Convenient Disposal

Chapter Twenty-seven

The German shepherd four doors south sniffed something on the still night air that tickled his attention, and he settled into a rhythmic two-three-two barking. Estelle lay in bed, curled inside the arc of her husband’s body, listening. She could feel his even breathing against her left shoulder. Since his earliest days as a medical student, Francis Guzman had been able to grab deep, comfortable sleep whenever the opportunity arose, whether on a hard couch, an empty hospital bed, or even the floor of the staff lounge.

She knew that Francis would sleep until the alarm, the telephone, or one of his children blasted him awake.

Estelle shifted her head just enough to be able to see the digital clock on the dresser across the room. The neighbor’s dog stopped barking at 1:26 AM For another five minutes, she listened to the sounds of the house and her sleeping family.

Somewhere out in the county, Deputy Jackie Taber was working her regular shift, cruising the back roads, poking into dark corners, leaving the high-speed drone of the interstate to the State Police. Jackie had been sent home earlier in the day to grab a few hours of sleep.

Now, never grumbling about frustration or fatigue, she would plod patiently on, looking and listening. If Estelle turned on the scanner, she knew that she would hear Jackie on the air once in a while, perhaps firing a license number to Dispatcher Brent Sutherland for an NCIC check, something to do to keep them both awake.

The telephone hadn’t rung since early evening, when she’d talked briefly with Sheriff Robert Torrez. The minutes and hours ticked away with the only progress being Carmen Acosta’s slow healing, three hundred miles north. The medical staff still would not hazard a guess about how long it might be before Carmen could remember the incident at all. The grim odds were that the blow to the back of her skull had smashed all remnants of the episode from her mind.

Moving the sheet and blanket as little as possible, Estelle slipped out of bed. Her eyes now accustomed to the dark, she crossed to the chair, slipped into her nightgown and robe, closed the bedroom door behind her, and padded out to the living room.

In a moment, the sharp image of Dr. Arnold Gray was calling the county meeting back into session. Estelle plugged in a set of earphones and settled into the rocking chair beside the sofa.

She saw herself enter and take a seat near Mitchell and Torrez. The commission immediately resumed its discussion of providing services to the village, and more than once, one or another of the commissioners would ask about Kevin Zeigler’s absence. As if to punctuate the problem, Milton Crowley would swivel the camera each time the county manager’s name was mentioned, and even once touched the zoom lens to zero in on Zeigler’s empty chair, as if to say, “Aha, see? This is your government in action.”

Tinneman made a wisecrack about Zeigler’s power lunch, and then Sheriff Torrez rose from his seat and strolled back to the microphone. For the next few minutes, discussion continued, with Torrez answering questions using just enough volume that the commissioners could hear if they paid rapt attention.

Estelle found herself pressing the headphones against her left ear to hear the sheriff. Eventually, their questions for Torrez wound down, and the undersheriff took her place at the small podium.

As she walked to the podium, the camera swung to follow her. Because she had been standing so close to its lens, what the video picked up behind Estelle was fuzzy. Clearly, though, Zeigler’s desk was still empty.

Estelle pressed the remote Pause, and then rummaged through her briefcase to find the agenda for the meeting. Item 17 was open for discussion at that moment. Several less weighty items were scheduled to follow, taking the meeting to its projected five PM adjournment.

Scanning down the list of action items, Estelle could see that a presentation to the commission by a representative of Baynes, Taylor, and O’Brien of Albuquerque was scheduled to present final paperwork for a bonding issue. Dedication of a portion of a little two-track on the western side of the county as a county road joined a host of other similar items-the sort of day-to-day workings of local government that some folks found fascinating, others found stultifyingly boring, and a few, like Milton Crowley, claimed were cloaks for governmental conspiracy.

Item 28, headed Discussion Items, included such blockbusters as sharing a road grader with the tiny unincorporated village of Newton, a hamlet that lay outside the northern Posadas County limits by about a hundred yards; communication from The Country Patriot, which Estelle knew to be Milton Crowley’s newsletter; the preliminary report from the county manager about the feasibility of hiring a private contractor for solid-waste and landfill services; and an entry simply titled Resolution of Litigation. The meeting would conclude with an executive session for Personnel Matters and Pending Litigation.

Estelle wasn’t surprised by either the personnel session or mention of litigation-that was standard procedure for the county. Employees were hired, evaluated, fired. The county sued and was sued on a regular basis, whether over something as simple as determination of an old fence line, violation of a vendor contract, or failure to pay back taxes. The constant flow of civil paperwork kept Sergeant Howard Bishop busy.

