“I’m headed that way, I think.”
“You think?” Mears chuckled.
“Yeah. I’m at Bill’s house. He took a tumble.”
“He what?”
“He tripped over his front step and cracked his head. The ambulance just took him to the hospital. I really need to go there for a few minutes.”
“Yipes,” Mears said. “Is he okay?”
“I think so, but I need to be there.”
“Yep,” Mears agreed. “This is like dominos, you know that? You think it’s something in the air? We got us quite a run going.”
“I hope not.”
“Collins and Taber just showed up, so we can break someone free to go visit the judge if that will help speed things up.”
“Good idea, Tom. You know, Jackie gets along with the judge pretty well. I think he’s afraid of her,” Estelle said, trying a weak laugh.
“Then she’s on the way,” Mears said. “By the way, Eddie and Mike are back from Lordsburg. They’re going to be down in Eddie’s office for a bit.”
“I’ll swing by when I can,” Estelle said.
“I understand that. I hope things go all right.”
“Thanks, Tom.”
She let the telephone fall to her lap, counted to a hundred while forcing slow, even breaths, and then straightened up and started the car. As she pulled out of Gastner’s driveway, she palmed the mike.
“PSO dispatch, three ten.”
“Three ten, go ahead.”
“I’ll be ten-seven at the hospital. Call Lieutenant Adams at the State Police and ask him if we can borrow a couple of his officers.”
“Ten four. He just called a few minutes ago, asking about that.”
“Okay. Tell him I’d like one of his guys to patrol central, and the other to give us some help, especially on State 76 down to the border.”
“Ten four.”
She racked the mike and drove up Grande toward Posadas General Hospital, so lost in her thoughts that she didn’t realize that she’d driven through the red light at the intersection of Bustos and Grande. “Por Dios,” she said aloud with a start. “Pull yourself together.” Her pulse raced, partly from fatigue and partly from the grim image of her patrol car T-boning some innocent old lady out to buy a late-night can of cat food.
Chapter Seventeen
For more than an hour, Estelle paced the waiting room at Posadas General Hospital, knowing perfectly well that there were a dozen things more productive that she should be doing, knowing that Bill Gastner would be the first person to call her silly for wasting her time just because he needed a couple of stitches in his scalp. But she couldn’t bring herself to leave.
It would have been an oversimplification to characterize her relationship with the former sheriff as father-daughter, although there was a strong element of that, especially since Estelle had never known her own biological father…or mother.
Gastner had served as her mentor, confessor, counselor, friend, and perhaps most important of all he had been a true padrino, or godfather, for both of her children. As she paced the polished tile floor, she thought back twenty-two years, when she had come to the United States at age sixteen to live with her Uncle Reuben and attend the last two years of high school in Posadas. More than once, her uncle had talked about Undersheriff Gastner and El brazo largo de la ley… “the long arm of the law,” and before she graduated from high school, she’d discovered that law enforcement was magical for her.
When she’d earned her first degree in criminal justice, it seemed only natural that she would seek a job that would allow her to remain close to home and her fiancé, the young doctor Francis Guzman.
Undersheriff Bill Gastner had pushed the then civilian sheriff to hire twenty-two-year-old Estelle Reyes, and she’d become the first uniformed deputy sheriff in the history of Posadas County. During the nineteen years since then, the bond between Bill Gastner, herself, and her family had only deepened. She’d even been amused at the affection between Francis’s Aunt Sofía and the old lawman.
During the wait, she had come close to calling Sofía at home, but was loath do to so until she had concrete information about Gastner’s condition. At 10:05, her cell phone rang, and Eddie Mitchell’s calm, quiet voice brought her back into focus.
“How are we doing?” he asked.
“We are waiting,” Estelle said. “They took him down to CAT scan, and we’ll see.”
“Huh. Look, they got the warrant from Hobart, and Mears is down there now with his brother. It looks like Janet withdrew three hundred and fifty dollars at 3:05 p.m.”
Estelle frowned as she rolled the numbers around in her head, and Mitchell mistook the silence for irritation at not being told sooner. “Mears said that he’d wait to hear from you before he told you,” Mitchell added. “He didn’t want to bother you over there.”
“I appreciate that, but bother might be better than wearing circles in the waiting room floor,” Estelle said. “Three fifty. That’s a nice, logical number. Enough to get her through a long weekend, and not enough to be suspicious.”
“Right. At least we have a time now.”
“Three oh five.” Dead center in the middle of a Christmas afternoon, she thought. Just seven hours had passed. “Are those numbers accurate, do you suppose?”
“Terry Mears says so.”
“What about a video?”
“Nothing. For one thing, it’s out of service at the moment. For another, it shows only the interior of the ATM foyer…nothing outside. If the killer nailed her in the car, then it’s out of range of the camera. Of course, he might have talked to her at the ATM. We don’t know.”
“That’s about an hour between the time she was at the office and when she went to the ATM…and presumably was killed shortly thereafter.”
“That’s right,” Mitchell said. “Mike’s spending some time by himself in the sheriff’s office, writing out a deposition. We had a good long talk on the way back from Lordsburg. That’s primarily why I called.”
“How’s he doing?”
“‘Basket case’ might be a good description. He wants to arrest the whole world just now. I don’t want him out on the street, and I don’t want to send him home. I was thinking that maybe he should go back to his folks in Lordsburg when we’re all wrapped up tonight.”
“Maybe.”
“Anyway, I’d like to go over what he said when you get the chance. We ran through it a dozen times, and now he’s taking a cooler and putting it down on paper.”
“What do you think, Eddie?”
There was a pause. “If he killed Janet Tripp, then he deserves an Oscar for best actor. No…I don’t think he had anything to do with Janet’s death. But he’s the logical place to start, Estelle.” He exhaled a little huffing sound that might have been the beginning of a laugh. “I need your intuition.”
“My intuition,” Estelle said wryly. “I might have had some, once upon a time.”
“Take a deep breath and get it back in gear, Undersheriff,” Mitchell said. “You got your vest on?” When she didn’t answer instantly, he added, “Things like dark alleys and landfill pits should have made you a believer, my friend,” referring to two previous incidents that could have gone even more wrong than they had.
“The sheriff should have had an armored butt,” she laughed, knowing perfectly well that Mitchell was right.
“Yeah,” he said. “Look, we’ll be here for quite a while. If you get a chance to break away, we need to talk, okay? And by the way, Frank Dayan’s had his scanner on again. He stopped by.”
“Use your own judgment,” Estelle said.
“Yeah, well. I didn’t have much to tell him. But for once he’s got a major story hanging with lots of time before he goes to press…a whole damn week, practically.”
“I’ll talk to him when I get a chance.”
“He doesn’t know about Gastner yet.”
“He doesn’t need to…Bill’s a civilian, and it was a home accident. If I told Frank, Padrino would have my hide.”