Statute of Limitations

by Steven F Havill

  “Yes, you would. I would too. What would you do?”

  “I guess I’d try to contact her on the phone to make sure that she was all right. And when she didn’t answer, I guess that I’d probably call Mike. She’s with him more often than not, anyway.”

  “Doing all that takes some time, doesn’t it. And that’s if you stopped in the first place to check the car. A unit this new might well belong to one of the bank officers, here to do a little extra work. And that’s if you stepped out of your unit to look inside it, once you ran the computer check.”

  “Well, sure.”

  “And all that changes if we find the car, look inside, and see a corpse, right?”

  Tom Pasquale laughed. “Well, sure,” he said.

  “So it might be worthwhile for the shooter to take the body and dispose of it to gain some time—maybe even after weighing the risks of being seen.”

  Another county Expedition squealed to a stop at the curb on Pershing, and a slender man in jeans, checkered flannel shirt, and baseball cap got out. “Ah, here’s Tom One,” Estelle said, referring to Gayle Torrez’s habit of calling Mears and Pasquale the Two Toms. Sergeant Tom Mears ambled to the yellow tape that Pasquale had stretched from the front door of Estelle’s sedan to the front door handle of the bank. He stopped there, and Estelle beckoned, swinging her arm in a big circle to the left that would steer Mears well clear of the blood droplets.

  When he saw the chalked circles, he angled inward and stooped to examine them. “You’re kidding,” Mears said, straightening up and scrutinizing the small vehicle. “Kinda bizarre, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, sí.”

  “If that’s her blood, it kinda gives us a link,” Mears said.

  “I think so. I mean, it’s Janet’s car, it’s her only car, and it’s logical for her to have been in this spot. If she was going to Lordsburg with Mike Sisneros, then she might have wanted some cash along. But that was early this afternoon. She didn’t do that. She had other plans, same answer.”

  “Was she going to Lordsburg?”

  “We don’t know yet, Tom. We’ve got conflicting versions so far. Eddie went over there to talk to him.”

  “He doesn’t know about Janet, then. That’s no good.”

  “No.”

  The other Tom made a noise that might have been a cough, a groan, or a strangled chuckle. “Unless...,” he said meaningfully.

  “Yeah, unless,” Mears said. “But I don’t even want to think about that.” He glanced toward the street as one of the department’s Crown Victorias rolled to a stop behind his unit. “Here’s Abeyta. Let’s see what our three great minds can come up with.”

  “There’s four of us here,” Pasquale observed, stepping into the trap with alacrity.

  “Uh-huh,” Mears said, and his thin face broke into a smile. “Process of elimination then, right?” He turned toward the Jeep. “One thing we want to be aware of right off,” he said. “If she was in the car when she was shot, and the shooter was standing by her door, then...” He paused.

  “Perrone said the bullet struck her just behind the left ear, low on the mastoid, and ranged forward and up, Tom. It didn’t break out of the front of her skull.”

  “That’s not surprising. The gun was close to her skull when fired, right? That’s what Abeyta said.” He reached out and rested a hand on Tony Abeyta’s shoulder for emphasis as the deputy joined the group. “Then we want the shell casing, guys.”

  “What if it wasn’t an automatic?” Pasquale asked.

  “Then we don’t get the casing,” Mears said easily. “But if it was, then the gun tossed it out to the right, or straight up—unless the shooter held it Hollywood ‘gangsta’ style. The empty case would either glance off the back window glass, or some other part of the car, or...” He peered toward the Liberty. “Is that the ignition warning that I’m hearing?”

  “Yes,” Estelle said. “Key’s there, door’s ajar.”

  Mears nodded. “If she was leaning forward, like maybe she was picking something off the floor, or just looking down at her lap, and the gun was pressed to her skull, then the casing might be inside here.”

  “Unless he picked it up,” Pasquale said.

