Out of Season

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Neil Costace was leaning against the counter in the dispatch room, idly reading the daily call log, when Estelle and I entered the Public Safety Building. He turned and saw us, and his lips came close to a smile. But the rest of his face was sober, even grim.

As I approached, the FBI agent straightened up and extended his hand. His grip was firm. “Bill,” he said, and nodded at Estelle. “Walter Hocker, one of our special agents who works out of Oklahoma City, is up here with me.”

I looked around. “Fine. Where is he?”

“He’s using the telephone in the sheriff’s office.”

I nodded and said to Gayle Sedillos, “When he’s finished, tell him to join us.” I indicated the door to my own office, and as Estelle and Costace filed past me, I turned back to Gayle. “And I need to see Linda Real, Eddie Mitchell, and Doug Posey.” I smiled at her. “In any order.”

“Linda’s working downstairs, sir,” Gayle said, and made hand motions to indicate a camera.

“As soon as she can break free,” I said, and walked into my office and closed the door. I’d worked with Neil Costace several times before on cases that interested the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He had a law degree, but never let it get in the way.

“Bring me up to speed on this fine Sunday morning,” he said, and sat down on one of the straight chairs. “I understand from Buscema that the pilot of the aircraft was killed by ground fire.” He made it sound like an incident in a war zone.

“That’s correct. It appears that one bullet struck him low in the back, traveled upward and unzipped his aorta. It also appears that the bullet was fragmenting when it struck him, so it’s going to be interesting to see just where it struck the airframe of the Bonanza. That should tell us something.”

“No ground witnesses?”

“Maybe one,” I said. “We have a woman…come here and let me show you.” I stepped to the wall map of Posadas County. “She and her husband live right here. The Finnegans. She’s the woman who made the initial call reporting an aircraft in trouble. She told us that she saw it flying in big circles in this area here, and then she claims that she heard sounds that were like an engine backfiring.”

“Backfiring?”

“Right. And that’s what the sounds, if she heard them at all, might have been. So far, there’s no obvious evidence of mechanical failure in the aircraft’s engine, but we won’t know definitely for some time.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Costace said with impatience. “They’ll have to tear it down. Weeks and weeks. But you’re saying the sounds that the witness said were of backfiring could have been the gunshots responsible.”

“Yes.”

“Weather?”

“Windy, gusting out of the west-southwest at twenty knots or more.”

“So regardless of the source of the ‘backfires,’” Costace said, “that noise had to have been fairly close to the witness in order for her to hear it, even downwind.”

“I would guess so.”

“And no one else was seen on the ground?”

“No. We’ve had people scouring the mesa, the forest roads, everywhere. But remember that we didn’t locate the crash until nearly dark, and we didn’t arrive at the scene until well after dark.” I stopped and took a breath. “And we didn’t know about the bullet fragment until yesterday around mid-morning. So the odds of the shooter still being in the area are slim to none.”

Costace crossed his arms over his chest. “And the wounds that killed the pilot were such that you don’t think he could have flown for any great distance after being struck?”

I shook my head. “If what Mrs. Finnegan tells us is correct, the plane was flying normally, then she heard the noises, followed immediately by erratic flight patterns. Then it disappeared from view behind a mesa, so she didn’t actually see the crash.”

“How reliable is she, do you think? You just sounded like her version of events might not be the most accurate.”

“If she’s not actually mentally ill, Charlotte Finnegan is a hairsbreadth from it. I’m not sure how much of what she actually sees is real or what she imagines.”

“Husband? Other members of the family?”

“Only her husband, and he wasn’t home at the time.”

“Huh.” Costace rubbed a hand through his close-cropped hair. “And Buscema says that…” He let his voice trail off as the door opened. A short, stumpy man in jeans, knit golf shirt, and a light blue jacket stepped into the room. He didn’t bother to knock, and he pushed the door shut behind him. He carried a slender black-leather folder.

“Bill, this is Special Agent Walter Hocker. Walt, Undersheriff Bill Gastner. And this is Detective Estelle Reyes-Guzman.” Hands were pumped, and Hocker regarded Estelle with interest.

“Isn’t your husband one of the docs over at the hospital?” His voice was quiet and husky, right on the edge of being hard to hear.

“My husband is a physician, yes,” Estelle said.

“He’s doing the autopsies?”

“Yes. He’s working the autopsies with Dr. Alan Perrone, one of the assistant state medical examiners.”

“Ah,” Hocker said. He stood with his hands on his hips, feet planted. He transferred his attention to the top of my desk, but it was clear that he was preoccupied with his own thoughts rather than actually interested in my housekeeping.

While he gathered his thoughts, I walked around behind the desk and sat down. “So,” I said, and folded my hands on the blotter. Hocker jerked out of his trance, squared his shoulders, and sat down on the edge of the desk, dropping his leather folder beside him.

“Buckmaster…no, what’s his name?”

“Vincent Buscema,” Costace prompted.

“Buscema.” Hocker looked up at the ceiling and closed his eyes for a couple of seconds, as if he were playing private memory tricks. “Buscema. Right.” He nodded and looked down at me. “He says that you have film from the sheriff’s camera, as well as a fragment of the projectile. Is that right?”

“Correct.”

“All right. We need to get those to the lab,” Hocker said. “Just as quickly as we can.”

“The film is being processed into prints right now,” I said. “And two of the deputies are working on the bullet fragments.”

“What, you didn’t send the film off somewhere, did you?”

