Lies Come Easy

by Steven F Havill

  Estelle retraced her steps to the front door. The mobile home, although clean and neat, had been manufactured before the stringent standards and regulations of the mid-1970s. Flimsy at best, the doorframe was not as stout as the composite door itself. A determined kick would shatter the door jamb and the thin wood around the strikers. Something as innocent as a miscalculation while delivering a new appliance through the front door could result in the same damage.

  Connie Suarez had made it to the sanctuary of her bedroom before what appeared to be a single bullet struck her in the neck. She’d tumbled to the floor and bled out, but the blood from that catastrophic wound appeared to be limited to the bedroom.

  Estelle stood in the bedroom doorway, letting the images offer up possibilities. Connie Suarez might have been holding the heavy automatic herself. She might have jammed it under her jaw and pulled the trigger, collapsing without taking an additional step, the gun spilling from her hand. And sure enough, the front door might have been broken earlier, and be entirely unrelated to Connie’s misfortune.

  Might.

  Jackie Taber waited for her, standing on the gravel at the bottom of the front steps.

  “Just the one victim here. We need to reach Craig Stout ASAP.”

  “He’s on the road our way, ETA probably an hour at best,” Jackie replied. “Gunshot?”

  “It would appear so.” She didn’t elaborate, and Jackie didn’t ask. “Let’s get this taped-off before the hordes arrive.” She looked east across the road and through a small field of cornstalks. A woman stood on the front porch of a tiny adobe, almost entirely obscured by the towering brown remains of a hollyhock planting. She was more than a hundred yards away, out of earshot. “And then we’ll find out who heard what.” She stopped and turned back to the trailer. “We’re going to need all the help we can get. Is someone coming from the State Police?”

  “Officer Hector Dominguez was on the interstate just west of Posadas. He’s headed this way.”

  “A rookie.”

  “That, he is.”

  “We’re going to need their mobile crime lab before this is over.”

  “I’ll get started with that, and he’ll help.”

  Estelle held her index fingers pressed to either side of her head. “Myron Fitzwater isn’t just a curiosity out of the Arizona National Forest anymore, Jackie. We need to find him.” She brought her hands down and pointed in stereo at her lieutenant’s utility belt, where Jackie’s own automatic rode in a black holster. “A Glock 17 is lying in there on the floor, close to Connie’s right hand, soaking in a pool of blood. Maybe we’re supposed to think that she used it, and maybe she really did. Or maybe it’s a throw-down piece.”

  She took a deep breath. “Ay, this could go so many ways.”

  Far in the distance, they heard the shriek of sirens, and in a moment the tiny black and white beetle flashing through the trees up on the mountainside morphed into a State Police car. Tires squalled as the driver had to brake hard for the first of several hairpins.

  “If Officer Dominguez makes it here without piling into a tree, have him control the sign in. He needs to block the lane, and they can use his squad car as a checkpoint. Nobody gets past him until we invite ’em in.”

  She stepped to Taber’s vehicle and removed her own camera from the briefcase. “I want some outside photos before the crowds get here,” she said.

  “I saw just the one bullet hole through the back window,” Taber said. “If that’s fresh damage from this incident, it’s going to be hell finding the slug.”

  Estelle’s phone played its tune. “Guzman.”

  “Sheriff, Craig Stout. Are you at the scene?”

  “I am.”

  “One fatality?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure of the I.D.? It’s Connie Suarez?”

  “Yes. I’m sure.”

  “Damn it.” In the background she could hear the roar of his truck. “Signs of a struggle? Anything like that?”

  “No…at least not at first glance. The victim is lying on the bedroom floor, beside the bed. Nothing else in the house appears to be disturbed.”

  A moment of silence followed. “Look, I’m just coming into Lordsburg. That puts me about forty-five minutes out. What are you going to need?”

  “The medical examiner is on the way and after that, I’ll know more. The gun that might have been used appears to be a Glock 17. I’d be interested to know if Fitzwater owned one. That’s standard issue for several agencies.”

  Again Craig Stout fell silent. “Damn,” he said at last. “As a range tech, he’s not allowed to carry a gun, or even have one with him in the government truck. He certainly wasn’t issued one. We just don’t do that.” He took a breath. “But, having said that…I know that Myron has at least one letter of reprimand in his file for doing just that. I know, because I wrote it. Just a second.”

  Estelle watched Jackie Taber confer with the young state policeman who was now standing beside his unit, nodding as she spoke. Dominguez’ body language said clearly that he wanted to stride into the scene and take over. Lieutenant Taber’s said he wasn’t going to. A tough young woman, Taber nevertheless had a light touch when necessary. She understood the turf wars that were possible between agencies like the State Police and the Sheriff’s Department.

  “Sheriff?” Craig Stout came back on the line.

  “Our team is just starting to arrive,” Estelle said.

  “Good. Look, I just sent a text back to the office. I know that in the original report I wrote on Fitzwater’s firearms incident last year, I included the make, model, and serial number of his weapon, in case we had a repeat incident. We’ll have that report in a few minutes, certainly by the time I reach your location.”

  “Was there any indication of conflict between the two of them? Between Myron and Connie? Had you heard of anything like that?”

