Statute of Limitations

Chapter Twenty-six

“You have reached voice mail for Sergeant Tom Mears. If this is an emergency, please dial 911. Otherwise, leave a message at the tone.”

“And your call is important to us,” Estelle said to the robotic voice. She punched another set and waited.

“Posadas County Sheriff’s Department. Sutherland.”

“Brent, this is Estelle. Do you know where Sergeant Mears is right now?”

“I think he’s home, ma’am. I’m not sure. He worked most of the night, I know. He logged out this morning about four or so.”

“How long have you been up?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Sutherland said. “But Ernie is coming in a little later to relieve.”

And he’s the swing shift, Estelle thought. The department organization was going to pieces. “Okay, thanks.”

“Captain Mitchell just came in a few minutes ago. Do you want to talk to him? He’s standing right here.”

“Sure.”

In a moment Mitchell’s quiet, soft voice greeted her. Estelle had always thought that if voices were all that mattered, Edward Mitchell would make a great physician, handling patients over the phone. He could make Take two aspirins and call me in the morning sound as if it really might work.

“Eddie, we need to check Janet Tripp’s keys. Tom Mears had them in an evidence bag, and he was going to run prints, but we need to know if her apartment keys are on the ring.”

“You mean the keys to the place she shares with Sisneros?” Mitchell asked.

“Right.”

“Is Sisneros with you?”

“Yes, he is. We’re at the Don Juan.”

“Okay. Hang tight. Tom was downstairs with Linda a few minutes ago. I don’t know if he still is or not. Give me a minute to track things down.”

“We’re headed back to the office right now,” Estelle said. As she switched off, Mike nodded and slid out of the booth. He accepted both doggie boxes from JanaLynn.

Estelle dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the table, thinking immediately of the countless times she’d seen Bill Gastner do exactly the same thing, whether he’d had a dinner or just a slice of pie and coffee. “Thanks, JL,” she said.

“You guys take care,” JanaLynn said, and the look she gave Mike Sisneros would have been comical under other circumstances. She didn’t quite reach up and pinch her nose shut against the aroma, but her reaction was close. Oblivious, the deputy headed out of the restaurant toward Estelle’s car.

“Is he going to be all right?” JanaLynn whispered to Estelle as Mike slipped through the inner foyer door.

“We hope so,” Estelle said. “A little more sleep, a lot less beer, and a very long shower.”

It took a minute and a half to drive back to the Public Safety Building, straight east on Bustos through the heart of Posadas. The two of them rode in silence, Estelle content to leave the young man alone with his thoughts. Mike Sisneros appeared to have pulled himself out of his personal morass, and his eyes flicked from one side of the street to another as if the answers to all his questions were about to step out in front of the county car. Estelle could see that he was thinking, not just puddling. That was progress of a sort.

Inside the Sheriff’s Office, Eddie Mitchell stood near the dispatch island, and as Estelle and Mike entered, he extended a plastic evidence bag toward Estelle. “They’re still downstairs,” he said.

“Still?” She looked up at the wall clock as she and Mike followed Mitchell to his office.

“Still. It’s the new schedule we talked about. Thirty-six hours on, two hours off. That way, we’ll be able to cut back to a staff of two. Leona Spears will be ecstatic.”

Estelle looked quickly toward the front doors and the foyer, where the line of plastic chairs awaited visitors. Leona Spears, the potential county manager-to-be, was nowhere in sight. “She was here?”

Mitchell raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Paranoid, are we?”

“No…not paranoid, exactly. I just want to have time to prepare for the challenge,” Estelle said. Mitchell closed his office door, and Estelle spread the plastic bag out on his desk so she could look at each key. The fob was bright blue plastic with the a amp; h welding logo in gold. “Which one goes to the apartment, Mike?”

Sisneros took the bag, glanced through the set, and shook his head, then looked more carefully. “It’s not there.”

“She did have them, though?”

“Well, of course she had them.”

“As far as you know, she had them when you two last saw each other? What, that would be yesterday some time?”

“I suppose so. I didn’t ask.” He hunched his shoulders. “Who ever asks somebody if they have their keys? I mean, do you have your house key on your key ring?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

Resisting the temptation to check, but now keenly aware of the weight of her own key ring in her pocket, she plunged doggedly on. “But as far as you knew, Janet had her own key to your apartment and she had it with her. It was on this key ring, not some separate one? She didn’t have it on a separate special one or something?”

“Yes, I said.” A flash of irritation flushed his face. “It’s just the one key.” He enunciated the words as if talking to little Carlos. “It’s one key, and it fits both the inside door by the stairwell, and the outside door. That’s the one door we use most of the time. We don’t come and go through the house. We use the outside stairway.”

“You always lock the apartment when you go out?” Mitchell asked.