I didn’t bother to dignify the question with an answer, and Estelle must have seen the flush on my cheeks. “One of our staff is processing the film downstairs,” she said.

“And the fragment analysis…they’re doing the work here as well?”

“Yes,” I said. Somehow, Hocker had made the word heresound as if it referred to the end of the earth, and that irritated the hell out of me-even more than the implication that we’d entrust evidence to MinutePhoto down at the mall, if we had a mall.

“I’ll be glad to share with you what we have so far.” Hocker frowned and I added, “What, we’re going to have one of those ridiculous turf wars now? Where we all waste time arguing about whose case it is?”

Hocker twisted his head and looked sharply at me. I returned his gaze without further comment. After ten seconds or so, I saw the crow’s-feet at the corner of his eyes deepen just a bit.

“No, we’re not going to do that, Sheriff. The Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board asked for our assistance. I wish that they’d made that request through your office initially, and I apologize that they didn’t. You have to admit that it’s a case that will draw considerable attention-a Canadian plane, a Canadian citizen at the controls, shot out of the sky not a stone’s throw from the U.S.-Mexican border, killing both the pilot and a passenger, who just happens to be the county sheriff.” He paused. “That’s the story as it was passed on to me. Am I about right?”

“You’re about right. Except that the incident has nothing to do with either the Canadian citizenship of the pilot, the Canadian registry of the aircraft, or with the proximity of the incident to the Mexican border.”

Hocker raised an eyebrow. “You’re sure?”

“No.”

He relaxed and this time, the smile lit up his face. “Well, we can all hope that it doesn’t.” He stood up. “What about the bullet fragment?”

“We have one piece, about the size of-” I glanced around for something to make a comparison. I pointed at the little rectangular amber light on the front of my computer-“a little bigger than that light. There may be others.”

“That’s going to be a tough one,” Hocker said.

I nodded. “I’ve assigned two deputies to work that up. When they exhaust their resources, and I imagine that will be fairly quickly, then we’ll send the fragment to whatever lab is most appropriate. We may develop specific questions to ask that will help in the analysis.”

“Do you know what kind of work the deputies are planning to do on the piece?”

“I would imagine that they’ll take basic measurements, weigh it, that sort of thing. If the fragment includes marks from the rifling in the barrel, that may be useful. With a fragment that small, it’s going to be hard to establish the caliber with any certainty. Establishing the make or model of weapon is going to be even more difficult. And photos will be taken, of course. If by some stroke of luck we should come up with a suspect’s firearm, we might be able to make a comparison-if there are enough marks to go on.” I smiled. “The deputies won’t ruin the evidence, Agent Hocker.”

Hocker shook his head quickly. “I didn’t mean to imply that,” he said. “I just want to make sure that the initial avenues of investigation are opened quickly.”

“That’s what we do around here,” I said and leaned back. “We open avenues.” I glanced at Estelle, who had remained silent and stood near the door. She regarded Hocker, her face expressionless. I couldn’t tell what was going on behind those black eyes, and maybe that was just as well.

“And the photos?” Hocker asked.

“As the detective said, one of our personnel is in the darkroom right now. The film has been developed and she’s working on a series of enlargements.”

Hocker nodded. “Outstanding.” He squared his shoulders and tucked in his shirt. “Did you get a preliminary look?”

“Yes. Detective Reyes-Guzman has several of the initial blowups, if you’d like to see them.”

Hocker did, and after Estelle spread the photos out on my desk, he spent several minutes looking at each in turn, with Costace at his elbow.

“This windmill apparently interested the sheriff,” I said, tapping the photo of the block-house site. “There are two ranchers whose land covers the crash site, the Boyds and the Finnegans. This is on the Finnegans’ property, about a mile from the site.”

“Bizarre,” Hocker mused. He lined up the edges of two prints. “And this little building here is just off to the side, a few yards from the windmill?”

“Right.”

“Prairie, fence, more prairie. A few head of cattle,” Neil Costace said.

“Actually, they’re antelope,” Estelle said. She managed to make it sound like simply an interesting fact rather than a correction.

Hocker didn’t look up. “And what would the sheriff care about antelope?” he asked. “They’re all over the southwest.”

“We don’t know,” I said.

He stood up and shook his head. “Huh.” He shrugged and added, “Well, all this is interesting, but it doesn’t tell us much. We agree on that?” He slid the photos back into the packet and handed them to Estelle, then picked up his leather folder. “The fact that one of the crash victims was the county sheriff is what interests me,” he said. “If the shot wasn’t just a random one, if it was intentional, then it’s a case of an altogether greater dimension.”

I nodded and said nothing. We had been down that road before, without any answers popping out of the sand.

“I’ve made some inquiries through the regular federal channels,” he said. “In fact, I just got off the phone. We have only four names so far that are connected with this thing, and it made sense to me to run each one through the federal centers and see what we got.”

“Holman, Camp, Boyd, and Finnegan,” I said. “I would guess it’s going to be slim pickings.”

Hocker shrugged. “The day is yet young,” he said and grinned. “But first I’d like to take a look at the aircraft and see what that tells us.”

I couldn’t imagine seeing much more than a neat hole through a piece of crumpled aluminum, but sifting through the remains of the Bonanza would give us all something to do. Maybe the others didn’t, but I needed that. I was growing impatient, waiting for the slow wheels of forensic science to tell me something I couldn’t already guess with equipment no more fancy than a good pair of bifocals.