Dead Weight

Chapter Three

Dr. Arnold Gray dropped me back at the modest flat-roofed two-story structure that Posadas grandly called its Public Safety Building. As I walked inside, a trash can by the pay phone reminded me that my first inclination, to tear the anonymous note into shreds before it could do any damage, was probably a good one. The whole idea of someone sanctimoniously tapping out a little message that could ruin either a career or a life made my stomach churn.

But I wasn’t naive, either. In a department with a dozen employees, there was always an off-chance that one of them wasn’t as pure as the driven snow.

When I walked in, Gayle Torrez glanced up from her desk. Hell, I’d known her since she was a skinny twelve-year-old. She’d started working for the Sheriff’s Department when she was eighteen, had been with us for a decade, and was now married to Undersheriff Robert Torrez. If the note rang true, was she in on the scam? Was he?

I dropped the white envelope in my center desk drawer and slammed it shut until I could figure out what to do about the damn thing. After taking a minute to straighten my face so the anger wouldn’t show, I strolled out to Dispatch. Gayle was on the phone, the pencil in her right hand doodling little spirals on the scratch pad. Every once in a while, she’d stop spiraling and the pencil point would tap a few times on the pad as she listened.

“Sure,” she said. I leaned against one of the black filing cabinets and waited. The pencil tapped another series. “Sure.” She nodded. “I know it does.” I took a deep breath and looked off into the distance. “Let me pass it on to the village for you. Maybe they’ll listen to me.” Gayle sat patiently through another long string and nodded as if the nod were carried over the wires. After a few more noncommittal pleasantries, she hung up.

“Another dog,” she said, jotting in the big logbook by her elbow. “You’d think it would be too hot to bark.” She looked up at me. “What’s wrong, sir?”

“Wrong?” I asked.

“You looked peeved,” Gayle said.

“The damn car, I suppose,” I replied, and she accepted that with an understanding nod. I pushed myself away from the filing cabinet. “I need the dispatch logs for last month.”

“Just June’s?” She reached across to the steel bookcase under the window and pulled a slender black volume off the shelf. I took it and started back to my office.

“No calls for a while, all right? And when Bob comes in, I’d like to chat with him.”

“He’s home right now if you need him,” Gayle said.

“No,” I answered quickly and shook my head. “Just whenever he comes in this afternoon is fine.” Gayle didn’t ask what I wanted with the dispatch logs, my privacy, or her husband, and I felt better. Gayle Torrez worked hard at being the best dispatcher I’d ever met, making her a perfect match for her husband. Undersheriff Torrez worked the four-to-midnight shift, as well as twenty or thirty other odd hours during an average week. He avoided the boredom of working the day shift whenever he could.

Back in my office, I slumped back in the cool of my old leather chair, swung my feet up on the corner of my desk, and browsed through the logs. The volume included April, May, and June, and I concentrated on the last month, assuming that if there was any validity to the charge against Pasquale, the incident that had precipitated the note would be a recent one, not something from the distant past.

The logs were simple, black-on-white abbreviations of any activity that included radio conversations with the patrol officers. But their nebulous character could be frustrating. On June 3, for example, an entry read: 18:36, 303, 10–10. That was followed by 18:59, 303, 10-8.

Deputy Thomas Pasquale’s vehicle was 303, and at 6:36 p.m. civilian time, he had announced that he was out of service, at home, no doubt engaged in something as exciting as eating a sandwich. Twenty-three minutes later, he was back in service-and there was no way to determine from the log where he was or what he was doing.

After studying the log for half an hour, I looked at my legal pad jottings. During the twenty-two days that he had worked in June, Deputy Pasquale had called in 137 requests for vehicle registration checks…the sort of routine action a deputy took when he stopped an unfamiliar vehicle for a traffic infraction or because something in the driver’s manner had piqued his attention.

A rate of six or seven registration checks a night was average. On one extreme was Undersheriff Torrez, who might request one check a week; on the other, rookie Deputy Brent Sutherland, with us for three months, whose idea of a good time was running routine checks at three in the morning on cars parked in the Posadas Inn parking lot, down by the interstate.

Of Pasquale’s one hundred and thirty-seven registration checks, one hundred and two were on vehicles stopped on one of the four state highways that cut up Posadas County like a little withered pizza. That was logical, too, since the state highways carried the most traffic.

I frowned. If my numbers were right and my bifocals didn’t lie, eighty-four of the traffic stops were logged on New Mexico 56. That particular ribbon of asphalt, at the moment damn near liquid under the fierce sun, wound southwest from Posadas across the two dry washes that New Mexicans loved to call rivers, up through the San Cristobal Mountains, to plunge south through the tiny village of Regal and then into Mexico.

My frown deepened, even though State 56 was the logical route for traffic stops. The snowbirds flocked up and down that route, either headed for who knows what in rural Mexico or turning westward at Regal, headed to Arizona. The only highway to carry heavier traffic was the interstate, but for the most part, deputies stayed off that artery, leaving it to the state police.

The anonymous note claimed that Pasquale was shaking down Mexican nationals, and at first blush State 56 would be the logical highway for that activity, were it not for the border crossing a mile south of the hamlet of Regal. That crossing was open from 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., with the stout gate securely locked the rest of the night. Foot traffic was no problem, if travelers didn’t mind a little barbed wire. Vehicular traffic was out of the question.

If the Mexicans were crossing in Arizona, then ducking east through the mountains, 56 might be a logical route. I ran the numbers for April and May and found comparisons that differed by insignificant percentage points. Deputy Pasquale was consistent, if nothing else.

“And so what?” I said aloud.

I tossed the yellow pad on my desk, dropped the log on top of it, and leaned back, eyes closed. After a moment I picked up the log again. Deputy Tony Abeyta shared the swing shift with Pasquale and Torrez. Ten minutes later, I knew that Abeyta made forty-six traffic stops in June, barely two a night. Only eight of them had been on State 56.

There were explanations for that, too, but trying to crunch numbers only made me impatient. I was no statistician-and on top of that, I didn’t believe that statistics would give me the kind of answer I wanted.