“Maybe so.”
“And the tire? The tire ends up on the county pile, not at the landfill.” She leaned forward eagerly. “Do you want to place bets about that black paint?”
“You think Zeigler had a flat tire up at the landfill, then.”
“What makes more sense? Sure, the tire should have just been tossed in the back of Kevin’s truck. But it wasn’t, somehow. Forgotten in the heat of argument, maybe. I don’t know. When it’s all over, what if Fulkerson goes back to the landfill and oops…there it is. He’s got to get rid of it. He wouldn’t want it at the landfill. It’s too risky. If it was found, he’d be implicated right away.”
“I don’t know. I don’t see why it would be apt to be found. He could bury it anytime…”
“Because Fulkerson can’t know if Kevin told someone what his errands were. Did he mention to his secretary that he had to go up the hill? The simplest thing is to get rid of it, just in case someone starts snooping around.”
“Tossing it on the back of the pile down at the county barns sure does that.”
“Even if by chance it’s found, Bobby, it directs our attention that way.”
“The last thing he’d do, though, is toss the tire up on the headache rack of his truck when he’s driving around,” Torrez said.
“Maybe he didn’t do that. Maybe that was just an accidental scrub when he was getting ready to toss it across the fence. I can see him doing that. He stops, tosses the tire up on the rack, climbs up there himself, and over it goes. A nice high vantage point for a hard toss.”
Torrez nodded toward the television set. “The only thing on that tape is that Fulkerson comes back from lunch way late, and Zeigler doesn’t come back at all. And when he does come back, Fulkerson is not wearing his coat. Well, it ain’t exactly cold out, either.”
“No, it’s not. But it’s just one more little point. Why should he be late, on the very day when it’s likely that Zeigler’s going to talk about the landfill thing with the commission? It’s not like he has to drive thirty miles to be there, Bobby.”
“Maybe he’s not the punctual sort. Maybe he just likes irritating Zeigler.”
“Maybe.” She ticked off several fingers. “Too many little things that point to him. They’re adding up. Plus, it would be to his advantage to be at the meeting if they started discussing the landfill in Zeigler’s absence. Fulkerson would be in a perfect position to throw a wrench in the whole idea, without fear of contradiction.”
Torrez heaved a deep sigh, glanced at his watch, and leaned back again. “I got one naggin’ question. You want to guess what it is?”
“Just one?”
“Well, let’s start with this one,” Torrez said. “Fulkerson parks the truck in Zeigler’s driveway. Sees Carmen. Does his thing with the handy lug wrench. That’s slick, ’cause folks are going to blame Zeigler, right? Well, then what? Fulkerson is on foot, and the old bat down the street doesn’t see him walk by. No one does. Where’s he go?”
“Do you know where Don Fulkerson lives, Bobby? I didn’t, until I checked this afternoon.”
“Yeah, I know where he lives. I think he’s the last trailer in that mobile-home park off Camino del Sol. He’s got about half of that landfill collected in his backyard.”
“And Camino del Sol becomes County Road Nineteen when it leaves the village limits. He doesn’t even need to go back out Candelaria Court to MacArthur.” She walked over to the small whiteboard bolted to the sheriff’s office wall and quickly drew a simple map. “Right out the back of Zeigler’s property to Arroyo del Cerdo. Cross Bustos out there beyond Sissons’, walk maybe a thousand yards of cross-lots to his place.”
“Yup.”
“His motorcycle was at the landfill today, Bobby. So was his truck. What if on Tuesday, his bike was at his house? I mean, that’s the normal thing, isn’t it? He drops off Zeigler’s truck, runs cross-lots back to his own place, then rides the motorcycle back to the landfill. Maybe that’s when he sees the forgotten tire. He parks the bike and takes the truck. Tire goes on the county pile, he shows up back at he meeting when he’s sure that he’s covered his tracks.”
“Huh.”
“He had the motive, he had the opportunity. And he certainly had the means.”
