“You got it.”
He disappeared and I knelt back down. “Just hang in there, buddy,” I whispered, but there was no response. I touched the side of the young man’s neck, feeling a thin, thready pulse.
Seconds later, Pasquale’s light added to mine. He handed me the blanket, then bent close, keeping the beam out of Patrick’s eyes. He examining the wound even as he tore open the first four inch gauze pad.
“We don’t want to move his head,” I said.
“This’ll help,” Pasquale said, and wormed a fist-sized rock out from under the young man’s right cheek. I backed out of the way a bit. “Make things a little better,” he said, and rested one hand on Patrick’s forehead, gently, just to make a connection. “Can you hear my voice?” He reached around and lifted Pat’s right eye lid as he said that, but gained no response. “He’s out.” The deputy ripped open two more pads and pressed them against the jaw wound. “No easy way to do this mess. How did it happen?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s use that,” the deputy said, and took the blanket that he’d handed me. “What other injuries, you know?”
“No idea. The hematoma on the eye, and the cut throat. That’s what I know.”
Pasquale ran a hand from the back of Patrick’s skull down the center of his back, then down each leg. “Everything points right.” He stood back, made a quick survey for blood, then shook open the blanket and let it waft down.
The deputy unsnapped the little mike from his shoulder epaulette. “PCS, three-oh-two.”
“Go ahead, three-oh-two.”
“Expedite ten-fifty-five this location. One male, age nineteen, severe head injuries, significant blood loss. Pulse is weak, respiration light and ragged. Victim is unresponsive.”
“Ten-four.”
“And notify three-ten and three-oh-eight that we’ll be inbound with the subject of their earlier complaint.”
“Ten-four.”
Pasquale tucked the radio back into his belt. “It’s going to seem like a long, long wait,” he said.
Indeed it was. Mercifully, Pat Gabaldon was unconscious for most of the forty-five minutes. A groan or two, a spasmodic twitch or jerk, and that was it. The deputy and I kept a running stream of comfort and attention, making sure that if the young man did swim back to the surface, he wasn’t greeted by dismal silence.
Eventually-it seemed like hours rather than minutes-we heard the approach of the heavy diesel emergency unit as it turned onto the county two-track.
“Three-oh-two, Rescue One is just leaving the highway. You’re at the campground?”
“That’s affirmative. Pull beyond my unit. We’re all the way in the back.”
“Ten-four.”
With Patrick Gabaldon’s future entirely out of my hands, I stepped away, making room for the two EMTs and the bulky gurney. Matty Finnegan, half-way down the arroyo slope with her bulk of equipment, paused to look hard at me.
“Are you all right, sir?”
“I’m fine,” I said, and then added to the deputy, “I’ll be at my truck.”
Neither Bobby Torrez nor Estelle would call me while I was in the middle of this mess, but they’d be waiting for an update. Sure enough, Estelle answered her phone after the first ring. She listened without interruption until I was finished.
“Why there, I wonder.”
“Maybe they’d been there before,” I said. “Maybe they saw the campground sign and figured it was their last chance before the border. I don’t know.”
“Patrick wasn’t able to speak?”
“No. We have a long, long list of unanswered questions, sweetheart.” Tom Pasquale and the two EMTs appeared at the lip of the arroyo, maneuvering the gurney to the ambulance. “They’re about to pull out. I’ll be inbound with ’em as soon as Tom and I secure the radio.”
“That’s good. Bobby and I are here at the hospital, if you’ll meet us there,” Estelle said. “Some interesting developments.”
“I’m not sure I can stand any more interesting things.” I switched off and waited for the ambulance to leave. Pasquale approached, an aluminum clipboard in hand.
“The phone, sir?”
“We need your camera and tape first,” I said.
“The Sheriff wants to keep an eye on this until we have the chance to sweep the area,” he said, not looking altogether enchanted with that thought. “I’ll just secure the road right at the highway. Taber comes on at midnight.”
“I know it’s a mess,” I said, “but if there’s a shoe or boot print to be had, we’ll want it.”
