“We might get lucky and find some powder residue on the liner,” Mears added.
“And if you’ll get your brother, I’ll see about the warrant.” She glanced at her watch, remembering her promise to former sheriff Bill Gastner. What was supposed to be fifteen minutes had mushroomed into an evening. “I was going to talk to Bill about what happened in the office earlier this afternoon, but I never made it. I’ll get him to go with me to Hobart’s. That’ll mellow the judge down some.”
“Linda’s on the way?”
“Yes.”
“Good. We need to impound this puppy, too. Get it over into the secure barn so nobody dinks with it,” Mears said, and shook his head. “We’re going to have a long, long list of folks wondering about whatever happened to their nice holiday.”
“Remind them that Janet Tripp can’t wonder about anything anymore,” Estelle said. Far off to the north, she heard the moan of an aircraft, and her own spirits rose. As it approached fast and direct, she could tell that it was a twin jet-prop. “And that has to be the air ambulance,” she said. “I need to pick up Francis at the airport.”
“Merry Christmas,” Mears said.
“People keep telling me that. If I hear it long enough, I might start believing it.”
Back at her car, she opened the door and removed the plastic crime-scene tape that Pasquale had strung up, repositioning it to Mears’s unit. Then she headed to the airport, six miles away at the foot of Cat Mesa. By the time she arrived there, the Piper Navajo had parked, its engines spooling down to idle. Estelle left her car at the chainlink gate and walked out across the tarmac toward the air ambulance. In a moment, Francis gingerly made his way down the little folding steps from the plane, turning to wave at whomever was inside. The moment he was around the wing and clear, the engines shrieked, the nose wheel cocked sharply to the left, and the Navajo surged back out to the taxiway.
“Smooth as silk,” Francis said. “Flying at night is neat, querida.”
“I’ll take your word for it, oso.” She snuggled into his arms and enjoyed her own airborne moment as her “bear” swung her around, her feet well clear of the ground.
“How’s it going?” he whispered in her ear.
She sighed. “Not good, oso. Not good. And it’s not going to improve much, either.”
“What’s going on? I phoned Alan, and he said Eduardo was slipping. He also said you had a homicide of some sort. We had a bad connection, and I didn’t get the details.”
“A homicide of some sort,” Estelle repeated. “We have the kind where someone’s been killed to death.” But she didn’t smile, and neither did Francis. He saw the look of misery in her eyes and lowered her until her feet touched the ground. “Someone I know?”
“I don’t think so. Janet Tripp? She’s Mike Sisneros’s girlfriend.”
“My God. This happened just this afternoon?”
“Yep.” She took his hand as they walked back to the county car. “Remember Butch Romero?”
“Sure.”
“He found the body in Escudero Arroyo.”
“Wow.”
“One gunshot to the head. Just dumped in a tangle of old cars. Nothing else. It’s looking like she was attacked over at Posadas State Bank, and then dumped in the arroyo afterward.” Francis tried to settle his bulk in the passenger seat and yelped as he cracked his knee against the computer that grew out of the center console in front of the radios. “Let me fold that out of your way,” she said.
He thumped his left elbow against the shotgun in the rack between them. “You need some more junk in this car,” he said. “It’s a miracle that it has enough power to move.”
“We don’t get a lot of passengers up front,” she said. “A veces no está en situación de exigir nada.”
“Your mother says that,” Francis said as Estelle backed the car away from the gate. “Her version of ‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’”
“She says lots of things. And after today, she’s going to be at her acid best,” Estelle said. “I haven’t been home since 4:05 this afternoon, and we haven’t even started yet.”
“Any good leads?” Francis settled with one hand looped through the panic handle as the car accelerated hard on the highway toward Posadas.
“It’s bizarre,” Estelle said. “And no…nothing that sends us in any particular direction. That’s the trouble.” She paused as she let the car drift toward the center line as they raced around the sweeping corner, and then pushed hard through the intersection with County Road 43. “Every minute that we dawdle, the killer puts more miles between him and us.”
Francis leaned over the center console equipment, gazing at the speedometer. “Dawdle has a new definition in this household,” he said.
“If I could figure out a way to be in three places at once, I’d try it,” Estelle said.
“Alan’s doing the autopsy?”
“As we speak. I just came from there a little bit ago.”
Francis looked hard at her. “Is there anything that makes you suspect the deputy? The boyfriend?”
“Por Dios, I hope not,” Estelle sighed. “But we can’t be sure. Not yet. Eddie went over to Lordsburg to get him.”
“Bizarre,” Francis said.
“Oh, sí.”
“Sofía is okay with the two terrors?”
“She’s in heaven…or so she says. We were all out for a nice afternoon walk when Butch found the body. And then he found us. That ended the nice walk.”
They swung into the hospital parking lot where Francis’s vehicle had been left. “You going home now?” he asked.
Estelle shook her head. “I can’t, querido. I need to talk with Padrino about this afternoon. He’s one of the last people to see Janet alive.” She glanced at her watch. “And I was supposed to do that hours ago.” She rested her forehead against his, the two of them bent over the junk between their seats.
“Be hard as hell to make out in this car,” Francis said.
“That’s what the back seat is for.” Estelle laughed.
“I need to check on Eduardo,” he said, and tipped his head back until their lips met.
“Do what you can for him.”
“Oh, for sure,” he replied. “And I’ll check in with Alan and see what he needs.”
“Maybe next week sometime, we can get together for a while and pretend that we have a life.”
“It’s a deal.” He opened the door and pushed himself out. “Be careful, querida.”
“Love you, oso.”
As she accelerated out of the parking lot, she watched Francis in the rearview mirror, watched as he trudged toward the emergency room entrance. She stopped at the highway and looked again. From that distance, just before he pulled open the doors, his figure in the evening light looked just like Francisco, and she felt a pang of loss as he opened the door and disappeared inside.
Chapter Sixteen
Even though she knew that she still needed to call on Judge Lester Hobart to obtain a subpoena for the bank’s ATM records, and then return to the bank parking lot, Estelle still felt a soft flood of relaxation and relief as she turned onto Guadalupe Terrace. Former sheriff Bill Gastner’s large, fortress-like adobe nestled in the huge cottonwoods, a retreat where it would be just too easy to welcome a mug of tea and good conversation.
The porch light was off, an old habit that Gastner had once explained away with a shrug. “A light scares away the nesting swallows. Besides, I know where the damn step is.” Christmas wasn’t the nesting season for the little birds, and with returning curls of clouds and a fraction of moon, it was dark enough that the single porch light would have been welcome.
She pulled into his driveway and at the same time found her cell phone, thumbing the autodial. Gastner might well ignore the telephone, too. He did. His answering machine, a gadget he loathed but kept in deference to his job as a state livestock inspector, finally clicked, and Estelle switched off before the beep to record a message.