The Fourth Time is Murder pc-15

by Steven F Havill

  Over the years, Estelle had come close to clobbering critters on the highway half a dozen times, and connected twice-once with a mule deer and once with a Brangus calf. She knew how little it took for even seasoned reflexes to do the wrong thing. It was easy to picture the white pickup truck driving on the damp pavement, perhaps a shade too fast, cresting the pass and starting down the slight curve just as the doe stepped off the shoulder, intent on crossing the highway for no other reason than that it was there. The rush of headlights would make no sense to the animal. It would either freeze in place or bolt-and a driver could bet money on the critter bolting the wrong way.

  Estelle took her time, sweeping the ground around the body for anything out of place. The muddy residue on the victim’s left palm carried enough of the characteristic mold marks that there was no mistaking its origin. Why would someone do that? Did a passerby witness the accident, then clamber down the dangerous hill and, unable to stop the momentum of his descent, plant a foot on the victim’s limp hand? Stranger things had happened.

  She peered again at the mark. With a proper photo, they might be able to ascertain direction, but here in this variable light, it would only be a guess. Collins thought a deep imprint in the gravelly soil was a heel. He might be right, and that meant the boot that stomped the hand was pointing uphill. The owner of the boot would have been standing close to where she now stood.

  Keeping to the hard surface of the surrounding rocks, Estelle made her way to a point uphill of the body, near the right side of his head. A large amount of blood had foamed up and out of the victim’s gaping mouth, and she could imagine the young man struggling for his last breath as his flailed ribs moved in all the wrong ways. “Huh,” she said, and tried to find a way to support herself on elbows and knees, ignoring the dull, naggy ache in her own bones, exacerbated by the climbing and bending. Past injuries had a way of reminding their owners, she thought.

  The victim’s head was turned slightly to the right, and she bent down close enough to smell the path of his last breath. The distinctive odor of beer clung to the body, and she imagined that she could see dried residue on his right cheek, as if the beverage had trickled out of his mouth during his final moments. Maybe it had.

  Was Chris Marsh tipping a can of brew just as the doe bolted into the truck’s path? Smashed and battered down through the rocks, crushed by his own somersaulting truck, he had come to rest here flat on his shattered back, staring at the foggy heavens, choking on a last mouthful of beer.

  Were you dead when your friend stepped on your hand? she thought, and then aloud, she said, “And where did he go?”

  “Who?” Matty said. The EMT sat quietly on a nearby rock, watching.

  “That’s what we need to find out,” Estelle said. She pushed herself upright and turned back to the truck. Again picking her way using the rocks as her only path, she took her time, finally kneeling at the crushed door on the driver’s side. Because the truck was upside down and twisted, the opening would have allowed a child to wriggle through, but not Christopher Marsh. The inside of the cab was a jumble, with all the trash that had been on the floor now tossed about the crumpled space in senseless disarray. A white plastic cooler was jammed between the crushed roof, the remains of the steering wheel, and the gear lever, jammed so hard that it had cracked open and molded itself around the bent lever.

  The smell of beer was moderate, and she could see where some had leaked from the cooler and puddle on the head liner. In the far corner, about where the corner of the windshield had originally met the dashboard, lay a bent but still-sealed beer can, sprung loose from the cooler, no doubt.

  “Okay,” Estelle murmured to herself. She had seen hundreds of accidents similar in most respects to this one-crumpled and torn steel, crumpled and smashed drivers and passengers, all tainted with that familiar, depressing aroma potpourri of beer and blown bladders and colons.

  She got up and brushed off the knees of her trousers. The accidents were all too familiar, and so was the notion that someone-some Good Samaritan-had stopped and gone to all the trouble of climbing down that forbidding cliff side. But then, instead of phoning 911 from that spot with the ubiquitous cell phone, at that moment he or she had left the scene.

  And then what? Estelle thought. Who would stop, climb down, and then leave, panicked by the gurgling death rattles of Chris Marsh?

  “Three-ten, PCS.”

  Dispatcher Ernie Wheeler’s disembodied voice startled her out of her thoughts.

