The remains of Dennis Wilton’s truck sat in the middle of the floor. I walked slowly around it until I reached Estelle, who was sitting on a shop stool off to one side. I thrust my hands in my pockets and stood silently beside her, gazing at the remains.
The truck had hit the rock outcropping so hard that the frame had folded at the spot where cab and bed met, forced downward far enough that the truck actually rested on the two back tires and the bent frame members rather than all four wheels.
I walked around in front and cocked my head. “If it had hit center on, both kids would be dead now, air bag or no,” I said. The left half of the truck’s front, although bent and twisted by the forces tearing at the passenger side, had missed the rock. Incongruous with the rest of the mangled mess, the left headlight and parking light were in perfect condition.
“What year was this thing?” I asked.
“Nineteen ninety-five,” Estelle said. “Just over sixteen thousand miles on the odometer.”
“And the driver said that he dozed off?”
“That’s what he claims.”
“And the House kid must have been asleep. Otherwise he would have had time to make a grab at the steering wheel,” I said. “The bus driver would have seen them swerve. If they traveled more than a hundred feet on the shoulder, and even ripped out a fence, either one of the occupants would have had plenty of time to make a frantic wrench at the wheel.”
“That’s why I ordered the blood test, sir. It’s routine for the autopsy, but I want the driver’s, too.”
“That’s what you wanted to show me?” I said.
“Well, no.” She pushed herself up, moving like she had a crick in her back.
“You need to go home,” I said.
“In a few minutes. Let me show you a couple of things. Then we can both brood on them for a while.”
She walked around the truck and pulled the driver’s-side door open slightly more than it already was. The deflated air bag hung from the core of the steering wheel.
“The bag functioned perfectly, and the driver was wearing his shoulder harness,” Estelle said. “That, combined with most of the force of the impact being on the far side of the truck, accounts for his relatively minor injuries.”
“And there was no air bag on the other side.”
“No, sir. And worse than that, the passenger’s seatbelt wasn’t buckled.”
I leaned against the cab of the truck and squinted at the interior. The dashboard had collapsed back so far that the section including the glove compartment was buried in the fabric of the seat, crushed backward by the heavy V-8 engine as it crashed off its mounts. When the firewall folded backward, the cab of the truck had ovalized, with the roof folding upward.
There wasn’t much blood inside. Ryan House had been fired through the windshield during the first microseconds of the impact, taking out part of the roof framework with him.
“He had his belt on,” I said, and pointed. The belt was indeed deployed, tangled in part of the dashboard so that the retract mechanism couldn’t reel it in.
“But it wasn’t buckled, sir.”
I turned to look at Estelle and she lifted an eyebrow a fraction. “That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Did the buckle fail?” I slid into what remained of the driver’s seat and pulled the passenger-side belt free from the twisted steel and plastic. The shiny chrome buckle insert was undamaged. The slots stamped through the metal for the locking lug were clean and unmarred.
Estelle reached out and pointed at the edges of the larger cutout with her index finger. “If the buckle had been securely latched, and then torn from the locking clasp, we would expect to see some marking on the metal. There would have to be some distortion if that happened. If the belt itself gave way, we’d see obvious evidence of tearing or stretching of the fabric.”
“Yes, we would,” I said. I pulled the belt toward the center and inserted the buckle into the lock. It snapped into place with a crisp, definite “click.” I yanked on it, knowing full well that I could never exert the kind of forces generated by a crash. “It feels normal enough to me,” I said. “But who’s to tell? Actually, the way these things are made, I’m not sure that buckle failure is even possible if the thing snaps in place properly.”
“I wouldn’t think so,” Estelle said. “I’ve never seen one fail that was properly latched…at least not on newer vehicles. The forces just aren’t there. It’s not like a jet plane crashing into the side of a mountain at six hundred miles an hour.”
“And even in airplane crashes, it’s not uncommon for investigators to find victims still strapped in their seats, hundreds of yards from the plane. The seat tears out of the floor, but the belt doesn’t fail.” I shook my head. “No, the most likely answer is that the thing wasn’t latched properly,” I said. “Ryan House wasn’t paying attention and didn’t push it in far enough.”
“That’s the most likely explanation.”
She beckoned me out of the truck. “It just seems to me that there are several possibilities. But all things being equal, the explanation you gave is the most likely. Having the buckle itself fail just isn’t in the numbers, sir. The belt was not fastened properly and came loose at the critical moment of impact. That’s probably what happened.”
I recognized that particular tone of voice, and I turned to frown at Estelle. “You still don’t sound convinced.”
“Well,” she said, “there is a third possibility. Maybe it was fastened properly and was then unlatched.”
“Like maybe Ryan House had dropped something on the floor and was in the process of unbuckling when the accident happened. He never had the time to jam the buckle back in, even if he had thought to do so.”
Estelle nodded. “I’ve done that myself on occasion.”
“I can imagine that maybe House had something in his hands-like a cup of coffee or something-and managed to spill it. He leans forward to get away from it and unbuckles his belt so he can squirm away from the mess.”
