Statute of Limitations

Chapter Twelve

Estelle couldn’t move. Now that a name had been supplied, she recognized Janet Tripp, and for a long moment, the undersheriff simply froze, poleaxed by the turn of events. She didn’t know Tripp well-only that she seemed like a sober, almost dour person with a sudden, rare sweet smile who’d stolen Deputy Mike Sisneros’s heart a few months ago.

Janet Tripp hadn’t hung around the Public Safety Building. She hadn’t been a Here’s a box of cookies and platter of fudge for the deputies person. She hadn’t written supportive letters to the editor of the Posadas Register. She hadn’t picked up Mike when his shift ended.

Estelle had seen Janet only rarely, and now that she thought about it, could count on one hand the times she had actually spoken to the young woman. She knew that Mike and Janet had planned to be married sometime later in the spring, but the couple had kept their plans to themselves, trying their best to avoid a department gala. Only because of relaying a phone call a month ago did she know that Janet was employed at A amp; H Welding and Supply in Posadas.

Other than that, Estelle knew nothing of the victim, and certainly not how Janet Tripp had come to lie dead under an old car on Christmas afternoon. But the implications that included Deputy Mike Sisneros were immediate and sickening.

For a time before Dr. Alan Perrone arrived, Estelle sat on her haunches, back against the cool metal of the old sedan, looking at the woman. She was satisfied that she’d seen everything there was to see under the Oldsmobile, down its flanks, and in scuff marks across the top of the old sedan. As if sensing that the undersheriff wanted moments to herself, Linda Real had finished several rolls of film and several yards of videotape, then retreated back up to the parking lot, where Tony Abeyta put her to work. He had isolated seven different tire prints that were worth both photos and plaster casts. Anything that might have been shoe or boot prints were no more than worthless bruises in the dirt, without definition or distinctive shape.

Perrone arrived at 5:43 that afternoon, the light already failing enough to make work difficult. Estelle didn’t hear his car, and turned with a start when his shoes crunched the gravel of the arroyo to her left.

“Hey,” the physician said. “This is about the sorriest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen.” He frowned at Estelle’s expression. “You all right?”

Estelle pushed herself to her feet. “How’s the chief?” she asked.

“Unchanged,” he said. He bent over to examine what he could see of the hand and forearm. “Actually, I’m more inclined to say ‘failing.’ I get the impression that his system is just kind of caving in on itself, a little bit at a time. The family’s with him, and that’s good.” He nodded at the victim. “How the hell do folks do it?” he said, more to himself than actually expecting an answer. “Do we know who this is?”

“We think it’s Janet Tripp,” Estelle said. She looked up to see both Captain Eddie Mitchell and Deputy Jackie Taber in quiet, intense conversation with Tony Abeyta. Mitchell caught Estelle’s glance and raised a hand in salute, then broke away from the others and strode toward the cow trail down the bank.

“Janet Tripp,” Perrone mused. “Do I know Janet Tripp? I think I do.”

“Mike Sisneros’s fiancée,” Estelle said.

Perrone grimaced and his shoulders slumped. “Oh, you’re kidding. That’s ugly.” He waited a moment, but when Estelle didn’t say anything, added, “Let’s have a look.”

Short and wiry, Perrone maneuvered himself and his medical bag under the old car. “Okay,” Estelle heard him say, and knew he was talking into a small tape recorder. “We’ve got a white female, maybe thirty-five years old.” He droned on as he made the awkward examination, then said, “Estelle?”

“Sir?”

“What time was the body discovered?”

She had already done the mental calculations, estimating the time it had taken Butch Romero to roar first up and then back down the arroyo. “About 4:05,” she said. “That’s when I talked to dispatch after the neighborhood kid reported the body to me.”

“About,” Perrone mumbled. “Who found her? A kid, you say?”

“One of the neighborhood youngsters. Butch Romero? He was riding his bike up the arroyo.”

“Ah, he of the broken arm,” Estelle heard Perrone say to himself. The doctor had his own way of remembering patients. “Was he by himself?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“This young lady hasn’t been here very long, you know,” Perrone said.