Torrez studiously regarded a wart on his left thumb knuckle. “You want to go up there?”
“I think so.”
“You think so?”
“I want to find Kevin Zeigler, Bobby. Whatever it takes. I’d like to look around up there without either Fulkerson or Kurtz knowing…maybe in the office, around the grounds. Then, if we need to take a crew up there to sift through two days of trash, that’s what we’ll do.”
“Two days? There’ll be more than that.”
“Not if it happened the way I think it did. Bart Kurtz said that they cover the week’s collection on Sunday night when the landfill is closed. It’s closed Tuesday, too. So we have the collection from Wednesday and today uncovered in the pit.”
“Change your clothes, and let’s go take a look,” Torrez said.
Chapter Thirty-three
There was nothing surreptitious about Sheriff Robert Torrez’s approach. He pulled up to the Posadas County Landfill’s main gate, got out with his bundle of keys that included the master for all of the county’s heavy Yale padlocks, popped the lock, and swung the gate wide open.
“Let’s lock it,” he said as he climbed back in the Expedition. “You never know what bunch of kids will be out lookin’ for a place to party.” He pulled the Expedition forward. Estelle climbed down, closed and locked the gate behind them.
“Where do you want to start?”
Estelle nodded at the small shack that served as the landfill office. “Right there.” Torrez swung in close but didn’t switch off the ignition. “You know what you’re lookin’ for?”
“No.”
Torrez swiveled the spotlight to illuminate the little building, then swung the light to the left. “The bike’s not here.”
“He’s had lots of time to take it home in the back of his pickup.”
The sheriff snapped off the spot and then switched off the ignition. “Darker’n shit,” he muttered, and slid the large aluminum flashlight out of its boot in the center console. The new moon was far down on the horizon. A light breeze swirled around the shed, enough to set the symphony of landfill smells into motion.
Torrez unlocked the office door and pushed it open. “Let there be light,” he said, and snapped the switch. One of the two fluorescent bulbs flickered into dust-filtered life. The office was stuffy and cluttered. A constant flow of boots carrying mud and dirt had ground the original vinyl flooring bare, leaving recognizable patterns only in the corners, where feet never ventured.
A set of metal shelves bulged with various tools and machine parts, some boxed, some lying loose in the clutter. A single window on the east wall could open, but probably hadn’t in years. The glass was opaque, crusted on the inside from smoke, dust, and insects; on the outside from the constant clouds of landfill dirt that shifted with the wind.
Estelle opened each of the three desk drawers, lingering at the last one when she saw the half-full bottle of Canadian whiskey. “I could smell an additive in his coffee this morning,” she said.
“Don and the bottle are no strangers,” Torrez observed. “I know that for a fact.” He didn’t say how he knew, but Estelle was well aware that Bobby Torrez was determined when it came to busting drunk drivers; years before, shortly after joining the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department, he’d lost a younger brother to a weaving drunk. Other deputies swore that Torrez could now smell an open bottle of beer even before the driver lowered his window. She could not imagine him cutting Fulkerson any slack if he caught the landfill manager—county employee or not—weaving down the highway under the influence.
A computer sat in the middle of the desk, dusty and note-stuck. Directly above it on the wall was the load scale’s readout, the glass of the digital window as
filthy as everything else.
“Hi-tech operation,” Torrez said. He held a small plastic bag as Estelle transferred a dozen of the freshest cigarette butts from the overflowing coffee can that served as an ashtray. “Which ones are his?”
“Today he was rolling his own,” Estelle said, “but he had a pack of Camel filters in his shirt pocket. Kurtz was smoking Marlboros.”
“You know we’re lookin’ at a week or more for a DNA profile off these.”
She nodded with resignation. “I don’t care if it takes a month. I need to start somewhere. This afternoon, I asked Francis to find Fulkerson’s blood type for me, if it was on file anywhere over at the hospital. It’s not. Nothing’s going to be easy.”
“Could be that Bart might have had something to do with all this. That’s a possibility.”
