Bitter Recoil

Chapter 3

By the time I reached the public health clinic in San Estevan, the victim had been airlifted to Albuquerque. The EMTs in the ambulance had been quick-witted and efficient. They knew that the extent of the girl’s injuries was more than the clinic could handle. The helicopter air ambulance, a Bell Jet Ranger, had been dispatched from the city and made the roundtrip flight before I left the mountain.

As I drove into the village at six in the morning, San Estevan was beginning the rooster and barking dog stage of awakening. I drove past the Catholic retreat complex north of the village and caught sight of one friar or monk or whatever he was, as he crossed from one white adobe building to another, toiletry kit in hand.

A hundred yards beyond and on the opposite side of the road was a National Park Service historic site, the restoration of Gualate Ruin, a two-story stone structure that I’d heard was one of the dozens of outliers for the major ruin at Chaco Canyon to the west.

None of the feds were up yet, nor was there life stirring at the Forest Service District Office, a low, flat building tucked in the cottonwoods where the state highway turned away from the river and into the village.

No more than two dozen houses, scattered here and there across the narrow valley, made up the ancient village of San Estevan. Originally, the town had sprung up on the edge of the Indian pueblo, a mixture of clergy, traders, and farmers.

A few of the houses were massive, with adobe walls a yard thick and large courtyards-architecture that said there’d been some rich times in the valley.

But the inevitable was happening. The village was just outside the pueblo’s reservation, and so the valley was salted now with crackerbox shacks and trailers, bright aluminum mobile homes insulting the stolid, ancient adobes as city folk established their weekend camps and “ranchettes,” as the realtors say.

If I drove a thousand yards south of the village’s gas station, south of the modern clutter and detritus of seasonal residents, I could imagine that a century had been peeled away.

The pueblo, one of the state’s smallest, was neat and uniformly reddish-brown. Burnt sienna adobes with mud ovens in every yard, neat stacks of piNon and juniper firewood behind every dwelling, narrow brown lanes packed hard as cement between the houses, all leading down to the brown-trunked cottonwoods that screened the river from view.

The demarcation between pueblo land and private land beginning with the village of San Estevan was as obvious as if there were a solid wall between the two.

I passed the Texaco station and, where the highway jogged another right angle turn, the combination of Dairy Queen and general store. Just beyond, a group of three trailers was parked willy-nilly to form a compound filled with wrecked car and truck carcasses, and beyond those was a fenced pasture where two horses grazed themselves fat.

Remembering Estelle’s directions, I looked for the sign and found it nearly camouflaged by purple bee-weed. Below the sign for the San Estevan Clinic, United States Public Health Service, an arrow pointed to a graveled lane.

I pulled into the clinic’s driveway and parked beside a blue Isuzu Trooper with Posadas County plates. No matter where they moved in the state, Estelle and Francis Guzman would carry that tag until it rusted to pieces…a gentle reminder of their home to the south.

Only one other vehicle was in the lot, an older model GMC pickup-maybe a ’55 or ’56. It was no collector’s item, though, just an aging, battered work truck.

I crushed out my cigarette and walked inside the building. The clinic was cramped, with a twelve-by-twelve waiting room, a tiny cell for the receptionist, and a narrow hallway that led back to the treatment rooms. I guessed there were two of those at the most. I heard a metal pan clatter and voices, and then an Indian woman stuck her head out of one of the examining room doors. She saw me and held up a hand with one finger raised.

“I’ll be right out,” she said and disappeared again. I turned, looked around the waiting room, and saw universal doctor’s office decorations…aging magazines, a few children’s books. A large Ojo de Dios woven out of gaudy yarn hung on one wall and a sand painting of an Indian dancer in an awkward pose on another.

Across the room on the west wall was a framed state map with a large water stain rumpling all of Colfax, Mora, San Miguel, and Guadalupe counties. Beside the map was a framed aerial photograph of a mountain in fall colors, aspens aflame. It was no local mountain, of course…probably one from Colorado or Wyoming-wherever the postcard artist had been able to find a nice, conical, generic mountain with no towns, powerlines, or highways to mar the picture.

I stepped to the window and looked out at chamiso, cactus, and rocks.

“May I help you?”

I turned quickly. The nurse had a pencil and metal clipboard poised at the ready. She was older than I had first thought. Steel gray was beginning to temper her ebony hair, tied back tightly in a bun. Her black eyes regarded me calmly from a broad, flat face whose flawless skin was like burnished walnut. I read the name tag on her white blouse and wondered how long Mary Vallo had been an R.N. She might have been forty years old or sixty-five.

“Good morning, Mrs. Vallo,” I said. “I’m Bill Gastner, undersheriff of Posadas County, down in the southern part of the state. I’ve been assisting Deputy Guzman with an accident investigation this morning.” I started the standard smoker’s fumble for a cigarette and thought better of it. “I wondered if I could talk with Dr. Guzman for a minute, if he’s not tied up.”

“Surely,” Mary Vallo said. “Come on back.” She led the way down the hall, and in one small cubbyhole I saw a coffee maker just beginning to drip. Sharp-eyed Mary saw my glance and said, “I just started it. I’ll get you a cup as soon as it’s ready.”

“Wonderful,” I said, feeling about three hours overdue for my first morning caffeine buzz.

The examining room we entered was small and the scene of considerable recent action. Mary Vallo resumed her labors, at that moment cleaning the spatters from the front of the portable X ray unit. Francis Guzman was sitting at a table by the window awash with paperwork. His white smock was white in small spots only. He glanced up, not eager to move.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” the young physician exclaimed, and he pushed himself away from the table, extending a hand to me at the same time. “You’re about the last person I expected to see at this hour. How have you been, Sheriff?”

