Out of Season

by Steven F Havill

Hocker nodded. “Outstanding.” He squared his shoulders and tucked in his shirt. “Did you get a preliminary look?”

  “Yes. Detective Reyes-Guzman has several of the initial blowups, if you’d like to see them.”

  Hocker did, and after Estelle spread the photos out on my desk, he spent several minutes looking at each in turn, with Costace at his elbow.

  “This windmill apparently interested the sheriff,” I said, tapping the photo of the block-house site. “There are two ranchers whose land covers the crash site, the Boyds and the Finnegans. This is on the Finnegans’ property, about a mile from the site.”

  “Bizarre,” Hocker mused. He lined up the edges of two prints. “And this little building here is just off to the side, a few yards from the windmill?”

  “Right.”

  “Prairie, fence, more prairie. A few head of cattle,” Neil Costace said.

  “Actually, they’re antelope,” Estelle said. She managed to make it sound like simply an interesting fact rather than a correction.

  Hocker didn’t look up. “And what would the sheriff care about antelope?” he asked. “They’re all over the southwest.”

  “We don’t know,” I said.

  He stood up and shook his head. “Huh.” He shrugged and added, “Well, all this is interesting, but it doesn’t tell us much. We agree on that?” He slid the photos back into the packet and handed them to Estelle, then picked up his leather folder. “The fact that one of the crash victims was the county sheriff is what interests me,” he said. “If the shot wasn’t just a random one, if it was intentional, then it’s a case of an altogether greater dimension.”

  I nodded and said nothing. We had been down that road before, without any answers popping out of the sand.

  “I’ve made some inquiries through the regular federal channels,” he said. “In fact, I just got off the phone. We have only four names so far that are connected with this thing, and it made sense to me to run each one through the federal centers and see what we got.”

  “Holman, Camp, Boyd, and Finnegan,” I said. “I would guess it’s going to be slim pickings.”

  Hocker shrugged. “The day is yet young,” he said and grinned. “But first I’d like to take a look at the aircraft and see what that tells us.”

  I couldn’t imagine seeing much more than a neat hole through a piece of crumpled aluminum, but sifting through the remains of the Bonanza would give us all something to do. Maybe the others didn’t, but I needed that. I was growing impatient, waiting for the slow wheels of forensic science to tell me something I couldn’t already guess with equipment no more fancy than a good pair of bifocals.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  As we arrived at Posadas Municipal Airport, Robert Torrez, Tom Pasquale, Vincent Buscema, and another FAA official whom I hadn’t met were in the process of lifting a large portion of the right wing off a small flatbed truck.

  The shield on the truck’s door read “Posadas Electric,” and I wondered briefly which of Torrez’s relatives had donated the use of his vehicle. The sergeant was related to half the town and knew the other half.

  I watched as Deputy Pasquale operated the forklift and for once, he drove the machine as if he had a Ming vase on the forks.

  Inside the cavernous and cool hangar, I surveyed the litter. In the hours since dawn that Sunday, Vincent Buscema had been able to work miracles. The hangar floor looked as if someone were arranging a display of landfill art. As the wing settled to the cradle of two-by-fours that Buscema kicked under it, I walked around the back of the forklift, staying well clear when Pasquale threw the thing into reverse.

  With no load, he spun the lift around in its own length and charged back outside to the apron, operating once more at his normal pace.

  Buscema approached and shook hands with the two FBI agents. “We’re making progress,” he said.

  “I would never have guessed that a small aircraft could make so many pieces,” I said.

  He nodded. “What we’re going to do as we bring more and more down is to arrange everything we’ve got so it makes sense, nose to tail, wingtip to wingtip. That helps us understand what we’ve got.”

  I stepped over to the engine block. The propeller hub was still in place, but even my unpracticed eye could see the bend in the crankshaft and imagine the tremendous forces slammed against the hub and shaft as the prop hit the ground. “I’ve seen pictures where the plane was basically reassembled,” I said, “actually put back together, patched together. They did it with that airliner that blew up back East didn’t they?”

