Lies Come Easy

by Steven F Havill

  “Apparently so.”

  Perrone reached out a gloved finger and touched the wound. “You can see the pattern of the front sight above the entry wound,” he said. “That kind of imprint is not unusual in suicides…that and the star-shaped wound that’s characteristic of blowback from a powerful weapon. The victim holds the gun with a nervous death grip, pulling it into himself. That’s what he did here. He pulled it in hard enough to dig a gouge in his skin. So often, that’s why the victim removes his clothes, so there’s nothing in the way.”

  “One layer of thin cotton ain’t going to stop much,” Torrez remarked.

  “But that’s a layer, nevertheless.” Perrone tapped his own forehead. “It’s all up here. In their perception. If they were thinking straight, they wouldn’t be suicides in the first place.” He beckoned Linda, who had been waiting expectantly. “You’ll want to bag his hands,” Perrone said, but Estelle already had the plastic bags ready.

  Perrone straightened up and turned to Torrez. “We’ll see,” he said, and the sheriff nodded. “If the revolver is his, that removes a little more of the doubt.” He watched as Matty Sheehan zipped up the body bag. “Not an unusual scenario going here. He waits for mom to be out of the house and for the kid to be sound asleep, then slips outside and takes care of business.”

  “Maybe so.”

  The physician shot a quick glance at Torrez. “I’m planning the post for two tomorrow afternoon, if one or both of you can make it.”

  “We appreciate you being so prompt,” Estelle said.

  “With something like this, time matters,” Perrone said. His expression brightened a little. “Well, onward. When’s your hubby due home?”

  “What day is this?” Estelle smiled. “He’ll fly in Sunday midday to El Paso, so late afternoon if all goes well. Tomorrow.”

  “His meetings went well?”

  “He thinks so.”

  “Good for him. I look forward to hearing about them.”

  Her smile grew a little wider. “And the boys are flying in on Monday.”

  “Oh, wow. Even better for the both of you. Is there a concert planned? Did I miss hearing about that?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Estelle said. “Not this visit.”

  The physician shrugged philosophically. “I guess the maestro deserves a holiday too, right?” He shook hands all around and headed for his BMW.

  “That’s it?” Matty asked before touching the gurney.

  “That’s it,” Torrez said.

  Chapter Nine

  For the past several minutes, the home at 905 Larson had been silent, and Estelle rapped on the front door and entered to find Lieutenant Taber sitting on the couch with Penny Fisher. Bright-eyed and wide awake, little Derry sat in Penny’s lap, and when Estelle entered the room, he pointed a sharp little index finger toward her and said something incomprehensible.

  Penny had obviously been crying, with dark circles under her eyes. Derry squirmed, but she hugged him close.

  “Mrs. Fisher, I’m so sorry for your loss.” The words sounded hollow to Estelle as she said them, and no doubt sounded totally empty to the widow.

  “The lieutenant tells me that we may never really know what he was thinking. What pushed him to do this,” Penny Fisher said. She lowered her head and snuffled against the little boy’s neck.

  “That’s true.” Estelle left it at that. “Can you answer a couple questions for me, Mrs. Fisher?”

  “If you’ll call me Penny, Sheriff.”

  “Penny. We need to know about the handgun. The Ruger Redhawk. Was that his?”

  Penny clenched her eyes tight for a moment. “Yes. He bought it up in Albuquerque. That was another one of our legendary fights. I was so angry with him when he did that. I mean, we don’t earn a whole lot of money, Sheriff. And here he goes and spends eight hundred dollars on that thing. He was going to hunt with it, but he never did. His brother borrows it now and then. Al likes to go pig hunting over in Texas. As least we’ve been getting some meat out of that.”

  “Had your husband ever hinted at taking his own life? Did he talk about that?”

  “Once he did. Last year, after things piled up on him.” Penny stopped abruptly and drew in a long, ragged breath. “Sheriff, I know I’m not the easiest person to live with. Well, neither was he, you know. There were times…there were times when I thought I had two two-year-olds in the house.” She finally let Derry slide down to the floor, and he stumped over to an enormous, fleecy bear. First he hugged it, then seized it by one foot and dragged it down the hall.

