The Fourth Time is Murder pc-15

by Steven F Havill

  “Well, I tell you,” Estelle said, “I’m tired, you’re tired, and we’re both asking for the impossible, sir. Go get yourself some breakfast, and take one matter at a time. Your son’s arraignment is at nine. He’d appreciate your being there.” She rapped the divider again with the folder. “Excuse me.” Deputy Pasquale lingered near the door, and she nodded at him. “I’ll be out in a couple of minutes, Tom.”

  Without waiting for a final parting shot from Elliot Parker, Estelle returned to her office and closed the door. Parker’s reaction was predictable-a man grasping at something that might take the public spotlight off his son’s behavior.

  Settling into her chair, she opened the envelope and pulled out a sheaf of photocopied reports, along with a set of digital photographs that wiped Elliot Parker from her thoughts. Someone else had their own share of troubles, and Estelle was immediately curious about what tendrils might connect an incident in rural Catron County with her own border community.

  The Catron County deputy’s incident report listed the victim’s name as John Doe. The death had occurred sometime Thursday afternoon, and had been discovered late in the day by a firewood contractor, Anthony Zamora. The preliminary report was handwritten in the investigating deputy’s tight, angular script:

  Landowner Lucencio Zamora says that he gave permission to his brother Anthony and his crew to cut firewood on the Zamora ranch. Anthony Zamora states that he left the victim and another man alone to cut piñon and cedar in the woodlot near the ranch road off County 18-A.

  When he checked at approximately 4:15 p.m., Anthony Zamora discovered the victim dead, apparently as a result of bleeding to death from a chain-saw injury to his inside left thigh. It appeared that the victim had been limbing when the bar kicked back. The chain cut the victim across the inside thigh on his left leg. It appears that the victim tried to stop the bleeding, but could not.

  Anthony Zamora states that the second man was not in the area when he arrived, and might not have known about the accident. Mr. Zamora did not know the names of the two men, but states that he hired them in Reserve for day labor. He doesn’t know where the other man went, but he likely hitched out of the area.

  A search of the body shows no documentation; a scrap of spiral notebook paper with a phone number was also found in the dead man’s jacket pocket.

  Fidel Romero states that the men stopped at his store earlier in the day and inquired about work. He says that he believes the two were illegals, but didn’t think much about it.

  The incident report, signed by Deputy Albert Romero, included a series of photographs. Estelle read the report again. If deputy Albert and store owner Fidel Romero were related, that made life a little more interesting.

  The photographs included one panoramic shot showing that when the gnarly piñon tree in question had been chain-sawed down, it had propped itself up on broken limb wood. Several other trees had been cut in the immediate area and the ground was a welter of boot-trapping slash. The bright scars of freshly cut limbs dotted the felled piñon trunk for a dozen feet, to a point where the tree trunk was suspended two feet above the ground by the remaining broken limbs.

  A close-up view showed the stub of a dead limb low on the left side. The stub had been deeply nicked by the saw’s chain, and a dark spatter of what could have been blood-there was too much for it to be bar oil-sprayed the bark and the ground nearby. The chain saw was still wedged upside down among the cut limbs, no doubt unmoved from where it had been flung.

  Estelle shuffled the photos and looked hard at a third that showed the victim. He had crawled nearly a dozen feet, spraying the ground and himself with blood as he did so. Estelle grimaced, imagining the moments of panic. The young worker, perhaps twenty-five years old, had managed to prop himself up against a shaggy juniper. The wound in his leg, deep and ragged, would have been fatal in a few minutes at most. Blood loss must have been from a gusher, enough to render the victim immobile in seconds. By the time he had crawled even a few yards, he would have been dizzy and disoriented as his blood pressure plummeted. In a final slump, he had leaned back against the tree, both hands clutching his leg in a vain attempt to stop the pumping blood from his lacerated femoral artery.

  “What a mess,” Estelle whispered. Where had his partner been at that moment? Standing rooted in panic? Ready to faint at the sight of the spurting blood? Even if the second man had been on the scene with his wits about him, the situation would have been desperate. A tightly cinched belt might have worked to stem the tide, but the accident had happened so far from medical help that time was their enemy.

