Easy Errors

by Steven F Havill

  Despite the warrant, I hesitated. My chain of evidence was pitifully short, and shy of specifics. Judge Hobart had granted a warrant to search the truck, based on his longtime faith that I knew what I was doing. Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. Certainly shy of direct links, I could prove that the Dodge had been in the general vicinity of the Torrance ranch, if I considered the stump out on the county road the “general vicinity” and if I could prove that stump had jumped out in the road in front of this Dodge. No one had seen truck or owner at the windmill site, even though some bullet holes—and maybe slugs recovered from the tank—in due time might establish that link.

  No one had seen the truck or its owner down in Bender’s Canyon, either. The truck had been seen at the Broken Spur Saloon. So had other vehicles. Whether or not Victoria Sanchez could positively identify the Dodge after a quick look out the saloon window was open to debate.

  But Darlene Spencer’s death had changed the rules—at least as far as I was concerned.

  If Mr. Bailey squawked about his truck invasion, I might owe an apology and two new locks. At worst, he might sue me on general principles. The padlocks were box-store cheap, and yielded with a crisp snap of the cutters. The cover yawned open. Two ammo cans, one rifle case, one pistol case. A bundle of damaged fiberglass arrows, some missing nocks, some missing heads. Five olive-drab dried military meals, their heavy plastic wrapping guaranteeing them good for a millennium. A couple of emergency space-blankets, folded tightly in their original foil. And snuggled against the front of the toolbox, a handi-man jack and a spade.

  “Well,” I muttered, and reached in carefully to unzip the short rifle case. The little carbine inside had a hell of a bore, chambered for .44 magnum. I gently picked up the gun, nestled the butt against my thigh, left index finger right at the muzzle and pulled the bolt back with my index fingertip, just far enough to view the chamber. Both it and the tube magazine were empty. Even though I was still wearing the surgical gloves, I handled the gun with care, avoiding smearing any prints that might already be on the smooth, black metal. I took a long, deep inhale at the muzzle. Sure enough, the gun had been busy. I began to feel like a gambler who had drawn ten-jack-queen and was about to flip over the last two in the run.

  I jotted down a note recording the carbine’s serial number before replacing it in the case. The companion revolver was a brute of a thing, particularly heavy since it was fully loaded. Its owner was evidently not a believer in the old frontier edict of one empty chamber carried under the hammer. All six ports carried .44 magnum jacketed hollow-points.

  Mr. Bailey didn’t mess around with little wussy calibers. Both guns—carbine and revolver—were excellent choices for pig hunters, hunts that often turned up close and personal. And since both guns used the same ammunition, it made for simple packing. If he had gone to Mexico, he was smart to leave the guns behind. The carbine would have been okay, but not the revolver. And certainly neither of them, if they’d had a Mexican archery tag.

  After making a note of the revolver’s serial number, I zipped it back up. The two military ammo boxes contained just that—ammo, and lots of it. One can included empty brass, the other included six unopened boxes of Remington .44 mag ammo. Mr. Bailey came prepared.

  I sat back on my haunches. “Tell you what I’m going to do,” I said, more to myself than to Nick and Carmen. “I really need to talk to Mr. Bailey ASAP, and you may see him before I do. So…” I made sure the two cased guns were lying as I had found them, then lowered the lid of the toolbox.

  “I’d hate to have somebody heist this hardware after I conveniently removed the security locks,” I explained. “That’d be embarrassing as hell.” I glanced at Nick. “Although I guess your boneyard is fairly secure.”

  “Only fairly,” Nick offered.

  “And a thief could jimmy the camper lock with a pocketknife.” I nodded back at the storage box. “I need a series of photos, so I’ll be calling our department photographer out. I’m going to put a sheriff’s lock and seal on the box here, and I’ll leave one of my cards on the steering wheel, and one on top of this box. That kind of guarantees that Mr. Bailey will want to talk with me the minute he shows up.”

  Carmen looked confused. “There’s nothing illegal about storing those firearms in there, is there?”

  “Nope.”

