Prolonged Exposure

Chapter 3

I turned the key in the lock and pushed open the heavy carved door, glad that some little teenaged rodent hadn’t taken a crowbar to the ancient worn wood in his efforts to gain entry.

The massive oak slab had originally guarded the entry to a wine cellar deep in the bowels of a seventeenth-century monastery near Tlaxcala, Mexico. After the monastery burned in 1846, the door had been salvaged, and then over the years, it had worked its way north from one admiring owner to the next.

The hinges swung silently and I stepped to the foyer. The brass hardware on the inside of the door still showed a generous dusting of fingerprint powder, and I avoided touching the metal. The cool air wafted from deep inside the old adobe. The place should have been stone-quiet, too.

“Is that your phone?” Camille asked, but she made no move to elbow past me. I didn’t bother to say that it couldn’t have been anyone else’s. This wasn’t a suburb of Flint, Michigan. There were no next-door neighbors here, no smell of someone else’s barbecue, no screeching kids, no traffic except for the interstate in the distance. The only telephone whose ring I could hear would be my own.

If I had voiced the comparison, I suppose Camille would have been quick to reply that in Flint, people didn’t bury their spouses in the nearest handy wooded lot across the street, either.

I turned and reached out to put a hand on my daughter’s arm. “Stay here in the foyer a minute,” I said. She looked up at me, puzzled, and I added, “I want to see the house before we touch anything else.”

Despite the persistent telephone, I made no move toward the kitchen. “Do you want me to answer that?” Camille asked, and I grinned at her. She was from the generation that considered the jangle of a telephone some sort of imperative.

“If they want to talk to me badly enough, they’ll call back,” I said. After three more rings, the damn thing gave up, and I stood motionless, taking in the silence. That bliss lasted another four or five seconds before radio traffic from the patrol car in the driveway squelched it.

“I’ll just be a minute, sir,” Deputy Pasquale said. He had been standing in the doorway threshold, and he turned to walk to the car.

“You might as well head back to the office,” I called after him. “Thanks for the lift.”

“Our luggage is still in the police car,” Camille muttered. She bustled after Pasquale. That left me alone in my house, and I sucked in a deep breath of relief. It was good to be home, even if a bunch of strangers had violated the place.

I ambled across the foyer’s expanse of Saltillo tile toward the living room, an irregularly shaped seven-sided room with sunken brick floors and heavy, dark ceiling beams of ponderosa pine. Nearly thirty feet across at the widest point, the living room had been designed to suggest an Indian pueblo ceremonial kiva.

The room was a modern touch to an otherwise-traditional old adobe. An artist had lived in the house during the war, and in 1945, maybe in celebration, he’d knocked out a few walls, excavated, and plastered. The new living room and foyer that he had created split the house-a large den, two baths, and three bedrooms to the east; a kitchen, bathroom, and two more bedrooms to the west.

The artist had finished that project and then decided that Posadas, New Mexico, wasn’t the heart of the modern-art world. He sold the house to me, and we were both delighted.

I had lined those living room walls with floor-to-ceiling book-cases built of dark oak by Simon Ortega, an alcoholic cabinetmaker in Posadas who did wonderful work when he had drunk just enough to forget his troubles and steady his hands, but not enough to blur his vision. It had taken him three years to finish the job.

Figuring that everyone hides valuables behind books, the little sons of bitches had swept the shelves clean, scattering two thousand volumes across the bricks. The VCR that had been on top of the television set was gone, but that was no great loss. I rarely used the damn thing anyway. The VCR and one movie tape had been a birthday present from my youngest son. I used the tape to put myself to sleep on occasion-and that one tape was still the extent of my video library. The tape lay on the floor, half out of its jacket.

I stood with hands on hips, surveying the familiar scene that I had investigated dozens of times in other homes during my career. And always before, I’d been able to survey the damage with a cool, professional detachment.

Anything that had been resting on a flat surface had been swept off. It was a thorough, workmanlike job.