“I’ve been thinking about that, Bobby. Maybe he’s in on it. He was the more reserved of the two when I talked with them today. I couldn’t tell if he was nervous or not. But he struck me as a little evasive.”
“Bart’s just plain dumb,” Torrez said. “He’s firing on two out of four.”
“Maybe so, but he wasn’t the one drinking whiskey at nine in the morning.”
“Fulkerson seemed confident, did he?”
“Oh, yes. Pretty smug.” She gingerly lifted a grimy jacket off the back of the swivel chair. “This is Bart’s,” she said. “It’s too small for Don.” She held out the sleeves, then checked the pockets, finding a butane lighter, a quarter, a penny, and a piece of peppermint candy minus its wrapper.
They spent another five minutes in the shed, but found nothing of interest. Once more outside, Estelle took deep breaths, enjoying the relatively clean air and letting her vision adjust once more to the darkness.
“This is Fulkerson’s trailer,” Torrez said. “I’ve seen him pullin’ it around.” He walked across to it, playing the flashlight on the contents. “Lots of good shit. Looks like somebody tore down an old fireplace or something. Old Don scarfed up the bricks.” He leaned on the side of the trailer, methodically examining the load. “I could use some of those.”
“They may end up on sale, cheap,” Estelle said, and Torrez nodded judiciously.
“Yep, they might.” He thumped the side of the trailer, turned and shined the flashlight across the landfill. “Lots of traffic since Tuesday,” he said. “That’s the frustrating part. And it wouldn’t come as much of a surprise to find out that Zeigler had a flat tire up here, either.” He walked a couple of paces away from the truck, playing his light on the ground. “Too damn many tracks since then. No way to find where he had the jack.” He directed the light toward the pit and the beam reflected off the bright yellow of the dozer. “I’d like to take a look over there,” he said. “I ain’t walkin’, though.”
As they drove across the rough, litter-strewn ground toward the pit, Torrez swung the windshield-post-mounted spotlight this way and that. “Did you walk over there?” he said at one point, holding the spot on the large pile of branches, slash, and limb wood a hundred yards away in the back corner of the landfill.
“No. I visited the appliance showroom and the tires. Then I walked across to the pit.”
“They burn that pile every once in a while,” Torrez said. “Fire department brings the marshmallows and they have a grand old time.”
“That’s a cheerful thought.”
“Next time it’ll be barbecue-flavored smoke.”
Estelle grimaced at the graveyard humor. “If I was going to dispose of a corpse, it wouldn’t be under a pile of branches. That would be both hard to do and time-consuming.”
“Me neither.” He swept the light back, and Estelle saw that the day’s pile of refuse had been dozed into the pit, leaving a neat apron for the next day’s offering. Torrez maneuvered the Expedition carefully between the parked dozer and the side of the pit, the left front and rear tires no more than a stride from the edge. He swiveled the spotlight and played it down into the depths.
With barely enough room to open the door, Estelle climbed out and walked around the front of the truck. The sheriff remained inside, and Estelle crossed through the beam of the spot, keeping a hand on the truck for balance.
“Stay away from the edge,” Torrez said unnecessarily. “That’s a hell of a first step.”
“I was over on the other side earlier,” she said.
Torrez crisscrossed the spotlight beam methodically across the bottom of the pit, pausing now and then at points of interest. After several minutes, he leaned his head on one hand, elbow propped on the doorsill. “How sure are you?” he asked quietly.
“I’m not sure at all,” Estelle replied. “It’s just that in various conversations since Tuesday, the landfill keeps cropping up. It’s the only thing that’s consistent, and that makes me edgy. Hear it one time, that’s one thing. But over and over again, things keep circling back. Tony Acosta mentioned it. William Page mentioned it. The tire shows up down at the county yard, but it’s got a paint smear on it that might match the black paint on Fulkerson’s headache rack.” She shrugged and leaned against the truck’s door. “That’s thin, I know.”
“You ain’t kidding. Like it ain’t the only rack in town. It’s going to take the state lab a week to run a match.”
