouch where the tears came and went. Vanessa Davila was being wrenched this way and that by her own private hell, and she had elected to keep it to herself. Most kids weren’t that tough.
She didn’t nod answers, she didn’t use her hands. She didn’t focus on the picture of Maria Ibarra that Estelle slid in front of her. She just sat and waited us out while the tears flowed.
During a silence while Vanessa ignored a question from her mother, I glanced at the wall clock. In another two hours it would be dawn. Posadas would wake up and folks would have a lot to talk about. A little girl whom few of us knew had died a lonely and dirty death; the man she’d been living with had poisoned himself with a lethal alcohol mix; a harmless itinerant had been the victim of a hit-and-run; and one of the community’s top students had tried to fly through solid rock. The past twenty-four hours were something of a record for the tiny community.
At least we’d won the football contest. I gazed at what was left of Vanessa Davila and wondered how she’d managed to sit through the game, because it wasn’t the thrill of victory that had reduced her to jelly.
Her mother began another set of rapid-fire exhortations with the word basta sprinkled through it and I held up a hand.
“Mrs. Davila, I don’t think we’re getting anywhere,” I said. I didn’t take my eyes off her daughter. The mother subsided, and I leaned back in my chair, rapping my ring lightly on the edge of the table. It had been a long time since I’d been a practicing parent, and none of my four youngsters had strayed very far from the straight and narrow. Still, barring a family tragedy, I could think of only one reason for a fourteen-year-old to be so consumed by grief.
“Vanessa,” I said, “how well did you know Ryan House?”
Vanessa answered that question, but not with words. The name caught her off guard, and she sucked in a quick breath at the same time that her eyes closed. The flow of tears increased to a gusher, and she buried her head in her crossed arms, her thick black hair cascading around her face.
I nodded. “Well, well,” I said quietly.
“Sir?” Estelle asked.
I glanced at the detective and saw that she was frowning at me. If I was one step ahead of her, it was the first time in days. The late hours were really catching up with her.
“She wouldn’t go to a football game feeling like this,” I said. “She won’t tell us who she rode with, but she either saw, or heard about, the wreck.” I gestured toward Vanessa, whose head was still down on the table. “And she heard that Ryan House had been killed.” And when I mentioned the name, Vanessa flinched. It wasn’t much, but Estelle saw the slight hitch of the left shoulder and the snuffle from down under.