Each time I settled into 310, it seemed that the seat back hit me just a little bit harder. This time, I took a deep breath, counted to five, and let it out slowly, squinting out through the windshield at the stars. After a minute I realized that Estelle was sitting quietly, watching me.
I turned to look at her and shrugged. “What do you think?”
“About what, sir?”
“About what’s-her-name here,” and I tapped the yearbook. “Or anything else, for that matter.”
“I think I’d like to talk to her. I’d also like to know who was in the vehicle that drove by the convenience store when those five kids were on the sidewalk.”
“That shouldn’t be hard to find out. At least one of the kids will talk. Eddie Mitchell can do that in between everything else. Just give him that list of names Pasquale gave us.”
“Three-ten, PCS.”
Estelle reached for the microphone and I said, “You know who that is.”
A faint smile touched Estelle’s dark face as she keyed the mike. “PCS, three-ten.”
“Three-ten, ten-nineteen.” Dispatcher Ernie Wheeler’s voice was neutral, and I shook my head. I reached over and took the microphone from Estelle.
“PCS, that’s negative. We’ll be another hour. What do you need?”
“The sheriff wants to speak with you, sir.”
“Well, put him on.” I was willing to bet that that wasn’t about to happen, since Martin Holman went tangle-tongued any time he got within hollering distance of a radio. I would have lost. Holman’s voice was too loud, and I could picture him leaning over Wheeler’s shoulder, mashing down the talk bar.
“Three-ten, ten-nineteen.”
I glanced at Estelle. “He’s pissed,” I said.
“Well, sir, you told him ten minutes at the hospital, and it’s been more than an hour.”
“It won’t hurt him to be patient. Vanessa Davila is the first person we’ve found who might have been with Maria Ibarra in the past twenty-four hours. She might be able to tell us something. We can’t afford to let her slip away.”
I checked my watch. In another hour, the town would come alive with postgame madness, particularly if the Posadas Jaguars had won. “Let’s find Miss Davila,” I said.
I keyed the mike. “PCS, three-ten will be ten-seven at the Ranchero Mobile Home Park.”
Ernie Wheeler signed off, and even as he was saying “Ten-four, three-ten,” I could hear Martin Holman’s angry voice in the background. I hung up the mike. “Let’s go find Vanessa,” I said.
Estelle turned 310 south on Bustos and the street’s wide, windswept expanse looked particularly empty and bleak. She glanced over at me, but whatever she was thinking, she kept to herself.
19
The Posadas telephone directory told us that Teresa Davila lived at 100 Escondido Lane. She was listed under Teresa…not Bobby and Teresa Davila, or whatever her once-upon-a-time husband’s name was. The address was painted on the gate of the Ranchero Mobile Home Park.
As the tires of 310 crunched on driveway gravel, I scanned the rows of trailers. One or two of the twenty-four units had lights burning in the windows. Otherwise the park was dark, with a single sodium vapor light near the entrance. To the north and well above the level of the park, traffic droned by on the interstate, a constant infusion of noise.
A single light burned in the first trailer, where Taylor Boyd had his office.
“I’ll go in, sir,” Estelle said, and parked in front of Boyd’s trailer.
I watched her walk over to the porch and go up the steps two at a time, nimble as a teenager. About the fourth time she pressed the bell, I saw a light go on in the back. A moment later, the front door opened and a wash of light flooded out. Boyd’s T-shirt was stretched over a belly bigger than mine, and his boxer shorts somehow defied gravity.
He looked out at our car, frowned, and then squinted at the identification that Estelle held up. Finally he stepped out on the small porch and pointed toward the far end of the park. “About three trailers down,” I heard him say. Estelle didn’t buy the “about” and said something to which Boyd replied, “That’s right, the blue-and-white one.”
He said something else that I couldn’t hear even with Estelle’s window down.
He went back inside and before Estelle had reached 310, the light in the back of his trailer switched off.
“The blue-and-white one,” I said.
