Final Payment

Chapter Eight

“One of ours?” Estelle asked incredulously, and Pasquale nodded.

“The sheriff thinks so.”

The evening away from work hadn’t lasted long. Both she and Sergeant Mears had driven with their families to the recital, leaving patrol vehicles at home. For the altogether too fast ride back to her house, Estelle’s mind churned. She had a dozen questions, but they all could wait. Pasquale dropped her at the curb, and she raced into the house, changed clothes, and was heading toward the front door when her mother hobbled out of her bedroom.

“And so?” Teresa Reyes said.

Estelle hugged the tiny, birdlike frame gently. “I have to go, Mamá.”

“Always, you have to go. Am I going to hear how the concert went?”

“Beautifully, Mamá. I wish you could have gone.”

“There will be others,” the old woman said. She had never offered an explanation why she had not wanted to attend the concert, although the hard metal chairs in a cool gymnasium would be torture enough. “You be careful.”

“Everyone will be home in a few minutes,” Estelle said.

“Then maybe I’ll stay up.” She reached up with parchment fingers and touched Estelle’s cheek. “You be careful,” she said again.

A few minutes later, as Estelle neared the airport gate, she saw Bob Torrez’s county Expedition parked in front of the last hangar in the row of five buildings, nosed in with an older model BMW sedan and airport manager Jim Bergin’s Dodge pickup. Pasquale evidently hadn’t returned to the airport.

The main hangar door was closed, but the regular “people door” off to one side stood ajar. As Estelle pulled her car to a stop, Jim Bergin stuck his head out of the hangar door and lifted a hand in greeting. He waited in the doorway as Estelle approached.

“Thirty-two years in the business, and this is a first for me,” Bergin said, a surprising admission for someone who cherished his “seen it all, done it all” image. He stepped to one side to let her pass, and behind him Estelle could see what appeared to be a perfectly unremarkable airplane sitting inside an unremarkable steel hangar. She hesitated in the doorway, letting her eyes adjust to the dim light.

“Somebody’s been havin’ some fun at Jerry Turner’s expense,” Bergin said.

Estelle glanced at him, wondering how much the sheriff had told the airport manager.

The uncertain light inside the hangar came from two fluorescent shop lights suspended from the corrugated steel ceiling high overhead. Four old bulbs, one of them flickering and humming, turned the large hangar into a shadowy cavern. Estelle saw Torrez standing in front of the blue and white Cessna’s left wing. He held up a hand in greeting and then walked over toward her, looking over his shoulder at the airplane as if it might try to slip away while his back was turned. In the shadows behind the plane she saw another figure moving, but couldn’t make out who it was.

“Pretty bizarre,” he said. “Turner thinks someone’s been using his airplane without his permission.”

“I know someone’s been using it,” Jerry Turner called from the other side of the plane. He held a large, boxy flashlight, and was examining the rear of the fuselage around the horizontal stabilizer, glaring at this and that. He didn’t actually touch the aircraft, and Estelle got the impression that the businessman might be angry with the airplane, rather than the alleged trespasser. The comment and response made it clear that Jerry Turner knew nothing of the multiple homicide out at the gas company’s airstrip.

“Using it,” Estelle said. “You mean as in flying somewhere and then bringing it back?” She frowned, knowing that her question sounded dumb, since there the Cessna sat. She glanced around the hangar, seeing nothing but sheet metal panels on steel girders, with a steel ceiling forming a black night sky overhead. The hangar was plenty large for the one airplane and, in a back corner, what might be either an old car or a boat had been covered with a tarp. A stack of used tires was stored along a side wall beside a well-worn set of cabinets that might once have graced someone’s kitchen. The concrete floor of the hangar was reasonably free of debris.

Turner walked around the back of the plane, shaking his head. A large man with a vast belly and unusually narrow shoulders, he looked like a giant pear dressed in a business suit. He stopped, hands on his hips, and his wide, doughy face wrinkled in vexation. “I don’t believe this. I really don’t.” He nodded at the hangar doors. “You want those open so you can see something?” The twin sodium vapor lights outside might have helped some, but Estelle shook her head.

“Wait on those for a minute,” she suggested. “Since I don’t understand yet what I’m supposed to see.” She saw the look of impatience flash across the man’s face. “Let’s step outside and you can tell me what happened here, Mr. Turner.” Until she had heard the full story, she was loath to have an audience tromp around the inside of the hangar, planting size 12’s over any evidence that might remain. Enough of that had happened already.

The big man turned his back on the plane and followed the sheriff and Estelle outside.

“Look,” Turner said, holding out both hands in exasperation, “Bobby here called me and said that he wanted to check out my plane. I don’t know why, and he sure as hell didn’t say why. So I come out and open up, and you’re probably going to think I’m nuts, but sure as I’m standing here, someone has used that airplane.” The outburst subsided for a moment. “And yes…by that I mean they used it. There’s damn near eleven hours on the Hobbs that aren’t mine-I can sure as hell tell you that. Now I need to know what the hell is going on.”

