Scavengers pc-10

by Steven F Havill

  “How high above the ground were you?”

  “About fifteen hundred feet. Maybe a little more or less. When I saw what I thought might be a body, I spiraled down some. Probably lower than I should have been.”

  Estelle’s gaze turned to the airplane, a small two-seater that looked like the aircraft version of a tiny economy car. “You’re a student pilot?”

  Terri Keenan nodded. “I’m getting ready to take my flight test next week.” She watched as the undersheriff stepped close to the window on the pilot’s side and peered inside.

  “It must be something of a challenge to fly and take pictures at the same time.”

  “I think it’s easy,” Keenan replied. “My instructor would have a cow, naturally. I don’t see why, really. I mean, it’s easy to feel what the airplane is doing and stuff. And my camera only requires one hand.”

  Estelle smiled and stepped away from the airplane. “Did you happen to take any photos of the body?”

  The young woman hesitated. “Yeah, I guess I did. It was too far away to see any detail, though. It must have been at least a thousand feet. Even with the telephoto, that’s too far. Just a dot, maybe. Basically, it was a waste of film.” She held up her hands, rethinking the framing of the photo. “Some nice shadows, though. Early morning is really neat, you know? The sun’s all at an angle on the grass and stuff.”

  “I’d like to see them, Terri. Sometimes, a photo shows something that the eye doesn’t catch.”

  “Sure. The only other thing on that roll are a few pictures I took at the Las Cruces airport this morning. The sun wasn’t really up yet, even. There was an old C-Forty-seven there. I think it lives over at Mesilla.” She opened the passenger-side door and lifted the camera out of the bag. “It had been to some big air show out in California. I forget where. One of the engines was blowing smoke when they flew in a few days ago, and they had it all torn apart. Beautiful old thing.”

  She started to rewind the film but stopped, fingers poised on the crank. “Do you want me to have them developed and send them to you, or…”

  “If we could just have the roll, that would be fine,” Estelle said. “I’ll make sure you get the negatives of anything we don’t use. We really appreciate it.” Terri nodded and rewound the film. She popped the canister out of the camera and handed it to Estelle.

  “I hope it helps,” she said.

  “We’ll take all the help we can get,” Estelle said. “When you flew over that spot, did you happen to notice anything else?”

  “Like what?”

  “Any sign of human activity. Tracks, vehicles-anything at all?”

  The young woman shook her head. “Nothing like that. Just a lot of open desert. But then again, I wasn’t really looking, you know? The eagle got me all excited, and that’s where my mind was.” She grinned. “He was quite a sight.”

  “And nothing had changed out there when you went out again with Jim Bergin? Other than that the eagle had left the scene.”

  “Not that I saw. The body was still there. I was going to try for a picture when he buzzed the spot, but it went by too fast. Sorry. Do you know how long it had been out there? The body, I mean? Is it something that just happened, or what?”

  “There are still lots of questions to answer, Miss Keenan. Nobody is sure of anything yet. It may just be someone who got caught unprepared, out in the cold, after dark. It’ll take a while to sort things out.”

  Terri Keenan looked skeptical as she opened a fresh package of film and reloaded the camera. “That’s a long way from anywhere just to be out hiking around in February, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is,” Estelle said.

  When Estelle didn’t elaborate, Terri shot her a wry smile. She handed the undersheriff a business card, unadorned embossed gold lettering on ivory stock that announced the practice of Terri W. Keenan, DDS. “In case you need to reach me,” she said. “First thing in the morning is always easiest, before I’m up to my elbows in someone’s mouth.”

  “I’m sure that won’t be necessary, Dr. Keenan,” Estelle said. “We’ll want to get the film back to you, and if you should think of anything else that might be important to us, I’d appreciate a call.” She extended one of her own cards to the pilot. Terri Keenan frowned as she read it, then looked up at Estelle with a bright smile.

  “When your deputy said that the undersheriff wanted to talk to me, I pictured some big guy with a potbelly and bad teeth. I don’t know why. I mean, I’ve been told about a thousand times that I don’t look like your average dentist, either.”