“That was my impression,” Estelle said. She rested her hand on the old sedan, keeping out of the way.

“I’m guessing, but I’d say one shot to the back of the head. Right through the mastoid behind the ear. And small caliber. I don’t think we have an exit wound, but I’m going to have to wait for that to be sure. It’s kind of awkward trying to do an examination here.”

He shifted position with a middle-aged grunt. “Beyond that, I don’t know. I don’t think there’s much more that I can tell you at the moment. I don’t see any other injuries other than some scuffing that the fall down here might account for.”

“Could she have survived for any length of time after being shot?”

A long silence followed, and then Perrone backed out from underneath the Oldsmobile. “Estelle, I can’t answer that,” the physician said. He nodded at Eddie Mitchell, who stood quietly to one side, looking down at Janet Tripp’s hand. “All I can tell you is that a shot like that usually drops the victim like a sack of bricks. Remember RFK?” He tapped his own skull behind his left ear, touching the mastoid tuberosity. “No, you don’t. But that’s where he was hit. Down he went, boom. Didn’t move a step or two past the point where he was shot. At least that’s what all the famous pictures show. But he lived for several hours…what, almost a day, or something like that?”

He carefully adjusted a strand of blond hair that had fallen across his forehead. “You can imagine any wound you want, and there will be case studies where the victim lived for a while…seconds, minutes, hours, or long enough to heal and have a happy life. It all depends on how fast the blood pressure drops to zero, and how long it stays there without intervention.” He shrugged.

“It looks as if she raked the sand with her fingers, Alan.”

“She might have. Maybe just some reflex. Or maybe all the way to the other end of the spectrum. Conscious and looking for a way out. You’re going to bag those hands carefully, I’m sure. But a reflex movement is certainly not beyond what we might expect.” He regarded his rubber gloves. Blood smeared the one on his right hand. “Much of the blood in her hair is comparatively fresh, Estelle. However this happened, it hasn’t been long.”

The undersheriff calculated backward. “Janet Tripp was seen alive early this afternoon,” she said. “In our office.”

“Well, then,” Perrone said. “There you go.” He nodded at the Oldsmobile. “I’m clear, if you want the EMTs to remove the body now. Francis is headed home, by the way. Did he get ahold of you?”

“Yes. The Med-Evac is going to drop him off.”

“I chatted with him a few minutes ago-maybe half an hour before this call. He says that Bobby is feeling okay. Groggy, but okay. They’ve got him sedated and drugged and God knows what else. His blood will be as thin as distilled water right about now.” He turned and saw Linda, squatting on her haunches out in the center of the arroyo, camera in hand, waiting. “Puzzles,” he said cryptically. “I’m on my way, unless there’s anything else.”

“Thanks, Alan.” She turned to Mitchell, who hadn’t moved a centimeter since climbing down in the arroyo. He regarded her, his expression expectant.

“Merry Christmas,” he said.

“Sure enough.”

“Where’s Sisneros? Has someone talked with him yet?”

“No.” Estelle heard the shift, perhaps unconscious, in Mitchell’s tone. The informal “Mike” was replaced with the flat, professional reference to “Sisneros.” “Linda says that he went over to his folks’ place for dinner.”

“In Lordsburg.”

“Yes.”

“Without his fiancée.” Mitchell’s quiet, soft voice made it sound like a simple statement of fact, despite the obvious implications.

“Apparently.”

“How long?” He nodded at the victim.

“Linda saw her at the office in the early afternoon.”

“Found at?”

“Shortly after four. By a kid riding a motorcycle.”

Mitchell mulled that as he watched the three EMTs approach. He moved out of the way, giving them a parking place for the gurney. Matty Finnegan, who approached the front of the Oldsmobile warily as if it might be a den for rattlesnakes, hesitated and looked at Estelle.

“Okay to go?” she asked.

Estelle nodded. “There’s a lot of sharp metal there. Be careful.”

The three EMTs were careful, easing Janet Tripp’s corpse out of its tiny resting place. “Good thing she ain’t frozen up,” EMT Eric Sanchez remarked at one point, and the comment earned him an acidic glare from Matty.