“That’s the most likely scenario. But it doesn’t make sense with the way the accident happened. If they were awake and alert, they might let the truck drift off the pavement and onto the shoulder, but not for so long, and certainly not straight as an arrow through a fence without any attempt at correction. After all, the most common pickup truck accident is running off the shoulder, over-correcting, and then flipping. The occupant gets pitched out and crushed by the truck as it rolls. That sure isn’t what happened here.”
I straightened my back with a grunt and rested my hand on the side of the truck’s bed. “And that’s what has been bothering you all night?”
“Yes, sir. Dennis Wilton says that he fell asleep. Maybe they both did. Maybe it’s as simple as that. Maybe it’s as simple as Ryan House not properly snapping his seatbelt.”
“The wreck would have killed him anyway, probably,” I said. “That’s small consolation, but it’s true.”
We stood and looked at the cab of the mangled truck. Finally, Estelle sighed. “Yes, sir, that’s true.”
She stepped away from the truck and walked around the front. “Can I show you something else that bothers me?”
“Sure.” As I joined her, I could smell the tangy odor of gasoline and antifreeze mixing in a puddle under the truck, soaking into the sand that one of the county employees had spread on the floor when the truck had been brought in.
Estelle knelt by the right front side of the truck, reached out, and pointed at the tangle of metal that had been the fender. The front end had collapsed to within inches of the door post, crushing up in sharp, torn metal that folded back on itself in waves, like bizarre yuletide ribbon candy. Buried in the folds were bits and pieces of rock, headlight rim, grille, and front bumper.
I bent down with my hands on my knees, cricked my neck back so I could see through the lower portion of my bifocals, and pursed my lips.
“This, sir, is flat black paint.”
26
“Well, I’ll be damned,�
�� I breathed. “Let me see that.” I went down on one knee, at considerable price, and got close. The truck had originally been metallic blue-a bright, deep tone a squirt or two lighter than royal blue. The primer under the blue was gray. Nothing else on the truck was black, flat or otherwise, except that one smear.
The pickup had been hit at one time or another by something carrying a coat of black paint. One sharp dig was visible in the metal. The rest of the impact had been obliterated by the later damage done by the rock outcropping.
“What hit him?” I said.
Estelle smiled, a rare thing in itself. She put one hand on my right elbow and ushered me along toward the front of the wreckage. “Right here, you can see the mounting bracket, sir. Or what’s left of it. It’s easier to see on the other side where there was less damage.”
“A grille guard, you mean?” And that’s exactly what she meant. The mounting brackets were bolted to the frame. The right side bracket was twisted and ruined like the rest of the hardware that had lost the fight. The mount on the driver’s side was still in one piece, flat black paint and all.
“It’s been recently removed,” Estelle said. “On this side you can see the wrench marks. They scuff the black paint, and the marks haven’t been there long enough to collect road dirt or rust.”
“We don’t pay you enough,” I mused. And then, because it was easier, I let myself slump back until I sat down on the hard, cold concrete. “What you’re leading me to think is that this is the truck that smacked Wes Crocker.”
“I’ve considered that,” Estelle said. She knelt down on one knee and rested her right hand on the bottom rim of the undamaged left headlight. Her fingernails rapped a quiet dance on the glass of the light. “Everything fits, even this.” She reached out and for a moment her body blocked my view of what she was doing. When she turned around, she held out a small object to me.
I reached out and took it. The little black plastic trumpet was as undamaged as the headlamp. “A deer whistler,” I said. “And let me guess. The other side is missing one.”
“The other side is missing, period,” Estelle said. “There’s no way to even tell anymore what piece of metal held the little plastic mounting bracket. We didn’t get that lucky.”
I dug out my notebook and rearranged myself on the floor so I could attend to flipping the pages without toppling over. “Wes Crocker was hit sometime around eight P.M. yesterday,” I said. “It’s a nice theory, but it doesn’t fit the timing of the events. This pickup truck hit the rock at thirty-two minutes after midnight.”
Estelle nodded and waited.
“And so,” I said, “if they were going to a night football game that started at seven all the way over in Sierra Linda, why would they still be in town at eight?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“If the two boys had decided to go to the game, they would have been out of Posadas long before that in order to be in Sierra Linda in time for the kickoff.”
“That’s if they decided to go to the game, sir. Only one of them was in school yesterday.”
“Which one was that?” I asked.
“Dennis Wilton, sir. He was one of the front office aides.”
I frowned and looked back through my notes. “I didn’t write that down.”
“There was no particular reason you should have, sir,” Estelle said. “You did remind Glen Archer that you didn’t want students handling material that we asked for. The Wilton boy was the student aide who photocopied the parking permit list for us.”
“Son of a bitch,” I said, more in irritation at my memory than anything else. “And Ryan House was absent from school yesterday?”
“Yes, sir. He was.”
I leaned back and put both hands on the cold concrete floor behind me. “Let’s assume again that this is the vehicle in question…its passenger misses the day in school, its owner doesn’t. So we assume that sometime in the afternoon, the two boys get together, for whatever reason.”
“That’s easily done, sir. Dennis Wilton only attended classes until noon. He normally works from one to six every school day at Guilfoil Auto Parts.”
