Statute of Limitations pc-13

by Steven F Havill

  Gastner snorted in disgust. “I’m not much of a biblical scholar, but I never realized that Mary and Joseph were looking for a freebie.”

  “A plea for charity on Christmas Eve is a nice setup,” Estelle said. “I’ll be curious to find out what percentage refused them lodging.”

  “And a village named Posadas is a perfect target,” Gastner grumbled.

  “Mr. Patel put a dent in their statistics,” Estelle said, and she moved away from the building, looked up into the night sky, and wrinkled her nose against the fine drizzle. “And that’s kind of neat. But they’re not our problem right now, unless Miss Stacie goes into hard labor in Room 110.”

  They watched as the flat bed of the car hauler thumped horizontal with its load and Stub Moore and his helper cranked the tie-downs tight. “It doesn’t make any sense to steal a car back east, get this far, and then circle around and head east again.” She glanced at her watch again. “Tommy was headed toward Regál, and the State Police are covering the interstate all the way to the state lines in both directions, so those two aren’t going to make it very far.”

  “Or they could be smart,” Gastner said. “Slip south through María, work their way east toward El Paso and the border crossing there.”

  “They might do that. And they might have riffled through the chief’s glove box and found his address, and gone over there and robbed the place blind while the rest of the folks are at the hospital.” She glanced at Jackie.

  “I’ll check on that,” the deputy said. “Tony Abeyta and I are going to talk with the other guests here at the motel, too. Just on the off chance that someone saw something. There’s only a couple, but you never know.”

  Estelle watched the stocky woman hustle off toward her vehicle. “If I were them, I’d stay on the interstate westbound,” she said. “Rainy night, cops few and far between, they could do that and shoot all the way west out of the state. Their luck’s run pretty smooth so far.”

  “All the way from Indiana, or wherever it was,” Gastner said. “Publish all the bulletins you want, but somebody has to read them in order for BOLOs to do any good.”

  “True enough.” She nodded toward her car. “I want to stop by the hospital,” Estelle said. “We have two to worry about over there. I thought Bobby looked pretty wretched tonight.”

  “Ah,” Gastner scoffed, “he’s okay. Mr. Sunshine is one of those folks who makes a lousy patient, is all. I’m sure he’s thoroughly tired of hurting by this point. He likes to be in the middle of things, and here he is, forced to hobble around like an old man. He’s not even good competition for me.”

  As they drove out of the parking lot past the motel’s main entry, they could see Adrian Patel and Miranda Lopez in close conversation with Deputy Mike Sisneros.

  “I wonder why he came down here,” Estelle said. She started the car and sat for a moment with her hand on the gearshift.

  “Who, the chief? He needed aspirin,” Gastner said. “At least that’s what he thought he needed.”

  She shook her head in resignation and pulled the car into gear, turning toward the entrance to Grande Avenue.

  “Eduardo always did like the café here,” Gastner added. “He said they had the best iced tea in town, and he was probably right. So he was used to coming here. The lobby is always open, and he knew where the vending machine was.” Gastner thumped the side of the door thoughtfully with the back of his fist. “There’s no accounting for what people do when they aren’t thinking straight.”

  Estelle’s cell phone chirped, and she pulled it out of her pocket. “That includes young Mister Willis,” she said to Gastner, and then acknowledged the call.

  “Estelle,” dispatcher Brent Sutherland said, “I tried to get you on the radio, but you must have been out of the car.”

  “Just preoccupied,” Estelle said, and at the same time reached over and turned the volume of the radio up. “What’s up?”

  “Tom has the chief’s car in sight,” Sutherland said, and even as he said it, Bill Gastner pointed ahead of them. The bright lights of a fast-moving vehicle had materialized on Grande, and in a moment Sheriff Robert Torrez’s unmarked Expedition howled past southbound, grill lights pulsing. “The vehicle is parked at the church in Regál.”

  “At the church?”

  “That’s what Pasquale says. I just told the sheriff, and he’s on the way. Mike’s headed out that way, too.”

  “Roger that,” Estelle said, and she swung a wide U-turn on Grande. “Are the two suspects in sight? Are they with the vehicle?”

