Statute of Limitations

by Steven F Havill

  He ignored her question. “Gray said all that, or is that what you think?”

  Estelle hesitated, then shrugged. “Bobby, so far, it hasn’t mattered much to us who the county manager is. Kevin was good,” she said, referring to the previous manager, “but the one before him was an idiot. They come and they go. We both know that.”

  “Leona Spears needs to go, not come.”

  She laughed. “We’ll see, Bobby. Besides, Leona is local, for one thing.”

  “Loco, you mean.”

  “Well, maybe. But that’s important to the board, at this point. They don’t want some stranger coming in who doesn’t have some sympathy for the way we do things down here. Maybe they have a point. There’s no one who knows the county better than Leona does, except maybe yourself or Bill Gastner. I can see why they’re willing to give Leona a chance. She’s a professional planner, she’s good at working through budgetary matters, and she has to be pretty good at managing people, or she wouldn’t have been with the highway department as long as she has.”

  “She’s nuts,” Torrez said.

  “Maybe. She cornered me last week sometime and asked me a couple questions that didn’t sound too crazy.”

  “Like what? She never talked to me.”

  Small wonder. “For one thing, she wanted some figures on how much it would cost to have enough vehicles for the deputies to take the units home when they were off-duty.”

  “You know we can’t afford that.”

  “Leona wants to investigate applying for grants. That’s one of her specialties, I guess. Anyway, Bobby, I liked the sound of what she wanted to do. With the county having to provide coverage for the village now, it made sense to me to have each deputy with immediate access to a vehicle. If Leona Spears can make that happen, I’m all for it.”

  Torrez flipped the paper off to one side in contempt.

  “You want me to go through that and write up some answers?” Estelle asked. “She isn’t asking a lot...and there’s only a day or two left now to put together an answer that might do us some good.” She refrained from adding, We could have talked about this last week.

  “If you want to do that, go ahead,” Torrez said. He made no move to hand her the paper, and she reached across and retrieved it. “So fill me in. What’s going on, other than Leona Spears? Christ.”

  As succinctly as possible, Estelle reviewed their progress, and he listened without interruption, feet now propped up on his desk. When she’d finished, he let one leg slip off the desk, his boot thumping on the floor.

  “Mike stopped by,” he said abruptly. He picked up a 3 x 5 card. “Janet’s sister lives in Kentland, Kansas. Monica Tripp-Baylor. I was going to call her...give me something to do.”

  “Okay. When you do that, I’d like to know something about the parents.”

  “She died.”

  “The mother? So I’ve been told. But Mike says that Brad Tripp just sort of walked out on the family. I’d like to know what the real story is.”

  “That’s what happened,” Torrez said. “They didn’t get along, and he moved out. Lived in town for a while, then hit the road.”

  “I was trying to recall the incident of him on the stairway in the old building,” Estelle said.

  Torrez actually smiled. “He’d been tearin’ up Pike’s Saloon. Remember that place down past the Don Juan that burned a year or so later?”

  “Sure.”

  “Just a bar fight,” the sheriff said. “I happened to be cruisin’ by, and took the call. When I brought Tripp back to the office, he decided to take me on. Didn’t work,” he added with some satisfaction.

  “And that’s it?”

  “That’s it.” He shrugged.

  “And after that incident?”

  “Don’t know. I didn’t see him all that often. Eduardo would know, but he ain’t talkin’,” Torrez said bluntly.

  “Well, sure, Bobby.”

  “No doubt about it. Probably wasn’t a soul in the whole town that Eduardo didn’t know.”

  “Agreed. But, as you say...”

  “We need to sit down and talk with Essie, if you think you need to know something about Brad Tripp.”

  Estelle mulled that for a moment. Essie Martinez was living through the least merry Christmas of her life. Digging through what she recalled of her husband’s tenure as police chief would be painful and, under the best of circumstances, of suspect accuracy anyway. But the sheriff was right. It was another angle, and at this point, any angle could help.

