Dead Weight

Chapter Thirty-nine

We didn’t waste any time. At thirty-two minutes after six, I pulled into the empty parking lot of Sam Carter’s supermarket. Monday through Thursday, the place opened at 6:00 a.m. and closed twelve hours later. On Friday and Saturday, the store stayed open until 8:00. It was probably one of the few supermarkets left in the world that was closed all day on Sunday.

By driving around behind the building, I could look up the alley that ran behind the supermarket and Tommy’s Diner, then crossed Rincon to pass behind the large metal building that housed the Posadas Register. I caught a glimpse first of the big white-on-blue lettering on the side of the newspaper building and thought with grim amusement that if Frank Dayan was working late the day before publication, it would pay him to step out his own back door to catch the scoop of the year.

Tom Mears’ Bronco sat squarely in the middle of the alley beside the dumpsters. From that point, he could watch the back door of the supermarket and the black Explorer parked on Rincon just west of the alley. He couldn’t see the front doors of the grocery store but had wisely chosen the two targets most removed from casual view by passersby.

He got out of the Bronco and met Torrez and me as we approached the back door of the store.

“I walked around,” he said in a husky whisper. “The front doors are the kind that you have to open with a key, even if you’re inside. There’s no push bar.”

“All right. And this one is open?” I stepped to the back door and could see for myself. The door may have been locked, but it was ajar about a quarter of an inch.

I stood at the door, my ear to the metal. “Nothing? Did you hear anyone?”

“No, sir. Not since I drove up. I tried the front door and then came around here. I could see that the door might be open, so I didn’t touch it. And then I caught a glimpse of the Explorer.”

I stepped away from the building and looked down the alley. “Someone just driving by on Grande wouldn’t be apt to notice his vehicle, parked off to the side like that. And if they did, there’s no reason to think anything about it.” I turned to Bob. “What do you think?”

He pulled a hefty pocketknife out of his pocket and reached up high on the door, within an inch of the top corner. He inserted the blade and gently twisted. The door moved a fraction, held tightly in the jamb. It hadn’t been slammed quite hard enough to catch the bolt in the striker plate. Torrez slid the knife down a bit and twisted again. The door moved a bit more. He knelt and repeated the maneuver down at the bottom, and at the fourth twist, the steel door popped open.

“Uh-oh,” he whispered and grinned. Using the point of the knife, he tipped the door open far enough that we could enter without touching it.

No sooner had he done that than he held up a hand sharply, gesturing upward. Looking past him, I could see the lights on in Sam Carter’s upstairs office. The three of us stood in the door, listening. The outer door of Carter’s office, positioned right at the top of the short stairway, was open. If he was in there, even talking quietly on the phone, we’d hear him.

“I’ll check,” Mears said, and he moved across the concrete floor to the stairway, then ascended two or three at a time. He stopped in the office doorway, turned, and shrugged.

“Nobody,” he said.

I moved to the bottom of the stairs.

“He might be planning to come back,” Torrez said quietly.

“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe he just didn’t pay attention when he closed the door.”

“Sir,” Mears said, reappearing in the open office doorway, and this time there was some urgency in his voice. “You might want to look at this.”

I made my way up the stairway, with Torrez patiently following Mears waiting until I’d reached the landing, then stepped into the office, moving quickly to the one-way glass that overlooked the store. He pointed. Over to the left, near one of the glass cases that held the refrigerated beverages, was a considerable pool of liquid on the floor-perhaps water, maybe soda pop or beer.

“The glass in the cooler door is broken, too,” the deputy said, but I had to take his word for it. It looked fine to me.

I took a moment and scanned the rest of the store. Everything appeared in place.

“Take a look,” I said. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

The papers on top of Carter’s desk interested me, and I took out my pen and used it as a probe to move things slightly, looking at this and that, being careful not to start a landslide. There were order forms, inventory, correspondence with vendors, time sheets…all the sorts of things one would expect to find on a store manager’s desk. Sam would have been delighted to see me rummaging, I’m sure.

After no more than thirty seconds, my radio startled me as Mears’s disembodied voice broadcast in a harsh whisper, “Sheriff.”

I moved my pen and let an invoice from Royalty Line Food Specialties drop back in place, then stepped to the window and looked down. Mears and Torrez stood at the near end of aisle 12, and I could tell by their posture that they weren’t looking at a puddle of spilled mountain spring water.

Despite a hammering pulse, I took my time negotiating the steep stairway. I turned into the store and came up behind Mears, who looked as if he’d been flash-frozen in place. Torrez turned to me, one eyebrow raised. Sprawled on the floor with his blood mixing with whatever liquid was running out of the drink cooler was Posadas County Commission Chairman Sam Carter.

“Oh, for God’s sakes,” was about all I managed to say. Mears lifted a foot to move closer and Torrez snapped, “Watch your step.” By moving along the opposite side of the aisle, staying close to the shelves of pretzels and chips, Torrez avoided the puddle. He knelt near Sam’s head and reached out to check the carotid pulse.

“He’s dead,” Torrez said. He regarded the blood under Carter’s head. “Hasn’t been long, though.” Remaining on his haunches, Torrez pivoted slowly, scrutinizing the area around the body. “It looks like he took one in the back of the head, kind of a grazing shot. That would do it.”

“And look at this,” Tom Mears said, pointing at the cooler door. “Ricochet, maybe. Or maybe the one that killed him. It isn’t a clean hole in the glass. Whatever it was exploded a couple quart bottles of beer.”

“Christ,” I said, “I can still smell the gunpowder.” I looked at Torrez. “You smell it?”

