Statute of Limitations

by Steven F Havill

  She pulled into his driveway and at the same time found her cell phone, thumbing the autodial. Gastner might well ignore the telephone, too. He did. His answering machine, a gadget he loathed but kept in deference to his job as a state livestock inspector, finally clicked, and Estelle switched off before the beep to record a message.

  The front door, a massive, carved affair from a mission deep in Mexico, was recessed in the small courtyard. Had Gastner possessed the faintest tinge of green in his thumbs, realtors would have described the entryway courtyard as “inviting and charming.” As it was, it more resembled a fortress, plain and utilitarian.

  Estelle pulled her small flashlight off her belt to navigate the short distance from her car through the gateless portal, across the courtyard to the front door, and stopped short. The small beam of light caught first a pair of boots, then corduroy trousers, and finally the large body lying half on and half off the single concrete step, head deep in a runty acacia that Gastner had allowed to grow to the right of the door as his “guard dog.”

  “Padrino!” she gasped, and darted forward. The acacia was a nasty little bush, and its stubby thorns and sharp, leafless twigs had cut Gastner’s face in half a dozen places as he had crashed down.

  Even as she checked the old man’s neck for a pulse, she realized that she herself was in danger of hyperventilating. She forced herself to breathe evenly, eyes closed, as her fingers traced along the side of his neck. Responding to her touch, one of his hands lifted from the gravel a few inches, and hovered helplessly.

  “Padrino,” Estelle whispered. She flicked the light across his eyes, and saw him grimace and clamp them shut. Slipping her right hand behind his head, she reached across to pull a threatening acacia limb away from his eyes.

  “Don’t try this at home,” Gastner said clearly.

  Estelle couldn’t have laughed if she had wanted to. Holding his head in one hand, she managed to pull her phone from her pocket and dialed 911. Ernie Wheeler answered on the first ring.

  “Ernie, this is Estelle. I need an ambulance at Bill Gastner’s house right now. I don’t know what the problem is. Just get one here.”

  “Ten four,” Wheeler said quickly, and Estelle pocketed the phone, reaching up to cradle Gastner’s head in both of her hands. He murmured something that didn’t make sense. Loath to move him, Estelle simply waited, crouched at his side with his head in her hands. His upper body lay on the ground and his hips and legs lay twisted and awkward on the broad step.

  After a minute, his hand slowly lifted until he could grasp her right forearm. He held onto her with a surprisingly strong grip. In the distance, she heard the ambulance, its siren piercing in the calm, damp air.

  “I don’t know,” Gastner said. “Hell of a thing.”

  His legs appeared to be straight, ankles and knees pointing in all the right directions. His breathing was shallow but regular, and his pulse was steady.

  “A good argument for a porch light, sir,” she said. Her own pulse had slowed enough that her heart felt as if it might not rip loose after all. Gastner raised a single index finger to acknowledge the comment without moving another muscle. She shifted her hands in an effort to cradle his heavy skull and immediately sucked in a sharp breath even as Gastner winced. Her right hand came away wet with blood.

  She could hear the siren marking the ambulance’s route down Grande, heard the vehicle brake hard for Escondido, accelerate again, and then slow for the sharp turn onto Guadalupe. Lights flashed across the cottonwoods, and the ambulance swung wide, then backed up toward Estelle, its own Christmas tree of lights winking.

  Eric Sanchez appeared from the driver’s side, with Matty Finnegan making her way around the right side of the vehicle. While Sanchez opened the rear doors, Matty knelt by Estelle.

  “Did he fall?” she asked as she slipped the stethoscope’s earpieces in place.

  “I think so,” Estelle said. “I found him lying here just a couple of minutes ago.”

  “I didn’t fall,” Gastner said with surprising vehemence.

  “Easy, sir,” Matty said.

  “He has a wound of some kind on the back of his head.”

  “Hit something when he went over, I bet,” Matty said brusquely. “Sir, can you hear me?” She bent close, probing with her fingers while Estelle held her flashlight.

