The Fourth Time is Murder pc-15

by Steven F Havill

  “Not to worry,” Estelle said, digging out one of her own business cards. “If I’m in the middle of something, I just don’t answer the thing. And you can always reach me through Dispatch.”

  “I met…Gayle, is it? What an elegant gal she is. And she’s the sheriff’s wife, I’m told.”

  “Yes.” But Estelle’s attention was drawn to the numbers on the back of the reporter’s business card. “Excuse me a moment,” she said, and walked to the nearest window, a deep-silled, narrow expanse of stained glass rising nearly eight feet to an arched top. She laid the business card on the smooth white sill, and then opened the manila envelope, drawing out the photocopy of the slip of paper found in Felix Otero’s pocket.

  “Ay, now that’s interesting,” she whispered to herself. Even simple digits were tiny windows themselves, opening secrets. The digits 8, 5, and 7 especially invited the individual strokes of the pen. Estelle slid the two numbers close together. In both cases, the 8 was formed with not a single graceful stroke, but by joining two somewhat angular circles, one perched atop the other. The 5 included two features, a separate stroke for the bottom portion that included a tail looping back to cross the downward stroke, and a second horizontal mark forming the top plane of the letter. The 7 was more generic, save for the horizontal stroke that crossed the stem in the European fashion.

  She realized that Bolles was standing off to one side, watching her. She slid the copy back in the envelope, and reached out with the card.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” Madelyn Bolles said, making no move to accept. “And keep it. I have the numbers.”

  Estelle slid the card not into her pocket, but into the manila envelope, feeling an odd mixture of emotions. Father Bertrand Anselmo, whom she had known since she was in single digits, hadn’t actually lied to her, but nor had he taken her into his confidence. In another time and place, when there were no other ears to hear, perhaps he would. And perhaps not.

  That the priest would give the Mexican-if it turned out that indeed that’s who Felix Otero was-the telephone number of the village’s most accomplished grapevine cultivator, Betty Contreras, was in itself enough to pique curiosity, although that’s exactly what he had just done with Madelyn Bolles. Perhaps, in his own amused way, he had intended for Estelle to notice.

  “Let’s meet in my office,” Estelle said. “About an hour?”

  “Perfect,” the reporter said.

  “Emilio, thank you,” Estelle called. The old man had returned to his labors, meticulously waxing and polishing the communion rail. He raised a hand in salute.

  “Come back and see us,” he said. “You’re always welcome. You know that.”

  I’m not sure that will always be the case, Estelle thought as she pushed open the heavy door. As her feet touched the gravel of the parking lot, her cell phone buzzed. “Excuse me a second,” she said to the writer, and turned away, walking toward the county car.

  “Estelle, the address checks out,” Gayle Torrez said. “I talked with a Calgary city detective who says that CPL operates out of a double suite at that address. He doesn’t know anything about them, other than that they’re where they say they are. He says that area isn’t one of the high-rent places…just a little mini-mall sort of thing.”

  “That’s a help,” Estelle said.

  “They were supercordial,” Gayle added. “If you need any more information, they’re pleased to cooperate. Anything we need. I have the officer’s name and number when you need it.”

  “Thanks so much,” Estelle said. “You’re the best.”

  She broke the connection and pointed toward the mountain pass behind them. “See you in an hour?”

  “That’s a date,” Madelyn said. She let Estelle leave the parking lot first, and as the undersheriff crested the pass, she saw that the wrecker was finished with its chore of cranking Chris Marsh’s crumpled truck up the mountain. Only Jackie Taber’s vehicle was parked along the highway. Her shift was long since finished, and she hadn’t taken Estelle’s suggestion.

  Estelle’s hand went to the radio mike, but then she thought better of going public. Instead, she pulled off the highway a short distance ahead of Jackie’s unit, and auto-dialed 303 on her phone. Jackie would be somewhere downslope, seeing what the wrecker might have shaken loose when it bundled the crushed pickup truck back up the hillside.

  “Taber.”

  “Jackie, you were supposed to go home,” Estelle said. “What are you finding down there?”

