The Fourth Time is Murder

Chapter Three

The pickup lay on its top, nose downhill. The twisted frame and torn bed had been mangled in every direction. A single stubborn bolt had refused to sheer, and the lightweight aluminum camper shell had been flailed into what looked like a white, rumpled sheet, still attached to the truck bed by that single bolt. The cab was crushed flat to the dashboard, having taken the brunt of the first somersaults over the guardrail.

The EMTs had covered the driver’s body with a sheet of yellow plastic. Matty Finnegan and Cliff Herrera waited off to one side while Estelle surveyed the entirety of the catastrophe. The EMTs were well aware that adding their tracks to the scene only complicated matters.

“He stayed with it for a while,” Matty said. She pointed up the hill. A hundred yards above, the guardrail was a faint glint in the lights of the parked vehicles. The scars where the truck had hit the ground were clear. Had the steep slope been covered with the characteristic runty brush of this rugged country, the little Chevy might have been snagged earlier, its crashing descent slowed. But the rocks hadn’t provided anything other than a hard springboard for each amazing tumble.

Estelle nodded. The driver had stayed with the truck for most of the journey-unfortunately for him. What the crushing cab hadn’t done to him, the rocks had finished off. He lay smashed between two large slabs of limestone, and Estelle approached the body from the side away from the truck.

She bent down and pulled the yellow plastic back. The young man-if it was his truck, he was just twenty-one-lay on his back. One leg had caught and twisted sideways in the dead stump wood of a gnarled juniper. His right arm, hidden under his body, appeared to have been broken so many times that the original line formed by the elbow’s joint to upper and lower portions was lost.

“We haven’t touched anything,” Matty Finnegan said. “Just covered him up. I wouldn’t be surprised if in a little bit this mist turns to rain…or worse.”

Another vehicle stopped on the road up above, and Estelle recognized the sound of the sheriff’s elderly pickup. “Weather isn’t going to bother this young man much anymore,” Estelle said. She knelt and stretched out a hand, feeling the side of the victim’s neck. The skin was as cold as the February weather. The young man’s features were surprisingly composed, the only injury to his face a single massive laceration through his right cheek.

“Any idea how long he’s been here?” Cliff asked. “He’s not rigored anymore.”

“No telling,” Estelle replied. “Connie called Dispatch to report the accident just a minute before Ernie called you guys out. As far as I know, he could have been here for a week.”

“Well…,” Matty said.

Estelle glanced at her and shrugged. “In a manner of speaking,” she amended. She looked back at the victim’s face. He stared straight up into the night sky, face surprisingly clean of dirt or blood. The ravens and coyotes hadn’t found him yet. A puddle of blood had formed and dried beside his head, and Estelle bent down with her flashlight. The man’s left ear had been terribly lacerated, gouged out of the side of his head by a raking blow-probably a sharp corner of boulder, the same instant that his cheek had been ripped open.

“He’s local?” Matty asked.

“Don’t know yet,” Estelle said. “The truck is registered to Chris Marsh of Las Cruces, who should be twenty-one. That part fits.” She looked at the victim’s left arm, and saw that the unpredictable forces of the crash had broken it in several places above the elbow, including a catastrophic fracture of the joint of clavicle and shoulder socket.

She shifted position and realized that Deputy Dennis Collins was crouching at her right elbow, so close that she could hear his breathing and smell his aftershave. He reached out and laid his hand on her forearm. “This is what I meant,” he said. “Look at this.” He held his flashlight for her. The man’s left hand lay palm up in a small clear spot between the two rocks, fingers gently curled. Estelle bent close, puzzled at what she saw.

“What have we got here?” she said, more to herself than Collins. But the deputy assumed the question was meant for him, and he used a ballpoint pen as a pointer. “I think these are boot marks,” he said. “We got the heel right here, in this patch of dirt between the rocks. The ball of the foot rested right on his hand.” The marks were clear, outlined in muddy dirt on the pale skin of the man’s palm.

“What’s with this?” Estelle whispered. “Move a little bit,” she said to Collins, and he pushed himself away enough that, shifting her knees, she could scrunch down until the slope of one of the rocks cradled the side of her head.

“More light?” Matty asked helpfully.

“Please,” the undersheriff said. “Don’t step anywhere around his head. Come in from behind me.” In a moment, the second beam from Matty’s light flooded the grim picture. It hadn’t been their imagination. Someone had planted a good-sized boot on the victim’s left hand, pinning it in place.

“You want me to lift his hand up so you can see the back side?” Collins asked.

