A few minutes before midnight, I heard both Bishop and Mitchell call in their mileage to dispatch and request that the gasoline pump be turned on. Any blockhead with a scanner knew then that the county was lying quiet and wide open.
Tom Mears went on duty a couple of minutes later, and dispatcher Erie Wheeler went home, replaced by T. C. Barnes, a former county highway department employee who’d managed to smash himself in the tailgate of one of the county’s dump trucks. He was slow, steady, and as dependable as they came. He worked nights part-time for us while his wife worked at the hospital.
After Tom Mears’s initial radio check, the county went quiet…so quiet I found myself wondering if the paint had dried yet on my kitchen window.
At 12:32 A.M., Martin Holman’s voice startled me.
“PCS, three-oh-seven. We’ve got an MVA just west of the Bar N B gate.” He sounded reasonably sure of himself. Maybe he’d rehearsed.
“Ten-four, three-oh-seven,” Barnes said. “Are you requesting an ambulance?”
“Ten-four, PCS.”
“And three-oh-eight, did you copy?”
I could hear the roar of Mear’s car in the background as he keyed the mike. “Ten-four, PCS.”
I looked across at the dark mobile home, weighing my options.
“Three-oh-seven, this is three-ten.”
I breathed a sigh of relief when Holman answered. I could hear his siren in the background. “Three-oh-seven.” He was breathing hard.
“Martin, what have you got there?”
“Three-ten, it looks like somebody went off the road just past the Baca place. They hit one of those big boulders. The school bus is stopped, too. We’re going to have the whole cavalcade here in a minute.”
“Shit,” I said and then keyed the mike. “Three-oh-seven, three-oh-eight is on his way. He’s about six minutes out. Was the bus involved in the accident?”
“I don’t think so, three-ten.”
“If the bus wasn’t involved, make sure that the occupants stay inside the bus. Inside the vehicle.”
“Ten-four.”
“If the bus was involved, make sure that all oncoming traffic is blocked, and that ambulatory occupants are escorted away from the bus, and away from the highway. No stragglers. Keep them in a tight group.”
“Ten-four, three-ten.”
The rest would have to depend on Sheriff Holman’s common sense. I pulled my car into gear and cursed again. We didn’t need a mess just now. We’d taken a step forward by discovering that Vanessa Davila existed. Now we were running backward.
I accelerated out onto Grande Avenue and turned on my emergency lights. The street was deserted, and I straddled the center line, giving myself all the choice there could be.
The town seemed to drag on forever until I broke free on County Road 43, heading up the hill toward the intersection with the state highway. The road was wide and clear, and I accelerated until an out-of-round front tire began to shake the steering wheel.
State Highway 78 split the northern part of the county as it came in from the northwest, dropping down past the airport and out toward the tiny hamlet of San Pasquale to the east. Ned Baca’s Bar N B Ranch straddled the county line, something that I’m sure drove the assessors of the two counties nuts.
Just west of Baca’s front gate, State 78 plunged down through a series of roller-coaster spills as it paralleled the dry washes and arroyos cut deep into the limestone and sand. No cow with any brains grazed there. It was colorful, bleak country-the kind of place where tourists pulled off the road to snap panoramic pictures to send home to Aunt Minnie to prove that, by God, they’d been where other people weren’t.
I crested a hill and saw a sea of headlights leading down into one of the deeper draws. It looked as if every car in Posadas County was linked nose to tail, forming an enormous westbound traffic jam. Leading the parade were the running lights of two school buses, and behind the buses were the winking emergency lights of a patrol car.
Deputy Mears had faced the same impressive confrontation, and he’d pulled to a stop squarely in the center of the highway. I pulled up behind him, turning my car diagonally across the highway.
With heavy flashlight in hand, I got out of the car and trudged down the pavement.
With a sigh of relief, I saw that the two school buses were undamaged. In fact, despite the awesome display of rubberneckers, the accident appeared to involve a single late-model pickup truck that had tangled with a boulder the size of a house.
