Statute of Limitations pc-13

by Steven F Havill

  “I understand that. And I find it hard to believe that Janet took the gun.”

  “She didn’t take it. She didn’t like guns.”

  “Well, then. Someone did, unless you took it out of its plastic case, diddled with it, and then put it somewhere else and forgot about it.” She grinned. “Somewhere safe where you wouldn’t lose it.”

  “Diddled with it?”

  “Con permiso, Mike. I’m sorry. I have two little boys.” She smiled at the deputy. “Sometimes these things slip out.”

  “I didn’t put it somewhere else, Estelle. I kept it in the original box. I never shot it much.”

  “How long have you had it?”

  “I got it for my twenty-fifth birthday. My dad gave it to me.”

  “Ah. This is Mr. Cruz?”

  “No. Not my stepdad. My dad. Hank.”

  “And he lives in…”

  “Deming. He moved there about fifteen years ago when him and my mom split up.”

  “You get over to see him a lot?”

  “No.” He didn’t amplify, and Estelle saw the muscles of his jaw twitch. She hazarded a guess.

  “The pistol was a peace offering of sorts, then? From him?”

  “A peace offering?” He shrugged. “Yeah. I guess you could call it that. He gave it to me when I signed on with the village PD.”

  “It didn’t work, though? It didn’t work as a peace offering?”

  “No, it didn’t work. I was going to sell it, but I never got around to it. It just sat in the box in the back of my drawer. I maybe took it out once or twice. I haven’t shot it for five years.”

  “But you still kept it.”

  “Well, it was from my dad.”

  Estelle took a small, tentative sample of the burrito’s aromatic filling and chewed thoughtfully, letting the essence of the green chile waft up through her sinuses. “What was the deal between you and your dad?”

  “We don’t have to go there,” Sisneros said.

  She hesitated. “You know we do, Mike.” She let him have a moment to think. “What was the deal?”

  “The deal was that he’s a drunk, Estelle. Was and still is. He made my mom’s life a living hell, that’s what the deal was. You’ve rolled on enough domestics that you know the story. Well, my dad’s one of the statistics. Let me put it that way. Just about classic. He’d be the example in every chapter on family disputes. Drink, and a temper to light it with.”

  “So you don’t see him much now?”

  “I don’t see him at all.”

  “You must have seen him when he gave you the gun, what, about six or seven years ago?”

  “Yeah. I saw him then. For all of maybe five minutes. I told him at that time that I didn’t need to have him in my life.”

  “But you kept the gun.”

  “It wasn’t quite like that. He left it behind. I didn’t notice that he’d done that. And yeah, I should have taken the trouble to return it. I didn’t. I just shoved the case in the dresser drawer, and that’s that.”

  “Does your dad have a key to your apartment?”

  He frowned with surprise. “Of course not. Why would he?”

  “Is this because of your mom?”

  “Is what because of my mom?”

  “The reason you don’t talk.”

  His face darkened. “I don’t see how that would have anything to do with any of this.”

  “Does he ever talk to your mom? Do you know?”

  “No.” His answer was out almost before she had finished her sentence.

  JanaLynn appeared by the serving station, hesitant to intrude. Estelle looked at her and nodded, and she stepped up to the table. “Not much in the mood for eating, huh,” JanaLynn said sympathetically. Both dishes looked as if an ambitious mouse had attacked one corner. “How about a take-home box?”

  “That’ll work,” Mike replied.

  “How about you?” JanaLynn asked Estelle.

  “Sure. Why not.” The plates disappeared.

  “When was the last time your mom talked to your dad, Mike?”

  “I have no idea how I would know something like that. You’d have to ask her.” His tone was clipped and contentious, and Estelle hesitated.

  “What year were they divorced?”

  “Nineteen ninety-two,” he said without hesitating to calculate.

  “Long time ago.”

  “Yeah, it’s a long time. Life goes on.”

  Yes, it does, Estelle thought. “Tell me about Janet’s friends,” Estelle said. “She’s lived with you for how long now?”

