Before She Dies

Chapter 7

An ambulance’s red lights winked in my rearview mirror as we passed under the interstate exchange on South Grande Boulevard and started to slow for the sweeping right-hand turn onto State 56. As I accelerated 310 out onto the highway, Estelle turned up the radio slightly, hunching forward as if to prompt the electronic signals.

“Three oh seven, PCS. Ten-twenty.”

Gayle Sedillos’s voice on the radio was crisp, almost mechanical. Estelle reached for the microphone and held it in her lap, waiting.

I could envision Howard Bishop reaching over to grope for the microphone without taking his eyes from the highway as it hurtled past.

“Uh, PCS, three oh seven is about a minute out. I just passed the Broken Spur.” Deputy Bishop’s voice was soft, almost hushed. He was eight miles ahead of us with Deputy Mears close on his bumper.

“No traffic,” Estelle said. Our headlights drilled a tunnel into the black prairie.

I didn’t respond. I concentrated on the highway. The drowsiness following a heavy meal had vanished with Gayle’s voice on the telephone. The black macadam of the state highway stretched out in front of the county car, a ribbon that grew narrower as we accelerated into the night.

For several seconds, the only sound was the bellow of our car’s engine. And then the dam broke.

“PCS, three oh seven is ten-ninety-seven.” I tensed and gripped the wheel until my knuckles were white. Maybe whoever had called had sucked up one too many drinks at the Broken Spur Saloon and had gotten the story all wrong. Maybe it was a false alarm, a practice run where we all got to drive like crazy people with red lights and sirens and then got to laugh about it afterward.

We wound up through the esses that curled around the base of Arturo Mesa and then flung down the other side, to cross the Rio Salinas and flash past the tiny ghost town of Moore. I caught a wink of red far off in the distance to the southwest.

“Three ten, three oh seven.”

Estelle responded in less than a heartbeat. “Three ten is just coming up on the Broken Spur.”

“Three ten, is the ambulance right behind you?”

“Affirmative.”

In another minute, as we shot past the saloon, I saw a group of half a dozen people standing in the parking lot, clustered around a cattle trailer and a fleet of pickup trucks. They were on their way to provide an audience, no doubt.

Two minutes later we crested a slight rise, turned a corner to the right, and came face to face with a parking lot in the middle of the state highway. I swore and braked hard. A civilian was standing in the oncoming lane waving a flashlight frantically, thinking perhaps that I was blind.

I stopped 310 diagonally across the double yellows so it blocked both lanes. Up ahead I could see Mears’s and Bishop’s patrol cars, one slightly ahead and one behind a third county car that was parked almost off the pavement. Half a dozen other vehicles were parked on both sides of the highway, and a circle of people nearly hid Deputy Encinos’s patrol car from view.

I recognized rancher Howard Packard as I stepped out of the car. “Stay back here and make sure no one else comes through except emergency vehicles, Howard,” I said, and pointed back toward town. “Stay back behind my car.”

Estelle was two paces ahead of me, walking down the center of the road, her hands thrust in her coat pockets. Ahead in the glare of a spotlight I saw that both doors of Encinos’s patrol car were open.

I pushed my way past several curious, taut faces and knelt beside Howard Bishop. His huge frame was folded awkwardly as he tried to pump and breathe some life back into Paul Encinos.

“Any pulse?”

“No,” Bishop said between grunts.

“The ambulance will be here in less than a minute.” I didn’t need to tell Bishop that his efforts weren’t going to do Paul Encinos any good. Whoever had assaulted the deputy had used a shotgun and used it more than once.

“Sir…” Mears called across the car. I rose and made my way around to the other side. “I don’t know what to do, sir,” Mears said when he looked up and saw me.

The deputy had cause to panic. Linda Real’s face, neck, and left shoulder were punctured by so many holes that Mears needed six hands to stop the gush of blood. Estelle Reyes-Guzman slipped into the backseat of the patrol car and leaned over the front seat back, cradling Linda’s head while Mears and I tried to compress the multiple wounds on her left shoulder, neck, and face. After what seemed an eternity the first ambulance did arrive and I heard Bishop shout, “Over here.”

A moment later a head peered into the car. “That one alive?” the EMT barked.

“Yes, just.”

“Ah, here we come,” he said as the second ambulance slid in behind the first. Mears, Estelle, and I stepped back as the EMTs took over.

“What a goddamned mess,” I said. I looked at Deputy Mears’s pale face. “Take your car on up the road about a quarter mile and block the oncoming lane. No one comes through. No one.” He nodded but didn’t move. I took him by the arm. “Tom…do it now. And find out from Gayle what the deputy’s last radio call was and get back to me.”

“Yes, sir,” he said with a start. To Estelle I said, “Let’s get an inventory and then get ’em out of here.”

She nodded. There were nine civilians present, and by the time we took IDs, statements, and inventories and marked where each vehicle had been parked, Sergeant Robert Torrez and Sheriff Martin Holman had arrived.

We needed the manpower to control that circus, and every time I caught a glimpse of Estelle’s taut face I knew just what she was thinking. Whoever had pulled the trigger on Encinos and Real had picked a perfect spot. There had been no passersby to witness the shooting, no neighbors to hear the shots.

And the nearest telephone, when a motorist finally did stumble onto the carnage, was at a crowded saloon seven miles from town. That assured that the spectators would arrive well before any law, trampling any evidence there might have been into the fine New Mexico sand.