  Other photos showed a faded yellow pickup truck fifty yards away, its bed a third filled with neatly stacked firewood. A gas can and a plastic quart bottle of oil rested on the tailgate, along with a small blue cooler and a second chain saw.

  Estelle scanned the photos again. The other woodcutter had fled, but he had not run for help. He had not even made an anonymous phone call-if the two men had owned a cell phone, which was unlikely at best. The man had simply abandoned his dying companion. “Why would you do that?” Estelle wondered aloud. An accident was an accident. What did it matter if the pair had indeed been illegals? One woodcutter could have bundled the other injured man into the truck, and driven for help. Judging by what Estelle could see of the wound, a mad dash to the clinic in the nearest tiny village would have been futile. The injured man would have drained out long before they had driven the seventeen miles of rough roads to the nearest nurse-practitioner or physician’s assistant. But you didn’t even try, she thought.

  Frowning, she leafed back to the photos of the tree and the offending limb. The saw would have been snarling full throttle as the young man touched the chain to the dead limb spar. The scene brought back memories of another incident to which Estelle had responded as a young deputy, when an older man had been building a stock fence south of Posadas. He’d been cutting railroad ties when the saw kicked and bit him savagely in the face, laying open cheek and jaw, shattering teeth, and coming a hair’s breadth from the major arteries in the man’s neck. He had managed to stagger into his mobile home, splashing blood over everything. That he was even able to dial 911, much less mumble a garbled message, had been remarkable.

  In this case, the clear digital photo showed that the limb had been free of bark, the hard gray of seasoned piñon. The saw’s flashing teeth had touched the wood, perhaps on the very tip of the saw’s bar, and Estelle could imagine how the teeth had bitten deep and then kicked up and back. If the sawyer was standing astride the trunk, twisting with the saw to reach down awkwardly for the limb with his boots caught in the snarl of limbs on the ground, he was an easy target. It was a moment of inattention, of carelessness, late in the afternoon after a full day of labor.

  Estelle tapped the photos into a neat pile and sighed. From hopes and dreams, fueled by quick cash earnings and a pleasant day in the fragrant woods, to a moment of horror and total loss…not what the young man had had in mind when he and his friend had found their way across the border.

  His friend. It wasn’t hard to imagine the other woodcutter fleeing. People panicked all the time. It was one thing to imagine heroism in the comfort of a living room chair, when no real threat actually loomed. When the moment came with all its ugly reality, there was no predicting how people would react. In this case, the blood and gore hurled by the saw, the shriek of pain, the impossible wound-all of that would have been enough to test the strongest nerves. Estelle suspected that the other cutter had run, too unnerved even to take the pickup truck. He had run out to the highway, run to hitch a ride, leaving his dying friend to be found by someone else.

  “And now, the question is,” Estelle said aloud, “why do we need to know about all this?”

  A brief memo had been included with the photos, signed by Deputy Albert Romero, that requested a check of the telephone number found scribbled on the scrap of paper in the dead man’s coat pocket.

  Estelle frowned at the number, eyebrows archin
g up in surprise. Her mouth formed a silent O as she stared at the number, puzzled by its familiarity. The prefix indicated Regál, the tiny village just south of the pass that shared its name, a very long way from the piñons of Catron County.

  She thumbed the Rolodex and stopped at a well-worn card. The phone number matched the one scrawled on the slip of paper recovered from the dead woodcutter’s pocket.

  Chapter Twelve

  Coincidence made Estelle Reyes-Guzman uneasy. She had known the Contreras family for years-the elderly and crippled Emilio, who spent practically every waking moment working for the mission in Regál, Iglesia de Nuestra Señora; his wife, Betty, the energetic, bustling lady whose volunteer activism filled her days after a long career in the elementary classroom; even their three grown children, who returned infrequently to the little border village to celebrate the long string of birthdays and anniversaries.

