“No, sir.”
“Understand that when you make mistakes, or even when you don’t, you’ll be a favorite target for all the wackos who want to make a quick buck at the government’s expense. We try not to do stupid things to encourage litigation. Walking into situations without preparation, backup, or even proper authority is one way to encourage the wackos. We have a wonderful county attorney, but he can’t work magic if you don’t use your head.”
“Yes, sir.”
I surveyed my desk. “So…that’s enough yakking. We have a long day ahead, and contrary to what I just got finished explaining, I’m not going to have you sit in dispatch today. We have too much to do, and I’m about fifty bodies short of what I need. And this is too good an opportunity for you to miss. Are you ready to go to work?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. By the time the day’s over, you’ll be royally sick of hearing me talk. I like to preach when there’s somebody to listen. Most of the time, I’m talking to myself. You’ve had breakfast?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good, because in this business, you’ll never be sure where your next meal is coming from.” I started toward the door, then stopped. “One more thing. At all times, what you think is important to me, and to the sheriff. Don’t keep ideas, or intuitions, or hunches, to yourself. Share, share, share. Use your own judgment for when and how to do that. I’ll want to see how you make those decisions. We’re a team, Ms. Reyes. Yes, there’s a chain of command, but since I’m your training officer for the next few weeks, not to worry about that. What you need to know is that we’re not in competition with each other. And that starts today.”
Chapter Nine
By 7:45 a.m., we had a dozen folks at Highland Avenue, each with a fistful of yellow surveyor’s flags. We fanned out in a line and tramped through the mounds of weeds for the entire length of Highland, from the intersection with Hutton at one end to the intersection with County Road 43 on the other. Five passes offered a walk of about two miles. We moved slowly, eyes locked on the ground. Every time a treasure was discovered, an evidence flag sprouted if in the officer’s judgment the item could be of interest to us.
I kept the search and seize instructions simple. An old, sun-bleached beer can wouldn’t be much of a find. A fresh can or bottle ripe with fingerprints might be. An old, weathered shot shell casing wouldn’t matter, but a fresh, shiny .30-06 casing damn sure would. A rotted cigarette butt didn’t count for much, but a stash of fresh butts demanded scrutiny. And so on.
The catch with all this, of course, was that after a dozen sets of size 12’s had walked through the area, not much that might be evidence would be left. So we had to get it right the first time.
After five passes—two down each side of the roadway and one right down the middle—we had a mediocre collection of flags growing. Satisfied, Sheriff Salcido and I excused everyone except Bobby Torrez, Tom Mears and my ride-along.
With the traffic gone and the prairie quiet, we visited each flag site in turn. The list of interesting tidbits was depressingly short. One set of tire tracks marked the soft, ungraded shoulder eighty-five yards directly in front of the parked Cat. It appeared that someone had swung off the road far enough that when they did so, their vehicle would have pitched sharply. A moment’s inattention, perhaps, quickly corrected.
“Not a chance.” Tom Mears shook his head. “A cast would be a waste of time. All we can get is a measurement of the width of the tire, and even that’s more of a guess.”
“I’ll take it,” I said. “Any little piece.” We added a pop can so fresh that the remains of the half ounce of liquid inside still showed traces of carbonation. That interested me, since the soda hadn’t been finished before being flung—and whether or not that meant anything was any one’s guess. It went into an evidence bag, with Estelle Reyes watching our every move.
Fifty-five yards in front of the road grader, and within five feet of the roadway itself was a nest of .22 casings, fresh enough that even I could smell the burned powder—or maybe it was the clump of desert yarrow in which the casings had landed. We had the bullet that killed Larry Zipoli, and it sure as hell was no .22. We bagged the .22’s anyway.
Thirty feet in front of the Cat, eight feet from the roadway, we picked up a handy lug wrench. That’s certainly something I always do after I change a tire—fling the wrench off into the desert. Not far from that was a nest of two quarters, three dimes, and two pennies. How one goes about losing eighty-two cents out in the prairie would be interesting in and of itself.
