Statute of Limitations

by Steven F Havill

  Estelle waited, giving Mitchell time to frame his thoughts. “Number one,” he said without looking up, “it appears that Janet Tripp was killed sometime after 3:05 p.m. That’s what the ATM receipt shows, and we have no reason to suppose that she waited around in the parking lot for any length of time after making her transaction. There’s always the chance that the killer took her ATM card after shooting her and did the transaction himself.”

  “I can’t imagine that,” Estelle said. “He’d have to have her PIN number, for one thing.”

  “That, and other reasons. Number one, why take just $350? The single transaction limit is $500 a day, Mears tells me. And second, once the shot is fired, I would think that the killer would be motivated to split. I can’t see him casually walking over to the ATM, with her lying there, shot and bleeding.”

  “He took the time to pull her out of her car and dump her into his...trunk, back of an SUV, whatever it was.”

  “Sure, he did. But if we use a couple of minutes after 3:05 as the time of the shooting, that gives us a window of opportunity there. It might be easier if we had a stopwatch timing everything, but nobody pays too much attention to the fine details. The only time we’re sure of is what’s printed on the ATM slip.” He raised his head to look at Estelle. “3:05. She does her business, walks back to the Jeep, and pop.”

  “And at that time, Mike isn’t even on his way to Lordsburg yet. He’s still in town,” Estelle said.

  “Correct. But...,” and Mitchell leaned forward, shifting his weight on the small chair and pulling at the bottom of his vest where it chafed his belly. “I would be willing to bet every penny that’s in my enormous pension fund that Mike Sisneros didn’t kill Janet Tripp. I talked to him in Lordsburg, and tried to lay things out as gently as I could. I might as well have hit him between the eyes with a baseball bat. And if it was an acting job, I’ll hang up my spurs.”

  “What’s he have to say, then?” Estelle asked. “Did Janet have enemies, or does Mike think it was just a random thing...a crime of opportunity?”

  “I’m not sure he’s thinking straight at all. Desperate might be a good word. He’d like to wrap his finger around the trigger and put the killer in his sights. If anything, we’re going to have trouble keeping him from mucking around and getting in our way with this thing. He and Janet were closer than I thought, I guess. He said that they were planning to get married this spring sometime.”

  “Ay. That’s rough. I’d heard that rumor, but they were keeping their plans close to themselves.”

  “He said that he almost decided not to go over to his mom’s, but Janet talked him into it. Mrs. Cruz is ailing, and Janet said that Mike should spend some holiday time with her.”

  “Generous girl.”

  “I’ve only met her half a dozen times, but I liked her,” Mitchell said.

  “And what was she going to do?”

  “Do?”

  “For the rest of her holiday? She evidently wasn’t in the apartment to see Mike off. Was she going to see relatives of her own? Does Janet have folks nearby? I know about the sister out east somewhere.”

  “Mike says not. Her mother died a while ago. Dad walked out on the family when Janet was just a kid, and who the hell knows where he is. Maybe the sister knows. Mike says that Janet told him that she had some errands, and then was going to spend a quiet evening in their apartment. Mike planned to be home by ten or so.” He shrugged. “Finish out their holiday together.”

  “Not to be,” Estelle said, more to herself than Mitchell. She glanced at the wall clock, then at the captain. “That’s all?” With it pushing midnight, it wouldn’t have taken Eddie five hours to round out. Mike Sisneros’s simple story...even to the point of double and triple checking times with whoever might have an accurate guess about what might have happened when.

  “No,” Eddie said. “We have a few bullet fragments from Tripp’s brain, but I kinda doubt that we’re going to match much of anything. I’m sure it’s a .22, and so is Mears.” He paused, looking down at his hands again. “I asked Mike if he had a .22 of some kind. In point of fact, he has two. Actually, I should say, had two.”

  “Had?”

  “One’s missing.”

  Silence hung heavy for a moment.

