I glanced at Schroeder, and then acknowledged the message. “Gayle, contact any Border Patrol or state police that might be in the immediate area.”
“We’ll just have to wait and see,” the district attorney said when I was finished, and pulled his seat belt tighter.
From the pass through the San Cristobals twelve minutes later, we could look down at the tiny village of Regal, and off to the south I could see the ruler-straight line that was the international border fence. The border crossing was open, and if an agent was available, he’d be only seconds away from Torrez’s location.
As we came down off the pass, a thin veil hung over Regal, a haze that was equal parts fragrant wood smoke and dust kicked up by traffic on the narrow, winding dirt lanes. The dust plumes led right to Sosimo Baca’s scruffy little adobe on the west side of the village.
When I had arrived at Sosimo Baca’s place the night before, there had been room for another vehicle to pass by on the dirt lane if I parked carefully, snugged in close to the fence. Now the west side of Regal was a goddamn parking lot, beginning just after “porch corner,” where the road nicked around someone’s front porch so close that over the years the corner column had collected a fair sample of automotive paint chips.
“This is going to be a mess,” Schroeder muttered.
I saw flashing red lights off to the left, where Tom Pasquale had taken a shortcut through first a backyard and then across a shallow arroyo, sliding his Bronco to a stop by a collection of rotten poles and sticks that might once have been Sosimo Baca’s back fence.
Weaving and dodging fenders, we managed another fifty yards before the road was corked by a fancy diesel pickup truck, last in line behind several other vehicles. Two men stood by the pickup’s front bumper, in animated discussion. Beyond the truck and a row of seven other vehicles including one with the green and white U.S. Border Patrol logo, I could see Sergeant Bishop’s patrol car. He had managed to skirt off to the right through a neighbor’s side yard, narrowly missing a chain-link enclosure that housed a pair of frantic yellow mutts. A board fence had stopped him within a dozen yards of Torrez’s Expedition, parked with its nose just east of Baca’s gate.
“We know it’s not a wedding,” Schroeder said. He braced his hands against the dash as I bounced the car over a hump of bunchgrass and a low rock border garden to the right. The dogs went nuts as I pulled past their enclosure, and I parked beside Bishop’s car.
One of the men who had been holding up the front of the Dodge pickup hustled toward us, as if I’d arrived with just the information he needed. “Hey, Sheriff,” he called, and I recognized Steve Parker, a county highway department foreman.
“The first thing you can do,” I barked before he had a chance to ask his question, “is to get all those goddamn vehicles out of the road so we can do our job. And no, I don’t know what the hell is going on.” Apparently that answered whatever question he had, because he stopped short.
Baca’s tiny front yard was a mass of people. If it had been the church, I’d have guessed that they were waiting for the bride and groom to come out. Then they would let fly with the rice. I picked what looked like the easiest route toward the front gate and then the passage across the dirt yard to the front door. That door was wide open-with the incomprehensible din of rapid-fire Spanish. The flow of people was outward from the house, though, and that’s what was causing the ruckus.
As we went through the front yard gate, Deputy Thomas Pasquale appeared from inside the house with his nightstick held in both hands like a bumper, herding a knot of jabbering sightseers out of the house. Schroeder and I stood to one side as the deputy escorted six people, every one of whom was talking a mile a minute, across the front yard toward us.
I held the little rickety gate as they passed through. Three I recognized by name. The others were only familiar faces I’d seen many times but never formally met. The largest and noisiest of the group was Clorinda Baca, Sosimo’s older sister. She was proving that she could talk louder and faster than her niece, Mary Silva, or Mary’s sister, Sabrina Torrez.
“We got here as quick as we could,” Pasquale said to me, “but it’s a mess.” I wasn’t sure to what he was referring, but unless the gathered herds were corralled and controlled, any evidence there might have been would be stamped to dust, regardless of what had happened to spark the crisis.
No doubt irritated that the deputy wasn’t paying any attention to her, Clorinda latched on to my forearm and directed her torrent of words at me, never bothering to switch languages so that I might understand.