  “Rocks, rocks, and more rocks. I don’t think we missed much.”

  Estelle looked up as Madelyn Bolles’ red sedan swooshed by, the driver offering a cheery wave.

  “Okay,” Estelle said. “I just finished up down in Regál with Betty and a few of her neighbors. My gut feeling is that this thing is going to get really messy before we’re through.”

  “Where’s it going to take us?” Jackie asked.

  “It looks like Marsh was delivering sweepstakes checks to a couple of the village residents.”

  “No kidding. What are the odds of that, I wonder.”

  “Of winning?”

  “No…of there being more than one winner in such a tiny town. That smells. How much did they lose?”

  “That’s what’s bizarre, Jackie. Nobody has lost anything. They’ve won. Signed, sealed, and delivered. It’s just that it was delivered by a bogus courier.”

  “Now there’s a scenario,” Jackie said. “I wonder what the bank says. Are you headed back in?”

  “Yes. Here’s the thing to think about, Jackie. A bogus courier doesn’t necessarily make the items that he was delivering bogus. I mean, Chris Marsh might have passed himself off to Canadian Publications as a legit service.”

  “A Canadian sweepstakes?”

  “So it seems.”

  “That smells even worse.”

  “Yes, but the phone and address on the confirmation letter that the folks received checks out, so far. It exists, anyway.”

  “Huh. I don’t believe it.”

  “What would have been the next step for these guys? If Chris Marsh hadn’t hit the deer, hadn’t been killed here on the pass, what would have been the next step? I just found out that he was carrying a check with him from Joe and Lucinda Baca for more than thirty thousand.”

  “That stinks worser and worser, Estelle. I can think of several ways that little deal could go south. Somebody had to have been waiting for him when the deer got in the way.”

  “Think on that,” Estelle said. “You’re about finished out here?”

  “I think so. The sun on the rocks is reminding me that it’s nap time.”

  “Go for it.” She looked in her rearview mirror as the sound of another vehicle reached her. The rattling, gasping chug was familiar, and in a moment, Father Bertrand Anselmo’s Chevy crested the pass and started down the north side, passing her with a faint whiff of very old, very burned, oil. The priest raised a hand in greeting.

  The Chevy gained speed until it disappeared around one of the sweeping curves. Estelle pulled back on the highway. By the time she had caught up with Father Anselmo and the blue cloud that trailed his car, they were nearing the Broken Spur Saloon. His speed surprised her. Drawing to within a few hundred yards, she slowed long enough to pace him. The aging sedan thundered along at 71 miles an hour, in flagrant disregard of the speed limit and the condition of its tires.

  Suddenly aware that he was being paced by a county car, the priest touched his brakes. One of the brake lights managed a faint flare, and Estelle pulled out and passed him. In the wink of time when their eyes met, Anselmo’s expression was guarded. Estelle wondered where the priest had gone after leaving the church, and then felt a pang of regret that his movements might become her business.

  In another few miles, as she approached the little ghost town of Moore just beyond the Rio Salinas bridge, she saw flashing lights. Sure enough, the magazine writer’s red Buick LaCrosse was pulled off the road, snared by one
of the state troopers who liked to park behind the remains of Moore Mercantile, a tumbled-down reminder of half a century ago that now afforded an open radar shot in either direction.

  “Oops,” Estelle said. The trooper was standing on the passenger side of the Buick, bent down so he could see inside. He heard her county car approaching, itself rocketing along well over the speed limit, and looked up. He was smiling broadly, and Estelle wondered what Madelyn Bolles had used as an excuse.

  Chapter Twenty

  “The magazine writer is in town,” Estelle said, and when Sheriff Bob Torrez looked at her blandly as if to say, So what? added, “She may want to talk to you at some point.”

  “People in hell want ice water, too,” the sheriff said affably.

  “She followed me in from Regál. We’re going to meet here after a bit.”

  Torrez shifted so that he could stretch out both legs past his desk, and Estelle nudged the door closed and then pulled one of the metal folding chairs out of the corner. The sheriff’s office was long on function and short on amenities or color. He never spoke of the two years he’d spent in the army decades before, but apparently he’d been impressed with the use of drab as a foundation style.

