Privileged to Kill

31

The sun’s schedule had very little to do with my own. I had learned that simple lesson over the years, and that’s probably what had contributed more than anything else to my colossal insomnia. After Estelle left, I glanced at my watch, thinking that a two-hour nap might be the proper medicine. But other things nagged, and seven minutes after ten on a late-October Saturday morning was as good a time as any to find normal folks at home.

When I walked back through the living room, Wesley Crocker didn’t bother to open an eye, and his lower jaw was going slack as he sank into the comfort and quiet of the place. It was enough to make me yawn, but I plodded on into the kitchen and thumbed through the phone directory.

Stub Moore answered his phone on the tenth ring, and he didn’t sound alert. I glanced outside through my newly trimmed, painted, and cleaned kitchen window and saw no sun filtering down through the bare limbs. With the weather chilling and the sky gray, people were going to start hibernating.

“Stub, this is Bill Gastner.”

“Yo,” he said, and let it go at that. He knew damn well it wasn’t a social call. I didn’t need to keep him long. Like so many expert school-bus drivers, he knew the youngsters and he knew their habits. He gave me what I needed in less than two minutes. Estelle had said that Moore had given her a list of students as well, and when the bus driver hung up the phone, he was probably shaking his head, wondering if the investigating cops ever talked to each other.

With his short list of names in hand, I went into my bedroom and changed clothes, donning the most comfortable and least threatening civilian clothes I could find-a pair of heather-green corduroy slacks and a wool checkered shirt that my daughter had sent me for my birthday. And like the honest soul she was, she hadn’t bothered to try to stroke my feelings by sending something several sizes too small. It was a checkered tent, and it fit my mounds like an absurd, huge glove.

With a light tan jacket to hide the threat of gun and cuffs, I left the house to a sleeping Wesley Crocker.

A few minutes after ten-thirty, I pulled into a driveway on Hidalgo Loop, behind the middle school off MacArthur. I parked 310 behind a late-model foreign sedan and beside a Volkswagen bus.

I had known Maryanne Scutt for twenty years. She had two daughters, and hadn’t seen her husband since the older daughter turned three. She’d probably sold more real estate in Posadas County over the years than any other two Realtors put together. She answered the doorbell, and when she saw me her eyebrows came together quickly, and then her face smoothed as she composed herself.

“Sheriff, good morning,” she said. She didn’t open the screen door.

I smiled faintly and nodded. “Morning, Mrs. Scutt. We’re still in the process of investigating that fatality from last night.” I waved a hand aimlessly off toward the east. “The one out on 78.”

“Wasn’t that awful,” she said, and meant it.

“Yes, it was. We’re doing some routine follow-ups. The school-bus driver said that your daughter was a passenger on the game bus. Is that correct?”

“Yes, she was.”

“I wonder if I might talk with her for a few minutes.” I saw the worry on the woman’s face. “Apparently she was sitting on the side of the bus where she would have seen the vehicle when it passed. There’re a couple things I’d like to ask her. And I’d like you to be present,” I added.

“Well, sure,” she said, and pushed open the screen door. “She isn’t up yet, but let me get her.” She indicated the living room, and I walked over to a padded straight chair that sat beside the blocked-off fireplace whose wood and brickwork were painted gloss white.

The place smelled like a mix of a hundred different perfumes and powders. I could feel my sinuses starting to swell shut. The chair looked as if it was sturdy enough, and I eased myself down onto it to wait.

In a few minutes Mrs. Scutt reappeared with young Gail, a pretty towhead high school sophomore, plainly embarrassed at having a stranger see her dressed in a bathrobe.

They both perched on the sofa. “Gail,” I said, “I’m Undersheriff William Gastner.” I smiled. “I think the last time I saw you was when you were about this long.” I held my hands a couple of feet apart, but Gail didn’t care when I’d seen her. She shifted nervously and tried a brave smile.

“I know it’s been a rough night for you,” I continued, without the vaguest idea what sort of night she’d had, “but I need to ask you a few questions about the truck accident.”

She nodded and clasped her hands together between her knees. Her eyes followed my hand as I slipped a microcassette recorder out of my pocket and placed it on the footstool in front of me. I leaned forward, locking my eyes on hers. “I’d like to record, if it’s all right with you.” I smiled ruefully. “My hands get so lame in this cold weather it’d take me all day to write down a few notes.” I glanced at Mrs. Scutt. “Is that all right with you, Maryanne?”

She nodded and put her hand over her daughter’s.

“Good. Now, Gail, the bus driver, Stub Moore, says that you were one of several students sitting on the left side of the bus last night. Is that right?”