Tom Mears was working inside the cab of the pickup truck with three other men, and Martin Holman was doing his best to hold a light for them. Stub Moore, the driver of one of the school buses, was standing by the door of the first school bus, and I hurried over toward him. They sure as hell didn’t need me in the way over by the wreck.
“Did you see this, Stub?”
A sea of eager faces craned from the bus, and I motioned for Moore to close the door of the bus. He did, and then said, “Yep. They passed me a ways back, before the Baca place. In fact, it was about where the sheriff was parked. They wasn’t going all that fast. And they was a ways ahead of me by the time we got here. But it looked to me like they might have fell asleep. Just kind of drifted off to the right, and then pow.” He smacked his fist. “Right through the fence and into that rock.”
“No swerve or anything?”
“No, sir. Just drifted over, like I said.”
“Who was it, do you know? Did you recognize the vehicle?” I turned and looked ahead toward the wreck. The vehicle was a tangle, resting at odds with the boulder and the highway. It had hit solidly and bounced sideways.
“I’d guess it to be the Wilton boy’s truck.”
I grimaced. Who was in the truck didn’t matter just then, and I stepped back away from the bus and scanned the long line of traffic. “All right. Look, let’s get you out of here.” I paused as an ambulance crested the hill from Posadas. “As soon as that ambulance has parked, pull your bus as far over to the left as possible and walk it on by.”
“You got it.”
And as the buses passed, every face was pasted to a window. In another minute, Eddie Mitchell arrived in civilian clothes, and I gratefully passed traffic control off to him. Within three minutes, the spectators were gone and the deputies had room to work.
From the first tire marks off the pavement, the pickup truck had traveled 151 feet before it struck the corner of the limestone boulder’s flat face. There were no skid marks, no indication that the driver had yanked the steering wheel. Like a guided missile, the vehicle had tracked straight and true.
After being unlucky enough to fall asleep, the driver had bargained with fate pretty well. The pickup was less than a year old, with all the options. The air bag in the steering wheel had deployed just right and his seatbelt and shoulder harness had been snug. From all appearances, the truck had been traveling nearly sixty miles an hour when it had struck the rock, but the driver had been pillowed enough that the collapsing cab hadn’t cut him to pieces or crushed him to pudding.
His buddy hadn’t done so well. The truck had struck the rock face just to the right of center. If he’d been awake, the passenger had had one brief moment when his head-on view was nothing but limestone. The truck didn’t have a passenger air bag, and if the passenger had been wearing his seatbelt, it hadn’t followed him out of the truck. He’d gone ballistic and after blasting through the powdered windshield had made solid contact with the limestone rock. If the truck hadn’t bounced to the left after the impact, the kid would have landed right back on the crushed hood.
I winced and turned away. Martin Holman had surrendered his place to the EMTs, and he grabbed my arm.
“It looks like just the two of them,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Are you going to call Estelle, or do you want me to?”
“I’ll do it,” I said. As I turned to walk back to 310, I wondered if Vanessa Davila had been in one of the cars that had filed by the wrec
kage, or if hers had been one of the faces pressed against the bus window. The thought had never occurred to me to step up into the bus and check. I stopped and turned to Holman.
“You don’t need me here,” I said. “We’re staking out a place at the trailer park for a young girl who was seen with Maria Ibarra earlier. We had information that she might have been at the game.” I nodded down the now-dark highway. “While you people are finishing up here, I’m going to see if I can corral her.”
“You’ll be back at the office later tonight?”
“Yes.”
Holman took a step closer and touched my elbow again. “No, I mean…really. You’ll be at the office?”
I looked at the sheriff for a long minute, and then nodded again. “If the kid we’re after isn’t home by now, there’s no point in sticking around the rest of the night watching. I’ll be at the office.”
“Okay, because we need to talk.”