  He opened his desk drawer and took out the same pistol that she had showed Bill Gastner, reached across the desk, and laid it directly in front of Estelle. “I did some studying,” Torrez said cryptically, as if that explained everything. She reached out and hefted Deputy Dennis Collins’ department sidearm. The slide was locked back, with an empty magazine in place.

  “These have inertia firing pins,” Torrez said after a moment. “Could be, if that gun is loaded, cocked, and locked, it could fire if it falls and hits the muzzle just right.”

  “Except it fell against the truck, back sight first,” Estelle said. “And not very hard, at that.”

  “I know it did. I’m just sayin’. If that don’t happen, it means that either something else was wrong with the gun or it was cocked, locked, and his finger pulled the trigger when he grabbed onto it.”

  “That’s most likely,” she agreed.

  Torrez leaned forward and folded his hands on his desk. “Not that it matters a whole hell of a lot,” and then he sat back abruptly as if he’d caught himself talking too much.

  Estelle laid Dennis Collins’ gun back on the sheriff’s desk. “I suspect that you could pick any gun, made by anybody anywhere in the world, and if you worked hard enough, you could invent a circumstance where it might go off unintentionally.”

  Torrez nodded once. “And if you take any gun and pull the trigger, it’s going to go off…unless there’s something wrong with it or the ammo. Collins was too quick gettin’ it out of the holster, then he fumbled it, and then he flat ran out of luck.”

  “I think that’s exactly what happened,” Estelle said.

  “We got to make sure that the fumble don’t happen again.”

  “Any word yet from the boy’s father? He impressed me as the sort who won’t let go. My impression was that he thinks he can lay the blame for this whole mess right on the deputy’s head.”

  “Don’t care about him,” Torrez snapped. “He’s all mouth. He can do what he wants. If he wants to sue us, let ’im. I could give a shit. I’ve been thinkin’ about what we need to do.” What he said next surprised Estelle. “I think Collins is a good, solid kid. I don’t plan to just throw him away.”

  “Do you want suggestions and input, or have you already decided?” Estelle said, and she saw the sheriff’s left eyebrow edge up a little.

  “You can input all you want,” he said, and held up both hands, waiting.

  “Well, first of all, we need to take a long, hard look at our own training and qualification program,” Estelle said. “Dennis went through the academy last summer, and then he had to qualify here. I don’t think he’s a shooter in his leisure time, and I’m willing to bet that before the other night, he hadn’t actually fired a box of ammo through this pistol since he had to go through the department’s qualification…and when was that, October?”

  “Well, he’s going to start,” Torrez said. He pointed at the filing cabinet across the room. Resting on top of it was a stack of heavy paper nearly six inches high. “That’s a thousand targets,” he said. “It’s all we had in the vault, and that’s what he shoots before he goes back on duty. Each target is a full magazine, starting with the gun holstered. Draw against the clock. He’s going to shoot at three, seven, and fifteen yards, and three hundred rounds or whatever it works out to be for each distance.” He rose carefully, as if his bones were fragile, and edged around the desk. He slid one of the targets out of the plastic pack. “He puts the date here, the time, the score, and one of us initials it.”

  “That’s an ambitious program,” Estelle said, both impressed and relieved that Torrez hadn’t taken the simple route and told Dennis Collins to go sell real estate.

  “Yep. And by the time he’s done, maybe he won’t drop the damn gun again. He’ll be able to draw and fire in his sleep. He’ll be a damn Sundance Kid.”

  “He needs someone with him for the first few go-arounds to make sure he doesn’t have any dangerous habits. You’ll do that?”

  “Could. Me or Eddie or you. But I was thinkin’ of asking Bill to do it. What the hell, that old gunny ain’t got nothin’ better to do.”

  “He might just like that.”