  “Three-ten. Go ahead.”

  “Three-ten, be advised that both Dr. Perrone and Dr. Guzman have been called into surgery. The hospital tells me that it’s going to be a little while before either one of them can answer a call.”

  “Ten-four. Keep me posted. The weather might force us to transport here in a little bit. I’m going to hold off as long as we can, though. As soon as one or both are out of surgery, get back to me.”

  “Ten-four.”

  She could feel the mist on her face like a cold, clingy veil, and she bent to pull the yellow plastic so that it covered the boot-marked left hand of the victim.

  Chapter Four

  By midnight, photographer Linda Real had finished at the crash scene and Estelle was confident that they had a complete portrait of the accident. Pictures would show the wild skid marks on the highway, the battered guardrail, the various gashes and gouges the somersaulting truck had dug in the hillside rocks and in the victim himself. They had examined the carcass of the doe and found white paint flecks that no doubt would match the truck. There was blood and deer hair caught in the crushed metal of the truck.

  Unless it had spun about at the last instant, the animal had been crossing from the truck driver’s right, headed for the bank and brush on the left, or uphill, side of the highway. Other deer tracks marked the bank.

  The skid marks suggested that the driver may not have seen the deer until the animal was about to leap into his truck’s grill, just as he rounded the curve at the top of the pass-a sweeping right-hander that paralleled the flank of the mountain. Had the driver held the steering wheel motionless while he stood on the brakes, the doe might have bolted away unscathed.

  But the wet pavement had conspired with driver panic. The skid marks showed that in concert with slamming on the brakes, the driver had twisted the steering wheel. The truck had rocketed first to the left, veering all the way across the highway toward the inside bank. With overcorrection, it had then spun right, its back tires actually cutting the gravel of the southbound shoulder of the highway. Had there been oncoming traffic, a head-on collision would have been likely.

  The truck had smacked the doe, then plunged back across the highway and struck the first section of the guardrail with the left corner of its bumper while the right front tire vaulted up and over a hump of dirt and rock. That had sent the little truck airborne. The driver wouldn’t have had time for more than a short scream during the 133 feet from first skid to bashed guardrail. On dry pavement, that distance would have been enough to stop even if he had been driving at 60 miles an hour, but not in the wet.

  As the weather closed in, it was clear to Estelle that she could spend hours on this hillside in the dark without finding what she was looking for-and at this point, she didn’t know what that was. The wrecked truck wasn’t going anywhere soon, either. Short of hiring a helicopter and sky hook, there was no practical way of retrieving the wadded-up vehicle without doing more damage to the evidence. Taking the wreck downhill to the old mining road would require cutting numerous trees, and even then Stub Moore’s tow truck wouldn’t be able to back to within a hundred feet of the crash site. The most direct route would be to drag the wreck back up the rock-studded cliff side to the highway. That would wait for daylight, which was just as well, Estelle reflected. There were too many unanswered questions.

  “Hey,” Sheriff Robert Torrez said. So absorbed was she in her own thoughts that Estelle hadn’t heard him approach from behind her. She snapped off her flashli
ght. “We’re about to head out,” he said. By the glare of the spotlights on the roof rack of the sheriff’s truck, she could see that the two EMTs had secured the gurney in the back of the pickup for the victim’s short ride out to the highway and the transfer to the waiting ambulance.

  “Maybe with the light of day,” Estelle said, and Torrez cocked his head. “I just don’t know.” She shrugged helplessly. “We need to take the truck apart. I agree with Dennis-there wasn’t a passenger with Marsh. He was by himself, and I think it’s as simple as a collision with a deer. That happens all the time. The crash is simple,” she corrected. “What happened afterward…” She let the words trail off. “We need answers from Alan.”

  “Well, we gotta roll or that ain’t going to happen,” Torrez said. “You want Stubby out here with the wrecker, or you want to wait?”

  Estelle shook her head. “I don’t want the truck moved until we have a chance to scour this place. It’s too easy to miss something.”

