At first, I had assumed that a gang of neighborhood kids had been responsible, tempted after they’d learned I was away from home. But Estelle Reyes-Guzman had said that my filing cabinet had been taken, and that didn’t sound like the work of children.
We pulled to a stop at the intersection below the interstate overpass, and Tom Pasquale started to turn left, toward Escondido Lane and Guadalupe Terrace. I held up a hand.
“Why don’t you swing by the office first for a few minutes,” I said, nodding off to the right.
For someone who didn’t appear to be paying attention, Camille had finely honed hearing. “He needs to go home before anything else, Officer,” my daughter said quietly, taking her self-appointed role as my nurse seriously.
I’d enjoyed a twenty-year career in the Marines Corps, retiring as a gunnery sergeant. After that, I’d been in civilian law enforcement for a quarter of a century, with fifteen years spent as undersheriff of Posadas County. I was as used to giving orders as most people were to breathing.
Tom Pasquale glanced over at me, hesitated for two heartbeats, and turned left.
Chapter 3
I turned the key in the lock and pushed open the heavy carved door, glad that some little teenaged rodent hadn’t taken a crowbar to the ancient worn wood in his efforts to gain entry.
The massive oak slab had originally guarded the entry to a wine cellar deep in the bowels of a seventeenth-century monastery near Tlaxcala, Mexico. After the monastery burned in 1846, the door had been salvaged, and then over the years, it had worked its way north from one admiring owner to the next.
The hinges swung silently and I stepped to the foyer. The brass hardware on the inside of the door still showed a generous dusting of fingerprint powder, and I avoided touching the metal. The cool air wafted from deep inside the old adobe. The place should have been stone-quiet, too.
“Is that your phone?” Camille asked, but she made no move to elbow past me. I didn’t bother to say that it couldn’t have been anyone else’s. This wasn’t a suburb of Flint, Michigan. There were no next-door neighbors here, no smell of someone else’s barbecue, no screeching kids, no traffic except for the interstate in the distance. The only telephone whose ring I could hear would be my own.
If I had voiced the comparison, I suppose Camille would have been quick to reply that in Flint, people didn’t bury their spouses in the nearest handy wooded lot across the street, either.
I turned and reached out to put a hand on my daughter’s arm. “Stay here in the foyer a minute,” I said. She looked up at me, puzzled, and I added, “I want to see the house before we touch anything else.”
Despite the persistent telephone, I made no move toward the kitchen. “Do you want me to answer that?” Camille asked, and I grinned at her. She was from the generation that considered the jangle of a telephone some sort of imperative.
“If they want to talk to me badly enough, they’ll call back,” I said. After three more rings, the damn thing gave up, and I stood motionless, taking in the silence. That bliss lasted another four or five seconds before radio traffic from the patrol car in the driveway squelched it.
“I’ll just be a minute, sir,” Deputy Pasquale said. He had been standing in the doorway threshold, and he turned to walk to the car.
“You might as well head back to the office,” I called after him. “Thanks for the lift.”
“Our luggage is still in the police car,” Camille muttered. She bustled after Pasquale. That left me alone in my house, and I sucked in a deep breath of relief. It was good to be home, even if a bunch of strangers had violated the place.
I ambled across the foyer’s expanse of Saltillo tile toward the living room, an irregularly shaped seven-sided room with sunken brick floors and heavy, dark ceiling beams of ponderosa pine. Nearly thirty feet across at the widest point, the living room had been designed to suggest an Indian pueblo ceremonial kiva.
The room was a modern touch to an otherwise-traditional old adobe. An artist had lived in the house during the war, and in 1945, maybe in celebration, he’d knocked out a few walls, excavated, and plastered. The new living room and foyer that he had created split the house-a large den, two baths, and three bedrooms to the east; a kitchen, bathroom, and two more bedrooms to the west.
The artist had finished that project and then decided that Posadas, New Mexico, wasn’t the heart of the modern-art world. He sold the house to me, and we were both delighted.
I had lined those living room walls with floor-to-ceiling book-cases built of dark oak by Simon Ortega, an alcoholic cabinetmaker in Posadas who did wonderful work when he had drunk just enough to forget his troubles and steady his hands, but not enough to blur his vision. It had taken him three years to finish the job.
Figuring that everyone hides valuables behind books, the little sons of bitches had swept the shelves clean, scattering two thousand volumes across the bricks. The VCR that had been on top of the television set was gone, but that was no great loss. I rarely used the damn thing anyway. The VCR and one movie tape had been a birthday present from my youngest son. I used the tape to put myself to sleep on occasion-and that one tape was still the extent of my video library. The tape lay on the floor, half out of its jacket.
I stood with hands on hips, surveying the familiar scene that I had investigated dozens of times in other homes during my career. And always before, I’d been able to survey the damage with a cool, professional detachment.
Anything that had been resting on a flat surface had been swept off. It was a thorough, workmanlike job.
I bent down and picked up a photograph mounted in an inexpensive silver frame. My son William, in full flight suit, with helmet tucked under one arm, knelt in front of a T2-C Buckeye naval jet trainer. His other arm hugged Kendal, his oldest son, just turned seven when the photo was taken. I put the picture back on one of the shelves and made my way through the mess to the den.
Being an open-and-dump burglar must have been hard on the back. It would have been easier just to open the drawer and look through its contents than to dump things on the floor and have to bend down and rummage around. But these kids had strong backs, and dumping was obviously their style. The den looked like the county landfill. And conspicuous by its absence was my filing cabinet, which normally nestled between the east wall and the end of my desk.
A deep scar was gouged into the desk’s wooden top near one corner. I bent down to peer at the damage. The scar ended in a well-defined triangular cut in the oak finish, and I could imagine exactly what had happened. The intruders had picked up the filing cabinet, discovered how heavy it was, and slammed it down on the desk to regain their grip. Maybe one of them had blown a hernia or slipped a disk in the process. I could only hope.
I bent down, hands on my knees, and squinted at the polished wood of the desktop. With the light flooding across it at an angle, the well-defined dusting marks told me that one of the deputies had done a careful, patient job.
“All right,” I murmured with satisfaction. On the desk corner nearest the wall was a clear shoe print, the fancy tread patterns clear on the dark wood, clear enough that we’d be able to match for brand, size, and wear marks. “We’ve got you, you little bastard,” I said aloud.
One of the officers had drawn a set of four-corner bracket marks around the print with a dry-erase marker. They wouldn’t have been able to lift the shoe print, but someone talented with a camera could sure as hell photograph it.
With an audible crack of joints, I stood up and looked at the wall. The Springfield.45–70 trap-door carbine was gone, as was the sword that had hung below it. To reach the carbine, I had to stand on my tiptoes, and I was five feet ten. The burglar had stepped up onto the corner of the desk to reach the weapon, leaving his shoe print behind.