I gazed at the two machines. “Stranger things have happened, Robert,” I said. “It’s jury-rigged, that’s for sure. He wanted to lift the tire, so he tried to do it with the backhoe. Something slipped, like where he had the chain hooked, and he got down to work on it. The damn thing nailed him. In fact, that’s exactly what it looks like-one man trying to do something by himself that he shouldn’t have been. And he was in a foul mood to begin with.”
“You’ll be at the office later?” The way he said it sounded like he’d dismissed my logical scenario.
I nodded. “I’m just in the way here. Let me know if you need anything.” I indicated the idling tractor. “And you might as well shut that thing down. Make it easier to hear and breathe both.”
Torrez glanced at his watch. “Dr. Perrone will be here in a minute. Then we’ll clear things up. There’s no hurry.”
Chapter Seven
Brent Sutherland sat in front of the dispatcher’s console with both elbows on the table and his head supported in his hands. His unruly red hair was about an inch longer than I would have liked, but what the hell. If that was the only concession I had to make as the millennium clicked over, I was lucky.
Whether Sutherland was reading the New Mexico Criminal and Traffic Law Manual that rested open between his elbows or sleeping was hard to tell.
If the deputy was studying, he certainly had peace and quiet. The persistent exhaling of the building’s circulation system as it moved stale air, summer dust, and range country pollen from one room to the other was all the excitement the Public Safety Building had to offer at 3:15 that morning.
In four weeks Sutherland would attend the Academy, and until then the weekday graveyard dispatcher’s shift was just the right time and place to whittle away at his inexperience. Once in a while, Bob Torrez assigned Sutherland to double up on patrol with one of the deputies. We didn’t have the manpower to do that often, though, and Sutherland had to content himself with the bottom rung on the duty ladder.
Tom Mears, a veteran who preferred the midnight-to-eight shift so that he had time to race his beloved stock cars on summer weekends, was the only deputy on the road at the moment. Undersheriff Torrez and one or two others who were supposed to be off-duty were still over at the Sissons’, probing and photographing, oblivious to whatever else might be going on elsewhere in the county.
Mears and Sutherland had the place to themselves, and I trusted that Mears could keep the rookie out of trouble.
Whether the sound of my boots on the polished tile floor woke him up or it was just coincidence, Sutherland’s right hand drifted down from his chin and picked up the pencil on the table. He jotted a note in the margin of the book, replaced the pencil, and glanced at the digital clock in front of him.
“Fascinating stuff, eh?” I said, and Sutherland started, cranking his head around so fast I thought I heard a vertebra crack. “Sorry about that.” I stepped closer and looked at the log. Since the Sisson emergency, things had drifted to tomblike peace and quiet.
Thirty-one minutes before, Deputy Mears had radioed in that the side door of the tiny Catholic church in Regal was open, not an unusual state of affairs, and that he was going to check it. Three minutes later, logged at 02:47, Mears had radioed ten-eight, the numerical mumbo-jumbo that meant he was back in service.
“No sleep-overs this time,” I said, and Sutherland looked puzzled.
“Sir?”
“Sleep-overs. The church in Regal is never locked. I don’t think there’s even a lockable chasp on the door. It’s a favorite place for Mexican nationals to spend the night.”
“That’s why the three minutes, then,” Sutherland said.
“That’s why. And that’s why you need to be on your toes, even when you’re bored to death and you’ve committed that book to memory and you’re counting the ticks on the clock. Where’s the nearest officer who can provide backup to Mears?”
Sutherland frowned and I saw his back straighten and one hand move an inch or two in the direction of the transmit bar on the radio.
“No matter who you find,” I said, “odds are that they aren’t going to be close to Regal. So Mears is on his own. If he walks into that church and there are about eight illegals snoozing on the pews and two of them happen to be armed with something more than an attitude, the night can get exciting. So when someone goes in to check a place like that, you give him three or four minutes, no more. If he isn’t on the air ten-eight by then, you remind him.”