I pried myself loose and held up a hand, shaking my head. “Not now, Ms. Baca,” I snapped. Off to the left, Scott Gutierrez appeared, his dark green Border Patrol uniform looking as if he’d been lying on his back under a car. He spun a large roll of yellow crime-scene tape across the side yard, looped it around a sagging juniper post at the corner, and headed across the front of the yard toward us.
“Where’s Torrez?” Schroeder asked, and Pasquale ducked his head toward the rear of the house.
“Backyard,” he said. “He wants the place cleared out to the road, no one inside.”
In another five minutes, without knowing anything about events that may have transpired, we had established a semblance of order with most of Regal’s population outside the yellow ribbon. Ten people wanted to talk to me at once, but I ignored them and entered the house, stopping just inside the door to let my eyes adjust to the dim light. Nothing had changed in those few hours since I’d found Matt Baca asleep on the old sofa.
Bob Torrez appeared in the doorway that led to the kitchen, and he ducked to avoid cracking his skull on the low, narrow archway.
“Sosimo Baca’s out back. He’s dead,” Torrez said cryptically, and beckoned Schroeder and me to follow. The kitchen would never grace the pages of House Beautiful magazine. A dingy little room, it had stopped looking fresh and appealing sometime around 1937.
A white drop-leaf table stood in the center of the kitchen floor with four chairs neatly placed. That was the extent of any order. The old round-topped refrigerator graced a dusty corner under a two-door cabinet that had been first painted yellow, and then, probably years later, layered with not quite enough gloss white to hide the previous color. The door of the fridge, dented, scarred, and stained, stood ajar a couple of inches.
Several meals’ worth of dishes waited beside and in the old cast-iron sink, and underneath, jammed between the two-by-four sink supports, sat an incongruously bright and cheerful blue plastic trash can.
“Be careful,” Torrez said when he saw Schroeder beginning to drift toward the back door. The door swung inward, and was unlatched. Torrez toed it open with his boot. The upper glass door pane had been broken long ago and then repaired with cardboard and tape, the whole affair painted white to match the frame. The lower pane had been shattered outward, leaving long, ragged shards projecting from the glazing. The screen door, dilapidated to begin with, had been flung open so hard that the frame split and sagged against the side of the house, held in place by remnants of torn screen. The recoil spring hung limply along the doorjamb, a chunk of wood still attached to the eye hook that had pulled free.
“A little ruckus, it looks like,” I said, taking a careful step through the broken glass. Two concrete blocks served as a none-too-steady step to the backyard. A dozen paces beyond the house, its bright, shiny black stark against the bare earth, lay a plastic tarp.
“Sosimo?” I asked.
Torrez nodded. “We’ve got some clear shoe prints, so stay well over to the side.”
I took a step or two toward the tarp and then stopped, turning back to look at the house. I could see a knot of people who had drifted along the fence to the east so that they could see past the building, hoping for a glimpse of something. “What about the two girls? Where are they?”
For a moment, the undersheriff looked as if he hadn’t heard me, but then he said, “Josie was here earlier this morning. Father Anselmo was st
ill here. Clorinda and a couple of others were too.” He saw the blank look on Schroeder’s face and added, “Josie is Sosimo’s wife. Clorinda says that Josie came and got the two girls. Maybe around seven-thirty or so.”
“She wasn’t living here? The wife?” Schroeder asked.
“No. She hasn’t been for almost two years now.”
“They were divorced?”
“No.”
“And who’s this Clorinda person?”
“My aunt. She’s Sosimo’s older sister.”
“Married?”
“Nope.”
“Terrific,” Schroeder said. “So the ruckus was with her? The wife? Ex-wife? Whatever she is?” I looked back at the shattered screen door, trying to picture what might have happened.
“We don’t know that,” Torrez said. “But the way the relatives were piling in here, I thought I’d better get some help…before everything was trampled.”