  “You mean stolen?”

  “I don’t know what I mean,” Mitchell said. “And neither does Mike. The last time he saw it, the gun was in a dresser drawer in their bedroom. It’s not there now. The plastic box is there. The gun isn’t.”

  “What about the other one?”

  “He showed it to me. It’s a .22 conversion kit that he bought to fit his duty gun. Kind of a slick little deal. Take the barrel and slide off the .45, and just slip on the replacement .22 kit. Go plink on the cheap. The kit’s clean as a whistle. It hasn’t been fired in a while, unless Mike did the job and then came home and diligently cleaned up.”

  “But you said a second gun is missing.”

  “Yup. A .22 Ruger .22/45, one of those heavy barreled things that’s supposed to sort of match a 1911 in heft. He says that he’s had it for quite a number of years.”

  “He didn’t loan it to anyone?”

  “Says not.”

  “Janet didn’t use it?”

  Mitchell shook his head. “She wasn’t much of a gun fancier. What bothers me is that Mike can’t account for how it might have gone missing. He says that he knew it was in its case, in the drawer. No doubt Janet did too, although he says that she would never use it for anything. He says that he once tried to talk her into carrying a little something for protection, but that she wouldn’t do it. So he doesn’t think she took it. And it doesn’t make sense to me that she would.”

  “Somebody did.”

  “Sure enough, somebody did,” Mitchell said. “The apartment was locked, with no sign of forced entry. It’s on the second floor, so no one busted in through a window.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Nothing else is missing, as far as Mike can tell. And we really looked.”

  “Just the gun.”

  “Yup. And Mike claims he doesn’t know how, why, or when. I have trouble with that, Estelle. A gun is not the kind of thing most folks misplace.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Another hour spent with Deputy Mike Sisneros produced nothing that the investigators didn’t already know. Estelle let Captain Eddie Mitchell’s steady, methodical pressure on the young deputy continue uninterrupted. No one in the department knew Sisneros any better than did Mitchell. As the time dragged into the early hours of the morning, small bits and pieces of information dribbled in, but Estelle knew, as that awful Christmas Day finally slipped into yesterday, that they’d reached an impasse.

  A State Police officer in Lordsburg reported that a careful search of Mike Sisneros’s personal vehicle, still parked at his mother and stepfather’s house, had produced nothing out of the ordinary. It would have been physically impossible to cram a body the size of Janet Tripp’s into what passed for a trunk in the Mustang without leaving traces behind. Samples of human hair on the upholstery were taken, and Estelle had no doubt that they would belong to Mike and Janet. Further search had revealed the usual junk lodged under the seats—popcorn, two wrapped mints, pennies, one dime, an empty .45 ACP casing without even a hint of burned powder aroma, and a broken windshield scraper.

  Other than the ATM records and a single .22 long-rifle cartridge casing found in the parking lot, Janet Tripp’s vehicle produced nothing but questions.

  The arroyo where the young woman’s body had been found was telling no stories.

  Estelle had chafed at the delay, but she knew there was nothing she could do about it. Her one contact at the lab who might have considered coming into the state office to work on a holiday was out of town visiting relatives. The wheels of forensic laboratory work ground to a halt on Christmas
Day, further hampered by the holiday’s falling on a Saturday. But there was little that the lab could tell them anyway, short of an unexpected curve ball when the toxicology reports came back.

  Alan Perrone had called the office earlier with the news that Janet Tripp’s body bore no other wounds or marks that weren’t consistent with being roughly transported and then dumped into a tangle of rusting cars and arroyo gravel. She hadn’t struggled with anyone...her short fingernails were clean with the exception of a small amount of grit from her death spasms in the arroyo. She hadn’t flailed about, grabbing her assailant’s hair, or gouging flesh from his face or arms. Instead, all signs pointed to her sitting in her car in the bank parking lot, head bowed forward as she tucked money and the ATM receipt into her purse. And then...pop. Unconsciousness, if not death, would have been instantaneous.