I leaned across and pushed the bar. “Three oh seven, PCS. Ten-thirty-nine.”
Three seconds later, Tom Mears’s matter-of-fact voice responded, “Three oh seven is ten-eight.”
“Ten-four. PCS two five one.”
I straightened up. “You know his status now, and he knows you’re not asleep.” I grinned. “And that’s all the weird folks who spend the night listening to scanners need to know, too. That’s why you don’t spend your shift asking the deputies where they are. There’s only one of him and a big, empty county. He’s got little-enough edge as it is without someone being able to plot his course every minute.”
“That’s what Ernie Wheeler said.”
“Listen to him.” I nodded. “On a night like this, when you’ve got deputies and civilians both edgy after the mess over at the Sissons’, somebody needs to be paying attention to the little things. Don’t let yourself be distracted. Pay attention.” I grinned. “End of sermon.”
“Yes, sir,” Sutherland said, nodding his head in appreciation. I wasn’t sure if he was glad to have such monumental erudition bestowed on him by the sheriff of Posadas County or glad that I had finally shut up.
I checked my mailbox and retrieved a yellow WHILE YOU WERE OUT note. I recognized Ernie Wheeler’s angular printing-just the name Frank Dayan, time recorded as 21:05, and a check through the please-return-call box. I turned it so that Sutherland could see it. “Were you here when Dayan called?”
“No, sir.”
“Huh,” I said. Dayan had called before the Sisson tragedy, so there was the possibility he wouldn’t even remember what he had wanted. Not that a call from the publisher of the Posadas Register was unusual at any hour. He was either an insomniac like myself or a twenty-hour-a-day workaholic-I wasn’t sure which. The Register came out on Fridays, reduced from its heyday as a twice-a-week rag, and most of the time Dayan and his staff of three did a pretty fair job selling ads and sandwiching a little news in what space was left.
I folded the note into a wad and tossed it in the trash. “Huh,” I muttered again, the nagging feeling that some creep had sent Dayan the same anonymous note that had been dispatched to at least two of the county commissioners sinking to the pit of my stomach. That was all we needed.
“If Linda Real comes in, I need to talk to her,” I said over my shoulder.
“She’s downstairs with Tom Pasquale,” Sutherland replied, and I stopped in my tracks. My reaction flustered him, and he stammered, “At least I flink they are. Linda said that she wanted to finish printing the photos.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” I said. I couldn’t imagine there being enough room in the small darkroom for both Linda Real and Thomas Pasquale. Maybe that was the point of the whole exercise.
The door downstairs was beyond the drinking fountain and conference room. I opened it and then stopped, groping for the buzzer button below the light switch. The wiring was one of Bob Torrez’s brainstorms and more than once had saved a valuable piece of film from someone inadvertently opening the wrong door and letting in a blast of light.
I tapped the button twice tightly, hearing its bray down in the bowels of the basement. In a couple of seconds, the stairwell light snapped on and the doorway at the bottom unlatched with the sharp, quick snick of an electric dead bolt, activated when the folks in the darkroom knew that any unexposed film or paper was safely stowed.
I made my way down and pushed open the door at the bottom of the stairs. The darkroom shared the basement with the heating
and cooling plant and the concrete fireproof evidence locker that had been built a couple years before during the renovation. A dozen steps ahead, the darkroom’s black doorway was partially obscured by the corner of the furnace. The door was open and the light on. Thomas Pasquale was bent over the counter examining a display of photos.
Linda Real, about half his size, stood beside him, and she was using Pasquale’s broad back as a leaning post, her elbow comfortable on his shoulder, her head supported by her fist.
“How do they look?” I said.
Linda jerked her arm off Tom’s back. I didn’t know who she had been expecting, but evidently it wasn’t me.
“Really good, sir,” she said, and traded places with the deputy. Pasquale made for the door and I stood to one side to let him pass.
“Are you going to be around for a while, or are you going home?” I asked him.
“I can stay as long as needed, sir.”