“If I’m not there when you get back, just give me a call.”
Holman smiled and his eyes narrowed. “I’ve been doing that all day, Bill.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that. I climbed into 310 and headed back toward Posadas. Less than three miles from town, Estelle’s unmarked county car flashed by, and my radio barked a couple of times. She’d seen me and could figure out easily enough where I was headed.
I reflected that Martin Holman had handled himself with surprising competence. Of course, it was a simple enough traffic accident, but still he’d managed pretty well. And then I realized that I was brooding not so much about Holman’s performance, but about having to explain my own.
Posadas was buzzing when I drove back into town. I slowed to my usual crawl, window down and radio low. “All right, Vanessa, where the hell are you?” I said.
21
I idled past Jan’s Pizza Parlor, looking at cars and crowds. The place was hopping, and I didn’t recognize many of the faces. I wouldn’t have even if I had been able to see them clearly. New generations of kids were passing through the school so fast that I had long since given up trying to keep track of them all.
Posadas was a tiny place by most standards. Still, I was discovering that it was startlingly easy to grow out of touch.
All four of my own kids had graduated from Posadas High School, and back then when I saw a kid on the street, odds were ten to one that I would recognize him-and probably in eight of those cases I’d also know the parents, know what the father did or didn’t do for a living, know what the closet skeletons were.
Now I was lucky to recognize one out of ten. And that included the two victims of the truck crash that night. I’d heard Stub Moore mention the name, and it had meant nothing to me. Nor had a quick glimpse of the kid’s ashen face as he was strapped onto the stretcher. All I’d seen of the passenger was a lump under a blanket. But I was content that I’d find out in due time who they were, and I knew that they’d be just two more faces in a passing crowd.
I swung around the back of the restaurant and parked the patrol car next to the Dumpster. The service entrance was unlocked and I slipped inside.
The smell of fresh pizza and all its possible toppings hit me like a club.
Crowded though the restaurant was, the atmosphere was subdued. The patrons didn’t know whether to celebrate the winning game they’d seen or mourn for a lost classmate. But folks eat at both wakes and weddings, so what the hell. The pizza soothed either way.
“Sir?”
I turned and waved a hand in recognition at Jan’s assistant manager-whose name promptly escaped me. I handed her a photocopied yearbook picture of Vanessa Davila. “Have you noticed her in here tonight?”
The young lady, a short, stocky, well-manicured gal who looked like she could work sixteen-hour shifts back to back, squinted at the photo and shook her head. “But then, we’ve been really busy, you know? She could have been in here a dozen times and I wouldn’t have seen her.”
I nodded, stepped up closer to one of the cash registers, and scanned the faces in the restaurant. There was no Vanessa.
The same was true at the other pizza joint, and at the convenience store. I drove down to the Ranchero, but trailer number three was still dark, with Mama asleep somewhere in the back.
I was no longer feeling gracious. I parked 310 and left the door open so I’d have some light. This time, Mrs. Davila took her sweet time. I knocked, pounded, rang the bell-and finally heard muffled footsteps.
Mrs. Davila opened the door and surveyed me with complete disgust.
“Did your daughter make it home yet, ma’am?”
“What?” There it was again, the automatic bastion of the deaf or the dull.
“Is your daughter here?” I kept my voice down and worked hard at keeping the frustration out of it.
“Does it look like she’s here?”
“I don’t know, ma’am. I can’t see into your home.”
She snorted and stepped to one side. “Well, then, come on in and see for yourself. She’s not here.”
Ordinarily I wouldn’t have bothered to press the point-and I didn’t think that Mrs. Davila expected my response-but it was the middle of the night, and I had nothing better to do.
“Thanks, I will,” I said, and stepped past her. “Where do you think she’s staying? With one of her friends in town?”
“I don’t know,” Mrs. Davila said, her voice winding up and down as if the whole thing was an unfathomable mystery. “I told you that before.”