  “A couple of months.”

  “And in that time, who’s come over to the apartment?”

  “Oh, she has a couple of friends that we see now and then. Nobody that has a key.”

  “No one she’d lend a key to?”

  “What for? You don’t just lend house keys, do you? And there’s the timing thing, too. I don’t know for sure when the pistol went missing. I told Mitchell that, too. I don’t take it out and fondle it on a regular basis, you know. It could have been taken yesterday, or last week, or last month…even last year.”

  “Do you have anyone come into your apartment on a regular basis? Cleaning lady, someone like that?”

  “Mitchell and I went over every inch of that. No, I don’t. I can’t afford a cleaning lady. The gas guy reads the meter from the outside. So does the electric company.” He grinned and, except for the fatigue, might have looked five years younger. “The Jehovah’s Witnesses knock once in a while, but I don’t let ’em in.” He took a long swig of coffee and grimaced. “The last person in the apartment, other than me and Janet, was Tommy Pasquale. He borrowed the Mustang to take Linda out for a swank dinner in Las Cruces. He didn’t want to take her in his Jeep.”

  “When was that?”

  “I don’t remember exactly. Sometime in early December. I told him that he could just let himself in and toss the keys on the table when he came back.”

  “And that’s what he did?”

  “That’s what he did. Said ‘Howdy’ to Janet, and went on his way. And if I can’t trust him, then the whole damn world can just come to a stop for all I care.”

  “Sure enough,” Estelle agreed, and then she sat back abruptly. A realization stabbed through Estelle’s head like a mini-stroke, so simple and obvious that she felt the surge of blood up her neck. She hadn’t blushed in years, but her face burned now. Everyone was tired, everyone had worked too many hours, everyone-well, she-was preoccupied with a dozen other things, and it all boiled down to missing the obvious.

  She pulled her cell phone off her belt and punched the speed dial for Sergeant Tom Mears.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  “You have reached voice mail for Sergeant Tom Mears. If this is an emergency, please dial 911. Otherwise, leave a message at the tone.”

  “And your call is important to us,” Estelle said to the robotic voice. She punched another set and waited.

  “Posadas County Sheriff’s Department. Sutherland.”

  “Brent, this is Estelle. Do you know where Sergeant Mears is right now?”

  “I think he’s home, ma’am. I’m not sure. He worked most of the night, I know. He logged out this morning about four or so.”

  “How long have you been up?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Sutherland said. “But Ernie is coming in a little later to relieve.”

  And he’s the swing shift, Estelle thought. The department organization was going to pieces. “Okay, thanks.”

  “Captain Mitchell just came in a few minutes ago. Do you want to talk to him? He’s standing right here.”

  “Sure.”

  In a moment Mitchell’s quiet, soft voice greeted her. Estelle had always thought that if voices were all that mattered, Edward Mitchell would make a great physician, handling patients over the phone. He could make Take two aspirins and call me in the morning sound as if it really might work.

  “Eddie, we need to check Janet Tripp’s keys. Tom
Mears had them in an evidence bag, and he was going to run prints, but we need to know if her apartment keys are on the ring.”

  “You mean the keys to the place she shares with Sisneros?” Mitchell asked.

  “Right.”

  “Is Sisneros with you?”

  “Yes, he is. We’re at the Don Juan.”

  “Okay. Hang tight. Tom was downstairs with Linda a few minutes ago. I don’t know if he still is or not. Give me a minute to track things down.”

  “We’re headed back to the office right now,” Estelle said. As she switched off, Mike nodded and slid out of the booth. He accepted both doggie boxes from JanaLynn.

  Estelle dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the table, thinking immediately of the countless times she’d seen Bill Gastner do exactly the same thing, whether he’d had a dinner or just a slice of pie and coffee. “Thanks, JL,” she said.

  “You guys take care,” JanaLynn said, and the look she gave Mike Sisneros would have been comical under other circumstances. She didn’t quite reach up and pinch her nose shut against the aroma, but her reaction was close. Oblivious, the deputy headed out of the restaurant toward Estelle’s car.