  Her lovely, thick eyebrows damn near met in the middle. “Then what’s the deal?”

  I slid out of the truck. “Maybe it’s just me, being overcautious.” I smiled at her. “But that’s okay. I can take the flack for that.” I held up the truck keys. “I’m going to keep these until I talk with Mr. Bailey. I’m going to call our camera wizard, and until we have the series of photos to record all this, I’d appreciate it if one or both of you would stay around. I know that’s inconvenient for you, but it can’t be helped.”

  “Eventually we’ll find out what’s going on?” Carmen asked.

  “Yes, you will.” I sounded perfectly confident.

  Sergeant Avelino Garcia was already pushing the overtime envelope out in Bender’s Canyon, as Deputies Torrez and Mears sprayed the countryside with Luminol. We didn’t have the manpower to ask a deputy to babysit the truck at D’Anzo’s, so I stayed put.

  Carmen tried out half a dozen ways of framing her questions, but I good naturedly stonewalled her. If she waited long enough, eventually the tendrils of the community gossip vine would find their way to her, and she’d hear at least one version of Darlene Spencer’s death.

  After a bit, she and her brother went inside the dealership with a promise that coffee would be forthcoming.

  The night hung quiet around me, giving me time to think. I found it puzzling that the owner of an expensive, camper-equipped three-year-old truck would be so cavalier about its repair. He’d managed to drive it from the stump as far as the Broken Spur Saloon, and its wobbly behavior would have told him that repairs were going to be both time-consuming and expensive.

  Beyond that, I didn’t make much progress, and was astonished when the radio jarred me awake. I wipe my face and blinked, striking the familiar “what was that?” pose.

  “Three ten, PCS,” dispatcher Chad Bueler said again.

  I jerked upright in the seat and fumbled the mike. “Three ten,” I croaked.

  “Three ten, can you ten nineteen for a phone call?”

  “Negative.”

  “Dr. Perrone would like to conference with you before he heads back to Deming, sir.”

  “Ask him to swing by D’Anzo’s, if he can. I can’t leave here just yet. Otherwise I’ll have to catch him later.”

  “Ten four.”

  And sure enough, about eight minutes later, the good doctor’s BMW glided into the parking lot and pulled up window to window.

  “Sorry about that, Alan. I’m waiting on Garcia to come take some photos.” I pointed at the truck. “These folks were out near Torrance’s earlier…probably last night. There’s some hardware in the truck that needs documenting.”

  “That’s fine.” He relaxed back against the seat, one arm on the windowsill. “No surprises at the Spencer autopsy. Just the one wound in the left eye. The bullet fragment is pretty large…close to nine-point-seven grams.”

  “And nothing else.”

  “Nothing else. She hadn’t had sex recently, and other than a few inconsequential scrapes and digs from rolling around on the ground, nothing else.”

  “TOD?”

  “I would estimate this morning sometime. Maybe as late as nine or ten o’clock.”

  Immediately the image came to mind of the girl lying dying while, a hundred yards away, I took my time jawing with Herb Torrance. Alan Perrone saw the expression on my face and interpreted it correctly.

  “If she’d been found just ten minutes after she was struck and then immediately transported, I don’t think we could have saved her, Sheriff.”

  “She
lived a long time, though.”

  “Sort of. A strong kid. She would have just drifted out. There’s nothing you could have done.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “They’re still shooting photos out there?”

  I nodded. “Garcia is using both color and black-and-white with filters with the Luminol. He’ll develop the black-and-whites tonight, and the color will go to the lab in Deming first thing in the morning.”

  “My best guess, looking at everything, is that she found herself a spot to urinate, had just about finished, and got found by a ricochet. There’re just no signs of anything else going on. No bruises, no nothing. No signs that she tussled with anyone. Certainly no signs of an assault. No torn clothing, no blood except from the head wound. No defensive wounds of any sort. Nothing under the fingernails.” He shook his head. “Nothing to suggest she was in a scuffle.”

  “A ricochet.” Bob Torrez had more support in his camp. He’d been an avid, and successful, hunter since he had been old enough to hold a gun. He knew what bullets did, or didn’t do.

