It appeared the exhausted parents had called it quits for the night. That surprised me, since Tiffany Cole hadn’t shown any weakening of her stubborn streak earlier. But fatigue has a way of building until it finds the weakest link in a person’s constitution.
I jotted down the license number of the Corsica, thumbed the mike, and jolted Ernie Wheeler out of his paperback.
“PCS, three ten. Information request on New Mexico Tom Lincoln Paul one niner seven.”
“Three ten, PCS, stand by.” I grinned. Ernie Wheeler sounded as if he’d been poised over the microphone, expecting my call.
While I waited for the computer to spit out what it knew, I drove on down the street to the intersection of Fifth and Blaine and turned around, punching off my headlights as I did so. No sooner had my wheels scrubbed the curb than the radio crackled again. I buzzed up the windows so our conversation wouldn’t be public knowledge on the quiet street.
“Three ten, PCS. Be advised that New Mexico Tom Lincoln Paul one niner seven is issued to a 1996 Chevrolet Corsica, blue over silver, registered to Alicia T. Cole, Three ninety-two North Fifth Street, Posadas. No wants or warrants.”
“Ten-four, PCS.”
I drove past Tiffany Cole’s house, my headlights still off. I had seen Browers’s truck up on the mesa and didn’t bother running its plate. But the big RV in Andy Browers’s yard interested me. With the vehicle hidden in the dark shadows two houses down from the nearest streetlight, it was impossible to tell if it was just a corroded-out hulk waiting restoration or a newer unit waiting for its first outing.
I pulled up to the curb three or four houses farther on. If one of the deputies had stopped to check out a vehicle without calling in, I’d have given him a withering reprimand. But that was them.
With flashlight in hand, I got out of the car and strolled across the street. I stepped up on the rough sidewalk and ambled down toward the house at 407. The night was so quiet, I could hear the occasional tractor-trailer on the interstate, a full mile to the south.
No dogs barked, no nothing. I stopped by the rear of the motorboat and turned on my flashlight. The RV hadn’t been there too long, either that or Andy Browers was meticulous about snipping weeds. The rear tires had pressed obvious tracks in the gravel.
Moving carefully, one hand on the block wall, I made my way along the RV until I came to the rear, as high and square as any diesel bus. The New Mexico license was current.
Holding the flashlight under my armpit, I jotted down the number. The only other identification was a dealer logo mounted just above the bumper beside the left-rear taillight. I wrote down the logo and moved around the other side of the unit.
In the poor light, with shadows from my flashlight harsh, I damn near tripped over the power cord. It snaked out of the house from what had to be a bathroom window, and it was plugged into the side of the RV, just in front of the right-rear duals.
“Huh,” I muttered. The unit would provide damn near all the comforts of home, that was for sure. And once again, I found myself admiring Andy Browers’s good judgment. He had never tried to navigate Cat Mesa in it. If he had, the monster would probably still be up there, mired up to its fancy hubcaps in mud, or trapped between a couple of oak trees when he discovered there was no space to turn the flagship around.
Watching my step, I made my way back to 310. The patrol car burbled to life, and I keyed the radio. “PCS, three ten. Information New Mexico recreational vehicle tag Baker Echo zero zero one.”
“Ten-four, three ten. That’ll be a couple of minutes.”
“Ten-four.” I had nothing but time. I turned west on Hutton and followed it all the way to Twelfth Street, where I turned south, driving past the Don Juan de Onate Restaurant after a couple of blocks.
I drove past the Guzmans’ home on South Twelfth and noticed that neither Estelle’s county car nor the good doctor’s Isuzu was in the driveway. I knew what that meant, especially since Erma Sedillos’s little worn-out Toyota was parked at the curb. With a sigh, I turned and headed toward Posadas General Hospital.
Just as I was pulling into the parking lot, Ernie Wheeler returned from the computer errand.
“Three ten, PCS. Be advised that New Mexico RV tag Baker Echo zero zero one should appear on a 1991 World Rambler L-Ten, white over silver. That’s registered to a Bruce Elders, Two nine two nine Paseo del Sol Terrace, Corrales, New Mexico. No wants or warrants.”
“Ten-four, PCS. I’ll be ten-seven at Posadas General for a while. Hold that printout for me, if you would.”
I didn’t know who Bruce Elders was, but right then, I didn’t care much. For both Estelle and her husband to be at the hospital at 3:00 A.M., the news couldn’t be good.
Chapter 24
Three A.M. at Posadas General Hospital was a time of muffled noises-things like rubber-soled shoes on polished floors, muted whispers among white-cloaked staff members, and the soft swish of mop on linoleum.
I stepped around the little yellow CAUTION sandwich sign, and the custodian smiled at me and avoided slapping my shoes with the mop. Whatever potion was in his mop bucket had the same cloying sweet smell shared by all the other hospital disinfectants, and it was a smell that brought back all the wrong memories.
I’d been there a half dozen times as a patient, and hundreds of times for other reasons. At one time, head nurse Helen Murchison had half-jokingly called Posadas General my “home away from home.” That was a grim notion.
No one was at the reception desk, and I steered around it and walked past the darkened coffee shop. When someone might need coffee the most, the place was closed. No one was in the Financial Services Office, and no one was in the X-ray Department. Where another hallway intersected, the walls gave way to the glass panels of the nurses’ station.
A young man whom I didn’t recognize looked up from his charts and raised an eyebrow. I suppose he didn’t get a lot of walk-in traffic at 3:00 A.M.
“May I help you?” he asked. His voice sounded muffled and distorted behind the glass.
“Is Detective Reyes-Guzman here? Or her husband? Or both?”
“The last time I saw them, they were both down in ICU. If not there, you might try-”
We both saw Dr. Francis Guzman step out of a room at that moment. “Thanks,” I said to the nurse. Francis had taken to sporting a full beard, trimmed short. It filled out his normally lean face and made him look professorial. He saw me and grinned.
“How are you doin’?” he said, and his grip was strong but gentle. He didn’t let go of my hand right away, his black eyes looking out over the tops of his half-glasses, boring deep into mine, as if he could read some truth hidden there. “I haven’t had a chance to welcome you home. Estelle tells me that everything went fine, and that you’re already doing too much.”
“As a matter of fact, I feel next to useless,” I said ruefully.
He nodded sympathetically. He was almost a head taller than I was, his black hair and beard peppered with premature gray. He took off his glasses and slipped them in the breast pocket of his lab coat. “I’ve been meaning to call you,” he said. “Estelle didn’t know who was monitoring your medications.” The crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes deepened. “Or how many you were taking.”
“A shitload,” I said. “Camille bought one of those little boxes to put ’em all in.”
“A medications organizer?”
I nodded.
“Did you happen to request that your records be sent back? If not, I can request them by phone or fax, but it would really be helpful to have the whole background of what they did to you.”
“No, I didn’t do that,” I said. Francis didn’t look surprised. He knew damn well that I was far from the most helpful patient in the world. “And she just mentioned today the bit about Mayo.”
The good doctor looked almost apologetic, and he leaned one shoulder against the polished wall tile. “It’s just too good an opportunity to pass up, Bill.”