Easy Errors

by Steven F Havill

  “Maybe, could be.”

  “Had Orlando been ill recently?”

  “Not no more than usual. Last week, he had some trouble.”

  “Huh.” I nodded at the yellow tape. “And why right here? Why this particular spot? It’s not down in the canyon, which is the usual party site. It’s not in the pasture up by the windmill, where the shooting recreation took place.” I turned a circle, trying to imagine what might have happened. “You’ve been outside the perimeter?” He shook his head.

  “See,” I said, “you and I walked down the little trail that follows the old two-track from the windmill. The kids might have done the same thing. It’s no big hike. I mean, as the crow flies, we’re, what, a hundred yards from the windmill? Fifty yards down into the canyon? It’s a small area. But that trail downslope? We’re off that beaten track by a dozen yards.” I gestured at the carbine. “Why did whoever it was walk up here to lay down the M-1?”

  “Don’t know. Takin’ a leak, maybe.”

  “Maybe so, Roberto. Maybe so.”

  I motioned with both hands. “Let’s just concentric out a ways.” From the faint trail to the carbine was roughly north, and my plan was to survey all the way to the top of the low ridge. I walked counterclockwise around the perimeter marked off by the tape, with Torrez going clockwise. Aging bottle caps, fading aluminum zip-tops, a crumpled cigarette pack—all the usual “humans were here” junk marked their territory. The number of cigarette filters that remained long after the tobacco and paper had faded away always amazed me. No wonder Smokey Bear was always trying to beat tourists over the head with his shovel.

  I happened to glance up when, about thirty yards northwest of the carbine site, where a gray juniper stump and a swarm of prickly little seedlings attempted to cling to the rocks, Robert Torrez stopped short.

  “Hey?” He waited motionless while I made my way up to him. He never looked at me as I approached, didn’t point, didn’t move a muscle.

  “Oh, shit,” I whispered and stopped short, shoulder-to-shoulder with the deputy. The girl lay crumpled on her back in a small alcove formed by Volkswagen-sized boulders, head turned away from us, black hair fallen over her face. She wore no jacket, and blood soaked the left shoulder of her t-shirt. Her blue jeans were unbelted and unzipped, bunched along with light blue panties below her knees.

  Her shoes and socks were in place, but her left leg was flexed at the knee, her foot cocked as if she had been trying to kick. The ground around her left shoe was lightly scarred by her dying efforts.

  Watching where I put my feet, I knelt down and touched the right side of her neck. My own pulse was slamming in my ears, and I closed my eyes, concentrating on my search for her right carotid artery. The skin was silky and almost warm. Almost. I shifted my fingers several times to find the pulse, but felt nothing.

  Chapter Eight

  Posadas County Coroner Sherwin Wilkes kept a brave face. In his other life, he enjoyed a strong chiropractic practice, now in partnership with freshman County Legislator Arnie Gray. The connections with the legislature didn’t end there, since Dr. Wilkes was the legislative chairman’s brother-in-law. Still spry from spending so many hours on the rugged Posadas golf course, he ducked under the yellow tape that now included about an acre of hillside. For the second time in as many days, his face was pale, with sweat standing out on his forehead.

  “My God, how did you find this place?” he said.

  “Luck,” I said. “The assistant medical examiner is on his way. He was in Deming, so it’s going to take a little while.”

  Wilkes edged closer to the thin space-blanket that reflected sun so bright it hurt the eyes. I nodded at Deputy Torrez, and he and Sergeant Avelino Garcia, who had chauffeured Dr. Wilkes to this forlorn spot, carefully secured two corners of the silver blanket and drew it back. Wilkes knelt, and I heard the repetitive crick of Garcia’s camera.

  Wilkes said nothing for a few seconds, his tongue sucking little clicks against his palette. He reached out and drew the fall of hair back from the victim’s face. “Darlene Spencer,” he said. “Oh, my.” Shifting position a little, he placed a hand on each side of the girl’s neck and closed his eyes. “Oh, my,” he said again. I hadn’t been able to think of anything more profound, either. Ever so gently, he turned the victim’s head a bit to the right and left. Looping his stethoscope free from the collar of his jacket, he took his time, seating the earbuds just right. He roamed the bell around the corpse’s chest without disturbing the t-shirt.

