He made a strange gurgling noise, as if he was choking on his own spit. He sagged back against the safe, both hands on top of his head.
“Have you ever made that mistake?” I asked gently. He shook his head without moving his hands. “Ever reach for the wrong box? I mean, the guns are similar-the ammo is similar.” I reached across the bench and retrieved the empty casing by slipping my pen down its mouth. Sure enough, the head stamp in the brass base announced.30–30 Winchester.
“No.”
“Did you ever run short of.32 cases and blow out a few.30–30’s to get you by? I mean, you could do that.” I was no reloader, but knew enough folks who did, and knew that they were always experimenting with this and that, fashioning cases that couldn’t be purchased commercially. He shook his head again. “Ever loan these guns to someone who might do that?” There was that chance, of course-the chance that somehow, Mo Arnett was innocent as the driven snow.
I reached out a hand and rested it on Mark’s shoulder. “We need to talk with your son, Mark. We need to talk with Mo.”
“You better find that little shit before I do,” he threatened again, the only thing he knew how to do just then. He was of the old-fashioned beat-the-crap-out-of-the-kid school of child rearing-a school that sometimes had my sympathy. But sometimes that mentality just wasn’t enough.
“No, that’s not what’s going to happen, Mark.” My grip on his shoulder rocked him a little, ameliorating the sharpness of my words. “Let me tell you what is going to happen. One of the deputies will be back with a warrant. We’ll use that whether you think one is required or not-and let me tell you. We appreciate your cooperation. But we’ll have a warrant. Then, this room will be sealed off, inventoried, all that happy shit. The two rifles will be taken into evidence, along with all the ammo for them. We’ll have photos up the whazoo. Prints on everything. Interviews, depositions. You know the drill. Between now and the arrival of the warrant, that door,” and I turned and nodded at the entry that Deputy Torrez so effectively blocked, “will be sealed with a Sheriff’s Seal. You won’t come in here. None of your family will. Not until we’re finished.
“And if we’re wrong in all this, and Mo walks through the front door in five minutes with a hell of a perfect alibi, with a hell of a good reason for touching your rifles, I’ll be the first to show up and grovel with an apology, Mark.“ I smiled at him. “I’ll buy you a case of beer. Whatever the apology takes.” Safe promise, I thought. But it sounded good, and I saw Mark Arnett wilt a little.
“What do I do?” The stuffing had been knocked out of him, the umbrage diluted. We were making progress.
“First, we want Mo found, we want him safe. So go fetch your wife. Then decide what attorney you’re going to use, and get him over here to assist you, to assist Mo. Trust me on this…if he’s charged with anything, you’re going to need all the help you can get. So start early.”
“He’s just a kid, for Christ’s sake.”
“Yep, he is. Or was.” I opened the safe again, touching it gingerly by one corner of the massive door. “Are you missing any guns?”
Mark Arnett’s glance was perfunctory. “No. Everything’s there.”
“Small thanks for that, at least.”
“There was one in the center console of the Pontiac,” Arnett said. His face had drained of color. “He don’t know anything about that one.”
“You better hope he doesn’t,” I said, not the least bit optimistic. “What was it?”
“A.45 Springfield.”
“Loaded?” Why would it be there if it wasn’t?
“One loaded magazine. Nothing in the chamber.”
I groaned inwardly as Mo Arnett’s slippery slope clicked a few degrees steeper. Someone, most likely Mo, had used the not-so-thoughtfully hidden key to the gun room. Why he’d decided to take a shot at the grader-and maybe the operator in it, I certainly didn’t know. If the kids’ stories were to be believed, Mo was humiliated by Larry Zipoli. Most folks could take a little humiliation. But now, someone had managed to open the safe, unless dad was so careless that he left it unlocked. That someone was now fleeing in his mother’s car. And we could add the ‘A and D’ to the BOLO.