“Just fine, except that wife of yours has been putting me to work.” At his puzzled expression, I added, “The accident this morning with the girl pedestrian happened just above where I was camping. And you know the way old cops are. I couldn’t help snooping.”

“Up at Steamboat, you mean?”

“Yes. And how is the girl?”

Guzman shook his head and sat down again. He was six inches taller than my five-eight and built like an athlete, but now he looked like he’d just finished the pentathlon.

“I don’t think she’s going to make it, Sheriff. She has about eight broken bones, including her skull. She’s hemorrhaging internally as well as suffering a dozen gashes and lacerations. She was out there a while, you know, before anybody found her. I was surprised she hadn’t bled to death.”

“And with all that, she still managed to crawl almost a hundred yards,” I said and accepted a Styrofoam cup of coffee from Mary Vallo.

“You’re kidding.”

I shook my head. “The last few yards were up a steep embankment, back up to the highway shoulder. It looked like after she was hit, she ended up on a pile of boulders down by the river. At that point the highway embankment is almost vertical. Since she couldn’t crawl up there, she apparently moved in the only direction she could, along the stream in the grass until she reached a spot where she could try for the road again.”

“I don’t see how that would have been possible,” Guzman said. “I really don’t.” He stood up. “Look at this.” He had a set of small X rays and he handed the top one to me.

“We don’t have very good equipment, but even so, look at that hip.” He traced the fracture with his index finger.

Even I could see the damage. The head of the femur looked like it had been pried off the shaft, taking a chip of the hip socket with it.

“And her right arm was broken in three places. Her left ankle was snapped. There are what look like compressed fractures of two lower vertebrae. And a comminuted fracture of the right parietal.”

“What’s that?”

He tapped the side of his skull above his ear. “With all that and the bleeding, I can’t believe she crawled.”

“No one was there to help her that we know of,” I said. “Not as far as we’ve been able to determine. Of course, it’s hard to tell. But Estelle’s still there and might turn up something.”

Francis Guzman leaned forward, hands clasped and forearms resting on his knees. He remained silent, deep in thought. Finally he said, “The other thing that bothers me about her injuries-and I’m no great expert, you understand-what bothers me is that they’re not really consistent with being smacked by a car or truck. I know that’s what the ambulance attendants told me, but still…”

“Meaning?” I sat back, my chair leaning against the wall. I wanted a cigarette, but the “Thank You For Not Smoking” sign was staring me in the face.

“If a car hits you hard enough to do serious damage, to fling you right over a guardrail, there’s usually some clue that that’s what happened.”

“Well, sure.” I’d seen hundreds of accident victims in twenty years.

“But there were no paint chips, Sheriff. No chrome. Nothing.”

I shrugged. “That happens all the time.”

“Maybe. But there were no sharp lacerations, the sort of injury we’d expect from headlights and rims and bumpers or grill parts. And we’d see those in relationship with traumatic fractures and deep tissue bruising.”

He paused, then added, “And look at the fractures. Her right hip, Sheriff. The sort of fracture you get in football, when the joint is yanked and wrenched the wrong way. No compression injuries related with the fracture, except minor scrapes. Now, the major lacerations on her broken right arm were contaminated with rocks and dirt. The same thing is true of her broken left ankle.”

Guzman was warming up and I let him continue without interruption.

“And see here, on her skull. She took a hell of a rap there. You know what I found in her hair? Besides dirt? Lichen. The stuff that grows on rocks. Flakes of it right in the wound. Her head hit a rock, Sheriff, and hit it hard.”

“Well, we know that. That’s likely where the other fractures came from…or some of them. When she landed on the rocks. She was walking along the highway and got clipped. The impact threw her over the embankment. She tumbled ass over teakettle down into the rocks, breaking who knows what on the way.”

Francis Guzman shook his head. “Where did the car hit her?” He stood up and pretended to be walking along the road. “Right hip? She turns and it’s her left hip that’s facing traffic, not right.”

I grimaced. The young doctor had a hell of an imagination. “Come on, Francis. She could have just as easily turned the other way.”

“Not likely. And that leg was yanked out of its socket, not impacted.”

“So what are you saying happened?”

“I’m not sure, but I’m willing to bet she was never hit by a vehicle of any kind.”

“What, then?”

Francis Guzman hesitated. “I think she was thrown over the embankment.”

“Oh, you do.”

He nodded. “The rest fits that way, too.”

“The rest?”

“There was an attempt at rape, Sheriff. I’m sure of that. And what I’d say were deep fingernail gouges on her back, near the base of her neck. Her hands were busted up pretty badly, and I didn’t have a chance to check under her fingernails. The M.E. in Albuquerque will do that. And it looks like she was punched hard in the mouth. Right here.” He touched the left corner of his own mouth. “Not the sort of injury caused by sharp rocks. But a fist, yes.”

I toyed with my empty and crumpled coffee cup. “It’s hard to believe the other injuries were caused by sliding down an embankment like that.”

“Not if she were thrown from a moving vehicle it’s not.”

I stared at Guzman incredulously. “Tossed out of the back of a moving pickup truck, you mean? Something like that? Jesus. A hit-and-run I can imagine. But the other?”

Guzman nodded and glanced at his watch. “That’s what I think. You’ve got at least one murder on your hands. I’d bet on it.”

“She’s not dead yet, Doc.”

Guzman looked pained. “No, but her baby is. The young lady was four months pregnant.”