All in all, we found absolutely nothing of significance—nothing we could look at and say, “Ah ha, this fits!”
Sheriff Salcido stood in the center of Highland Avenue and watched Tom Mears take the last of the documentary photos.
“I don’t like this,” the sheriff said. “We don’t have nothing.”
“Half an ounce of Pepsi and eighty-two cents,” I said. “That’s more than we often get for a day’s work.”
He mopped his forehead and resettled his Stetson. “Why would anybody do this. Just for kicks, you think?” He pronounced it keeks, with a grimace.
“At this point, we can’t know,” I said. “The only thing we think that we know is that the shooter fired from somewhere between here and the intersection with Hutton. If we knew the height of the shooter, from ground to rifle barrel, a little trigonometry would tell us how far he stood from the grader. We’re going to have to go with averages.”
I dug a toe of my Wellington boot into the dirt. “The list of what we don’t know is much, much longer. Were there other shots fired that didn’t hit the grader? What kind of gun was it? Did the victim know the shooter? Hell, did the shooter know who the hell he was shooting at? Or that she was shooting at? We could go on and on with questions, like the basic one…why.”
Salcido reached out and took the bundle of unused flags that Estelle had collected. “I’d like to have that list,” he said. “You’re assuming it was no accident.”
“I don’t believe it was,” I said. “I hope I’m wrong.” I turned to Bob Torrez. “Today I want to know everything there is to know about that recovered bullet, Bobby. That’s a start. That’s something we have. I want a firmer handle on the trajectory. That would be your best guess how far away the shooter was standing, if you take five feet from ground to rifle barrel as an average.”
I turned to the other deputy. “Tom, the thought occurred to me that you could borrow a laser from one of the county surveyors and shoot a beam to establish a trajectory. Hell, I don’t know. Maybe that wouldn’t work. Lasers don’t drop over distance, bullets do…and there’s the issue of deflection when the bullet hit the glass.” I waved a hand, orchestrating frustration. “Hell, I don’t know. But try it. Try anything.”
Tom Mears nodded as if he perfectly understood my ramblings. I glanced at my watch. “I’m headed over to the county yard to talk with Zipoli’s supervisor. Tony didn’t have much to say about any maintenance issues, or with something broken on the grader, but if there was, they’ll have some record of it. He’ll have scouted that out. Somebody will remember something. I want to know what Larry Zipoli was doing when he was shot. The grader was running, but the transmission was in neutral. Go figure that one. He wasn’t stopped to talk with someone, not with that noisy diesel running. So why? And it’s a start with one fundamental question…does anyone have a single notion about why somebody would want to shoot Larry Zipoli.”
“Would want to?” Salcido frowned.
“Sure as hell, would want to,” I replied. “If it’s not an accident, then the shooter has to want to pull the trigger. That’s not rocket science, is it. But it gives us a trail to be followed. And I had an interesting conversation with Marilyn Zipoli last night. Her husband had some issues with a neighbor. We’ll see about that. I’ll talk to that neighbor today and see where that take
s us.” I slapped my belly. “I wish my gut told me something intuitive, but it doesn’t. So we plug along, check under all the rocks and in the dark little corners.”
“And my gut…I wish it would go away.” The sheriff rubbed his girth. “This neighbor…you’re talking about Jim Raught?”
“That’s the one.”
“I don’t know him very well.” But obviously he did know Raught, after a fashion. Eduardo Salcido probably knew ninety percent of the Posadas County residents.
“I don’t either, Eduardo. But we’re going to know him.”
Salcido laughed ruefully. He regarded Estelle Reyes for a moment with an expression of almost paternal pride. He knew Estelle’s great uncle Reuben better than I did, enough to consider him an old friend. “Are you ready for all this?”
