Convenient Disposal

Chapter Thirteen

The blue jeans looked small and oddly pathetic in the evidence bag. Estelle glanced at the photograph of the girl lying facedown on the bed, with two pale-faced paramedics kneeling by her head. Eighteen hours before, Carmen had poured herself into those jeans, tight enough to hinder the circulation.

“Her mother says that she’s right-handed, if that’s any help,” Chief Eddie Mitchell said. He stood with his spine pressed tightly against the wall, trying to straighten out the kinks in his back after four hours in a procession of cramped, speeding patrol cars.

“Something is bound to show,” Bob Torrez said. “But even if it does, I’m not sure that it tells us a whole lot.”

“Every little bit,” Estelle said. She arranged the fabric of the left leg of the blue jeans under the low-power stereo microscope. An instant later, it took no imagination to see the uniformly stretched threads along the inseam. The loops of thread that marched along the seam in the jeans were normally so tight as to be pulled right into the stiff fabric. Under the lens of the stereoscope, Estelle could see the stitching stretched up into a small loop, every half inch or so. She straightened up and beckoned the sheriff toward the table. “Want to place bets?”

Torrez planted both hands on the bench on either side of the microscope and bent over, then released his grip to adjust the oculars. “Huh.”

“You can see the loops,” Estelle said.

Torrez gazed through the eyepieces for another few seconds, then twisted to one side as Eddie Mitchell ambled over, hands pressed to the small of his back. With a sigh, he bent down and examined the inseam for himself.

“Regular little holster she’s got there,” Torrez said. “Why not just stab it in twice-once going in, then again a few inches down the pike to hold the tip?”

“That’s not very secure,” Estelle said. “Thread the hat pin through loops every little bit, and it’s going to be held in place, keeping the tip on the outside of her jeans, out of her leg.”

“Right now, we’re thinking that the hat pin was Carmen’s,” Mitchell said, and straightened away from the counter. “That makes for an interesting scenario.”

“If she was wearing it when she was attacked,” Torrez said. “We don’t know that.”

“Let’s suppose that she was,” Estelle offered. She stepped across the small room and tapped the drawing on the white board. “There’s no blood in the kitchen-just furniture that indicates a struggle, a chase of sorts. Whoever attacked Carmen got through the door, busting the already broken screen. Maybe she tried to push the table between herself and her assailant, buying a few seconds.”

“Didn’t work out,” Torrez said.

“No, it didn’t. The assailant takes a swing, maybe connects, maybe not. By this time, they’re in the dining room, and the assailant takes a good lick with the lug wrench, maybe while Carmen is scrunched up against the wall trying to dial nine-one-one. Or maybe she’s holding her hands up, trying to fend him off. The wrench connects with the wall, hard enough to smash the plaster.”

With her finger, Estelle traced a ragged line toward the bedroom. “They fight through the living room, back to here. The last stand,” she said. “She makes it to the bedroom pretty quickly. If any of the blows to her head connected either in the kitchen, the dining room, or while crossing the living room, she didn’t leave a blood trail. And then…” Estelle paused, gazing at the schematic. Without turning around, she reached out, pointing at the jeans under the stereo. “What if she has the hat pin in her jeans. See”-and she looked at Torrez-“that’s what we don’t know. If she did, then she pulled it out somewhere during the fight. She might have been able to cut her assailant with it, a raking blow. Or”-and she shrugged-“maybe she got lucky and stabbed him a good one.”

“Just enough to make him mad,” Mitchell said. “He either connects at that point with the wrench, or just manhandles her around, wrenching the hat pin out of her hand. And then, boom. ”

“Boom,” Estelle repeated.

“Our contact with APD is Frank Hershey,” Mitchell said. “He posted one of his detectives at the hospital for us. When the doctors can spring loose, we’ll find out some more. But I tell you, I don’t see that Carmen’s going to do much after taking the blow to the head. She pulls the hat pin, maybe jabs him with it, and that sets the guy off. He’s pissed, and whammo. That’s when she gets it, hard through the ear.”

“I think that’s when he hits her,” Torrez said. He leaned against the counter. “She’s down on the bed, stuck through the ear. She’s maybe makin’ noise, panicked, not knowing what’s happened, still fighting. He hits her in the back of the head because that’s the target that he’s got.”