  “Anybody else wants to go along and do the same thing, they can,” the sheriff said. “We’re requalifyin’,” and he paused while he leaned forward to examine the calendar on the wall beside the filing cabinet, “on August second. Everybody. That gives us two and a half months to do what we gotta do to be ready.”

  “And this is everyone?”

  “Every single everyone,” Torrez said emphatically. “Includin’ me.” He turned and frowned at Estelle. “And that’s includin’ you. And Eddie. And everyone.”

  “That’s ambitious,” she said. “Changes in the scoring?” The actual scores needed for police qualifying had always impressed Estelle as abysmal, and cheating the system wasn’t unusual, either. She was aware of the standard, budget-saving arguments. Cops were required to make correct decisions that sometimes-although rarely in these far-flung rural areas-required that their weapon be drawn.

  But cops weren’t required to shoot out a gnat’s eye at fifty paces with a handgun. They didn’t need to. That’s what shotguns or sniper rifles were for. Hitting center mass on a man-sized target at seven yards didn’t require the skills of an exhibition shooter. And, she reflected ruefully, an entirely different set of skills was required if the “man-sized target” was shooting back or flailing with a butcher knife. It was almost entirely mind-set, not gun-set.

  Torrez smiled, an expression that Estelle thought the sheriff should do more often. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “There’s changes in the scoring. I’ll post ’em as soon as I talk to some folks. A whole lot higher scores this time around.” He rested back in the chair and changed subjects as effortlessly as a breeze shifted. “What the hell was Marsh up to?”

  Estelle took a moment to organize her thoughts. “I talked with Betty, and then visited with Joe Baca and Serafina Roybal. It appears that Chris Marsh was delivering checks from a Canadian sweepstakes.”

  “You gotta be shittin’ me.”

  “No. Not one of them noticed his name tag enough to read the fake name he was using. But they all remember the face.”

  “You mean he was doing one of them scam things, like the Nigerian stuff?”

  “At first, that’s what I thought. But no…there’s something going on here that’s a little different. The first contact Marsh had with anyone in Regál-that we know of, at least-was a couple of months ago. On December fourteenth, he delivered a check for a little more than three thousand dollars to Serafina Roybal. In exchange, she gave him a cashier’s check for five hundred bucks or so. To cover what the sweepstakes company called taxes and exchange rate. I have the original letter.” She pulled out her po
cket notebook and flipped pages. “Thirty-two fifty in winnings, five fifty-two in fees. She netted twenty-six ninety-eight.”

  “That’s until the check bounces,” Torrez said. “Ain’t that the way these things work?”

  “And that’s the catch. The check didn’t bounce, Bobby. It cleared just fine, and the money is sitting in Serafina’s bank account. I had Gayle track down the telephone number and address that was listed on the stationery for the sweepstakes company in Calgary. It’s a real place. No one answered because it’s the weekend, and I’ll pursue it more on Monday. But the business exists. At least it has a storefront. The Calgary PD is willing to cooperate in any way they can, if we feel the need. Anyway, there has been plenty of time for the check to clear, which evidently it did.” She leafed through the notebook.

  “And then it gets bizarre. Marsh delivered a second check, this time for about twenty-eight hundred even. He collected a personal check from her this time for about five hundred. He told her that the company didn’t usually do that, but he apparently made the decision so Serafina wouldn’t be inconvenienced.”

  “Go figure. She could have just stopped payment.”

  “But she didn’t. She had no reason to. The winning check was good.”

  “You’re shittin’ me. So she won twice, is what you’re sayin’.”

  “Exactly. And Marsh made a point of telling Joe and Lucinda when he delivered their first check that multiple winners were common…that he thought it might be some sort of computer glitch.”

  “Glitch, my ass.”

  “The multiple wins thing is part of it somehow. I’m sure of it. What better way to sucker somebody in.”

  “Ain’t breakin’ the bank, though,” Torrez mused. “A few thousand ain’t much of a jackpot.”

  “No, it’s not. That’s part of the puzzle, I’m sure. The thing we have to remember is that Chris Marsh wasn’t a legitimate deliveryman. The company on his name tag doesn’t exist. Jackie scouted that on the Internet.”