She didn’t just belt out a chirpy, enthusiastic, unthinking “Yes, sir.” Instead her face darkened a bit, eyebrows knitting. “No one should get away with something like this,” she said.
“Más sabe el diablo por viejo que por diablo,” the sheriff murmured, and Estelle smiled.
“That’s one of my mother’s favorite sayings,” she said.
“Well, you listen to her. And you listen to this one.” He nodded toward me before starting to turn away, then paused. “We all pay attention, and the son of a bitch won’t get away with pulling that trigger.”
Eduardo Salcido didn’t cuss much, but he was as frustrated as I was. He settled his Stetson again and nodded at the young lady. “And my best wishes to your mother.”
“Thank you, sir.”
He grinned at me and pulled his Stetson down the military two fingers above his eyes. “I heard about last night,” he said. “With Officer Murton.” Again, he enjoyed each of the three syllables. I’m not sure what kind of off-i-cer he thought Murton to be. “Those badges…they sometimes take a walk, don’t they.”
“Minds of their own,” I replied.
“I’m going to work this section of the village.” Salcido swept a hand to include the houses just to the south of us, where he and I had spent time the evening before. “One at a time. Somebody heard something, you know. You can’t fire a high-powered rifle this close to houses and not hear it. All those folks yesterday who claimed not to hear nothing…maybe they’ve had time to think it over.” He turned back with a look to include us all. “Anything at all…I want to hear about it sooner rather than later.”
As he trudged back toward his car, I turned to Estelle. “What’s the dicho mean?” I didn’t know much Spanish—what three years in a North Carolina high school forty years before could teach. I didn’t mind when others settled into their home language, leaving us gringos behind. After all, it was my choice to remain so clumsy and inept in that language of the border.
“Literally, ‘the devil knows more because he’s old than because he’s the devil.’ A colorful way to say that experience is the best teacher.“
“Ah. Well, we’ll see. Right now, I’m feeling just this side of stupid.” I sighed. “Are you ready to meet some people who may not be so excited to meet us?”
“Yes, sir.” No hesitation there.
Chapter Ten
The Posadas County maintenance barns were on north Third Street. If Third had crossed the big arroyo that scarred the north side of the village, it would have intersected Highland in a quarter mile or so. The county barns and bone yard were close enough to Highland that anyone working outside should have been able to hear a rifle shot clearly.
But this was the rural southwest. Shooters abounded, whether slaying beer cans on the mesa, rattlesnakes invading the yard, or ravens ravaging a song bird’s nest. No one took particular notice of gun shots. Shots.
This had been, as far as we could tell, a single shot, in my book one of the most lethal sounds. One bullet was all it took if the shooter knew what he was about and conditions were right. During hunting season, if I heard blam, blam, blam, blam, I could guess that the deer or elk or antelope had probably escaped unscathed, the flurry of bullets kicking dust. But one, solitary, definitive blam…that was a different scenario. A critter dropped in his tracks. Or Larry Zipoli dead before he could move a hand to the gearshift, or duck to safety.
I swung 310 through the boneyard’s generous gate in the chain link and razor wire boundary fence, and drove cautiously through all the junk before reaching the maintenance office, housed at the north end of a long, steel building with four gigantic bay doors. Two were up, two down. In one, a twin-screw dump truck was resting on jacks, its hind-most differential in a thousand pieces. One of the county pick-up trucks was backed into the other open bay.
Parking directly in front of a single door marked Office, I lowered the front windows on both sides, then nodded at the mike without reaching for it. “PCS, three ten is ten six, county barn.”
Without hesitating, Estelle slipped the mike off its hook and repeated the message, her tone measured and pronunciation distinct without being exaggerated.
“Three ten, ten four,” dispatcher T.C. Barnes responded immediately.
“Most of the time, we want dispatch to know where we are,” I said. “There are times when we don’t, too. Half the goddamn county is listening to what we say, so we want to think before yapping. It’s a balance between staying safe and staying discreet. I keep badgering the sheriff to put mobile phones in each car, so we can stay off the radio waves entirely. No dinero. And radios are a tradition, stupid as that sounds.”