  But as Estelle drove south toward the pass, she considered the other odd pieces of this puzzle that had presented themselves. An unidentified man, odds strong that he was an illegal alien, had managed to lose control of a chain saw, which had then chewed him to death. His partner had vanished without lifting a finger to help the mortally injured man. All of this had happened 150 miles to the north, yet the sole documentation on the victim was a slip of paper with the telephone number of Emilio and Betty Contreras in Regál.

  The radio and cell phone remained mercifully silent for the twenty minutes during which Estelle’s car sped south on State 56 toward the looming mountain range that formed the southern border for most of Posadas County. During those twenty minutes, she relaxed back in the seat and let her mind roam through the possibilities.

  If one were to dial the Contrerases’ telephone number, odds were overwhelming that it would be Betty who answered. Her husband, 20 years older than Betty, was so lame that walking the 300 yards from home to the mission was a major penitence each day. Emilio did not belong to the twenty-first century. He and the little white mission continued on as he had for 88 years, and as it had for 219.

  The mission had no electricity, no heating system other than the large potbellied stove that dominated the east wall. It certainly had no telephone. Emilio didn’t carry a cell phone draped on his worn, hand-tooled leather belt. He needed no phone to keep in close contact with his God, with whom Emilio shared most waking moments of each day. If anyone else wanted to talk with him, well…they could meet him at the church, or pass a message to him through his good wife, Betty.

  If a stranger carried the Contreras phone number in his pocket, then Betty Contreras would know why. That loose end was what the deputy in Catron County wanted tidied up, and was the sort of thing one county routinely asked of another.

  Just before the beginning of the guardrail as the road started its long grade up the pass, Estelle saw the tracks cutting off to the left where the EMTs had pulled the ambulance onto the mining road the night before. Later this morning, the wrecker would unceremoniously bundle the smashed vehicle back up the rugged hillside. What information the little truck might hold needed to be gained before that happened, and Estelle knew that Deputy Jackie Taber, assigned to guard the site during the night, wouldn’t waste any time. The deputy had a keen eye and would have made good use of the long hours during the night.

  At one point as the highway swept through a long, graceful turn to the left, Estelle saw the wink of morning sun off vehicles parked down below on the mining road-more just an overgrown path than anything else. In another mile she passed the accident site, then using the turnout just beyond the Forest Service sign that announced the 8,012-foot elevation of the pass itself.

  Pulling as far off the pavement as she could, she eased the county car in behind Jackie Taber’s white Bronco.

  “I’m coming up.” The disembodied voice crackled out of Estelle’s handheld radio.

  “Take your time,” Estelle replied.

  “Tom and the sheriff are down below,” Jackie said, and Estelle could hear the young woman’s labored breathing.

  “Not to hurry,” Estelle said. She slipped the clip of a small digital camera on her belt, and as she got out of the car, she saw Jackie Taber reach the guardrail and pull herself over.

  “Interesting stuff,” the deputy said as she heaved a deep breath. “Let me show you.” She retrieved a large sketch pad from the Bronco and spread it out on the hood of the truck. Her drawing of the accident site was from a raven’s-eye view with the trees in perfect perspective from overhead. The measurements had been neatly penciled in.

  “My first thought,” Jackie said, “was that a little truck like that wouldn’t be cookin’ along too fast after climbing a mile-and-a-half grade…and the south side of the pass is the steeper one. But the skid marks say maybe sixty, even a little faster. The truck’s a V-six, so that’s possible. He sees the deer at the last minute,” and the deputy traced the route with the eraser end of a pencil, “swerves, crosses the highway, recrosses the highway, and vaults over at that mound of dirt near the beginning of the guardrail.” She pointed over Estelle’s shoulder with the pencil. “Another foot or two, and he might have just bounced along the rail and never gone over at all.” She shifted the drawing.