“All right, so he even has time to go to work yesterday.”
“He didn’t, though.”
“You checked?” I asked, knowing it was a waste of breath. Estelle nodded. “So the pair link up sometime in the afternoon, perhaps. We don’t have a clue what they did between the time Dennis Wilton left school and the time of the encounter with Wes Crocker. If that happened at all, we can then suppose that they hightailed it out of town. If they wanted a place to hide, then an out-of-town football game is as good as anyplace.”
“The complication is the grille guard, sir.”
I nodded. “If it was on the truck at eight P.M., when Crocker was hit, then it was taken off sometime before midnight thirty-two, when they crashed the truck into the rock.”
And that was as far as my fatigued brain would go. I put the notebook back in my breast pocket and turned over on my knees so I could push myself upright. That accomplished, I brushed the dirt and sand off my trousers and hands.
“I don’t like any of this,” I said. “And I’ll tell you why. No matter which way we go, there’s a fork in the road.”
“For example…”
I shrugged. “If this is the truck that hit Wes Crocker, and if one of the boys was driving it at the time-and by the way, we don’t know that for sure yet-then we’ve got a fork in the road.” I pointed off to the right. “One choice says that they meant to hit him.”
Estelle leaned her head the other way and finished the thought. “And the other route says it was an accident.”
“That’s right. If it was intentional, then we’ve got ourselves a wonderful mess, with all kinds of nasty questions. And lots of forks in the road, by the way. And if it was an accident…” I shrugged. “Either way, they took off. Maybe it took as much as half an hour in someone’s garage or backyard to yank that bent grille guard off and clean up the truck.” I waved a hand at the right side. “They missed a little slash of black just above the scrape where the guard bent back and dinged the fender. And then, because it’s a tiny town and they know the cops will be out looking for them, they slip out to the east, figuring to get themselves lost in the sporting crowd. If somebody asks, hell, they were at the game all night.”
“We’re not that stupid, sir.”
“God, I hope not. But kids think we are. And right now, I’m so tired, I think I am.”
“We don’t have to make a move right away,” Estelle said. “If this is the truck, it’ll be around for a while. I’ve got some fingerprints to match, and I was able to pull a paint tracing off that black mark on the fender. We can send it to the lab along with paint from Crocker’s bicycle. That will give us an absolute match. And later today”-she held up the deer whistler-“I’m going to ask Bob Torrez to take a microscope to all this pot metal and see if he can find the spot where the right-side whistler might have been. If we can make some kind of match there, that’s it.”
“It’s part of it, anyway,” I said wearily. “If this is the truck, we don’t know why they hit Crocker and ran. And if it’s not the truck, we’re no further ahead than we were.” I glanced at my watch. “I’m going to swing by the hospital and see what time they’re going to release Crocker. I’ll put him in Camille’s old room.”
“The one with all the stuffed toys?”
I grimaced. “Uh-huh. That way, he might not want to get too comfortable and stay too long.”
“It’s really sweet of you to do this,” Estelle said, and I shot a quick glare at her, sure she was kidding. She wasn’t.
“What’s the choice?” I said, and started toward the door of the garage. “You ready for some breakfast?”
She declined, claiming “a couple of things to do.” I didn’t know what, but I didn’t twist her arm. My little notebook told me that I’d been going around in circles since Thursday evening, when I’d eaten too much green chili at
the Don Juan de Oñate. I was ready to fall off the carousel.
Estelle locked the door of the steel building and was driving out of the county yard before I’d even untangled my keys. The patrol car started instantly and settled into its usual smooth idle, waiting for me to select a gear.
With my hand on the gear lever, I frowned and looked over my shoulder at the little trail of dust from Estelle’s car.
“What fingerprints?” I said aloud. She had told me that she had some fingerprints to match. I looked ahead toward the garage where the broken truck rested. There had been two occupants. One was headed toward the autopsy slab; the other was riding a wave of sedative at the hospital. We knew who had been driving, and who had gone flying.
I frowned again. There was little comfort in knowing that if Estelle Reyes-Guzman had wanted me to know about fingerprints, she would have told me.
27
I went home and slept for three hours. That was something of a record, and it should have rejuvenated me. It didn’t. I awoke feeling awful, with ears ringing like the carillons in the 1812 Overture and a vague, general ache that puddled in an arc above and behind my left ear.
I showered in the hottest water my aging hot water heater could brew, and then managed to shave without cutting my throat-although that might have been an improvement.
Breakfast didn’t hold much of an attraction, so I settled for coffee, taking a steaming mug with me to Posadas General Hospital.
Sometime during my three-hour nap, a couple of ideas had begun cooking inside my thick skull. One in particular had leaked to the surface and refused to go away. If an answer was to be had, Wesley Crocker had it…and then several forks in our tangled road would close like magic.
I walked down the hall to Crocker’s room and was surprised to see Ernie Wheeler sitting outside the door. Even dispatching was more exciting than counting floor, wall, and ceiling tiles. Posadas General was as quiet as the village it was named for…no one shouting “stat,” no crash carts charging down the hall, no buxom nurses threatening to heave their bosoms out of their white uniforms.
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