Prolonged Exposure

Chapter 6

“Do they know you’re here, do you suppose?” Camille asked. I watched Sheriff Martin Holman walk across the parking lot toward the restaurant’s entrance, head down, hands in his pockets. At five ten, the same height as I am when standing up straight, he was a head shorter than Sgt. Robert Torrez, who walked beside him.

Torrez was explaining something to the sheriff, and with Holman, it could have been something as simple as the time of day. The sheriff nodded, then nodded again, then shook his head.

“He knows all right,” I said. “He would never eat here, given any kind of choice. The country club is more his style.”

And sure enough, within the minute, JanaLynn appeared around the salad bar’s divider, followed by Holman and the towering sergeant.

Martin Holman pasted on his widest smile, stuck out both hands, and shook mine like a long-lost brother. I didn’t bother trying to get up by scrubbing my belly through my burrito. “Back in the real world,” he said. He waved a hand at my dinner. “And this figures. A safe bet that it’s the exact opposite of what the doctor ordered.”

I shrugged and had the courtesy not to say something nasty about his preference for embalmed chicken and green beans. Instead, I said, “Sheriff, this is my eldest daughter, Camille. From Flint, Michigan. I think you two knew each other, back in the dark ages.”

Martin pumped her hand, too, maybe for just a little too long. Camille’s smile was radiant. “I’ll be darned,” she said, as if I’d never talked to her about the current sheriff of Posadas County. “You aren’t that scruffy little kid that sat in front of me in Mrs. Dutcher’s American history class.”

“Not anymore,” Holman said. He feigned mock hurt. “And I don’t think I was ever scruffy.”

I glanced down at his polished boots, still mint after a day up on the mountains, and the sharp crease of his gabardine trousers. Even the raindrop circles on his leather jacket were placed just so. “I don’t think so, either,” I said. “Join us.” I pushed myself over closer to the wall, taking my burrito with me. “Robert, it’s good to see you. Camille, this is Bob Torrez, the department’s senior patrol sergeant.”

Torrez nodded at me, then at Camille. He was handsome enough that he probably could have landed a Hollywood job, but instead he had settled into place, keeping tabs on his eight younger brothers and sisters. I’d suspected for years that the long-term arm’s-length love of his life was our senior dispatcher, Gayle Sedillos. Maybe the two of them figured there was no hurry, since they saw each other as regularly as shift work.

Holman sat down beside me, and Torrez balanced his huge frame on the edge of Camille’s bench seat, careful not to slide too close.

“You’re still eating that stuff,” Holman said.

“I’m still breathing.”

“Uh-huh.”

JanaLynn had sidled back around the divider and now looked at the sheriff expectantly. “Just coffee,” he said. “Decaf.”

“Bobby?” she said to Torrez.

“Nothing, thanks.”

She left, and Holman leaned forward, his voice low. “Bobby? What’s with Bobby?”

“She’s my cousin,” Torrez said without a trace of fluster. “They all call me that.”

“I think he’s related to half the county,” Holman said, and he then turned to me, his arm on the back of the booth. “So. What do you think?”

“About what?”

“About being back.”

I chuckled. “Long overdue.”

“I should say so. What’s first on the agenda for you?”

I looked sideways at Martin, wondering what he really wanted. “First, we’re going to clean up the mess in the house. Camille made good progress today. And by the way, thanks for covering that window, Robert.”

Holman leaned forward and folded his hands on the table. “Yeah. That was a hell of a welcome home for you.”

I nodded. “What’s the news on the youngster?”

Holman shot a glance at Torrez, then shrugged. “I just don’t know. I really don’t. That’s one reason we stopped by. You weren’t home, and at dinnertime there weren’t too many other places you were apt to be.” He grinned and craned his neck, looking around at the other booths in that section of the restaurant. They were empty.

“Are they going to go with a night search?”

Holman nodded. “The National Guard’s going to keep after it, along with Search and Rescue. It looks like the weather is holding stable enough that they might be able to use the choppers with spotlights. And I’ve sprung all the personnel the county can afford. Bernie Tafoya even has his dogs up there. This will be the second night. I don’t know. It looks grim.”

“That’s rugged country,” I said.

“Yes, it is. About the worst in the county.” He paused, then traced one of the patterns in the plastic tablecloth with his right ring finger. “And I get the impression that there’s something about the whole thing that Estelle doesn’t like.”

“Meaning?”

Holman shrugged. “I don’t know what I mean. She asked Bob here to coordinate things for our end. So he’s been working with the Guard and SAR.”

“Who’s up there now, by the way,” I asked, “coordinating things?”

“Eddie Mitchell, and he’s got Tom Pasquale keeping him awake.”

