Convenient Disposal

Chapter Ten

With one hand over the other ear, Estelle pressed the telephone close so that she could hear Chief Eddie Mitchell. At the same time, she stepped out of the Acostas’ living room where Tom Pasquale, Tom Mears, and Jackie Taber were industriously combing the carpet, and found a quiet corner in the dining room.

“You’re still out there, huh?” Mitchell’s soft voice lowered another notch, as if he was sitting in a crowded library, loath to be overheard. In the background, she heard traffic. “I’m southbound on I-Twenty-five,” he added.

“Who with?” Estelle asked.

“Ah, I called in a few favors,” said Mitchell. “Hank’s giving me a ride to the county line.” Estelle heard the Bernalillo County sheriff’s deputy say something in the background, and Mitchell replied, “Yeah, right,” obviously in response to the deputy. “Valencia’s got a quiet night, and one of their deputies is waiting for us on down the interstate a bit. He’ll run me south so I can grab a ride with Dona Anna. Won’t be long.”

“How’s Carmen? Have the doctors been able to tell you anything yet?”

“Now there,” Mitchell said, and paused. Estelle heard the patrol car’s engine noise subside for a moment, then bellow. She wondered how fast Mitchell’s “shuttle service” was eating the miles. “She’s a lucky girl, Estelle.”

“You have the clothes with you?”

“Yup. Every stitch. And I talked with a physician named Hans Deakman at University Hospital. He says he knows your husband. Anyway, he thinks that Carmen will be in surgery for about another hour.”

“That’s all?”

“Well, an hour more,” Mitchell amended. “She’s a lucky, lucky kid, at least as far as that damn hat pin goes. From what they can tell from the pictures, her head was turned hard to the right when she was hit, and that makes it likely that the pin was driven in from behind. Deakman says that it broke through the ear canal headed forward, so it pretty much avoided her brain.”

“Pretty much.”

“Yeah, well. We can’t have everything.”

“There’s some brain damage?” Estelle sagged against the wall, suddenly bone weary.

“Not from the hat pin, I don’t think. Somebody fetched her a real stout clip from behind, too. Look for something like a hammer, fireplace tool, something like that.”

“How about a lug wrench?”

“Sure. That would do it. You come up with one?” She told him about the wrench under Kevin Zeigler’s county truck. “That makes sense,” Mitchell said. “There’s some intracranial bleeding going on. That’s what they were working on when I left.”

“You have the hat pin, too?”

“Yup. And an amazing X-ray. I think your hubby took some while they were prepping her for the plane ride, too. They actually did the removal surgery up here. You might want to check with him.”

Estelle glanced at her watch. Mitchell was on the road at 7:55 PM That would put him back in Posadas-given perfectly executed hand-offs and lead-footed deputies in four counties-at close to midnight.

“Tell me about it,” she said.

“Well, when her assailant rammed that pin into her head, it angled forward and up.” The hair on the back of Estelle’s neck prickled. “It kind of bounced around through her hard palette, up into her sinuses, and then glanced off the inside of her right cheekbone. Bent hell out of the pin, that’s for sure. Maybe it was a good thing for her that it wasn’t the absolute best grade of spring steel. She might have ended up like one of those frogs we pithed in high school biology.”

“Can you tell how long it is?”

“What, the hat pin? Just a second. Hang on.”

Estelle waited, hearing mumbles from the deputy. Mitchell came back on the line after a moment. “Nobody’s written anything up yet, but I got me this handy-dandy pocket rule and a full-size X-ray. Lemme see.” After another pause, he said, “It’s got to be four inches.”

“Four, not six.”

“Nope, four. Any longer, and it would have popped out her right eye.”

“Okay. Thanks, Eddie. I have some people I need to talk to, but that’ll have to wait until we can look at the clothing.”

“What are we looking for?”

“I don’t think we’ll be able to see it without a lens, but I want to know if Carmen was carrying that thing. The spot that’s in favor right now seems to be the inseam, up along the inside of the thigh.”

“Just like young what’s-her-name.”

“Deena Hurtado.”

“Just like her. Look, I already called Gayle and asked her to have a deputy at the line to play taxi for me. If you guys are all tied up, she said she’d ask the State Police to give me a lift.”

“I’d like to look at those clothes the minute you get in, Eddie.”

“Hell yes. Why should you have a life?” Mitchell laughed. “It’s going to be after midnight.”

“That’s okay. You said you have the pin with you?”

“That’s affirmative.”

“Is it handy?”