  “Stop shouting,” Gastner said, and Matty laughed, grinning at Estelle. “He hasn’t changed a bit,” she said. “Sir, did you hit your head on something when you fell?” She looked over at Estelle and frowned. “He’s got a nasty laceration on the back of his head. Eric, we’ll want a good pad and easy pressure on that.”

  “I didn’t fall,” Gastner said.

  “That would explain the horizontal position,” Matty quipped. She slipped a blood-pressure cuff around his upper arm, and as she pumped, she turned to her partner, who had clattered the gurney close at hand. “We’re going to want the backboard, Eric. Pulse is 90, BP”—she paused as she held her light to read the dial—“just about 140 over 95.” She patted Gastner’s arm as she pulled off the cuff. “If I didn’t tell ya, you’d ask, right sir? Not too bad, though.”

  Sanchez handed her a neck brace, and she deftly slipped it into place as he worked to secure a temporary bandage around Gastner’s head, tramping down the acacia in the process. “Nice bush,” she said as the last Velcro fastener grabbed into place. “Sir, we want to move you out of the vegetation. Are you up for that?”

  Gastner grunted something that might have been a yes.

  “Do you hurt anywhere else? Ankles? Knees? Hips? Back?”

  “Absolutely fit,” Gastner said, and this time he managed to open his eyes. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Matty Finnegan, sir. You know my mom and dad.”

  “Of course I do. I know you, too.”

  “That’s good, sir. We’re going to try and get you on the backboard.” That took considerable muscle and maneuvering, with Estelle holding Gastner’s head and the thick pad of bandage Matty had gauzed in place to cover the head wound.

  Once Gastner was secured to the backboard and gurney, the three of them worked in careful unison to heft his portly carcass into the ambulance.

  “Let’s rock and roll,” Matty said. “See you at the hospital, Sheriff,” she said, and when she saw how pale Estelle’s face was, she added, “He’ll be okay, Estelle.”

  “I’m right behind you,” Estelle said. She could hear Eric Sanchez on the radio, advising Posadas General of an incoming head injury. She watched the ambulance pull out of the driveway and for a moment found herself unable to move. Common sense worked its way into her brain, and she realized that Padrino was now in good hands—there was nothing she could do for him at the hospital.

  Behind her, the house loomed dark and cold. Still wanting to follow the ambulance, she forced herself to turn and walk across the small courtyard. It appeared that Gastner had been stepping up to enter the house, miscalculated, and careened into the acacia head-first. It was the sort of simple trip that a teenager would handle with a corrective skip. Gastner, seventy-one years old, overweight, and always fighting his trifocals, had managed a full gainer.

  The crushed bush showed splotches of blood, but Estelle could see nothing against which he would have torn his scalp, unless he had first struck the sharp edge of the step.

  She checked the front door and found it locked. Off to the left, her light caught the glint of keys, and she stooped to pick them up, recognizing the leather key fob. That made sense. As Gastner had stepped toward the door, he’d been fumbling his keys. When he went flying, so did the keys. She pocketed them and walked quickly back to her car, where she settled into the seat with a loud sigh.

  “Caramba,” she said to the quiet night. She leaned her head back against the rest and closed her eyes, but her hands were on autopilot, finding the telephone
. She opened one eye and regarded the display, then selected Tom Mears’s number.

  “Mears.”

  “Tom, this is Estelle.”

  “Oh, good. Look, Terry will come over the minute we have that court order,” he said. “I wish I could say that we’ve found a magic bullet of some kind, but we haven’t. We need to know what’s on that ATM receipt.”

  “I’m headed that way, I think.”

  “You think?” Mears chuckled.

  “Yeah. I’m at Bill’s house. He took a tumble.”

  “He what?”

  “He tripped over his front step and cracked his head. The ambulance just took him to the hospital. I really need to go there for a few minutes.”

  “Yipes,” Mears said. “Is he okay?”

