Before She Dies

Chapter 18

“Morning,” I said shortly. I didn’t tack on a “good,” since Karl’s face told me it was anything but that. I read equal parts embarrassment, apprehension, and resentment in his expression. Estelle rose quickly from her chair and beckoned me back toward the door.

“Will you excuse us for just a moment?” she said to Woodruff. Estelle and I stepped out into the hall and she closed my office door behind us. At first she spoke so softly I couldn’t hear her.

“I can’t read lips, Estelle,” I said. “And how come you didn’t wake me up?”

“Sir, it was pure chance. I decided to run the fingerprints on the wrench for a match, so I just started with the most recent prints we had on file. From this weekend.”

“Well, that makes sense.” I looked suddenly at my office door as if I could see right through the old dingy mahogany. I could see Karl Woodruff sitting in that room, alone, his pulse hammering away in his ears. “Not him,” I said.

“One of the prints on the wrench belongs to Tammy Woodruff.”

“To Tammy?”

Estelle nodded. “A perfect match, sir. No mistake. I sent the wrench to Santa Fe early this morning for backup analysis, but I’m right. There’s no mistaking that print.”

Estelle held up her right index finger. With her left index, she drew a corkscrew line from the corner of the nail down across the pad, ending at the joint line. “Tammy has a scar across the pad of her finger. Friday night when we booked her, she told me she sliced her finger last year, when the top of a wine bottle that she was trying to open broke.”

“Tammy Woodruff,” I mused. “What the hell was she doing out there.”

“Changing a tire?” Estelle offered.

“Why did you call Karl in? Tammy’s the one we should be talking to, Estelle. She’s no minor.”

“I thought maybe her father might know where she is.”

“You checked?”

Estelle nodded. “She’s not at her apartment, sir.”

“Shit,” I muttered, and added, “Let’s go see what he has to say.”

Karl Woodruff watched us reenter the office; his eyes tracked my face as I closed the door. Estelle sat down and once more picked up her notebook, this time sliding her pencil into the spiral binding as if to announce that we were off the record. She then folded her hands on her lap.

The casualness of that little motion was not lost on Karl Woodruff, and he took a deep breath and tried to relax back in the hard chair.

“Sir, I asked Mr. Woodruff to join us for a few minutes this morning,” Estelle said to me. I glanced at my watch. Woodruff’s RxRite pharmacy would open in six minutes. “Is this a bad time, Karl? Do you have someone covering for you, or…”

He shook his head quickly. He leaned forward, taking most of his weight on his elbows, pushing against the arms of the chair. His hands were balled into his gut as if he were about to toss his breakfast burritos. “No, it’s fine,” he managed. He was a spare man anyway, one of those folks whose nervous system hangs on the outside. He’d make a lousy poker player.

“You want a cup of coffee or something?”

“No, thanks.”

I sat down behind the desk, behaving for all the world as if I knew what the hell was going on, as if I had orchestrated this reduction of a confident, successful merchant and chairman of the Republican party into a nervous wreck. Estelle pulled the pencil out of the notebook binding again.

“Sir, I asked Mr. Woodruff to come down because of the information we’ve received that places his daughter Tammy at or near the scene of the homicide Sunday night.”

Woodruff blanched. Homicide was one of those grim words that was a real attention grabber. I leaned forward and propped my chin on one hand. Woodruff was terrified, which was to our benefit, since if he knew anything at all he’d tell us-in a great rush of words that would try to wash away the grime of that single pronouncement.

Tammy Woodruff was twenty-three years old. She didn’t need daddy’s permission for anything, as she’d proven the previous Friday night at the Broken Spur Saloon with Sergeant Torrez. And we sure as hell didn’t need daddy’s permission to arrest her attractive young butt if she’d gotten tangled in something far dirtier than public drunkenness.

But for all her majority, nothing could erase her from her father’s mind as a little kid-a little kid winning 4-H ribbons at the fair, a little kid screaming out her first cheer, a little kid…all those sentimental things had to be swimming in Karl Woodruff’s mind just then. I felt sorry for him. I had four “little” kids of my own.

Estelle bent slightly and retrieved the lug wrench from her briefcase, which had been leaning against her chair. She held it out toward Karl Woodruff.

“Mr. Woodruff, this is part of a lug wrench from a General Motors product-a newer model truck of some sort. It’s the sort of wrench that we discovered in the grass just a few feet in front of where the deputy’s patrol car was found parked Sunday night. We have reason to believe that the deputy stopped that night, perhaps to assist someone.” She held up the wrench and turned it. Karl Woodruff’s eyes followed it.

“I don’t…”

“Mr. Woodruff, your daughter’s fingerprints were found on the wrench.”

“On that?”

“On the lug wrench that we found near the scene of the shooting. Yes, sir.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Nor do we, sir.” Estelle said it so quietly I almost didn’t hear her. And then she let the moment of silence hang.

“Her fingerprints?”

“Yes, sir.”

He pushed against the arms of the chair, rising up an inch or two. “I don’t understand. How does that wrench…” He stopped abruptly, cocked his head, and frowned. “What did Tammy tell you? I mean, she must have a simple explanation for all this. Just because she handled a wrench doesn’t mean…I mean, she could have touched it at any time. It doesn’t mean she had anything to do with that…with what happened out there.”

“Indeed not, sir. But it’s a connection we need to track down. I was hoping you could tell us where she is, sir. So we could ask her a couple of questions.”

Woodruff looked relieved, as if he had the right answer. “Well, I assume she’s at her apartment, detective.” He tried for a grin and managed a lopsided grimace. “She’s not an early riser.”