“That’s consistent with the blood,” Estelle said. “She didn’t move an inch after that.”

“We’re all set for someone to take a run to the state lab in the morning?” Torrez asked.

Estelle nodded. “Tom was going to see what he could do with the blood spatter on the lamp shade. He wasn’t really optimistic. There’s just not enough there.”

“And the crap on the wall?”

“That has to go to the lab. That’s way beyond what we can do here.”

“Which ain’t much,” Torrez added.

“One of the docs I talked to at University said that if Carmen survives the attack and the follow-up surgery and everything else, that it might be days before she can answer questions about what happened,” Mitchell said. “Maybe weeks.”

“And maybe never,” the sheriff said.

Estelle picked up the stack of eight-by-ten photos, the first installment sent upstairs from Linda Real’s darkroom. “We’ve got a good start for morning,” she said.

“What do you want us to do?” Mitchell asked. Torrez reached out for the photos and began shuffling through them methodically.

“It’s important to exhaust every possible place that Kevin Zeigler might have gone,” Estelle said. “He’s the key. I really believe it. It’s just way too bizarre otherwise. We need to talk to all the county folks…again. Maybe something he said in passing during the morning, any little thing. Check with the county barns, see if any of the maintenance crews saw him. Or someone from the village. In the course of a normal day of county business, he must see two hundred people, maybe talk to fifty or a hundred. We need to double-check with every one of them.”

“You going to talk with the pink flamingo again?” Torrez flashed a brief smirk when Estelle’s face went blank. “Mr. Page,” he said. “He’s still camped out in the lobby.”

“He needs to go home,” Mitchell said. “Shit, it’s almost one o’clock. I need to go home.”

“At the moment, he has no home,” Estelle said. “Zeigler’s house is still off-limits. He said he’d get a room at the Posadas Inn.”

“Then maybe you’d encourage that very thing,” Torrez said. He held up a single glossy print, a close-up of the hat pin taken from Deena Hurtado in the principal’s office of the middle school. “You brought the weapon back from Albuquerque, right?”

Mitchell nodded. “Linda took a preliminary picture with it still in the bag. After we get it back from the lab, she’ll shoot it again.”

The sheriff flipped quickly through the prints again.

“You don’t have that photo yet,” Mitchell said. “Linda’s still working downstairs. Those you have there are just the first batch.”

“She workin’ all night?” Torrez glanced at Estelle.

“Most likely.”

He shrugged. “Won’t hurt her. She’s young yet,” Torrez said. He handed the photos back to Estelle.

“Until we know something to the contrary, we need as many people on the road looking for Kevin as we can spare,” she said. “The first step is to comb every piece of county property, every piece of county equipment and real estate. That’s a start. And then every other connection we can dig up from Kevin’s personal life. Everyone he knows, everyone he’s talked to recently. And in that respect, William Page might be of some help.”

“First thing we need to do is call it a day,” Torrez said. “Every time I try to blink, I got to pull my eyelids back open. You two don’t look much better. Who’s on the road tonight?”

“Jackie and Mike Sisneros,” Estelle said.

“Well, they both know what to look for,” the sheriff said. “Maybe come eight tomorrow morning, the county manager will walk through his office door and surprise the shit out of us all.”

“That would be a nice surprise,” Estelle said. She carefully repacked the blue jeans and then snapped off her gloves.

“And it isn’t going to happen,” Eddie Mitchell said.

Torrez watched Estelle retag the evidence. “What direction are you takin’?” he asked after a moment.

She sighed, staring at the evidence bag in front of her. “What makes the most sense to me is that Kevin Zeigler walked into the middle of something,” she said. “Carmen is no angel. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit that the minute she learned that her daddy was taking a walk to the pizza place, she knew she had time on her hands. No one else was home; mom’s working, brothers and sisters are all at school…or supposed to be. And then…” She hesitated. “We don’t know what happened. But it looks like Kevin came home for lunch at the wrong time. Page told me that they’d witnessed fights at the Acostas’ before. And he told me that on at least one occasion, when the two boys were fighting and no one seemed willing to say anything, Kevin wanted to go next door and see what he could do.”

“But he didn’t,” Torrez said.

“No. Page said he talked Kevin out of it. It wasn’t any of their business.”

Torrez let out a loud grunt that could have meant any number of things. “Sure as hell is now, though.”