“Oh,” Acevedo said, his expression showing complete understanding. “Well, I’ll tell her you called.”
“Thanks.” Outside, she sat in the car for a moment. Did Dana Gabaldon know where her friend had gone? Did she know that Stacie’s child, Ginger, had been locked in the car along with the excitable puppy? If that were the case, of course she would be reticent about talking with the law. The questions were worth spending two hours out of county. Estelle started the Charger, set the air conditioning for seventy-four degrees, and pulled out of the parking lot, heading south on Grande toward the interstate. In less than a block, dispatch had answered the phone.
“I’ll be in Cruces for a little bit,” Estelle said. “I should be back by four.”
“Affirmative,” Mike Esperanza said. “They got something going on at the school. They may be calling you in.”
“Two hours, and I’ll be back. The sheriff didn’t say what it was?”
“That’s negative.”
Estelle had not driven two miles when the phone jarred her thoughts, and she thumbed the controls on the steering wheel.
“Guzman.”
The sheriff’s voice was amped a little beyond his usual whisper and he didn’t mince words. “Needja back ASAP, Estelle. We got one down at the school.”
“Accident of some sort?” Something going on? There was no school on this particular Friday. Bob Torrez didn’t make contact with hopes of a meeting later in the week, or even later in the day. ASAP meant just that, regardless of what the something was. She braked hard and swung into the broad, jouncing center median.
“This ain’t no accident,” Torrez said, and that’s as far as his explanation went. “How far out are you?”
“ETA five minutes.”
“Make it three.”
Chapter Ten
The gym annex had once upon a time been the middle school before being joined at the hip to the high school. Arranged roughly like a U inside the aging brick building, the old-fashioned, high-ceilinged classrooms ringed the gymnasium/auditorium. The building was three stories high, the first floor actually below ground level. At one point, the middle school had been earmarked for destruction, but escaped when plans for the bond issue to finance its replacement evaporated.
Sent to Posadas when she was sixteen to finish high school in an American system, Estelle remembered the middle school building well, especially the cafeteria, which occupied one end of the first floor. Public school nutrition had required only one or two lunches to make her homesick for Tres Santos and her adopted mother’s spicy treats.
Behind the cafeteria were the locker rooms, boys’ on one side of the building, girls’ on the other. Back stairways led up to access the gymnasium/auditorium on the second floor.
As she swung the Charger into the school roundabout, she glanced at the dash clock. Not yet twelve-thirty. She whispered a relieved thank you at the absence of school buses. Even the faculty would be spared, unless someone had left the in-service meeting early, then drifted off to sleep while descending a flight of stairs.
Deputy Paul Escobar, one of the most recent hires, stood at the building’s main entrance, behind a yellow crime-scene tape that tangled in a hedge at the corner of the building and then stretched out to the sidewalk, around the parking lot, and out of sight behind the high school. Estelle nosed the Charger up to the tape and switched it off. Response had been prompt. She saw several department vehicles, along with Medical Examiner Dr. Alan Perrone’s red BMW. A small crowd had gathered across the lot, near the administration building.
“If you’d come right up the sidewalk,” Escobar called to Estelle. A big, burly man who had taken to shaving his bullet skull, he carried about thirty pounds too much on his large frame, just enough to look sloppy under the otherwise neat, tailored lines of his uniform and Sam Brown belt. She reached the flight of steps leading to the main doors and stopped. An ambulance had already arrived, parked now with its lights winking and the two EMTs waiting inside.
Escobar moved a little bit to meet the undersheriff and extended an aluminum clipboard toward her. “I need you to sign in.” She did so, forcing herself to take her time with the signature and time. As she handed the board back to him, he instructed, “The sheriff asks that you go through the doors and then stay right, going downstairs on the far right side of the staircase.” He paused as if she might have misunderstood. “Then walk past the cafeteria and on down the far right side of the hallway, staying as close to the wall as you can. You’ll see the yellow tape on the floor. Stay to the right of that, ma’am.”
“Right,” she repeated. He nodded soberly. “How many?”
