Privileged to Kill

3

I glanced at the clock over the stove and jotted down the time on the telephone pad just as he added, “This here is Wesley Crocker. You might remember that you gave me a lift into town earlier.”

At that hour, there was no point in chitchat. He wasn’t calling to thank me again for dinner.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Crocker?”

“I hope I didn’t wake you.”

I briefly wondered why people who called in the middle of the night bothered to say that. “What can I do for you?”

“Well…” And he stopped talking. I could hear a voice in the background, and then Crocker said, “Yes, sir,” obviously not to me. I waited. The unmistakable crackle of a two-way radio came next, and I knew where Crocker was before he spoke.

“Sir,” he said, “I’m in kind of some trouble here. I didn’t know who else to call.” He murmured something apologetic that I didn’t catch, then added, “I still have your card, thank the Lord.”

“Where are you, Mr. Crocker?”

“I’m…I’m down at the village lockup.” Again I heard a voice in the background and Crocker said to someone else, “Yes, sir. Here.”

“Bill?”

“Yes.” I would have recognized Sheriff Martin Holman’s voice in the middle of a deep sleep. “What’s going on, Marty?”

“I didn’t know he was going to call you right off the bat or I would have beaten him to it,” Holman said. “We’ve got a real mess down here at the village P.D. I already called Estelle Reyes-Guzman and some of the others. But it sure would help if you’d come on over.”

I took a deep breath, knowing it did no good to get testy with Holman’s oblique nature.

“Sheriff,” I said, measuring my words as if I were talking to a four-year-old instead of a reasonably intelligent former used-car salesman, “what happened?”

“Well, the village got a report of a possible person down. Over under the high school bleachers. Looks like it’s a twelve- or thirteen-year-old kid.”

“Dead?”

“Yes. Tom Pasquale’s first guess is that it was assault.”

I managed not to groan. Tom Pasquale had worked his way up from hopeful volunteer to paid part-timer for the village department, adding his overly enthusiastic weight to the village’s two-man squad.

The young officer’s application for employment with the county had taken up residency in my filing cabinet more than a year before. I was sure there was a carbon copy at the state police personnel office as well.

Pasquale spent a good deal of his time trying to impress whoever would pay attention. He would have been better served by going to the police academy in his spare time…but he wasn’t going to attend on our buck.

“And he arrested Wesley Crocker?”

“Well, it seems logical to me,” Holman said. “Officer Pasquale said the man was camping near the bleachers, apparently. Are you coming down?”

“I’ll be right there. Who is the victim, do we know?”

“Not yet. They haven’t moved the body yet. They’re waiting on Estelle. She was going to pick up Francis at the hospital and head over.”

“All right. I’ll see you in a few minutes. Who’s standing by at the scene? Is someone protecting that?” I had visions of huge Pasquale boot prints squashing evidence into unrecognizable pancakes.

“Bob Torrez said he’d take care of it until you or Estelle got there. Chief Martinez is there with him.”

“Good. I’ll be right there.” I hung up, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath. Before the night was over, we’d know who the victim was, if Estelle Reyes-Guzman and the deputies had to knock on every door in town. That would be half of the puzzle.

I left the quiet darkness of my old adobe wondering how long it would take to find out who Wesley Crocker really was.

***

I drove 310 out of Escondido Lane and turned onto South Grande Avenue. Grande split the village in half from north to south. The only thing grand about it was its name.

The streets of Posadas were deserted. Even traffic on the interstate was sparse with winter still too far away for the snowbirds to be heading for Arizona or Mexico and too late in the fall for family vacations…just the consistent, dull flow of trucks.

I turned on the radio and was greeted with silence. Holding the coffee cup and steering wheel in one hand and keying the mike with the other, I said, “Three-oh-eight, three-ten.”

The response from Sergeant Robert Torrez was immediate. “Three-oh-eight.”

“Three-oh-eight, I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“Ten-four.” Torrez sounded half asleep, but he would sound that way in the middle of a train wreck. “You might want to park in front of the school, in the bus loop.”

I acknowledged with two clicks of the transmit button and then slowed down as I continued north through the intersection with MacArthur. The high school was the dark hulk off to the left, on its own island, surrounded on all sides by the families who supported the place.

As I turned onto Piñon, I buzzed down the window, listening to the night sounds of the village. Piñon jogged to Sylvester and then I turned the patrol car onto Olympic, the narrow macadam service road that skirted the football field and track. Someone shot a flashlight beam at me, but I didn’t stop the car. Instead, I continued on, circling the grounds by turning left on Pershing and away from the field.

The semicircular driveway in front of the high school was aglare with three sodium vapor lights, and I idled the patrol car into the driveway, aiming to park behind Torrez’s unit and the chief’s blue Pontiac.