“Where do you want to start?” Mitchell asked as the gurney began the final trip up and out of the arroyo.

“It’s just two hours,” Estelle said. “That’s in our favor. From the time Janet left the Sheriff’s Department until she ended up here, maybe two hours. I was going to talk to Linda and get a closer estimate from her. But regardless, that’s not much of a time window.”

Mitchell looked at his watch. “And now it’s a four-hour head start for somebody,” he said.

“Or less.”

“Or less. Did you talk to Bill yet?”

Estelle shook her head. “That’s ahead. We need to know who was at the office, what time they left…anything that will help us narrow this down. How well did you know Janet?”

Mitchell shook his head. “Didn’t. She and Mike weren’t the most public couple in the world.” He heaved a deep breath. “You want me to go get him?”

“Either you or me. I don’t want him to find out about this from a phone call.”

“I’ll run over. You have enough on your plate.”

“Thanks.”

“This could be just some creep passing by, you know that, don’t you?”

“Yes, it could. I think we’re going to have some tire prints. We know that she was shot somewhere else and dumped here.”

“Maybe right up there,” Mitchell said, nodding at the rim of the arroyo.

“Maybe. No blood, but that doesn’t mean anything.” She stepped closer to the tangle of junk. “The scuff marks on the top of this car hint that the body slid down here, and then into that opening.”

“Odd to be stretched out the way she was if that’s what happened,” Mitchell said.

“I think she moved some, Eddie. I think she was still alive. I can’t picture the killer climbing down here and stuffing her farther in. Maybe that’s what he did, but I can’t picture it. I see him pushing her down into the junk, and when she slides into the gap between the cars, he’s going to figure that’s enough.”

“Maybe.”

“All he needs is some time to slip away.”

“Then he doesn’t care much if the body is found,” Mitchell said.

“That’s a little something that bothers me, Eddie. The body was bound to be found…maybe not in hours like it was, but certainly the odds were good, over time.”

“Son-of-a-bitch is confident or careless, one or the other.”

“That’s the scary part. Dr. Perrone said that she was popped once, behind the ear. Small caliber, execution style. That’s one thing. Then she’s dumped out here. If this were the swamps of New Jersey or the bay shore of Chicago, I’d say ‘gangland.’”

“Huh.”

“Cold confidence,” Estelle said. “Shoot and dump. That doesn’t leave us much.”

“That’s the whole point, I would guess,” Mitchell said. He twisted and looked up at the sky. “Clear tonight. You want some lights out here, or go over it again first thing in the morning?”

Estelle hesitated. “There’s nothing magic out here, Eddie. That’s what my first impressions tell me. Someone drove up, and we have tire tracks. Someone lifted Janet Tripp out of the trunk of a car, or the back of a pickup, and lugged her over to the edge. It’d be nice if we had a clear set of bootprints, but we don’t…and I don’t think a set is going to magically appear, either. Her body slid down here, and that’s that.” She shook her head. “We need to button this up, but I’m not sure we can afford to spend more time out here tonight. If we dillydally around, the trail’s going to grow cold. Jackie’s on shift, and there’s nobody better to sit the scene until morning. We won’t lose a thing. If you go to Lordsburg right now and bring Mike back, that’ll be good. We need to talk with him and connect the dots there. While you do that, I’ll sit down with Linda and really nail down what she remembers. And I’ll do the same with Bill Gastner. Then we’ll see where we are.”

Mitchell hunched his broad shoulders against the growing chill as the heavy twilight crept across the prairie. “And there’s that one nasty possibility, Eddie,” Estelle said. “From what I’ve heard, Mike and Janet were planning to drive to Lordsburg together. They didn’t. Mike went by himself. Janet ended up here.”

Mitchell nodded morosely. “That’s what I’ve been thinking.” He scuffed the loose sand of the arroyo bottom with the toe of a polished boot. “Are you going to call the sheriff?”

“That’s next on my list.”

“Make sure Gayle is right there when you do. Otherwise he’ll be out of bed, trying to find a taxi home.” Mitchell reached out and tapped Estelle at the base of her throat, on the hard plane of her sternum. “And put on your vest, Undersheriff.”