  “That’s a fact. Take your time,” Torrez said. “There might be a real simple answer.” He almost smiled. “I can’t think of one, but who knows.”

  “At this time of night, I’d like simple answers,” she sighed. “And by the way, speaking of simple answers…we have a reporter from one of the national magazines coming for a visit.”

  Bob Torrez jerked as if someone had slipped a cattle prod down his trousers. “What the hell for?”

  “Well, that’s what they do, Bobby.”

  “When’s this going to happen? Who thought this up?”

  “She contacted me a couple of weeks ago, and I e-mailed a generic, bureaucratic response to her saying that we were a public agency, blah, blah. I hadn’t heard anything, so I thought maybe the idea had been dropped. It hadn’t been, I guess.” She smiled at the thunderclouds on Bobby’s face. “She’s coming tomorrow sometime.” She shined her light on her watch. “Today sometime.”

  “That’s just what we need,” the sheriff grumbled. “How come you didn’t let me know?”

  “Check your e-mail,” she replied. “I sent a department memo and a copy of my response to everyone, including you.”

  “I didn’t see that.”

  “You have to turn your computer on, Robert,” she chided.

  “Well, she don’t need to talk to me.”

  “You’ll be the challenge, that’s for sure.”

  “Yeah, right.” He looked up at the battered junk that had once been a truck. “You got someone to sit this for the night?”

  “Jackie Taber is coming out to give Dennis a hand. I’ll ask her to stick close so he can go back in and wrap up the preliminary paperwork. He was working a double shift, so he’s about had it.”

  “Pasquale’s workin’ graveyard. He can help.”

  “I know he is,” Estelle said. Pasquale had worked the game before his midnight-eight shift-he had the endurance of the young, and twelve hours once in a while was a matter of course. “But I want Jackie’s eyes and ears,” Estelle added. She took a deep breath in frustration. “Somebody somewhere knows about this wreck, Bobby. Someone was down here. Maybe just looking, maybe we don’t know what. I’ll be interested to hear what Alan has to say.”

  “He ought to be free by now. Him and Francis got called to the hospital earlier. A kid collapsed at the school. Right before the tip-off. Pasquale was tellin’ me that she was headin’ out of the gym to the refreshment stand, and boom. Down she went.”

  “Really. One of ours or theirs?”

  “Pam Gardiner’s daughter.”

  “Kerri, you mean?”

  “Yep.”

  “Ay, that’s too bad. What happened, do they know?” She could picture Kerri Gardiner, vivacious, raucous, and nothing like the great doughy mountain who was her mother. Pam had been editor of the Posadas Register for a dozen or more years, but it would have surprised Estelle to see her at a sporting event. The newspaper’s publisher and business manager, Frank Dayan, covered all those, the modern technology of his little digital camera finally allowing him to take some in-focus pictures. He sold ads, covered sports, and chased sirens…all the things that Pam would or could never do. He was a frequent visitor at the Sheriff’s Department, and Estelle had come to trust his judgment. She didn’t worry about what he saw or heard.

  “Don’t know what happened. Gayle called me from home. She said Kerri was with a few friends and collapsed right there by the trophy case outside the gym doors.” He shrugged. “Mears is with them.”

  “Okay. That’s good.” Sergeant Mears would have been at the game as a parent, more to listen to the pep band of which his daughter Melody was a member than to watch the basketball action.

  “PCS, three-oh-three is ten-ninety-seven, Regál Pass.” Deputy Jackie Taber’s quiet voice broke the radio silence.

  “You want to ride out with us?” the sheriff asked.

  “I’ll go up the hill, thanks,” Estelle replied. The old mining road angled out to meet State 56 almost a mile down the hill. The two hundred feet up through the rocks to where her car was parked would give her more time to think and one more chance to scour the cracks and crannies between the rocks-looking for what, she didn’t know.

  By the time she had scrambled her way along the tortuous route back up to the guardrail, she could look down through the trees to the east and see the headlights of Bob Torrez’s pickup truck still picking its way along the narrow, rock-strewn mining trail. If the victim’s bones weren’t in a jumble before, they certainly would be now, she thought, and shivered.

