“Ain’t none of this is news to us,” Sheriff Torrez muttered.
“I wouldn’t think so,” Perrone said. “But patience, Sheriff. This might be news.” He reached up and swiveled the stainless steel examination light closer so that it flooded the corpse’s upper back. “Eagle eye saw this before I did,” Perrone said. “You can see it better at an angle.” With a gloved finger, he traced the mark without touching the skin, just to the left of the spine’s first and second thoracic vertebrae, high on the back between the shoulder blades.
“Well, shit,” Torrez muttered. “That’s startin’ to be a bruise.”
“Starting to be,” Perrone agreed. “I asked Linda to stop by to do the documentation. This is so faint, we’re going to need her expertise before the autopsy. But this is what’s really interesting, folks. Hang on a minute.” He turned away from the table and stepped to one of the tall, narrow cabinets, returning with a man’s hiking shoe enclosed in a plastic evidence bag.
“This is one of Mr. Thompson’s size thirteens, considerably larger than the outline of our bruise. Now, I’m sure he didn’t kick himself, but the shoe will do to make my point.” He held it above the bruise, the heel just a fraction of an inch above the skin. He waited while his audience absorbed what they were seeing. The outside arc of the bruise roughly suggested the outline of the shoe’s heel.
“You’re sayin’ he was kicked?”
“That’s my guess.” He grimaced at his own choice of words. “Let me amend that. Not a guess. That’s what I really believe happened. See, this area started to bruise…well, let me paint a scenario for you. It started to bruise the instant that someone’s shoe crashed into the victim’s back. Now,” and Perrone held up an index finger as if he were lecturing a class, “Kyle Thompson measures out at 193 centimeters tall, give or take. That’s about six feet four for you metrically challenged folk. That’s the number to remember. Six-four.”
He turned to the sheriff and took hold of one arm. “That’s your height, more or less, right? So observe.” He turned the sheriff in place and rested a hand on his back. “That means the tops of his shoulders are about five feet off the ground. Maybe five-two or five-three. More or less. This bruise is a little less than that, but close there to.”
Perrone stopped and looked at each one of them. Torrez scowled impatiently.
The morgue door opened, and Linda Pasquale stepped in and beamed at the group. “Hi, guys. Séance time?”
“Ah, good. Mrs. Pasquale, impeccable timing,” Perrone said. “So, as I was saying, picture this impact, this kick, five feet or more off the ground.” His finger once more traced the portion of the bruise nearest the spine, and then he held the shoe in place. Then he turned and held the shoe in that same position against Torrez’s back.
“That is some high kick, sports fans. And the toe points upward and to the victim’s left, so in all likelihood, it was a right foot. And the bruising would have turned out to be considerable except for one thing.”
“His heart stopped,” Estelle said.
“Exactly. So we have a little bruising, enough to capture on film, but not enough to make a really livid mark. On top of which, blood sinks downward. The lividity patterns would appear on the front of the body as he lay there, the blood draining away from the surfaces of the back.”
“All this says that you believe he was kicked off the rock?” Estelle asked.
“I do. We took our time and really looked, folks. There isn’t a single bruise on the body except this one. He has an injured ankle that was obviously under treatment at the time of his death, and you can see substantial bruising there, for sure. But not a nick, not a cut, not a defensive wound or bruise that we can relate to his fall. Some gravel ground into his left palm as if it struck the ground at the same time as his skull did.” He shook his head. “Just this shoe print, if I may be allowed to call it that, and of course, the massive head trauma. Well, that’s almost it.”
“Almost?”
“The victim has a fracture of the neck, right below the occipital.” He pointed. “There’s an X-ray on the monitor. But it’s nothing unusual. In fact, we’d expect a fracture where the victim lands headfirst, jerking the head backward, so hard that there’s compression fractures in the neck vertebrae.”
“That would have been fatal as well?”
“Absolutely. But that’s it. Perfectly predictable. Our victim wasn’t picked up by a couple of thugs and tossed to his death. The results of those fingers clamping on him would have shown up. I picture him standing on the brink, admiring the scenery. He’s a little awkward, maybe even a little off balance, and his assailant comes up behind him and bam!” Perrone clapped his hands. “An aggressive kick near top dead center, and…” He made an outward zooming motion. “Over he goes. Pitchin’ headfirst.”
Perrone stepped back to the locker and removed an evidence box containing various articles of clothing, each piece additionally wrapped in its own labeled evidence bag. “His polo shirt shows damage on the front, as we would expect from the crash landing. But also, there’s scuffing, with dirt particles driven into the fabric, on the back.” He drew out the shirt and spread it on one of the stainless steel tables. “See what you can do with that, Linda.”
“The impossible is our possible,” Linda quipped.
“No tox yet, though,” Estelle said.
Perrone glanced at the undersheriff and raised an eyebrow. “Blood alcohol was negligible. About what we’d expect if he’d had a single drink for lunch. Nothing more. As you folks know, full tox will take a while, but I tell you, I don’t expect anything.”
“Linda, what do you think?” She watched Pasquale as the young woman examined the shirt fabric without actually touching it.
