“Were you responding to a call when you saw him?”
“A call at the store? No, sir. I stopped to talk to a group of middle-school youngsters who were in the parking lot.”
“What were they doing?”
“I saw two of them making obscene gestures at a passing motorist, sir.”
“Ah. So you were busy with them and chose to ignore Mr. Crocker.”
“Yes, sir. And I can see that was a mistake, sir. If I’d stopped to talk to him then, maybe that little girl would still be alive.”
I decided to let Officer Thomas Pasquale agonize over that judgment call without assistance for a while. It would be cause for some long, sleepless nights. And maybe that was just what he needed.
6
By half past four, we’d pounded Officer Thomas Pasquale long enough. We’d had no word from Dr. Guzman, and Sergeant Torrez hadn’t returned from working the identification of the dead child.
Sheriff Martin Holman gave up trying to keep his eyes open and headed home to bed, optimistic that when a new day dawned in a couple of hours, all his problems would have resolved themselves. We assigned Thomas Pasquale the task of locating Crocker’s alleged sister in Anaheim. I fervently hoped that the young officer couldn’t get in trouble on the telephone.
I trudged upstairs to check on Wesley Crocker and found him sleeping soundly.
After reminding the dispatch deputy to check on the prisoner every ten minutes, I headed for the door, ready to idle around the county for a while to give my mind a chance to sift and ponder.
I pushed open the side door that led to the parking lot and damn near tripped over Estelle Reyes-Guzman. She was sitting on the top step like a little kid, arms circling her drawn-up knees.
“I thought you were going home,” I said.
“Not yet. I was just sitting here stargazing.”
“A new hobby,” I chuckled. “Crocker could give us lessons.”
The detective looked up at me and then unfolded and pushed herself to her feet. “Do you have fifteen minutes, sir?”
“That’s all I have, is time,” I answered and glanced at my watch. “Give it another two hours and it’ll be time for breakfast.” We walked across the parking lot to my patrol car. “Does Irma ever squawk?”
“About the hours, you mean? No. She’s used to it.” Francis and Estelle had hired Irma Sedillos as a full-time housekeeper/nanny, and the girl was earning her keep. Since her older sister, Gayle Sedillos, was our office manager and chief dispatcher, Irma must have had some inkling of what she was in for when she signed on with that frenetic household.
I opened the door of 310 and grunted my way inside. Estelle was already settled, brooding, by the looks of her forehead, by the time I closed my door.
“I’d like to visit the football field again,” Estelle said, and I nodded and started the car. At that hour in the morning, Bustos Avenue looked like an extension of the parking lot, empty and bleak. Even during the middle of a July 4 parade, Posadas was a quiet place. At 5 A.M. in mid-October, it was comatose.
We drove the few blocks in silence, and I pulled the car to a halt on Olympic, approximating the spot chosen by Officer Pasquale.
Estelle got out and I followed her toward the east end of the field, staying on the outside of the fence. When she reached a spot opposite the goalpost, she stopped and switched her flashlight back and forth. “Bicycle tire marks,” she said. “This is where he leaned the bike up against the fence.” She pointed off into the grove of trees on our left. “And then he camped over there, in the trees.”
“That’s what he told us,” I said, and zipped my jacket. Along the fence were two utility poles whose sodium vapor lights flooded the area. Her flashlight beam was nearly lost in the flood of the two lamps as she walked into the grove of trees.
“And this is where he said he was when Pasquale arrived,” she said, pointing her light down at a scuffed, matted spot on the ground.
“Probably.”
“So when he saw the police car, and realized something was going on, he got up and walked out of this grove, over to the fence.” She walked to the four-foot-high chain-link as she narrated.
“That’s how Pasquale could see him. The lights would have made that easy enough,” I said. Estelle squinted up toward the lights, forehead furrowed.
She leaned against the chain-link and observed the out-of-bounds and the end zone ahead of her. “Is that gate back there open?” And before I could answer, she walked quickly back along the boundary fence until she reached one of the small gates that opened to the field. I followed, my hands thrust deep into the pockets of my jacket.
Once through the gate, the sod underfoot was soft and quiet—the rich, thoroughly watered relative of the dry prairie grass that died brittle and tawny that time of year.
We walked to the goalposts and I didn’t bother to ask Estelle what was on her mind. I knew from long experience that it was useless to rush her. I fished a toothpick out of my shirt pocket. It was one of the mint-flavored ones from the Don Juan de Oñate restaurant and reminded me that it’d been too long since dinner.
Between wind gusts, it was almost warm…perfect weather to sit in the bleachers and watch the Posadas Jaguars rack up yardage against some unhappy rival. Estelle walked over to one side of the goalpost and slid down to sit at its base.
“If I do that, I’ll never get up,” I said.
She leaned back against the red and white steel of the post, eyes searching the sky. “Shouldn’t Orion be right about there, sir?” She pointed toward the western horizon.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Where is Orion this time of year?” She swept a hand overhead. “The constellation Orion. Where in the night sky?”
“I don’t have the faintest idea.” I spent very little time looking heavenward, and my ignorance of the heavenly bodies and where they should or should not be at any given time was close to total.
