Statute of Limitations pc-13

by Steven F Havill

  “Something like that,” Mitchell said gently. “It could happen. And nobody is going to be the wiser. At least for a day or two. Somebody knew what Janet’s apartment key looked like, too. Right?”

  Gastner looked skeptical. “He whacks me, and takes my conference room key? Interesting that he’d know what it’s for.” When silence ensued, he turned to Estelle. “When you found yours truly lying on the front step like a goddamn drunk, did you check my keys?”

  “Ah, no sir. I picked them up and put them in my pocket. And then sometime later, after Jackie and I checked out your house, I put them in your trouser pockets in the closet of your hospital room.”

  “This is nuts,” Gastner said.

  “But it would explain why he hit you, and then didn’t enter your house. If it was the key to the conference room that he was after, he found what he came looking for, didn’t he?” Mitchell said.

  “Nobody’s been in there, though,” Torrez said. “If he wanted the key, he ain’t used it yet.”

  “You’re sure about that?” Gastner said. “Hell, busy as you gents have been? In and out and around in circles?”

  “Dispatch would have seen that,” Mitchell said. “It’s right across the hall.”

  “Even if dispatch left his station for a minute to take a crap?” the older man asked bluntly. “You can’t cover something like that every minute of the day. Slip in, then slip out.”

  “I don’t think so,” Mitchell said doggedly. “There’s nothing in that room that you could get in and out.”

  “The files?”

  “Even if you knew what to look for, good luck finding it,” Mitchell said.

  “Then he’s waiting for a chance,” Gastner persisted. “Maybe later on, when he has time to search. And the next question is why. If he took my key…” He hesitated. “We’re going to look pretty foolish if I go home and there it is on my nightstand.”

  “Where you always leave stray keys,” Estelle said, and Gastner shot her a withering look. “But that’s interesting,” she continued.

  “What is?” Gastner asked.

  “Janet’s killer took her apartment key. Why would he do that?”

  “There’s something in her apartment that he wants,” Gastner said.

  “Mike’s apartment also, sir.”

  Gastner stood with his fists on his hips, feet planted…the pugnacious stance Estelle had come to know so well over the years. “Maybe he thought Mike had a key to the conference room, and kept it stowed in the apartment.”

  “Mike doesn’t have a key to the conference room,” Mitchell said. “The sheriff has one, Estelle has one, and you had one.” It was his turn to receive the withering look, and he shrugged. “That doesn’t make sense, though-for the same reason. If Mike had a key to the conference room, why would he take it off his key ring and leave it in the apartment? Nobody would do that. We put keys on our key rings, and they stay there.”

  “Then what was the killer looking for in that apartment?”

  Gastner said. “We don’t know if he was. We don’t know for sure that it was him who took the key from Janet’s ring in the first place. Or mine, for that matter. We don’t know if he was even there. Mike says nothing is missing from his apartment, nothing is messed up.”

  “There’s something someone wants that he thinks are in those files,” Torrez said. “That’s the only thing that makes sense to me.”

  “Related to what?” Gastner asked.

  “Wish I knew,” the sheriff replied.

  “Janet Tripp,” Estelle said, more to herself than anyone. “Number one, I can’t believe that her murder, and the assault on Padrino, were unrelated. The timing is just too close, and I see similarities. Number two, we think that whoever killed Janet took her apartment key…Mike’s apartment key.”

  “And you don’t know that for sure,” Mitchell observed.

  “No, I don’t. But it makes sense to me. As you say, keys don’t jump off key rings. Especially not two keys, from two key rings, within a few hours of each other. That means there was something in her-Mike’s-apartment that Janet’s killer was after. That he thought might be there. And as you say, Mike didn’t have a key to the conference room files.”

  “The killer wouldn’t know that,” Torrez said.

  “Maybe not. But if he thought Mike had a key, it makes no sense to go through Janet to get it, does it? Mike would have it on his key ring, just like Bill had his.” She held up her own keys. “Just like I have mine, and you have yours. It makes sense to me that he wanted something that Janet had…and not the key. That’s number three.” She held up three fingers. “And that’s what I can’t get past.”