  “Stranger things have happened,” Mears agreed. “Stranger things have happened. But for now, I want everything that’s on the ground—under, beside, off in the brush somewhere. Don’t just grind stuff into the asphalt with your big feet. Pay attention.” He turned to Estelle. “Do we know how much she got from the ATM? Do we know if she even made a withdrawal?”

  “Not yet. No one’s touched anything inside the car. I haven’t even opened the door.”

  “Then let’s do the simple things first,” Mears said. “That wallet and purse should tell us a few things. That’s where I want to start.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  If Janet Tripp had withdrawn money from the ATM at Posadas State Bank, there was no record of it in the Jeep. There had been no money or papers in her clothing when it was searched at the morgue. There was no cash in her wallet, no credit cards, no driver’s license, no ATM receipt, no nothing. Her purse held an assortment of typical personal items of no particular value, but nothing that made Estelle pause.

  “Good surface for prints,” Mears said as he dropped the glossy black leather wallet into an evidence bag. “But I’ll be surprised. She was hit by somebody who knew exactly what he was doing. He’s not going to butter everything up with his fingerprints.” He looked at Estelle, who was crouched at the passenger side, in the open door. “What?”

  “I don’t understand the fit,” she said.

  “The fit? Of what?”

  “If this is a typical robbery—if someone had the ATM staked out and wanted to make a score—why choose Christmas Day, why then shoot the victim, and why remove the corpse, other than to buy himself some time?”

  Mears shrugged. “I don’t know, Estelle. Christmas Day is dull, without a lot of traffic. But maybe he figured that whoever stopped would be flat busted from last-minute shopping, and be more apt to withdraw a larger amount?” He grinned. “If you’ve already dug yourself a financial hole with too much Christmas shopping, what’s the harm of adding a little bit more to it? How’s that for far-fetched. Hell, I don’t know why. Maybe my brilliant brother has a theory.”

  “And we need to call him, too,” Estelle said. Terry Mears, Tom’s twin brother, was vice-president of Posadas State Bank.

  “Shooting the victim in the head,” Mears continued, “is a pretty sure way of making certain that she doesn’t talk, that’s pretty obvious. And you’re probably as close as anybody about why he moved the body. Or maybe he was thinking that a little nasty-time recreation with her might be in order. You know how these things can go.”

  “Casing!” Tony Abeyta shouted. He had been working far to the right side of the Jeep, on his hands and knees close to the edge of the asphalt. He stood up suddenly, as if he’d crawled too close to a rattlesnake. Estelle saw that the single .22 long-rifle cartridge case rested in the channel between asphalt and the soil of the border garden.

  Estelle looked back to the Liberty. “If that’s the one, the gun ejected it right over the roof of the car,” she said. “That’s quite a toss.”

  “I have a bag,” Abeyta said, but Estelle held up a hand.

  “Don’t move it until Linda takes the photos, Tony. And we don’t know for sure if this is the one. So measure about four times, okay? Mark it with a flag, then just leave it alone.”

  “You got it.”

  Estelle moved off to one side and opened her phone. In a moment, Linda answered, her voice sounding small and far away.

  “Hey,” Estelle said. “Are you okay?”

  “Oh, I guess so. I’m down in the darkroom.”

  “Ah.” Estelle knew that it was one thing, out in
the open with others to provide support, to deal with death and destruction, especially if the victim was family. But it was worse to watch the grotesque images appear out of the chemical bath, ghostly apparitions that gazed up out of the developer tray in the hushed and musty tomb of the lonely downstairs darkroom.

  Linda Real usually handled such things with aplomb and good humor. The rules changed when violent death became personal, taking a step closer.

  “I wanted to finish up the black and whites,” she said. As standard procedure, she took triplicate photos, one set in black and white that she could develop herself, a set with another camera in color—film that would have to be sent out for processing, with both the attendant risks and delays—and finally finishing up with digital shots for instant reference.

  “We found Janet’s car, Linda. As soon as you can break loose...”

  “I’m on my way.”

  “We’re in the bank parking lot.”

  “Gotcha.” Linda sounded as if she might revive. “I could use a little air.”