I hadn’t made a move to get out of the car yet, and took a moment to make a notation in my log…a document I cheerfully ignored most of the time. Now that my every move was under scrutiny by my ride-along, perhaps it behooved me to do things properly to start her off right.
“We want to talk first with Tony Pino. He’s bossman. He was out at the crime scene yesterday, and he’s shaken by all this.” I paused. “By way of historical interest, Tony’s grandfather was the first mayor of Posadas. Between Eduardo Salcido and myself, we could devise a hell of a trivia game about this little corner of the world—and what I find interesting is that sometimes, that makes folks nervous, thinking we know something about ’em that we shouldn’t. That can be to our advantage.”
I glanced at the steel office door, ajar just enough that anyone inside would have heard the crunch of our tires. “There will be lots of questions. Yesterday when we were buttoning up Highland, we had something of a crowd watching, although watching what I don’t know. Tony’s foreman was there too—Buddy Clayton. They’re going to have questions, and the trick is to make them feel included without giving anything away.” Looking sideways at my passenger I saw the look of noncommittal interest on her pretty face. My lectures hadn’t driven her over the brink yet.
“At this point, they don’t need to know what we know—which I’m sorry to say is diddly squat. But they don’t need to know that.” I slid the aluminum clipboard that included my log sheets under the pile of junk that threatened the center arm rest. “The base line is this: somewhere out there is someone with a high powered rifle who picked an easy target. We need to remember—always remember—that that son-of-a-bitch is still out there, still watching. We don’t get complacent, we stay sharp, we look and listen and watch. Okay?”
“Yes, sir.” Flat, noncommittal. Her fingers didn’t even stray toward the door handle. Maybe she expected more lectures.
“And that’s whether you’re riding with me or anyone else. And while you’re at it, ponder this cheerful thought. It might be quiet as a tomb in Posadas County for days on end. But we’re just off the interstate, and that connects us to the world. Some creep might have killed a dozen people in Terre Haute, Indiana, and be fleeing west…right through here. Or some hijacker slips custody in San Diego and heads east. Or some dealer is heading north with five hundred pounds of cocaine from downtown Mexico. Here we sit, hopefully not half asleep. It might be quiet h
ere, but elsewhere, maybe not. And we’re all connected.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Let’s see what they have to say.” I popped the door, at the same time noticing the lithe, effortless, almost anti-gravitational way that Estelle Reyes moved. Oh, to be twenty-two again. What interested me even more was watching her close the car door. Not a slam, just a gentle nudge against the latch. And all the while her eyes were roaming the boneyard, inventorying who knew what.
I rapped a knuckle on the office door and pushed it open. Two steps and I was greeted by a belly-high counter. A heavy-set woman sat at the first desk, the surface more cluttered than my own, a vast sea of requisitions, time sheets, phone messages, blueprints, job or parts—all the things that keep a busy department busy.
“Well, good morning.” Bea Summers spoke without any of her usual bounce or sunshine. “Tony was trying to call you earlier. I think he talked to Sheriff Salcido.”
“I’ve been out and about,” I said, without adding that I hadn’t checked my answering machine in the past couple of hours. I took a deep breath and let it out in a long, heart-felt sigh. “I’m sorry about all this,” I said. “Rough time.”
“Is there any news?”
“I wish there were. There are a number of things we need to find out from you, if we might.” If we might. I couldn’t imagine that Bea Summers would hesitate to cooperate in any way we asked, but sometimes folks hesitate when it’s the privacy of their turf that’s being violated. We’d find out what we needed to know whether Bea, or even Tony Pino, was agreeable or not, court orders being what they are.
“And by the way, Bea, this is Estelle Reyes. She’s a new hire who’s spending some ride-along time with me this morning.”
One Perfect Shot Page 7