“If it’s just rising in the late evening, then by this time it should be well past the zenith, and headed for the hills.” She swept her arm in an arc, finally pointing toward the bleachers and the high school beyond. “Maybe it’s already set,” she said. “I’m not sure.”
I craned my neck and looked overhead, squinting against the sodium vapor lights. And just as suddenly, I knew what was bothering Estelle.
“How can you see any stars at all with these lights?” I asked, and Estelle stood up.
“I’ve been thinking that same thing,” she said. “Wesley Crocker said he had a view ‘all the way to Peru.’ Do you remember him saying that?”
“Something to that effect.”
“And then he said he was looking at Orion when the kids arrived.”
“And you’re wondering how he could have been seeing any stars at all with all this light.”
“Yes, sir.”
I looked up again, frowning at those two sodium vapors. Their hum was steady, like a distant truck that never made progress. They were spaced ten or twenty yards on each side of the goalposts, far enough back so that someone booting a field goal wouldn’t be kicking right into the glare.
Estelle turned and looked off toward the east and the wash of light that rose from downtown Posadas—about the same amount of light as would be cast by a poorly decorated Christmas tree. The eastern horizon was just beginning to show signs of life behind the grove of bare trees.
“This field lies east to west,” she said and thrust her hands in the pockets of her skirt. “If Wesley Crocker arrived here some time around nine P.M., which fits with Pasquale’s version of things, then Orion would be low in the eastern horizon—depending on what time he got here, it might not even have risen above the lights of downtown.”
We both stood in silence, staring off into space.
“So Wesley Crocker is lying,” I said finally. “Or mistaken.”
Estelle didn’t answer, but out of the corner of my eye I caught the slightest
of shrugs.
“What do you think?” I asked.
She folded her arms and leaned against the goalpost, gazing off toward the bleachers. “I think it’s almost certain that he knows more than he’s telling us. And I think it’s almost certain he wasn’t counting stars through the glare of two sodium vapor lights.”
“Do you want to talk with him again?”
“Yes, sir. I do. Before he eats. Before he gets too comfortable.”
Her pace back to the car was brisk—almost predatory. If Wesley Crocker was in the middle of an entertaining dream, he had about five minutes to wrap it up.
7
Sergeant Robert Torrez pulled his patrol car in beside mine just as I shoved the gear lever into “park.” His face didn’t show any excitement, and he methodically gathered his paperwork before uncoiling his large frame from the front seat.
The air was the crisp of predawn with the sun just beginning to highlight the tops of the San Cristobal mountains to the west. If Orion had ever been in the sky, it was long gone then. It would have been a nice morning to sit on the back steps, enjoying a cup of fresh brewed coffee and a cigarette. Out of habit, my fingers began to grope in my shirt pocket and settled for a perfunctory pat of the pocket flap.
Torrez held up a manila folder.
“Archer let me borrow his guidance department’s file on the girl.”
I stopped short and frowned. “She’s local then. How come none of us knew her? And who are her parents? Has someone contacted them yet?”
Torrez held open the back door of the old red adobe building that had housed the sheriff’s department since the structure was built in 1934, and then followed Estelle and me inside. “You’ll get a pretty good idea about that when you look at the file, sir.”
“Who’s talking with her parents?” I repeated. “Did you assign someone to that?”
Torrez took a deep breath. “Eddie Mitchell said he’d work on it.”
“Work on it?” I frowned again. “Let’s see this thing.”
And at 5:15 A.M., the paperwork that had accumulated to mark a brief life was spread out on my desk.
I tipped my head back so I could see the small typing. “Maria Ibarra,” I read. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“She was fifteen,” Estelle murmured, reading over my shoulder.
“And looked twelve,” I said, reading the short biographical information form quickly. “Did Eddie find this guy?” I tapped the space for “parent/guardian” that listed the name Miguel Orosco. “I know a Manny Orosco, but he sure as hell doesn’t have a Las Cruces address…or a kid.”
“We haven’t found him yet,” Torrez said.
I frowned. “Did he check this?” Orosco had listed a Las Cruces address for residence, but it was a post office box number—no street address.
“He’s working on it, sir,” Torrez said.
“There’s not much here,” I said. “The school just lets them walk through the front door like that? Where was she living? In a culvert somewhere?”
Estelle Reyes-Guzman took a deep breath. “A public school isn’t a high security place, sir.” She indicated the handwritten addendum for “shot records” at the bottom of the form where someone had printed “REF/Paddock.” “Dawn Paddock might know about her.”
“She might.” Dawn Paddock had been the school nurse for eighteen years. When my youngest son had busted his ankle playing basketball in gym class, she’d told him to lie down on a cot outside her office for half an hour to see if the ankle felt any better. My hopes for information from her didn’t soar. But it was something.
The rest of the information added very little to the picture. A copy of her schedule showed that Maria Ibarra had been taking all the standard eighth-grade academic courses, along with art and Spanish II as electives. “Do eighth-graders take second-year language courses?” I asked, and Estelle shrugged.
“If she didn’t speak much English, they might have put her in a second-year Spanish class as a way of helping her. Especially if she was an accelerated student. Glen Archer would know.”
