I leaned forward and rested my head in my hands.
“Maybe the crime lab will turn up something when it processes her clothes. Some fibers that shouldn’t be there, something like that,” Holman said, trying again.
Estelle Reyes-Guzman set the foam tea cup down on the floor beside her chair. “And there were no unusual marks at the scene. She wasn’t dragged through the dirt. She didn’t leave a trail of blood. At the moment, there’s no way for us to be sure about where she died.”
“Maybe she died right there. Maybe that’s where the assault took place…if there was one,” I said, and Estelle nodded. “Did Francis say how she died?”
“He’s not sure.”
I looked at Estelle with interest. “Oh?” Usually, very little escaped her talented husband’s attention.
“There were no obvious wounds, other than a torn left index fingernail. That’s where the blood on her hand came from. He thinks that possibly she was choked.”
“Huh,” I murmured. “Was she molested?”
“Maybe.”
Holman cleared his throat. “I think that all we need is one little piece, and he’ll talk. One little piece of hard evidence that ties him to the scene.”
“Who?” I asked. “Crocker?”
Holman nodded. “I think he’s just trying to test the waters. See how much we know.”
“We don’t need anything to tie him to the scene, Marty. He was there.”
“That’s what I mean.” Holman walked over to my desk and plopped down on the corner. Frustrated, he let his fingers mess with my papers. “He can’t be sure just what we know. One little connection is all we need, and that’s it.”
I looked across at Estelle. “Did you get a chance to talk with Pasquale at any length?”
“No, sir. Just a preliminary.”
“Did he say why he arrested Crocker?”
“Apparently because he was there, sir.”
“And that’s it?”
“I don’t see what other reason he needs, Bill,” Holman said. “Even if he didn’t commit the murder, Crocker knows more than he’s telling us.”
“You think so?” I said.
“How could someone be camped on the playing field and not see what was going on just a hundred yards away? I can’t imagine that girl sitting around quietly and letting herself be murdered. There’d be all kinds of ruckus. He’d be bound to hear.”
“If that’s the way it happened, Martin. She may have been killed before Crocker even got there. Let’s get Pasquale in here for a few minutes,” I said. “Let’s see what was going through the young man’s mind, if anything.”
Holman grunted. “You sound like you’re more concerned with protecting this bum of yours than finding out who butchered a little girl.”
I turned my head slowly and regarded Holman. “That was a stupid thing to say.” Silence hung heavily. The sheriff’s hands twitched nervously in his lap, and then he busied himself picking tiny pieces of imaginary lint off his knee.
“I’ll call in Pasquale,” Estelle said after a moment, and I nodded.
“Thank you.”
“Well, you know what I mean,” Holman continued lamely as Estelle opened the office door. “We’ve got a killing here. Or at least, an unattended death. An innocent little kid.”
“I’m painfully aware of that,” I said.
“It’s just that if this is a murder, with every hour that passes, the odds of solving the case don’t improve. What’s the statistic? In instances where the crime isn’t witnessed, at least sixty percent of capital cases go unsolved? Something like that?”
I grimaced. “And other fascinating election eve trivia, Martin.”
“Now listen…You didn’t even ask Crocker if he did it.”
“That’s because I don’t think he did.”
“On what evidence?”
I leaned back farther and hooked my hands behind my head, regarding Martin Holman through my bifocals. The lower lenses made him nice and blurry, as if he were standing in a fog at a great distance.
“I think the evidence is supposed to go the other way,” I said.
“If you don’t think that he had anything to do with it, why don’t you let him go, then?”
“Because.”
This time, Holman actually grinned. “Yes?”
“Because…I’m as confused right now as you are. I don’t want to rush into some stupid mistake. It won’t hurt Wesley Crocker much more to spend a couple of hours as a guest of the county.”
“What do you mean, ‘much more’? It won’t hurt him at all,” Holman snapped. “And the sad thing is that nothing we do will bring that girl back either.”
“That’s the way it is,” I said and let my chair rock forward with a bang. Holman was about to say something else when he saw Officer Tom Pasquale standing in the doorway of my office.
The kid’s face was pale, and he nervously twisted the handle of his nightstick.
Sergeant Robert Torrez appeared in the hallway behind Pasquale. He caught my eye and asked, “Do you need me for anything?”
“Not for a few minutes.”
He held up a black-and-white photograph. “Mears is with Glen Archer over at the school. They’re doing a preliminary autopsy at the hospital, and Doctor Guzman wouldn’t let them in yet. I’m going to take one of the morgue photos and see if Archer can give us an I.D.”
“Good idea.” Principal Archer called us often enough in the middle of the night when some vandal popped a window or beat the crap out of a soda pop machine. Like it or not, trying to identify dead students was as much a part of his job as pinning ribbons on spelling bee winners. “You might get lucky.”
He nodded and left, and I beckoned Tom Pasquale toward a chair.
“Do you want me to stay?” Estelle asked.
“Yes, I do.”
Martin Holman paced his corner of the room, too nervous to sit. I fixed Pasquale with a steady stare and let the silence build for a few seconds.
“Officer Pasquale, we want to run through what we’ve got so far,” I said. “Before we make any other moves.” I picked up a pencil and drew a small circle on the notepad that lay in the middle of my desk calendar. “Who called the P.D. about the possible victim?”
“I have no idea, sir.”
“You took the call?”
“Yes, sir.”
“On the regular business line, not 911?” He nodded and I added, “And the caller wouldn’t give a name?”
He shook his head.
“Did you ask?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Was it a man or woman?”
“A male voice, sir. If I had to guess, I’d say teenager. Late teens, maybe.”
“But you didn’t recognize the voice, then. Exactly what did the person say?”
“He said that there was a child’s body under the bleachers by the football field. He said the body was right beside the center foundation.”
“That’s the term he used? A child’s body?”
“Yes, sir.”
“He didn’t say, ‘a hurt child’ or anything like that? He actually said those three words…‘a child’s body’?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that in the first place?”
“Sir?”
“When I saw you over at the school earlier, you said that someone called you,” and I used the eraser of my pencil to push the small pages of my notebook until I found the spot. “Someone called you to report a ‘possible downer.’ That’s what you called it. A ‘possible downer.’
Pasquale looked confused. “It’s just a slang expression, sir.”
I looked at the young officer and counted mentally to ten. When I had my temper under control, I said, “Let’s have an understanding, Officer Pasquale. We are in the middle of a homicide investigation. The apparent victim is a child, and we have a man in custody. This might be a nice time to dispense with slang and stick to facts and correct terminology. Does that sound reasonable to you?”
Pasquale flushed. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Holman finally sit down, backward, buckaroo-style, on one of the straight-backed chairs. He was probably happy as a clam to have me angry with someone besides himself.
“Yes, sir,” Pasquale said, and I silently commended him on his self-control. He could have said, “Look, I don’t work for you, you fat old son-of-a-bitch. Get off my back.” And there wouldn’t have been much I could have done, except bluster.