“She’s not at her apartment, sir.”

“She’s not?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, a friend’s then. She frequently stays with a friend.” Woodruff shifted in his chair, uncomfortable having to admit that his healthy, wild-hair daughter didn’t live the life of a nun. “But wait, now.” Woodruff looked at me as he tried to rise to the offensive. “I don’t understand any of this. Why would Tammy’s fingerprints be on that…that wrench in the first place? She doesn’t even drive a Chevrolet, or whatever you said it’s from. Hell, you know what she drives.” He chuckled weakly. “Doesn’t drive it too well, sometimes, either.”

Estelle lifted a page in her notebook. “Mr. Woodruff, is the white over gold 1993 Ford half-ton extended cab pickup that’s registered to your daughter her only vehicle?”

“Sure. She’d live in that thing if she could, I think.”

“In the past few days or weeks, has she had occasion to drive any other vehicle?” Woodruff looked puzzled and Estelle added softly, “To your knowledge?”

“No. Of course not. I mean, as far as I know, no. She drives that truck everywhere.”

“Who is your daughter seeing right now, Karl?” I asked.

He frowned and bit the corner of his lip. “You know, for quite a while there she was hitched up pretty steady with Brett Prescott. He’s a nice enough kid.”

“Gus Prescott’s boy?”

Woodruff nodded and said with considerable chagrin, “That was Gus’s new truck that Tammy backed into Friday night at the bar. She told me that she’d had some sort of tiff with Brett. She doesn’t talk much to her mother and me about who she sees. Bill, you went through the same thing with your girls, I imagine.”

“Sure.” I hadn’t, but what the hell.

“The latest thing I heard was that she went to the fire department’s Valentine’s Day dance with…” he hesitated. “Someone came in the store and mentioned how nice a couple they made. Who the heck was it.” He frowned hard and stared at the dark pine flooring. The lightbulb finally lit and he said, “Torrance. One of the Torrance boys.”

“Pat Torrance, maybe?” Estelle offered.

“I think so, yes.”

Herb Torrance raised beef, sheep, emus, and nine kids on his ranch west of Posadas. Patrick was somewhere in the middle of the nine in age.

“You don’t know if Tammy has been seeing the Torrance boy regularly, then?” I asked, and Woodruff shook his head. I folded my hands and tapped the tips of my thumbs together while I gazed across the desk at Estelle.

“I really wish I knew what was going on,” Karl Woodruff said miserably. “I just can’t believe that Tammy would be involved…”

“Karl,” I said, getting up and walking around the desk, “it’s probably nothing. We’ll talk with Tammy and find that out, I’m sure. A hundred to one that it’s just a fluke, some crazy coincidence.” I patted him on the shoulder. “We don’t even know what kind of vehicle was stopped, or for that matter even if there is a connection between that incident and the shooting.”

Woodruff looked hopeful and pushed himself to his feet. “Bill,” he said, “will you call me the minute…the second…that you know anything? I’ll be at the store all day, until nine tonight. And everyday. Just call, all right? As soon as you hear from Tammy, as soon as you have the chance to talk with her?”

“You bet, Karl.”

We ushered him out of the office and I closed the door. “What do you think?”

“I think…” Estelle started to say, then stopped. She tapped her notebook. “I think we’ve got several sets of questions, sir. If Tammy Woodruff is the one whom Linda Real recognized, then that’s one scenario.” She cupped her hands and moved them to one side, as if all those questions were floating in a puddle of water. “And one set of questions-like what vehicle was she driving, and why. And did she know the killer? And why hasn’t she come forward to talk to us?” Estelle paused to take a breath and cupped her hands again.

“If Tammy is not the person Linda saw, and is not the person Linda thinks we all know, then how did Tammy’s prints get on the wrench? And what was the wrench doing out there? And when was it dropped? And does that incident have anything at all to do with the shooting?”

“And who was with her,” I added. “Who was the person Linda saw?”

“Just so, sir,” Estelle said. “Who’s with Linda now?”

“Howard.”

She nodded. “If you’re going back to the hospital, I’d like to spend some time trying to track Miss Woodruff down. You know, it’s interesting…”

“What’s that?”

“You remember our conversation with Victor Sanchez?”

“Dimly. I was depending on your note-taking skills.”

Estelle smiled and flipped back through several pages in her notes. “I think it’s interesting that Senor Sanchez mentioned that Pat Torrance was in the bar, drinking himself sick. It’s not unusual that Pat was there, certainly, since his family’s ranch is just up County Road 14 a bit. But it’s interesting that, if Tammy Woodruff was out in that desolate corner of the county, near an establishment that she frequents, near a saloon where her maybe boyfriend is chugging the brew…it’s interesting that either she never stopped at the Broken Spur, or that she did stop but Victor didn’t see her.”

“What’s really remarkable,” I said, “is that you understand what you just said, Estelle.” I ran a hand through my hair and slumped against the side of the desk. “Now listen. I don’t want you out in that corner of the county by yourself, you understand me?”

“I wasn’t planning…”

“Yes you were. If you didn’t find Tammy right away, you were going out to the Torrance ranch to find young Patrick. I don’t want you doing that by yourself.”

“That’s a logical next step, sir.”

“Sure, it is. And when you take that next step, make damn sure you have someone else with you.”

Estelle picked up her briefcase. “I don’t think there’s anything to worry about, sir.”

“So you say. Remember one simple thing.” I saw her eyebrow lift in that characteristic expression of attention. “You say Tammy isn’t at her apartment. If she was out on State Highway Fifty-six and witnessed a murder, she may very well be cactus fertilizer right now.”