  “He won’t even remember his daddy, will he? When he’s grown up, I mean.”

  “The young can be pretty resilient,” Estelle said. “Penny, I’ll ask Gayle Torrez to stop by later today. Her department has all kinds of resources for you to draw upon.”

  “I want to keep my job. I really do. I love working at the hospital.”

  “And you should. Gayle can help you make arrangements for comprehensive sitter services for your son, and she’ll find out what other kinds of assistance the county and state can offer you. Maybe the hospital can transfer you to working days. Penny, it’s important that you accept all the help that’s out there. No one expects you to handle this alone.”

  Tears flooded the woman’s eyes and she buried her face in a thick wad of tissue.

  “Undersheriff.” The voice behind Estelle was quiet, and she turned to see Linda Pasquale standing in the doorway. “The sheriff needs to talk with you if you have a moment.”

  Or even if I don’t, Estelle thought. She reached out and took one of Penny Fisher’s hands in hers. “Call us if we can help.”

  “I’m sure there’s nothing you can do,” the woman said, almost wistfully. She cleared her throat. “I know I’m probably as much to blame as anyone for what happened. That’s something I’ll have to figure out how to live with.”

  Estelle pushed herself upright and transferred her grip to a traditional handshake. “Call me whenever you need to, Penny.” Estelle handed her a business card. “Call me whenever you think I can be of help.”

  Outside, she saw that the sheriff was occupied at the passenger side of the pickup, and when he saw her, he beckoned impatiently.

  “She going to be all right?” he asked as she approached.

  “I think so.”

  He nodded once. “Tell me what you think of this.” Stepping to one side, he cleared the truck’s door so she could squeeze past him. He aimed his flashlight at the truck’s floor mat.

  “Still wet,” Estelle said after a moment. “A good partial boot print. Linda recorded it?”

  “Yep. About a hundred times.”

  “Digital film is cheap, Bobby.” The sheriff snorted something that could have been a chuckle at the well-worn joke.

  “And right there.” He directed the flash beam upward to a spot on the dashboard just above the radio console.

  Estelle pulled out her own flashlight and took her time examining the surface. “Good eyes,” she said. Drawing out her pen, she brought it up just short of touching the surface where a smudge—what could be imagined to be a palm print—marked the dust on the dashboard. She pointed at three small points of dried blood. “This looks like some blood splatter. Not much, maybe not enough even to type.”

  “Only one guy bleedin’ in this truck,” Torrez said. “And splatter can go a long ways.”

  “But the handprint is on top of the blood splatter. On top of it.” She looked around at the sheriff, and he nodded slightly. He watched as she held her hand out, fingers spread just above the evidence without touching, trying to match the faint print on the dusty dashboard’s surface. “Thumb is down, fingers pointing off toward the steering wheel, toward the driver. It’s a right hand, like the owner needed to push back against something for support.”

  Linda Pasquale was waiting patiently behind
Torrez. “Linda?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Are you confident that you captured this as clearly as possible?”

  The girl held out her camera, and Estelle took it, bringing up the series of photos on the preview screen. She took her time, looking at each one. Finally, she said, “Someone was in the truck besides Darrell Fisher.”

  “Yep.”

  “And somebody was turned sideways in the cab, and had his foot over in one corner, and his gloved hand stretched out for support.”

  “Yep.”

  “Linda Wizard, how large can we print back at the office? On the new computer and printer.”

  “Fourteen-by-eighteen or so, I think.”

  “I’d like to see that, one for each. The best of the handprint, the best of the boot.”

  “It likely won’t be detailed enough to stand up in court,” Linda said.

  “And it might not have to. Sometimes, just showing a print to someone is enough to loosen their tongue. And messy pixels or not, the photo will show that the handprint is on top of the blood spatter.”

  “’Messy pixels.’ I like that.” Linda grinned at Torrez.