  “You think she knows the killer somehow?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Huh.” He gazed at Estelle, eyes narrowed. “Where the hell do we go with that. There’s nothing in the county rap sheets that mentions Janet.”

  “And I haven’t found anything in the village files,” Mitchell said. “Going back to the year she was born-1977.”

  “She was born here?” Gastner asked, surprised.

  “Yep.”

  “I’m surprised I didn’t know that.”

  “No reason you should,” Mitchell said. “One of your hobbies isn’t memorizing birth announcements from each year, is it?”

  “Not hardly,” Gastner said. “I have enough trivia clogging my arteries.”

  “What’s Essie say?”

  “Nothing,” Estelle said. “She’s worried about Mike.”

  “Aren’t we all,” Gastner said. He started to head around Torrez’s desk toward the chair. “Whoa,” he said, and stopped, looking down at the desk without seeing it. “A thought occurs to me,” he said slowly, then continued around the desk to sit in Torrez’s remarkably uncomfortable swivel chair. He spent a long moment rearranging things on the sheriff’s desk. Finally, he folded his hands and looked at the others, one at a time. “Who are the old farts in all of this?”

  “Means what?” Mitchell asked.

  “Who are the old farts,” Gastner said again, “who would be apt to know what’s in the village files from way back?”

  “Chief Martinez,” Torrez said, then added, “and you.”

  “And me. Exclusive club, compared to all you youngsters.” He pushed his glasses up, and peered across at Estelle. “If you had something in those files that you’d just as soon not see the light of day, that you’d just as soon not be remembered and dug up, wouldn’t you be just a little nervous when you saw the article in the newspaper about consolidation? How we were going to merge all those nifty files? How yours truly here was heading up the job? Frank Dayan did a good job with that story, didn’t he.”

  “No one attacked Eduardo,” Estelle said.

  “True enough. But what happened? He had a public heart attack, and the whole town is bound to know. It was in the metro papers….at least the one from Cruces. It might have made the news on the Cruces or Deming radio. And there’s our own speed-of-sound grapevine.” He held up a thumb. “There’s one down. Eduardo knows what’s in those files. Pardon me. Knew.” He turned the thumb and jabbed himself in the chest. “And I’ve been around for a while. Maybe somebody thinks that I know something.”

  “The key?” Estelle asked.

  Gastner shrugged. “Don’t know, sweetheart. Unless it’s as simple as this: with Eduardo gone, and me gone, Mr. Slick knows that the playing field has been leveled a little, as politicians like to say. The old farts who might remember something from way back are out of the picture. And with a little luck, nobody’ll notice the missing key for a while, and he’ll have the chance to slip in and do a little file removal. Think on that.”

  “Janet,” Estelle said abruptly. “If the files have to do with her, she’s out of the way, too.”

  Mitchell chuckled. “Wonderful,” he said. “And if all of this is out in left field somewhere, we’re back where we started.” He held up a hand. “What’s to lose.”

  “I’ll get the lock
s changed today,” Torrez said, but Gastner shook his head.

  “Don’t bother, Roberto. It might be kind of interesting to let ’em in. See who it is, and what he wants.”

  The sheriff gazed at Gastner for a moment, and the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes deepened a little. “If he thinks someone’s going to recognize him, maybe he’ll be a little reluctant anyway,” he said.

  “Could be that,” Gastner said.

  “We need to talk with Mike again,” Estelle interrupted.

  “What do you want to know?” Chief Mitchell asked. “He and I have been over this ground so often we’ve dug ruts.”

  “I want to know everything there is to know, starting from 1977,” she said. “For one thing, there’s one obvious little detail nagging me. Mike’s.22 pistol was stolen, and he can’t seem to account for when that happened. For some reason, he goes to Lordsburg without Janet. He claims that Janet doesn’t get along so well with his mother, and maybe it’s that simple. On top of that, Mike is on the transition team, but he doesn’t have his own key…we limited the number of those floating around.” She fell silent while the others waited, hating to voice the thought. “If Mike has himself a key, no one in dispatch is going to wonder when he goes in that conference room.”