  “Negative. Tom thinks that they’re inside the church.”

  “What’s his twenty right now?”

  “He’s just up the road, in the turnoff to the water tank. He said he drove past the church lot, down toward the border crossing, and saw the car. I didn’t know whether or not Chief Martinez still had a scanner in his car, so I wanted to stay off the radio as much as I could,” Sutherland said.

  “That’s good. We’re on the way. Tell Tom to stay put unless they come out of the church and it looks as if they’re going to take off.”

  “You got it.”

  She handed the phone to Gastner and pulled the mike off the clip.

  “Three oh eight, three ten. We copy the info on Bert’s Place. We’re a minute or so behind you.”

  “Ten four.” Torrez’s reply in his habitual radio voice was not much more than a murmur. “Bert’s Place,” the radio moniker for the Iglesia de Nuestra Señora in Regál, where Father Bertrand Anselmo was the priest, was one way to keep scanner aficionados-and perhaps the two car thieves if they had a radio-in the dark about location. Torrez’s voice broke the silence once again.

  “Three oh two, sit tight.”

  “Now that’s bizarre,” Gastner said. He reached out and braced one hand against the dash when Estelle braked hard enough to make the tires howl as they turned onto State 56, the highway leading southwest the twenty-three miles to Regál Pass and the little village beyond on the Mexican border. “Why would two car thieves hole up in the church? That’s not good news.”

  “No, sir,” Estelle said. She accelerated hard, and far ahead of them, they could see the taillights of the sheriff’s vehicle as she closed the gap between them.

  Chapter Five

  La Iglesia de Nuestra Señora was one of the most frequently photographed landmarks in Posadas County, preserved on film by thousands of tourists. Most travelers found the small church charming and quaint, and they then went away relieved that they didn’t have to attend services there.

  Three-foot-thick adobe walls, tall and narrow windows recessed with eighteen-inch windowsills, and carved ceiling beams that had been salvaged more than a century before from an Indian ruin in northern Mexico encased the cool interior in musty silence.

  Cottonwood planks had been intricately carved and painted for the altar, with a heavy communion railing polished to a soft, reflective shine by generations of hands. The same cottonwood had been used for each of the twelve stations of the cross, the carvings nestled deep in nichos sunken into the adobe walls.

  With a little cooperative planning, the twelve straight-backed pews, six on each side of a narrow aisle, could seat sixty worshipers-nearly twice the total population of the village of Regál.

  That neat package, immaculately maintained and painted so white that a blast of sun through one of the narrow windows could reflect from the opposite wall like a flashbulb, had never known a utility. For evening services, light came from beeswax candles made by one of the parishioners. Burning piñon and juniper in the plump potbellied stove that stood in the center of the long east wall chased the deep chill that settled into the building when it stood empty. The black single-walled stovepipe reached up precariously a dozen feet before piercing through the ceiling thimble.

  Estelle let her memories of the little church form a blueprint in her mind as they sped southwest. There were no hiding places in the church-no attic, no sanctuary. She glanced at the clock. There wa
s also no congregation at this hour, and for that she was thankful. Not long before, her mother and aunt had knelt within those stout walls during the 5:00 p.m. service, listening to Father Anselmo and inhaling the fragrance of juniper boughs. There would be another service at nine o’clock that Christmas Eve, and, just because Father Anselmo loved it so, another at midnight.

  As they crested Regál Pass, Estelle could see a scattering of lights off to the right, through the mist and light rain. The village of Regál nestled against the slope of the San Cristóbals, facing Mexico to the south. The land fell away to the flat, empty Mexican desert, a vista of endless stunted brush, cacti, and arroyos by day, a giant black hole at night.

  A thousand yards southeast of the village, the Regál border crossing was harshly illuminated by a fleet of lights. In recent months, the fence had been upgraded, the chainlink and razor wire shining in the light of the sodium vapors.

  There wasn’t enough traffic to operate the border crossing at night. As a concession, a large gravel-surfaced lot had been provided so that folks could park their RVs and grab a nap until the customs people arrived at 6:00 a.m. Or, they could walk a hundred yards to the church and find quiet comfort there. The iglesia was never locked-its mammoth, carved doors had never known a hasp.

