Bitter Recoil

by Steven F Havill

  The deputies didn’t miss. Five of us swarmed over that truck and used enough print dust to powder a thousand faces. I worked as long as I could, but after a while my eyes refused to focus.

  I sat on a rock off to the side and watched. Francis Guzman had stayed with us, and as the clock ticked toward three in the morning he finally lost his patience. I saw him escort Estelle away from the truck, and for several minutes the two were in animated conversation. I didn’t want to eavesdrop, but I found myself watching like some damn Peeping Tom.

  Estelle stared at the ground as Francis talked, and at one point she looked up at him and shook her head. That set off another long session of lecture, and finally she nodded. Francis didn’t look pleased. Their faces were only inches apart, and after a minute Francis put one hand under her chin, lifted her head, and kissed her lightly.

  The young physician started up the hill, and Estelle walked slowly over to join me.

  “Francis is going back to town if you want a ride,” she said.

  “No. I may go up and grab the backseat of your car for a few minutes after a bit. But how about yourself? You’re pushing pretty hard.”

  That earned me a raised eyebrow, and I guessed that Francis had said much the same thing. Estelle changed the subject.

  “Tell me what Parris said.” She sat down beside my rock.

  “Cecilia Burgess’s little girl is his daughter.”

  Estelle’s mouth opened slightly, her lips forming a silent whistle. “He said that?”

  “Yes.” I told her about Parris’s friendship with Richard Burgess and the priest’s sorry affair with the girl after Richard’s death.

  She looked back over at the truck, lost in thought. “Maybe he’ll try for custody now.” She turned back to me. “He’s got to understand that Daisy is ultimately his responsibility. He can’t just give her away. He can’t just leave her out in the woods with Finn. Not with her mother dead.”

  “The kid’s the least of your worries right now,” I said. “She’s happy chasing toads and beetles.” I gestured at the truck. “You need a motive. And my first question is simple. If this is the truck involved in Cecilia Burgess’s death, what’s the connection to this mess? Neither Parris nor Finn had the time or motivation to act out of revenge…assuming that somehow either of them knew who drove the truck.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “No, I don’t. Finn didn’t appear to give a shit, one way or another. I don’t know what his trip is, but he didn’t seem too concerned when we talked to him. His focus seemed to be the little girl.”

  “That’s what worries me,” Estelle muttered.

  “Trust the child’s judgment, Estelle. You saw the way she clung to him.” She wasn’t convinced, but I continued, “And Parris is a marshmallow. It takes a special kind of monster to break a hurt kid’s neck in cold blood. Nolan Parris certainly isn’t the one.” I realized how silly that sounded as soon as I said it. The history of crime was full of innocuous-looking little schmoes who turned butcher.

  “We need time to process the prints,” Estelle said. “There’s got to be an answer here.” She stood up. “And I still think you’re wrong about Daisy, sir. She doesn’t belong in a tent out in the middle of the woods with a couple of Jesus freaks who probably aren’t even related to her.”

  The vehemence of her remark took me by surprise.

  Chapter 14

  We abandoned that damn mesa at seven in the morning. I’d had so much coffee I couldn’t go ten minutes between visits to the bushes. My eyes were open all right, but behind them my brain was comatose.

  It felt good when the tires of Estelle Reyes-Guzman’s patrol car finally turned onto the pavement and we drove back to San Estevan.

  She had a briefcase full of fingerprint cards and not much else. We sure as hell weren’t dealing with one of those nut cases who hangs signs all over his murder saying, “Catch me, catch me.”

  Sheriff Pat Tate wanted us all to meet for breakfast and a strategy session, but as we rolled through the village I could see Estelle had other plans. We passed the lane that led down to their adobe. Without slowing the car, she glanced at me and asked, “Do you want me to drop you off at the house?”

  I should have said yes just to see if she’d really turn around. Instead I said, “That depends on what you’re going to do.”

  “Francis has a low-power stereo microscope at the clinic that I want to use. For a preliminary print comparison.”