  Chapter Thirty-three

  “So,” Bill Gastner said as he followed Estelle back to her office. “What can I help with?” Eddie Mitchell had taken Essie Martinez home, and the sheriff had remained in the conference room, his wife hovering, while he rummaged through files.

  “I want to go through our files and the village files again, Padrino.” She opened the top drawer of one of her own office cabinets, riffling quickly through until she found the orange folder that contained the personnel records for Mike Sisneros. “I want you to retrieve any files from that memory of yours, too. About Mike, about Janet…about all their relatives back to the dawn of time.”

  “You don’t know what you ask,” Gastner said. “And why the relatives? We’ve got nothing that shows there’s a connection with anything in the family album.”

  “Because,” Estelle said. She sat down at her desk with the personnel folder. “Statistics say that the majority of violent crimes are rooted in the family.”

  “Ah.” He shrugged. “But that’s true, isn’t it?”

  “And that’s the only door I see that’s open, Padrino. We don’t have prints. We don’t have tire tracks. We don’t have DNA. Or a convenient witness. And we don’t have a weapon…other than the tantalizing little itch that at one time Mike Sisneros had a.22 pistol, and now it’s missing-and it’s his girlfriend who was shot with that same sort of weapon.” She held up her hands helplessly. “I have two things I can do. I can sit here and wait for something to happen, wait for something to show itself, or I can poke around. I don’t know where else to poke, other than family.”

  Gastner sat quietly, regarding her thoughtfully.

  “I know that there’s a Hank Sisneros,” she said. “But I don’t know where he is…except maybe this vague ‘in Deming’ that I keep hearing. I know he was a heller in years past.”

  “And a drunk.”

  “That, too. He leaves town, and even his own son isn’t on speaking terms with him. When Mike talks about his father, I can see this steel door drop down behind his eyes.” She made a chopping motion. “All that makes me curious. We have mama living in Lordsburg with a new husband. And Janet? What do we know about her? That there’s a sister over in Kansas. I need to call her today.” She looked up at Gastner. “And her parents? Her mother died, and her father took off for parts unknown. I don’t like any of this. Vague is bad, Padrino.”

  “None of that means there’s a connection with some thug working in the dark.”

  “When he shot Janet, it wasn’t dark, Padrino.”

  “True enough.”

  She leafed through the folder, trying to force the dry notations to form an image of a living, breathing human being, dimensions beyond what Estelle thought she knew about Mike Sisneros already.

  The contents of the folder painted of portrait of a level-headed, small-town kid who hadn’t strayed far from the nest. His high-school record was average, heavy on sports and without any AP or honors courses. He had never failed a class-at least any that were listed. During four years of high school, Michael Sisneros had achieved only two A’s outside of physical education classes: one in American history and the other in consumer math.

  “It says here that Mike worked part-time at the hardware and lumber yard since his freshman year in high school.”

  “I remember that,” Gastner said. “I think.”

  “And then he enlisted in the United States Army in 1992.”

  “I guess he did,” Gastner said. “It seems to me that he was overseas for a while.”

  “Germany,” Estelle agreed. “He finished out his tour with the military police unit at Fort Bliss.”

  “And then came back home.”

  “So it would seem. He joined the Posadas Village Police Department in 1998 as a part-time officer and attended the state law enforcement academy in 1999. Eddie hired him full time for the village that fall.” She shuffled through a selection of copied diplomas, certificates of attendance, and certifications. “All the usual stuff. There’s nothing there,” Estelle said, and tossed the folder on the desk.

  “I didn’t think Mike was the one at issue,” Gastner said.

  “He’s not, at least as far as I’m concerned. I was hoping I had missed something.” She rose and the two of them went back to the conference room. Eddie Mitchell had returned, and he and the sheriff were seated at the long table, a litter of village files and documents spread out in front of them.