“Right. In slot three. But he doesn’t think they’re home.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” I said. Sure enough, the blue-and-white mobile home in the third slot was dark. There was a porch light fixture, but no bulb. Estelle cranked the spotlight around and illuminated a sorry hulk of a car that was parked next to the trailer, both back tires flat.
“My turn,” I said. I didn’t take the steps two at a time. In the harsh light from the spot, I watched where I planted each foot. There were only three steps up to the door, and I was glad of it. I rapped on the door, feeling the light-gauge metal bend under my knuckle. Estelle turned off the spotlight so my eyes would have a few minutes to adjust.
No one answered my knock, so I pressed the doorbell. I was surprised to hear it chime bright and cheerful inside. Just after my finger pressed the bell for the second time, I heard a light thud from inside the trailer, and then a voice.
I turned to look at Estelle and nodded.
If I had been Teresa Davila, I’m not sure that I would have opened my door at that hour to a fat stranger on my front porch. But she did and looked up at me with unfocused eyes heavy from sleep. Not counting about a hundred pounds, I immediately saw the family resemblance. Vanessa Davila was a young, heavyweight version of her mother.
I stepped back away from the screen door so she could see past me to the patrol car.
“Mrs. Davila?”
“What you want?” Her voice was flat and featureless.
“Mrs. Davila, I’m with the sheriff’s department. Is your daughter home?”
“What?” She said it as if I were speaking Dutch or Greek.
“Your daughter? Vanessa?”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“Nothing is wrong with her, ma’am. We just need to talk with her. Is she home?”
“No, she’s not home yet.”
“Do you know where we can find her?”
“What do you want?” This time a touch of late-night crankies tinged her voice.
“We need to talk with her.”
“You want to talk with Vanessa, you come back in the day time.” She started to close the door.
I heard the door of the patrol car open and saw Mrs. Davila’s eyes dart down to focus on Estelle as she approached.
“Who is this?”
“This is Detective Estelle Reyes-Guzman, Mrs. Davila.”
“Is she the one who needs to talk to Vanessa?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Estelle stopped with one hand on the thin aluminum railing and her left foot on the first step.
“Señora Davila,” she said, and her voice was soft and musical. “¿Vanessa…no esta aqui?” She made it sound as if it were really too bad we were missing the girl.
Mrs. Davila answered in a flood of rapid-fire, slurred Spanish that was far beyond my limited vocabulary. Estelle grimaced and then shrugged.
“Tal vez-” she started to say, and the woman interrupted her.
“Mas tarde, anoche,” she said. “O quizas manana, no se.” She glanced at me, then back at Estelle. “¿Esta la joven en un aprieto?”
Estelle smiled and shook her head. “No, I don’t think she’s in trouble,” she said in English, and Mrs. Davila’s hand crept up toward her throat, clasping the collar of her nightgown. “But we need to talk to her.”
“Is it about that little girl…”
Estelle nodded. “Yes, señora. We think that Vanessa might have seen her sometime yesterday.”
Mrs. Davila nodded vigorously. “They plan to go to the game tonight.
But now, I don’t know…” Her voice drifted off in that delightful habit where the speaker expects the other person to supply the necessary details. But we didn’t know details, in any language.
“She went to the game anyway?” I asked, not bothering to add, “Even though her best friend just choked to death?” I didn’t say it for two reasons: Mrs. Davila didn’t need to hear it, and we didn’t know yet what the relationship had been between Maria Ibarra and Vanessa Davila.
“That’s what she said,” Estelle answered, and then to Mrs. Davila, “¿Es posible fue con varias amigas?”
The woman didn’t know, or wouldn’t say, whether her daughter had gone to the game alone or with a mob, and it was apparent that she really didn’t care…or if she did, she was so far from being able to do anything about it that she had given up long ago. We left it at that, and we didn’t promise to return…although I had a feeling Mrs. Davila would be seeing much more of us before it was over.
I settled back in the car and looked at Estelle. “I think it’s interesting that the girl comes and goes as she pleases, when she pleases. Mama didn’t seem the least bit uneasy about not knowing when the kid was coming home.”
“Oh, she’s uneasy, all right,” Estelle said, and swung the car around.