Chapter Thirty-three
Estelle Reyes held out the photograph, and I took it reluctantly, standing just inside my office door with about thirty other things that demanded my attention at that moment. The last thing I wanted was to be sidetracked by a treatise on religious art. Who the hell knew where Mo Arnett was at that moment, or what the kid might do next. Jim Raught’s saint panels weren’t going to fetch the boy home. But I could tell by the look on the young lady’s face that she’d been captivated by that puzzle, if in fact it was one. Maybe the muse of the three saints had grabbed her attention.
“The attorney is sending us a photograph of the original retablo,” she said. “A good series was taken for a magazine article not long before the theft. It shows,” and she leaned forward to point out a neat circle she had drawn with an orange hi-liter around St. Ignacio’s left sandal. “That margin is a portion of the gold leaf. And you can see where it’s been mended at one time.”
“I can?” One gold leaf looked pretty much like another to me, but I could see some small fracture lines that appeared to interrupt the flow of metal.
She persisted. “Sophía Tournál is sending an enlargement, but from her description, I would guess that this is much the same.”
“Sophía…”
“My fiancé’s aunt. The lawyer.”
“Much the same? It damn well better be more than that if we’re going to make time for this.”
“Yes, sir.” She drew another photo from her briefcase. “This is the enlargement Ernie made for me from the art book. The damage to the gold border is quite clear in this.”
I glanced, compared, nodded, and looked at my watch. Time was on Mo’s side. The saints could wait.
“More important is that the work is attributed to Orosco on the back,” Estelle persisted. “The three retablos were actually framed as one unit in 1919, and the framer documented Orosco’s artistry by writing his name in India ink on the back, just beside the new frame.”
“Okay.”
“The original retablos disappeared in the art theft with several other important pieces four years ago. No trace since.”
I handed the photos back to her. “I’m impressed, although not with the timing of all this. Look, we’ve got a missing kid, maybe armed and dangerous. The saints can look after themselves for a little while longer.”
“Did Mr. Arnett have any notions?” Her easy change of subject suggested that she was easy with relegating the saints to the back burner.
“None. So we start digging. Are you ready for that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m not suggesting that we’re going to forget all this.” I waved a hand at the photos she was sorting back into her briefcase. “But right now, the good judge is signing a warrant for us, and that’s where we’re headed…to take Mo’s life apart and see what we can find.”
She nodded, almost eagerly sure enough, but I could see the resignation just the same.
A few minutes later, with a fresh warrant in hand, we talked with his parents, now sitting hand-in-hand on the living room sofa while officers upset their household. Mark had given up blustering and promising a punch, and now had deflated a couple of sizes. We talked with Mo’s little sister, and finally elicited from fiesty little Maureen the evaluation that Mo was decidedly “a creep.” Of course, to a fourth grader, most of the world was full of creeps. Mindy ‘Mom’ Arnett’s favored expression was, “I just don’t understand this.”
We discovered that Mo’s life wasn’t an open book. That was scary. Mo Arnett was truly a stranger in his own house. We had heard lots of helpful gossip from others.
“He’ll find shelter with a friend or relative.”
“He’ll retreat to a favorite private spot-a hide-a-way.”
“He’ll try to cross t
he border.”
“He’ll find a quiet place and kill himself.”
“He’ll…”
No one, including his immediate family, could give us an intelligent guess about the boy’s intentions or location. As far as we could discover, Maurice “Mo” Arnett wasn’t buying into any of the neighbors’ predictions. While every available eyeball was looking for a gold Pontiac, license Charlie Lincoln Thomas four nine nine, we kept plugging away closer to home.
A sweep of the boy’s room showed us nothing beyond a nest for a surprisingly neat teenager, and that in itself made me uneasy. Mo Arnett had a love affair with the Chevrolet Corvette and old steam locomotives. A lad of contrasts, for sure. His choice of art included sixteen framed photographs of Corvette models from the car’s clumsy introduction in the early 50s to the latest heart-thumping twin-turbo version. To compliment those, six photos of huge late-vintage steam locomotives were gathered in framed elegance over the head of his bed.
The clothes in his closet were orderly, and there was nothing hidden under the socks and underwear in his bureau. If he’d left with no intention of returning, it wasn’t clear what he might have taken with him.
