Privileged to Kill

6

By half past four, we’d pounded Officer Thomas Pasquale long enough. We’d had no word from Dr. Guzman, and Sergeant Torrez hadn’t returned from working the identification of the dead child.

Sheriff Martin Holman gave up trying to keep his eyes open and headed home to bed, optimistic that when a new day dawned in a couple of hours, all his problems would have resolved themselves. We assigned Thomas Pasquale the task of locating Crocker’s alleged sister in Anaheim. I fervently hoped that the young officer couldn’t get in trouble on the telephone.

I trudged upstairs to check on Wesley Crocker and found him sleeping soundly.

After reminding the dispatch deputy to check on the prisoner every ten minutes, I headed for the door, ready to idle around the county for a while to give my mind a chance to sift and ponder.

I pushed open the side door that led to the parking lot and damn near tripped over Estelle Reyes-Guzman. She was sitting on the top step like a little kid, arms circling her drawn-up knees.

“I thought you were going home,” I said.

“Not yet. I was just sitting here stargazing.”

“A new hobby,” I chuckled. “Crocker could give us lessons.”

The detective looked up at me and then unfolded and pushed herself to her feet. “Do you have fifteen minutes, sir?”

“That’s all I have, is time,” I answered and glanced at my watch. “Give it another two hours and it’ll be time for breakfast.” We walked across the parking lot to my patrol car. “Does Irma ever squawk?”

“About the hours, you mean? No. She’s used to it.” Francis and Estelle had hired Irma Sedillos as a full-time housekeeper/nanny, and the girl was earning her keep. Since her older sister, Gayle Sedillos, was our office manager and chief dispatcher, Irma must have had some inkling of what she was in for when she signed on with that frenetic household.

I opened the door of 310 and grunted my way inside. Estelle was already settled, brooding, by the looks of her forehead, by the time I closed my door.

“I’d like to visit the football field again,” Estelle said, and I nodded and started the car. At that hour in the morning, Bustos Avenue looked like an extension of the parking lot, empty and bleak. Even during the middle of a July 4 parade, Posadas was a quiet place. At 5 A.M. in mid-October, it was comatose.

We drove the few blocks in silence, and I pulled the car to a halt on Olympic, approximating the spot chosen by Officer Pasquale.

Estelle got out and I followed her toward the east end of the field, staying on the outside of the fence. When she reached a spot opposite the goalpost, she stopped and switched her flashlight back and forth. “Bicycle tire marks,” she said. “This is where he leaned the bike up against the fence.” She pointed off into the grove of trees on our left. “And then he camped over there, in the trees.”

“That’s what he told us,” I said, and zipped my jacket. Along the fence were two utility poles whose sodium vapor lights flooded the area. Her flashlight beam was nearly lost in the flood of the two lamps as she walked into the grove of trees.

“And this is where he said he was when Pasquale arrived,” she said, pointing her light down at a scuffed, matted spot on the ground.

“Probably.”

“So when he saw the police car, and realized something was going on, he got up and walked out of this grove, over to the fence.” She walked to the four-foot-high chain-link as she narrated.

“That’s how Pasquale could see him. The lights would have made that easy enough,” I said. Estelle squinted up toward the lights, forehead furrowed.

She leaned against the chain-link and observed the out-of-bounds and the end zone ahead of her. “Is that gate back there open?” And before I could answer, she walked quickly back along the boundary fence until she reached one of the small gates that opened to the field. I followed, my hands thrust deep into the pockets of my jacket.

Once through the gate, the sod underfoot was soft and quiet-the rich, thoroughly watered relative of the dry prairie grass that died brittle and tawny that time of year.

We walked to the goalposts and I didn’t bother to ask Estelle what was on her mind. I knew from long experience that it was useless to rush her. I fished a toothpick out of my shirt pocket. It was one of the mint-flavored ones from the Don Juan de Oñate restaurant and reminded me that it’d been too long since dinner.

Between wind gusts, it was almost warm…perfect weather to sit in the bleachers and watch the Posadas Jaguars rack up yardage against some unhappy rival. Estelle walked over to one side of the goalpost and slid down to sit at its base.

“If I do that, I’ll never get up,” I said.

She leaned back against the red and white steel of the post, eyes searching the sky. “Shouldn’t Orion be right about there, sir?” She pointed toward the western horizon.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Where is Orion this time of year?” She swept a hand overhead. “The constellation Orion. Where in the night sky?”

“I don’t have the faintest idea.” I spent very little time looking heavenward, and my ignorance of the heavenly bodies and where they should or should not be at any given time was close to total.

“If it’s just rising in the late evening, then by this time it should be well past the zenith, and headed for the hills.” She swept her arm in an arc, finally pointing toward the bleachers and the high school beyond. “Maybe it’s already set,” she said. “I’m not sure.”

I craned my neck and looked overhead, squinting against the sodium vapor lights. And just as suddenly, I knew what was bothering Estelle.

“How can you see any stars at all with these lights?” I asked, and Estelle stood up.

“I’ve been thinking that same thing,” she said. “Wesley Crocker said he had a view ‘all the way to Peru.’ Do you remember him saying that?”

“Something to that effect.”

“And then he said he was looking at Orion when the kids arrived.”

“And you’re wondering how he could have been seeing any stars at all with all this light.”

“Yes, sir.”

I looked up again, frowning at those two sodium vapors. Their hum was steady, like a distant truck that never made progress. They were spaced ten or twenty yards on each side of the goalposts, far enough back so that someone booting a field goal wouldn’t be kicking right into the glare.

Estelle turned and looked off toward the east and the wash of light that rose from downtown Posadas-about the same amount of light as would be cast by a poorly decorated Christmas tree. The eastern horizon was just beginning to show signs of life behind the grove of bare trees.

“This field lies east to west,” she said and thrust her hands in the pockets of her skirt. “If Wesley Crocker arrived here some time around nine P.M., which fits with Pasquale’s version of things, then Orion would be low in the eastern horizon-depending on what time he got here, it might not even have risen above the lights of downtown.”

We both stood in silence, staring off into space.

“So Wesley Crocker is lying,” I said finally. “Or mistaken.”

Estelle didn’t answer, but out of the corner of my eye I caught the slightest of shrugs.

“What do you think?” I asked.

She folded her arms and leaned against the goalpost, gazing off toward the bleachers. “I think it’s almost certain that he knows more than he’s telling us. And I think it’s almost certain he wasn’t counting stars through the glare of two sodium vapor lights.”

“Do you want to talk with him again?”

“Yes, sir. I do. Before he eats. Before he gets too comfortable.”

Her pace back to the car was brisk-almost predatory. If Wesley Crocker was in the middle of an entertaining dream, he had about five minutes to wrap it up.