Heartshot

Chapter 17

The light plane touched down smoothly and Jim Bergin fast-taxied toward where I had parked 310. The propeller clicked to a stop and the Arrow rolled quietly the last few yards.

I unlatched the door while we were still rolling, and when the plane stopped I clambered clumsily out, then turned to help Amy Salinger while Bergin held the seat forward. “I’ll get squared away with you later, Jim,” I said, and he shook his head, face sober. He was watching Amy Salinger as she deplaned.

“On the house,” he said quietly. “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.”

I hustled Amy into the car, and we drove away from the airport. “I think I should go up there first,” she said as the car pulled out onto the paved road. “I can’t tell Mom and Dad without knowing for sure. I mean, there’s a chance, isn’t there?” She looked across the room at me. “There’s a chance.”

“Amy,” I said patiently, “The deputy knows your brother. Baker’s worked enough games at school, or seen his picture in the paper often enough.”

Her hands were tightly clenched together on her lap. “I want to go up there first,” she said simply.

We drove in silence for a couple of minutes as we passed through Posadas. I didn’t waste any time, but I avoided the red lights and siren. There wasn’t much need. Only after we had started up the hill did Amy shake her head slowly and say, “I just didn’t believe he’d really do this.” She dug out a wad of tissue and through it whimpered, “I don’t know if I can take this.”

“I wish I could say something that would help,” I said. She shrugged her shoulders simply and looked away, her body occasionally shivering like a little cold kid caught unhappy and out in the rain.

We turned into the access road, and I saw one of the county cars pulled diagonally across the narrow right-of-way. Eddie Mitchel, who had probably been just about ready to go to bed when he received the call, bent down as I lowered my window.

“Sir, you can drive through the gate just up ahead there on the right. We haven’t located the security guard yet, but I took the liberty of cutting the lock off.”

I nodded. “Don’t let anyone down here except department personnel without my say-so, Eddie.” I looked at him hard and added, “Nobody.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you might move your car back up the road-right at the turnoff from the pavement. I want all of this closed off.”

He nodded and made for his car. I picked up the mike as we drove down toward the gate.

“Posadas, three-ten.”

“Go ahead, three-ten.”

“What’s Detective Reyes’s twenty?”

“Uh, three-ten, I’m still trying to locate her.” For the first time that I could remember, Gayle Sedillos sounded a little flustered. With good cause, I thought.

“Find her,” I snapped, and hung up the mike.

Todd Baker had moved his unit to the gate, and he met us there. “Stay in the car,” I said to Amy. My guess that maybe a brusque approach might be helpful paid off. She nodded quickly, responding to the desperate need for direction.

No one else had arrived, and I told Baker to stay with Amy Salinger until Estelle Reyes arrived. I didn’t want Amy alone, and I certainly didn’t want her alone at the gate, acting as a greeter for all the law-enforcement personnel who were bound to arrive during the next few minutes.

I started across the hot, packed surface of the boneyard at a fast walk, and after the first fifty feet realized it wasn’t just apprehension that was putting a garter around my insides. I tried for a deep, calming breath, and the pressure under my sternum subsided a bit. I swore pointlessly at the high altitude and slowed my pace, trying to calm my pulse. I reached the shed and turned the corner.

I leaned against the warm metal of the building and looked at Scott Salinger. I had investigated probably a dozen suicides during my years in the military and later as a cop. Some of those incidents seemed to be the result of spur-of-the-moment decisions. If the victim had given himself a few minutes, there might well have been some reconsideration. But others-they showed planning and determination. So twisted had their lives become that nothing anyone could say or do would have mattered an iota. That was the impression I had then.

When a wave of dizziness subsided, I stepped forward and knelt down. The body was in a sitting position, knees drawn up and feet flat on the hard-packed asphalt on which the portable sheds rested. Salinger’s forearms rested just above his knees, as if he had been bracing the heavy revolver with which he had shot himself. The revolver was still in his lap, and his right thumb was in the trigger guard.

I heard footsteps crunching behind me and turned to see Deputy Paul Encinos and the county coroner, Emerson Clark. I pushed myself to my feet. “Hello, Doc,” I said.

He nodded. “That’s his sister out in your car, isn’t it?”

“Yes. She wants to identify the body. I don’t want her to see him like this. When they move him to the ambulance, maybe.”

“Tough stuff,” Clark said. He knelt down and peered at the corpse. While he was examining the body, I turned to Encinos and asked, “Is Reyes on the way up?”

“Last I heard, dispatch was still trying to locate her, sir.”

“Shit.”

“Does this weapon belong to the boy?” Clark asked. He looked at the gun without touching it.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Well,” Clark muttered, “as long as the bullet hole isn’t from back to front, it doesn’t make much difference. But that’s your department, not mine, Sheriff.” He pushed himself to his feet. “Is the young lady handling this?”

“Reyes? Yes, if we can find her.”

“If she’s not here soon, then it’s yours, I guess. Unless you’re going to have Miss Salinger sit out in the car all afternoon,” Clark said. He grinned at me. “Us old buzzards sure get used to delegating, don’t we?” He looked back down at Salinger’s corpse.