  “Remember the PM is at two. You need to be there,” Estelle reminded her.

  “Yuck time,” Linda said. “Anything else here?”

  “We’re gonna go through it one more time,” Torrez said. “Don’t go runnin’ off.”

  “That’s what I was about to do, all right,” Linda said. “I do that a lot, run off.”

  The sheriff’s deep-set eyes regarded Linda. He had never quite gotten used to her casual manner and almost insubordinate, flip attitude, but she blasted him with one of her huge grins, and reached over to dig a knuckle into his ribs. “Lots of film left,” she said.

  Chapter Ten

  “I’m not calling that creep,” Penny Fisher snapped at one point. Estelle had gone back in the house and sure enough…Lieutenant Jackie Taber’s notebook was ballooning with tidbits she’d gleaned from commiserating with the widow. “If I don’t ever see him again, it’s too soon.”

  “We’ll need to touch bases with him,” Estelle said. That earned a slight nod from Jackie, who thumbed through the little notebook.

  “Penny tells me that Al was going on a pig hunt over in Texas this weekend,” Jackie said.

  “He was tryin’ to get Darrell to go with him, but I said, ‘Oh no. I have to work, and you need to spend some time with this one.’” Derry and his bear had returned to the couch, and she nestled the snoozing boy closer. “We can’t afford it anyways. I mean, all they’ll do is drink beer for a weekend. And who’s going to mind Derry while they’re gone and I’m workin’?”

  It wasn’t the responsibility of the Sheriff’s Department to contact all of the Fisher next of kin, but Estelle had dispatched Deputy Thomas Pasquale to Regál to talk to Darrell’s brother, Al, before Penny relented and changed her mind, calling relatives to alert them of the tragedy.

  Pasquale offered a ride-along to Tanner Garcia. Tanner, the department’s most recent hire, was accumulating ride-along hours before attending the spring session of the Law Enforcement Academy. A former resident of the South Valley in Albuquerque, the thirty-two-year-old Garcia was fresh out of a marriage, and equally tired of the traffic congestion, smog, and noise of city life. It didn’t hurt that he was one of Thomas Pasquale’s first cousins.

  When she was sure that the scene at 905 Larson had nothing more to add to the meager assortment of evidence, Estelle returned to the office to browse through Linda’s first round of photographic offerings. The Seth Thomas wall clock clicked to twenty minutes after midnight—she’d spent the last five hours of that Saturday at the Fishers’, as if the rest of the world had been put on hold.

  Refusing to be denied, the rest of the world was responsible for a small stack of Post-its that accumulated in the in-box beside Estelle’s telephone console, Post-its written by the dispatcher for incoming calls when the caller didn’t want to have the message routed to Estelle’s voicemail. For contacts who embraced technology, the little amber light on the phone’s answering machine winked patiently. That was as close to immediate contact as Estelle wished to get. The idea of walking about with an i-gadget demanding constant attention was repugnant. A simple cell phone was enough. Sometimes she agreed with former sheriff Bill Gastner’s gruff opinion that “telephones should be black and hang on the wall.”

  “You have…twenty-two messages,” her phone extension announced when she tapped the button. The message log, from most recent to those a day or two old, scrolled up the small green screen. Posadas County Manager Leona Spears wanted to talk with her. One of the Post-its was from, or referred to, Leona as well. Estelle was surprised that the ebullient Leona hadn’t appeared out at the scene on Larson. The manager hadn’t called Estelle’s personal cell phone, but that could be expected shortly.

  Frank Dayan, owner, publisher, and energetic reporter for the Posadas Register, had called both dispatch and Estelle’s extension, and no doubt when she booted her computer she’d find an e-mail from him as well.

  Estelle scanned down the list of callers, seeing little to pique her interest. Craig Stout, one of the few law enforcement officers employed by the U.S. Forest Service, had called twice, the last effort at close to eleven p.m. Saturday—an odd time to be trying to contact her—four-thirty was the magic hour for government agencies to quit for the day. That was reason enough to return the call, and she tapped in the Arizona number and waited for the circuits to connect.

