The Fourth Time is Murder

by Steven F Havill

“Good morning, sir. How may I help you?”

  He extended a hand, and his grip was perfunctory. “I’m Elliot Parker. I understand that my son’s arraignment is this morning at nine?”

  Estelle glanced at Sutherland, who nodded agreement. “Mike scheduled it,” Sutherland added.

  “Anyway, I’m here for that,” Parker continued. “The sheriff was in here earlier, and was good enough to allow me to talk with my son. May I have a moment of your time? The sheriff suggested that I might talk to you.”

  The sheriff didn’t suggest that to me, Estelle thought, but she was thoroughly used to Robert Torrez’s ways. “It will have to be a brief moment, Mr. Parker.” She had no trouble imagining what the abrupt sheriff had actually said.

  “This is important, officer.”

  “I understand that you’re concerned about your son, sir. But at the moment, there’s nothing I can do about the schedule of the arraignment, or even about the fact that he’s going to be arraigned.” She saw the muscle of Parker’s right cheek twitch.

  “The others have all gone home. My son is still locked in that cell. Now I can understand you all being a little unsympathetic about this sort of thing, and no one wants to tolerate underage drinking, but—”

  “It’s not a question of sympathy,” Estelle said evenly. “The others are all minors, Mr. Parker. They are under eighteen. For them, Juvenile Probation has jurisdiction. Your son is not underage. On top of that, there’s more here than a question of underage drinking. Your son will be treated like any other adult.”

  “I think that we need to talk, young lady,” Parker snapped.

  Estelle stepped closer and rested her hand on the gate’s polished wood. “Thank you for that thought, Mr. Parker. A forty-year-old mother of two always appreciates a compliment.” She saw his eyes narrow a bit. “But at the moment, we have an active homicide investigation ongoing. Even if that were not the case, there isn’t much that the sheriff or I can do for you until after your son’s arraignment. Or even then, for that matter.” She tapped the edge of the manila envelope on the rail. “It’s a matter for the district attorney now, not us.”

  “I assume you have an office?” Parker’s tone was heavy with condescension, and Estelle did not reply, waiting for him to continue. “May we talk in private?”

  Did you ask the sheriff if he had an office? she thought, but kept her tone civil. “Go ahead, sir. I’m listening.” Parker looked across at Sutherland, who was doing a credible job of ignoring them.

  For a moment Parker regarded Estelle, and she could hear his index finger tapping on the counter. “I spoke with my son,” he said finally, as if that summed up the whole issue. When Estelle didn’t reply, he added, “He tells me that the officer fired a shot from his weapon.”

  No question mark followed Parker’s remark, and Estelle remained silent.

  “Is that true?” he persisted.

  “Like the rest of the incident, that is under investigation by both our department and the State Police.”

  “I want to know how this could happen.”

  “So do I.”

  “I should be able to talk with the officer,” Parker said. “If what my son says is true, and I have no reason to doubt that it is, your officer’s behavior put everyone in that parking lot in jeopardy.”

  “And that means that you should be the investigating officer?” Estelle snapped. “Is that what this all means? I don’t think so.”

  Parker appeared to swell and Estelle watched the color wash up from his white shirt collar.

  “Now look,” he said, and then hesitated as he groped for words.

  “Mr. Parker, unless there is something urgent that I can help you with at this particular moment, I have other issues that I need to attend to. Your son’s arraignment is at nine in the court chambers down the hall in the main building. I’m sure he’d appreciate you being there.”

  As if on cue, the door of the officers’ workroom opened, and both Deputy Tom Pasquale and State Police officer Richard Black appeared. Black walked past them and nodded curtly at Parker. “Morning, sir.”

  Deputy Pasquale had a thick folder of paperwork in his hand, and paused at the dispatch counter. “Are you headed out to the pass?” he asked Estelle, and nodded politely but without any apparent interest at Parker, who appeared to deflate a little at the abrupt appearance of the two uniformed officers.

  “Yes. I’m running behind a little,” Estelle said.

  “So all of this is just going to be swept under the carpet?” Parker said.

  “No, sir,” Estelle said, “I imagine it will be all over the front page of every newspaper that will carry the story. I’m sure it will be the lead story on News at Five. I’m sure it’ll be the central topic of conversation for every group that gathers to discuss the behavior of today’s kids, or the ineptitude of today’s cops.” She cocked her head, appraising Parker. “And you’ll do your share, I’m sure.”

  His eyes narrowed still further. “And I’m not sure that I care for your attitude, young lady.”

  “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 tr
ee 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 arching 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.