  “I think so, but I need to be there.”

  “Yep,” Mears agreed. “This is like dominos, you know that? You think it’s something in the air? We got us quite a run going.”

  “I hope not.”

  “Collins and Taber just showed up, so we can break someone free to go visit the judge if that will help speed things up.”

  “Good idea, Tom. You know, Jackie gets along with the judge pretty well. I think he’s afraid of her,” Estelle said, trying a weak laugh.

  “Then she’s on the way,” Mears said. “By the way, Eddie and Mike are back from Lordsburg. They’re going to be down in Eddie’s office for a bit.”

  “I’ll swing by when I can,” Estelle said.

  “I understand that. I hope things go all right.”

  “Thanks, Tom.”

  She let the telephone fall to her lap, counted to a hundred while forcing slow, even breaths, and then straightened up and started the car. As she pulled out of Gastner’s driveway, she palmed the mike.

  “PSO dispatch, three ten.”

  “Three ten, go ahead.”

  “I’ll be ten-seven at the hospital. Call Lieutenant Adams at the State Police and ask him if we can borrow a couple of his officers.”

  “Ten four. He just called a few minutes ago, asking about that.”

  “Okay. Tell him I’d like one of his guys to patrol central, and the other to give us some help, especially on State 76 down to the border.”

  “Ten four.”

  She racked the mike and drove up Grande toward Posadas General Hospital, so lost in her thoughts that she didn’t realize that she’d driven through the red light at the intersection of Bustos and Grande. “Por Dios,” she said aloud with a start. “Pull yourself together.” Her pulse raced, partly from fatigue and partly from the grim image of her patrol car T-boning some innocent old lady out to buy a late-night can of cat food.

  Chapter Seventeen

  For more than an hour, Estelle paced the waiting room at Posadas General Hospital, knowing perfectly well that there were a dozen things more productive that she should be doing, knowing that Bill Gastner would be the first person to call her silly for wasting her time just because he needed a couple of stitches in his scalp. But she couldn’t bring herself to leave.

  It would have been an oversimplification to characterize her relationship with the former sheriff as father-daughter, although there was a strong element of that, especially since Estelle had never known her own biological father...or mother.

  Gastner had served as her mentor, confessor, counselor, friend, and perhaps most important of all he had been a true padrino, or godfather, for both of her children. As she paced the polished tile floor, she thought back twenty-two years, when she had come to the United States at age sixteen to live with her Uncle Reuben and attend the last two years of high school in Posadas. More than once, her uncle had talked about Undersheriff Gastner and El brazo largo de la ley... “the long arm of the law,” and before she graduated from high school, she’d discovered that law enforcement was magical for her.

  When she’d earned her first degree in criminal justice, it seemed only natural that she would seek a job that would allow her to remain close to home and her fiancé, the young doctor Francis Guzman.

  Undersheriff Bill Gastner had pushed the then civilian sheriff to hire twenty-two-year-old Estelle Reyes, and she’d become the first uniformed deputy sheriff in the history of Posadas County. During the nineteen years since then, the bond between Bill Gastner, herself, and her family had only deepened. She’d even been amused at the affection between Francis’s Aunt Sofía and the old lawman.

  During the wait, she had come close to calling Sofía at home, but was loath do to so until she had concrete information about Gastner’s condition. At 10:05, her cell phone rang, and Eddie Mitchell’s calm, quiet voice brought her back into focus.

  “How are we doing?” he asked.

  “We are waiting,” Estelle said. “They took him down to CAT scan, and we’ll see.”

  “Huh. Look, they got the warrant from Hobart, and Mears is down there now with his brother. It looks like Janet withdrew three hundred and fifty dollars at 3:05 p.m.”

  Estelle frowned as she rolled the numbers around in her head, and Mitchell mistook the silence for irritation at not being told sooner. “Mears said that he’d wait to hear from you before he told you,” Mitchell added. “He didn’t want to bother you over there.”