  After a long moment, he straightened back and then pushed himself to his feet. “All right,” he said. “Dr. Perrone’s on his way, you said?”

  “Yes.” Alan Perrone, commuting each day from Posadas to Deming to run the small medical examiner’s office there, would take Wilkes’ preliminary report without question, but in cases like this one, Wilkes knew his own limitations. Cause of death was not clear, and the circumstances leading to that death were anything but obvious.

  He shook his head. “I can’t tell you much, but I can tell you this, Sheriff. The girl hasn’t been dead long. No rigor, and I would doubt that her core body temp has dropped even ten degrees.” He glanced over at me. “And that’s the limit of what I’m willing to give you. I can pronounce, but,” and he turned wearily back to regard the corpse, “you’re going to need a hell of a lot more than that. Looks like a head injury of some sort. As for the rest…”

  The “rest” was our concern, and the mind does a good job of leaping to conclusions. Find a dead girl with her jeans and underwear pulled low, and we start looking for the bastard who raped her before smacking her fatally in the head. Clearly, there were problems with that easy scenario. For one thing, rapists generally forced the whole view, top half as well as bottom. The victim’s white t-shirt, and the bra underneath it, appeared undisturbed.

  Wilkes stopped at the sound of voices and vehicles down in the canyon. The EMTs would have had a challenge bringing the ambulance up Bender’s Canyon two-track…not because of the footing, which in this weather was firm and packed, but because of the “gates,” a series of house-sized boulders that loomed on either side of the southwest entrance to the canyon. They were scuffed in more than a few places, showing automotive paint left behind.

  I guessed that Deputy Scott Baker, an EMT during his spare moments, was driving the rig. He would eschew the long way around, through Torrance’s ranch and then down the trail to the windmill. Instead, he’d come directly in the mile and a half from County Road 14. Once in the canyon itself, and facing the boulder gates, he’d fold in the ambulance’s big wing mirrors and go for it, trying his best not to leave another offering of paint on the rocks.

  “Deputy, you need to make sure everyone respects the yellow tape,” I said. “Things stay untouched until the ME gets here. And I mean untouched. If there’s a speck of fiber left on a tree limb somehow, or a boot-heel print in the soft dirt between a couple of rocks, that could make or break the case. ”

  Torrez nodded and backed away.

  Dr. Wilkes watched Torrez. “I remember when that deputy was a skinny little twerp.”

  “That’s hard to imagine, Doc.” I bent down and pulled the space-blanket up to cover the victim. I remembered Darlene, with her unfailing good humor, cavorting about in the cold, cheering the Posadas Jaguars to once-in-a-while victories. As she did that, Chris Browning had been on the field, doing his best. How did it all end up like this I thought, and then shook that sorry image away. I was glad that Willis Browning was not here to see this.

  “You haven’t had a moment to contact Francine, I imagine,” Wilkes said.

  “No. She called me earlier, concerned when Darlene hadn’t come home last night. Mom was afraid the girl had been involved in the crash.”

  Wilkes frowned, pondering that for a long moment. “The other kids were out here, you think? They were headed home from here?”

 
“It looks that way.”

  “Then how did this happen…?” He shook his head. The conundrum was obvious to him, just as it was obvious to me. He’d pronounced the three teens killed in the crash of the Suburban around ten o’clock the night before. Earlier in the evening, they could have been out here—all four of them. If Darlene had been killed then…if her death had been what caused the panic that maybe set off Orlando’s asthma attack…then rigor would have been fully advanced by now. But she had died not many minutes before we found her body—maybe as much as an hour—about the time that Deputy Torrez was wading around in the stock tank. Maybe even while I was standing in the pleasant sunshine, yakking with Herb Torrance.