“It’s just that there is a rack here, too, Bobby. And there are some things that are even thinner. Like the smell in Zeigler’s truck. You walk into that shack over there, and it’s a megaversion of that same stink.”
“It’s just cigarettes.”
“Well, no, it’s not. It’s smoke mixed with alcohol, Bobby. I know. I could be wrong. But then you add Fulkerson’s motive. That’s intriguing, and on top of that it’s the only motive we’ve stumbled across that’s immediate.” She thumped Torrez on the arm. “We know that there are some ill feelings between Fulkerson and Zeigler. At the very least, some dislike. And it runs both ways, beyond just one man’s contempt for another’s lifestyle. If a private company from out of town takes all this over, Fulkerson stands to lose…and lose big time.”
“‘All this will be yours one day, my son,’” Torrez intoned. “What a kingdom. Too bad he don’t have a son.”
“And Fulkerson comes up again in Crowley’s video.”
“Just because he was at the meeting.”
“A little more than that. He was there and then left the meeting, right at the time that Zeigler disappeared. And returned late. It’s hard to tell, but it looks like he changed his clothes. Or at least took off his coat.”
“He had the opportunity. I agree with that.”
“Sure enough he did. Now think about the grease on Carmen’s bedroom wall? Fulkerson’s the right size, and he works with machines all the time.” She jerked her head toward the bulldozer and shined her flashlight over the roof of the Expedition. “It’s not there now, but he stuffs his jacket under the seat and uses it as a pad for his thermos of coffee. There’s grease all over the place. These little things, Bobby. They just keep adding up. Fulkerson could have walked from Zeigler’s to his own place on Camino. It’s only a couple of blocks, and makes sense. He wouldn’t want to be seen. After what happened with Carmen, he’d want to be out of there. He’d be nervous.”
“More’n that. He probably hurt like hell from bein’ jabbed with that freakin’ hat pin.”
“That, too. It makes sense that he’d duck out the back. And suddenly, both his vehicles end up here at the dump. Explain that to me.”
“Do you feel sure enough to shut this place down? Put a lock on the gate, close it off for however long it takes to dig it all up? I’m thinkin’ that a dog will help. I know they have a rescue canine in Deming. Get him up here to nose through all this shit.” Estelle didn’t respond. “That’s what you’re talkin’ about, you know. That’s what we do if there’s reason to believe that Zeigler’s buried down in that pit somewhere.”
“Ay. I really hate thinking that he’s here.”
“Well…” Torrez shot the spotlight all the way d
own to the far end of the pit again, where the dozer would climb up and out when it dug the pit in the first place, pushing the load of dirt to the storage pile. Each week, a layer of dirt would be graded back as a cover blanket for the trash. “It don’t make any difference to Kevin Zeigler whether he’s lying down there, or under a juniper up on Cat Mesa, or in the bottom of an arroyo someplace. We go with what we got. So you call it. You’ve relied on your intuition before.”
“I feel really, really uneasy about this place.”
He switched off the light and they listened to the silence for a while, broken occasionally by the light rustle of the breeze touching the loose plastic of a garbage bag down below. “That’s good enough for me. Let’s go take a look,” he said after a minute. “What’s to lose? Maybe rummaging through trash in the middle of the night is just the ticket. At the very least, we might find some really good shit, and stiff Fulkerson out of his flea market profits.”
Estelle moved away from the door, careful to stay back from the edge of the pit. “I’m leavin’ the truck right here,” Torrez said. “It’ll give us something to see by.” He turned the spot back on, centering it to cover the most area. “You have your light?”
“Yes,” Estelle said.
“Gloves?”
“Sure.”
He tossed his bulky handheld radio on the seat. “I don’t need to lose that,” he said. He got out and stood for a minute with his hands on his hips. “I think we can just kinda slide down over here.” He walked back toward the drop-off apron of the pit, where the slope was nearly seventy degrees, as opposed to the gently sloped exit end.
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