I pulled to a halt beside a SCHOOL BUSES ONLY sign. The night air was cool, but the wind had finally given up. I heard another car before I saw it, heard it accelerating hard, its oversized engine howling. Headlights flashed on Pershing and the tires of the village police car chirped as the vehicle swung into the driveway and pulled up beside me, driven like something out of Hollywood.

Patrolman Tom Pasquale looked across at me and raised an eyebrow in what he no doubt hoped was an imitation of his favorite movie star. He opened his window but didn’t get out.

I half wished that Pasquale had been asleep somewhere, skull propped against the seat’s headrest, mouth open and blissfully ignorant of the world around him.

I stepped out of the county car and hitched up my trousers. “Thomas, who’s at the police station?”

“The sheriff’s still there, sir. And Deputy Mitchell. And Cindy.”

The village department’s girl Friday, Cindy Aragon, worked very hard to keep Pasquale out of trouble. “So tell me what happened.”

“Sir, someone called the P.D. to report a possible downer. I took the call. I happened to be the only one in the office at the time other than Cindy. So I drove right over to check it out.”

“And then?”

“I hopped the fence by the track, over there on Olympic. I crossed directly to the bleachers and saw the body by the foundation of the press box. I determined that the subject was deceased. On the way back to my unit I saw another subject over near the east end of the football field. In that small grove of trees by the pump house.”

“You were able to see him in the dark?”

“The field night lights are bright, sir.”

“And that person turned out to be Mr. Crocker?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you took him into custody.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did he resist in any way?”

“No, sir.” After the briefest of pauses, Pasquale added, “I almost wish he had, sir.”

“No…you don’t.” I started to walk off and then stopped. “On what grounds did you make the arrest, by the way? Did Mr. Crocker admit that he had anything to do with the incident?”

Pasquale’s head jerked forward as if he’d just been startled in the dark. “No, sir, he didn’t say much of anything at all.”

“You read him his rights?”

“Yes, sir. That’s when he said he needed to make a call. That there was someone here in town that would vouch for him.”

“Yeah, well…” I motioned at the walkway between the main building and the gymnasium. “Let’s cut through there.” We left the cars and walked through the inky black passageway between the buildings, Pasquale’s flashlight stabbing into each dark crevice.

A yellow crime scene ribbon stretched across the parking lot, effectively blocking off the rear of the bleachers.

Sergeant Robert Torrez and Chief Martinez appeared out of the shadows, looking like Mutt and Jeff. Torrez, six-four and walking like a hunting cat, led the chubby chief of police.

“Estelle coming?” Martinez asked, sounding altogether too cheerful for the time and the circumstances. I liked Eduardo Martinez as a human being and thought he was ridiculous as a law officer. But Posadas was an incorporated village that budgeted its own law-the chief and two part-time patrolmen.

Most of the village night calls were handled routinely by the sheriff’s department, logical since the P.D. had no dispatcher of its own and not enough manpower to cover twenty-four hours. Martinez was a parade cop…polish the car and turn on the lights for the Fourth of July.

“Yes. Estelle’s on the way. You gentlemen stay here for a minute.” Pasquale wanted to go with me, but I waved him back. I knew perfectly well that he liked to spend time in Sergeant Torrez’s company, but this wasn’t the time for impressions. The chief understood the same thing and put a chubby hand on the kid’s arm to hold him still.

I ducked under the channel-iron braces and worked my way carefully along under the bleachers, keeping my footprints immediately beside the row of concrete pillars. In the center of the structure, a cinder-block foundation arose like a huge chimney, providing support for the press box and announcer’s station above.

The circle of light from my flashlight played around the blocks, and sure enough there was a bundle pressed over in the corner. A casual glance could have mistaken it for a garbage bag left behind by the custodians after the last home football game. Pasquale had good eyes, at least.

I approached to within a dozen feet and stopped, playing the light slowly this way and that, surveying the area. The footing was crushed stone, broken glass, torn Styrofoam, a sock or two-a delightful place. I stepped forward carefully.

The corpse lay like a broken rag doll, flat on its back. A brightly colored coat was bunched around the upper body, concealing the face. I grimaced at the bare knees that looked absurdly small and fragile in the harsh beam of my flashlight.

One arm was twisted under the body, the other was caught up in the loose fabric of the coat, as if the garment had been hastily wrapped around the child.

I turned the light and looked at the only patch of skin I could see besides the two spindly legs-the back of the child’s left hand, fingers dug into the fabric of the coat, dirt caked with blood on the smooth brown skin.

With a grunt, I shifted balance and pulled the coat far enough down that I could see a tangle of long, black hair. Maybe a girl, maybe not. The hand was cool to my touch. I slipped my hand inside the coat and pressed two fingers to the side of the kid’s neck and waited…waited longer than I needed to.