  Typically, my mind tried to jump ahead to conclusions—but none of them made any sense to me. I didn’t know what had killed Darlene Spencer. I couldn’t comprehend why, if they had been witnesses to the event, the other three kids hadn’t brought the injured Darlene back to Posadas. If they’d found her injured and bleeding, hell—stuff her in the big Suburban and get her to the ER. That wasn’t complicated. But kids—hell, even otherwise rational adults—did bizarre things under pressure.

  Dr. Alan Perrone’s autopsy would solve a portion of that mystery for us. Some of the blood on the girl’s t-shirt had dried to a brown crust, but not all. Some of it was still the consistency of warm molasses. And that meant that either she had been hurt recently, or had lain out under the stars all night, struggling against her injuries, alone and without comfort. She had made it to a new day, but not by much.

  I caught sight of Deputy Baker, spiffy in his EMT duds, as he stopped to talk with Torrez. Behind him, a second EMT, Wendy Ritter, waited with the featherweight gurney. Everyone was going to be in suspended animation until the medical examiner arrived, so I caught Torrez’ eye and beckoned him back.

  “Stay with her for a few minutes.” I nodded toward the waiting EMTs. “They know to wait for Perrone?”

  “Yep.”

  “I’m going to see if the sheriff wants to contact Francine. I want to stay off the radio, so I’ll go back up to the ranch and use Herb’s phone. In the meantime, I want a photo panorama of this whole area.” I made a circular motion. “All the way around, outside your tape. When Perrone gets here, we’ll go from there. I should be back by then.”

  I started to turn away and stopped. “Someone has to drive Dr. Wilkes back to his car out on the highway. I don’t care who does that, but I want you,” and I pointed at Torrez, “to stay here and make sure the scene is secured. Sergeant Garcia can work the photos, and Perrone gets in the circle as soon as he shows up. But that’s it. No other clodhoppers stomping the scene.”

  Torrez nodded, a pained expression on his face as he tried not to look at the victim. And this time, I didn’t even earn a “yep.”

  Herb Torrance had left the windmill and tank, and I followed his tracks back to the ranch house…a sprawling, older model double-wide tucked into the side of a hill within a quarter-mile of the county road. A blue heeler, belly sagging from the excited mouths of four pups, led the barking, tumbling mass to greet me. By the time both my boots had hit the ground, I’d been licked and peed on. The only one who stayed on her feet was Beulah, the long-suffering bitch. The pups squirmed and danced and ground their new fur into the dust.

  Herb still sat in his truck, writing something on a most executive-appearing clipboard. In a moment, he dismounted. “Beulah, get ’em out of here.” His tone was entirely conversational, but sure enough, the heeler did exactly as she was told, leading the squirming, yipping mass of puppies toward one of the barns.

  “Herb, I need to use your phone.”

  He nodded at the house. “You know where it is. Just help yourself.”

  Alice and Herb Torrance were busy raising nearly as many kids as Ariana and Modesto Torrez, but on a calm, clear day like this, all the older ones were either off with chores or visiting neighbors—there was one other family, the Prescotts, within five miles. The two youngest Torrance kids, Desi and Melinda, greeted me at the door, reminding me of the wide-eyed kids captured in those black-and-white Depression-era photos.

  Melinda, maybe five years old and a hundred years wise, looked me up and down gravely. “Beulah had puppies,” she said. At that announcement, three year-old Desi’s head snapped around, and he pointed a crooked finger after the flow of dogs.

  “I see that.”

  “There were six of them, but two came out dead.” She pronounced it “day-yed.”

  “Ah, I’m sorry to hear that.” I looked around for Herb, who was headed toward the house.

  “What’d Torrez find?” He ushered Melinda away with a gentle hand on the back. “Scoot, now,” he said to the two children.

  “We’ve got a real situation,” I replied. Alice appeared in the hallway that led back to the labyrinth of bedrooms in the spacious home. “Bill,” she greeted. As stout as her husband was skinny, I knew that she kept a close watch on her brood, and that despite those tight reins, her oldest boys, Patrick and Dale, still managed to spike her blood pressure from time to time.

  “It’s going to get a little busy around here,” I said. “I need to use your phone. Our radios aren’t worth much down in the canyon.”

  “You just help yourself. I’ll put coffee on.”