“Just the one as far as I know, but I haven’t been to the scene yet. Sheriff’s not sayin’ much, and he’s not lettin’ nobody extra inside except the lieutenant and the coroner and a couple of other guys.”
Estelle groaned inwardly. That meant too many size-twelves clomping through the crime scene.
“I got the crowd contained over there by the fire hydrant,” Escobar continued. “Even the EMTs have to wait.” Estelle looked at the waiting officers and civilians. “Like I said, the sheriff ain’t talkin’.”
“And what else is new?” Estelle got an “oh-well” smile in return.
He tucked the clipboard under his arm and hitched up his uniform trousers. “Lemme know what you need.”
“You’re doing it, Paul.”
The door was chained open, the brass latch already bagged. Inside, the foyer offered two immediate choices: upstairs to the classrooms on the second floor, or downstairs to the ground-floor cafeteria and beyond that, the locker rooms.
The stairs upward to the second-and third-floor classrooms were taped off, and she stepped far to the right to take the narrow aisle downstairs that the floor tape allowed. The yellow tape ran a foot away from the wall all the way down the hall, past the cafeteria on the right and, on the left, what had been the home ec and junior high shop rooms.
At the double locker room doors, the tape turned abruptly to the right. The right-hand door was propped open.
Inside, the spacious office shared by some of the physical education faculty now included a sole occupant. A thin, fine-boned and balding man sat sideways at a desk, his hands tightly clasped between his knees. He looked up, and Estelle recognized Barry Lavin, one of the school custodians. He’d been one of the custodians decades before, too.
Off to the right, past the lockers, she heard voices and footsteps approaching, and Lieutenant Tom Mears appeared, shepherding three others—State Police Sergeant Hector Dominguez along with Sheriff’s Sergeant Todd Baker and Special Deputy Dick Jonas. Jonas waddled when he walked, and his body language said loud and clear that he enjoyed being in company with Dominguez and Baker, both veterans carrying command stripes.
“Sheriff wants us out of there until you have a look, ma’am.” Mears kept his voice low, his back to Barry Lavin. He shook his head. “Pretty bad deal.”
“Student?”
“No, ma’am. One of the faculty.” Estelle frowned, and Lieutenant Mears added, “Looks to be Clint Scott. And you’re going to need boots.” He pointed at the locker room floor, where a sheet of water had advanced under one of the benches. “May I get them for you?”
Without taking her eyes off the water, Estelle handed the lieutenant her car keys. “In the trunk behind the evidence locker,” she said. “Thank you, LT.”
“You bet. Camera gear?”
She glanced at him. “Yes. The big black camera bag, also in the trunk.”
“You got it.”
The locker room included three rows of lockers, one on each side, and another down the middle. A long wooden bench split each aisle. Without conscious thought, her gaze found where locker 233 had been twenty years before—the door now missing, an empty gray space remaining. The nightmare of herself as a student in PE, struggling with the recalcitrant combination lock, still wasted brain space.
Rather than turning toward the likely source
of water, the gang shower at the far end of the room, Estelle kept to the dry tile straight ahead. She took her time, examining each side of the locker room. Other than a pair of white socks wadded up on the bench and a couple of sprung locker doors that gaped open, the place looked worn but tidy.
Staying clear of the stream, she walked the length of the locker room, along the row of lockers and on the dry side of the wooden bench. Near the end of the bench lay a neatly folded pile of clothes, with socks stuffed inside a pair of running shoes. Estelle examined the pile without touching it—trousers, polo shirt, underwear, and a large white beach towel. “All right,” she said softly, and turned away.
The shower room itself was just the way she remembered it, off to the right behind a step-up of ceramic tile. Water sheeted over the lip of the tile now in small surges—each time someone in the shower took a step and sent waves sloshing. She stopped and looked at the tiled sill. To overflow, the shower drain had to be plugged, and then enough water pumped in to fill the four-inch shower-floor pan up to the sill.
She moved to the shower room doorway. Inside, Sheriff Robert Torrez’ voice was little more than a whisper as he engaged the medical examiner in conversation.