I bent down and picked up a photograph mounted in an inexpensive silver frame. My son William, in full flight suit, with helmet tucked under one arm, knelt in front of a T2-C Buckeye naval jet trainer. His other arm hugged Kendal, his oldest son, just turned seven when the photo was taken. I put the picture back on one of the shelves and made my way through the mess to the den.

Being an open-and-dump burglar must have been hard on the back. It would have been easier just to open the drawer and look through its contents than to dump things on the floor and have to bend down and rummage around. But these kids had strong backs, and dumping was obviously their style. The den looked like the county landfill. And conspicuous by its absence was my filing cabinet, which normally nestled between the east wall and the end of my desk.

A deep scar was gouged into the desk’s wooden top near one corner. I bent down to peer at the damage. The scar ended in a well-defined triangular cut in the oak finish, and I could imagine exactly what had happened. The intruders had picked up the filing cabinet, discovered how heavy it was, and slammed it down on the desk to regain their grip. Maybe one of them had blown a hernia or slipped a disk in the process. I could only hope.

I bent down, hands on my knees, and squinted at the polished wood of the desktop. With the light flooding across it at an angle, the well-defined dusting marks told me that one of the deputies had done a careful, patient job.

“All right,” I murmured with satisfaction. On the desk corner nearest the wall was a clear shoe print, the fancy tread patterns clear on the dark wood, clear enough that we’d be able to match for brand, size, and wear marks. “We’ve got you, you little bastard,” I said aloud.

One of the officers had drawn a set of four-corner bracket marks around the print with a dry-erase marker. They wouldn’t have been able to lift the shoe print, but someone talented with a camera could sure as hell photograph it.

With an audible crack of joints, I stood up and looked at the wall. The Springfield.45–70 trap-door carbine was gone, as was the sword that had hung below it. To reach the carbine, I had to stand on my tiptoes, and I was five feet ten. The burglar had stepped up onto the corner of the desk to reach the weapon, leaving his shoe print behind.

I sighed. The sword was no great loss, but to a military history buff like myself, the carbine was. And it wasn’t the weapon itself so much as where it had been and what it had done. Manufactured in 1874, the.45–70 had been issued, still packed in Springfield Armory’s grease, to a young trooper named Gilbert T. LeSalle.

LeSalle hadn’t been a famous military hero or a cutthroat villain. Just one of the thousands of young men who’d spent their lives in the Southwest, moving from one fort to the next, he rode one dusty, rocky trail after another, year after year after year. His military career spanned three decades, long enough to see the aging Springfields replaced by more modern weapons.

Whether he was technically allowed to or not, Trooper LeSalle had kept his.45–70 and taken it with him when he left the service. It hung over the fireplace of his home in Deming until he’d died in 1950 at the age of ninety-six.

I had purchased the carbine in 1973 at a garage sale for twenty-five dollars. Over the course of the next two years, I tracked down both the carbine’s provenance and the military records of the trooper who had carried it.

All that paperwork, interesting only to someone fond of the little guy’s place in history, had been in the locked filing cabinet. Government paperwork was all replaceable, of course. A few items in the cabinet that I didn’t want to think about were not, and their loss made my stomach churn.

Of more interest to a thief were a couple of handguns-including the.357 Magnum Smith amp; Wesson issued to me by the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department. I grimaced, knowing damn well what kind of trouble a kid could get into with those. That wasn’t all, of course. A lifetime’s worth of financial papers, my own service records-the list went on and on. The more I thought about it, the sadder and madder I got.

I folded my arms across my chest and leaned against the desk, frowning. The faint marks of tape and print dust on every smooth surface told me that deputies had finished with their chores. Estelle hadn’t cautioned me when we’d last talked, and I knew that procrastination wasn’t part of her character. She probably had a thick file folder of glossy eight-by-ten photos of every corner of my home and its shambled contents. Camille and I could start the cleanup.

Out in the kitchen, the telephone sprang to life again, and I could hear Camille’s steps on the foyer tile. “I’ll get it,” she called, her voice sounding small and distant through the maze of adobe walls.

I straightened up and left the den, reaching the living room just as Camille leaned over the kitchen counter to holler at me, her hand covering the receiver.

“It’s Sheriff Holman, Dad.”