  “Are you going to eat?”

  “I’m not hungry. Maybe after a little bit.”

  I sighed with resignation but had enough sense to keep my mouth shut. “I’ll tag along. If I go with Tate, I’ll eat another of those breakfast burritos, and it’ll sure as hell kill me.”

  We drove through the village, and I noticed the parking lot of the San Estevan Catholic church was full. “Wedding, do you suppose?”

  Estelle laughed quietly. “You are tired, sir. This is Sunday morning.”

  “Oh.” I looked at the date window of my watch. “Son of a gun. Is the clinic going to be open?”

  “I have a key. And Francis might be there.”

  Francis wasn’t there. If he had any sense at all, he was home in bed. To keep myself awake, I made a pot of coffee while Estelle set up in the examining room.

  The viewer was designed for counting bacteria colonies growing in petri dishes but worked just fine for ogling fingerprints. She pulled out the card with Cecilia Burgess’s prints and then selected through the prints lifted from the truck.

  For a long minute she focused and arranged until she had the two sets side by side. Then she just sat and looked. I waited patiently and found it was more comfortable to wait with eyes closed.

  “Take a look,” she said. Her voice startled me, and I realized I’d been asleep. She got up to give me room.

  I’m glad the scope had two eyepieces…that way, it supported my head when I leaned over to look. If I had had to close one eye, the other would have followed suit.

  In the forty-one years I had been in law enforcement—twenty in the marines and twenty-one for Posadas County—I had looked at thousands of impressions left by human fingers, some of them in unlikely places. When I looked at fingerprints long enough and often enough I found that it was very much like looking at human faces.

  They’re all unique, yes, but there are family portraits where similarities show up. All that’s required is a clear print—smudge it, and the personality vanishes.

  The prints on the left had been provided by the Office of the Medical Examiner. They’d been lifted from Cecilia Burgess’s corpse. All ten digits were clear, the prints marred on three fingers by trauma associated with the crime.

  I shifted the cards and looked at the prints Estelle had taken from the top right bed rail of the truck. My pulse picked up a few beats. “Huh,” I said and shifted the cards. Estelle remained silent and then I heard her leave the room. I could smell the coffee, but what I was looking at was even more interesting.

  “The coffee’s at your left elbow,” she said when she returned.

  “Thanks. This is remarkable, you know that?”

  “They’re clear. It’s a good thing the top edge of the truck’s bed was clean.”

  “It usually is. That’s where everybody leans when they’re standing beside the vehicle yakking. It rubs off the dirt. Now if I had to read a story into these, I’d say that I can imagine a match. We’ve got a right index, ring, and middle finger and a smudged fragment of the little finger.”

  “With no trauma.”

  “That’s right. I can’t swear to any of the others, but the comparison of the two index fingers would stand up in court. The laceration cut deeply, but just above the center most characteristic swirl.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  I looked up from the scope. “She grabbed the side of the truck…and the print position shows she had to be facing forward at the time. Sometime after that, she was assaulted and pitched
out. The fingers were cut in the process.”

  Estelle pushed the coffee cup toward me and indicated a brown bag. “Some of Mary Vallo’s cookies left over from yesterday.” Cookies weren’t my idea of breakfast.

  “So she was in that truck for sure,” Estelle added. “That’s one square of the puzzle that fits.” I moved and let her rearrange the evidence under the stereo scope.

  “I’m most interested in the prints along the truck bed,” she said as she worked. “That’s what’s going to tell us who was in the back with her.”

  “Or who killed Waquie and Grider,” I added. I looked inside the paper bag. The cookies were those big oatmeal creations that kids hate…and that mothers make so that the cookie supply will last more than a single day. I took one and tried to pretend that it was a bowl of hot oatmeal with brown sugar.

  For fifteen minutes I watched Estelle work, trying this card and that. I was just crushing out a cigarette when she sat back, frowning.

  “What’s the matter?”

