As we drew closer, I could see a large yellow backhoe working, a section of shiny metal culvert suspended from its bucket with a length of chain. A worker walked with the machine and its load, one hand on the end of the culvert so that it wouldn’t pendulum.
“I don’t see the kid,” I said as we slowed to a crawl.
“Nope,” Torrez said. He swung the car onto the shoulder of the road and stopped. One of the workers waved instructions at the other men, then headed toward us. Torrez ignored him and instead twisted around with an old pair of military binoculars in his hand, looking off to the west. I saw a faint smile twitch the corners of his mouth.
“Help you fellas?” the man said, and leaned down, putting both hands on the driver’s side door.
Torrez turned, dropped the binoculars on the seat, and lounged one wrist over the steering wheel as if he had all the time in the world. “The home office tells us that Kenny Carter is working out here,” he said.
The man nodded. “Was.” His eyes flicked over to me and then back to the undersheriff.
Torrez looked on down the road toward Columbus and then Palomas, across the Mexican border. “But he’s done for the day or what?”
The man straightened up and hitched his trousers a little closer to his impressive belly. “He told me he had a family emergency,” the man said.
Bob turned and looked at him. He could read the name over the man’s pocket better than I could. “Well, Paul…”
“Paul Turner.”
“Paul, what time was this family emergency? They must have called him from the Deming office, unless he walks around with his own cell phone in his jeans.”
Paul looked a touch uncomfortable, having been trapped into implicating his boss. He settled for vague. “Well, I guess they did. He left some time ago.”
“Going home to Posadas?”
“He didn’t say.”
The man stepped back and looked down at the decal on the door of the patrol car, realizing for the first time that we weren’t locals. He was about to say something when I leaned over and asked, “Mrs. LaCrosse told us that the kid was out here. You have the office number handy?”
I had the cell phone in my hand, and Paul Turner obviously didn’t like being caught in the middle. He pulled a business card out of his pocket and handed it across to me. “Number’s on there.”
“Dandy,” I said, and punched it in. After four or five rings, a pleasant voice announced that I’d reached LaCrosse Construction. “EllenFae LaCrosse, please,” I said. “Sheriff Bill Gastner calling. We were there just a few minutes ago.”
In a moment, Mrs. LaCrosse came on the line. “Yes, Sheriff?”
“Mrs. LaCrosse, is Kenny Carter in the office?”
There was a pause, and then she said, “Well, no, he’s not. Are you calling from the job site?”
“Yes. And he’s not here. Apparently after you called out here, he took off. I just thought he might have headed back to the office.”
“No, he didn’t do that.”
“Mrs. LaCrosse, let me ask you something.” I glanced over at Paul Turner. He was leaning on the car, head down, looking studiously at the gravel at his feet. “Why did you bother to call out here before we had a chance to talk with the kid?”
“Well, I…well, I thought that if the boys knew you were going to drive all the way out there, they wouldn’t send Kenny off on some errand so you’d run the risk of missing him. After driving all that way, I mean.”
I chuckled. “Slick, ma’am. Thanks for your help.”
She’d started to say something else when I hung up. “Let’s go.”
Bob smiled pleasantly at Paul Turner. “Where’s that road go?”
The man glanced up briefly. “Oh, just on over to the other side of the block. This whole area’s gridded.”
“So if I went that way, I’d hit a road that would take me back to Deming?”
The man nodded, noncommittal. “Faster, easier just to go back the way you come. On the pavement.”
Torrez nodded. “Sure enough.” He pulled the car into gear. “Thanks.”
The man waved a couple of fingers and trudged back to the ditch and the new culvert.
Torrez turned the car around and accelerated hard, heading back north on the paved highway. After a minute, he said, “Nobody passed us coming out.”
“What’s the kid driving, do you know?”
“He’s got a red ’97 Jeep Wrangler,” Torrez said, and pointed off to the west. “I can’t tell if that one’s red or not, but I’m willing to bet.”