I sighed and regarded the tarp. The lump under it didn’t look big enough to be the man who’d been sitting in the passenger seat of my car less than twelve hours before.
Torrez bent down and peeled the plastic tarp away. Sosimo Baca was lying on his face, right knee drawn up and his arms under his body as if he’d been crawling and then collapsed. His eyes were open wide, staring at the dirt.
“Is Perrone on the way?” I asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Any ideas about what killed him?” I asked.
“Doesn’t look to be any wound that I can see,” the undersheriff said. He knelt down and gently touched what he could see of Sosimo’s left hand.
“Christ,” Schroeder said. “So he could just as easily have had a heart attack, or stroke, or something.”
“That’s possible,” Torrez said, and rose to his feet. “Dr. Perrone will tell us for sure. But I don’t think all that damage to the kitchen door is consistent with him having a heart attack.”
“Why not?” Schroeder said. “He panics, tries to go out the door. If he was off balance, he could ram his elbow through the glass as easy as not. Just his weight against that flimsy screen would do some damage.”
I looked at Torrez. His expression was skeptical. “What time did you arrive?” I asked.
He glanced at his watch. “A little after nine. Maybe a minute or two. The ladies were here at that time.”
I frowned. “The ladies? You mean Clorinda and…” My brain drew a blank. “The sisters? Your cousins?”
“Yes.”
“So when you arrived, and the women were already here, Josie and the girls were gone, and Sosimo was lying out here?”
“And who found the body?” Dan Schroeder asked before Torrez had a chance to answer.
“One of the neighbor kids, sir. She and her mother are sitting in the backseat of my car at the moment.”
I looked at Torrez incredulously. “How did that happen? And I glanced at your vehicle when we drove in. I didn’t see anybody.”
“I’m sure they’re making themselves very small, sir.”
Schroeder thrust his hands in his pockets and frowned with exasperation. “So what the hell do they say happened?”
The undersheriff took a deep breath and held it as he regarded the corpse of his dead uncle. “Josie and the girls left here about seven-thirty. The neighbor girl didn’t know that the girls were gone. She didn’t know about Matthew yet, or any of the events the night before.”
He turned and gestured off to the west. “She lives down this lane a ways, in that little stone house right below the water tank. She wouldn’t have heard anything if there was a ruckus. She says that she came over around eight, maybe eight-thirty, to play with the two Baca kids. She walked right in without knocking, which is what she usually does.”
“In a village like this,” Schroeder said, “she probably lives over here half the time anyway.”
Torrez nodded. “She said that no one appeared to be home-at least she didn’t hear anything. She came into the kitchen, happened to glance out the window by the sink, and then saw Sosimo’s body lying in the dirt outside. She ran home and told her mother. The mother’s first reaction was that Sosimo had blind-staggered drunk into something.”
“And the mother obviously didn’t call the police, since dispatch in Posadas didn’t know anything about all this when you responded,” Schroeder said.
“No, sir, she didn’t call the police. She called my aunt.”
“That would be Clorinda? Wonderful,” the district attorney said. “The village grapevine.” He grinned at me without much humor. “Or more like kudzu, maybe.” He stretched with both hands on the small of his back, grimacing. “You think he struggled with somebody?”
Torrez nodded. “Yes, I do. For a couple of reasons.”
“The damage to the door and what else?” I asked.
“The refrigerator.”
“Oh, please,” Schroeder muttered. “You could dent that thing a hundred times, and it’d just blend in with the custom finish.”
“That’s not what I mean, sir,” Torrez said. He stepped closer and lowered his voice. “The refrigerator door doesn’t close. It doesn’t stay closed. Let me show you.”
He turned and strode off toward the house with Schroeder and me following. At the back step, the district attorney glanced at his watch. “I need to get back to town. Do you have someone you can spring free to take me back?”
“Just take the car,” I said, and handed him the keys.
He nodded his thanks, and went inside.