Setting the county meeting back into motion, Estelle listened to herself respond to questions until the tape reached the point where Commissioner Tinneman petulantly repeated that he wanted to talk with the county manager. At that point, it appeared that Crowley wasn’t sure whom he wanted to capture on tape. The camera actually wavered a bit with indecision. He swung it hard to the left and recorded Estelle as she left the commission chambers, then panned back to where Zeigler should have been.

Dulci Corona’s sharp voice could be heard on the tape, and in a moment, the camera’s view returned to the podium. After a few minutes, it filmed Estelle’s return as she walked down the aisle and sat beside Mitchell. In a flurry of activity, the final vote was pushed through. The camera caught Tinneman’s discomfiture, then captured Estelle leaning toward Chief Mitchell for a final comment before she rose to leave and the commission moved on to other matters.

With a quick stab at the remote, Estelle stopped the tape and ran it in reverse, watching Dr. Gray’s gavel spring up from the desk and herself waddle backward to her seat. She kept rewinding until she reached the point where she had left the chamber to inquire about the missing Zeigler, then replayed the tape.

When Crowley panned the camera to the left to catch her exit on tape-and what was so important that he would film that particular moment? — the rear of the chambers was also visible, all the way across the spotty audience to Kevin Zeigler’s desk and microphone. A number of people hadn’t returned from lunch, including Commissioner Tina Archuleta and Posadas Register editor Pam Gardiner. The seat where Don Fulkerson had been sitting, directly in front of Zeigler’s desk, was also empty. Predictably, several new faces had joined the audience as well, including an elderly couple at the far side of the chambers. The husband stood his walker in the outside aisle.

Estelle ran the tape forward again. Fifteen minutes after the session resumed, Tina Archuleta returned, grimacing with apology as she took her seat. The others ignored her, except for a pleasant nod of recognition from the commission chairman. Crowley filmed her arrival from the moment the door opened, panning as she walked down through the audience.

The meeting plodded onward through two breaks, and as if concerned that his high-density tape would run out too soon, Crowley became more conservative with his recording, cutting off the video during discussion that he considered to be of no consequence. Estelle wondered how he decided, since not a great percentage of what he taped appeared to be much higher on the consequence scale.

At 4:02 PM by the video camera’s timer, Crowley panned left once more, as the old man with the walker stood to briefly address the commission about the condition of his undedicated two-track that had once been a county road but no longer was and should have been. In the row behind him and close to the aisle, Don Fulkerson had returned, but Ralph Johnson had left, leaving Fulkerson to doze alone.

Estelle glanced at the agenda. The discussion item concerning the contracted services was looming on the agenda’s horizon, and Fulkerson had timed it well. Estelle sat forward a little in the rocker and frowned at the screen, but the light in the back of the commission chambers was uncertain, turning individual audience members into shadows.

With Zeigler absent, the commission dropped several agenda items and adjourned early to executive session. The camera panned across the audience, many now standing and milling toward the exits, apparently deciding not to remain and wait for the commission to return from session. The noise level rose as people took the opportunity for chatter and the exchange of gossip tidbits. As she watched their images-some smiling, some sleepy, some bludgeoned numb with boredom-Estelle wondered if someone in those chambers knew exactly where Kevin Zeigler was.

The camera must have been its own form of intimidation, since not one of the audience stopped to talk with Milton Crowley. Maybe sometime in the past, they too had read the sign on his fence, and didn’t care to trespass on his personal space.

Far in the back of the house a toilet flushed, its noise muffled by Estelle’s earphones. Estelle looked at her watch. She had another hour before Francisco would appear, bright-faced and with mouth in gear.

The tape went blank, then flickered and sprang into life as the commissioners filed back into the hall after the executive session. Dr. Gray pushed them through what little business remained, and at 5:03 by the video timer, he rapped his gavel to end the meeting.

Crowley continued to videotape, the camera intruding into the various private conversations that took place in the natural course of a meeting’s end. Finally, the tape ended.

Estelle sat back in the rocker, tapping the remote on her thigh after pressing Rewind. She had seen nothing to pique her interest, other than Zeigler’s absence. The huge, numbing possibility loomed clearly. What if…what if? she thought. What if she was stumbling blindly down the wrong road entirely? What if Kevin Zeigler’s disappearance had nothing whatsoever to do with his work as county manager? Estelle realized with growing frustration that she could say the same thing about every other avenue, too.

For nearly an hour, she sat in the rocking chair, doodling on the legal pad. In half an hour, she’d blackened in enough semicircles to represent a fair-sized pile of discarded tires, with a little one standing at the top.