I grimaced. “Tell him that I’ll call him later.”

She returned to the telephone, and after a brief exchange, I heard her laugh. I stepped up into the kitchen and she extended the receiver toward me.

“He says you must be feeling better.”

“No doubt,” I muttered, and took the phone. Finding one’s home turned upside down wasn’t my idea of a practical convalescence. “Hello, Marty.”

“Hey, Bill. Welcome back, and I sure am sorry about the-”

“Thanks,” I said, cutting him off before he got too far into the eulogy over the break-in. “Hell of a homecoming. Any news on the lost kid?”

“Not a thing yet. Pasquale filled you in?”

“In part.”

“Let me tell you, the folks are getting worried sick.”

“I can imagine. Listen, don’t tie up any of the officers on my account. I’m not going to be much use to you for a while, and I sure as hell am not going to be of any use up in those rocks.” I glanced back into the living room. “I can handle a residential burglary if I move slowly.”

The least the sheriff could have done was manage agreement to that, but he didn’t. After a moment’s hesitation, Martin Holman asked, “What sorts of things are missing, besides the firearms?”

“Just personal papers. Nothing from the department.”

“Oh,” Holman said, and the relief in his voice was obvious. I could imagine Martin Holman worrying at night, as he lay in bed, that I had secret files at home, culled over the years-names, dates, indiscretions. Maybe even his name. Sheriff Martin Holman’s specialty was worrying, even when he had nothing to worry about.

“Have you been up on the mesa yet?”

“All morning,” Sheriff Holman said. “And by the way, there’s a message here that a Stanley Willit wants to talk with you as soon as you’re available.”

“Stanley who?”

“Willit. W-I–L-L–I-T. That’s the name on the note. I’ve never heard of him.”

“Nor have I. What does he want? Did he say?”

“The note just says, ‘Ref F. Apodaca.’ That mean anything to you?”

“Sure. Reference Florencio Apodaca. The old gent who’s using my back lot as his own private cemetery. I can’t imagine who Stanley Willet is, or what he has to do with that, but I’ll give him a call when I get down to the office.”

I didn’t look in Camille’s direction when I said that, since she had made it abundantly clear that she would accompany me to Posadas and help me settle in if I promised that the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department was off-limits.

“Well, shoot,” Holman said. He was one of the few people I knew who actually said things like that. “You know, we’ve been so caught up in the logistics of the search up on the mesa that I didn’t even remember the old gravedigger. Estelle told you about that, eh?”

“Yes. And all that’s the least of our problems right now.”

Holman laughed good-naturedly, assuming that I was referring to my health. “We jumped right back into all these things so fast, I haven’t had a chance to ask you how you’re doing. Did you miss us?”

“Like typhoid,” I said. “And I’m doing fine. As the doctor in Flint said, I’m a new person now.”

“That in itself will be something to see,” Holman said. He could have meant any number of things, but I didn’t pursue it.

Instead, I asked, “You said you’d been up on the mesa. Any sign of the boy at all? Any footprints, scraps of clothes, anything like that?”

Holman made a small groan of disappointment. “No, not a trace. We’ve got a good crew out there, though. We’ve got nearly two hundred people now. They brought in the dogs this morning, and the National Guard has three choppers out of Las Cruces.”

“He’s spent one night out?”

“Yes, a cold and wet one.”

“Then you don’t have much time, Marty. If he isn’t found by morning, he’s a goner.”

“I know it. But it’s tough. One of the rescue folks was telling me that a little kid like that will actually hide from the search party. He’ll get frightened and do just the opposite of what would make sense.”

“Just like a little frightened animal, Marty. Who knows what tiny rock ledge he’s crawled under.”

“I’ll have Estelle give you a call as soon as she breaks free.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I said. “She’s up to her ears. But if I get a chance, I’ll drive up on the mesa later this afternoon, if you haven’t found the youngster yet. Getting out would do me some good.”

After I hung up, I stood for a long time, staring at the designs in the countertop.

“It never lets up, does it?” Camille said. I looked over at her and she was smiling, her expression sympathetic.

“No, it doesn’t,” I said.