I squinted, trying hard, and saw a lot of blue sky, rolling white clouds building heavenward, and tan prairie. If I let my imagination play, I could pretend that I saw a thin, wispy vapor trail of dust kicked up by a speeding vehicle. “You think he cut back on one of the side roads?”
“Yes, I do. I don’t think he wants to talk to us much, and I don’t think he’s going to show up this afternoon at the office.” He turned and grinned at me. “Mama LaCrosse back in Deming must have called the instant we stepped out the door.”
“If that’s the case, turning tail isn’t the smartest stunt that kid’s ever pulled. She should know that.”
“We’ll see,” Torrez murmured. I glanced over at him and saw the intent hunter’s expression that meant Bob Torrez was having his own version of fun. “It won’t be hard to catch up with him once he’s on the interstate.”
We entered the southern outskirts of Deming and in a couple minutes saw that fun wasn’t in the cards for Kenny Carter. We turned onto the main drag and immediately saw the winking lights of a Deming patrol car up ahead a couple of blocks, snugged into the curb behind a red Jeep. Bob had plenty of time and eased over to the curb well back, out of view.
“You sure that’s him?” I asked. “There are a lot of red Jeeps in this world.”
“I’d be willing to bet,” Torrez said, and he slid the cellular phone out of its boot on the dash. “I’d be just as happy if he didn’t know we were here just yet.” It took a moment for Information to find the Deming PD’s nonemergency number, and Torrez dialed. I listened with amusement as he then said, “Jerry?…Hey, glad you’re workin’ today. This is Bob Torrez…Yeah. Hey, one of your units just stopped a red Jeep Wrangler west of the intersection with Route Eleven. Who do you show that vehicle registered to?”
He paused and listened and turned toward me, grinning. “That’s what I thought.” He shook his head. “No, just curious, is all. We’re following him on in to Posadas on another deal. We don’t want to talk to him, and he doesn’t need to know that we’re here.”
He listened again and laughed. “Hell no, don’t let him off. Give the little son of a bitch a ticket.” I could hear chatter on the other end, and Torrez looked heavenward. “Thanks, guy. You and Sadie come over one of these days. Bring Lolo with you.”
He switched off and racked the phone. “It’s him.”
“So I gathered. It’s handy, being related to half of the Southwest,” I said. “Who’s Jerry?”
“Jerry Pellitier. I knew he worked days on Dispatch, but it was just luck he was on today.”
“A cousin?”
“No relation.”
“That’s amazing in itself.”
Torrez shrugged, eyes locked on the blinking lights ahead. “His wife is Sadie, formerly Sadie Quintana.”
“Ah,” I said. “The wife’s a relative. Let me guess-a cousin.”
“Nope. Sadie is actually some distant relation to my wife, but I don’t know what. They lived in Posadas for a few months, and Gayle’s sister-Irma? — she did some day care for them when she wasn’t busy with the Guzmans. Their kid, Lolo, is about three or so.”
After a few minutes, we saw the Deming officer climb back out of the patrol car, ticket book in hand. He handed the ticket to Kenny Carter and pointed on down the road, no doubt telling the kid to keep a lid on it. Even as the cop was walking back toward the patrol car, the Jeep pulled away from the curb without signali
ng and accelerated away.
Torrez let him have a thousand-yard head start, then pulled out into traffic. With his head buried in paperwork, the Deming cop didn’t notice us as we slid by.
For the rest of the trip to Posadas, Kenny Carter kept the Jeep just a shade over eighty-close enough to the interstate speed limit that a trooper wasn’t apt to bother him but fast enough to say, “So there, a ticket don’t matter to me.”
We stayed far enough back that he wouldn’t recognize the vehicle in his jiggling rearview mirror, and more than once I had the uneasy feeling that we should stop playing cat and mouse and just stop Carter so that we could talk. About ten miles east of Posadas, I said as much to Torrez.
“The trouble is,” I said, “we haven’t talked to this kid yet-not since Jim Sisson’s death. In fact, not at all, before or after. We don’t know what’s on his mind. He might be innocent as the driven snow.”