“This,” Bob Torrez said, and indicated the battered old appliance. Sure enough, the door had drifted open two or three inches. With the corner of my handheld radio, I nudged the door shut. The latch didn’t click or catch, and when I released the pressure, the door opened again.
“Neat,” I said, and repeated the effort two or three times for Schoreder’s benefit.
“They propped one of the kitchen chairs against the door,” Torrez said. He took out his pen and indicated a faint horizontal scuff mark below the handle.
“Anything could make that mark,” Schroeder said.
“True enough. But when I was here at four this morning, I saw the chair in place. Father Anselmo, Uncle Sosimo, and me all sat around the table. One of the chairs was under the latch on the fridge.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Nope. That’s where it was. When I came in here after Clorinda’s call, all four chairs were in place. Neatly around the table, the way they are now.”
“And the fridge hanging open?” I asked.
“The fridge open.”
Schroeder took a few seconds to survey the little kitchen, turning a full circle with his head held high as if sniffing the scents from the four corners of the room.
“Keep me posted, Bill,” he said finally. “I’ve got to run back over to Deming for a while, but I’ll be back later this afternoon. We’ll see what we’ve got by then.” He reached out and shook hands with Bob Torrez. “And you be very, very careful,” he added.
Chapter Eleven
By late Saturday morning, the ogler gallery had reached some conclusions all by themselves, and most had retreated to their homes to leave us in peace. Whether the spectators’ theories about what had happened were right or wrong, even the most hard-core gossips had learned a few things.
Yes, Sosimo Baca was dead. The heart attack scenario was the path of least resistance. After all, the old drunk had been through a lot in the past hours, beginning with consumption of about a gallon of hard cider, and then progressing through the death of his son and the arrival of his estranged wife who snatched the two remaining children. In less than a day, fortune had taken Sosimo from bleary-eyed contentment to some seriously twanged heartstrings.
No, we weren’t going to let all of Regal gawk at the corpse or let friends and relatives into the house to rummage for souvenirs. No, we weren’t going to hold a question and answer session out front.
In addition, a stout southwest wind gradually b
uilt, driving the bite of chilly November air. Without a circulating hot coffee vendor, folks who hadn’t dressed for the occasion quickly wearied of leaning against cold trucks, waiting for us to attend them. A heart attack wasn’t that interesting, after all-even an incident as odd as this one appeared to be.
While Linda Real, Tom Mears, and Tom Pasquale worked to photograph and lift every square inch of the interior with special concentration on the Bacas’ kitchen, Sergeant Howard Bishop, Scott Gutierrez, and a pair of state troopers scoured the back and side yards of the tiny house. That alone accounted for some of the spectators lingering beyond their welcome, since it’s unusual when a heart attack attracts so much law enforcement attention. That added interesting fuel to the gossip fires.
Eventually the coroner, Dr. Alan Perrone, allowed the EMTs to remove Sosimo Baca’s corpse. Perrone’s examination at the scene was just enough to establish that someone hadn’t driven a blade under the victim’s ribs, or popped a.22 in Sosimo’s ear. “I would guess that it was his heart,” Perrone said quietly, and left. We agreed with him. Sure enough, Sosimo Baca’s heart had stopped. Exactly when and how was a puzzle.
Undersheriff Robert Torrez and I tackled the seemingly endless job of sorting out who had actually been in the house, and when and why they’d been there.
We didn’t know who had been the last person to see Sosimo Baca alive, so we started on the other end-we knew who had been the first to see him dead. Little Mandy Lucero had walked into the middle of things, took one look at the victim, and ran screaming home to her mother. Mandy adamantly maintained that she hadn’t touched anything in the house other than the front and back doorknobs. She remembered that both were closed when she arrived. An honest little kid, Mandy didn’t remember if she’d closed either when she ran out.
Mrs. Lucero hadn’t simply taken her distraught daughter’s word and then called the police. She’d hustled over to Baca’s herself to make sure, adding her own shoe and fingerprints to the mix. And then she’d telephoned who to her was the logical choice…the formidable Clorinda Baca.
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