I stood in the middle of the tiny, narrow living room and surveyed the place. The ten-by-twelve room didn’t offer much space for decorating. But it was clean and neat, even heated in winter…a hell of a lot more than Maria Ibarra had been looking forward to.
“Mrs. Davila, how old is your daughter?”
“What?”
“How old is Vanessa?”
The hesitation that followed was a bit too long for a mother, even one who’d given up. “Fourteen next month.”
“Fourteen.” I turned and looked at the woman. “And at fourteen she comes and goes as she likes? When she likes?”
The woman didn’t answer my question, but instead asked, “What do you want her for? I deserve to know that.”
“We need to talk to her about one of her friends. We told you that before.”
“Well, she’s not here. You can search the place if you want. She’s not here.”
“All right,” I said. “I’d like to take a look, with your permission.” That wasn’t what Mrs. Davila wanted to hear, but I didn’t wait for another invitation. I had no warrant, and it was my word against hers. The opportunity was there and I took it.
I sidled down the narrow hallway, past the closet door and the doors for the furnace and the front bathroom and then, on the opposite side, a small bedroom. I would have gone further, but there was no need.
Vanessa Davila was sitting in a chair by the window of her little bedroom, rocking back and forth, tears streaming down her face. She was hugging a huge stuffed skunk. She looked up, saw me, and buried her face in the skunk’s silky fur. Her body, so large that it overflowed the chair in all directions, shook with her sobbing.
I didn’t go in, but turned and beckoned Mrs. Davila. I was acutely aware of Estelle Reyes-Guzman’s absence. If she hadn’t been busy investigating a traffic fatality, I would have headed for the telephone and let her come and unravel the mess.
Mrs. Davila ducked her head in either relief or embarrassment and shuffled down the hallway until she was within arm’s length. I reached out a hand and rested it lightly on her shoulder.
“Mrs. Davila, now listen to me. I know this is hard for you and your daughter, but we really have to talk to Vanessa. And it would be so much easier if you went along.”
“She never did nothing…”
“I know that, Mrs. Davila. We’re after information, is all. Just give us an hour or so, all right?”
“I got to come, too?”
I nodded. “We really need you to b
e there. Your daughter’s underage. She needs you. She really does.”
It was obvious that Vanessa certainly needed something. Mrs. Davila coaxed and got a response that was an odd mixture of rattlesnake venom and abject misery. The two of them slipped into Spanish and left me far behind.
At last, Vanessa rose out of her chair, still holding Sammy Skunk. Through lids puffy from crying, she regarded me as if I were the cause of all her misery. Still, she shuffled across the bedroom toward the door.
I back-pedaled out of her way, taking a step down the hall so she could walk by. Just as she reached the doorway, she turned and flung the skunk into the room. The rejected, soggy thing hit the wall near the head of the bed and tumbled into a corner.
“I’ll drive you down and then bring you both back home,” I said, and Mrs. Davila nodded.
“My coat’s in the kitchen.” She didn’t say anything about a coat for Vanessa. The girl was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, and I could see her bare ankles above her soiled and stretched athletic shoes.
“Are you going to be all right?” I asked as Vanessa reached the front door. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t what I got.
Without a backward glance, Vanessa yanked the door open and stepped out into the brisk night. I followed, but she was beyond reach. She ignored the patrol car and set off across the open spaces of the trailer park at a wild gallop.
I bellowed something but I was shouting at the darkness. Vanessa Davila might have weighed enough to squash the scales, but she was only fourteen years old and determined as hell. The last glimpse I had of her was her broad back disappearing around the end of the dark mobile home in slot 12.
Mrs. Davila stood in the doorway, her hands tightly clasped.
“Do you know where she might be going?”
She shook her head. “She doesn’t talk to me anymore,” she said.
“She’s going to talk to us,” I said, and forced myself to take the three steel steps down to the car one at a time.
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