“She is?”
“Sure. But what can she say? What can she do? If she says anything to her daughter, she’d probably be beaten even worse.”
“Whoa,” I said, puzzled. “Beaten worse than how?”
Estelle shot a quick glance my way, and when she accelerated out onto Escondido, the back tires chirped. “You didn’t notice the bruises?” she asked.
I frowned. “No. I couldn’t see her well enough.”
“Especially around her left eye. A nice shiner.”
I hadn’t noticed that, and I began to wonder what else I wasn’t seeing. For a couple of blocks I just sat, staring out the side window at nothing. “Christ,” I said finally. “Remember when it used to be simple? Somebody would rob a store, and we’d chase ’em. Remember that? Or they’d have too much to drink and crash into a tree? Nice simple stuff like that.”
“It hasn’t been like that for a long time, sir.”
“A very long time. Too long.” I shook my head. “A horse, gun, and badge, just like Crocker said.”
“Sir?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Do you want to go back to the office now?”
“Sure. Why not.” What I really wanted to do was go home and go to bed. I picked up the microphone and rapped it against the dashboard, beating out a soft cadence of frustration. “So you think the girl beats her own mother?”
“Nothing would surprise me, sir. That’s the simplest explanation.”
“And the most depressing. What other explanations have we got, other than that maybe the mother makes a habit of walking into doorjambs?”
“A boyfriend, maybe.”
“At her age?”
“Sir…” Estelle said in the tone that she reserved for the times when my Stone Age heritage was showing. “Sir, boyfriends are possible at any age. But bet on the girl.”
“She’s big enough,” I said.
“Yes, she is. And Mrs. Davila doesn’t look like she’s capable of putting up much resistance.”
I keyed the mike. “PCS, 310 is ten-eight, ten-nineteen.”
Ernie Wheeler acknowledged, and I wondered if Sheriff Martin Holman was still standing behind him, waiting. It wasn’t like Holman to stay up during the night shift unless he absolutely had to. He preferred to meet the public refreshed and well rested, like any good salesman. I didn’t have any news to make him sleep any easier.
20
Holman wasn’t pacing around the dispatch desk. He wasn’t pacing anywhere, as far as I could tell. The dispatcher, Ernie Wheeler, looked up from his paperback novel as Estelle and I walked into the building. The world might have been ending outside, but it seemed to me that all good dispatchers acted as if they lived completely insulated from the ruckus.
“Where’s his nibs?” I asked, checking my mailbox at the same time. It was empty, with no pink slip from the sheriff.
“He took 307 and said he was going to make himself visible.”
I stopped short and turned to stare at Ernie. He was a tall, gangly kid, maybe a year or two past thirty, who would have been cast in the lead role of Ichabod Crane had they been filming the remake in Posadas. He bobbed his head as if I were about to lop it off.
“He did what?”
“He took 307, sir.”
“Well, he can do that. He’s the sheriff.” Wheeler wasn’t stupid, and he knew I didn’t believe a word I said. Holman was sheriff, all right, duly elected. But he wasn’t a cop-never had been and probably never would be, no matter how many rinky-dink two-week FBI seminars he attended. Driving around in his personal, unmarked brown Buick was one thing. People could ignore him.
“Where did you say he went?”
“He said he was going to make himself visible, sir. That’s all he said.”
I gestured at the radio. “Ask him where the hell he is.” I glanced up at Estelle. “Goddamn elections.”
Wheeler swung his chair around and keyed the mike. “Three-oh-seven, PCS.”
After a moment, during which time he no doubt had been groping for the microphone, the sheriff replied much too loudly, “Ah, PCS, this is three oh seven.”
“Three-oh-seven, ten-twenty.”
There was a pause while Sheriff Holman mulled that over. Perhaps he was looking at the ten-code card on the back of the visor to find out what “twenty” stood for. Or maybe he didn’t know where the hell he was.
“Ah, PCS, I’m at mile marker one eight one.”