  “Hand?” Jackie Taber’s blocky figure appeared out of the dark, looming over the guardrail.

  “Thanks,” Estelle said. The young woman’s grip was strong and sure, and Estelle eased over the rail with a loud exhale of breath. The steel rail was icy cold and sopping wet. “That is quite a climb.”

  “Bad night for it,” Jackie said. “Last place you ought to be.” She wore a yellow slicker, and the plastic weather cover over her Stetson was dotted with water, the beads of moisture catching the flashing lights from the roof rack of her vehicle. Her admonition was gentle, and Estelle nodded her appreciation.

  “Yes, I was just beginning to think that,” the undersheriff agreed. Estelle knew that, without the added drain of the climb, her energy reserves were still less than optimum. The initial weeks of hospital convalescence following extensive surgeries had done nothing for muscle tone, and the slow months of recuperation and therapy at home had been tedious. Sometime during those months, she had begun working consciously to avoid the posture that initially had given her the most relief-hands tucked under opposite armpits, arms hugging her chest the way a heart patient hugs his post-surgery “cough pillow.”

  She had returned to work three months after the incident, and still ran out of gas-usually at the most inopportune moments. And she had returned to work fully aware that in order to be of any use, bulletproof vests needed to be between the bullet and the wearer.

  “Dennis was saying that some things don’t work out on this one,” Jackie said.

  “Let’s sit in the Bronco,” Estelle said, the chill of the dank night finally penetrating her clothing. A car whistled over the pass from the south, altogether too fast, tires hissing on the wet pavement. The driver braked hard at the sight of the flares and emergency lights. Deputy Taber stepped forward, pointing an index finger at him with one hand while indicating that he slow down with the other. He passed, brake lights bright.

  “Morons,” Taber muttered. She swung into the Bronco and slammed the door, picking up the radio mike at the same time. “Three-oh-four, three-oh-three.”

  “Three-oh-four.”

  “Ten-twenty?”

  “Three-oh-four is just coming up on Moore.”

  “Ten-four.” She hung up the mike. “If Denny wasn’t so far on down the road, I was going to have him pull over for a minute and pick up Speedy Gonzales there on the radar. Anyway, another time.”

  “There’ll always be one,” Estelle said. “Loo
k, I know it’s a pain, but I need you to sit this until we can get back here in daylight. We’re not going to move the truck until tomorrow, and I really want to go over the whole area again with some daylight. It’s just too hard to see out there tonight. There’s no way to get lights on that cliff from above or below.”

  “Roger that,” Jackie said. “I was thinkin’ that the forest road at the top of the pass would be a good place to camp out. I can see this spot from there. What was this about a boot print on the dead guy’s hand?”

  “We think so. But it’s hard to tell for sure. The light plays games. Or lack of light, I should say. I’ll be really interested to see Linda’s pictures and hear what Alan has to say.” She started to open the door of the Bronco. “Did you hear any more about the youngster at school? Kerri Gardiner?”

  Deputy Taber shook her head. “Just a request for medivac to transport.”

  “Ouch. That’s too bad.”

  “I’ll stay in touch,” Jackie said. She reached out and patted the radar unit mounted on the dash. “Good night to run a superblitz on the pass,” she said with a grin.

  “How many cars does it take to make a blitz?” Estelle asked, laughing. “You’ll be lucky if five vehicles go by all night.”

  “And four of them will be speeding,” Jackie said hopefully.

  “Did you read your e-mail, by the way? I sent a memo around last week.”

  “About the magazine lady? Yes, I did. Thanks for your response, by the way. I appreciated that. In the army, nobody except the top brass does any talkin’.”

  “I just wanted to make sure everyone understands the ground rules,” Estelle said. “Nobody needs permission from Bobby, or from me, to talk about anything they want. That’s all. Or not talk to her, as far as that goes.”

  “She had an article last month about that woman aerobatic pilot who just won the national unlimited championship,” Jackie said. “It was pretty good. I left my copy in the workroom, if you want to take a look.”