  “Sure,” Buscema said. “But we won’t have to do that here. We’re ninety-nine percent sure of what happened. I mean, that engine you’re looking at tells most of the story. It was turning at least cruise RPM when the blades hit the ground. Two of the blades were sheared off, and we’ve got the tips. The third blade looks like a pretzel.” He nudged the engine with his toe. “There was nothing wrong with that engine when the plane hit the ground. You can bet on that.” He put his hands on his hips and turned, surveying the collection.

  “We could spend days and days trying to decide if there was a mechanical control failure of some kind, but I think that’s going to be a waste of time, too. What you want,” he said as Hocker bent down and examined a chunk of white-painted aluminum roughly the size of a large grocery bag, “is to find a small hole that doesn’t belong.”

  “Or holes,” Hocker said.

  “Or holes, yes,” Buscema pointed off to the left. “We’re putting the fuselage right in here.”

  “So show me the seats,” I said. “If the fragment hit the pilot low in the back, it had to go through the seat first.”

  “Exactly, and the hole is exactly where we thought it might be. Look.” I grimaced as he stepped over and beckoned me to one of the brightly upholstered seats, now twisted and looking so out of place amid the scraps on the floor.

  Hocker and Costace were quicker than I was, kneeling beside one of the seats as Buscema turned it slightly. A small piece of red survey flagging had been tied to part of the seat’s framework.

  “It’s such a small cut that at first glance, it doesn’t show,” Buscema said. He slid his hand under the seat cover from the bottom and spread the fabric. “Entry,” he said. “Of course that little cut in the fabric could have been caused at almost any time by somebody careless with a ski pole, fishing rod”—he shrugged—“even with the latch of a briefcase, I suppose.” He slid his hand out of the seat.

  “But higher up on the front side, we’ve got a companion tear, a little bit larger.”

  “A really steep angle,” Estelle murmured.

  “For sure,” Buscema said. “The angle fits. There’s blood on the seat, but that’s consistent with the crash trauma.”

  “The wound from a small, high-velocity fragment isn’t going to cause much bleeding,” Bob Torrez said, and Hocker glanced at him.

  “All right,” Hocker said. “We’ve got holes in the pilot. We’ve got holes in the seat. Then it shouldn’t be hard to find where the bullet pierced the belly of the plane, ripped up through the flooring, whatever that’s made of, zipped through the carpet, then through the seat and into the pilot.”

  “That’s what we plan to do,” Buscema said. “The next truck down will have the majority of the fuselage’s remaining pieces, including the major cabin structure.” He glanced at his watch. “I expect that within the hour. Sheriff, I really think that you’ll have something solid to go on in just a short while.”

  I nodded. “What we need to do,” I said, “is to start the process of matching the fragment with other fragments. What are the odds that when you take that seat apart, you’ll find more of the bullet?”

  “Maybe,” Hocker said. “And maybe inside the cabin floor structure too, if the bullet hit a frame member and shattered.” He turned to Estelle. “There were no exit wounds on the body?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Any calculated guesses on the bullet caliber?”

&nb
sp; “That’s going to be a tough call,” I said. “Maybe when we see the first entry hole that it made in the plane, we can make a guess.”

  “I’m guessing twenty-two caliber,” Torrez said. “Maybe twenty-five.”

  “Is that just a hunch, or do you know something we don’t?” Costace asked.

  “On the fragment that Mitchell and Abeyta are working up,” Torrez said, “there’s a small portion of rifling marking. Just enough that it can be measured. It’s real narrow, like you’d find on something of that caliber.”

  “You’re not talking twenty-two rimfire like in a kid’s gun?” Hocker asked.

  “No. Two-twenty-three. The sort of bullet fired in any of the high-performance center-fire rifles. The M-16 is a two-twenty-three. So is the Mini-14. Or the twenty-two two-fifty. And a whole bunch more. And if it’s twenty-five caliber, it opens up a whole world of possibilities—the twenty-five-ought-six, two-fifty-seven Roberts, and on and on.”

  “And then there’s the whole world of foreign cartridges, too,” Costace added.