“How did you happen to notice all this?” Estelle asked.

“All you got to do is look,” Turner snapped. “I don’t go drivin’ her around in the dirt.”

“In the dirt?”

“Jesus H. Christ,” Turner barked. “Yes, the goddamned dirt. You want to see?”

“In a minute.”

Bob Torrez had said nothing, but stood bemused, hands in his back pockets, regarding the interesting surface of the tarmac. “Excuse me, will you? Give us just a minute.” She left Turner fuming and with a hand on Torrez’s elbow led him a few yards away, toward the corner of the hangar. A light breeze from the west whispered around the building.

“You think this is it?” she asked, keeping her voice low.

“Could be,” Torrez said. “Measurements fit. Our tire cast is for shit, but this one’s got rubber that’s consistent. That’s the best we’re going to get. Wheel base is right on the money. Lemme show you something.” At the same time, another set of headlights pulled onto the airport apron, and when it passed under the first sodium vapor light by the fuel pumps, Estelle saw that it was Tom Mears.

“Let’s wait for him,” Torrez said. He motioned for Mears to park beside his own vehicle. “Truck smells like perfume,” he added. “You didn’t bring her majesty along?”

“She’s at the concert,” Estelle replied. “How did you stumble on this?”

Torrez flicked his flashlight beam toward the corner of the hangar. “I’ll show you.” When Mears joined them, he nodded at Turner, who had retreated to his BMW, where he leaned on the front fender, arms crossed over his chest, in conversation with Jim Bergin. “Stick with him,” the sheriff said to Mears. “There’s some things we don’t know yet.”

He motioned with the flashlight. “Jimbo? Come on back with us. Step kinda careful.”

Saltbrush, koshia, ragweed, and a host of other opportunistic weeds surrounded the hangar, a crackly dry barrier just beginning to green up after the rare May precipitation. Estelle followed the sheriff closely, stepping in his footprints. He led them around the building to a point about a third of the way along the back wall, stepping carefully and avoiding open patches of ground that might yield shoe prints. He stopped like a proud guide about to expound on the next attraction on the tour. “Check this out,” he said. Before she pressed forward, Estelle played the light carefully under the base of the creosote bush that grew tight against the hangar’s back wall. Seeing no short-tempered reptiles coiled in the shadows, she pushed the bush to one side and stepped closer.

Torrez waited until she had regained her balance and then pointed at the wall. A football-sized rock had been rolled against the bottom of the corrugated siding in an attempt to hold in place one of the steel panels whose bottom and a portion of the side seam had been pried loose. Elsewhere, rusted pop-rivets secured the siding where it wasn’t spot-welded to the hangar’s steel skeleton. Running diagonally downward from above the loose seam was a subtle disruption in the sheet metal’s surface, the sort of mark left by gently folding the metal back without creasing it.

“Move the rock and you got a six-foot-high section that can fold back out of the way,” Torrez said. “I would bet far enough to slip through.”

“I’ll be goddamned,” Bergin muttered. He reached out a hand, but Estelle caught him gently by the forearm. He jerked back as if stung. “Somebody sure as hell has been busy,” he said.

Without touching either rock or hangar, Estelle examined the sheet metal closely for a moment. The evidence of a fold in the metal extended all the way down to the foundation. And once folded, the steel panel would never close back against the stud properly. At midpoint, it gaped more than an inch. When folded back, the panel formed a clever entry, but one for a pint-sized intruder. Someone as burly as Jerry Turner would have created a far larger doorway than this, where the rough edges of the metal would grab and tear at fabric or skin.

She pivoted and surveyed the jumble of scrub behind the hangar, looking out toward the roadway. Twenty yards of open space separated the row of hangars from the dilapidated chain-link boundary fence. Unless the intruder stood up and waved his arms, he would blend with the shadows and scrubby vegetation, impossible to see. At night, a simple crouch would make him invisible.

During their patrols, sheriff’s deputies routinely swung into the airport. Sometimes it was for a quick cup of coffee with Jim Bergin, sometimes just to check for vagrants or unlocked hangars. If the security gate was open-as it always was if airport manager Jim Bergin was working or if one of the aircraft owners was on the premises-the officers would drive onto the tarmac. If the gate was closed, deputies turned around in the parking lot, using the vehicle’s spotlight to inspect each of the buildings and the gate.

Despite the fence, with its three loose strands of barbed wire atop six feet of chain-link, the airport was not a secure area. Each aircraft owner had a key to the main gate, as did the county manager’s office and the sheriff’s department.