  An hour after Estelle had given Tom Mears the rebar, Bill Gastner’s house keys, and the shovel, the sergeant’s report confirmed what she had expected. There were no prints on the rebar, none on the shovel. Her own—and Bill Gastner’s—were on the bundle of keys and the tiny penlight joined on the ring.

  Linda Real’s photographs clearly showed the eruption of dirt around the hole in the ground where the rebar had first been jerked out, then returned to its place.

  Beyond that, nothing.

  Shortly after two in the morning of December 26, when no new ground could be pawed over, Lieutenant Mark Adams ran out of patience and overtime. He offered to drive Mike Sisneros home, and Estelle watched the young officer leave Mitchell’s office, his shoulders bowed like an old man’s. She wanted to find a quiet, dark corner and talk with Sisneros by herself, but was too tired at the moment to frame coherent questions and strategy.

  “Shit,” Eddie Mitchell said succinctly. He stretched far back in his chair with a creaking of leather, arms straight over his head, fingers entwined. He held that position for a long time, then slumped with his hands in his lap. “You got any bright ideas?”

  “I wish that I did,” Estelle said. She rubbed her face wearily. “I need a great big sign in neon letters that says, ‘Go this way.’”

  “Copy that.”

  She grinned at Mitchell and his curt military style, even though the dark circles under his eyes were probably just as deep as hers. “I wonder if we’re missing something obvious just because of the way we’re looking at this.”

  “And how would that be, Undersheriff?”

  “If we go all the way back to the beginning of this miserable holiday, to what is now the day before yesterday, I responded to a telephone call from Chief Martinez on Christmas Eve.” She paused. “That seems like a year ago, now.”

  “Okay, he called you from the motel.”

  “And then he goes out in the rain, to sit in his car, to do what, we don’t really know. What we know is that he did not do what my husband told him to do—sit down and wait for medical help. We know he did not say, ‘Okay, Dr. Francis, I feel terrible. Treat me. Here I am, waiting at the motel. Take me to the ER and make this all go away.”

  “Most people aren’t so rational, but okay.”

  “And we progress from there,” and she chopped the air in a line with her hand. “First one event, then another. We have the two kids in the motel trying to make some lame point about modern generosity with their Mary and Joseph thing...or whatever it is that they were doing. A nice way to spend Christmas Eve. Then the next day, on Christmas afternoon, a kid on a motorcycle finds Janet Tripp, dumped in a trash heap in the arroyo, the victim of a bizarre robbery. And then later that night, when he and I should have been having a meaningful and productive conversation, I get tied up in work and someone else takes the opportunity to club Bill Gastner over the head...but this guy, or gal, doesn’t take anything. He doesn’t take Bill’s wallet, or his keys, or go inside and ransack the house. It seems clear to me that the target was Bill.”

  “Some old enemy, maybe,” Mitchell offered.

  “There may be some of those. I don’t know what cases he’s working on at the moment, except he’s got some guy from Montana who keeps trying to bring horses into New Mexico without any paperwork...who knows why.”

  “Or a burglar who thought he was trapped when Wild Bill drove up. He hides behind the wall, and when the old man’s back is turned, he grabs a weapon and swings.”

  “But why?” Estelle said. “What sense does that make? He could just have huddled there in the dark for a minute until Padrino went inside and then slipped away as easily as can be—or just darted off when Bill’s back was turned. There isn’t going to be a foot chase, that’s for sure.” She ran fingers through her short black hair in frustration. “For us, all these events seem related.” She chopped her hand through the air again. “But maybe only because one comes right after another. That’s what’s confusing me.”

  “If you don’t see a connection with all these things, I’m with you there,” Mitchell said.