  She groaned. “Maybe I’m wrong.” She leaned forward and concentrated on the scope, but now she had my full attention.

  “Wrong how?”

  “You look.”

  I played musical chairs again and found myself comparing the top half of a perfect print on the left with a full but slightly smudged version on the right. The smudges weren’t so bad that I couldn’t extrapolate how the lines continued. “I’d bet they’re the same. I could be wrong, but I’d bet they are.”

  I straightened up and rubbed my eyes. “ ’Course, two of almost anything would look the same to me right now.”

  “I think it’s a match.”

  “Fine. Who do they belong to?”

  “The half print is from the graduation photograph of Cecilia Burgess. It’s the one that they brought up from the lab early this morning.”

  My brain was slow to digest that. “You handed the picture to Nolan Parris,” Estelle continued, “and that’s his thumbprint. Only the top half…like anyone does when they want to pick up a piece of paper carefully by the edge.”

  “And the other one?”

  “From the truck. The right side. Two feet behind Cecilia’s.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “It was oriented the way it would be if Parris had taken hold of the truck side when he was standing beside it. Four fingers inside, thumb outside and pointed to the left and slightly downward.” She walked to the sink and grabbed the side, her thumb on the outside. “Like this.”

  “Son of a bitch,” I said again. We looked at each other for a long minute. “That leaves a big question.”

  “Yes, sir. It does.”

  “When did the good Father Nolan Parris grab the side of that truck? Here in town? On the state highway? Or up on Quebrada Mesa.”

  Estelle nodded. “Let’s go ask him.”

  “On a Sunday morning a priest shouldn’t be hard to find.” I stood up slowly and said more to myself than to Estelle, “And maybe I can find out how he actually sprained his ankle.”

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  I waved a hand wearily. “I’ll tell you on the way.”

  Chapter 15

  When we started to pull out of the clinic’s parking lot, Estelle radioed the county dispatcher to let the office know she was bound for the Catholic retreat north of the village. The radio cracked the burst of static that was characteristic of the signal hitting a repeater tower somewhere, and almost immediately the dispatcher was back on the air.

  “Four-o-two, ten-nineteen San Estevan.”

  “Tate’s waiting for you at the office,” I said. “He’s going to want to be briefed on what you’ve got.”

  “I was going to stop,” Estelle said. “Either there or the restaurant, whichever.”

  I laughed. “Sure you were.”

  “I was.” She glanced at me, mock hurt. Only a state police cruiser was parked in front of Bobby’s Cafe, so Tate wasn’t lingering over breakfast. The party was at the highway department building. I counted six vehicles that belonged either to Castillo County or the Forest Service.

  Inside Estelle’s closet-sized office, the air was thick with smoke. She propped the door open. I lit a cigarette in self-defense.

  Pat Tate was looking at a wall map with two of the deputies, tree warden Les Cook, and another serious-looking young man in pine-tree green. Deputy Paul Garcia was sitting at the single desk, frowning over paperwork.

  “We wondered where you went,” Tate said when he turned around and saw us. “You missed breakfast.”

  “No, I didn’t. I had a wonderful cookie while she matched prints. The clinic has a good viewer.”

  “What did you find out?” he asked Estelle.

  She put her briefcase on the desk where Garcia worked. “First of all, it is the truck that was involved with Cecila Burgess’s death. We lifted a perfect print of hers from the truck bed.”

  “She might have touched it some other time,” Tate said.

  Estelle grimaced. “No. I think she was picked up, probably here in town. Maybe she was hitching up to the springs. It’s the truck. I know it is.”

  Tate held up a hand to slow her down. “All right. What else?”

  “Second, one thumbprint from the truck bed belongs to Nolan Parris.”

  “The priest?”

  Estelle nodded. “It was on the outside, consistent with gripping the truck side while standing on the ground. We have no evidence that shows he was actually up in the truck bed.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Tate muttered. “What would he have to do with all this?”