Torrez shot a glance at me as if to say, “You know better than that,” but instead settled for, “That’s a fact, sir.”
“We don’t know for sure if he’s the father of Jennifer Sisson’s child.”
“No, we don’t. But he’s a place to start. He’s been seen with her, and Mike Rhodes says they’ve spent some time together.”
“He’s a place to start, sure enough. I’m just not sure deliberately spooking him like this is going to be productive.”
“I don’t think he knows we’re here, sir.”
“How could he not?”
“No, I mean he doesn’t know that we’re sitting here, a quarter of a mile behind him, watching. He thinks he’s given us the slip. As long as that’s the case, I think we’ve got something to gain by just being patient, seeing where he’s headed in such a hurry.”
“Straight home to Daddy is my guess,” I said.
“You think Sam would cover for him?”
“Of course he’d cover for him, Robert. Get a grip.”
“That’s going to make it interesting,” Torrez muttered.
“Doubly so if Taffy Hines’s intuition is correct.”
“Taffy Hines? About what?”
“Carter couldn’t keep the Pasquale letter to himself. He showed it to Taffy, at the store. She said her first thought was that Sam wrote it himself. She told him so. Needless to say, he said he hadn’t. He blames Leona Spears.”
“Leona never wrote an unsigned letter in her sorry life,” Torrez said. He let the car coast as we approached the Posadas exit. “Old Sam keeps it up, he’s going to have a full menu.”
Chapter Thirty
Kenny Carter’s Jeep left the interstate and headed up Posadas’ Grande Avenue. I half-expected to see the kid turn on MacArthur, aiming for his sweetheart’s, but apparently the love of his life-if we were right about the kids-wasn’t the first thing on his mind. The Jeep pulled up into the parking lot of the Family SuperMarket. We drove by just in time to see the Jeep swing around back, into the alley.
“You want to give them some time?” Bob Torrez asked.
“No, I don’t,” I said. “What I want is some answers.”
Torrez parked the patrol car on the north side of the store, next to Sam Carter’s black Explorer.
As the automatic doors swung open to greet us, Taffy Hines looked up from register one, black marker in hand. She had what looked like a proof of the weekly full-page grocery ad spread out on the conveyor. A weekday midmorning obviously wasn’t hustle time for shoppers.
With a slight smile, she pointed over her shoulder with the marker. “His Nibs is in the office,” she said. “I assume that’s who you want to see, unless you’re here to actually buy something.” She grinned good-naturedly.
“Thanks,” I said. “We need to see Sam.” I stepped close to her and paused. “I’m sorry if you’re getting sucked into this mess.”
Taffy straightened up, marker poised. “Sheriff,” she said, voice even and low, “I could really care less. You just do what you have to do.”
“I appreciate that,” I said, reaching out to touch her lightly on the forearm. If he bothered to look, Sam Carter could see us through his mirrored observation window, so I didn’t bother with subtlety, didn’t bother trying to make the visit look as if we’d just dropped by to pass the time of day or to check bargains on cookies.
As I opened the swinging door with the EMPLOYEES ONLY sign, Kenny Carter was coming down the back stairs from the office. He saw Torrez and me and stopped on the bottom step. His shoulders sagged just a touch, and he leaned against the wall.
“How you doin’, Kenny,” I said. He straightened up and glanced toward the exit door at the rear of the building. “Nobody’s going to bother your Jeep, son. Can we talk for a minute or two?”
Sam Carter emerged from the office door and stood on the narrow landing at the top of the steps.
“What have you got to tell me?” he said.
I shrugged. “I think it’s time we had a little chat, Sam.” I stepped forward toward the stairs, giving Kenny the choice of blocking my path, trying to bolt past me, or retreating uphill. The stairs were too narrow for both of us. He retreated, and Torrez and I trudged up the stairway behind him.
“Come on in,” Carter muttered. “I’ve got a lot of things I need to be doing, so I hope this won’t take too long.”