  “Robert, let me ask you something,” I said. “If you’ve got a good clear sample of the marks left by rifling, can that be compared to other samples?”

  The sergeant grimaced. “Really tough,” he said.

  Hocker frowned. “The answer is yes, Sheriff. They can be compared under a good microscope. But you’re not going to get the points of comparison that you’re going to need in court. Not unless you’re really, really lucky.”

  “But it gives us someplace to start,” I said. “And that’s what we need now.”

  A truck drove up to the hangar door and I looked outside to see the dark blue Dodge four-by-four with the “New Mexico Department of Game and Fish” decal on the door.

  “Finally,” I said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Doug Posey appeared in the doorway and hesitated. He stood with his hands on his hips, surveying the collected remnants. He saw me and shook his head, a grimace on his face as he walked over. As tall as Bob Torrez’s six-four, Posey was so thin that he looked as if he’d break in the middle in a stiff breeze.

  I introduced him to the federal agents. “Officer Posey has been with the State Department of Game and Fish for four years,” I said. “If we could steal him away from them, we would.” Posey tried to smile and he tugged nervously at all the junk on his Sam Brown belt. He looked more like nineteen than the twenty-nine that he was.

  “I sure was sorry to hear about the sheriff,” he said. “God, look at this. The crash just tore it to bits, didn’t it?” He bent down and touched one of the twisted propeller blades. “It’s on the television, even.”

  “You know it’s big when news from Posadas hits the airwaves,” I said, and then reflected privately that all the publicity would have made Martin Holman nervous. He wouldn’t have liked this at all—being the center of federal, state, and local attention. And sure as could be, now that the preliminary reports had leaked out, we’d be targeted by the news crews.

  “They’ll descend like vultures when they find out it was no accident,” Neil Costace said. “I’m surprised they’re not knocking on the door now.”

  “It wasn’t an accident?” Posey looked up, startled.

  “Looks like it wasn’t, Doug,” I said. “The pilot caught a bullet that we think was fired from the ground.”

  “No shit?”

  I nodded. “Keep it under your hat for now, all right?”

  “Sure. Frank Dayan was at the office when I stopped by. Gayle was giving him the official story, from what it sounded like.”

  “Which means she was giving him zilch,” I said. I had nothing against the editor of the Posadas Register. In fact, there had been times when I’d orchestrated events—or at least news releases—so that they benefited the Register’s Wednesday/Friday publication days, giving them a local scoop over the big-city papers. But we needed some peace and quiet now. “Look,” I said and took Posey by the elbow.

  “You want some privacy?” Hocker asked.

  I waved a hand in dismissal. “No. In fact, you might be interested, too. Doug, our call logs show that Sheriff Holman was trying to get ahold of you yesterday. He tried several times.”

  “Yesterday?”

  I frowned. “What the hell is today? Sunday? Not yesterday, then. Friday. On Friday, he was trying to reach you. Did you get those messages?”

  Posey nodded. “I was stuck down in the eastern part of the state with a little operation we had going there. I got his message on my machine when I came in just a little while ago.”

  “What did the sheriff want, do you know?”

  Posey rested his hand on the clip pouches on the front of his belt. “The crash wasn’t an accident? You’re sure of that?” he asked, and he glanced across at Hocker and Costace. I liked the kid even more.

  “No, it wasn’t,” I said. “The firing of the bullet might have been. At this point, we don’t know if the bullet that struck the pilot was fired intentionally or not. None of us know for sure which direction we should be going with all this, but we’re trying to track down each loose end. There’s the question of Martin’s calls to you and we need to know where those lead, if anywhere. It’s conceivable that the flight he was making was somehow related to what he wanted from you. We don’t know.”

  “Well,” Posey said, “about two weeks ago, he stopped me downtown as I was coming out of the bank. He asked me what I knew about the legalities of impounding wildlife. Game animals.”

  “Impounding?”