“With the mark on the back…” She shrugged. “I can filter it up to help, but what you’re going to end up with is just a mark that contrasts a little with the surrounding skin. No obvious patterns or stuff like that. Now this shirt? The light-blue fabric might give us a little more, but not much.”
“Do what you can.”
“Of course. Always.”
Estelle glanced at the sheriff, and caught the glower. “Bobby?”
“So we got a karate kick to the back? With enough power to send him headfirst over the edge in some wild dive?”
Estelle didn’t respond, but knew what was coming. On more than one evening occasion, she’d seen the “Karate Kids” coming out of the basement of the First Baptist Church after a session of taekwondo. Quentin Torrez, already proudly sporting a first- degree black belt, was an avid coach for the younger participants.
“It could have happened that way, Sheriff. Could have. Or the circumstances might have been totally different, something none of us visualized. However it happened, if I’m right about this being a kick bruise, then the assailant somehow got directly behind Mr. Thompson, who at the time would have had to be standing on the edge.”
He sighed. “It’s the face full of rock, ten feet out from the edge, that’s signature. This man stood six-four, so the arc of his fall isn’t extraordinary. In fact, a healthy athlete could manage the same trajectory without an Olympic-class leap. But I gotta tell ya, he didn’t just slip or lose his balance and tumble down the rock face, frantically trying to catch himself as he went. He didn’t end up at the bottom of those rocks in a heap, with scrapes and cuts and broken bones. And he didn’t hit the ground close in and then crawl out to expire on the rocks. All of that much is pretty obvious, for whatever it means.”
Perrone crossed over to one of the sinks, stripped off his latex gloves, and began the process of washing his hands. As he did so, he said over his shoulder, “Full autopsy tomorrow…later this morning, I mean.” He glanced at the wall clock. “He’ll keep ’til then. But both Francis and I thought you should know about the bruise on the back.”
He took a deep breath as he dried
his hands. “Somebody else was out there, folks. Bet on it. This is not just some simple hiker’s injury. The laws of physics say otherwise. The only other explanation is that the victim took a running jump, flinging himself out—a really creative, difficult suicide, considering the sore ankle, and given the uncertainty of success.”
“Come first light,” Torrez said, “we need to get back out there and take another look—all the way out to the county road. You, me, and pick up Taber on the way.”
Estelle nodded at Linda. “And the magician with the camera too.”
“Of course,” Torrez said, more affably than usual. He reached out and punched Linda Pasquale lightly on the left shoulder, a display of emotion adequate to last him for the rest of the month.
Chapter Twenty-Two
By ten o’clock the next Monday morning, the sunshine of that first June day had baked the prairie to a fragrant potpourri of creosote bush, black sage, and the myriad species of composites in full yellow bloom. Estelle Reyes-Guzman still felt logy despite four hours sleep, and on top of that, frustrated that the new day had brought no positive results at the Kyle Thompson death scene.
The prairie itself was a welter of old tracks, both two- and four-wheeled, cut after the last rain that the sky had managed. The gravel was hard, baked stove-top dry, with small patches of blow sand here and there. Even knowing exactly where Thompson’s Subaru had been parked, it was impossible to follow any kind of trail where he might have walked to the cliff edge.
The Subaru’s tire tracks marked clearly where he had parked, however. The left front tire had crunched over a patch of bunchgrass, and the right front had forced its pattern in a small patch of sand. One of Linda Pasquale’s photos showed the Subaru being hooked up to the car carrier that had removed it from the site, and it was simple enough to find the exact spot where the little car’s tires had rested. Which told them nothing.
Had Kyle Thompson followed a direct line from Subaru to the jutting top of the rim rock from which he’d then fallen, he would have limped just under two hundred feet. He had left no discernable footprints during his hike, not even scuff or drag marks from his therapeutic but awkward boot. With her hands in her back pockets, Estelle strolled back out toward the county road, then turned and headed north, concentrating on keeping her eyes open and probing every shadow, every dip and hummock.
The urge to doze off was strong, reminding her of an old, worn-out horse she had ridden as a child, growing up in Tres Santos, Mexico. The animal would plod along the dirt road, his old bones soaking up the warmth, and after a little while his ears would flop akimbo, his eyes would sag shut, and his lower lip would hang loose. He could walk for miles, sound asleep on his feet. Only when tripping over the occasional pebble did he jar awake for a moment.
Two hundred yards up the road, a deeper two-track cut angled off to the right. It bore a collection of tracks, perhaps where the surveyors had turned in, perhaps where the vandals of the surveyors’ stakes had driven onto the private property. Some of the tracks were cut by wide, aggressively lugged tires, like those of an ATV. Several of the tracks were singles, like those of motorbikes. Those, Estelle reckoned, would have become a major challenge for the Thompsons. Their land covered a large area frequented by recreational riders and hunters. To expect them all to suddenly stop and find new ground to explore was unrealistic.
Years before, when the department was looking for a lost child, Estelle had driven down this two-track, and she knew that it angled south after a while, cutting across the prairie below the rim rock on which Thompson had been standing.