  “How about if I do that,” she said. “I’ll take Bill along—he and Eduardo worked together for years. He might think of something to nudge Essie’s memory.”

  Torrez glanced at his watch. “This afternoon?”

  “Sure. Why not? Bill was going to come over to the house for dinner anyway. We’ll swing by Essie’s first. You’ll be home?”

  “Home or here,” Torrez replied. “I got to pay attention to my therapy now, you know.” He said the word with so much venom that Estelle laughed, and that only deepened his glower.

  Chapter Thirty

  Less than an hour after Estelle left Sheriff Robert Torrez’s office early on that Sunday afternoon, her phone chirped. She had just parked the county car in her driveway after running several errands, and Francisco was halfway across the front yard toward her.

  “Guzman,” she said, and held out a hand to her son. She was surprised to hear the characteristic monosyllabic greeting from the sheriff.

  “Hey,” Torrez said, and the one word didn’t carry a flood of good will and holiday cheer. The intervening hour hadn’t improved his mood. “Where you at?”

  “I just pulled into my driveway,” she replied.

  “You got a few minutes?”

  No, I don’t, she almost said. I’m going to spend the rest of this Sunday with my family. “Sure.” She reached across the seat and grabbed the two plastic sacks of groceries with her right hand, and handed them to Francisco, whose small hands deftly twined around the tops. “Give those to tía, hijo,” she said.

  “We got us a problem,” Torrez said. “I’m in my office.” The connection broke.

  “I thought Padrino was coming,” Francisco said.

  Estelle sighed. “He is, hijo. After a little bit. Right now, Roberto el Gruñón needs to see me.”

  “He could come over here,” Francisco said. “Tía and abuela have been baking all day.” His face beamed, and she saw the trace of powdered sugar near the left corner of his mouth. “There’s lots to eat.”

  “Bobby’s not hungry right now,” Estelle said, and almost added, and that’s not the way el gruñón works. “You save some for Padrino.” She closed the car door. “I’ll be right back, okay?”

  The little boy stepped back. “Okay.” The resignation in his tone was heavy, and he didn’t turn toward the house, waiting as if there were a chance his mother might change her mind.

  “These things happen, hijo,” she said.

  Her son’s expression was almost comical. Had he been old enough to frame the right words, he would have muttered, “Don’t make it a habit.”

  As she drove back to the sheriff’s department, impatience prompted Estelle to run down her mental inventory of potential problems that might have reared their ugly heads, and she found herself centering on Mike Sisneros—if ever there was a lost soul, Mike was the very definition. With no clearcut direction for the case to go, nothing positive for him to pursue, all he could do was pace in circles and fume. The weekend even made it worse.

  The sheriff’s office door was open, but Estelle paused at the counter of the dispatch island, where Gayle Torrez was busy organizing and straightening after two days of unplanned absence. As if the sheriff had been lying in wait for the first sounds of his undersheriff’s footsteps, his voice
interrupted her greeting for Gayle.

  “Hey?” His command was easy to interpret: If you’re there, get in here.

  “Neanderthal man summons,” Gayle said, and beamed at Estelle. “You want to go out for some late lunch and leave him?” She knew her husband too well to be intimidated by his moods.

  Estelle laughed. “Uh,” she grunted in reply, bending over and dangling one arm like an ape. She straightened up. “Did you see Jackie’s cartoon, by the way?”

  “The one with Leona visiting Bobby in the hospital?”

  “That’s the one. Has he seen it yet?”

  “Ah, no. Jackie showed it to me yesterday.” She made the okay sign with index finger and thumb. “Perfecto,” she said, and then glanced toward the sheriff’s office door and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Linda said we should save it for the calendar.”

  “That’s just what he needs,” Estelle agreed. The annual calendar project had become legendary, with photos of the sheriff’s department staff snapped during the year—some gorgeous portraits with stunning New Mexico scenery in the background, some loaded with pathos, some comic shots of deputies caught during unguarded, less than complimentary moments. “It’ll make a great cover.”