I waved a hand, wishing sometimes that he didn’t have to be so goddamn formal when he talked to me. “I just need to talk to you a minute. But it can wait if you have something you need to do.” To Linda I added, “Let’s see what you’ve got here.”
“Nasty, nasty,” Linda said.
I didn’t share her enthusiasm for watching crime scene photos appear under the magic of the darkroom safelight. Corpses in their natural habitat were bad enough without special effects.
A live Jim Sisson may have been photogenic, but he certainly had made a mess of himself this time. “These were taken after Sisson’s body was moved by the medical examiner,” Linda explained needlessly, indicating the set on the right. “And this is what Bob was trying to understand.” She positioned half a dozen eight-by-tens in front of me. I could smell her perfume or shampoo or whatever the source of the fragrance was-light, fresh, appealing even at that hour and in that morbid place of red lights, chemicals, and time-frozen tragedy.
“This is a tread mark on the outside wall of the shop.” She touched a photo with the tip of her pen. “The way the siding’s dented, that might be the point of first impact.”
“It would have to be,” I said. “It’s the farthest point up on the wall.”
Linda nodded. “From there to this mark on the concrete apron is fifty-four inches, give or take.”
“And that would be the height of the tire,” I said, and turned to Tom. “Did you measure it yet?”
“Yes, sir. It matches that.”
“So the tire dropped off the chain, or whatever, and crashed against the side of the building. Jim Sisson happened to be there, for what reason we don’t know. If the chain had started to slip, I would have thought he would have just lowered the thing to the ground.”
“It caught him somehow,” Linda said. “And I guess they’re pretty heavy?”
“Loaded, with weights and all, I would guess close to a ton,” I said. “Somewhere in that ballpark, anyway. More than he could manage, that’s for sure.”
I looked at the photo. “And these?”
Linda pointed. “You can see where the tread slid down the wall. In order to do that, the bottom has to kick out, too.”
“Sure. That’s not surprising. And it looks like it did.” The black marks on the concrete scrubbed away from the building as the tire slid down, with Jim Sisson pinned underneath.
I frowned and leaned close, trying to bring the marks into the right portion of my bifocals. “On that concrete, though, I would have predicted that the tire would just have leaned against the building and stayed there. Or maybe rolled off to one side. It’d have to hit it absolutely square.”
“Sir?”
“I’m surprised that it slid down in the first place. That’s all I’m saying. The concrete isn’t slick, and the rubber tire would have had a pretty good grip. It must have dropped hard, maybe with even a little bounce to it.”
“And then there’s this,” Linda said, “and you have to look close. But I made an enlargement.” She pulled another photo closer. “See the last set of black marks on the concrete? They’re the farthest out from the building, right?”
“Right.”
“The tire would have been almost horizontal by then, propped up by Jim’s body.”
“Yep.”
“Now look at this.”
I folded my arms on the counter to act as a brace, relieving my protesting back. Linda bent the goosenecked drafting lamp closer. “What am I seeing?” I asked.
“The scrub marks are darker, more pronounced, and abruptly change direction. They look like a comma, with the tail off to the left.”
“Huh.”
“The tire had to jig sideways,” Tom said.
“I can see that.” I looked at the marks for a long time, then turned my head to gaze at Linda. She was a fetching kid, a little heavy from too much fast food at odd hours, but with raven black hair that she kept cut short, framing a wide, intelligent face. She looked like she could be Tom Pasquale’s younger sister.
“You do good work,” I said, and she grinned. The late hour was costing her, though. When the fatigue started to win, her left eye wandered a bit. She had been blinded in that eye during a shotgun assault a couple years before that also had taken the life of one of our deputies.
The harsh light from the table lamp played on her features, and the scars on the left side of her face were just faint pale tracks against her olive skin. She could have covered them with makeup if she had been the sort to worry about such things.
“So tell me what you think,” I said to them both.
“The tire had to kick sideways some,” Tom replied. He reached across and tapped the enlargement. “That sideways mark is about six inches long.”