Holding the idiot end of the tape measure, I made my way back to the piñon on the slope.
“Ninety-seven feet, four inches,” Tom shouted.
“Not a bad toss.” I waited as he rewound the tape, and in a moment he appeared at my side. I turned the light on the tree, illuminating the little phone.
“Well, hell,” he said. “This is amazing. How’d you do this stunt?”
“I dialed his number,” I replied. “No rocket science involved.”
“Jeez.”
“I want photos of it in place, and then put it in an evidence bag without touching it. I’ll take it with me. The sooner we can process prints, the better.”
“You’re shitting me,” Thomas said, still in wonder. “How’d you find it, did you say?”
“I could hear the ring tone.”
“Well, damn. That’s pretty neat, sir.” Shaking his head, he retraced his steps to his unit and fetched the bag. A good deal taller than I, Pasquale had no trouble tipping the phone into the bag using the end of his ball-point pen.
“Why would they throw it?” the deputy asked. He handed me the sealed bag.
“That’s one of the interesting questions.”
The dust from the ambulance still hung in the night as I bumped my way out of the canyon back to the state highway. I ambled along in my best think mode, arm out the window, slouched against the door, letting my mind roam. There was certainly no hurry, now that Patrick was in good hands. But that forty-five minutes of deep thought during the drive back to Posadas produced no epiphanies-just more fuming and fretting.
Part of my uneasiness was worrying about Patrick’s injuries. Part of it was wondering what Herb Torrance was going to do, working into the fall months without the only two ranch hands he had. I’d call him from the hospital after I’d talked with Estelle and Robert. But the dark of that night kept reminding me that we didn’t know what kind of cold-blooded freak we were dealing with.
It was seeing the undersheriff’s Crown Victoria parked outside of the hospital’s emergency room’s double doors that added another round of bleak thoughts to my mood. It seemed a year rather than eighteen hours since I’d stood in George Payton’s kitchen, looking down at the end of a life and the loss of an old friend. Estelle had promised “interesting developments” in that case, and I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to hear them.
I parked behind Estelle’s car, making sure I was clear of the ambulance lane. Ignoring all the instructional signs that guarded the staff only emergency room entrance, I went inside, grimacing at the strong wall of artificially cooled and perfumed air and the bright lights that had no regard for the natural time of day.
Chapter Nineteen
The emergency room waiting area was empty, only the television entertaining itself. Just beyond the emergency room itself, before the radiology suite, the doorway of an office marked administration was open, and I headed for that. The room was a private lounge of sorts where medical staff could duck inside for a few private moments of consultation or snoozing. Four uncomfortable stainless steel chairs lined each wall, all upholstered in institutional orange. A small table with telephone and coffee maker graced one corner. Other than a painting that hung above the phone table, a pastel of an improbable barn located in a rolling green place like Wisconsin, the room was sterile and naked.
Sheriff Bobby Torrez sat in two of the chairs, his big frame skewed sidewa
ys so that he could prop his boots up and rest his head against the wall. He appeared to be dozing, but I knew better.
Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman sat beside a pudgy young man who appeared unreasonably neat and well-scrubbed for the hour. Louis Herrera was the hospital’s staff pharmacist, and I knew that Estelle’s husband had already head-hunted him away for the new clinic.
“Ah, sir,” Estelle said when she saw me. She smoothed the pages of the hefty volume that she supported in her lap and then handed the tome to Herrera. “Tomás tells us that you worked a miracle.”
Torrez’s eyes opened. “Hey,” he said, and let it go at that.
“You found Patrick by finding his phone,” Estelle said. “That’s impressive, sir.”
“Well, you put a call through, and the damn thing rings.” I handed the evidence bag to the sheriff. He regarded the small phone critically. “Might be some interesting prints on that.”
“Patrick got lucky,” the sheriff murmured.
“He’s not my definition of lucky.” I glanced at the wall clock and saw that it was coming up on 11:30. “He was out there a good long time.”
“Could still be without this,” Torrez said.
“So,” I said. “You mentioned some developments?”