In less than two minutes, the handheld radio on my belt squawked. The news from Deputy Tom Mears wasn’t what I wanted to hear. If Paul Encinos had stopped a vehicle, he hadn’t radioed in. The last transmission Gayle Sedillos had recorded in the log back in Posadas was at 10:53 P.M., when the deputy had radioed that he was stopping at Chavez Chevrolet-Oldsmobile to talk with a motorist. He had given no name or license then, either.

That coincided with the information on the deputy’s own patrol log. The clipboard rested on Encinos’s briefcase in the middle of the front seat. The blood-spattered top page offered only a cryptic account of the deputy’s last hours. He hadn’t documented either the stop at Chavez or any event thereafter.

I felt a hand on my elbow. “Bill…” Sheriff Holman pulled gently, ushering me to one side. “Listen. Cassie isn’t sure they are going to be able to…resuscitate him.” Cassie Gates, the best EMT in Posadas County, wasn’t usually wrong.

I nodded. “I know, sheriff.”

“Maybe if they can get him back to the hospital in time…” His voice trailed off as he watched the first ambulance’s door slam shut. After a deep sigh he shrugged his shoulders a little straighter and looked at me. “What do you want me to do?”

“Control things at the hospital, Martin.” I ticked off a list while he jotted notes in the little blue spiral. “Make sure both sets of parents are notified. Paul’s father lives in Scottsdale, I think. I’m not sure where his mother is now.”

“She’s up in Albuquerque,” Holman muttered.

“And get a hold of Paul’s ex-wife.”

“Tiffany,” Holman said.

“She lives over in the Mesaview Apartments. And Linda. I’m not sure. I think she told me once that her mother was living in Las Lunas.”

“I’ll take care of it.” He snapped the little book shut, confident now that he had somewhere to go, something to do. “Anything else? Do we know who he stopped?”

I shook my head. “No, we don’t. But right now the most important thing is what’s going on at the hospital.” As Sheriff Holman turned to go, I added, “And Martin…”

“Yes?”

“Keep the lid on over there. Frank Dayan will want to talk with Linda.”

Holman frowned and walked back to me, standing so that our faces were less than a foot apart.

“If she lives, then she’s the only witness to what happened here,” he said, grasping the obvious more quickly than usual. The back door of the second ambulance slammed shut and then that vehicle too pulled away.

“If she regains consciousness, we have to talk with her. And that means before anyone else,” I said.

Holman nodded. “I’ll be at the hospital.”

“I’ll have one of the deputies there as soon as I can. In the meantime, if anything breaks, call me. Take my recorder in case Linda is able to speak with you. If she says anything at all, tape it. The recorder is in my briefcase on the front seat of my car.”

He walked briskly back toward his car, caught in the winking of a dozen red lights. I saw the huge, dark figure of Sergeant Bob Torrez herding spectators east along the highway, well away from the scene. The routine of the drill would keep our minds occupied, at least.

The spectators would be individually interviewed and then escorted, one by one, down the macadam to where their vehicles were parked. They would be allowed to pull directly back onto the highway, their tire tracks in the sandy shoulder marked with a red surveyor’s flag.

Eventually the entire fleet would be gone, leaving only the bullet-pocked patrol car parked on the north shoulder of the road. Then we would put a half mile of state highway under a microscope if we had to.

Maybe one of the rubberneckers had seen something. Maybe one of them had overheard someone say something at the Broken Spur Saloon. Maybe.

I left Bob Torrez and Bing Burkett, one of the first state troopers to arrive, to work the witnesses. Estelle was setting up her camera gear on the pavement beside Encinos’s patrol car.

“Do you need any help?”

“You could hold the flashlight for me, sir.”

I swung the beam over the patrol car and counted seven holes in the driver’s door, doorpost, and roof.

“I’ll take close-ups of those in the morning when it’s light,” Estelle said. “I want the side of the car and the macadam beside it right away.”

By the time we finished two hours later, the list of evidence was painfully short. Paul Encinos had been driving county patrol car 308. The tire tracks showed that he had pulled his patrol car off the pavement in a normal fashion. Another set of tracks was printed clearly in the sand several feet in front of 308. The origin of the tracks was obscured by both the patrol car and dozens of bootprints. Whether the tracks belonged to the killer’s car was anyone’s guess.

The driver’s door of 308 was open, and that’s the way Francisco Pena had found it when he’d happened by sometime after eleven that night. Pena worked for rancher Herb Torrance. He traveled from his line shack the nine miles down County Road 14 to the state highway and the Broken Spur Saloon often.

It had been Pena who’d raced to the Broken Spur and called Posadas. Pena said that when he’d driven by the scene, the car door was open. The engine was idling, the four-way flashers were blinking, and Deputy Encinos was on the ground by the back tire. Another person was inside the car.

The first pool of Paul Encinos’s blood began four inches in front of the back tire and extended east for seventeen inches, part of the pool smeared by the deputy’s upper left arm.

Another larger pool of blood actually touched the tread of the back tire where the tire rested on the macadam, extending around and under the car in a crescent. What appeared to be a blood smear on the bodywork of the patrol car began just to the rear of the wheel-well opening, extending down to the chrome strip above the rock guard.

The deputy had managed to exit the patrol car, but Linda Real never moved from her seat. “The killer fired at Linda through the driver’s side window,” Estelle said.

“I don’t understand why Paul didn’t call in, Estelle. I mean we harp and harp on that.” I’m sure Estelle heard the helplessness in my voice, but there were no easy answers.

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Somebody does,” I said.