  The room fell silent, and from out in the hall, they both heard the quiet cadence of dispatcher Brent Sutherland passing information over the radio. Mitchell had turned down the volume of the speaker on his desk, and he reached across now and turned it up just far enough that Estelle could hear Deputy Tom Pasquale’s clipped delivery.

  “We have three officers on the road for the quietest night of the year,” Mitchell said. “Taber’s out there, Pasquale’s running every plate he sees, and Mears is poking around who knows where. Adams has two state police officers in the county. The Border Patrol has a heads-up, along with every sheriff’s department in southern New Mexico. We have lots of eyes out there. And you and me are sitting here wishing we’d get smart.” He leaned forward and let his head fall, forehead resting on his hands. “Sleep would feel good. That might be the smart thing.”

  He jerked upright. “The trouble is, we have some woodchuck out there with a gun who thinks killing a girl for a few bucks is a fair trade, and we got another creep who tracks down an old man and whacks him on the head with an iron pipe. They’re good company for our two creeps from Indiana who figure it’s fair to steal a car from an old man dying from a heart attack.”

  “I keep circling around to that,” Estelle said.

  “To what, Wardell and Jakes?”

  She nodded.

  “You want to tell me why?”

  “I don’t know why, Eddie. Maybe just because that’s where all this started.”

  “Huh.” He toyed with a pencil. “Eduardo deserved better than he got, that’s for sure,” he said after a minute. “It’s going to be interesting to see what charges Schroeder will agree to file against those guys.” He dropped the pencil. “I’m going home,” he said, and pushed his chair back, standing abruptly. “Roberto is coming home later today.” He looked at the clock as if to ascertain that it was after midnight, and officially Saturday. “Did I tell you that earlier?”

  She shook her head. “You talked with Gayle?”

  “Yup. His sister is going up to Albuquerque to pick the two of them up after Bob’s released. Gayle said he isn’t a happy camper. He’s got this whole regimen of therapy that he’s supposed to do several times a day, and a locker full of drugs. You can imagine how all that sits with him. He’d rather just go off by himself, hunting somewhere.”

  “We have lots of hunting he can do,” Estelle said.

  Mitchell snorted what might have been a laugh had he not been so tired. “He’ll like that.” He watched Estelle push herself out of the chair. “You need to go home,” he said. “Switch all this off for a while.” Estelle grinned. Eddie Mitchell still managed to sound very much like the chief of police he had been before the village and county had consolidated departments.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, and managed a limp salute.

  Moments later, as she walked out of the building to her car, she realized that she was bone tired, but wide awake. At home,
Francisco and Carlos would be snoozing soundly, their world incomprehensibly simple from an adult point of view. If Dr. Francis wasn’t home yet, he would be soon. He would tumble into bed and be asleep before his head settled into the pillow.

  Estelle paused with her hand on the door handle of the Crown Victoria. If she went home now, she would lie in bed staring at the ceiling, kept awake by the cacophony of images swirling in her mind, trying to discover answers in the mess. There certainly should be something more productive than doing that, she thought.

  She knew who else would be awake, his insomnia honed by long years of practice. The Don Juan de O-ate Restaurant was long closed, so she couldn’t bring former sheriff Bill Gastner one of his beloved burrito grandes as a middle-of-the-night snack, but at least she could bring him a puzzle or two.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  The yellow plastic cone that announced caution on one side and cuidado on the other was placed dead center in the hospital’s main hallway, and behind it, Stacy Cunningham guided the floor polisher in gentle, sweeping arcs. He allowed the pad to nuzzle right up to the rubber wall trim on one side, then with a little shift of weight and pressure on the handlebars, encouraged the machine to float back the other way.

  Cunningham saw Estelle enter and out of reflex looked over his shoulder at the large clock.

  Taking two seconds to wait for the machine to complete its arc to the left, he then shut it off, letting his weight settle on the handles as if he had been expecting exactly this old friend to walk through the doors. “Hey, Merry Christmas,” he said cheerfully. “But I guess officially it’s over.”