She nodded and said in a hoarse whisper, “I was sitting three seats behind the driver.”

“By the window?” I asked.

She nodded and then, like the sharp little kid she was, said for the benefit of the recorder, “Yes.”

“All right, Gail, I’m most interested in what you saw when the pickup truck passed the school bus. The truck that later crashed into the rock. Where you looking out the window when it passed the bus?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“Is there any particular reason you looked out just then?”

“Well, I heard somebody behind me, and they’re all, ‘Here comes Denny and Ryan.’ So I turned to look. There was lots of cars passing us on the way home.”

“Could you see clearly?”

“Yeah, pretty.”

“And was it them? Was it Dennis Wilton and Ryan House?”

She nodded and frowned.

“Was the truck going very fast?”

“No. Not really.” She moved her hand from side to side. “It just went by, like.”

“And you could see them clearly?”

“Yeah.”

“Could you see who was driving?”

“Well, I could see Ryan, so I guess it was Denny behind the wheel.” She bit her lip.

“You could see Ryan House clearly?”

She nodded and I could see tears in her eyes. Her mother slipped an arm around her.

“Gail, can you remember what Ryan House was doing? Did he look up at the bus, was he waving, what?”

“He was asleep.”

“He was asleep?”

“Yes, his head was leaning against the thing there,” and she tipped her own head and indicated with her hand about where the passenger window’s rear post would be. “He’s all with his jacket, or something, wadded up like a pillow.”

“And he didn’t appear to wake up when the truck went by the bus?”

“No, sir.”

“Were you able to see Dennis Wilton?”

“Not really. Only for a second as the truck came up beside us.”

“And not after that?”

She shook her head.

“Now I’d like you to really bring that picture back in your mind, Gail. Could you see, or did you notice, whether Ryan House was wearing his shoulder harness?”

She frowned and looked at the rug. “Yes, he was.”

“You noticed that particularly?”

She looked up at me. “Yes. Because I could see that he had his coat all squished under the belt where it went by his neck, like it was holding it in place. His jacket.”

“Okay. Did the person sitting with you see them, too?”

“Yes.”

“Who were you sitting with?”

“Melissa Roark. She leaned across me to wave, but they didn’t see her.”

“Do you remember if Vanessa Davila was on the spectator bus?”

Her pretty little eyebrows twitched a hair when she heard the name, as if puzzled that I would think that she’d know Vanessa. “I didn’t see her.”

“And one last thing. Did you see the truck veer off the road?”

This time her reply was just a small, strangled croak that I took for a “no.” She wiped her nose. “I heard the driver shout something, and then all of a sudden we slowed down and stopped. He was all shouting for us to stay in our seats, and then he grabbed the fire extinguisher and ran up ahead. I couldn’t see very well.”

I nodded and reached for the tape recorder, then hesitated. “Gail, did you know Maria Ibarra?”

“Who?”

“Maria Ibarra. She was a student from Mexico who just came to Posadas High a few weeks ago. She’s a freshman.”

“You mean the girl they found under the bleachers?” She scrunched her shoulders together, making herself as small and inconspicuous as possible. “I knew who she was, is all. A couple of times, I knew some of the kids were all talking about where she lived and stuff like that.”

“Where she lived?”

“They were just stories, I think. And they’re all, ‘She lives in an old truck out in the arroyo,’ but…” She scrunched a little more, as if she were trying to touch together the outboard ends of her young, pliable collarbones.

“But no more than that?”

“No.”

I stood up amid a cracking of joints and creaking of belt leather. “Mrs. Scutt, thanks. And Gail, you, too. You’ve been a big help. I shouldn’t have to bother you again.”

Gail Scutt was all too happy to head for her room, and Maryanne Scutt saw me to the door. I thanked her again, mostly because she had the good sense to let me leave without badgering me with questions that I wouldn’t be able to answer.

An hour later, I had three nearly identical copies of my interview with Gail Scutt. Her seat partner, Melissa Roark, confirmed what Gail had seen.

Sitting directly behind the driver had been a sleepy high school junior, Bryan Saenz. He’d seen the truck go by, had remembered a vague image of Ryan House snoozing, and then had been jarred into full wakefulness when the bus driver shouted and spiked the brakes.

Three rows behind Gail, Tiffany Ulibarri, a sober-faced senior, had seen the pickup glide by as well. She’d seen the somnolent Ryan House, even noticed a small patch of breath condensing on the side window by his slack mouth.

That was as far as I cared to go. I didn’t need sixty adolescent bus passengers to tell me that Ryan House certainly had been sound asleep when the truck passed the school bus and then pounded itself and him into the limestone.