The gate was left open as often as not. Estelle had found it so a dozen times herself. In addition, the security fence did not extend the length of the taxiway, but marked only the perimeter of the outer parking lot. If the facility was locked, anyone wanting access had only to trot west a hundred feet and slip through the four-foot-high barbed-wire property fence.

Estelle turned back and looked at Bergin. “This isn’t something that Mr. Turner had told you about before?”

Bergin scoffed. “Hell, no. If this was flappin’ in the wind, he’d likely say something. But who’s going to notice?”

“This isn’t a setup for a one-time thing, though,” Torrez said. “Someone made themselves a door. Pretty clever.”

Estelle examined the undisturbed rivets beside the suspect panel, comparing them with the bright-rimmed holes left when the metal was pried loose. “Planning ahead, it looks like,” she said. “Interesting, interesting.” She stepped back and looked at the rock-strewn gravel that passed for prairie soil. “The only way we’re going to find tracks that amount to anything is to pour some plaster and hope they come back and step in it tonight.”

Bergin chuckled. “Now that’s a thought. I wondered how you guys did that.”

“How’d you happen to notice this?” she asked Torrez, and the sheriff just shrugged.

“Drivin’ in. Spotlight picks it up.”

“I wouldn’t have noticed it in a thousand years,” Bergin said.

“And you say Turner wouldn’t have seen it, either, at least under normal circumstances. How often does he use this airplane?”

Bergin’s left eyebrow drifted up. “Not nearly enough. But that’s true of most hobby flyers.”

“Once a week? Once a month?”

Bergin hesitated. His fingers drifted toward the cigarette pack in his shirt pocket, but he thought better of it. “Maybe once a month or so. And I’ll tell you one thing-that ain’t enough flyin’ to stay current or safe, either one, Estelle. That’s flyin’ on luck.” He shrugged. “Lots of pilots do that. For most of ’em, a plane’s like a boat, or an RV. When the novelty wears off, the thing just sits.”

“Turner’s plane just sits?”

“Most of the time, yep. Like I said, he’s flyin’ on luck. That’s what I call it. As long as nothing goes wrong, as long as he don’t fly into some sort of problem, then it’s okay. That’s a nice airplane Jerry has there, that 206. Older model, but still real strong. A real workhorse.”

“Maybe on both sides of the border,” Estelle added. “What’s he actually use it for?”

Bergin grinned. “Drinkin’ coffee? That’s another one of his hobbies I think. He flies over to Cruces with a friend and has a cup. Or to Socorro. Or Grants. Wherever there’s a coffeepot.” He shrugged. “There’s good Mexican coffee to be had south of the border, but that would surprise me, Jerry doin’ something like that.”

“I was under the impression that coffee was always part of your operation right here at home, Jim.”

“Well, it is. But it always tastes better after a good flight, Estelle. Old Jerry just likes to cruise, is all. He don’t need a 206 to do that…but that’s the plane he likes, and he can afford it.” He shrugged. “He should fly it a little more often, is all.”

“So most of the time the airplane just sits inside the hangar gathering dust?”

“Sits, anyway. He keeps ’er clean and waxed up, fair enough. But he don’t fly ’er enough. That’s no way to treat a lady.” Bergin grinned.

“Somebody’s using her now,” Estelle said, turning back to the bent wall section. “I want to take a few pictures of this, and then can I ask your help to fold this back? I want to see how it works.”

“You bet.”

“I called Mark,” Torrez said. “He’s bringin’ Sebastian over.” Sebastian, a State Police dog who had earned his stripes dozens of times, lived in semiretirement with the State Police lieutenant.

“Good move,” Estelle said. “We need his nose.” More vehicles turned into the airport driveway. Linda Real’s small red Honda sedan was followed by a county pickup truck, County Manager Leona Spears’ preferred wheels.

“Something else,” Torrez added. “Tell her about the fuel, Jim.”

“Well,” Bergin said. “She’s just about full, Estelle. Maybe a gallon or two down. Both wing tanks. You don’t fly eleven hours and end up with full tanks.”

She studied Bergin for a moment, digesting the possibilities. “So the pilot refueled somewhere.”

“Yep.”

“You sell gas right here.”

“Not to this airplane. Not recently. You can check my fuel logs if you want.”

“Then he stopped in someplace like Deming? Lordsburg?”

“Not and arrive back here with full tanks. That bird burns somewhere between eight and twelve gallons an hour, Estelle. She’s only down maybe one or two in each wing.”

“Could he have fueled it himself? Right here in the hangar? Estelle asked.

Bergin looked skeptical. “Could, I suppose. I ain’t sold avgas to someone with five-gallon cans.” He held up a hand, halted by another thought that burst into his mind. “Something else we should check,” he said, but before he could explain, two State Police cruisers braked hard and turned into the airport.

“Here’s Sebastian,” Torrez said. “Let’s do it.”