  Torrez appeared in his office doorway, and for a moment his eyes narrowed at the tête-à-tête, obviously called at his expense. “Hey,” he said again, with somewhat less command.

  “Uh,” Gayle grunted, a fair imitation of Estelle’s first reply. She reached out and hugged Estelle’s shoulder. “You have a good day,” she said.

  “You bet.”

  “You seen this?” Torrez said by way of the only greeting Estelle could expect to hear. He held up a folded copy of a metro Sunday newspaper.

  “No. I forgot it was even Sunday,” Estelle said. “Are they giving Frank Dayan ulcers again?” The Posadas Register publisher lived in constant apprehension that the large metro dailies in the state would make his struggling weekly look foolish. Most of the time, it wasn’t difficult to do.

  “I don’t care about Dayan,” Torrez said, which Estelle knew was no understatement. In fact, she was surprised that Bobby had bothered to read anything but the sports pages and the comics of the Sunday paper. He turned to go back inside the office. Estelle glanced back at Gayle, and the sheriff’s wife waved a hand in dismissal. Estelle took the proffered newspaper as the sheriff settled carefully behind the desk, and Estelle saw a flinch of pain cross his face.

  “We made the front page,” he said. “Did you know he was going to do that?”

  “Who, and do what?” Estelle asked. She flipped the paper over and saw the headline, neatly centered over four columns at the bottom of the page.

  Posadas Not So Peaceful

  Murder, Assault Stalk Village Over Holiday

  She frowned at the byline. “Todd Willis. That’s interesting. He didn’t go to Tucson after all?”

  “Willis?”

  “The young man who played Joseph at the motel on Christmas Eve. Friday night. The reporter who wrote this whatever it is.”

  “I’m not worried about him and his dippy stories,” Torrez growled, and he grunted to his feet, crossed the small office, and closed the door. “What I want to know is who the ‘source’ is, if it ain’t you.”

  Estelle settled in one of the chairs, holding up a hand to fend off further comment until she had read the story.

  Posadas, NM—Investigation continues in Posadas County today into the death of a former Posadas Chief of Police after the man suffered an apparent heart attack on Christmas Eve after a confrontation with two travelers at a local motel. At the same time, officials are investigating the violent death of a Posadas woman on Christmas afternoon, and the assault on a former Posadas County sheriff only hours later.

  Although refusing to say whether or not the three incidents are linked, Sheriff’s Department officials are not ruling out any possibilities.

  Sources in the department said that the death of former village Police Chief Eduardo Martinez was announced late on Christmas Day. Martinez had apparently suffered a heart attack on Christmas Eve that may have been exacerbated by a confrontation with two men at a local motel.

  In that incident, Bruce Jakes, 43, and Everett Wardell, 54, both of Hickory Grove, IN, were arrested and charged with multiple counts of assault, auto theft, and resisting arrest, sheriff’s officials said. Jakes and Wardell allegedly took Chief Martinez’s personal vehicle after the retired law officer collapsed in the parking lot of the Posadas Inn following an apparent heart attack. Martinez, 74, collapsed after talking to the two men, witnesses said.

  Jakes and Wardell were apprehended shortly afterward in the border village of Regál by Posadas County Sheriff Robert Torrez and Undersheriff Estelle Guzman.

  Less than twenty-four hours later, Posadas resident Janet Tripp, 30, was found shot to death late Saturday afternoon, her body discovered in an arroyo north of Posadas by a youth riding a motorcycle, police said.

  Sheriff’s officials said that Tripp apparently had been killed by a single gunshot to the head, and that robbery appeared to be a motive. Police said that Tripp was killed after making a withdrawal from the Posadas State Bank’s ATM. In a bizarre twist, Tripp was reportedly the fiancée of one of the Posadas County Sheriff’s Deputies, officials said.