  “No, thanks just the same. I’ll only be here a minute.”

  “Then you can take some with you.”

  I knew better than to try and sidetrack Alice’s determined hospitality. I headed for the phone on the little end table near the sofa. Miracle had returned to dispatch from his overlong, meditative trip to the can, and he answered promptly.

  “JJ, I need you to find Sheriff Salcido ASAP,” I said.

  “Oh, now, he just headed out your way, Sheriff. Just a few minutes ago. He caught the call for the coroner, and figured he’d save some time. You know who the vic is yet?”

  The vic? After success eliminating three whole letters from a tough word, maybe JJ Miracle would tackle something really challenging, like “perp.”

  “I need to meet with him at the Torrance ranch headquarters. Find out his ETA for me.”

  “Just a sec, sir.” He didn’t bother to cover the phone, and I could hear the background radio conversation clearly. The sheriff was just crossing Salinas Arroyo, highballing south on State 56. That put him just about halfway to the Broken Spur Saloon, about where County Road 14 intersected the state highway. Even the way the sheriff drove, that put him twenty minutes out. Murton wrapped up his radio call and came back on line.

  “I heard,” I said. “I’ll be able to get him on car-to-car in a few minutes, then.”

  “Got that. Say, ah, the mom called again. She’s hopin’ to talk to you when you come in.”

  “The mom?”

  “Oh. Francine Spencer? She was camped out here for half an hour earlier. She had someplace to go, I guess. She ain’t here just now, but she’s sure enough worried about her daughter. I think she wants the whole darn department out searching for her. Shacked up with a boyfriend, is my guess.”

  I hesitated, and glanced at Herb. His wife had left the room, and he nodded toward the front porch, tactfully moving out of earshot.

  Witless Miracle might not, but Francine knew. If she’d been sitting on one of the old wooden church pews out in the Sheriff’s Department lobby, she would have been within earshot of the radio traffic, especially with the blabby Miracle feeling the need to amplify and explain. “If she comes back,” I said, “tell her to wait in the sheriff’s office…or mine. We’re going to need to talk with her.”

  “Ten four. I’ll do that. You’re going to need the whole crew again?”

  “For what?”

  That flustered Miracle. “I mean, the call for the coroner and the ME and all.”

  “We’ll get back to you.” I had no intention of telling Miracle that Darlene Spencer’s body was cooli
ng down in Bender’s Canyon. I started to hang up, then had second thoughts. Much as I hated to inflict Miracle Murton on anyone, this wasn’t going to wait until everything was convenient for everybody. “Give Willis Browning a call for me. I’m going to need to talk with him before the day is out. Don’t set an appointment, and don’t send him out here. Just give him a heads-up that I need to speak with him, and tell him to mind his radio. And then let me know.”

  “Will do, Sheriff.”

  “And give Ernie Wheeler a call. Have him come in as early as he can. When he does, make sure he’s up to speed on everything that we have going on.” Wheeler was sitting swing dispatch, and he was competent enough that he could have stepped right into one of the road patrol slots, were it not for a knee ruined playing soccer. I’d never heard him flustered, or overly dramatic. His radio delivery was smooth and unhurried. There had been times when that unflappable delivery had helped a shaken deputy regain control of his nerves. If I hurt Miracle Murton’s feelings by booting him out of the dispatch chair, too damn bad.

  I didn’t make it to the front porch before Alice Torrance intercepted me with a large chrome beverage container, one of those quart-capacity things that truckers use. “No cream, no sugar, as I recall. I know you won’t stand still for a piece of lemon cake, but at least take this.”

  “Lemon cake?” She started to look hopeful when I said that, but I backpedaled. “No…we’ve got a mess right now. But thanks for this.” I hefted the container. “I’ll get this back to you.”

  “Not to worry about it,” she said. “The bank gives ’em away. I think we have a dozen.”

  “You’re a jewel. Thanks.”

  Out on the front porch, Herb waited, one boot hooked on the railing. He straightened up as I walked past. “We’re going to get busy out here, Herb. Are you going to be home most of the day?”