He looked up and saw his undersheriff. “I can get Linda comin’, if you need her.”
Estelle shook her head. “She shouldn’t work this, Bobby.”
“She’s seen bodies before.”
“I don’t mean that. It’s awkward, it’s slippery, there are stairs coming and going…it’s not worth the risk for her.” But of course, if the sheriff so ordered, nine-months’ pregnant Linda Real Pasquale would try her best to oblige. “She doesn’t need to be here.”
The sheriff made no comment, but watched Estelle as she stood to one side of the doorway, examining the shower from one side to the other. By habit, she ignored the corpse, the prominent landmark dead center in the twelve-by-twelve tiled room.
“Were Baker, Dominguez, and Jonas in there, as well?”
“Nope.” And then the sheriff added, “Fats was doin’ a ride-along with Baker. Otherwise he wouldn’t be in the building at all.”
“Okay.” The shower room, like its twin on the other side of the building in the boys’ locker room, included three nozzles on each of the three walls away from the silled entry. Coaches could run an entire team through in minutes. On the wall to her left, beside the center showerhead, a spray of blood arced up the wall, smeared in one spot four feet above the floor, as if someone had tried finger painting. The wall tile itself wasn’t in the best of shape, but three spots showed what she thought could be fresh damage.
Coach Clint Scott lay nearly in the center of the shower room, buttocks squarely blocking the shower drain, arms flexed and fists clenched, his hands resting on his chest. He had collapsed flat on his back, feet toward the shower room entry. Estelle didn’t need to ask if the victim was deceased.
Dr. Alan Perrone stood still, his hands in his pockets. He wore an old-fashioned pair of buckled galoshes with sterile booties pulled over them, his pants tucked neatly inside. The sheriff’s rubber Wellingtons were similarly bootied.
Refusing to enter until she had secured the scene photographically, Estelle stepped away from the shower room sill, watching the overflow of water running along the tile in a foot-wide river to the first locker-room drain. “Is someone hunting up a piece of screen for the shower drain?” Estelle asked.
“We’ll get one.”
“What do we have, Alan?” She moved once more to the doorway without stepping in, and Perrone stepped carefully toward her, until he was standing near the victim’s feet.
“Just what we can see, Estelle, at least until we move him. It looks as if he’s been shot four times. I was just telling the sheriff that it’s going to be hell in this particular venue to establish just which shot came first, although we’re making some good guesses. We need to drain this place. And who knows what surprises we’ll find when we turn him over.”
“In a little bit,” Estelle said. “I don’t want evidence washing away.”
“Of course.”
She scanned the room again. “Who found him?”
“The janitor. He’s waiting in the office out front.”
“All right. That’s Mr. Lavin?”
Torrez nodded. “He ain’t a very happy camper just now.”
“I saw him sitting in the coaches’ office when I came in. So Lavin just walked in here and there he was?”
“Yep.”
The victim lay flat, his stature measured by the four-inch floor tiles. At six feet, four inches, he had towered over most folks with whom he was photographed, and Coach Clint Scott had been photographed often, loving the attention the media gave him. Estelle scanned the shower room again. There was no sign of struggle, no sign of fight or flight. No bar of soap sank or floated in the sea of water. No sodden towel had been tossed in a corner.
The man lay in four inches of water, blocking the drain, naked as he would be when taking a shower, hair plastered to his skull down to the waterline, where it then floated out in a brown halo.
“And you said that the shower was running when the victim was found?”
“That’s what he says.” The sheriff sounded dubious.
“And then? Lavin walked through here, right through the shower, around the body, and shut off the shower?”
“Nope. He says he went into the boiler room next door and shut off the main valves. He says he stopped at the shower entrance there, to one side, out of the water. Says he didn’t step in, says he didn’t track water around.”
“Smart man. That shows an amazing presence of mind.” Estelle looked back at the tiled locker room floor. Abundant prints marked the floor—a whole active volleyball team’s worth, for starters. And then half a dozen cops. And somewhere in there, the killer.