  Within hours of the murder of Janet Tripp, police said that former Posadas County Sheriff William K. Gastner was assaulted near his home. Gastner was hospitalized for treatment of a head wound, officials said, and is listed in stable condition.

  Officers refused to speculate on whether the killing of Tripp and the assault on Gastner were related.

  “Sheriff Gastner has information that we’re currently processing,” a Sheriff’s Department official said. “It appears that he may have information that may help police identify his attacker.”

  The undersheriff looked up at Bob Torrez. “See what I mean?” Torrez said. Estelle quickly scanned the rest of the article, but found nothing new.

  “Let me show you the press release that I wrote yesterday,” she said, and started to get up. “I think it was yesterday.”

  Torrez waved a hand impatiently. “Forget it. Just tell me the parts of this shit that you didn’t write,” he said.

  “I never said anything about a relationship between Janet Tripp and Mike, Bobby. That’s nobody’s business but theirs—at least at the moment. And I certainly never said anything about Bill being able to identify his attacker. I said that he had been assaulted near his home, and that was it. I also never said that we were investigating any relationship between the incidents.”

  “Did this Willis guy talk to somebody in dispatch? Where’d he get all this crap?”

  Estelle shook her head. “I’ll ask...don’t think he did. I’d be surprised. You know as well as I do that they have standing orders not to discuss any aspect of a case over the phone with anyone outside the department. Every one of them knows Frank Dayan, and they’ve all been over this ground time and time again. They aren’t going to start blabbing just because it’s from some big out-of-town paper. They won’t read a police report or any other piece of public information over the phone to a reporter. They might read the call log, but that’s a summary that’s written for public consumption anyway. If there’s a question, they always say the same thing: ‘You’ll have to talk to the sheriff.’”

  “And then I always say, ‘Go talk to Estelle.’” Torrez managed a tight smile.

  “Yes, you do.” It was the first sign that Bobby’s blood pressure might be returning to something near normal, and Estelle was relieved.

  “Did Bill talk to this guy? Willis what’s-his-name?”

  “That’s a possibility, I suppose. Not likely, but possible. We both know that Bill’s not the blabby type....He’s been in our shoes as long as both of us put together. If h
e said something, especially without talking to us first, he had good reason.”

  “Reason or not, I want to know,” Torrez said. “Just because I want to know, that’s all. There ain’t much we can do about it now, but we don’t need somebody goin’ off and playin’ the Lone Ranger on us.”

  “That’s simple enough, Bobby. I’ll ask Padrino, and he’ll tell me if it was him. We were talking earlier this morning, and he’s coming over for dinner later on. Right now, it makes sense to me that we should dig a little deeper into Janet Tripp’s background. There’s just too much there that we don’t know, too many things about her death that don’t make sense as a random robbery-gone-bad.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Torrez said, and Estelle knew it wasn’t just gratuitous agreement for the sake of taking credit. He shifted on the uncomfortable chair. “Me and Eddie are going through the files, Estelle. First thing we did was check our own records—and as far as we’re concerned, Janet Tripp was clean. Not even a speedin’ ticket. Nothin’. The village files are somethin’ else. They’re a mess, for one thing. But Eddie was going to give it a try. We know there’s no rap sheet on her. No obvious file.” He shrugged. “But it’s worth lookin’.”

  “I just don’t think that her murder was a simple robbery, Bobby.”

  “You said that before.”

  “Well, there’s just too much...” She hesitated. “I don’t know. Just too many circumstances that don’t make any sense to me.”

  “So where you goin’ with it? Gastner?”

  “His attack is linked somehow. I really believe that, and I couldn’t tell you why, except for the unlikelihood of coincidence. There’s something there that we’re missing. Bill agrees.”

  “Huh.” Torrez stared off into space for a moment, chewing his lower lip. “So what’s next?”

  “You said you and Eddie already made an end run on the files, and that’s a logical place to start. Anything and everything that’s even tangentially related to Janet Tripp—or anyone related to her. And anything that ties her to Bill Gastner.”