  “Yep, that’s what I think. There was nothing about the head wound that would account for the damage to the projectile. What bone it encountered was the thin back wall of the orbit, right around the optic nerve. My bet is that the bullet was deformed before it struck her. Judging from the soft tissue damage, by the time it struck her its velocity had fallen off considerably.”

  Dr. Perrone fell silent and we gazed at each other, with me thinking that if I thought long and hard enough, all the pieces would jumble together to make sense.

  “The recovered bullet and my prelim report are in the morgue file waiting for a certified officer to pick them up,” Perrone said. He took his foot off the brake, letting the BMW drift a little. “Holler if there’s anything else you need.”

  “You bet. Thanks, Doctor.”

  Nine-point-seven grams. A sizeable chunk of lead, that. Conversion charts were filed somewhere in my dusty memory, but the numbers were a blur. Something like fifteen grains to a gram. The arcane grain scale wasn’t used by many folks other than those in ballistics. No one counted out seven thousand grains of wheat for a pound any more. But the ammunition industry did use the finely chopped grain scale, both for weighing powder and bullets.

  The boxes of .44 magnum ammo in the crippled Dodge’s toolbox all announced bullet weights of 240 grains…or about fifteen and a half grams.

  If my military memory served me correctly, the .30-caliber carbine tossed out little bullets that weighed only 110 grains or so—a bit more than seven grams in the morgue’s parlance.

  I relaxed back in my seat, letting my thoughts drift. But by ten minutes after eleven, my patience had worn thin.

  “Three oh nine, three ten.”

  Silence greeted me until Chad Beuler’s cheerful voice found me. “Three ten, three oh nine is ten forty-two.”

  Sergeant Garcia is home? “What’d he do, retire?”

  Chad wisely didn’t respond to that lack of understanding on my part.

  “PCS, give Sergeant Garcia a call…” I stopped short. “PCS, cancel that.” The light was on in one of the dealership’s office windows, and from there I could keep an eye on the Dodge and use the D’Anzo’s phone.

  The showroom door was locked, but Rick saw me coming and hustled over with a jangle of keys.

  “I need to use your phone, if I may.”

  “You bet. How about the one right there in my office? Dial eight to get out.”

  Garcia’s daughter, Valorie, answered with a muted greeting, as if her head was stuffed under a pillow. Maybe it was. She and her husband, Rod, a truck driver up at the Consolidated Mine, lived with their three children in multigenerational bliss with her mother and father, with a maternal grandmother thrown into the mix.

  “Sergeant Garcia, please,” I said. “Undersheriff Gastner calling.”

  “He’s…” Valorie hesitated, and I could hear a voice in the background. “Just a sec.” A hand muffled the phone, and then Avelino Garcia came on the line.

  “Yes?”

  “Sarge, we need your camera for a bit,” I said. “I’m out at D’Anzo’s.”

  A mighty sigh greeted that. “I just stepped out of the shower,” he said.

  What was I supposed to say? “Oh, I’m sorry. When would be a better time for you?” I considered using the shower excuse the next time Sheriff Salcido asked me to attend a County Commission meeting.

  “After you dry off, you’ll likely need your whole kit,” I said pleasantly. “We’re shooting the inside of a truckbed toolbox, with a couple of weapons involved. The light is miserable.”

  “When do you want it? I could run over there first thing in the morning.”

  “Actually, now is just right, Sarge. Rick and Carmen have opened the place up for us, and I’m sure they’d like to go home to bed sometime soon, too.” Silence greeted that. Avelino was close to retirement, and I envisioned him counting days on the desk calendar beside his phone. “Judge Hobart gave us a warrant, so we’re good to go.”

  “You said you’re at D’Anzo’s right now?”

  “Yes.”

  Another pause. “Give me a couple minutes.”

  “You got it. Thanks, Sarge.”

  He grunted something and hung up. Headlights blasted through the window, reflecting off the lonely M-bodied Grand Fury posed on the polished showroom floor. Robert Torrez’ department ride jarred to a halt beside mine.

