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 takes 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 here, 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.”
Bea didn’t rise from her swivel chair, but favored Estelle with a polite smile. “I know her great uncle, Reuben Fuentes.”
“Ah,” I said. Interesting that Bea hadn’t directed the comment to Estelle, instead speaking as if the girl were a piece of furniture. Maybe the grudge against Reuben extended to the next generation as well. Bea no doubt knew that over the years, Reuben had swiped more base course gravel from county and state piles than anyone else, and had been caught a time or two. I guess that when the crusher fines were stockpiled right beside the highway, the temptation was too strong to ignore. That might be what Bea was remembering.
“So…first I need to talk with Tony. He’s buried under paperwork?”
“Actually, he went over to Marilyn’s for a little bit this morning. Bill, this is all so terrible, so senseless. Tell me it didn’t really happen.”
“I wish I could. Maybe you’d give Tony a shout and see when he’ll be able to break loose. And if it’s not a good time, I would think that you’re going to be able to help us as well or better than anyone else.” She was the office czarina, after all, with her finger on the Highway Department’s pulse.
She nodded and picked up the radio microphone, turning up the volume a little as she did so. “Base to one. Copy?” Silence ensued and she repeated the message without success. “He’s not in the truck. Should I call the house?”
“Well, we hate to interrupt ’em. But look, two things right away, and as I said, you know as much or more than anyone else. Larry’s personnel file. We’re going to need a look at that.” I knew that was thin ice, and Bea’s reaction was immediate.
“His personnel folder?”
“Or whatever version of that you have in this office. There’ll be something in the county manager’s office too, but I need to see anything you have.”
“Personnel?”
“Yes, ma’am. I don’t think that we’ll need to take it out of the office.” Bea could figure out for herself that Larry Zipoli’s life was about to come under the microscope.
She pushed herself to her feet, closing the center drawer of her desk tightly as if concerned that I might peak at her secrets. “This is just so awful. What else will you be needing?”
“It’s my understanding that Larry took one of the department trucks home at night.”
“Yes.” She frowned. “He’s one of the senior men, Sheriff. He needs to be able to respond during emergencies.” Her tone said clearly, with just a touch of petulance, as if somehow I might be judging her department’s procedure, “You already knew all that.” She stepped over to the window and pointed. “The white Dodge Ram, over by the fence. That’s Larry’s.”
“Out at Highland yeste
rday-he didn’t have the truck out there with him.”
“Well, no. I mean, it’s what, a few blocks? In the morning, he was out on 43, and drove back to find a part before going out Highland. The lower muffler clamp had burned through. He fixed that just before lunch, and that darn old thing still broke down on him and blew a hydraulic hose. One of the boys ran it out to him after lunch.”
“Do you remember the time?”
“Oh, maybe two o’clock or so.”
“As early as one-thirty?”
“Not that early. Maybe even two thirty. Louis had to make one up real quick, and that took him a few minutes, then to run it over.” She nodded. “No, I’d say closer to two-thirty.”
“This is Louis Duenas?”
“Yes…but now wait. Louis made up the hose, but he’s busy working on the truck. I think Mike ran it out.” She nodded. “I’m sure he did.”
“Mike Zamora?”
She nodded.
“We’ll need to talk with him, Bea.”
“Oh, my,” she sighed, and turned to scrutinize the large white board on the wall behind her desk. “He and Dougy Burgess went to Deming to pick up a whole raft of parts from Pitts Diesel. They’ll be back this afternoon. I gotta tell you, none of us are real excited about working today. This whole thing has been such a shock. I mean, Larry? My gosh, I’ve known him and Marilyn for Lord only knows how long. I don’t know what she’ll do now.”
“Bad times,” I said sympathetically. “We’ll all do what we can. I’ll catch up with Mike later, when he gets back. You have the keys to Larry’s truck?” There had been a set of keys that went into the evidence envelope along with the rest of the items on the victim’s person, and I assumed they included one for the Dodge.
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