I heard a little chuckle from Ernie but kept my eyes glued to the microphone in front of us just in case Holman should materialize there. “Ten-four, three oh seven. What highway is that?” Wheeler asked. He grinned with delight, but kept the grin out of his voice.
“Ah, roger, PCS. I’m on State seventy eight.”
“Ten-four, three oh seven. PCS clear.”
Wheeler turned to me, and I shook my head. Estelle said helpfully, “Isn’t mile marker 181 a little bit east of the Posadas County line?”
“Yes, it is. And now I know what he means by making himself visible. The school bus carrying the team comes home that way…and so do all the revelers. Actually, except that it’s not our county, it’s a good spot.” I stepped over to the big wall map. “If he’s parked about here, just this side of San Pasquale, then traffic will see him before they start down through the breaks. That’s dangerous stretch of road.” I stepped back from the map. “Maybe they’ll think we’re out in force and behave themselves.” I shrugged. “What the hell.”
“What do you want to do about Vanessa Davila?” Estelle asked. “Put somebody on her place?”
I nodded. “Who’s on tonight…other than the self-appointed Martin?” I looked at the roster and grimaced. “Shit. Eddie Mitchell and Howard Bishop are on until midnight, then Tommy Mears alone midnight to eight. With Tom Pasquale at the hospital, the only one working the village will be the chief, which means there’s no one working the village.” I glanced at Wheeler. “You didn’t hear me say that, son.” He looked appropriately blank.
I looked at my watch. “I don’t have anything cooking at the moment. I’ll take 310 and go sit in the shadows. If Vanessa doesn’t show up by two-thirty or so, then it’s a safe bet that she’s camped out elsewhere for the night. I don’t have a clue where, unless it’s with her aunt.”
“I’ll check there,” Estelle said. “And she hangs around downtown a lot. She might be spending the night with friends.” She opened the yearbook and showed Vanessa Davila’s photograph to Wheeler. “This is the young lady we want to chat with. Vanessa Davila. She’s a ninth-grader, and her mother thinks she went to the game with somebody. We don’t know who. Tell Eddie Mitchell and Tom Mears to stay central and keep an eye open for her. I’ll make copies of her
picture from the yearbook. They need to come in and pick those up.”
“Do you want this girl taken into custody if they see her?”
“Yes,” Estelle said. “We do. Tell them to bring her in for questioning. Call me the instant that they do that.”
“Me as well,” I said. I didn’t want to be caught painting windows again.
***
I parked 310 under a dense grove of elm saplings with the Ranchero Mobile Home Park fifty yards to my right. Escondido Lane was a narrow ribbon of hard-packed dirt, a faint tan strip in the moonlight. The browning leaves of the elms dappled the light from the moon and the park’s sodium vapor enough that the car was invisible.
With a deep sigh, I buzzed the window down an inch and then settled back to wait and listen. It would have been a perfect moment for a cup of coffee and a cigarette. I didn’t have either one. I tried to will my mind blank, but in a very few minutes, I found myself fretting about Martin Holman.
I didn’t care what the voters said-this particular sheriff was a civilian by training and more important, by inclination. Hell, he didn’t even wear a sidearm, not that he needed one for most of the county commissioner meetings that he attended. The patrol car he’d heisted included a 12-gauge shotgun in the dashboard rack, but I wasn’t sure he knew how to pop the lock.
In his own car, he could observe events and then call in the troops if need be. But folks expected that a marked police car would respond in an appropriate fashion-and not next week. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have cared if the good sheriff had ridden a palomino horse through downtown while he was dressed only in his Stetson. But the bizarre deaths of Maria Ibarra and Manny Orosco had trashed all of our normal circumstances.
I considered driving east and baby-sitting, but the last thing I wanted was for Vanessa Davila to slip back home, grab her bag, and head for Mexico.
Radio traffic was slow. Deputy Howard Bishop plodded his way around the county without a word. In sharp contrast, Eddie Mitchell’s clipped eastern accent kept the dispatcher busy with routine license plate checks. He was fond of driving through the parking lot of a restaurant or bar and reeling off plate numbers of vehicles he didn’t recognize for NCIC checks.
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