Bitter Recoil

Chapter 14

We abandoned that damn mesa at seven in the morning. I’d had so much coffee I couldn’t go ten minutes between visits to the bushes. My eyes were open all right, but behind them my brain was comatose.

It felt good when the tires of Estelle Reyes-Guzman’s patrol car finally turned onto the pavement and we drove back to San Estevan.

She had a briefcase full of fingerprint cards and not much else. We sure as hell weren’t dealing with one of those nut cases who hangs signs all over his murder saying, “Catch me, catch me.”

Sheriff Pat Tate wanted us all to meet for breakfast and a strategy session, but as we rolled through the village I could see Estelle had other plans. We passed the lane that led down to their adobe. Without slowing the car, she glanced at me and asked, “Do you want me to drop you off at the house?”

I should have said yes just to see if she’d really turn around. Instead I said, “That depends on what you’re going to do.”

“Francis has a low-power stereo microscope at the clinic that I want to use. For a preliminary print comparison.”

“Are you going to eat?”

“I’m not hungry. Maybe after a little bit.”

I sighed with resignation but had enough sense to keep my mouth shut. “I’ll tag along. If I go with Tate, I’ll eat another of those breakfast burritos, and it’ll sure as hell kill me.”

We drove through the village, and I noticed the parking lot of the San Estevan Catholic church was full. “Wedding, do you suppose?”

Estelle laughed quietly. “You are tired, sir. This is Sunday morning.”

“Oh.” I looked at the date window of my watch. “Son of a gun. Is the clinic going to be open?”

“I have a key. And Francis might be there.”

Francis wasn’t there. If he had any sense at all, he was home in bed. To keep myself awake, I made a pot of coffee while Estelle set up in the examining room.

The viewer was designed for counting bacteria colonies growing in petri dishes but worked just fine for ogling fingerprints. She pulled out the card with Cecilia Burgess’s prints and then selected through the prints lifted from the truck.

For a long minute she focused and arranged until she had the two sets side by side. Then she just sat and looked. I waited patiently and found it was more comfortable to wait with eyes closed.

“Take a look,” she said. Her voice startled me, and I realized I’d been asleep. She got up to give me room.

I’m glad the scope had two eyepieces…that way, it supported my head when I leaned over to look. If I had had to close one eye, the other would have followed suit.

In the forty-one years I had been in law enforcement-twenty in the marines and twenty-one for Posadas County-I had looked at thousands of impressions left by human fingers, some of them in unlikely places. When I looked at fingerprints long enough and often enough I found that it was very much like looking at human faces.

They’re all unique, yes, but there are family portraits where similarities show up. All that’s required is a clear print-smudge it, and the personality vanishes.

The prints on the left had been provided by the Office of the Medical Examiner. They’d been lifted from Cecilia Burgess’s corpse. All ten digits were clear, the prints marred on three fingers by trauma associated with the crime.

I shifted the cards and looked at the prints Estelle had taken from the top right bed rail of the truck. My pulse picked up a few beats. “Huh,” I said and shifted the cards. Estelle remained silent and then I heard her leave the room. I could smell the coffee, but what I was looking at was even more interesting.

“The coffee’s at your left elbow,” she said when she returned.

“Thanks. This is remarkable, you know that?”

“They’re clear. It’s a good thing the top edge of the truck’s bed was clean.”

“It usually is. That’s where everybody leans when they’re standing beside the vehicle yakking. It rubs off the dirt. Now if I had to read a story into these, I’d say that I can imagine a match. We’ve got a right index, ring, and middle finger and a smudged fragment of the little finger.”

“With no trauma.”

“That’s right. I can’t swear to any of the others, but the comparison of the two index fingers would stand up in court. The laceration cut deeply, but just above the center most characteristic swirl.”

“That’s what I thought.”

I looked up from the scope. “She grabbed the side of the truck…and the print position shows she had to be facing forward at the time. Sometime after that, she was assaulted and pitched out. The fingers were cut in the process.”

Estelle pushed the coffee cup toward me and indicated a brown bag. “Some of Mary Vallo’s cookies left over from yesterday.” Cookies weren’t my idea of breakfast.

“So she was in that truck for sure,” Estelle added. “That’s one square of the puzzle that fits.” I moved and let her rearrange the evidence under the stereo scope.

“I’m most interested in the prints along the truck bed,” she said as she worked. “That’s what’s going to tell us who was in the back with her.”

“Or who killed Waquie and Grider,” I added. I looked inside the paper bag. The cookies were those big oatmeal creations that kids hate…and that mothers make so that the cookie supply will last more than a single day. I took one and tried to pretend that it was a bowl of hot oatmeal with brown sugar.

For fifteen minutes I watched Estelle work, trying this card and that. I was just crushing out a cigarette when she sat back, frowning.

“What’s the matter?”

She groaned. “Maybe I’m wrong.” She leaned forward and concentrated on the scope, but now she had my full attention.

“Wrong how?”

“You look.”

I played musical chairs again and found myself comparing the top half of a perfect print on the left with a full but slightly smudged version on the right. The smudges weren’t so bad that I couldn’t extrapolate how the lines continued. “I’d bet they’re the same. I could be wrong, but I’d bet they are.”

I straightened up and rubbed my eyes. “ ’Course, two of almost anything would look the same to me right now.”

“I think it’s a match.”

“Fine. Who do they belong to?”

“The half print is from the graduation photograph of Cecilia Burgess. It’s the one that they brought up from the lab early this morning.”

My brain was slow to digest that. “You handed the picture to Nolan Parris,” Estelle continued, “and that’s his thumbprint. Only the top half…like anyone does when they want to pick up a piece of paper carefully by the edge.”

“And the other one?”

“From the truck. The right side. Two feet behind Cecilia’s.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“It was oriented the way it would be if Parris had taken hold of the truck side when he was standing beside it. Four fingers inside, thumb outside and pointed to the left and slightly downward.” She walked to the sink and grabbed the side, her thumb on the outside. “Like this.”

“Son of a bitch,” I said again. We looked at each other for a long minute. “That leaves a big question.”

“Yes, sir. It does.”

“When did the good Father Nolan Parris grab the side of that truck? Here in town? On the state highway? Or up on Quebrada Mesa.”

Estelle nodded. “Let’s go ask him.”

“On a Sunday morning a priest shouldn’t be hard to find.” I stood up slowly and said more to myself than to Estelle, “And maybe I can find out how he actually sprained his ankle.”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

I waved a hand wearily. “I’ll tell you on the way.”