“This is nuts,” Gastner said.
“But it would explain why he hit you, and then didn’t enter your house. If it was the key to the conference room that he was after, he found what he came looking for, didn’t he?” Mitchell said.
“Nobody’s been in there, though,” Torrez said. “If he wanted the key, he ain’t used it yet.”
“You’re sure about that?” Gastner said. “Hell, busy as you gents have been? In and out and around in circles?”
“Dispatch would have seen that,” Mitchell said. “It’s right across the hall.”
“Even if dispatch left his station for a minute to take a crap?” the older man asked bluntly. “You can’t cover something like that every minute of the day. Slip in, then slip out.”
“I don’t think so,” Mitchell said doggedly. “There’s nothing in that room that you could get in and out.”
“The files?”
“Even if you knew what to look for, good luck finding it,” Mitchell said.
“Then he’s waiting for a chance,” Gastner persisted. “Maybe later on, when he has time to search. And the next question is why. If he took my key…” He hesitated. “We’re going to look pretty foolish if I go home and there it is on my nightstand.”
“Where you always leave stray keys,” Estelle said, and Gastner shot her a withering look. “But that’s interesting,” she continued.
“What is?” Gastner asked.
“Janet’s killer took her apartment key. Why would he do that?”
“There’s something in her apartment that he wants,” Gastner said.
“Mike’s apartment also, sir.”
Gastner stood with his fists on his hips, feet planted…the pugnacious stance Estelle had come to know so well over the years. “Maybe he thought Mike had a key to the conference room, and kept it stowed in the apartment.”
“Mike doesn’t have a key to the conference room,” Mitchell said. “The sheriff has one, Estelle has one, and you had one.” It was his turn to receive the withering look, and he shrugged. “That doesn’t make sense, though-for the same reason. If Mike had a key to the conference room, why would he take it off his key ring and leave it in the apartment? Nobody would do that. We put keys on our key rings, and they stay there.”
“Then what was the killer looking for in that apartment?”
Gastner said. “We don’t know if he was. We don’t know for sure that it was him who took the key from Janet’s ring in the first place. Or mine, for that matter. We don’t know if he was even there. Mike says nothing is missing from his apartment, nothing is messed up.”
“There’s something someone wants that he thinks are in those files,” Torrez said. “That’s the only thing that makes sense to me.”
“Related to what?” Gastner asked.
“Wish I knew,” the sheriff replied.
“Janet Tripp,” Estelle said, more to herself than anyone. “Number one, I can’t believe that her murder, and the assault on Padrino, were unrelated. The timing is just too close, and I see similarities. Number two, we think that whoever killed Janet took her apartment key…Mike’s apartment key.”
“And you don’t know that for sure,” Mitchell observed.
“No, I don’t. But it makes sense to me. As you say, keys don’t jump off key rings. Especially not two keys, from two key rings, within a few hours of each other. That means there was something in her-Mike’s-apartment that Janet’s killer was after. That he thought might be there. And as you say, Mike didn’t have a key to the conference room files.”
“The killer wouldn’t know that,” Torrez said.
“Maybe not. But if he thought Mike had a key, it makes no sense to go through Janet to get it, does it? Mike would have it on his key ring, just like Bill had his.” She held up her own keys. “Just like I have mine, and you have yours. It makes sense to me that he wanted something that Janet had…and not the key. That’s number three.” She held up three fingers. “And that’s what I can’t get past.”
“You think she knows the killer somehow?”
“Maybe.”
“Huh.” He gazed at Estelle, eyes narrowed. “Where the hell do we go with that. There’s nothing in the county rap sheets that mentions Janet.”
“And I haven’t found anything in the village files,” Mitchell said. “Going back to the year she was born-1977.”
“She was born here?” Gastner asked, surprised.
“Yep.”
“I’m surprised I didn’t know that.”
“No reason you should,” Mitchell said. “One of your hobbies isn’t memorizing birth announcements from each year, is it?”
“Not hardly,” Gastner said. “I have enough trivia clogging my arteries.”
“What’s Essie say?”
“Nothing,” Estelle said. “She’s worried about Mike.”
“Aren’t we all,” Gastner said. He started to head around Torrez’s desk toward the chair. “Whoa,” he said, and stopped, looking down at the desk without seeing it. “A thought occurs to me,” he said slowly, then continued around the desk to sit in Torrez’s remarkably uncomfortable swivel chair. He spent a long moment rearranging things on the sheriff’s desk. Finally, he folded his hands and looked at the others, one at a time. “Who are the old farts in all of this?”
“Means what?” Mitchell asked.
“Who are the old farts,” Gastner said again, “who would be apt to know what’s in the village files from way back?”
“Chief Martinez,” Torrez said, then added, “and you.”
“And me. Exclusive club, compared to all you youngsters.” He pushed his glasses up, and peered across at Estelle. “If you had something in those files that you’d just as soon not see the light of day, that you’d just as soon not be remembered and dug up, wouldn’t you be just a little nervous when you saw the article in the newspaper about consolidation? How we were going to merge all those nifty files? How yours truly here was heading up the job? Frank Dayan did a good job with that story, didn’t he.”
“No one attacked Eduardo,” Estelle said.
“True enough. But what happened? He had a public heart attack, and the whole town is bound to know. It was in the metro papers….at least the one from Cruces. It might have made the news on the Cruces or Deming radio. And there’s our own speed-of-sound grapevine.” He held up a thumb. “There’s one down. Eduardo knows what’s in those files. Pardon me. Knew.” He turned the thumb and jabbed himself in the chest. “And I’ve been around for a while. Maybe somebody thinks that I know something.”
“The key?” Estelle asked.
Gastner shrugged. “Don’t know, sweetheart. Unless it’s as simple as this: with Eduardo gone, and me gone, Mr. Slick knows that the playing field has been leveled a little, as politicians like to say. The old farts who might remember something from way back are out of the picture. And with a little luck, nobody’ll notice the missing key for a while, and he’ll have the chance to slip in and do a little file removal. Think on that.”
“Janet,” Estelle said abruptly. “If the files have to do with her, she’s out of the way, too.”
Mitchell chuckled. “Wonderful,” he said. “And if all of this is out in left field somewhere, we’re back where we started.” He held up a hand. “What’s to lose.”
“I’ll get the locks changed today,” Torrez said, but Gastner shook his head.
“Don’t bother, Roberto. It might be kind of interesting to let ’em in. See who it is, and what he wants.”
The sheriff gazed at Gastner for a moment, and the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes deepened a little. “If he thinks someone’s going to recognize him, maybe he’ll be a little reluctant anyway,” he said.
“Could be that,” Gastner said.
“We need to talk with Mike again,” Estelle interrupted.
“What do you want to know?” Chief Mitchell asked. “He and I have been over this ground so often we’ve dug ruts.”
“I want to know everything there is to know, starting from 1977,” she said. “For one thing, there’s one obvious little detail nagging me. Mike’s.22 pistol was stolen, and he can’t seem to account for when that happened. For some reason, he goes to Lordsburg without Janet. He claims that Janet doesn’t get along so well with his mother, and maybe it’s that simple. On top of that, Mike is on the transition team, but he doesn’t have his own key…we limited the number of those floating around.” She fell silent while the others waited, hating to voice the thought. “If Mike has himself a key, no one in dispatch is going to wonder when he goes in that conference room.”