  “Not a thing, but I’d probably be the last one to know, Sheriff.”

  “What was the nature of the firearms complaint with Fitzwater?”

  “He was hard-nosing some campers about their campfire pit. As it turns out, Smokey Bear himself would have awarded them a medal for proper compliance. Apparently Fitzwater thought the fire was too big. Some of his language was inappropriate, and the folks filed a complaint. He’s a range tech, for crissakes. He builds fences, installs erosion control structures, cuts a few trees, checks on seed plots. That’s what he does. He’s not law enforcement. He’s a GS-seven laborer. That’s it.”

  “A BOLO will go out in a few minutes,” Estelle said. “The fact that Fitzwater has been among the missing since Friday complicates matters for all of us.”

  “How long has the girl been dead, can you tell?”

  “At least a day, maybe more. Craig, you reported that Fitzwater’s Forest Service truck was found up by Newton. He had a project going on up there?”

  “Not that I’m aware of. I talked with his supervisor, the district range manager, and there was nothing up in that country that he’s aware of, either.”

  “Then we’ll see you as soon as you can get here.” She switched off and walked across to where Jackie and Hector Dominguez were unrolling the yellow ribbon. “BOLO for Myron Fitzwater,” she said. Jackie nodded, handed the spool to Dominguez, and turned toward her vehicle. The young state trooper looked hard at Estelle as if he expected that she was holding something back.

  “That’s the guy whose truck they found up north?”

  “That’s the guy.”

  “I’ll lay money that he’s already deep in Mexico.”

  “Maybe so.” She reached out and touched his left jacket sleeve. “Thanks for being here, Hector. We appreciate your help in all this.”

  Estelle turned and surveyed the small mobile home, trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together in her mind. Fitzwater’s Forest Service picku
p was abandoned west of Newton. That was fifty or so miles to the north, with only one direct route—County Road 14—winding its way up there. Connie Suarez’ Subaru was parked in the shed beside the house. Maybe she’d met him up there after he’d abandoned the government truck. Maybe. Maybe the young couple had argued. Maybe over the busted door. That was known to happen. But none of the details fit.

  The Mexican border was just yards away, and it would have been easy for Fitzwater to skirt the fence. Thousands had done it before him—most of them headed north rather than south. But the notion of a felon skipping into Mexico to avoid the cops was just that…a romantic notion from the days of the Old West, with help from Hollywood…ride your horse across a cooperative Rio Grande, and you’re home free. But the Rio Grande and the border it marked were far to the east. South of Regál stretched thousands of square miles of hostile Chihuahuan Desert. Despite the vast distances, though, the days of the frontier were over. Computers, a perfectly able Mexican police force, and the strands of modern communication made going “south of the border” not such a viable alternative, especially for a conspicuous gringo.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Fifty-four inches from heel to chin,” Dr. Alan Perrone said. “More or less.” He looked over at the damaged window. “And that’s if she was standing up straight when struck, as opposed to struggling or ducking or a hundred other variables.”

  Linda Pasquale’s big digital camera clicked again, capturing the medical examiner posed and pointing. Perrone ignored her, or appeared to. But a couple of fingers strayed up to his carefully slicked blond hair to make sure every last strand was in place.

  “Is it likely that when she was shot, she collapsed in her tracks?” Estelle’s question formed more as a thought to herself, rather than directed to the medical examiner, but Perrone frowned as he considered the possibilities.

  “You have one gunshot wound that entered under the left side of her jawbone, just anterior to the curve of the mandible. It exited on the right side of her skull, through the mastoid, on a slightly upward path.” He nodded at the spray of blood, tissue, and bone fragments across the bedding, wall, and even a portion of the ceiling. “What’s obvious is that she was not shot somewhere else and dragged here. Now, how she twisted around, how she struggled—who’s to say? And I’m guessing from the blood spatter that she was standing beside the bed, not sitting on it.”

  He mimed with his hands, and Linda’s camera captured the performance. “Picture her head here, the bullet passing straight through on a slightly upward path. To answer your question, my guess is that the bullet path suggests lights out, like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Chop off the brain stem, and you chop off the body’s control center.”

  Sweeping his pen in a wide arc to include the puddle of drying blood, he added, “Her heart soldiered on by itself for a little while, for a few seconds, maybe even a minute or two, and she bled out. But that puddle hasn’t been disturbed or smeared. I don’t think she struggled.” He grimaced. “So, to answer your question, no, I don’t think she moved much after the shot was fired. I think she went down like a puppet with its strings cut. The blood flowed out and around the gun.”

  The physician let out a loud breath. “I would be very surprised to learn that this head wound was caused by a nine millimeter. I mean, I suppose it could be. The entry wound is small enough, but there appears to be a lot of expansion there at the exit. Explosive, even. If you can find the bullet, that’d be a plus. We’d know for sure. There’s some fancy nine millimeter ammo on the market…home defense stuff that’s loaded hot, with extreme hollowpoint bullets. They could do this.”

