Double Prey

Chapter Eleven

“Some clear prints.” Sheriff Robert Torrez passed to the undersheriff first a card bearing Freddy Romero’s finger prints lifted by Perrone at the morgue, and then a latent print collection. “Freddy didn’t make any effort to keep his prints off the gun.”

“I can’t imagine why he would,” Estelle replied. She studied the card, blinking to clear tired eyes. The clock on the office wall read nearly nine thirty, and she had already fielded a second call from George Romero a couple hours earlier. She’d managed to convince Romero that a visit to the crash site would serve them both far better in the fresh light of morning. He and Tata had settled instead for a visit to the morgue, a brief moment that would keep them sleepless for the rest of the night. Perrone had been there, had been gentle and thoughtful, allowing them only to see their son’s face.

Tata Romero had been unable to ask questions other than why, a word she repeated a dozen times. Estelle had no answer. George Romero’s face was set in grim lines, and at one point, as they left the hospital, had asked, “What do you know?”

Estelle had been almost honest in her answer, erring only in being deliberately incomplete. She hadn’t mentioned the handgun found on the ATV.

“Kind of interesting,” Torrez continued. “The gun had a round chambered, but wasn’t decocked.” He slid the heavy automatic across to Estelle. Sgt. Tom Mears had spent considerable time with the gun, retrieving whatever evidence he could. The sum total was several smudgy prints, all belonging to Freddy Romero.

“Freddy wrapped the gun in that cloth, with one round in the chamber, hammer cocked, ready to go,” Estelle said. “He didn’t try to unload it, and I doubt that he fired it.”

“Looks like.” The sheriff hefted a sealed plastic envelope and displayed a handful of stubby.40 S amp;W cartridges. “The gun has a ten round magazine. You could add one in the chamber, and that would make eleven. We recovered nine. One was in the chamber, eight in the magazine. All Speer Gold Dot. Mears is processing a couple of prints that might work for us.”

“So it could have been fired once, or maybe twice, depending on how it was loaded.” Estelle took a moment to mull the sheriff’s shorthand explanation.

“Could have been fired a thousand times, far as that goes,” Torrez said. “But that’s what was in the gun when we found it in Freddy’s carry-all…cocked, with one in the pipe, eight more in the magazine.”

Estelle gazed at the stubby, heavy automatic, then picked it up and thumbed the decocker lever. The cocked hammer snapped down, but the large, rotating bar of the decocker mechanism prevented the hammer from striking the firing pin. The gun then could be carried safely with a chambered round, hammer down. Then snap the decocker up, leaving the gun in double-action mode, and all the shooter had to do was pull the trigger. When the gun fired, the hammer was cocked by the slide slamming backward, and would remain that way, cocked and ready to fire, unless the decocker was activated.

“I can think of a hundred ways Freddy could have come to grief with this,” she said. “Not the least of which is having it bounce around in the carrier of that ATV, charged and ready to go.”

“Odds are slim that it would go off by itself,” Torrez said. “Slim and none. But then he gets home with it…”

“That thought gives me the willies. I didn’t mention it to George Romero yet. I wanted to know more before I did that.”

The sheriff nodded. “So instead the kid does something really dangerous. He drives into an arroyo,” Torrez said, almost philosophically. “Anyway, Mears said the gun looked like it had been locked away in somebody’s attic for a few years. We can comb through any unresolved break-ins or thefts, but I don’t remember anything.”

“No. Plus I never got the impression that was Freddy’s style. I don’t think he would have taken the gun in a burglary. It almost looks as if it’s been outside. It’s stainless, so it didn’t rust, but look at the rest of the condition. If that gun was in somebody’s closet, they sure were the world’s worst housekeepers.”

The sheriff turned as another figure appeared in the doorway. “What do you want,” he said in mock truculence, and Doug Posey flashed him a smile. The New Mexico Game and Fish officer was in his late thirties, but still managed to look sixteen.

“I’m working my ass off, sheriff,” Posey said. “If you don’t think talking to a class of second graders is scary, you can take the next round. That’s what I did this afternoon, for starters.”

“Ain’t gonna happen,” Torrez said.

Posey’s expression turned serious. “I heard about what happened to the Romero kid. Shit, his fifteen minutes of fame didn’t last long.”

“Bender’s Canyon arroyo,” the sheriff said.

“Son of a gun, that’s too bad. I liked him. Real wild hares, those two boys. How’s Butch coming along, anyway?”

“He lost the eye, but will recover otherwise. Probably,” Estelle said. “He’s up in Albuquerque.”

Posey grimaced. “What’s with the Smith?” He leaned over Estelle’s desk and peered at the gun without touching it.

“This was wrapped in a cloth inside the carrier of Freddy Romero’s ATV,” Estelle replied.

