“I need to go back to the truck for just a moment,” Estelle said. “I’ll be right back. Would you like a bottle of water?”
“No, thanks. I don’t think so.”
Estelle nodded and hugged her again, just a one-armed caress that also said, “stay here,” and then she made her way back down the slope to the truck where she threaded the case for her small digital camera onto her belt, and pulled the big Kel-lite from its boot on the far side of the center console. “I just love this,” she said aloud, mocking her own impatience. But she knew exactly what Sheriff Robert Torrez’s first question would be when she reported finding the little cave.
Chapter Seventeen
Walking back up the side of the mesa, Estelle came to the conclusion that she knew exactly the emotion that had driven Freddy Romero’s return trip to the cave after finding the skull. Sure, there were proper ways to do this…especially for the undersheriff of Posadas County, who had access to all manner of resources, equipment, and personnel. All of that took time. And Estelle could not bring herself to wait. Just a quick look-that would be enough to satisfy her.
Casey Prescott looked at the flashlight, and wilted. “You’re kidding.”
“I have to see a little more than a cigarette lighter will show,” Estelle said. “Trust me. I don’t like caves any more than you do.” She took a deep breath and dropped to her knees, regarding the narrow slit. The even flow of cool air said that this was more than a tiny irregularity, a small pocket. On the far western side of the mesa, the network of caves had attracted considerable interest, even talk of another national monument or park…at the very least, a site of spectacular interest, perhaps on a par with Lechuguilla, the huge cave system in the southeastern part of the state that rivaled some of Carlsbad’s branches. It was conceivable that this could be more of the same. That would be enough to take anyone’s breath away.
What had caused the overhang that now housed the happy packrat was anyone’s guess. Perhaps decades ago, someone had dug a small exploratory pit, then given up. When the house-sized boulder had crashed down from above, loose rocks could have skidded away, causing the overhang.
“When Freddy crawled in here, how far did he go?”
“Oh, not far. Just his shoulders. I had one hand on his left foot the whole time,” Casey said, and Estelle laughed.
“I won’t go even that far.” She adjusted the hardware on her belt around to the small of her back, and then handed first her jacket and then the small two-way radio to Casey. “Maybe you’d hold this so it doesn’t get all grunged up.” A broken juniper limb, with a wand of dried needles on the end, made a fair probe, and Estelle carefully swept the cave entrance, not hard enough to disturb the dust, but enough to annoy any critters into announcing themselves. Loose rocks, most the size of a basketball, plugged the cave opening-perhaps Freddy’s work. It wasn’t the neat work of a stonemason, just a quick effort at camouflage. One at a time, Estelle moved the jumble, at the same time watching fragments that hung down from the ceiling. Finally satisfied, she grasped the light and found that in the widest portion of the slit, she could work her way forward on her elbows and toes.
The light revealed a fairly smooth ceiling, dotted here and there with tiny brown bodies. One of the bats yawned, showing needle teeth. “Yes, there are bats,” she said.
“Oh, boy.”
“Okay,” she said, and inched forward a bit, cranking the light around to illuminate the jumble of rocks that arched around her. The silence and cool air could have been refreshing under other circumstances, like when strolling through Carlsbad Caverns on a nice walkway with a printed tour booklet in hand.
By shifting a football-sized rock, she could inch forward a bit more. By the time her belly rested in the cave’s entrance, she could see that the ceiling was studded with a vast puzzle of interlocking rocks, some poised for the slightest jar or tremor or bump of a shoulder. Several that had fallen littered the floor of the cave.
Estelle wiggled another foot forward and stopped. The beam of the flashlight was harsh, and several of the little brown bats were fretful, one of them fluttering to a new perch.
Off to the left, a fragment of metal winked, and Estelle juggled the light to free one hand. Slipping her ball-point pen from her breast pocket, she deftly hooked the artifact, a heavy brass buckle with the remnants of a leather belt still attached.
“Hello,” she said.
“That’s probably far enough,” Casey responded.