“He’ll love that,” I said. Eddie Mitchell had been with the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department for nine years, after an unhappy stint with one of the big metro departments. I knew that the taciturn and efficient sergeant delighted in assigning young Pasquale to every dull civil-law job that came along, but I agreed with him-that was one way to keep the youngster out of trouble until he aged a bit.

“Estelle had a family emergency,” I added. “That’s going to be her first priority for a while. There’s no problem with that.”

Holman waved a hand. “No, no. I know her mother took a header. I know about that. No, what I mean is before that. Everyone is working out of a base camp, like right here, just east of the tip of the Pipes.” He drew a little circle on the table, close to the edge. “That’s about where the hunting camp was that the kid strayed from.”

He turned and rested his head in his left hand as he looked at me. “I was hoping that being a young mother herself, Estelle’s intuition might tell her where the kid went, right away. But she’s got something else on her mind. She’s not communicating with us.”

I frowned and put my fork down. “She’s not communicating with you? What do you mean?”

Holman shrugged. “Just that. You know how you used to joke that Estelle was half Oriental or something? She gets so damn inscrutable that no one knows what the hell she’s thinking? Well, at a time like this, it just seems like she sure as hell should be talking to us. That’s a little kid out there. I’d like to hear her ideas.”

“Did you talk to her?”

“You bet. Her stock phrase for anybody in the search is ‘Just cover every square foot.’”

“Well? Good advice, seems to me. What else is there to do?”

“Sure. But for most of the afternoon, she’s off on the back side of the mesa, well out of the search area, doing who the hell knows what. Just before she got the call about her mother, I happened to catch sight of her standing off about fifty yards from the family’s campfire site, leaning against a tree, staring off into space.”

I chuckled. “That sounds familiar.”

“I thought maybe you’d have a talk with her when she gets back.”

“Of course. But I tell you, Marty, it’s been my experience, and yours, too, that Estelle does things in her own good time.” I took another forkful and chewed thoughtfully. “I’ve spent many a time waiting for her to decide what she wants to do. And she usually isn’t wrong, either.”

“It’s not just my imagination, then.”

I laughed. “No, Sheriff, it’s not your imagination. So tell me about this family. Pasquale told me their name, but I’ve forgotten already.”

“The Coles,” he said, and looked at Torrez. “Tiffany, right?” Bob nodded. “Tiffany Cole is the mother’s name. She moved here about a year ago.”

“They were hunting?”

“No. Just camping. The campsite looked more like it was just a place to blow off a little steam.”

“And just the three of them? Mom, her boyfriend, and the boy?”

“I assume so. She’s a wreck, so it’s hard to get any kind of answer out of her. Bob, you talked with her some.”

“Just those three,” Torrez said, his voice almost a whisper.

Camille looked puzzled. “It’s hard to imagine a three-year-old covering enough distance to get himself lost.”

“Yes, it is,” I said. “But he doesn’t have to travel far, as the sad experience we had about ten years ago with the Culpepper boy proved to us. That youngster was eleven years old when he walked away from a hunting camp over by Regal, and they found his bones six months later. He’d curled up under a rock snag less than two hundred yards from the camp.” I shrugged. “Now he was eleven, and two hundred yards is close enough, on a still night, to hear normal voices.”

“It wasn’t a still night, though,” Martin said.

“No, it wasn’t. It was a goddamn blizzard, and the youngster apparently fell and fractured his skull. And it was so cold that he probably froze to death the first night, if the injury didn’t kill him first.” I put down my fork and pushed back. “And that’s that. If this little tyke is only three, and this is his second night out, with the possibility of freezing rain, then he’s had it. And a little body is just terribly easy to miss, even if you’ve got a thousand troops combing the place.”

Holman sighed.

“And that’s probably exactly what’s bothering Estelle, Sheriff,” I said. “Remember that her oldest boy just turned three himself. So this is up close and personal.”

“You’ll talk with her, though?”

“Sure.”

Holman put his palms on the table and pushed himself to his feet. “Did you happen to talk with old man Apodaca about the grave in your backyard, by the way?”

I grinned. “No. Camille and I walked out there this afternoon. Damnedest thing I ever saw. I keep thinking that I’m just going to tell the village to put an oxbow in their goddamn water line and leave her bones in peace. I’ll deed him the land, if that makes it easier.”

“Whatever you want to do,” Holman said, but he didn’t sound convinced. “Let me know what Estelle says,” he added.

“I’m sure Estelle will let you know herself,” I said, and Holman looked heavenward.

“Nice seeing you again, Camille,” he said. “How long are you staying?”

My daughter mumbled something noncommittal that I didn’t catch, and Holman said something about having dinner with him and his wife if we got the chance.

As they started to move away from the table, Sergeant Torrez said, in his usual half whisper, “I’ll be heading back up to the mesa after awhile, if you need anything.”

I lifted a hand in acknowledgment, realizing that Bob expected me to reply that I’d be joining him.