  “And I’m sure you’re not,” Estelle said, and extended her hand. “Thanks for your help this morning. We’ll be in touch.”

  She left Terri Keenan to her preflight chores, and ducked her head inside Bergin’s office on the way out. “Thanks, Jim.”

  “Don’t mention it. Interesting gal, isn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  “Looks too young to be a dentist, though. She talks more like a high school kid…and stuff.” He grinned. “Makes me want to go to Las Cruces for a checkup.”

  “Win the lottery first, sir.”

  Bergin nodded slowly, pencil poised over his weather station log.

  “That’s the impression I got, too,” he said.

  CHAPTER THREE

  By the time Estelle Reyes-Guzman reached the Public Safety Building on Bustos Avenue, she was sure that someone had rapped both knees with a ball-peen hammer after first clamping her elbow joints in a steel-jawed vise. She forced herself to concentrate as she filled out the evidence tag and tracking slip for Dr. Terri Keenan’s roll of film, and then double-checked to make sure that she had put the film and paperwork in Linda Real’s drawer.

  She closed the cabinet and turned to find Gayle Torrez, the sheriff’s wife and chief dispatcher, watching her with sympathetic eyes.

  “You need to go home,” Gayle said.

  “Yes, I do.” She shook her head in frustration. “Go home and join the rest of los miserables. If you see Linda before she finds my note, would you ask her to process that roll of film as soon as she can?”

  “Sure. You’ll be home, then?”

  Estelle nodded. “A nap and I’ll be fine.”

  “How’s your mom?”

  “Yuck,” Estelle said. “She and Carlos are a pair. But I think they’re over the hump now.”

  “And now you?”

  “Don’t say that. I’m just tired.”

  “Well, take your tired self home, and stop breathing on the rest of us.” Gayle smiled. “Jackie said that she’s going to spend some more time out at the scene. Widen the search circle a little.”

  Estelle nodded and then rocked her head from side to side to remove the kinks. “Bobby called the house this morning and talked to Francis. No emergency or anything. I guess he just wanted an update.”

  “And he called here. I don’t think he cares much for Virginia. He said he hasn’t seen the sun since he got there. He’s homesick, Estelle.”

  “Me, too.” She opened Linda’s workstation again to make sure the bagged roll of film was where she remembered putting it, slid the steel drawer shut, and locked it. “If anyone needs me, tell ’em I went…somewhere.”

  “Did you see the note from Bill, by the way?” Gayle pointed toward Estelle’s mailbox.

  “Nope.” She pulled the While You Were Out message from the slot, penciled not in Gayle’s neat script but in the heavy, blocky printing of the state livestock inspector, Bill Gastner.

  “When was he in?”

  “Half an hour ago or thereabouts.”

  “He was supposed to come over for Sunday dinner today, but not with the stinkies, as Francisco calls them.”

  “That’s what he said. He just missed you when you went to the airport, so he stopped here to leave a note.”

  “I need to borrow Linda,’ ” Estelle read.

  “He’s working some complaint about a bunch of mules or something,” Gayle said. “He wanted Linda to take some pictu
res. Apparently the light’s not very good, and he needs her expertise.”

  “He’s got it,” Estelle said. “When Linda comes in from…” She waved a hand eastward. The spot where the corpse had been found was so bleak no one had thought of an appropriate locator name for it. “…from out there, would you tell her to get in touch with him?”

  “Sure. But he said there was no hurry on it.”

  “And that means inmediamente,” Estelle grinned. “We know how he is.” She slid the note into Linda Real’s mailbox and puffed out her cheeks at the effort of moving the single sheet of paper. “I’ll be home.”

  When she entered the house on Twelfth Street, the light tangy fragrance of simmering chicken greeted her, along with a silent house. Irma appeared from one of the back rooms.

  “It smells wonderful,” Estelle said. “How’s everybody doing?”

