Privileged to Kill

26

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I breathed. “Let me see that.” I went down on one knee, at considerable price, and got close. The truck had originally been metallic blue-a bright, deep tone a squirt or two lighter than royal blue. The primer under the blue was gray. Nothing else on the truck was black, flat or otherwise, except that one smear.

The pickup had been hit at one time or another by something carrying a coat of black paint. One sharp dig was visible in the metal. The rest of the impact had been obliterated by the later damage done by the rock outcropping.

“What hit him?” I said.

Estelle smiled, a rare thing in itself. She put one hand on my right elbow and ushered me along toward the front of the wreckage. “Right here, you can see the mounting bracket, sir. Or what’s left of it. It’s easier to see on the other side where there was less damage.”

“A grille guard, you mean?” And that’s exactly what she meant. The mounting brackets were bolted to the frame. The right side bracket was twisted and ruined like the rest of the hardware that had lost the fight. The mount on the driver’s side was still in one piece, flat black paint and all.

“It’s been recently removed,” Estelle said. “On this side you can see the wrench marks. They scuff the black paint, and the marks haven’t been there long enough to collect road dirt or rust.”

“We don’t pay you enough,” I mused. And then, because it was easier, I let myself slump back until I sat down on the hard, cold concrete. “What you’re leading me to think is that this is the truck that smacked Wes Crocker.”

“I’ve considered that,” Estelle said. She knelt down on one knee and rested her right hand on the bottom rim of the undamaged left headlight. Her fingernails rapped a quiet dance on the glass of the light. “Everything fits, even this.” She reached out and for a moment her body blocked my view of what she was doing. When she turned around, she held out a small object to me.

I reached out and took it. The little black plastic trumpet was as undamaged as the headlamp. “A deer whistler,” I said. “And let me guess. The other side is missing one.”

“The other side is missing, period,” Estelle said. “There’s no way to even tell anymore what piece of metal held the little plastic mounting bracket. We didn’t get that lucky.”

I dug out my notebook and rearranged myself on the floor so I could attend to flipping the pages without toppling over. “Wes Crocker was hit sometime around eight P.M. yesterday,” I said. “It’s a nice theory, but it doesn’t fit the timing of the events. This pickup truck hit the rock at thirty-two minutes after midnight.”

Estelle nodded and waited.

“And so,” I said, “if they were going to a night football game that started at seven all the way over in Sierra Linda, why would they still be in town at eight?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“If the two boys had decided to go to the game, they would have been out of Posadas long before that in order to be in Sierra Linda in time for the kickoff.”

“That’s if they decided to go to the game, sir. Only one of them was in school yesterday.”

“Which one was that?” I asked.

“Dennis Wilton, sir. He was one of the front office aides.”

I frowned and looked back through my notes. “I didn’t write that down.”

“There was no particular reason you should have, sir,” Estelle said. “You did remind Glen Archer that you didn’t want students handling material that we asked for. The Wilton boy was the student aide who photocopied the parking permit list for us.”

“Son of a bitch,” I said, more in irritation at my memory than anything else. “And Ryan House was absent from school yesterday?”

“Yes, sir. He was.”

I leaned back and put both hands on the cold concrete floor behind me. “Let’s assume again that this is the vehicle in question…its passenger misses the day in school, its owner doesn’t. So we assume that sometime in the afternoon, the two boys get together, for whatever reason.”

“That’s easily done, sir. Dennis Wilton only attended classes until noon. He normally works from one to six every school day at Guilfoil Auto Parts.”

“All right, so he even has time to go to work yesterday.”

“He didn’t, though.”

“You checked?” I asked, knowing it was a waste of breath. Estelle nodded. “So the pair link up sometime in the afternoon, perhaps. We don’t have a clue what they did between the time Dennis Wilton left school and the time of the encounter with Wes Crocker. If that happened at all, we can then suppose that they hightailed it out of town. If they wanted a place to hide, then an out-of-town football game is as good as anyplace.”

“The complication is the grille guard, sir.”

I nodded. “If it was on the truck at eight P.M., when Crocker was hit, then it was taken off sometime before midnight thirty-two, when they crashed the truck into the rock.”

And that was as far as my fatigued brain would go. I put the notebook back in my breast pocket and turned over on my knees so I could push myself upright. That accomplished, I brushed the dirt and sand off my trousers and hands.

“I don’t like any of this,” I said. “And I’ll tell you why. No matter which way we go, there’s a fork in the road.”

“For example…”

I shrugged. “If this is the truck that hit Wes Crocker, and if one of the boys was driving it at the time-and by the way, we don’t know that for sure yet-then we’ve got a fork in the road.” I pointed off to the right. “One choice says that they meant to hit him.”

Estelle leaned her head the other way and finished the thought. “And the other route says it was an accident.”

“That’s right. If it was intentional, then we’ve got ourselves a wonderful mess, with all kinds of nasty questions. And lots of forks in the road, by the way. And if it was an accident…” I shrugged. “Either way, they took off. Maybe it took as much as half an hour in someone’s garage or backyard to yank that bent grille guard off and clean up the truck.” I waved a hand at the right side. “They missed a little slash of black just above the scrape where the guard bent back and dinged the fender. And then, because it’s a tiny town and they know the cops will be out looking for them, they slip out to the east, figuring to get themselves lost in the sporting crowd. If somebody asks, hell, they were at the game all night.”

“We’re not that stupid, sir.”

“God, I hope not. But kids think we are. And right now, I’m so tired, I think I am.”

“We don’t have to make a move right away,” Estelle said. “If this is the truck, it’ll be around for a while. I’ve got some fingerprints to match, and I was able to pull a paint tracing off that black mark on the fender. We can send it to the lab along with paint from Crocker’s bicycle. That will give us an absolute match. And later today”-she held up the deer whistler-“I’m going to ask Bob Torrez to take a microscope to all this pot metal and see if he can find the spot where the right-side whistler might have been. If we can make some kind of match there, that’s it.”

“It’s part of it, anyway,” I said wearily. “If this is the truck, we don’t know why they hit Crocker and ran. And if it’s not the truck, we’re no further ahead than we were.” I glanced at my watch. “I’m going to swing by the hospital and see what time they’re going to release Crocker. I’ll put him in Camille’s old room.”

“The one with all the stuffed toys?”

I grimaced. “Uh-huh. That way, he might not want to get too comfortable and stay too long.”

“It’s really sweet of you to do this,” Estelle said, and I shot a quick glare at her, sure she was kidding. She wasn’t.

“What’s the choice?” I said, and started toward the door of the garage. “You ready for some breakfast?”

She declined, claiming “a couple of things to do.” I didn’t know what, but I didn’t twist her arm. My little notebook told me that I’d been going around in circles since Thursday evening, when I’d eaten too much green chili at the Don Juan de Oñate. I was ready to fall off the carousel.

Estelle locked the door of the steel building and was driving out of the county yard before I’d even untangled my keys. The patrol car started instantly and settled into its usual smooth idle, waiting for me to select a gear.

With my hand on the gear lever, I frowned and looked over my shoulder at the little trail of dust from Estelle’s car.

“What fingerprints?” I said aloud. She had told me that she had some fingerprints to match. I looked ahead toward the garage where the broken truck rested. There had been two occupants. One was headed toward the autopsy slab; the other was riding a wave of sedative at the hospital. We knew who had been driving, and who had gone flying.

I frowned again. There was little comfort in knowing that if Estelle Reyes-Guzman had wanted me to know about fingerprints, she would have told me.