He nodded. “Look over in the corner there.” I did so and saw the blue plastic bank money pouch, zipper gaping wide open. “Somebody came in right at closing, maybe.” He made a hammer-and-trigger motion with his right hand. “Pop. Take the money and run.” He stood up with a loud crack of the knees. “Or at least that’s what we’re supposed to think.” He backed away from the body.

“Explain the door to me, for instance,” I said.

Torrez nodded. “The cooler door is closed. The broken bottles are behind it. So how does the beer spill so far across the aisle if the door is closed, with only a little bullet hole through it?”

“Unless Carter grabbed it when he fell,” Mears said. “Maybe pulled it open some, then the door closes after he tumbles away.”

“Could be,” Torres said. “Could be.” He was gazing at the floor, and held up both hands as if he were blocking traffic. “Stay put,” he said, and brushed past me, staying close to the racks.

“Christ, Sam,” I muttered, “what the hell have you gotten yourself into?”

In a few moments, Torrez returned with his flashlight. The evening sunshine was still bright outside, streaming in through the advertisement-plastered store windows. The specialty stock, piled high in pyramids at the end of each row, bounced and shadowed the slanting sunlight so that most of the cavernous store, especially the rear portion where we were standing with its high fluorescent lights turned off, was gloomy.

“Just a thought,” Torrez said. “The killer didn’t run out the front door, unless he had Carter’s keys…and he’s not likely to spend time fumbling there and risk being seen. And we found the back door ajar. That’s what makes sense to me. You’ve got to really give that door a good hard push to make sure it latches securely. So if whoever it was goes out the back way after tussling with Carter, he either goes down this same aisle, maybe even having to step over the body, or goes up front, cuts across, and then down another aisle.”

“We don’t know if there was a struggle or not,” I said. “And we don’t know how Sam was standing when he was shot.”

“No, but we’ve got a trajectory in the cooler there, from door to bottle. That’s a start.”

“We’ve got to take this one step at a time now,” I said, apprehensive that the undersheriff was just eagerly charging ahead without any clear notion of what he was looking for. “We need to call Perrone over here,” I said to Mears. Trying to reach conclusions without even preliminary findings from the medical examiner always made me nervous.

Sam’s corpse hadn’t been touched yet. I looked down at him, wondering if his keys were in his pocket, wondering if he’d had a weapon when he came down the stairs to confront the killer, wondering who the hell had pulled the trigger, wondering all kinds of things in a confusing blizzard of questions.

Moving methodically, Bob Torrez crouched down, snapped on the flashlight, and laid it on the polished tile floor. “Some things we don’t want to have slip away,” he mused. “I don’t think we want to wait on this one.” The beam shot down the aisle toward the back wall, a parabola of white light harsh on the white-and-gray-flecked tile. He rolled the flashlight slowly across the tile, using just the tip of his index finger.

None of us were breathing. I bent down with my hands on my knees as the light stopped, and even I could see what had to be shoe prints.

“Bingo,” Torrez whispered. “Somebody got careless.”

“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” I said.

“We need Linda here with the camera,” he said to Mears. “And Perrone, and the whole crew. But stay off the radio. Use the phone.”

Mears backpedaled down the aisle, following Torrez’s example by keeping his steps immediately beside the shelving…an awkward and difficult place for anyone to walk and the least likely place for us to plant our size twelves on important evidence.

I knelt down while Torrez held the light motionless. “See ’em?”

“I see something,” I said. “I’d hate to be the one to have to swear what they are.”

He reached out his left hand toward the ghostly patterns. “Not much,” he said, “but something.” With his index finger, he traced the print’s outline in the air just above it. “It looks like whoever it was just sort of grazed the puddle here, enough to leave about a quarter of a print, a slice lengthwise from toe to heel. If we’re lucky, we can even measure a size.”

“What’s it look like to you?”

“It ain’t very big. Teenager, woman, small man.”

“You think it’ll show up in a photo?”

“If it can be done, Linda can do it,” Torrez said. “If we can bounce the light just right, I don’t see why not. If we can see them clearly with the flashlight, there’s no reason the film shouldn’t be able to see ’em, too.”

I remained kneeling, gazing at the prints-or at least at the spot where Bob Torrez said they were. “Shit,” I said, and shook my head. It was more than just a comment on the current state of affairs, particularly those that included the dead Sam Carter. Torrez caught the inflection and looked sharply at me.

“What?”

I took a deep breath and then pushed myself to my feet. “It was no casual robbery. Not shooting him in the back of the head like that. And unless Sam’s lying right on top of it, I don’t see a weapon, either. Nothing left behind.”

Torrez looked sideways at me. He held out a thumb. “Kenny Carter is home, under surveillance. Sam’s wife could have done it, but she’s bowling. I already verified that with a phone call after we stopped by there and saw Kenny. Grace Sisson is home, and has been ever since she came back from Las Cruces. Jennifer was locked in a motel room, waiting for her sugar daddy, here.” He gazed down at the corpse and then back at me. “So who does that leave?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I wish to hell I did.” I looked down the aisle. “Tell you what. You don’t need me here. While you’re working this, I’m going to go back upstairs and turn that office upside down. I gave it a once-over, but now…” I hesitated. “And don’t forget to have Gayle, or someone else who’s good at that sort of thing, break the news to MaryBeth Carter.” I turned to go, then stopped. “And make sure you give our brilliant assistant DA a call. He should be in on this. If you don’t, you’ll be on his shit list for life. And he’s too stupid to have as an enemy.”

I looked down at the remains of Sam Carter. As bad as I felt about not being able to save Sam Carter from his own foolishness, some ideas were beginning to coalesce in my mind that were making me feel a whole lot worse.