Prolonged Exposure

Chapter 22

Jason Black was a slender kid, tall for his age. He moped into the Posadas Public Safety Building, walking a step or two behind his mother, as if it she was the one who had business there and he’d just been forced to tag along.

His reddish blond hair was slicked back from his forehead, lying flat on his skull, thanks to liberal applications of something shiny that stuck it all in place. The sides were cut short, up to the tops of his ears, though, making his hair look like some kind of bizarre helmet slipped over his head.

I watched from my office as mother and son presented themselves at the window that separated our dispatchers from all the weird folks who showed up at all hours of the day or night. The woman’s jaw was clenched tight, and she spoke to Gayle Sedillos in monosyllables.

Gayle was used to handling parents who had reached their limit of stress, and she greeted Mrs. Black graciously, then pointed across the hall at the closed door marked CONFERENCE. The woman marched her son across the hall.

Jason Black managed to look indifferent and bored, but I saw him hesitate just a bit before following his mother into the conference room. He was trying his best to get an early start into the bizarre world of teenagers. Interesting times lay ahead for his mother, I mused.

The door closed behind them, and I elected to let them sit and stew for ten or fifteen minutes. It took that long to shag Deputy Mitchell back in off patrol.

Sheriff Holman led the assault, despite my suggestion that we wait until Estelle Reyes-Guzman could be present. I’d never met a kid whom she hadn’t been able to reduce to gelatin. But she was at the hospital with her mother, and I didn’t want to press into her time there.

Holman was in his usual good-humored form, and Jason misread that cue from the very beginning. The kid regarded him with studiously lidded eyes while the sheriff introduced everyone. Holman sounded much too reasonable, too much like a kindly guidance counselor. If the kid thought that he could get away with murder, he would elect to try it under the watchful, kindly eye of the Posadas County sheriff.

The kid sat with his shoulders hunched, part of the newfangled blend-in-with-the-crowd posture that had become so inexplicably popular. He avoided looking at Eddie Mitchell, whose expression was cold and blank, and he only let his gaze stray across to me one time. That was when I came into the room, tossed a manila folder on the table, and sat down with a scowl, obviously pissed.

The good sheriff was the only ally that the kid had in the room, other than his own mother. Jason shifted in his seat as Holman gently explained to both mother and son how deep the shit was that the boy was in.

“Jason,” the sheriff said finally, after rattling on for five minutes about responsibility and the rights of other people to own their own property unmolested, “The Posadas County Sheriff’s Department is considering filing charges against you that include possession of stolen government property. That’s a serious felony.”

If Mrs. Black had been planning to tough it out, that plan ended when she heard that. The mothering instinct was just too strong. I could almost hear her thinking, How could such a reasonable man say such an unreasonable, harsh thing as that?

“But Sheriff,” she said, “if he just found the gun…”

“We know that’s not what happened,” I said brusquely. “It’s that simple. Someone who walks into a particular alley, finds a loaded handgun, and then hides that weapon in his room obviously has plans of some kind.”

“Jason,” Mrs. Black said in her best “Son, how could you” tone.

I saw a faint quiver of the boy’s upper lip and added, “If he had been concerned with following the law, he could have simply reported what he found and that would have been that.” I turned to Eddie Mitchell, whose rattlesnake eyes were still making both kid and mother nervous. “What are the fingerprint results, Deputy?”

“Three sets,” Mitchell said, and his eyes never left Jason’s. “The computer is running matches now. It’ll be a few minutes. Mrs. Black said that she did not touch the weapon at any time. She opened the drawer, and in trying to reorganize the socks, she uncovered the weapon, realized what it was, and called us. Since she did not touch it, I don’t expect to find a match to her prints. When we book Jason, we will fingerprint him, as usual, and at that time, I expect to find a match.”

Mitchell droned all that out in one breath, flat and emotionless, as if we did this sort of thing on an hourly basis. No one had explained to young Jason Black that the police couldn’t just stuff unknown latent prints into a computer and be handed a match within minutes, if ever. If the kid thought that’s what we could do, so much the better.

“Obviously, one of the sets of prints is Jason’s,” Holman said, “since the only way the weapon could get in his dresser drawer is if he put it there. But maybe Jason wasn’t alone when the gun was discovered.” I almost grinned at that nice word, discovered, making a loaded Magnum seem like some kind of pirate treasure. “Maybe,” Holman said, “several people were involved, and several people handled it. Maybe someone talked Jason into just hiding the gun for a while. Is that about what happened, Jason?”

“Pete Harkins and Melody Perez,” Jason blurted, and tears came at the same time as the names. For just a fleeting moment, Marty Holman looked almost disappointed that he wouldn’t have to use any of the other tools in his arsenal of persuasion. It was like someone walking onto a car lot, pulling out a checkbook, pointing at a car, and saying, “I want that car. How much is it?”