  “Folks, thank you. We’ll be just a few minutes.”

  “Whatever you need, Sheriff.” Carmen and Rick were sitting in her office, her neatly booted feet propped on the corner of her desk. “And the coffee’s ready. Help yourself.”

  “Thank you. That’s very kind.” I beckoned Torrez and met him at the door.

  “It went all right?”

  “Yep.”

  “There’s coffee inside. Want some?”

  “That’d be good.”

  We fueled the cups, but I waited until we returned to the vehicles before asking, “So tell me. What do you think? Anything new to change your mind about what happened?”

  “Nope. I think that she needed to take a piss, and found that spot away from the others.”

  “While they stayed at the windmill?”

  “Yep.”

  “And then?”

  He opened the door of the Blazer and retrieved his clipboard. He had already attempted a scene drawing, but whatever his other skills might have been, artistry wasn’t among them. He pointed with a pencil. “She squatted right here at the end of the log. Got some roots and stuff to lean against. When she finishes, she starts to stand up, turns a little, and pow. The ricochet hits her right in the eye.” His pencil traced a line down to another blob he had drawn, with a stick figure of a body. “She tumbles down into that little depression where we found her. Lands flat on her back.”

  “Cried out? Tried to pull her jeans back up?”

  Torrez shrugged. “Don’t know what she could do, hurt like that.”

  “But how do you see it happening? I mean, the windmill—if that’s where the ricochet came from—is way over here. She would have had to turn, facing that way.”

  “Could have. She’s standing, sort of, pulling at her jeans, and turns her head to make sure she ain’t got an audience.”

  “And then they find her.” The deputy didn’t reply to that. Maybe he was running the same mental scenario I was…one of the kids, maybe all three, dash through the brush in response to the cries for help and find the girl, half-dressed, gushing blood, thrashing about. They panic. What teen would keep a cool head during all that?

  “Maybe they did,” Torrez said quietly. “Or maybe somebody else did.”

  “You think?”

  “There was a lot of shooting going on. At the tank, at the windmill.”

 
“Doc Perrone says the fragment that struck the girl weighed about a hundred-fifty grains. And he agrees with you…he thinks it was a ricochet. The bullet was damaged before it hit the girl. That’s what he thinks.”

  “So at a hundred-fifty grains, it wasn’t Chris Browning’s thirty-carbine. I need to see that piece.”

  “It’s being held in the morgue evidence locker. We need to send it off to the FBI lab for a comparison—when we have something to compare it to.”

  “I need to see it,” Torrez said.

  “I hear ya. First things first.” I nodded at the Dodge. “Odds are just about one hundred percent that this truck was damaged by ramming a stump, over on the county road just beyond Reuben Fuentes’ place. I mentioned that when we met down at the Spur. In fact, Reuben thinks that he heard the crash. The owner made it back to the Broken Spur, and called Attawene’s towing. The Sanchez girl remembers seeing them hooking it up. Attawene brought it here. What I think interesting is that the owner, a Mr. Clifton Bailey from Fort Riley, Kansas, had it towed here, but didn’t come with it. He didn’t make any arrangements with D’Anzo’s, other than sending a message with Attawene that he wanted the truck fixed.”

  I watched Torrez as he glared at the truck as if he could force the answers out of its grill.

  “That means Victoria Sanchez is right when she tells us that she saw Bailey with somebody,” I said. “She recalls Bailey and a companion coming into the Spur earlier in the afternoon to load up on booze. Now, Bailey didn’t come to town with Attawene, so he’s out there somewhere, with his buddy. And you know my question.”

  Torrez looked over at me.

  “Were Bailey and his bud the ones out at the tank? Is the bullet that struck Darlene Spencer from one of their guns?” The soft crunch of tires announced the arrival of Avelino Garcia’s unit. “I don’t trust coincidence, Robert. This truck was out in that neighborhood, Victoria saw the occupants at the Spur. And now, we find some interesting guns in their storage box. We need photos of all of that. And those guns may just be the place to start with a ballistic comparison to that fragment that Perrone pulled.”