“Did Freddy ever mention anything other than the cat’s skeleton?” Estelle’s voice sounded amplified by the chamber, small as it was. “Anything at all?”
“No. He wanted the rest of the skeleton.”
“But that’s out with the main packrat’s nest,” the undersheriff said. And cats don’t wear belts. Loath to move the buckle, she shifted the light and saw that the brown patch of rotting hide was in fact dust-covered black. Ever so gently, she slipped the pen under one edge and lifted. She had no trouble recognizing the object, especially since there was one almost identical to it strapped to her own waist.
For a long moment she held the pen so that the holster was elevated. It was no longer attached to the belt. Although the rats and mice and who knew what other sets of teeth had chewed the leather to bits, enough was left to judge shape and size. It was a perfect fit for a heavy-framed automatic.
Chapter Eighteen
Estelle squirmed backward from the cave. Her tan trousers and white blouse shed billows of dust and debris as she brushed herself off. She took the jacket from Casey and spread it on a nearby rock, along with the radio.
“This is where we have to change strategies a little bit,” she said, and watched the puzzled expression on Casey’s face. “Freddy never said anything about any artifact other than the cat skeleton. Is that right?”
“Not to me. I don’t know what he told Mr. Underwood.”
“There was no mention in the newspaper article, either.” Estelle stepped closer to the girl, locking eyes. “Freddy had a handgun with him when we found him,” she said. “Its condition leads me to believe that he might have found it in this cave. He had it wrapped carefully in a cloth in his carrier. It wasn’t packed as if it was just something he habitually carried with him.”
“I…I don’t know about that. He had that little rifle, that’s all I know.”
“You didn’t see him bring it out of the cave on Sunday…along with the skull?”
“No. Nothing like that.”
“And later in the week sometime…he didn’t mention the handgun to you? Or that he’d found one?”
“No, ma’am. He didn’t. Who would it belong to?”
“That’s a question, isn’t it.” Estelle looked first at her watch, and then the sky. Going on three o’clock, the sun was well past the edge of the mesa, and the shade around them was cool. “I need to get you home, Casey, but it’s going to take a few minutes.”
“Oh, there’s no hurry.”
“That’s good. First, I need you to call your mom and dad and let them know that you’re still with me, and that it’ll be at least an hour or two. I don’t want them to worry. As soon as I can round up a deputy to sit this site, I’ll drive you home. But we can’t leave it unprotected.” Casey didn’t question that, and they made their way down to the SUV, where Estelle waited while Casey called her mother. The conversation didn’t last long, and after a quiet conversation and then three or four “yes, ma’ams,” Casey closed the telephone.
“My sister Christine just got home from Cruces,” she said. “She hopes you’ll have time to stop by.”
“I look forward to seeing her,” Estelle said. She thumbed several digits into her own phone and Deputy Tom Pasquale answered promptly.
“Tomás, where are you now?”
“Workin’ my way up the canyon road. Sheriff told me to park it by the old homestead, and I think I’m just about there.”
“Stay on the west side of that,” she said. “There are tracks near the cabin foundatio
n that I don’t want disturbed.”
“Ten four. I’m there now and there’s nothin’ going on. Well wait, I got one coyote across the arroyo, about six hundred yards out. And he doesn’t look too interested.”
Estelle laughed. “I need you right where you are. I don’t want anybody disturbing that scene. Not the canyon road or the arroyo. And there’s some evidence down this way that needs to be protected until morning.” Her curiosity about the cave was a powerful attraction, and the dark depths of that formation were independent of the day and night above ground. A generator and lights would be necessary in the cave, but whatever was there to be discovered had been lying there in the dust and bat guano for years-it could all wait until morning, when logistics became exponentially easier.
“Tony’s lookin’ for something to do. He was at the office earlier,” Pasquale said.
“I’ll tell him you suggested it.” As Estelle redialed the phone, she watched Casey Prescott. The young woman paced head down in front of the Expedition, hands in the back pockets of her jeans, idly kicking a pebble out of the ruts. Circuits clicked and then Dispatcher Ernie Wheeler responded. Estelle requested a deputy at the cave location, and suggested Tony Abeyta.
