Gastner snorted in disgust. “I’m not much of a biblical scholar, but I never realized that Mary and Joseph were looking for a freebie.”
“A plea for charity on Christmas Eve is a nice setup,” Estelle said. “I’ll be curious to find out what percentage refused them lodging.”
“And a village named Posadas is a perfect target,” Gastner grumbled.
“Mr. Patel put a dent in their statistics,” Estelle said, and she moved away from the building, looked up into the night sky, and wrinkled her nose against the fine drizzle. “And that’s kind of neat. But they’re not our problem right now, unless Miss Stacie goes into hard labor in Room 110.”
They watched as the flat bed of the car hauler thumped horizontal with its load and Stub Moore and his helper cranked the tie-downs tight. “It doesn’t make any sense to steal a car back east, get this far, and then circle around and head east again.” She glanced at her watch again. “Tommy was headed toward Regál, and the State Police are covering the interstate all the way to the state lines in both directions, so those two aren’t going to make it very far.”
“Or they could be smart,” Gastner said. “Slip south through María, work their way east toward El Paso and the border crossing there.”
“They might do that. And they might have riffled through the chief’s glove box and found his address, and gone over there and robbed the place blind while the rest of the folks are at the hospital.” She glanced at Jackie.
“I’ll check on that,” the deputy said. “Tony Abeyta and I are going to talk with the other guests here at the motel, too. Just on the off chance that someone saw something. There’s only a couple, but you never know.”
Estelle watched the stocky woman hustle off toward her vehicle. “If I were them, I’d stay on the interstate westbound,” she said. “Rainy night, cops few and far between, they could do that and shoot all the way west out of the state. Their luck’s run pretty smooth so far.”
“All the way from Indiana, or wherever it was,” Gastner said. “Publish all the bulletins you want, but somebody has to read them in order for BOLOs to do any good.”
“True enough.” She nodded toward her car. “I want to stop by the hospital,” Estelle said. “We have two to worry about over there. I thought Bobby looked pretty wretched tonight.”
“Ah,” Gastner scoffed, “he’s okay. Mr. Sunshine is one of those folks who makes a lousy patient, is all. I’m sure he’s thoroughly tired of hurting by this point. He likes to be in the middle of things, and here he is, forced to hobble around like an old man. He’s not even good competition for me.”
As they drove out of the parking lot past the motel’s main entry, they could see Adrian Patel and Miranda Lopez in close conversation with Deputy Mike Sisneros.
“I wonder why he came down here,” Estelle said. She started the car and sat for a moment with her hand on the gearshift.
“Who, the chief? He needed aspirin,” Gastner said. “At least that’s what he thought he needed.”
She shook her head in resignation and pulled the car into gear, turning toward the entrance to Grande Avenue.
“Eduardo always did like the café here,” Gastner added. “He said they had the best iced tea in town, and he was probably right. So he was used to coming here. The lobby is always open, and he knew where the vending machine was.” Gastner thumped the side of the door thoughtfully with the back of his fist. “There’s no accounting for what people do when they aren’t thinking straight.”
Estelle’s cell phone chirped, and she pulled it out of her pocket. “That includes young Mister Willis,” she said to Gastner, and then acknowledged the call.
“Estelle,” dispatcher Brent Sutherland said, “I tried to get you on the radio, but you must have been out of the car.”
“Just preoccupied,” Estelle said, and at the same time reached over and turned the volume of the radio up. “What’s up?”
“Tom has the chief’s car in sight,” Sutherland said, and even as he said it, Bill Gastner pointed ahead of them. The bright lights of a fast-moving vehicle had materialized on Grande, and in a moment Sheriff Robert Torrez’s unmarked Expedition howled past southbound, grill lights pulsing. “The vehicle is parked at the church in Regál.”
“At the church?”
“That’s what Pasquale says. I just told the sheriff, and he’s on the way. Mike’s headed out that way, too.”
“Roger that,” Estelle said, and she swung a wide U-turn on Grande. “Are the two suspects in sight? Are they with the vehicle?”
“Negative. Tom thinks that they’re inside the church.”
“What’s his twenty right now?”
“He’s just up the road, in the turnoff to the water tank. He said he drove past the church lot, down toward the border crossing, and saw the car. I didn’t know whether or not Chief Martinez still had a scanner in his car, so I wanted to stay off the radio as much as I could,” Sutherland said.
“That’s good. We’re on the way. Tell Tom to stay put unless they come out of the church and it looks as if they’re going to take off.”
“You got it.”
She handed the phone to Gastner and pulled the mike off the clip.
“Three oh eight, three ten. We copy the info on Bert’s Place. We’re a minute or so behind you.”
“Ten four.” Torrez’s reply in his habitual radio voice was not much more than a murmur. “Bert’s Place,” the radio moniker for the Iglesia de Nuestra Señora in Regál, where Father Bertrand Anselmo was the priest, was one way to keep scanner aficionados-and perhaps the two car thieves if they had a radio-in the dark about location. Torrez’s voice broke the silence once again.
“Three oh two, sit tight.”
“Now that’s bizarre,” Gastner said. He reached out and braced one hand against the dash when Estelle braked hard enough to make the tires howl as they turned onto State 56, the highway leading southwest the twenty-three miles to Regál Pass and the little village beyond on the Mexican border. “Why would two car thieves hole up in the church? That’s not good news.”
“No, sir,” Estelle said. She accelerated hard, and far ahead of them, they could see the taillights of the sheriff’s vehicle as she closed the gap between them.
Chapter Five
La Iglesia de Nuestra Señora was one of the most frequently photographed landmarks in Posadas County, preserved on film by thousands of tourists. Most travelers found the small church charming and quaint, and they then went away relieved that they didn’t have to attend services there.
Three-foot-thick adobe walls, tall and narrow windows recessed with eighteen-inch windowsills, and carved ceiling beams that had been salvaged more than a century before from an Indian ruin in northern Mexico encased the cool interior in musty silence.
Cottonwood planks had been intricately carved and painted for the altar, with a heavy communion railing polished to a soft, reflective shine by generations of hands. The same cottonwood had been used for each of the twelve stations of the cross, the carvings nestled deep in nichos sunken into the adobe walls.
With a little cooperative planning, the twelve straight-backed pews, six on each side of a narrow aisle, could seat sixty worshipers-nearly twice the total population of the village of Regál.
That neat package, immaculately maintained and painted so white that a blast of sun through one of the narrow windows could reflect from the opposite wall like a flashbulb, had never known a utility. For evening services, light came from beeswax candles made by one of the parishioners. Burning piñon and juniper in the plump potbellied stove that stood in the center of the long east wall chased the deep chill that settled into the building when it stood empty. The black single-walled stovepipe reached up precariously a dozen feet before piercing through the ceiling thimble.
Estelle let her memories of the little church form a blueprint in her mind as they sped southwest. There were no hiding places in the church-no attic, no sanctuary. She glanced at the clock. There was also no congregation at this hour, and for that she was thankful. Not long before, her mother and aunt had knelt within those stout walls during the 5:00 p.m. service, listening to Father Anselmo and inhaling the fragrance of juniper boughs. There would be another service at nine o’clock that Christmas Eve, and, just because Father Anselmo loved it so, another at midnight.