  “Is he going to be all right?” JanaLynn whispered to Estelle as Mike slipped through the inner foyer door.

  “We hope so,” Estelle said. “A little more sleep, a lot less beer, and a very long shower.”

  It took a minute and a half to drive back to the Public Safety Building, straight east on Bustos through the heart of Posadas. The two of them rode in silence, Estelle content to leave the young man alone with his thoughts. Mike Sisneros appeared to have pulled himself out of his personal morass, and his eyes flicked from one side of the street to another as if the answers to all his questions were about to step out in front of the county car. Estelle could see that he was thinking, not just puddling. That was progress of a sort.

  Inside the Sheriff’s Office, Eddie Mitchell stood near the dispatch island, and as Estelle and Mike entered, he extended a plastic evidence bag toward Estelle. “They’re still downstairs,” he said.

  “Still?” She looked up at the wall clock as she and Mike followed Mitchell to his office.

  “Still. It’s the new schedule we talked about. Thirty-six hours on, two hours off. That way, we’ll be able to cut back to a staff of two. Leona Spears will be ecstatic.”

  Estelle looked quickly toward the front doors and the foyer, where the line of plastic chairs awaited visitors. Leona Spears, the potential county manager-to-be, was nowhere in sight. “She was here?”

  Mitchell raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Paranoid, are we?”

  “No…not paranoid, exactly. I just want to have time to prepare for the challenge,” Estelle said. Mitchell closed his office door, and Estelle spread the plastic bag out on his desk so she could look at each key. The fob was bright blue plastic with the a amp; h welding logo in gold. “Which one goes to the apartment, Mike?”

  Sisneros took the bag, glanced through the set, and shook his head, then looked more carefully. “It’s not there.”

  “She did have them, though?”

  “Well, of course she had them.”

  “As far as you know, she had them when you two last saw each other? What, that would be yesterday some time?”

  “I suppose so. I didn’t ask.” He hunched his shoulders. “Who ever asks somebody if they have their keys? I mean, do you have your house key on your key ring?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Resisting the temptation to check, but now keenly aware of the weight of her own key ring in her pocket, she plunged doggedly on. “But as far as you knew, Janet had her own key to your apartment and she had it with her. It was on this key ring, not some separate one? She didn’t have it on a separate special one or something?”

  “Yes, I said.” A flash of irritation flushed his face. “It’s just the one key.” He enunciated the words as if talking to little Carlos. “It’s one key, and it fits both the inside door by the stairwell, and the outside door. That’s the one door we use most of the time. We don’t come and go through the house. We use the outside stairway.”

  “You always lock the apartment when you go out?” Mitchell asked.

  “Yes. I mean, we forget once in a while, but yeah…we lock it as a matter of course.”

  “Leave an extra key with somebody? The manager, someone like that?”

  “No. Mrs. Freeman might have one. I suppose she does. I never asked her.”

  “Let me see yours.” Mitchell held out his hand and waited while the deputy dug the wad of keys out of his hip pocket. “Which one?”

  Sisneros held the apartment key by the blade, the rest dangling. Mitchell took them and looked again at the keys in the evidence bag.

  “Okay,” he said slowly, and looked up questioningly at Estelle. “Keys don’t just come off key rings all by themselves. And you’re sure she didn’t keep it on a separate ring.”

  “I know she didn’t.”

  “So where did it go?”

  “I don’t know, Captain.” The use of rank as a name wasn’t lost on Eddie, who gazed thoughtfully at Sisneros.

  “We have two choices that make sense,” Estelle said. “Either Janet gave it to someone…to anyone-”

  “Why would she do that?” Sisneros interrupted.

  “You’d know that better than we would, Mike.”

  “Well, I don’t know it.”

  “No idea? All right, then. The other choice is that someone took it. Let’s suppose for a minute. Suppose that the killer took it off the ring.”

  “What would he want with it?” Sisneros asked. “The killer, I mean. If he took it.”