“He’s workin’ graveyard tonight, remember,” Wheeler said. Estelle could hear a voice in the background. “Jackie has the night off, but she says she can work if there’s a problem.”
“Ay, ” the undersheriff said, trying to visualize the personnel assignment board that hung on the wall behind the dispatch island. “Well, Tony gets to work graveyard out here in the middle of peace and quiet,” she said. “Check with him and find out for me. I need to know his ETA this location.”
In less than a minute, the dispatcher came back on line. “He’s on the way. He said he wants to stop by the house and change clothes. Just a few minutes.”
“Ten four. Thanks, Ernie. I’ll be coming in as soon as he arrives.”
She folded the phone thoughtfully as she approached Casey Prescott. So much time, Estelle thought. From the moments on Monday when Freddy had showed the skull to the teacher until his death sometime on Thursday, the young man had had ample time to return to the cave. Perhaps more than one trip. There was no reason to take the four-wheeler each time, except that the machine was obviously fast and fun to ride-and much cheaper to operate than the old, jouncing pickup truck.
Estelle looked down the empty, silent two-track. At what point had Freddy Romero decided that there was enough interest in the cave to try to protect it with the cover story about Borracho Springs? Had he actually seen the handgun on his first visit, he would have recovered it. There was no way he’d leave it behind. Unless he was concerned that Casey would object, complicating his life with suggestions about what to do with the find.
“And no one else came by while you two were here, other than Herb Torrance’s brief stop earlier?”
“No, ma’am.”
Estelle shook her head slowly. “When you had the skull all wrapped and stashed on the ATV, did Freddy say that he was planning to come back? That he was planning to make another trip?”
“No. Earlier, he had mentioned getting some of his dad’s shop lights. Or even just a decent flashlight. But no, he didn’t mention it again.” She gazed back up the slope. So rocky and boulder-strewn was the mesa flank that their passing had left no tracks, nothing to indicate the cave’s location. And because of the lip of rock that overhung the work of the packrats, only the exhaling of cool air from the bowels of the earth would hint at the cave’s location.
Such odd circumstances had tangled in this lonely place, Estelle thought-and long before Freddy Romero first felt that gush of subterranean air.
Chapter Nineteen
The tire was clamped in the spreader, the sidewalls sprung wide to expose the inner surface. Sergeant Tom Mears had chalked the tiny imperfection five centimeters above the sidewall bead. As Estelle watched, he inserted a smooth wire probe.
“The exit hole, if there is one, could have been obliterated by the impact with the rock,” he said. Small-framed and fastidious, Tom Mears was one of those people for whom time stood still when he worked. When presented with a problem, he began by looking at the smallest parts, rather than the whole picture. He pushed a section of sidewall on the opposite side of the tire outward. It appeared that the rock had sliced into the sidewall just above the bead, ripping a large flap. “It’s just impossible to tell.”
Estelle looked again at the clear plastic evidence bag that Mears had handed her earlier. The fragment of brass was about the size of a snapped-off pencil tip-no more than half a centimeter long, and irregular in shape. Eyes concerned with seeing only a flat tire would have missed it.
“If this is from a rifle bullet…” She looked across at Sheriff Robert Torrez.
“It is a rifle bullet,” the sheriff said as if she were somehow contradicting him. “Nothing else it could be. There’s no brass in the wheel assembly or anywhere else on that ATV.”
“From earlier?”
“Now, we can’t be certain yet, but I don’t think so,” Mears offered. “That’s not much of a hole, but it is a hole. It’s nothing compared to what colliding with the rock did, but that’s enough of a hole to let air out over time.”
She turned to the ATV, now sitting on the concrete floor with a triangular jack supporting the left front suspension.