  “Craig Stout with Coronado National Forest. I’m not in right now, but…” She waited for the message to finish, and at the tone said, “Craig, Undersheriff Reyes-Guzman from Posadas County…” That was as far as she got before Stout picked up.

  “Hey, you caught me in mid-yawn,” Stout said. “Dispatch says you’ve been busy.”

  “Yes.”

  He laughed at her cryptic answer. “Well, look, I won’t keep you. To make a long story short, we’re missing one of our range techs, along with his unit. Last we knew, he was headed out to Stinkin’ Springs to check on one of the permitees who’s building a fence where he’s not supposed to.”

  “Your Stinkin’ Springs, or ours?”

  He laughed again. “That’s right. Everybody’s got a Stinkin’ Springs, don’t they? No, the one off Forest Road 113, over near Three Peaks.”

  “That’s a long way from us, Craig.”

  “I know it is. But we don’t have any report of him showing up there. See, you gotta know that this is Myron Fitzwater, and he marches to his own drummer. He has this habit of getting a wild hair at the last minute and going off somewhere without telling anybody.”

  “We have a few of those.”

  “Doesn’t everybody. Anyway, I’m doing a quick call-around. He hasn’t answered his radio or his cell. ’Course, he could be in a dead zone. Lots of land out there without cell towers.”

  Estelle leaned back and swiveled her chair so she could see the wall map behind her desk. Stout’s office in Douglas, Arizona, was a long drive from Posadas, but as the ravens flew, it was just next door.

  “When was last contact?”

  “He talked to one of our other range techs on Friday, a little before lunch. Larry said that they talked about a project where they’re building some erosion control structures north of here, around the Alejandro area. Fitz said he had some errands to run, and that’s the last we saw of him.”

  “He has a government truck?”

  “Yep.”

  “The unit has a radio?”

  “As a matter of fact, it doesn’t. Just kind of a utility rig, you know. Have to depend on either cell or handheld radio.”

  “Is it the usual procedure to bring the unit back to your office at the end of the day, or do some of the techs take their ride home for the weekend?”

  “No, they always
bring the vehicle back to the boneyard.”

  “Okay. Is there any particular reason for you to think that Fitzwater might have come this way?”

  “He’s got a girlfriend, for one thing.” He said the word “girl” as if it has about six r’s. “He hasn’t been able to talk her out of that little corner of New Mexico that you guys boast over there.”

  “You called her?”

  “If she has a phone, it’s a cell, and there’s no cell service down there.

  ‘“Down there’ meaning…?”

  “Little crossroads named Regál. Now I know you know all about that place.”

  “Indeed we do. What’s the girl’s name? Do you know?”

  “I don’t, but wait a sec. Maybe Glenda does. She’s worked here forever and knows everything about everybody. She’s a night owl, too. She’ll be home, so let me give her a quick buzz. I’m putting you on hold. Don’t go away.”

  While she waited and listened to the silence on the phone line, Estelle stood up and stepped closer to the map. She imagined that the whole corner of the state was a territorial nightmare for the Forest Service. Stout’s home office was in Douglas, Arizona, but a wing of the Coronado National Forest touched Posadas County, wrapping around the west end of the San Cristóbal Mountains and blanketing the country around Regál, as well as coming within a few miles of sharing a boundary with the Oria National Forest to the north and parts of the Apache-Sitgreaves to the west. Like most federal law enforcement officers, Stout would have an enormous area to cover, with little assistance.

  He was back on the line in a moment. “Okay. I survived that encounter. Connie Suarez, Glenda tells me. Constance Suarez.”

  “Sure.”

  “You know her?”

  “Yes. A nice girl. She still lives with her mother, as far as I know. Or did, anyway. The last time I talked to her was some months ago, at the Catron County fair over in Reserve. She and her mom make about the best peach preserves in the entire universe.”

  “So, there you go. Look, do you have anybody down that way at the moment?”