“So the tire fell against the wall and then slid down, and just as it stopped sliding downward, it kicked sideways. All right. Maybe. I can think of several explanations for that.” I reached across for the other photos. “What do these tell us?”
“The most instructive set are these,” Linda said. The first was a grisly photo of Jim Sisson crushed under the tire. The weight of the tire had smashed him into the small space beside the wall, his skull crushed against the metal flange that made up the frame for the massive overhead door. The tire was resting diagonally across his back.
Linda took a second copy of the same print and with a grease pencil circled the portion of the photo that included all that could be seen of the actual contact point between the tire tread and Sisson’s back.
“See these tire treads?”
“Cleats, I think they’re called.”
“Yes. Now, they’re about four inches apart, and each one is roughly two inches wide. That’s what Tom measured. Here’s one resting on Sisson’s right shoulder, digging into his neck and head.
Going to the left, here’s another, just past his spine and down a little bit.”
“OK,” I said, feeling uneasy.
“Now this.” Linda slid one of the photos of Sisson’s corpse across for me to look at.
Sisson had been a wiry little guy, the sort who could work ten or fifteen hours without a pause. That he hadn’t been able to scramble out of the way indicated that the chain had snapped loose so fast he hadn’t had time to even say, “Oh, shit.”
“Here’s a bruise, here’s the second, and here’s a third,” Linda said. “One, two, three, in an arc that we could extend from top right shoulder down to lower left flank.”
I blinked and straightened up, grimacing at the kinks in my back. I took off my glasses, pulled a lens-cleaning tissue from the box by the enlarger, and polished them. Tom and Linda waited for me to mull whatever it was that didn’t click.
“There’s no way that we can predict with one hundred percent certainty how that tire struck him,” I said finally. “But he had to have been crouching down when that tire hit him…maybe groping for a bolt or something-some tool maybe. That tire’s big, but it’s not like it’s off one of those giant earthmovers or something.”
“But there’s a clear match between h
ow the tire is resting on Mr. Sisson in this photo,” she pulled the first enlargement out of the pile and put it beside the photo of the corpse, “and the two upper bruises here and here.”
“True.”
“In this photo, the tire isn’t in contact with his body at this point, where the lower, third bruise is.”
“Also true.” I didn’t add that there could be several explanations for that, because I couldn’t think of a single one. “Anything else?”
Linda shook her head. “Bob’s out there now. I guess Mrs. Sisson went to Las Cruces with the kids to stay with some relatives. He wasn’t too happy about that, but…” She shrugged. “He said he was going to hang around until light. He wants me back out there then.”
“All right. Get some rest before that.” I looked at the photos again and frowned. “It doesn’t quite add up, does it?” I said.
As I turned to go, Tom Pasquale asked, “Did you want to talk to me about something, sir?”
I stopped short and frowned. “If I did, I’m damned if I remember what it was. Couldn’t have been too important.” I grinned at both of them. “You guys keep after this.”
I had no doubt that Undersheriff Robert Torrez was sitting over at the Sissons’, deep in thought, the same thing bothering him that now bothered me. Somehow, a heavy tire had fallen on Jim Sisson, crushed him to death, and then been jerked sideways.
Maybe Sisson’s death throes had been enough to do that, even with a two-thousand-pound, fifty-four-inch-diameter, nineteen-inch-wide tractor tire on top of him. If there had been a spark of life in him, it had been crushed out during the hour that he’d been pinned before his wife finally stuck her head out the back door to see when he was going to shut off the damn machine and come to bed.
Chapter Eight
For an hour I poked here and there without particular rhyme or reason. The events of the evening jumbled in my mind, and I couldn’t see a well-defined path of action. I didn’t want to end up stumbling all over Undersheriff Robert Torrez’s trail, getting in his way, slowing him down. I idled 310 east on a deserted Bustos Avenue shortly after 4:00 a.m., not breaking fifteen miles an hour.
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