He sat down in his chair by the idling computer and waved a hand toward a single straight-backed chair over by the bookcase. The row of catalogs and binders threatened to explode off the shelf, and I pulled the chair out so I wouldn’t be caught in the avalanche.
Kenny stood by the corner of his father’s desk, trying his best to look unflustered. He wasn’t very good at it. He toyed with a can of soda that I guessed he’d brought up from the Jeep, took a perfunctory sip or two, and then set the can on the narrow windowsill. Maybe it was Bob Torrez’s towering presence that made Kenny nervous. If he wanted to bolt out the door, he’d have to go through the undersheriff, and that clearly wasn’t going to work.
“Let’s just cut right to it, Sam.” I shifted on the chair, trying to avoid the crack in the wooden seat.
“I’d welcome that,” he said, and I knew he didn’t mean it.
“Kenny here knows the Sisson family, and he had contact with them recently.”
“Now how do we know that?” Carter snapped.
I sighed. “Sam, I think now is the time to stop playing the games, all right? We’re not all blind and deaf. We talk to people. We know that Jennifer Sisson is pregnant, and we know that particular situation has to be partly responsible for some of the hell that family has been through recently.”
Carter started to shift in his chair, and I leaned forward, watching his face closely.
“And it’s no secret that Kenny here has been keeping company with the young lady,” I added, turning to Kenny. “Am I right?”
He bit his lip and took a bit too long to nod agreement, as if he needed the time to calculate his odds. He was a pretty good-looking kid, lanky and tough, with a bit more height and weight than his father and some of his mother’s darker complexion.
“So then. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to put it together.” I leaned back, regarding Kenny. “More than one person assumes that you’re the father of Jennifer Sisson’s child. What do you say?”
“Now who says she’s pregnant?” Sam Carter barked, the first to be about two steps behind.
“You’re going to tell us that she’s not?” Bob Torrez said quietly.
Sam jerked around as if he’d been touched with a cattle prod, and he glared at Torrez.
“Well…”
“And it really doesn’t matter who told us, does it?”
“Of course it matters,” Carter exploded. “Jesus, you can’t just go around spreading rumors like that, getting people all worked up.”
“Yes, she’s pregnant,” Kenny Carter said before his father had a chance to take another breath. “So what.”
“Listen, Son-” Sam started, but Bob cut him off.
“T
he fact that Jennifer is or isn’t pregnant doesn’t matter, Kenny. At least not to us. At least not yet. What matters is that we find the person who killed James Sisson.”
“What, and you think that my son knows something about that? Don’t be ridiculous. And for one thing, nobody’s even proved it to be murder yet. It’s just all theory on your part. Lots of publicity.”
Torrez pushed himself away from the door and walked to the desk. His head was a scant inch below the ceiling fixture. “Earlier this morning, Kenny, we drove to your job site south of Deming, as you well know. When Mrs. LaCrosse called out there and tipped you off, you ran back here as fast as your little Jeep could go, short of getting a second traffic ticket.” He stopped and grinned at the expression on Kenny Carter’s face.
“Yeah,” Torrez added, “it’s a small world. But for starters, let’s establish some relationships. Jennifer Sisson is pregnant-everyone seems to agree on that. Are you the father?”
“Now listen,” Sam Carter said, but Torrez held up a hand.
“No, I’m not,” Kenny said from between clenched teeth. “I don’t know who knocked her up, but it wasn’t me.”
“All right.” Torrez nodded pleasantly. “Fair enough. How do you know it wasn’t you?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sakes,” Sam said, and he managed to find a small clear area in the landfill that was his desk so that he could slap the desktop with the flat of his hand. “What the hell does it matter, anyway? Whether the boy is or isn’t?” A vein pulsed on the side of his neck, and he was red enough to have spent the whole day out in the sun. “Hell, Kenny, tell ’em the truth, if that’s what they want to hear.”
“I told them the truth.”
“And on Tuesday night, did you have occasion to go over to the Sissons’ place?” I asked.
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