  Estelle returned to the Jeep. “Do you want to call your brother, or do you want me to?” she asked the sergeant.

  Mears laughed. “I’ll get him. He’s just sitting in front of the television, anyway, fat and happy.”

  Estelle knew that at least half of that wasn’t the case. Both Tom and Terry Mears were angular, slim, and barely average height. “I want to know if Janet withdrew anything from her account...and how much. There should be a time on the ATM slip, shouldn’t there?”

  “I would think so. I don’t use ’em, so I can’t tell you for sure. Bro’s going to ask for a court order, you know.”

  “Ay, I was afraid of that. Well, tell him that we’ll need to look at the ATM transaction tape, and also at the video. In the meantime, I’ll go get the paperwork from Judge Hobart.”

  “Better you than me,” Mears said. “By the way, I’ll use the black light to make sure, but I don’t think we have any blood spatters in the vehicle itself.”

  “That’s surprising,” Estelle said.

  “Nah, not really. Not with a .22. Pops a nice hole, not much blow-back, not much in the way of bone chips on the outside. Plays hell on the inside, but not otherwise. But we’ll see.” He knelt down by the Liberty’s running board and looked up toward the driver’s window, then played his flashlight upward at the soft, finely textured fabric head liner.

  “We might get lucky and find some powder residue on the liner,” Mears added.

  “And if you’ll get your brother, I’ll see about the warrant.” She glanced at her watch, remembering her promise to former sheriff Bill Gastner. What was supposed to be fifteen minutes had mushroomed into an evening. “I was going to talk to Bill about what happened in the office earlier this afternoon, but I never made it. I’ll get him to go with me to Hobart’s. That’ll mellow the judge down some.”

  “Linda’s on the way?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. We need to impound this puppy, too. Get it over into the secure barn so nobody dinks with it,” Mears said, and shook his head. “We’re going to have a long, long list of folks wondering about whatever happened to their nice holiday.”

  “Remind them that Janet Tripp can’t wonder about anything anymore,” Estelle said. Far off to the north, she heard the moan of an aircraft, and her own spirits rose. As it approached fast and direct, she could tell that it was a twin jet-prop. “And that has to be the air ambulance,” she said. “I need to pick up Francis at the airport.”

  “Merry Christmas,” Mears said.

  “People keep telling me that. If I hear it long enough, I might start believing it.”

  Back at her car, she opened the door and removed the plastic crime-scene tape that Pasquale had strung up, repositioning it to Mears’s unit. Then she headed to the airport, six miles away at the foot of Cat Mesa. By the time she arrived there, the Piper Navajo had parked, its engines spooling down to idle. Estelle left her car at the chainlink gate and walked out across the tarmac toward the air ambulance. In a moment, Francis gingerly made his way down the little folding steps from the plane, turning to wave at whomever was inside. The moment he was around the wing and clear, the engines shrieked, the nose wheel cocked sharply to the left, and the Navajo surged back out to the taxiway.

  “Smooth as silk,” Francis said. “Flying at night is neat, querida.”

  “I’ll take your word for it, oso.” She snuggled into his arms and enjoyed her own airborne moment as her “bear” swung her around, her feet well clear of the ground.

  “How’s it going?” he whispered in her ear.

  She sighed. “Not good, oso. Not good. And it’s not going to improve much, either.”

  “What’s going on? I phoned Alan, and he said Eduardo was slipping. He also said you had a homicide of some sort. We had a bad connection, and I didn’t get the details.”

  “A homicide of some sort,” Estelle repeated. “We have the kind where someone’s been killed to death.” But she didn’t smile, and neither did Francis. He saw the look of misery in her eyes and lowered her until her feet touched the ground. “Someone I know?”

  “I don’t think so. Janet Tripp? She’s Mike Sisneros’s girlfriend.”

  “My God. This happened just this afternoon?”

  “Yep.” She took his hand as they walked back to the county car. “Remember Butch Romero?”

  “Sure.”

