Estelle looked away, out the window toward the lights of Posadas.
“We’re not finding anyone sitting here,” I said, and pulled 310 into gear.
“If Madrid was involved,” Estelle said, still looking away, “then the boys were headed to Mexico. That’s the only thing that makes sense to me.”
“And something went wrong.” I drove out of the motel’s parking lot, trying to think of an easy solution. I knew that Estelle wasn’t naive-she knew as well as I did that children abducted from parents who weren’t wealthy were taken not for ransom, but for other reasons. And every one of those reasons was enough to jerk a parent awake in the middle of the night in a cold sweat.
“Cody went missing almost four days ago-sometime Saturday evening. Roberto Madrid checked into the motel today, Wednesday, shortly after noon. If there’s a connection, what is it?”
The shake of Estelle’s head was just the tiniest of motions.
“I want to talk to Tiffany Cole again,” she said.
“Right now?”
“Right now.”
We drove north on Grande, and just about at the point where dispatcher Ernie Wheeler could have looked out the front door of the Public Safety Building and seen our headlights, the radio crackled.
“Three ten, PCS. Ten-twenty.”
“PCS, three ten is at the intersection of Bustos and Grande.”
“Ten-four, three ten. Ten-nineteen.”
Martin Holman was fond of summoning people into the office, but he was busy at the motel, making sure Bohrer and the chief didn’t ruin evidence.
In less than a block, I turned into the parking lot.
“I’ll wait here for you,” Estelle said. “I need some time to think.”
“You might give your husband a call and tell him we’re on the way,” I said, and then I trudged up the back steps into the building.
“Ah, line two,” Ernie said, gesturing toward the phone.
“Holman?” I said as I started to walk into my office.
“No, Bernalillo,” Ernie said.
Chapter 34
I snatched the telephone off the hook. “This is Gastner.”
There was an amused chuckle at the other end. “Now that was fast. You must have been right outside the door when Dispatch called you.”
“Just about,” I said. “What can I do for you?”
“This is Richard Steinberg with Bernalillo County. You’ve got yourself a mess. I just got the bulletin about the Guzman child, and everyone’s got a sharp eye open. I won’t take much of your time, but let me shoot this by you. You may remember your sheriff asked us to locate one Paul Cole?”
“Yes.”
“Well, the bad news is that we haven’t been much help,” Steinberg said. “But that may change. We’ve talked to several people, and the general consensus is that he went elk hunting up in Wyoming.”
“The other bad news is that he didn’t,” I said. “Not unless he went up without a license. Wyoming has no record of him.”
“Well now, that’s the interesting part,” Steinberg said, and his mild west Texas drawl made it sound as if we had all day to chew the fat. “A piece of information from down in Posadas County dovetails in with this Cole business. You have a Deputy Edwin Mitchell working for you?”
“Yes. Eddie Mitchell.”
“He asked us to verify a license-plate number for him, and an address. We were able to do that.”
“A plate and address for whom?”
“Apparently you have an RV parked down there that belongs to Bruce Elders, a Corrales resident. The tag is Bruce Elders zero zero one.”
“That’s correct.” I wondered how many other officers had wandered around the big RV, each one of them thinking they’d been the first to check.
“I talked to Mr. Elders earlier this evening. I gotta tell ya, under normal circumstances Posadas doesn’t get mentioned once a year around here. I’m not much for coincidence.”
“What did Elders tell you?”
“Bruce Elders owns a couple of liquor stores here in town. Pretty straight-up kind of guy, as far as I know. Big chamber of commerce booster, big athletic booster, all that kind of good shit. He’s also Paul Cole’s brother-in-law.” The phone went silent as I caught my breath. Detective Steinberg enjoyed the moment and let the silence ride.
“No shit,” I said finally.
“No shit. Mr. Elders says that he loaned his brother-in-law his RV for a special elk hunt up in Wyoming. He expected him back this past Sunday, but he says that Cole told him not to worry if he was late. Cole said he planned to stay in the field until he got his elk. Or until the season ended.”
“He loaned his brother-in-law an expensive RV to take hunting?”
“They’re close,” Steinberg said, and chuckled again.
“Must be goddamn Siamese twins,” I said. “And he claims that he didn’t go with him?”
“Elders says he’s not much of a hunter.”
“And Cole’s wife didn’t go with him, either, it seems.”
“Apparently not.”
“How long have they been married?”
“I couldn’t tell you. And so…you folks have that RV parked down there, eh? That sure as hell isn’t Wyoming. I wonder if Elders knows that his unit is wandering all over southern New Mexico.”
“I don’t know. Do us a favor and don’t mention anything to him just yet. But that ocean liner isn’t wandering, either. It’s up on jacks, parked in the yard of a guy named Andrew Browers. I don’t know how long it’s been there, either.”
“Who’s this Browers person?”
“He’s Tiffany Cole’s boyfriend.”
“Mother of the missing kid,” Steinberg said, making me jealous as hell of his memory for names. I could imagine him hearing Tiffany Cole’s name on the television news, then filing it away in some discreet corner of his brain for later reference. “And Paul Cole’s ex,” Steinberg added. “That sure makes life interesting, trying to unsnarl all that. Deputy Mitchell filled me in. No word on the youngster yet, either, I assume? Either one of them?”
“No.”
“How big a village is Posadas?”
“Two thousand on a good day. Give or take.”
“Well, if the RV is there, and the Cole kid is missing, then you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that one of those two thousand souls is Paul Cole. Or was Paul Cole. And I’ll bet this month’s paycheck that you don’t have two child abductions in a small town in the same week that aren’t related, either. Shit, send the whole mess up north to us. We haven’t had a really interesting day for months. We’re getting tired of drive-bys.”
“Believe me, I wish I could.”
“Keep me posted, Sheriff. I’ll keep nosing around at this end. Let me give you my home phone, just in case.”
He did so, and I hung up. I sat with my head in my hands for a few seconds, thinking. I was sure the answer was staring me in the face, but the day was rapidly stretching beyond my endurance.
I turned away from my desk, thrust my hands in my pockets, and ambled out into the hallway, pausing to inspect the coffee machine. I didn’t really see it, since my mind was a kaleidoscope of possibilities and ideas.
Ernie Wheeler looked up. “Any news?”
I shook my head. “No news. On Estelle’s boy, you mean?” He nodded. “No, no news.”
More to give myself time to think than anything else, I scanned the activity log sheet and stopped with a jerk. I reread the entry.