“He didn’t want there to be any doubt, did he? Couldn’t have hit any more dead center if he’d laid it out with a T-square first.” He shook his head slowly. “I wonder what was so special about this place that he chose it?” Clark turned and looked down the hill. “Maybe the view,” he said with some bitterness. “Great view of the county dump way down there.” He looked at me from underneath shaggy eyebrows. “Gastner, you’re not saying much.”

“What’s there to say?”

His eyes narrowed. He was pushing seventy-five years old, and life didn’t hold many surprises for him anymore. “And you also look damn near like a basket case yourself,” he said.

By way of ignoring the comment, I said to Encinos, “Cover him up, Paul. Be careful not to move anything. Detective Reyes will want accurate pictures.”

“Do you have any ideas why he did this?” Dr. Clark asked as he watched Encinos spread out the black plastic blanket.

I shook my head. “The last time I talked to the boy, he seemed to have things pretty well sorted out.”

Clark grunted something. “You might want to ask the family if he ever mentioned suicide before.”

“The answer to that is yes. His sister told me that.”

“Well, then,” Clark said. “Unless the medical examiner comes up with something pretty bizarre during the autopsy, it seems pretty cut and dried.” He held up a hand as Encinos was about to finish covering the corpse. He bent down. “I’m no detective, but find me an answer for this before I have to make a ruling.”

He pointed at the heavy caking of blood on Salinger’s T-shirt. “Explosive exsanguination consistent with a close-range Magnum wound produces a lot of blood,” Clark said. “And that’s what we’ve got here.” With his index finger, he carefully pulled the elastic collar of the T-shirt away from Salinger’s neck. “Still, we ought to expect that gravity still rules, wouldn’t you think?”

“What are you getting at, Doc?”

“If he sat here, as it appears, and pressed the muzzle of a heavy Magnum to his chest, as it appears, and pulled the trigger, then we would expect the blood flow to be outward and then downward from the wound, would we not?” Clark looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “Now, cotton shirts soak up a lot of blood. You could call it a capillary action of sorts. Like a wick. But this”-and he pointed at the area near Salinger’s right clavicle-looks like a blood track to me.” He shifted position. “There is no reason for blood to flow from the bullet hole in the center of his chest to nearly the top of his collarbone. Not only no reason. It would be impossible, if the body didn’t move after the gunshot.”

He looked at me blandly. “Do you see what I mean?”

“Yes.”

“What you see here, unless I’m dreaming, is consistent with the body first lying on the ground, head perhaps slightly lower than the rest of the body.” He stood up again. “Fluids flow downhill, Bill.”

My forehead was wet with sweat, and one eye burned from the salt. “You’re saying he was shot somewhere else and then propped up here?”

Dr. Clark held up his hands in protest. “No, I’m not saying that. I’m saying that these particular bloodstains puzzle me. There may be a perfectly simple answer. I want that simple answer.” He thrust his hands in his pockets and stared hard at the corpse. “Unattended deaths are just that, Bill, as you well know. Unattended by anyone but the victim. We may never know. But if there is an interesting answer to be had, it would be a shame to ignore it.”

He started to walk off, and then stopped. “I didn’t want to move anything until you have all your photographs. I’m assuming from the lack of blood on the ground behind the body that there is no exit hole in the back. If there is, there also better be a hole in the back of this building. Keep me posted.”

“I’ll walk back with you, Doc,” I said. “Paul, I’ll be right back.”

We almost reached the cars when Dr. Clark extended his hand. I shook and he said, “Sometimes these jobs are shit, aren’t they, Bill.”

“Yup.”

“He was a good kid. I worked on his knee once, about four years ago. Seemed to have the world by the tail then. But I guess things can go downhill pretty fast when you’re that age.”

“Any age, Doc,” I said. He got in his car and left, and I walked over to the patrol car. Amy Salinger got out of the car, head bowed, and I offered her a hand. She was determined to see her brother, and we made our way back across the boneyard toward the shed.

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” I said.

“Yes, I do. Until I do, I’ll never believe it’s him.”

When we turned the corner of the building and she saw the black cloth and Deputy Encinos, she stumbled and almost lost her balance. I guided her with one hand on an elbow. I curled a corner of the drop cloth back, just enough to reveal Scott Salinger’s bowed head. Amy whimpered and stepped back. Paul Encinos protectively hugged her shoulders. After a minute, she nodded and turned away.

“Amy, I’m going to have Deputy Encinos take you down the hill. He’ll stop and pick up Father Carey as well. Is that all right?” She nodded soundlessly. “I can’t leave here, or I’d do it myself. I really need to be here when the detective arrives.”

“That’s…that’s all right,” she mumbled.

Paul and I escorted her back to the gate. I didn’t say anything else to her. There was nothing I could say. I wasn’t worried about Salinger’s family. They would have to tackle their own grief in their own way. They’d have help. Right then I was more concerned with why blood would run uphill.