Estelle raised a small vial and extended it toward me.
“And this is…” The vial was small, heavily tinted, about the size of an old-fashioned ink bottle. I knew better than to open it and sniff a deep breath, but I did unscrew the top gingerly and regarded the fine white crystals inside, as unremarkable in appearance, to me at least, as sugar, salt, or cocaine. The label was beyond the powers of even my trifocals, but I squinted at it anyway.
“Histamine diphosphate,” Louis Herrera said. “I was just telling the officers that it’s classified as a chemical, rather than a drug. We keep it in the compounding room, normally. Don’t take a taste.”
“Sir,” Estelle said, “Tony Abeyta is over at the university, and he called not long ago. They found substantial amounts of this chemical in the wine that was spilled on the floor, and in the portion remaining in the glass. Nothing in the bottle.”
I looked at her for a long moment, completely lost. She took that opportunity to pull out a small notebook and thumb through the pages until she found what she wanted. “Here’s the problem,” she said. “They wanted to establish a histamine level in the body fluids. They’re thinking to trace whether or not there was an allergic reaction of some sort.”
“That’s going to take days,” Herrera said, shaking his head. “Forty-eight hours at least for blood histamines, anyway.”
“And that’s the trouble,” Estelle said quickly. “The lab here? They have never actually done a quantitative histamine test, sir. It’s not something that’s routinely done when a battery of blood tests or urine tests is called for. They don’t even have a protocol established for how to go about it.”
“That’s about right,” Herrera agreed.
“Histamines,” I said, sounding like a damn parrot. “We are talking about an allergic reaction here, then. Just what I’ve been saying.”
“Not in the food, though,” Torrez muttered, and his quiet voice startled me. He hadn’t been snoozing.
I handed the bottle to Louis Herrera before I dropped it, and the resulting sneezing attack killed off half of Posadas County. “I don’t follow any of this.”
“Sir, the lab in Albuquerque found significant amounts of histamine diphosphate in the wine. Not in the burrito, not in the chile, not in the bottle of wine…but in the spilled wine, and in the glass,” Estelle said patiently.
I looked at Herrera for confirmation. “That could do it?”
“Oh, by all means, sir.” He leaned forward, staring at the little jar. “When we get stung by a wasp or have a reaction to gluten, for example…almost anything that we happen to be allergic to? The body produces a flood of histamines.” He shook the bottle. “This stuff occurs naturally in the system. Not in this crystalline form, of course, but histamines are a big part of our protein chemistry. They flood the system and trigger metabolic reactions to foreign proteins. In the worst case scenario, what they trigger is anaphylactic shock.”
“What if I took a spoonful of that stuff?” I asked.
“A spoonful? My God. You know, if they’re lucky, the lab can test for this, but the results would be read in something like nanamoles per liter. That’s not much. I mean, a nana-anything is one billionth. A bee sting is enough to kill a person who’s deeply allergic to that particular protein. We’re talking tiny amounts here, not spoonfuls.”
“Nobody is going to spike food with nanamoles,” I said. “What would a spoonful do?”
Herrera shrugged. “Ever been stung repeatedly by a 1,000-pound wasp?”
“Come on.”
“I’m serious, sir.”
“How fast does that stuff act?”
“About instantly.”
I looked over at the undersheriff. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that someone put this chemical, or one like it, in the wine, sir. We’ll know for certain when the blood and fluid tests are completed. Maybe sometime late tomorrow, if we’re very, very lucky. There’s a lot of midnight oil being burned, but it’s a whole new set of problems for the lab.”
“A bunch of this stuff dumped into the wine wouldn’t be noticed?” I frowned. “Hell, I’d notice it. Well, I think I would. Maybe not.”
“Unlikely,” the pharmacist said. “For one thing, histamine diphosphate is incredibly soluble.” He held up the bottle again. “This is five grams, more or less, but I gotta tell ya…I could dump the whole thing in a few CC’s of water, and it would dissolve immediately. No problem. One of your tablespoons in an eight-ounce glass…” He waved his hand like vapors in the air. “Dissolve right away. No taste.” Then he grimaced. “Not that you’d have time to notice.”