A student desk nestled under one window with a view out across the street. Sitting at it, I had a clear view of the Zipolis’ to the right, and Raught’s to the left. Did Mo sit here and stew, watching the fat man go about his home chores, beer can habitually in hand? Did he watch the other kids gather when it was time for a boating and skiing expedition? Did he watch Jim Raught grubbing among the cacti?
The desk drawers yielded nothing beyond the usual-pencils, pen, a calculator, a tiny teddy bear apparently hibernating for a while, a broken ream of printer paper. I sat in the straight-backed chair and regarded the modest computer and its accessories. I was willing to bet that there would be no secrets there, either. “You know how to run this thing?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Turn it on for me.”
She did so, and in a few moments I could see that the list of files appeared as innocuous as everything else in the room. “We’ll want to take this with us and do a thorough search of the drives,” I said. “Dollars to donuts says we won’t find anything, but we have to look.”
A single four-shelf bookcase held a couple dozen slip cases for video games-a conservative collection that leaned toward auto racing-a handful of books that ranged from fantasy to those study guides that students use so they won’t have to read the entire novel, and a modest collection of magazines, again leaning heavily toward muscle cars but with a few model railroading issues thrown into the mix. And true to motif, one shelf showcased a plastic model of a late 70’s era ‘Vette, its hood up to show the chromed engine. At the shelf’s opposite end, sitting on a twelve-inch section of track, was an HO gauge steam locomotive bearing the Santa Fe logo.
We found no journal, no diary, no stash of documents illuminating a teenager’s secret life, no little notebook full of sinister plans or names on a hit list, no Polaroid snapshots of either victims or intended victims. I stood at the end of the double bed, surveying the room. “How sad.”
Estelle looked up from her inventory of the closet. “Sir?”
“This place reminds me of a motel room,” I said. “I think about my own kids and the nightmare my wife or I faced when we ventured into their rooms. I mean, the life of a kid is a messy thing.”
She slid the closet door closed gently. “This closet is where they store their Christmas ornaments,” she said.
“And it should be stuffed with his stuff.” She stepped to one side as I slid the closet doors this way and that, double-checking for myself. I pulled a shoe box down off the shelf and opened it to find a pair of baseball shoes, spikes clean and new. “At least there’s a little something,” I said, and tapped each shoe to dislodge anything that might be stashed inside.
“Sir?”
I turned and glanced at Estelle. She reached out with a toe and touched a drawer pull just showing from under the hem of the bed spread. Flipping the spread up, I saw there were actually two brass pulls a yard apart.
“Isn’t that slick,” I said. The “drawer” was actually a piece of three-quarter inch plywood on drawer glides, and it slid out easily. The HO gauge model train layout on the plywood base was neat and organized-nothing fancy, but large enough that the train would be able to negotiate the twists and turns. The thoughtful builder had even engineered two short folding legs on the front edge for further support when the layout was pulled out. I wondered, at the time that Mark Arnett was building the table for his son, if there had been a spark of warmth and camaraderie there.
Estelle dropped to one knee and leaned on the bed with an elbow, taking a closer look. “Not much use,” she said, and reached out to nudge a dust bunny that threatened to block the track.
“He’s not really here, is he.” I glanced at Estelle. “It reminds me of a kid’s room who’s away at college or something. Neat, clean, and unused. A shrink would probably have a field day. God damn sad.”
Another hour was no help in figuring out the enigma that was Mo Arnett, and after Deputy Tom Mears arrived and collected the computer, we left the house. Estelle had been perfectly willing to remain with the Arnetts, or take on any task that I assigned. Her argument was a good one-there was no point in wasting a certified officer as a babysitter for the family. Nor her either, I reminded her. And I sure as hell didn’t want Miss Reyes driving around by herself, in her own private vehicle, playing cop. Badly as we needed personnel, she’d have to be content to sit and watch.
I stopped the county car at the intersection of Bustos and Grande, and in the rearview mirror watched a small group of kids-maybe ten year olds-trooping out with fists full of junk food.