“Nothing’s handy in this car,” Mitchell said, and that prompted a guffaw from the driver. “I got a shotgun killing my left knee, the damn computer under my elbow, and God knows what else. I’m not used to being a passenger. Just a second.” In a moment, he added, “Here that baby is. Nasty, nasty.”

“Do you have enough light to see the tip?”

“Sure.”

“Has it been sharpened? Ground or filed down?”

After a brief pause, Mitchell replied, “I would think so. The pin is finished somehow, like gun bluing. The color is ground off around the tip.”

“Okay. That’s what I needed to know.”

“Maybe they dip these things in curare.”

“That’s all we need,” Estelle said.

“We’re coming up on my Valencia County ride here in just a second. Anything else you need to know before I get there?”

“Are the Acostas settled down some? Did Freddy get there all right?”

“Yeah, he did. He even avoided all the radar somehow. Damn near drove that old car as fast as we flew. He found the two boys, and brought them up, too. That just leaves the two little girls. They’re staying with relatives, Bobby says.”

“We’ll want to talk with the boys,” Estelle said. “No one had a chance this afternoon. Did you have a minute to sit down with them?”

“Yep. I chatted with ’em a little at the hospital. Neither one of ’em knew anything about the hat pin, or where it might have come from.”

“If the hat pin was Carmen’s that’s hard to believe, too. We’ll see,” Estelle said. “I’ll have a talk with the girls. Maybe this evening, if I get a chance.”

“Whoa,” Mitchell said. “Here’s the next leg of my ride. Just a second.”

Estelle listened to the muffled conversation, then heard first one door slam, and then another.

“My new chauffeur is Deputy Melissa Gabaldon,” he said, and Estelle could hear the car accelerating hard for the run down through the center of Valencia County.

“Tell her thanks for me,” Estelle said.

“I’ll do that. Now, about this lug wrench thing…You still haven’t heard from Zeigler? No trace of the guy?”

“We haven’t found him yet, Eddie.”

“No shit?”

“Not a trace. His roommate from Socorro arrived not long ago. A guy by the name of William Page. Runs a computer design business up there. He doesn’t have a clue either. I believe him.”

“That’s the guy that Zeigler’s romancing at the moment?”

“I guess you could put it that way, Eddie.”

“I kinda thought so. I met the both of them a time or two. Interesting, interesting. Wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to come up with an interesting scenario for that whole mess. Zeigler comes home just after Freddy leaves, Carmen sees something she’s not supposed to see, and old Kevin does a botched-up job. Then he runs. He’s smart enough not to take the county truck, and smart enough not to take his own car.”

“And goes where?”

“That’s what we have to be smart enough to figure out,” Mitchell said. “The only trouble is, I’ll bet my miniscule paycheck that’s not the way it happened at all.”

“I don’t think so either.”

“Zeigler’s not a lug wrench man.”

The last time Estelle had seen Zeigler, less than nine hours before, he’d been tending to county business, with a couple of errands to fill his lunch break. She could still see him brushing his chinos after leaning against the truck. What else had he been wearing? The sleeves of his dress shirt had been rolled up loosely, the diagonally striped red and black tie pulled away from an unbuttoned collar.

Her last memory of Zeigler had been of a neat, dapper young fellow who might have just stepped through the front door of his college fraternity house.

“No, sir. Kevin Zeigler isn’t the lug wrench type,” Estelle agreed.

“What’s the sheriff think?”

“He hasn’t said,” Estelle replied. “Ever since he saw there wasn’t a guest bed in Zeigler’s house, he didn’t say much. Apparently that came as a surprise to him.”

Mitchell chuckled. “I bet. What the hell. There’s probably half the county that doesn’t know. Bobby’s one of ’em. This whole thing probably touches his conservative nerves. Anything else you need at the moment?”

“I don’t think so.”

“We’ll see you in a bit then, all right? You have this number if something comes up.”

“Thanks, Eddie.” She switched off the phone and walked back into the living room.

“I don’t think we’re going to find anything,” Tom Mears said, pushing himself to his feet. “How’s Carmen?”

She described the injuries, and Mears grimaced.

“It sounds like someone was wrestling her from behind,” Pasquale said. “That would take some strength.”

Estelle nodded. Once again, she tried to imagine Kevin Zeigler tussling with Carmen Acosta…first slugging her on the head with a lug wrench, then ramming a hat pin into her ear. It made no sense. Even if the hat pin had been jabbed first, followed by the savage blow to the back of the girl’s head, Estelle found it impossible to picture the county manager wielding either weapon.

“We have to find him, that’s all,” she said.