  “Good question. Obviously to get inside her apartment…either then or to use at some point in the future. He knew where she lived. Or he found out one way or another.” She held up the keys in the bag, looking at them again. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out which one is for the apartment.” She counted them off. “Jeep keys, this one looks like it’s for a small suitcase or night bag, we’ve got a safety deposit key for Posadas State Bank, and I’d be willing to bet that this big Yale key is for A amp; H Welding. Who knows what the little Brinks key is for…some little padlock somewhere.”

  “That’s to her storage unit over on Escondido, by the trailer park. Where she used to live.”

  “Fair enough. Somebody wasn’t interested in gaining entry to that, evidently. Is anything else missing from your apartment?” Mitchell asked.

  “Anything else?” Sisneros replied. “I mean, nothing’s missing. I was there from the time you dropped me off until the undersheriff called this morning. If something was gone, I would have noticed.”

  I’m not so sure of that, Estelle thought. The way Mike Sisneros had looked when she first saw him plodding down the stairs suggested that a bulldozer could have driven through the apartment and he wouldn’t have noticed or, if he had noticed, wouldn’t have minded.

  “Other than your.22 pistol, I think he means,” Estelle said. “Janet’s personal effects were all there?”

  For the first time since breakfast, the young man’s face crumpled with agony, and he leaned against Mitchell’s desk, jaw slack. “Christ,” he whispered. “Yeah…they were there. They’re still there. I walked into the bathroom and her comb and brush and everything…” He choked it off. “Still there,” he murmured. “Just like she stepped out for a minute and was coming right back.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “I can’t believe this.”

  “The gun was gone,” Mitchell said mildly, repeating the obvious. His heavy-lidded eyes assessed Mike Sisneros without a trace of expression.

  “I don’t know when that happened,” the deputy said. “I’ve said that a dozen times.”

  “Could it have happened yesterday?”

  “I suppose it could,” Sisneros said, exasperated. “And it could have happened a year ago, too. But what sense does that make? He shot her, then took her apartment key, wen
t to the apartment and stole my gun? That’s sort of backward for that little scenario, don’t you think?”

  “What if Janet didn’t have her key with her yesterday.” Estelle voiced the possibility and waited.

  “If she lost her key, why wouldn’t she have said something to me when she came here? Wouldn’t that have been the logical thing? Especially since I was going to Lordsburg, and she had decided not to. What’s she going to do, sit in the apartment all day?”

  “But she didn’t do that, did she?”

  Mike’s temper rose again. “What are you getting at, anyway?”

  Estelle held up the evidence bag. “The apartment key is gone. That’s what I’m getting at. We don’t know why it’s gone. We don’t know when it went missing.” She dropped the plastic bag back on Mitchell’s desk. “I’ll feel better when I know the answers.”

  “Well, so will I.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. You ready to go back to work?”

  He didn’t look ready for anything, but Estelle saw Mike Sisneros’s spine straighten a little.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Now that we know the key is missing, I want you to go back to your apartment and really look, Mike. Look through everything. All your papers. All your stuff. And Janet’s too. I know it’s hard, but you’ll know better than anyone what should be there and what’s not. Look at everything, Mike.” She paused. “When you’re going through Janet’s things, get the telephone number and address for her sister. We’ll want to talk with her.”

  “Okay. I know where that is. You want me to call her?”

  “I’d rather do that, Mike.” She nodded at the evidence bag. “And if I were you, I’d have the locks changed today.”

  “A burglar’s not going to get much in my place,” he said.

  “I’m not worried about burglars, Mike.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  When Estelle entered the hospital, the hustle and bustle of the day shift had overtaken the halls and offices. Medicine didn’t pause for rest on Sundays. There was no sign of the nocturnal Stacy Cunningham and his floor polisher.

  In his room, Bill Gastner stood in front of the window, gazing out into the bright December morning. A small bandage covered the back of his skull behind his left ear. Estelle rattled the door knob so he wouldn’t startle, and he raised a hand without turning around.