  “Chicken soup,” Irma Sedillos said, affecting a heavy New York accent tinged with her own Mexican border lilt. “That’s just what you need. Chicken soup.” She took Estelle’s jacket before it landed on the foyer floor and hung it up. “We had an early lunch, and then everybody crashed.”

  “Francisco, too?”

  “His dad stretched out for a bit, and el niño couldn’t resist. He’s a smart kid. You need something to eat, and then you do the same thing.” Irma waggled an index finger. With a gray wig and a touch of stage makeup, she could pass for sixty, rather than the twenty-six that she was.

  “The nap sounds good.”

  “You want some soup first,” Irma insisted, adding over her shoulder, “No estás pegando en cuatro, Estelle,” and headed for the kitchen. “You can’t start skipping meals, now.”

  With too many knots in her joints to argue and in absolute agreement that she wasn’t firing on all cylinders, Estelle did as she was told. The soup was so good that she lingered at the kitchen table, letting the vapors drift up from the bowl.

  Irma chatted about this and that, but most of what she said drifted past Estelle unheard, comfortable kitchen chatter that didn’t require an answer.

  Estelle surprised herself by finishing two bowls of soup before putting down her spoon and straightened her spine against the back of the chair. “Okay,” she said. “Now I can make it down the hall.” She glanced at the kitchen clock. “Give me an hour and I’ll be good as new.”

  In their bedroom, Dr. Francis Guzman was sleeping flat on his back, one arm thrown over his eyes. Francisco was curled beside him. Estelle left the door open and went to the boys’ bedroom, where little Carlos was curled into a ball about the size of a cocker spaniel. She stretched out on Francisco’s bed and, soothed by the smell of fresh linens and the regular, relaxed breathing of her youngest son across the room, fell asleep.

  She awoke to the sound of her husband’s quiet voice drifting into the darkened bedroom from somewhere in the front of the house. By turning her head a fraction, she could see the outline of Carlos, still sleeping peacefully. He had adopted a favorite position, scrunched on all fours with his legs drawn up under him and his rump in the air as if he’d fallen sleep while crawling.

  Estelle sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. With a start, she saw that it was almost five in the afternoon.

  Francis appeared in the doorway. “How are you doing?”

  “Okay…I think.”

  “You slept like a stone,” he said. He stepped into the room and peered at his youngest son. “This guy wanted to wake you up a while ago, but I told him that wasn’t such a good idea.”

  “Y mamá?”

  “Sleeping. This sleep is good stuff,” Francis said. “Irma took Francisco with her to do a little grocery shopping. I’m surprised you didn’t hear him.”

  Estelle pushed herself to her feet. “I didn’t hear anything. Did Jackie Taber call, by any chance?”

  “Nope.” Francis followed her out of the bedroom. “Alan did, though. I just got off the phone with him. He said to tell you that John Doe was shot once in the head, probably either with a rifle or a large-caliber handgun.”

  Estelle stopped in the kitchen doorway and leaned her weight back into her husband’s hands as he kneaded the muscles at the nape of her neck.

  “Someone worked his lower face over, too,” Francis added. “Alan wanted to talk to you about that. At first, he thought it was a case where the victim was beaten severely, and then shot. But apparently that’s not the situation here.”

  Eyes closed, Estelle tried to picture the scenario days earlier out on the prairie east of the MacInernys’ gravel pit. “What does he think happened?”

  “Shot first, then a systematic effort made to destroy the dentition,” Francis said.

  Estelle turned and looked at him, frowning. “That’s what he said out at the scene. That it looked like someone picked up a good-sized rock and did a number on his face.”

  “That’s what Alan thinks. Ragged sort of injuries. Not the sort of thing you’d see if he’d been bashed with the butt of a rifle or hit with a baseball bat.”

  “Whoa,” Estelle said, and rubbed her eyes.

  “This, by the way, is chicken soup,” Francis said, pointing at the crocked pot on the counter by the sink. “Enough for a fair-sized army. And the pot on the stove is posole. ”

  “I had some of the soup,” Estelle said. “What time did Irma go?”