“Just dump it in, maybe swirl with a spoon.”
“That would do it. Don’t lick the spoon, though.”
“Seriously?”
“Dead serious. The mucus membranes are the easiest route into the body’s systems. Look, somebody messing with this stuff…that’s scary business. For one thing, I can’t imagine how anyone would be able to procure this,” and he held up the bottle of chemical. “It isn’t for sale. It’s not on the street. At least, it better not be. It’s not the sort of thing where a little bit would give a buzz.” A fleeting grin touched his face. “Well, it’d be a buzz, all right. Once.”
“What’s the diphosphate part do?” I asked.
“That’s just a chemical binder,” the pharmacist said. “Something to carry the histamine radical.”
“Makes it packageable?”
“Exactly so.”
“So you can dump it into food, cook the stuff, and no one is the wiser.”
“No…you can’t do that, sir,” Louis said quickly. “Histamine is an amino acid. Remember your biology? The old ‘building blocks’ of the cell?” He leaned forward, enjoying the lecture. He waggled the bottle at me. “Like all amino acids, this is extremely heat sensitive. Heat’s the enemy. You go cooking this, it would be destroyed.”
“Alcohol wouldn’t destroy it?”
Herrera shrugged dubiously. “Probably not. Not the amount that’s in wine, anyway. Even if some of it lost its kick, there would be plenty left over to do the job.”
I looked at Estelle, but not a flicker touched her poker face. I could make a million with her as my partner in Las Vegas. I knew that she could see the little door opening, and so could Bobby Torrez. He hadn’t shifted position, but now watched us like an interested cat. He moved his feet and pushed one of the chairs toward me.
Crossing my arms over my belly, I tried to make myself comfortable in the awful little chair with its hard arm rests and slippery plastic cover. “Let me give you a scenario, Louis.” He looked puzzled. “What happens? Suppose I dump a tablespoon or two of this into a glass of wine. The victim drinks it.
What happens?”
Louis’ face screwed up in imagined pain. “Wow. This isn’t a little reaction to cat hair we’ve got here, sir. And see, the trouble with a histaminic reaction is that so much of the body is affected.” Still holding the nasty little jar a bit too casually for my liking, he jabbed the first two fingers of both hands into his neck, under his jawbone. “Like I said, the soft tissues of the mouth make a great pathway. The salivary glands kick in, the throat constricts, the pulse races, the blood vessels dilate. That’s all serious stuff. But what you’re suggesting with this?” He shook his head. “Spoonfuls? Kapowee.”
“Kapowee,” I repeated, knowing exactly what the young man meant.
“Yep,” he said. “That would be one nasty ride. For a few seconds, anyway.”
I glanced at Estelle, and I’m sure that she could see the anger in my eyes. She knew as well as I did that George Payton’s final moments hadn’t been a peaceful “passing away.”
Chapter Twenty
“So,” Estelle mused, “if tests confirm the presence of excessive histamines in Mr. Payton’s body that match the source in the wine, we’re left with some interesting questions.”
“You think there’s any doubt?” I paused. “Okay, after listening to Louis, I’m convinced. Either there was chemical added to the wine, or there wasn’t. It’s that simple, it seems to me. The questions are who…and when.” I took a deep breath. “And why.”
Pharmacist Louis Herrera shifted uncomfortably in his chair, as if just knowing about histamine diphosphate made him somehow guilty by association.
“Ricardo Mondragon delivered the food from the restaurant to Payton’s house,” Torrez said. He rested his elbows on his knees, his left hand supporting his head, and stared at the floor. “He says that when he got there, the old man was up and around, drinkin’ wine.”
“Ricardo isn’t capable of any of this,” I said. “And if someone intercepted his delivery, he would have told us.”
“You think?”
“I know,” I said. “For one thing, he would have no reason to hide that bit of information if he was privy to it. And regardless of what else might or might not go on in his head, Ricardo has his loyalties to the Don Juan and its customers. That job is his life.”
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