“Pete Harkins and Melody Perez,” Holman repeated. “Just those two?”

“Yes.” The word was a miserable little bleat, and ten-year-old Jason Black’s first venture into the world of crime came to an abrupt end. Once he started talking, there was little need for prompting, and mom, bless her, just sat back and let Jason ride on alone. Holman remained the patient, kindly prompter; Mitchell and I sat silently, watching and listening.

Pete Harkins, Jason Black’s best bud, lived just off Grande at the Ranchero Mobile Home Park. That put his residence less than five hundred yards from mine. Pete and Jason had recruited Melody Perez, a tough little number who lived on the other side of the interstate, on MacArthur. The two boys liked Melody, Jason said, because she wasn’t afraid to do anything.

They had busted into my house, Jason recalled, because they had heard a rumor that I owned a huge coin collection-which I didn’t-as well as a bunch of other “stuff,” which I probably did.

The three kids, all coldly calculating, chose my house because it was vacant, secluded, and scary, whatever a ten-year-old meant by that. It was simple enough to bust the bathroom window and squirm inside.

I looked at Jason Black skeptically. He was resting his arm on the table, relieved that he’d managed to talk his way out of an immediate trip to Leavenworth. I could have encircled his biceps with my thumb and index finger. I tried to picture the three of them wrestling to move my filing cabinet. Maybe Melody had carried it by herself.

“How’d you move the cabinet?” I asked.

Jason looked at me out of the corner of his eye and shifted slightly away, as if I might hit him. “We took the cart thing. The one that was right there by the garage.”

“You sneaky little bastard,” I wanted to say, but instead I settled for saying, “You mean the wheelbarrow?” He nodded. “And where did you take the file?”

Jason explained how they had managed to grunt the cabinet out of the house, into my own wheelbarrow, and trundle the whole affair on down Guadalupe Terrace until the lane ended in the arroyo that ran south, paralleling State Road 61.

“We were thinking that like if we dumped it into the arroyo, it would burst open when it hit the bottom.”

“And did it?”

Jason shook his head. “We used that old ax.”

“Old ax?” I wasn’t in the habit of leaving axes outside.

“The one that was with the wheelbarrow.”

“Ah,” I said. Ax, pickax, hoe, shovel-same thing. “So you took the pickax and busted it open.”

Jason nodded. “It came open pretty easy,” he said. “A lot easier than we thought.”

“What did you do with the papers?”

“We seen they wasn’t money or nothing, so we left ’em.”

“And the other gun?”

“Melody gots it.”

I looked at Eddie. “It’s a little Colt three eighty. It’s in the inventory I gave Estelle.” I took a deep breath, regarding Jason Black. “And you took the rifle, too? The big one that was up on the wall?” I slipped the eight-by-ten glossy of the shoe print out of the case folder and slid it across the table so it parked right under the kid’s nose. He didn’t have a poker face, and if it wasn’t his own shoe, at least he recognized whose it was.

“Melody gots it. That and the sword. She said she knew somebody who’d buy ’em from her.”

“And the VCR?”

“Pete took that. He was going to sell it to Predo Gonzales after a little while.”

“What else do you have?”

“Nothing.” He saw my eyes squint and hastily added, “Honest. Nothing.”

Martin Holman managed to sound almost helpful when he looked at a miserable Deann Black and said, “While we’re waiting for Judge Hobart, ma’am, it might save us some time to go ahead and book Jason. Get the fingerprinting process out of the way.”

She looked horrified. “But he admitted-you mean, if this is all cleared up, he’s still to be charged?”

“Ma’am, this is a serious business. We have pretty solid information that the burglary of the Gastner residence isn’t the only incident involving these youngsters.” My estimation of Martin Holman clicked up another few notches. “What happens will depend on how cooperative your son remains,” he added.

“While Deputy Mitchell takes care of that,” I said to Holman, “maybe you’d take a run out to the trailer park and bring in Pete Harkins. It’d be a good idea to have Debbie Mears go along when you pick up Miss Melody.” Debbie was the wife of one of our deputies and served frequently as an on-call matron. I got up from the conference table. “I’m going out to the arroyo and check this young man’s story. If he’s telling the truth, I’ll let Deputy Mitchell know.”

As I opened the door, I turned and said, “And by the way, don’t take any officers away from the search. We can walk through this thing if it takes all night.” I nodded at Jason Black. “And don’t let the three of them associate with one another in any way. Keep ’em separated. Separate cells.”

Jason’s face had been pale enough, but I have to admit I enjoyed seeing it go another shade lighter when I said the word cells.