“Right here,” Torrez said. He knelt and took a mechanical pencil out of his pocket, pointing at a gouge in the soft plastic margin that formed the very front of the machine’s bodywork. The gouge in the colored plastic was just a touch, a faint scar that could have been caused by any number of things-a breaking tree limb, the pickup truck’s tailgate, a dropped tool. Mears maneuvered the shop light closer so Estelle could look through the five inch magnifier.
“It’s fresh,” she said. The film of grit and grime on the rest of the fender had not been disturbed by whatever had made the mark.
“And then here.” Torrez hefted the wheel. A small gouge marked the margin of the rim.
“You got the folder?” Torrez asked Mears, and the sergeant nodded. He retrieved a manila folder from the bench and handed it to Estelle. The digital photos were wonderfully clear. In the first, the wheel and damaged tire had not yet been removed from the ATV. The gouge in the plastic fender, where the fender swept over to join the bodywork, was aligned with the wheel and tire. A metal pointer aligned the scuff in the fender with the gouge in the rim and the tiny rent in the sidewall.
“How definite is this?” Estelle asked. So many things could have caused the ding in the plastic skirt. It didn’t appear difficult to rotate the damaged tire until the spot on the rim and in the sidewall were approximately opposite the mark on the fender, no matter what had caused either.
“Not one hundred percent,” Mears said. “Maybe a long way from one hundred percent. But it’s possible. I don’t see how the bullet could even strike the inside wall of the tire except from the front.”
“Would the one shot cause an explosive flat?”
“I would guess not.” Mears scratched his shoulder. “Those ATV tires aren’t inflated real hard.” He reached across and pushed his fist against the tread of the other front tire. Estelle could see it flex slightly. “They’re stout enough that they’d actually run flat for quite a ways. What you’ve got going into the tire are fragments.”
“If you’re talkin’ about an explosive blowout that would cause a swerve into the rocks, the odds are slim and none,” Torrez said.
“So, then.” Estelle leafed through the portfolio of photographs. She paused at a macro enlargement, shot through the stereo microscope in the downstairs darkroom in the Public Safety Building. Torrez reached past her arm with the pencil and indicated a portion of the photograph.
“That’s a rifling groove,” he said. “Part of one, anyway. There’s no doubt in my mind about that. That’s a bullet fragment. We’re lookin’ at part of the brass jacket.”
“That won’t tel
l us much, except that if it is a bullet, it’s a small caliber, high-velocity job. The sort of thing that just explodes when it hits something hard.”
“You got that right,” Torrez said. “Something big and lumbering like a pistol bullet would just stay in one piece, more or less. And if it was a big bore, high velocity rifle, the damage would be significant to the wheel rim and the tire both.”
“Could it have happened before Freddy rode out from the truck, then?”
“No.” Mears looked at Torrez for affirmation.
“Nope,” the sheriff said. “Unless he’s so numb that he rides several miles and doesn’t notice he’s got a flat tire. Ain’t going to happen.”
“Then somebody took a shot at him,” Estelle said. “By accident or intent.”
“Maybe,” Torrez said. “It’d be a hell of a shot to pot a tire intentionally when the target is movin’ at thirty miles an hour, up, down, sideways. Just not likely. More likely the shooter was tryin’ for something else.”
“To hit Freddy, you mean?”
“Maybe. Could have been shooting at something else entirely.”
Estelle envisioned Freddy Romero’s ATV blasting along the two-track, the snarl of its marginally muffled engine carrying for a mile or more. A hunter would have heard him coming. So would a coyote. That a hunter was poised to take a shot at a varmint, and shot in such a way that suddenly the four wheeler leaped into the bullet’s trajectory…
She shook her head. The country around Bender’s Canyon didn’t lend itself to long shots-too many scrubby trees, undulating hills, the buttress of the mesa itself. The odds were good that if someone had struck the four wheeler with a bullet, he’d meant to do it.
“Linda’s going to have a long day.” She rapped the folder of digital prints. “When we go out to take another look at the cave, I want her to take photos before anyone crawls in there.”
“That’s a trick,” Torrez said.
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