“Yes. I mean, we forget once in a while, but yeah…we lock it as a matter of course.”

“Leave an extra key with somebody? The manager, someone like that?”

“No. Mrs. Freeman might have one. I suppose she does. I never asked her.”

“Let me see yours.” Mitchell held out his hand and waited while the deputy dug the wad of keys out of his hip pocket. “Which one?”

Sisneros held the apartment key by the blade, the rest dangling. Mitchell took them and looked again at the keys in the evidence bag.

“Okay,” he said slowly, and looked up questioningly at Estelle. “Keys don’t just come off key rings all by themselves. And you’re sure she didn’t keep it on a separate ring.”

“I know she didn’t.”

“So where did it go?”

“I don’t know, Captain.” The use of rank as a name wasn’t lost on Eddie, who gazed thoughtfully at Sisneros.

“We have two choices that make sense,” Estelle said. “Either Janet gave it to someone…to anyone-”

“Why would she do that?” Sisneros interrupted.

“You’d know that better than we would, Mike.”

“Well, I don’t know it.”

“No idea? All right, then. The other choice is that someone took it. Let’s suppose for a minute. Suppose that the killer took it off the ring.”

“What would he want with it?” Sisneros asked. “The killer, I mean. If he took it.”

“Good question. Obviously to get inside her apartment…either then or to use at some point in the future. He knew where she lived. Or he found out one way or another.” She held up the keys in the bag, looking at them again. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out which one is for the apartment.” She counted them off. “Jeep keys, this one looks like it’s for a small suitcase or night bag, we’ve got a safety deposit key for Posadas State Bank, and I’d be willing to bet that this big Yale key is for A amp; H Welding. Who knows what the little Brinks key is for…some little padlock somewhere.”

“That’s to her storage unit over on Escondido, by the trailer park. Where she used to live.”

“Fair enough. Somebody wasn’t interested in gaining entry to that, evidently. Is anything else missing from your apartment?” Mitchell asked.

“Anything else?” Sisneros replied. “I mean, nothing’s missing. I was there from the time you dropped me off until the undersheriff called this morning. If something was gone, I would have noticed.”

I’m not so sure of that, Estelle thought. The way Mike Sisneros had looked when she first saw him plodding down the stairs suggested that a bulldozer could have driven through the apartment and he wouldn’t have noticed or, if he had noticed, wouldn’t have minded.

“Other than your.22 pistol, I think he means,” Estelle said. “Janet’s personal effects were all there?”

For the first time since breakfast, the young man’s face crumpled with agony, and he leaned against Mitchell’s desk, jaw slack. “Christ,” he whispered. “Yeah…they were there. They’re still there. I walked into the bathroom and her comb and brush and everything…” He choked it off. “Still there,” he murmured. “Just like she stepped out for a minute and was coming right back.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “I can’t believe this.”

“The gun was gone,” Mitchell said mildly, repeating the obvious. His heavy-lidded eyes assessed Mike Sisneros without a trace of expression.

“I don’t know when that happened,” the deputy said. “I’ve said that a dozen times.”

“Could it have happened yesterday?”

“I suppose it could,” Sisneros said, exasperated. “And it could have happened a year ago, too. But what sense does that make? He shot her, then took her apartment key, went to the apartment and stole my gun? That’s sort of backward for that little scenario, don’t you think?”

“What if Janet didn’t have her key with her yesterday.” Estelle voiced the possibility and waited.

“If she lost her key, why wouldn’t she have said something to me when she came here? Wouldn’t that have been the logical thing? Especially since I was going to Lordsburg, and she had decided not to. What’s she going to do, sit in the apartment all day?”

“But she didn’t do that, did she?”

Mike’s temper rose again. “What are you getting at, anyway?”

Estelle held up the evidence bag. “The apartment key is gone. That’s what I’m getting at. We don’t know why it’s gone. We don’t know when it went missing.” She dropped the plastic bag back on Mitchell’s desk. “I’ll feel better when I know the answers.”

“Well, so will I.”

“I’m glad to hear that. You ready to go back to work?”

He didn’t look ready for anything, but Estelle saw Mike Sisneros’s spine straighten a little.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Now that we know the key is missing, I want you to go back to your apartment and really look, Mike. Look through everything. All your papers. All your stuff. And Janet’s too. I know it’s hard, but you’ll know better than anyone what should be there and what’s not. Look at everything, Mike.” She paused. “When you’re going through Janet’s things, get the telephone number and address for her sister. We’ll want to talk with her.”

“Okay. I know where that is. You want me to call her?”

“I’d rather do that, Mike.” She nodded at the evidence bag. “And if I were you, I’d have the locks changed today.”

“A burglar’s not going to get much in my place,” he said.

“I’m not worried about burglars, Mike.”