  “Not more than twenty minutes ago. She had one errand to run at home, and then she’d be back. She was planning to spend the night again, by the way.”

  “She doesn’t need to do that. I think the worst is over.”

  “She thinks she does. I’m on call. And she was worried about you.”

  “I’m fine. I might have some more soup.” She made no move toward the Crock-Pot. Francis sat down at the kitchen table and watched his wife think. Her thick black eyebrows knit together so tightly they nearly collided over the bridge of her nose. After a minute, she stepped close to the stove and lifted the lid off the simmering posole. Whether she actually saw it was another matter. Francis knew that her mind was somewhere east of Posadas, out on the rolling, rock-strewn prairie.

  “I really question whether there was enough blood on the ground or on the rocks for him to have been shot there,” she said finally.

  “He could have been lying out there for a long time, Estelle. Several weeks, anyway. Between weather and critters, who can say?”

  Estelle frowned and shook her head. “There hasn’t been any precipitation since January fourth, and that was less than an eighth of an inch of snow, barely a frosting. Alan thinks the man was killed about three weeks ago, and that puts it at the end of January or early February, when the ground was dry. If this guy was standing when he was shot in the face, he would have pitched right over backward. There’d be blood and tissue and bits of bone all over the place.”

  “Scattered, though.” Francis grimaced. “Or sprayed, might be a better way to describe it.”

  She looked at her husband. “We found a single skull fragment. Jackie found some small chips that may test out. Not much else. There was some dried blood under his head. But not much. Not a whole lot.”

  Francis shrugged. “The skull fragment says that he was shot there. It’s hard to argue with that. Coyotes cleaned up, maybe.”

  “With his face bashed in for good measure,” Estelle said. “And somehow whoever killed him managed to do it without leaving any tracks.”

  “From out of the clear blue,” Francis said.

  “No,” Estelle said, taking him literally. “If he’d been dropped from a plane, every bone in his body would have been broken, not just his face. Did Alan say anything about any other injuries?”

  “Nothing except the damage to the head. No bruises, no fractures, no defense wounds, no nothing.”

  “It’s possible the film that our dentist shot will show something,” Estelle said to herself. She glanced at Francis and read correctly the expression of combined curiosity and patience. He wouldn’t ask where she’d been, any more than sh
e would pester him to replay the mental tapes of his treatment of patients. “That’s who I talked to at the airport, querido. A young dentist from Las Cruces saw the body and called it in.” She stepped toward the phone. “You said you were on call tonight?”

  Francis nodded. “Why don’t you just let things mellow for a few hours?” he said. “Stew about it until morning. Maybe something will come to you. The guy’s as dead as he’s ever going to get.”

  “Just two things,” she said as she dialed. “I need to know what’s on the film, and I need to know if Jackie found anything else when she was out there. That’s it.”

  “Uh-huh,” her husband said. “And if either Linda or Jackie had new information that was of any importance, what would they have done?”

  “Called me,” she said, listening to the phone ringing at the other end.

  “Posadas County Sheriff’s Office, Wheeler.” Francis could hear the dispatcher’s voice across the kitchen.

  “Ernie, is Linda still downstairs?” Estelle asked.

  “She was. She and Jackie went back out to the MacInernys’ about an hour ago. Make that an hour and a half.”

  “Did either one of them say why?”

  “No, ma’am. I asked Jackie if she was going to work three shifts in a row, and she just looked at me.” Estelle smiled and glanced at her husband across the kitchen.

  “Who’s working swing tonight? I didn’t look at the schedule when I was in there earlier.”

  “Tom Pasquale. He’s headed out that way too, by the way. Maybe he thinks the girls are going to get lost in the wilderness or something.”

  “That’s likely,” Estelle chuckled. “If they need to reach me, I’ll be home, Ernie.”

  She hung up and grinned at the pleased look on her husband’s face. “The trouble is, this stuff smells too good,” she said, lifting the lid on the posole. “It makes me want to forget everything else.”