“No kiddin’. May I?” Estelle nodded, and Posey hefted the gun, racked the slide back and inspected the empty chamber and magazine. “Never used one of these. What’s the deal?” He looked across at the sheriff.

“Don’t know,” Torrez said. “We’ll talk with George tomorrow, maybe. See what he knows.”

“It’s been cleaned up some,” Estelle said. “When we found it, it was loaded and cocked, and looked like it had been out in the weather. Or a loft up in someone’s barn or garage somewhere. Covered with all kinds of nasties.” She opened a folder and pulled out an eight by ten print of the gun as it had first appeared, cradled in the oily cloth. Posey looked at it, turning it this way and that.

“Huh.” He turned it again, then pointed at one spot on the forward portion of the gun’s slide. “What’s that, bat guano?”

“Guano of some sort.”

“Huh.” He handed the photo back and leaned on the desk, staring at the automatic. “Prints?”

“Only Freddy’s.”

“Gun like that shouldn’t be hard to track down,” Posey said. He straightened up, not taking his eyes from the Smith and Wesson. “You guys got a minute?”

“Of course.”

“I’ll be right back. Let me go out to the truck and get something.” In no more than two minutes, he returned and handed Torrez a small plastic evidence bag. “Coincidences make me really uncomfortable,” he said, and waited while Torrez read the tag and then handed the bag to Estelle.

The single bullet was discolored and hugely mushroomed, its brass jacket peeled back around the lead core so that the resulting projectile was nearly twice its original size.

“From?” Torrez asked.

“I picked it out of the cat skull. I talked to Underwood over at the high school this afternoon, when I finished up with the little ankle biters.” He put a finger to his own skull. “There was that hole right behind the right orbit? This was wedged into the bone low on the other side.”

“Bill Gastner was talking about that,” Estelle said. “The bullet hole, I mean.”

“He mentioned that. I was on the phone with him for about an hour this evening. He wanted to know what sort of records we had concerning jaguar reports.” Posey grinned. “That part was easy. We don’t have squat. Nobody’s seen one in these parts, or any parts north of the border, for that matter. Not in years and years.” He looked at Estelle. “He’s going through some old Spanish records from your uncle?”

“Great uncle. He might have seen one, and if he did, he’d mention it in his journals.”

“Well, neat-o. The US Fish and Wildlife Service is interested in spades, I can tell you that,” Posey said. “We’ll be cooperating with them. They’ll give the school a permit to keep the skull in the school’s permanent collection, but they want to know more about this. But…”

He dropped the evidence bag containing the single bullet down beside the automatic. “This is way, way bizarre. I’m willing to bet that this is either a forty, a ten mil, or a forty-one mag.”

Torrez reached across and retrieved the bag again. “Too short to be a forty-one mag,” he said. “You were talkin’ about coincidence?” He held up the bag of ammo recovered from the automatic.

“Freddy finds a skull,” Estelle offered, “and it looks like Freddy maybe found a gun, too. There’s a hole in the skull with the slug still rattling around inside.” She reached out and touched the evidence bag. “And it could be the same caliber as the gun Freddy had in his possession.”

“Could be,” Posey said. “Wild.” He pulled out a pen and used it to point carefully to the undistorted rear portion of the fired bullet. “Not going to take much to come up with a comparison.”

“Mears can do a preliminary comparison for us first thing in the morning,” the sheriff said. “No point in waiting on the state.” He frowned. “Ancient history, though. You got a cat that’s been dead for what, five years? Ten? Fifteen? There’s nothing left but some bones and bits of hide.” He shrugged. “It’s no big deal now.” He looked across at Posey. “It’d be like finding the remains of a bald eagle somehow. They get themselves killed all the time-sometimes by ranchers, or whatever.”

“And if the Fish and Wildlife Service can dig up enough evidence to bring charges, it will.”

“Don’t doubt it,” Torrez replied.

“We have three events going on here,” Estelle offered. She leaned back in her chair and rubbed her forehead wearily. “The skull with a bullet recovered from inside it. That’s one. A few days later, the guy who found the skull crashes his ATV into an arroyo and breaks his neck. That’s two. In his ATV, we find a loaded handgun that all bets say wasn’t his. We’ll find out more about that tomorrow when we can think straight. But that’s three. Now, if that handgun,” and she reached across and tapped the relic through the bag, “happens to be the one that fired the bullet that killed the cat…”

“Fish and Wildlife is going to want to know,” Posey said. “A jaguar skull is kind of a big deal, you know. If it’s legit, then it’s an important find. The feds are going to send one of their field biologists down to take a look probably by the first of the week. They’re real interested in dating it, if they can.” He shook his head in frustration. “They sure would have liked to talk with Freddy.”

“Wouldn’t we all,” Estelle said.