  He knelt quickly and pointed at the victim’s jawline. “Most interesting, this, and Linda, make sure it’s well documented. The gun was pushed hard against her neck, right under the jawline. So hard, there’s a scrape and bruise there, along with the burn corona.” He looked up, first at Robert Torrez, who had arrived unannounced and had been standing in the bedroom doorway, silent and grim-faced. “Déjà vu, all over again, as the man said. Where have we all seen that before?”

  When neither Estelle nor the sheriff offered comment, Perrone added, “I think it’s really unlikely that this was self-inflicted. Not on the underside of the chin like that.” He looked hard at Estelle. “I’m not saying that it’s impossible. Just unlikely.” He rubbed his own smooth chin, and his latex glove squeaked. “I’m judging that the trauma inflicted by the gun barrel is in some ways similar to the young man’s death yesterday. For the sake of argument, say that this young woman is right-handed.” He picked up the evidence bag that now contained the Glock. “It’s possible to hold this weapon, bend the wrist, and turn the head to present the left upper neck as a target. Awkward, but possible. If what I remember about these Glocks is correct, there’s no separate safety to think about…no fancy grip safety the shooter has to pay attention to. In that respect they’re like an old-fashioned double-action revolver. If you can pull the trigger, whether it be with a finger, a pencil, or a toe, I don’t care what, then the gun goes off. Am I right?”

  He directed the question to Torrez, who nodded silently.

  “All right, then. So she could twist her arm around, and bang. Maybe easier if you put your thumb on the trigger, instead of the conventional grip. That’s also awkward.” He shrugged. “But why would she do that? Why not just press it against her right temple?”

  “Her watch is on her right wrist. What looks like an engagement ring is on her right hand,” Estelle said. “If she was left-handed…”

  “Then it’s easier, sure enough,” Perrone said. “But, still, why would she do that? Why not against her left temple, then? You’ve responded to a depressing number of suicides over the years, both of you. What’s the most common method used when a firearm is involved?”

  “Temple, or by the ear,” Sheriff Torrez muttered, more to himself than to Perrone. “That or suck on the end of the barrel.”

  “And what we saw yesterday with the young man is maybe a little ways farther down the list of favorites. It’s hard to miss with center mass, but there have been lots of cases where folks do.”

  “This ain’t suicide,” Torrez said quickly. “She ain’t going to ram a handgun under her lower jaw so hard the front sight tears the skin. And Darrell Fisher wasn’t going to jam the gun so hard into his own gut that it folded him over.”

  “She’s nervous, apprehensive, desperate?” Perrone offered.

  “Not likely.” Torrez regarded the bed and the stains that shot across it to the far window wall. “String,” he said cryptically. “String and tripod. That might get us a little closer.”

  The physician looked dubious. “Tough call, with both ends of the string unknown. You have a hole through glass, and that looks like all you have. You don’t know how she was standing, how the gun was held. You’d be guessing at trajectory.” He shook his head. “No word on the boyfriend?”

  “Not a thing. We have his truck, abandoned up outside of Newton.”

  “Newton?” the physician asked. “That’s a nowhere place, for sure.”

  “Maybe so. That’s where it was left. No trace of him.” Estelle nodded at the bagged gun. “The law enforcement officer from the Forest Service district is on his way. There’s some reason to believe that this might be Myron Fitzwater’s gun.”

  “That’s starting to paint an ugly scenario for you,” Perrone said.

  “Maybe so,” she said again. “Paint by numbers. Stay inside the lines.”

  Perrone looked at her sympathetically. “I wish I could give you more to go on. The sheriff is right. You find that slug, it might answer some questions. And there’s likely more of them still loaded in the Glock. Who’s to say the gun’s magazine didn’t hold an assortment, though? Finding the fired projectile is going to be a trick, I don’t care how much string you use. The bullet went out the window, and that’s a hell of a thing to deal with.” H
e looked at his watch. “On the other hand, we might just end up with more questions. I’ll get you what answers I can, just as quickly as I can. Right now I’m so tired I think my eyes are crossed. That won’t be any good for you. Maybe by tomorrow morning.”

  “Whatever and whenever you can.”

  “Francis is due back today?”

  “Any minute.”

  “Then the two of us can put our heads together first thing in the morning.” He looked up sharply as Lieutenant Taber appeared in the bedroom doorway.

  “Sheriff, Officer Stout is here from the Forest Service. He and District Ranger Robert Tulley.”

  “I’m finished here,” Perrone said. “The EMTs can move the body whenever you’re ready.” He stopped and looked down at the victim once more. “Somebody must have heard something, in a tiny place like this.”

  “Depends how and when,” Estelle said. “A single gunshot, muffled in a back room? Television sets blaring, all the other noises of a small community? The nearest neighbor is a hundred yards away. Even though everyone knows everyone else’s business, it’s amazing what you can get away with. It’s every bit as bad as the problems we ran into up in Darrell Fisher’s neighborhood.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “There are no fragments on the carpet by the front door.” Lieutenant Taber had waited until Estelle finished on the phone. She held up a small magnifying glass. “I used my Sherlock Holmes gadget. If the door was damaged by an intruder, he took the time to clean up thoroughly. If there’s anything in the carpet fibers, it’s microscopic.”