  “He found the body in Escudero Arroyo.”

  “Wow.”

  “One gunshot to the head. Just dumped in a tangle of old cars. Nothing else. It’s looking like she was attacked over at Posadas State Bank, and then dumped in the arroyo afterward.” Francis tried to settle his bulk in the passenger seat and yelped as he cracked his knee against the computer that grew out of the center console in front of the radios. “Let me fold that out of your way,” she said.

  He thumped his left elbow against the shotgun in the rack between them. “You need some more junk in this car,” he said. “It’s a miracle that it has enough power to move.”

  “We don’t get a lot of passengers up front,” she said. “A veces no está en situación de exigir nada.”

  “Your mother says that,” Francis said as Estelle backed the car away from the gate. “Her version of ‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’”

  “She says lots of things. And after today, she’s going to be at her acid best,” Estelle said. “I haven’t been home since 4:05 this afternoon, and we haven’t even started yet.”

  “Any good leads?” Francis settled with one hand looped through the panic handle as the car accelerated hard on the highway toward Posadas.

  “It’s bizarre,” Estelle said. “And no...nothing that sends us in any particular direction. That’s the trouble.” She paused as she let the car drift toward the center line as they raced around the sweeping corner, and then pushed hard through the intersection with County Road 43. “Every minute that we dawdle, the killer puts more miles between him and us.”

  Francis leaned over the center console equipment, gazing at the speedometer. “Dawdle has a new definition in this household,” he said.

  “If I could figure out a way to be in three places at once, I’d try it,” Estelle said.

  “Alan’s doing the autopsy?”

  “As we speak. I just came from there a little bit ago.”

  Francis looked hard at her. “Is there anything that makes you suspect the deputy? The boyfriend?”

  “Por Dios, I hope not,” Estelle sighed. “But we can’t be sure. Not yet. Eddie went over to Lordsburg to get him.”

  “Bizarre,” Francis said.

  “Oh, sí.”

  “Sofía is okay with the two terrors?”

  “She’s in heaven...or so she says. We were all out for a nice afternoon walk when Butch f
ound the body. And then he found us. That ended the nice walk.”

  They swung into the hospital parking lot where Francis’s vehicle had been left. “You going home now?” he asked.

  Estelle shook her head. “I can’t, querido. I need to talk with Padrino about this afternoon. He’s one of the last people to see Janet alive.” She glanced at her watch. “And I was supposed to do that hours ago.” She rested her forehead against his, the two of them bent over the junk between their seats.

  “Be hard as hell to make out in this car,” Francis said.

  “That’s what the back seat is for.” Estelle laughed.

  “I need to check on Eduardo,” he said, and tipped his head back until their lips met.

  “Do what you can for him.”

  “Oh, for sure,” he replied. “And I’ll check in with Alan and see what he needs.”

  “Maybe next week sometime, we can get together for a while and pretend that we have a life.”

  “It’s a deal.” He opened the door and pushed himself out. “Be careful, querida.”

  “Love you, oso.”

  As she accelerated out of the parking lot, she watched Francis in the rearview mirror, watched as he trudged toward the emergency room entrance. She stopped at the highway and looked again. From that distance, just before he pulled open the doors, his figure in the evening light looked just like Francisco, and she felt a pang of loss as he opened the door and disappeared inside.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Even though she knew that she still needed to call on Judge Lester Hobart to obtain a subpoena for the bank’s ATM records, and then return to the bank parking lot, Estelle still felt a soft flood of relaxation and relief as she turned onto Guadalupe Terrace. Former sheriff Bill Gastner’s large, fortress-like adobe nestled in the huge cottonwoods, a retreat where it would be just too easy to welcome a mug of tea and good conversation.

  The porch light was off, an old habit that Gastner had once explained away with a shrug. “A light scares away the nesting swallows. Besides, I know where the damn step is.” Christmas wasn’t the nesting season for the little birds, and with returning curls of clouds and a fraction of moon, it was dark enough that the single porch light would have been welcome.