  “Mike was in the service from 1992 through the spring of 1995,” she said. “What years was Janet in the army? Do we know for sure?”

  “I was lookin’ at that,” Torrez mumbled. He leaned forward and shifted papers. “Enlisted in January of ’95. Medical discharge September, ’96.”

  “That was in our file? I thought we didn’t have anything on her.”

  He shook his head slowly. “Nope, we don’t. I asked Virgil Hardy at A amp; H for her employment records. He didn’t much like bein’ bothered on a Sunday afternoon, and it turns out he didn’t have much on file anyways. Apparently Janet printed up this résumé when she first applied for the job. Eddie just picked it up.” He turned the single sheet of paper and shot it across the table to Estelle. “That ain’t what’s interesting.”

  She scanned down the brief form. It was perfectly typed, but so brief that Virgil Hardy could have memorized it in an instant if he had felt the need. “It doesn’t say what the medical discharge was for.”

  “Nope. Maybe old Virgil didn’t need to know. Welding rods and bookkeeping don’t much care about things like that.”

  “I’d like to know, though,” Estelle persisted.

  “I know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy,” Gastner said. “Getting anything out of military records is like digging a hole in a lake, but let me give it a whirl.” He motioned toward Estelle’s office. “Use your phone?”

  “Of course. Who can you find on a Sunday?”

  “We never know,” Gastner said, and left the room.

  She turned back to Torrez. “So she and Mike didn’t serve together?”

  “Nope.”

  “It doesn’t hurt to hope,” Estelle said.

  “A coincidence, but that’s about it,” Mitchell said. “Their military service gave ’em something to talk about when they were dating, maybe. And speaking of playing the odds,” Mitchell said, and shifted a boot where it rested on the mahogany table. “Let me fill you in on what we were talking about before you and Bill came back in.” He held up a document that had seen better days, including a ring of coffee stain on the lower left quadrant.

  “In 1990, Hank Sisneros was arrested for DWI for the fourth time.” He handed the folder to Estelle. “Interesting little file he has. Eduardo was the arresting
officer. It’s also interesting that there’s no disposition of the case. I don’t guess that it was ever prosecuted.” He reached out and touched the corner of the slender folder as Estelle spread it open. “Nothing in here says that it was, anyway.”

  “That’s been known to happen,” Torrez growled. “Eduardo was from the ‘escort ’em home’ school of drunk management.”

  “Well, he’d know the way,” Mitchell said. “Sisneros’s home address is listed as 412 South Sixth Street. That ring a bell with anyone?”

  “Next door to the chief,” Estelle said, looking up quickly. “Eduardo’s place is 410. Did Hank Sisneros have a rap sheet? I don’t see one in this folder.”

  Mitchell laughed. “You’re kidding. The chief didn’t bother with summary paperwork, Estelle. At least not back then. We got what we got, which isn’t much. It looks like the chief’s habit was to make an incident report, file it, and that was that.”

  Those incident reports showed that Hank Sisneros had tried Chief Eduardo Martinez’s patience half a dozen times for various petty complaints before his arrest in May 1990, for DWI. That arrest was the last one recorded in the folder.

  “This is it? Nineteen ninety is the last entry? Fifteen years ago? What does the county have on him?”

  “Absolutely nothing,” Mitchell said. “I checked. Unless Bill remembers something.”

  “Just a vague recollection that Hank was both a drinker and a fighter. He must have moved to Deming about then, or what?” Estelle asked. “This is the last entry. He suddenly starts on the straight and narrow after this DWI arrest in 1990. Either that, or he moves.”

  “Something like that,” Mitchell said. “I don’t know the details. All this is before my time.”

  “And I don’t remember,” Torrez said when Estelle looked his way. “Ask the walking directory,” he added, nodding in the direction of Bill Gastner’s exit.

  “I will, when he comes back from his call. So…the Sisneros family were the chief’s neighbors. That’s interesting. When I was talking to Essie Martinez, I wondered why she should remember so much about Hank Sisneros. She knew that Hank didn’t get along with his wife, for instance. With Irene.”