  “He’s the father of Cecila Burgess’s daughter.”

  Tate ducked his head with surprise. “You shitting me?”

  “No.”

  Tate looked at me. “Is this the kid you told me about last night? The one who’s staying with the hippies at the hot springs?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the priest is the father? You didn’t tell me that part.”

  I was about to say something like there were lots of things I didn’t tell lots of people, but Estelle saved me from my tired temper. “That was an angle we were just starting to work on when Paul found the truck.”

  Tate crushed out one cigarette and lit another that he bummed from Al Martinez. “So what’s the connection?”

  When he said that, every pair of eyes in the room was locked on Estelle. They were expecting a grand pronouncement, I guess.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Tate held up his hands, prompting. “Is Parris a suspect? In your mind? Did he kill the girl?”

  Estelle shook her head immediately. “No. That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Did he kill the two young men up on the mesa? Revenge, maybe?”

  “We thought about that,” Estelle said and looked at me. “I’m not sure he’s capable of it. And you, sir?”

  “Stranger things have happened.” I was no longer so eager to make assumptions.

  “You’re going to talk with him today?” Tate asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The sheriff took a deep breath and looked around for a chair. “We’re going to have to get you some furniture.” He settled for sucking in his gut and sliding his hands down behind his belt, like he had gas. If he ate at Bobby’s too many more times, he would. “I need to go back to the city, or I’d go with you. Bill, are you staying with us for a while?”

  I shrugged. “I’m kinda curious now. Besides, I need about thirty-six hours of sleep before I tackle an eight-hour drive home.”

  “All right. Estelle, I’m leaving both Paul Garcia and Al Martinez here. Whatever you need, holler.”

  Estelle nodded. “If we keep this kind of quiet for a while, it might be easier,” she said. “If the killer is still in the county, I’d rather not spook him.”

  “In that you’re lucky,” Tate said. “If this was the city, you’d have thirty-five media types crawling down your neck. Hell, nobody outside of San Estevan knows we’
re here unless we tell ’em.”

  He stood up. “Go talk to the priest who’s strayed into fatherhood and let me know.” He grinned at his own dumb joke, then turned to the two deputies. “Paul and Al, are you all set? Anything you need?”

  Both shook their heads, and Tate prompted Martinez by adding, “Give your wife a call, Al. Tell her you’ll probably be home tomorrow. Maybe Tuesday.”

  He picked up his baseball cap and snugged it down on his head. “It’s my granddaughter’s birthday today, and I’ll be at my son’s house most of the afternoon if you need me. The dispatcher will know. Bill, you take care. Don’t push so hard. You look like hell.”

  Tate thrust out his jaw like a master sergeant who’s just given his troops their marching orders and was now going to retire back to the comfort of his quarters.

  “Thanks,” I said. “That’s going to be my epitaph.”

  ***

  Estelle sent Deputy Martinez north to orbit Quebrada Mesa. Paul Garcia pulled a sleeping bag out of his Suburban and spread it out on the office floor. “Wonderful,” he said and was asleep in ten seconds at most.

  I envied that kind of metabolism. But what the hell. I’d had insomnia for so long I had developed the skill of falling asleep with my eyes open, in the middle of a conversation. If I actually were to lie down to rest, I’d end up staring at the ceiling.

  Estelle ran on her own private, inexhaustible power pack. Her ancient mother would have had biting words to say about her daughter’s apparent disregard for her own condicíon, but I knew better than to say anything. I knew damn well that the hours were going to catch up with both of us, sooner rather than later.

  As we drove out of the highway department yard, Estelle glanced at her watch. “It’s almost ten. Do you think we’ll catch Parris between services?”

  “Maybe. Or you might wait until later this afternoon. Catch yourself a few hours rest.”

  “I’m not tired.”

  I stretched and groaned. “I bet.” I could see the determination set into the muscles of her face. “Estelle, trust me. Parris isn’t going anywhere. And if he makes a break, a radio’s faster.”