  “Nice night,” Gastner muttered. “You want to lay odds on what happened?”

  “What do you think?” Estelle leaned forward, still picturing the church and its parking lot.

  “I think that they decided not to take the interstate, and took the state road without knowing where the hell it went,” Gastner said. “I think they’re lost. The kind of genius who would steal a 1982 Dodge in Indiana as a getaway car would have trouble with a road map.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “Three oh two, ten twenty.” Sheriff Robert Torrez’s voice was barely audible, and Estelle reached down to turn the radio volume up.

  “I’m on water tank road,” Deputy Pasquale replied. “Mike’s here with me.” The radio barked squelch twice as Torrez acknowledged by keying the microphone.

  “There’s a midnight service planned?” Gastner asked.

  “I think so,” Estelle said. “Father Anselmo does a service at seven over in María, and then comes back here for one at nine and then again at midnight. Someone will keep the fire going.”

  “Emilio Contreras, probably,” Gastner said, and Estelle felt a pang of worry. No church enjoyed more tender, persistent maintenance than that provided to Nuestra Señora by Contreras, himself closing on eighty years old. The old man cleaned, painted, and patched, working all day, every day, except Sundays. Despite using an aluminum walker to support a bad hip, Contreras walked the three hundred yards from his home in Regál to the church.

  Before the border fence upgrade, Regál had been a favorite resting spot for illegals, and the unlocked church had been a convenient hostel. Even a hard cottonwood pew made a welcome bed after a desert crossing on foot. Various law enforcement agencies had tried to convince Father Anselmo over the years that a locked door would be a small concession. Small concession or not, no lock had marred the finish since 1826, when the door had first been hung.

  Tom Pasquale’s unit was parked on the gravel access road to the village water tank, high on the flank of the mountains behind Regál, with Deputy Mike Sisneros’s well off the highway’s shoulder. Sheriff Torrez turned into the narrow lane and stopped door-to-door with the deputy’s vehicle. Estelle pulled onto the shoulder behind Mike’s SUV and killed the lights. By the time she had shrugged into her slicker, Pasquale had gotten out. He rested an elbow comfortably on the spotlight housing of Torrez’s Expedition.

  “Nothing going on that I can see,” he said. “The chief’s car was parked there when I cruised through. I didn’t even pull into the parking lot. Didn’t want to spook ’em. You want to use my glasses?” He reached into his vehicle and pulled the bulky, military-surplus night glasses out, offering them to Estelle, but she shook her head.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “The thing that concerns me is Emilio Contreras.” She turned and looked down the hill. It was dark enough that she couldn’t see smoke from the church’s stovepipe, rainy enough that the faint glow from candles wouldn’t illuminate the windows. “They get this far, and now they find that the border’s closed.”

  “Not the sharpest tools in the box,” Torrez said.

  “Maybe they’re thinking about spending the night until the border opens,” Tom said.

  “Maybe. We don’t know if they’re armed or not. We don’t know if they’re just sitting there chatting with Emilio, or robbing him, or what.”

  “So let’s go find out,” Torrez said. He turned and grinned at Estelle. “You up for helping an old peg leg?”

  “Sure,” she said. “What do you have in mind?”

  “Have Bill take your unit,” Torrez said. “If he stays right here, that’ll cover us if they manage to make a run up the hill. Mike can cover the village, and Tom will stay loose on the highway.”

  A fleeting expression of impatience crossed Pasquale’s face, but he didn’t argue. He was in uniform, and neither Estelle nor the sheriff were.

  In a moment, with the vehicle swap completed and Estelle’s unmarked sedan parked on the water tank road with Bill Gastner at the wheel, Estelle and Bob Torrez drove sedately down the state highway in Torrez’s unmarked Expedition.

  Going on ahead, Mike Sisneros turned onto Sanchez Road, the dirt thoroughfare that was Regál’s main street. In a moment, his county vehicle had disappeared in the labyrinth of corrals, barns, sheds, and dwellings. Tom Pasquale drove directly toward the border crossing and the parking lot there.