  “First impact after the jump was right here, downslope just shy of eighteen feet. That hump of rocks and dirt launched him up a bit, but the truck kind of rolled. Like a barrel roll to the left? When we go down the hill you’ll see this set of rocks. The marks are really clear. A nosedive, an impact right there left fender first, and then the truck somersaulted. The driver rode that one out okay, but the hill’s so steep that once the truck started to end-o, there was nothing to stop it. I’m counting five end-for-end flips. Maybe six. He came partially out of the cab on about number three, and all the way on four or maybe five.”

  Jackie shifted the drawing once more and touched her pencil to an artistically rendered set of rocks. “This is where the driver hit the first time after being thrown out through the passenger window. The truck crushed him up against the rocks right there. His right foot didn’t come loose right away, which is why we found his shoe down by the truck. His body came to rest where we found him.…That’s forty-one feet from the first bits of blood and cloth to where he ended up on his back.”

  “There’s no evidence that he moved at all after that?”

  The deputy shook her head and held both hands up as if in surrender. “Where he landed is where he stayed. There’s a scuff mark that would have been under his left heel. He drew his leg up maybe once or twice, and that’s it. Just a reflex.” She turned and surveyed the steep, rock-strewn slope behind them. “I didn’t find anything until I started combing the hillside right after dawn, Estelle. The flags mark points of interest. Bobby and Tom are moving outward and down from where the victim ended up, seeing if they can find anything else.”

  “And these?” Estelle indicated the three small numbers drawn on the sketch.

  “That’s what I wanted to show you. I didn’t want to leave ’em lying out in the weather, just in case.” She opened the passenger door of the Bronco and in a moment appeared with a small cardboard box. Pulling out the first plastic evidence bag, she laid it on the hood. Estelle took it by the corner of the label. The beer can was crumpled, the sort of crush that a good grip on an empty aluminum can could easily produce.

  “A good toss,” Jackie said. “Eighty-one feet northeast from the truck, and fifty-six feet from the victim. All the other cans from the six-pack are accounted for. Four cans that would have been full had they not broken open in and around the truck itself, one with its zip-top popped upslope a couple dozen feet right in line with the wreckage path, and this one, way off to the side. Makes for an interesting scenario, don’t you think?”

  “The force of the truck crashing down the hill isn’t going to throw an empty can more than eighty feet off to one side, perpendicular to the line of travel,” Estelle said.

  “I don’t think so. But only fifty feet from the victim?”


  The undersheriff scrutinized the drawing, then turned and stepped to the guardrail.

  “Look right off to the left, there,” Jackie said. “See the little group of scrub oaks with the juniper in the middle? That’s where the can was, just beyond that, down in the rocks. If you step over this way, you can see the flagging.”

  “The other possibility is that it didn’t come from the victim or his truck.”

  The deputy looked skeptical. “Same brand, a new can? If we check the beer residue inside, it probably still has its fizz.”

  “And it fits what Perrone says.”

  “You said last night that the victim had somehow aspirated beer into his lungs. How could he do that?”

  “That’s a good question. Perrone says a considerable quantity, in fact. At least into his left lung…the one that still worked.”

  “That’s cold, if it happened the way I’m thinking,” Jackie said. “One thing’s for sure.…Chris Marsh didn’t toss a can fifty feet, not with his bones all mush.” She cocked an arm and imitated a pitch. “Not a whole lot of arm to manage that throw, but not just a weenie toss, either. Not what you’d do with the ends of your broken bones grating together.”

  Estelle nodded. “What else?” She saw that Jackie was holding another plastic bag and she reached out for it. Inside, the plastic name tag’s metal clip was bent as if ripped from the pocket flap. “‘Barry Roberts,’” she read, and turned the tag this way and that. “Chris Marsh’s face, by any other name. Global Productivity Systems?”

  “Sounds nice, but GPS is fictitious, at least in this version,” Jackie said. “I checked on my laptop, and can’t find any reference to it.”

  “Where did you find the name tag?”

  “Stuck between a couple of rocks right in line with the wreck. It could have torn off when he was taking a somersault, but if somebody had wanted to recover it, it would have been hard to see in the dark. But I’m thinking that they would have wanted it.”