As if she had all the time in the world, she strolled down the path, examining each set of tracks as they cut this way and that. The morning sun pounded her shoulders, and she made it a point to amble, looking at every bush, flower, and dimple in the prairie. The two-track meandered, cutting around boulders that lay on the prairie as if tossed aside by some giant playing ball, then angled sharply to the north as it plunged down into one of the side spurs of the arroyo that cut the land like rumpled corduroy. The surveyors had come this way, no doubt—so had the vandals who had pulled up marker stakes. Here and there, she saw motorcycle tracks, marking a wild ride for some brave cyclist.
Her radio burst alive with a bark of squelch. “Lemme know when you’re directly below where Thompson fell,” Torrez said. She looked up and could see the sheriff, his large figure standing well back from the edge of the boulders. Ever the hunter, he’d had no trouble seeing her moving through the shadows of the vegetation, now and then obscured by the rock formations.
“It’s about fifty yards ahead of me.”
“Anything interesting?”
“Not yet. Lots of vehicular traffic, but there’s no way to tell how old the tracks are.”
He clicked the transmit button twice in acknowledgment, then came back on the air. “That old road winds all the way around, then takes off to the east. Ends up down at Prescott’s ranch.”
Of course he would know, Estelle thought. The sheriff had spent hundreds of hunting hours in this country, almost all of it on foot. She pressed her own transmit bar to acknowledge. Another few yards and she stopped. The motorcycle tracks swung a little to the right, and a single footprint marked the blow sand of the two-track—a single footprint, this time on the right side of the motorcycle’s track.
And then, that was followed by an odd collection of tracks. Another print on the right side, and then another, and then a scuff and dig on the left, along with a deep shoe print, only a partial where the sand had blown off a smooth jut of sandstone.
Estelle crouched for a closer look. “So what’s this?” she said aloud. Without shifting position, she looked up the near-vertical, rock-jumbled slope toward the shelf where Kyle Thompson’s body had crash landed.
“What?”
The single word from Bob Torrez amused Estelle. Without a doubt, he’d seen her stop and kneel. He had to know why.
“I’m considering coincidences,” she radioed back. “Someone was down here recently. Unfortunately, I have no idea how recent.”
“You need Linda down there?”
“Yes.” And that’s not all I need, she thought. She knelt and positioned herself as close as she could without disturbing any of the tracks. The edges of the boot print included only from the toe back to the arch area in front of the heel before the underlying stone made impression impossible. None of the sand grains, nor the bits of gravel, had tumbled down from the edge of the print. It had not been cast long enough ago to be even a little weather worn. The same was true of the motorcycle’s tire track. In the few spots where it had been able to print, the impression was sharp and unworn.
“The sheriff sent me this way,” Linda Pasquale said between deep breaths when she joined Estelle a few minutes later. Nodding back the way she’d come, she added, “I came around the long way, following what few tracks you left.” She shrugged the strap of her camera bag up on her shoulder.
“This is one of those things,” Estelle said. “Fresh tracks here, and what looks like a motorcycle dismount…and absolutely nothing to suggest that it’s in any way related to Thompson’s death.” She watched Linda bend down to examine the tracks. “The only thing we know for sure—well, reasonably for sure—is that the prints didn’t come after the incident. Too many of us hanging around at all hours. It’s likely we would have seen something.”
“Uh huh,” Linda said, and lowered the camera bag to the ground. “Unless they watched us and waited for a moment when the place was deserted. I’d wonder why, is what I’d wonder. You’re thinking that someone rode around on the old two-track, then parked it here, and then what? Scrambled up through the rocks, maybe all the way up to where Thompson was standing on the very top?”
“That’s one scenario. For someone fit, it wouldn’t take long.”
“Now why would he do that, though?”
>
“To talk to him? To Thompson?”
“And things then degenerate, and while Thompson is gazing out at the scenery, pow! The kick and over he goes.”
When Estelle said nothing, Linda turned her attention to the motorcycle track and the mark that the kickstand had made. “Or was he lying in wait all that time.”
“That would mean that he—or she—knew in advance that Thompson was headed over here. And lying in wait, down here when Thompson is up there, makes no sense either. Thompson would certainly have seen him climbing toward him.”
She hefted her camera and double-checked its settings. “I think this is a chance thing, Estelle. Nothing else makes sense to me.” Her camera clicked and she added, “Of course, in all fairness, there is a whole universe of things that don’t make sense to me.”
Estelle looked up past the rocks to the vista shelf where Kyle Thompson had taken flight. Once again, Sheriff Torrez appeared and was gazing down at them. She saw him lift the small handheld radio.
“Anything?”
“Someone parked a motorcycle here.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“You got any tracks comin’ up the hill?”
“It’s impossible to tell, Robert. It’s nothing but a rock jumble.”
“Is the tire print good enough to make a casting?”
“Maybe.”
“Pasquale is here now. I’ll send him down with the cast kit.”
“Ten four.”
“This is one of those things,” Linda said cheerfully. “If you cast it, you won’t need it. If you don’t cast it, you’ll wish you had.”
“Courts don’t think much of tire casts in this day and age,” Estelle said. “Too many tires out there, and with an example like this one, not enough detail for any kind of real match. There would have to be a clearly identifying mark that could be compared.”
Less Than a Moment Page 16