  Posey nodded. “That’s what the sheriff said. He told me that someone had asked him about it and that he didn’t know what the regs were.” Posey looked pained. “We both had places we needed to go, and he told me that he’d get back to me on it with more specifics if there was a problem. I got busy with other things and didn’t follow up on it. I guess he didn’t either, until last week.”

  “When you say ‘impounding,’ you mean fencing in wildlife so it can’t roam outside of a given area?” Estelle asked.

  “Sure. Mostly it’s done with fish. You dam up a waterway with a real restricted intake and overflow sluice so the fish can’t go upstream or down.”

  “I don’t think we’re talking fish,” I said.

  “I sure don’t know what you’d impound around here,” Posey said. “Antelope, I guess, maybe deer, although there’s enough of them out on the open that I don’t see what sense it’d make. Up in the northern part of the state, there have been a few ranchers who got into trouble restricting the movements of elk. The big-game ranches do that all the time. They manage herds, the whole bit—but they have the proper permits for it.” He shrugged. “I just don’t know. We didn’t talk again after that, so I don’t know what he was up to.”

  I looked at Estelle thoughtfully. “What do you think?”

  “I just don’t know either, sir.”

  “Let’s go talk to this Boyd person,” Hocker said. “See if he was out shooting at prairie dogs on Friday.”

  “You ready for it to go public?” Costace asked quickly.

  Hocker shrugged. “Hell, why not? Maybe somebody’ll call in a hot tip.”

  I beckoned to Estelle. “Come along,” I said. “If you get a chance to talk to Maxine Boyd, go ahead. Find out what’s eating her.”

  I turned and nodded at the FBI agents. “We were just out there at the ranch before you came to the office. The Boyds haven’t had so much company in a long time. And they’re going to be really pleased to see you folks.”

  Hocker caught the tone of my voice. “I bet,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  When I turned around and saw the dust plume as we turned south from Newton, I was glad that Estelle Reyes-Guzman was driving the lead vehicle. The two agents had elected to follow us, taking Costace’s Suburban. The monstrous truck would have held the four of us plus luggage for a month.

  “It’s a back-seat thing,” Estelle said with a hint of a grin. “If they rode with us, one or both wo
uld end up sitting in back.”

  “Can’t have that,” I said. To avoid traffic, we drove the loop around Newton, guaranteeing that if the two agents weren’t feeling lost before, they would be now. Neither Costace nor Hocker had visited the crash site, and we planned to go there afterward…not that there would be much left on the ground to see.

  As we neared the Boyds’ ranch, Estelle slowed, forcing the pace down to little more than an amble. I knew exactly what was going through her mind.

  Two big four-by-fours, spiraling vapor trails of dust, sliding to a stop in the middle of someone’s yard and then spewing out all kinds of strangers wearing dark glasses—it was enough to make anyone uneasy, especially folks whose list of monthly visitors rarely broke single digits. And especially well-armed folks who harbored an almost irrational distrust of things federal.

  We idled into the Boyds’ front yard. I could see Edwin over by one of the trucks, a one-ton GMC fitted with a flatbed and a large feed hopper. Johnny Boyd came out from behind the rear of the truck and watched our progress toward the house. When we pulled to a stop, he tossed his gloves onto the back of the truck bed and started toward us, head down, fingers of his right hand groping in his shirt pocket for the habitual conversational smoke.

  The dogs started yapping, but at a word from Johnny, all but the shepherd retreated to the workshop behind the truck. The dog trotted along beside Boyd, tongue lolling, ears toward us.

  Boyd grinned wearily and extended his hand. “Sheriff, you still out and at it, eh? I keep thinking of how nice a long afternoon nap would go right about now. Don’t get too many nights like the last couple, that’s for damn sure.”

  I shook hands and nodded. “That’s about it. Johnny, these two gentlemen are with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Walter Hocker from Oklahoma City, and the one who looks carsick is Neil Costace from the El Paso office.”

  He shook hands with each in turn and then touched the brim of his cap. “Detective,” he said to Estelle. “Nice to see you again. It’s been a couple of hours.” Edwin remained by the truck, leaning against the front fender, weight off his bad knee.