“Where did he go,” I mused, not expecting an answer.
“Assuming he’s not in a shallow grave somewhere,” Estelle said, and I looked at her in surprise.
“I don’t think so.” I didn’t want to think that. Larry Zipoli’s loss needed to end this tangle. Still, Estelle was right. Mo Arnett might have seen someone fire the shot, and been seen in turn. All the firearm evidence weighed against that, but we’d have to wait on some complex lab analysis by the state lab. I was half certain that Deputy Robert Torrez had been blowing smoke when he said the powder residue in the rifle’s chamber could be matched to the residue welded into the base of the bullet. We sure as hell couldn’t do that.
What we could do, however, and Bob Torrez was working on the task at that very moment, was compare the firing pin impressions-the face of the firing pin itself, compared to the dent in the cartridge’s primer. No two firing pins were microscopically alike, nor were the dents that they left.
Of course we could do that, but what difference did it make? What mattered was the bullet that the coroner had pulled from Larry Zipoli’s skull. It had to match a weapon for us to make progress. I wasn’t sure we could do that, but I sure as hell didn’t want anyone to know I had doubts.
“What?” I prompted. Estelle’s black eyebrows were furrowed in ferocious concentration. She leafed through her notebook as if she’d misplaced something now suddenly become important.
“I was wondering when Mo took off. What’s his head start?”
“Zipoli was killed Tuesday,” I said. “If Mo pulled the trigger, he drove home, dumped the shell casing back in the box, put the rifle away-didn’t clean it. One swipe with a patch would have thrown a good roadblock in our path, but he didn’t do that. I gotta wonder-but maybe he was just spooked. Or confident. That’s what it seems to me. I mean, why return the shell casing? Clever kid. He’s thinking.” I touched my forehead. “But he doesn’t know that he used the wrong cartridges. How about that. Clever, but dumb as a box of rocks.” I ticked off finger tips with my thumb. “He didn’t go to school, but his parents didn’t report him missing. They probably didn’t know. They didn’t pay attention to where he was on Wednesday during the day, but they think he was home on Wednesday night. He ditches school
today, unbeknownst to mom and dad. Sometime today, he takes the car, bound for who the hell knows where.”
“He would have had to leave after his parents both went to work,” Estelle said.
“Certainly, unless the Arnetts were so numb they didn’t bother to check the boy this morning-or open the garage to see that the car is gone. I think it’s likely that he left after they did, though. Mom and Dad go off to work this morning, and the boy is home…we assume.”
There’s a limit to how long you can park at an intersection, even when it’s a cop car. I pulled 310 out of my lane and idled to the curb. Two cars-what amounts to a traffic jam in Posadas-slid by, both drivers looking over at me curiously. Or perhaps my passenger.
“It’s now five forty-five,” I added. “To guess at an answer to your question, the boy could have a nine or ten hour head start. How scary is that. He could be…” I shrugged. “You name it. He could be anywhere.”
“I’m wondering why he waited so long before taking off.”
“Well, think about it. For a while, maybe he thought he’d pulled it off. Keep mum, just like a school kid. He didn’t even have to say, ‘I didn’t do it!’.” I shrugged. “There’s also the possibility that he didn’t know what he did, that somehow, he didn’t even see Larry Zipoli inside that grader. He didn’t walk over to check, and later in the day, when he heard what happened, he’s petrified. He doesn’t know who knows what. We started talking to his buddies today, right? This morning, in fact. We stopped Tom Pasquale out on West Bustos. What time did we do that?”
Damned if she didn’t know right where that particular notebook page was. “Nine fifty-five, sir.”
I reached for my aluminum clip board and scanned my own log for verification. She was right.
“You think young Mr. Pasquale called Mo? I mean, he got stopped by the cops-that’s news, right? That’s good stuff. Call a friend and tell ’em you got stopped for rolling a stop sign on a bike. How cool is that. But Tommy didn’t say that he reached Mo this morning, or that he talked with him.”
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