  “What’s the word on Chief Martinez?” Estelle asked as they neared the church.

  “I don’t know,” Torrez said simply. “I got called away on this before I had a chance to find out. When they took him into the ER, he was still alive. That’s all I know.” He swung the unmarked vehicle into the church’s broad parking lot, nosing upward toward the knoll on which Nuestra Señora had been built. At the same time, he reached over and turned off the radio.

  The chief’s brown Buick was parked away from the doorway, snuggled tight against the church, invisible unless someone knew exactly where to look. Torrez regarded the Buick for a moment. He then parked on the other side of the church, letting the dark bulk of the building hide the various non-civilian features of the Expedition should someone open the front door of the church and peer outside for a closer look.

  “You suppose some bonehead from Indiana knows how much that car’s worth down south?” he asked.

  “I doubt it,” Estelle said. She unclipped her badge from her belt and slipped it in her pocket, then leaned forward and slid her automatic as far rearward as it would go, well hidden under her jacket.

  “No stealth now,” Torrez said. He managed a grin, and Estelle saw that the crow’s feet around his eyes had grown a bit more etched during the last month or two-and not from laughter. “We’re supposed to be parishioners stopping by to see if anyone remembered to bring the fruitcake. And right about now, I wish this damn place had a back door we could just slip in.”

  He opened the car door and slid slowly down until his feet touched the ground, then pulled his cane loose from its position between the seats.

  Estelle had just enough room between the vehicle and the building to slip through the open door, which she then slammed with vigor. “You park close enough to the building?” she said loudly.

  “Hago todo lo possible,” the sheriff said, and his Spanish startled Estelle. He took his time with the two narrow steps up to the church door, and grasped the wrought-iron handle. He partially opened the door inward, and stopped, turning to look at Estelle. “Did Geraldo remember about tonight?” he asked, and Estelle shook her head.

  “He didn’t say anything to me,” she said. Looking beyond Torrez’s wide shoulders, she saw Emilio Contreras standing in front of the stove, hands casually behind his back as he toasted his arthri
tic fingers.

  “Hola, Emilio!” she called, and with her left hand held the door until Torrez had passed clear. The old man beamed widely at them, and Estelle felt a wash of relief. One of the two men was standing directly in front of the altar, as if he had been examining the ornate cross overhead. His ponytail reached almost to his waist, and he had twisted to see who had entered the church. His welding cap was scrunched in his right hand. The other man sat sideways on the pew directly in front of the stove’s alcove, one arm lying on the high wooden back, the other blocked from Estelle’s view by the pew in front of him.

  “We stopped by early to see if there’s anything else you need, Father,” Estelle said, and she closed the door, making sure the wooden latch fell into place.

  “Hey, Bobby-you know what you were supposed to bring this afternoon,” Emilio said. He stepped away from the stove, one hand rubbing his hot corduroy trousers against his butt.

  “What’s that?” Torrez said.

  “Remember that load of firewood? You know,” and he indicated the deep wood box off to his right. “I got what’s in here, and maybe one or two more loads, and that’s it. You going to bring some down?”

  Torrez grimaced at his poor memory as he made his way down the center aisle. “Ah…we’ll get it down here. I got too many things goin’.”

  “How you been?” Emilio said to Estelle as she approached. “The hijos?”

  “They’re fine,” Estelle said.

  “I enjoyed seeing your mother again,” Emilio said. “She and your aunt were here at the early service. I was looking for you guys.” His nod included both Estelle and the sheriff. His eyes were watchful, but Estelle felt a surge of relief that he was keeping perfect composure-either a tribute to his skill as an actor, or because the two car thieves had done nothing to arouse his suspicion.

  “That’s the way it is,” Estelle said. She shied away from the stove. “Caramba, you have that old thing stoked up.” By retreating away from the heat, she was able to step past the pew where the man sat. Medium age, medium build, heavy work boots, blue jeans and brown work jacket, no weapon visible, both hands in sight. His legs were crossed, and his right hand rested lightly on one boot.