In a moment, Tom Mears appeared at her elbow as she pulled on the blue latex gloves. He handed her the boots and set the camera bag on the end of one of the benches.
“We’re going to need a piece of clean, new brass screen about eighteen inches square to cover the drain, LT. Flat, not all rolled up. Would you send someone to find that? Maybe give Jonas something to do.”
She looked to the left, at the smear of blood on the wall between two of the showerheads, and then toward the center of the room where the corpse lay, the water around his body a garish deep pink aging to an amorphous brown. “Ay,” she breathed and turned away. If Clint Scott craved privacy or dignity in death, he wasn’t going to get it.
Sitting on the end of the bench, she shucked her shoes and pulled on the rubber boots, tucking her pant legs in, then slipped the sterile booties over the boots.
For a moment she regarded the contents of her camera bag before selecting a 24-70 mm zoom lens for her digital camera. With equipment in hand, she sat for another moment, regarding the locker room and the shower. She tried to sift through the cacophony of smells—the heavily chlorinated water now tinged with body wastes, the distinct aroma of burned gunpowder, and from the clothes that had been left on the bench, the strong odor of men’s sports deodorant.
Retreating down the locker room, she shot a series of photos from as far away from the shower entrance as she could, and from both sides of the center locker row. Lieutenant Mears had placed an evidence tag on the bench near the folded clothes, and she recorded that collection from four directions.
At the shower, she stepped to the sill and shot a wide-angle view of the entire room, then zoomed in on the blood smear on the wall for a close-up. Again, she looked from it to the corpse, a good six feet from smear to drain.
Torrez and Perrone watched her work, without comment or impatience. They stood still, letting the water subside into a dull pane. She hated to disturb it. Moving slowly and making certain of each step in the four-inch-deep water, she crossed and stood near Clint Scott’s feet. The coach had been a big, athletic man, sure enough, with broad shoulders, muscled chest, and flat belly. Approaching middle age, he’
d kept his conditioning, his classical physique marred only by an old appendectomy scar and a more recent blemish above his right rotator cuff.
But now, surrounded by a pinkish-brown lake and collapsed in on himself, he looked more like a mannequin from a men’s clothing store. He’d been at least that handsome, once upon a time.
Estelle documented the corpse from each side, then moved in for close-ups of each wound. She paused and looked over at Perrone. He stepped closer and squatted, careful to stay out of the water. “I’d start there,” he said.
What appeared to be a heavy caliber bullet wound in the gut punctured three inches directly below the naval, dead center. The wound had bled profusely, soaking the crotch and thighs, indicating that the large arteries and veins of the groin had been lacerated open by the shot while the heart was still beating powerfully. Lots of pumping pressure there as quarts of blood gushed.
For certain, the groin gunshot all by itself would have been a fatal wound, giving Scott just a few seconds to stagger, doubled over in agony, toward the support of the wall two steps to his right—if he was facing the doorway when the shot was fired.
Estelle turned and looked at the doorway—six feet wide at the sill, a four-inch step. Had the killer stepped inside the shower room? Why bother? If Scott had been standing under the farthest shower, the one directly opposite the door, the shot would have been a scant ten feet. The blood smear, and what could have been a handprint, were off to the victim’s right, halfway down the wall.
Had Scott recognized his assailant, and charged forward? Did he have time to do that? He might have thought about grabbing a towel, and might have made it to about the room’s center when the first shot was fired. Estelle shook the image away. The natural tendency was to try and answer the “what happened” question before the survey of scene and the victim were completed.
“We need to ask Lavin which shower the victim was using.” None of the showerheads were conveniently dripping.
“And then here,” Perrone said softly. A second bullet appeared to have entered under the victim’s left arm, forward of the armpit an inch or so, just visible past his biceps—likely if the assailant had fired even as Scott pitched toward the wall, groping for support, and in the process presenting his left side as a target opportunity. Without turning the victim over to search for an exit wound, there was no way to gauge where the bullet had rampaged, or what internal damage it had done. The wound near the arm was clearly a wound of entry, though—neat, almost round, about the size of a pencil eraser now with the elastic skin drawing in around the hole.
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