“Pete Harkins and Melody Perez,” Holman repeated. “Just those two?”
“Yes.” The word was a miserable little bleat, and ten-year-old Jason Black’s first venture into the world of crime came to an abrupt end. Once he started talking, there was little need for prompting, and mom, bless her, just sat back and let Jason ride on alone. Holman remained the patient, kindly prompter; Mitchell and I sat silently, watching and listening.
Pete Harkins, Jason Black’s best bud, lived just off Grande at the Ranchero Mobile Home Park. That put his residence less than five hundred yards from mine. Pete and Jason had recruited Melody Perez, a tough little number who lived on the other side of the interstate, on MacArthur. The two boys liked Melody, Jason said, because she wasn’t afraid to do anything.
They had busted into my house, Jason recalled, because they had heard a rumor that I owned a huge coin collection-which I didn’t-as well as a bunch of other “stuff,” which I probably did.
The three kids, all coldly calculating, chose my house because it was vacant, secluded, and scary, whatever a ten-year-old meant by that. It was simple enough to bust the bathroom window and squirm inside.
I looked at Jason Black skeptically. He was resting his arm on the table, relieved that he’d managed to talk his way out of an immediate trip to Leavenworth. I could have encircled his biceps with my thumb and index finger. I tried to picture the three of them wrestling to move my filing cabinet. Maybe Melody had carried it by herself.
“How’d you move the cabinet?” I asked.
Jason looked at me out of the corner of his eye and shifted slightly away, as if I might hit him. “We took the cart thing. The one that was right there by the garage.”
“You sneaky little bastard,” I wanted to say, but instead I settled for saying, “You mean the wheelbarrow?” He nodded. “And where did you take the file?”
Jason explained how they had managed to grunt the cabinet out of the house, into my own wheelbarrow, and trundle the whole affair on down Guadalupe Terrace until the lane ended in the arroyo that ran south, paralleling State Road 61.
“We were thinking that like if we dumped it into the arroyo, it would burst open when it hit the bottom.”
“And did it?”
Jason shook his head. “We used that old ax.”
“Old ax?” I wasn’t in the habit of leaving axes outside.
“The one that was with the wheelbarrow.”
“Ah,” I said. Ax, pickax, hoe, shovel-same thing. “So you took the pickax and busted it open.”
Jason nodded. “It came open pretty easy,” he said. “A lot easier than we thought.”
“What did you do with the papers?”
“We seen they wasn’t money or nothing, so we left ’em.”
“And the other gun?”
“Melody gots it.”
I looked at Eddie. “It’s a little Colt three eighty. It’s in the inventory I gave Estelle.” I took a deep breath, regarding Jason Black. “And you took the rifle, too? The big one that was up on the wall?” I slipped the eight-by-ten glossy of the shoe print out of the case folder and slid it across the table so it parked right under the kid’s nose. He didn’t have a poker face, and if it wasn’t his own shoe, at least he recognized whose it was.
“Melody gots it. That and the sword. She said she knew somebody who’d buy ’em from her.”
“And the VCR?”
“Pete took that. He was going to sell it to Predo Gonzales after a little while.”
“What else do you have?”
“Nothing.” He saw my eyes squint and hastily added, “Honest. Nothing.”
Martin Holman managed to sound almost helpful when he looked at a miserable Deann Black and said, “While we’re waiting for Judge Hobart, ma’am, it might save us some time to go ahead and book Jason. Get the fingerprinting process out of the way.”
She looked horrified. “But he admitted-you mean, if this is all cleared up, he’s still to be charged?”
“Ma’am, this is a serious business. We have pretty solid information that the burglary of the Gastner residence isn’t the only incident involving these youngsters.” My estimation of Martin Holman clicked up another few notches. “What happens will depend on how cooperative your son remains,” he added.
“While Deputy Mitchell takes care of that,” I said to Holman, “maybe you’d take a run out to the trailer park and bring in Pete Harkins. It’d be a good idea to have Debbie Mears go along when you pick up Miss Melody.” Debbie was the wife of one of our deputies and served frequently as an on-call matron. I got up from the conference table. “I’m going out to the arroyo and check this young man’s story. If he’s telling the truth, I’ll let Deputy Mitchell know.”
As I opened the door, I turned and said, “And by the way, don’t take any officers away from the search. We can walk through this thing if it takes all night.” I nodded at Jason Black. “And don’t let the three of them associate with one another in any way. Keep ’em separated. Separate cells.”
Jason’s face had been pale enough, but I have to admit I enjoyed seeing it go another shade lighter when I said the word cells.
Chapter 23
Jason Black hadn’t been lying. I parked at the end of Guadalupe Terrace, walked two dozen paces, and stood at the edge of the arroyo. It was a grand view. Ahead of me rumpled chaparral stretched all the way to Mexico, studded with acacia and creosote bush, old car hulks, doorless refrigerators-all the things that made the southwestern desert so charming.
A few hundred yards off to my right was the back fence of Florek’s Auto Wrecking, one of the premier businesses of Posadas, located on the east side of the highway, just beyond the point where Grande Boulevard lost its village designation and became simply State 61.
And ahead of me, down in the gravel of the arroyo, amid a blizzard of other junk from other eras, lay the gray hulk of my filing cabinet and my wheelbarrow. It only made sense that once the burglars were finished with the wheelbarrow, it, too, should be tipped down into the arroyo.
“Watch your step, Dad,” Camille said, but the warning was unnecessary. We made our way down the steep, crumbling sides of the arroyo, grabbing the dry stumps of chamiza for purchase.
In places, the bottom of the arroyo had been swept clean down to the bedrock, and small pools of water from the recent rains would remain until the sun fried them dry.
The cabinet lay on its side and I was thankful for that. A handful of papers had remained inside, sheltered from the weather. Most of it was replaceable and didn’t matter anyway-several insurance policies, a brown envelope containing my military papers and a ribbon or two, birth certificate, vehicle titles-the sort of things that were incomprehensible and of no value to three kids hunting for gold.
I squatted down and rummaged while Camille commenced a systematic search of the bushes and niches surrounding the spot.
By the time it was twilight, we’d assembled a fair stack of papers and documents, envelopes and packets. I felt more relaxed than I had since arriving home. If I couldn’t remember what else might be missing, I reasoned it obviously didn’t matter much.
I got to my feet, brushed the sand off my knees, and picked up the framed photo that I had placed on top of the rescued items. Camille reached out and I gave it to her. She wiped a bit of moisture off the unbroken glass, letting her fingers trace gently around the narrow wooden frame.
“I’m glad you were able to recover this,” she said. “The rest probably doesn’t matter much.”
I nodded. In the fading light, the photograph could easily have been mistaken for Camille herself, rather than her mother.
She looked up at me. “And this is the only picture you’ve got? Of her, I mean?”
“Yes.”
She examined the photo again, taken during a vacation twenty years earlier in Acajutla, in El Salvador. Her mother had consented to posing on a mammoth sea-polished rock, the water almost emerald green behind her. That particular rock hadn’t been chosen at random, nor was this her first time to perch on top, knees hugged tightly, the entire reach of the Pacific in front of her.