I picked up a form labeled Parent/School Cooperative Checklist. The lines for student and parent signatures were blank, as were the twelve items.
“‘I expect my child to act respectfully and be treated with respect,’” I read, and tossed the paper back on the desk. “Cute.” The home language survey form was also blank. “And this is all that Archer had?”
Torrez nodded. “Apparently the girl was new in the district.”
“Apparently very new,” Estelle said with considerable acid.
“Well, she had to have been living with somebody,” I said. I gathered the papers and handed the file to Torrez. “Keep after it, Robert. Talk with the nurse, the counselor, whoever. Get ’em out of bed.”
Estelle was already moving toward the door, and I followed her out into the hall and up the stairs toward Wesley Crocker’s cell.
Crocker wasn’t asleep. I’m sure his interior clock had told him half an hour before that it was time to be up and pushing that bicycle into another bright New Mexico day.
The jail cell was far from bright. Crocker lay on his back, contemplating the ceiling, one arm hooked behind his head.
When he saw us, he sat up quickly and swung his feet to the floor.
“Well, good morning to you, sir…and to you, miss.” He turned slightly and patted the heavy brown blanket just above the hem where the legend POSADAS COUNTY CORRECTIONS had been stenciled in black ink. “I’ve certainly slept on worse.”
I unlocked the cell and motioned him out. “We’d like to talk with you again, Mr. Crocker.” He rose to his feet and I indicated the conference room down the hallway. I didn’t bother with the handcuffs and Wesley Crocker didn’t offer his wrists.
He took the same chair he’d used before and folded his hands on the oak table, expectant.
“Mr. Crocker, you understand that you haven’t been formally charged with any crime?” He nodded and I flipped through the pages of my small pocket notebook. “When we last talked, you said a couple things that puzzled me.”
His eyebrows met over his nose but he didn’t say anything.
I gazed at him for a long moment until one of his hands fidgeted on the tabletop. “Mr. Crocker, why did you lie to us about what you did last night?”
His eyebrows knit even further, and his head tilted a fraction. “Sir?”
“You told us that yesterday evening you were out there on the football field by the goalposts, enjoying the stars. Under the glare of two sodium vapor lights. That’s hard to do.” He started to say something, and I interrupted. “And you mentioned the constellation Orion—how you had a grandstand view of it. At this time of year, it isn’t visible in the western sky until just before dawn.” I sounded as if I knew exactly what I was talking about. Wesley Crocker looked down at the table.
Estelle and I waited while Crocker mulled things over. Finally he held up his hands and said, “It was a stupid thing to say, sir.”
I waited.
“Did you ever get caught doing something when you were a kid and you were so eager to get off the hook that you said too much?” The crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes crinkled, but I wasn’t in the mood to share childhood humor. “Well, that’s about what happened, and it wasn’t just the smartest thing I ever did, I can see that.”
“Explain.”
He shrugged. “There ain’t nothing much more to it. I was campin’ right where I said I was, trying’ to decide if I was going to be able to get any sleep with all the glare from the field lights. That’s all. When you folks talked to me, I just padded the story a little. Kind of…you know, to make it sound maybe a little better. I shouldn’t have done that.”
I sat back in the chair and folded my arms across my chest. “Did you know what the officer was looking for when he arrived?”
“No, sir.”
“You had no idea that there was someone under
the bleachers?”
“No, sir. I sure didn’t.”
“When you heard the kids in the cars earlier, did you see any of them get out of the cars? Anything like that?”
“No, sir. It was too dark, too far away. My eyes aren’t just what they should be anymore.”
“Did you hear anything else?”
“No, sir. Well, now, wait a minute. One of the cars was quiet, and one was a little louder, if you know what I mean. It might have been a diesel, maybe.”
“Car or truck? Pickup?”
He shrugged helplessly. “I couldn’t say. It was just dark forms and taillights.”
“They didn’t have their headlights turned on?” Wesley Crocker shook his head. “And how long was it from the time the two vehicles drove away to the time the police officer arrived?”
Crocker frowned. “Well, like I say, one of ’em left first, then the other after a few minutes. And I’d say that it was fifteen minutes after that when the police car showed up. Maybe twenty at the most.”
“And that’s it.”
“Yes, sir.” Crocker didn’t bother tacking on the I’m telling the truth…why don’t you believe me? that kids do when they’re lying through their teeth.
Estelle Reyes-Guzman tapped the eraser of her pencil on the table thoughtfully.
“Mr. Crocker, who are you?”
“Ma’am?” Crocker said uneasily.
“Who are you?” Her black eyes held Crocker without blinking. “An officer is working up a background check, but save us some time.”
“Well, I…I been around a bit. Like I said, the good Lord has seen to bless me with my health, and there’s a lot of this country I still want to see.”
“Do you work?”
He shook his head. “No, ma’am. I mean, not at any one thing for any length of time.”
“Why not?”
He frowned at that, and spent a handful of minutes sifting possible answers. He settled for a shrug. “It’s not my way, I guess. Now and then, maybe, for a little while. And then it always seems more important to me to be movin’ on.”
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