  “I appreciate that, but bother might be better than wearing circles in the waiting room floor,” Estelle said. “Three fifty. That’s a nice, logical number. Enough to get her through a long weekend, and not enough to be suspicious.”

  “Right. At least we have a time now.”

  “Three oh five.” Dead center in the middle of a Christmas afternoon, she thought. Just seven hours had passed. “Are those numbers accurate, do you suppose?”

  “Terry Mears says so.”

  “What about a video?”

  “Nothing. For one thing, it’s out of service at the moment. For another, it shows only the interior of the ATM foyer...nothing outside. If the killer nailed her in the car, then it’s out of range of the camera. Of course, he might have talked to her at the ATM. We don’t know.”

  “That’s about an hour between the time she was at the office and when she went to the ATM...and presumably was killed shortly thereafter.”

  “That’s right,” Mitchell said. “Mike’s spending some time by himself in the sheriff’s office, writing out a deposition. We had a good long talk on the way back from Lordsburg. That’s primarily why I called.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “‘Basket case’ might be a good description. He wants to arrest the whole world just now. I don’t want him out on the street, and I don’t want to send him home. I was thinking that maybe he should go back to his folks in Lordsburg when we’re all wrapped up tonight.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Anyway, I’d like to go over what he said when you get the chance. We ran through it a dozen times, and now he’s taking a cooler and putting it down on paper.”

  “What do you think, Eddie?”

  There was a pause. “If he killed Janet Tripp, then he deserves an Oscar for best actor. No...I don’t think he had anything to do with Janet’s death. But he’s the logical place to start, Estelle.” He exhaled a little huffing sound that might have been the beginning of a laugh. “I need your intuition.”

  “My intuition,” Estelle said wryly. “I might have had some, once upon a time.”

  “Take a deep breath and get it back in gear, Undersheriff,” Mitchell said. “You got your vest on?” When she didn’t answer instantly, he added, “Things like dark alleys and landfill pits should have made you a believer, my friend,” referring to two previous incidents that could have gone even more wrong than they had.

  “The sheriff should have had an armored butt,” she laughed, knowing perfectly well that Mitchell was right.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Look, we’ll be here for q
uite a while. If you get a chance to break away, we need to talk, okay? And by the way, Frank Dayan’s had his scanner on again. He stopped by.”

  “Use your own judgment,” Estelle said.

  “Yeah, well. I didn’t have much to tell him. But for once he’s got a major story hanging with lots of time before he goes to press...a whole damn week, practically.”

  “I’ll talk to him when I get a chance.”

  “He doesn’t know about Gastner yet.”

  “He doesn’t need to...Bill’s a civilian, and it was a home accident. If I told Frank, Padrino would have my hide.”

  “I can imagine. We have a State Police presence, by the way. Not a good time for folks to be speeding through Posadas. The lieutenant says that whatever we need, we’ve got.”

  “Hopefully, nothing,” Estelle said.

  “You never know, once the bad luck snowball really gets moving downhill. The Christmas from Hell. Look, I’ll catch you in a bit. You’re going to be ten-seven there for a while more?”

  “I think so, Eddie. I keep thinking of a dozen things to be doing, and it’s like I’m stuck in the mud. I don’t want to leave here until I make sure Padrino is going to be all right.”

  She saw a door open down the hall, and her husband stepped out of the emergency room, rubbing the back of his neck. “Here’s Francis,” she said.

  “Catch you later.”

  “Thanks, Eddie.”

  Francis ambled down the hall toward her, both hands hooked behind his head. Estelle reached out and put a hand on each of his hips, using him as an anchor. He grinned.

  “A very hard head,” he said. “CAT shows that he’s got a hairline skull fracture, and we’re a little concerned about intracranial bleeding, querida. That’s always the joker in injuries like this. Eight sutures, and he has some area added to his bald spot now. However...” He stopped, resting his forearms across Estelle’s shoulders. “You need some photos.”