“No, no,” Estelle said quickly, straightening up. “Whatever is there will wait.” She nodded at the EMT and then turned to Collins. “But you’re right, Dennis…that’s going to be interesting. If this happened right here, then there’ll be grit and debris pressed into the back of his hand. We need pictures before any of this is moved.”

She straightened up and looked up toward the highway. In the glare of emergency lights, she saw the towering figure of Sheriff Robert Torrez, who only two years ago would have bounded down this rugged slope without a second thought. A hip injury that had demanded six months of convalescence and another half year of therapy had changed his outlook on indestructibility.

Estelle pulled her handheld from its belt holster. “Bobby, we need to call Linda on this,” she said, then thought, She’ll love it, and that prompted the recollection of the e-mail she’d been reexamining for the umpteenth time just an hour before. The reporter from the women’s magazine didn’t know what she was missing-the big, tough, macho sheriff up on the highway, who understandably hesitated to launch himself down the cliff, calling the cheerful young girl, the department’s photographer, who would tackle the assignment without a second thought, even though she was blind in one eye, her depth perception far less than perfect.

“Got it,” Torrez said. “What do you have?”

“One dead from multiple trauma. But someone else has been here.”

“How’s that?”

“We’ve got a boot print where it shouldn’t be.” She had tried to imagine how Chris Marsh-if this was in fact him-might have accomplished the boot track by himself…reaching down to his broken foot, hearing the sharp snap and pop of broken bones as he did so. Not likely. She flicked the yellow tarp clear of the victim’s lower body. The victim was wearing what had been a tan jacket, a neatly pressed tan work shirt with matching tan trousers, and highly polished ankle-high black work boots.

“Ay,” the undersheriff said. “What have we got here…?”

“That’s what I thought,” Matty said. “He a deliveryman of some sort?”

Estelle turned and played her flashlight over the truck. Although not new, the pickup would have been a neat little unit, with its matching white camper shell. She got up and made her way farther downhill until she could see the driver’s door. During one of the crushing landings, it had opened and then been smashed double, folding forward against itself. Estelle could see there was no logo or sign on the door.

“Odd,” she said, hefting her radio again. She rested the stubby antenna against her lower lip for a few seconds, deep in thought before she pressed the transmit bar. “Bobby, I’d really like Alan to take a look at what we have here, but getting him down here is going to be a stunt.”

“He’ll manage,” Torrez said. “We’ll come in from the bottom.”

“How’s that going to happen?” Matty asked. She played her light downhill, and Estelle could see the bottom of the canyon-perhaps only fifty yards farther down the hill.

“One of the old minin’ roads cuts up the bottom of this canyon,” Torrez radioed, as if he could hear Matty’s question. “I can get Alan in there.”

“Linda, too,” Estelle replied. “Is there room for the ambulance on that trail?”

“That’s negative. But we can put the gurney in the back of my truck. Save a long climb.”

“You got that right,” Cliff Herrera said with relief.

“Be back to you,” Torrez said, and his figure disappeared. “Tell Cliff to come up and move his unit before someone punts it over the side on your heads. I’ll show him where to park.”

“My unit,” Herrera said, and grinned at Matty. “Suddenly it’s my unit.” They held their lights for him, amplifying his own, until he had climbed far enough up the slope that they could hear his breath coming in ragged whistles of effort.

“Bobby,” Estelle radioed, “see if you can find the exact spot where the driver lost it. When Linda gets here, have her take a complete series of photos of any skid marks that might be left. If the weather closes in any more, we’re going to lose those.”

“Yep,” Torrez replied. “I was lookin’ at the dead doe in the ditch up here. Connie says she retrieved a transmitter. We don’t know for sure if it’s the same accident.”

“No, we don’t. But the condition of the deer fits. It’s been there a day or two.”

“More’n likely, that’s where it started,” Torrez said. “Look at the left front of the truck for hide and blood.”

Over the years, Estelle had come close to clobbering critters on the highway half a dozen times, and connected twice-once with a mule deer and once with a Brangus calf. She knew how little it took for even seasoned reflexes to do the wrong thing. It was easy to picture the white pickup truck driving on the damp pavement, perhaps a shade too fast, cresting the pass and starting down the slight curve just as the doe stepped off the shoulder, intent on crossing the highway for no other reason than that it was there. The rush of headlights would make no sense to the animal. It would either freeze in place or bolt-and a driver could bet money on the critter bolting the wrong way.

Estelle took her time, sweeping the ground around the body for anything out of place. The muddy residue on the victim’s left palm carried enough of the characteristic mold marks that there was no mistaking its origin. Why would someone do that? Did a passerby witness the accident, then clamber down the dangerous hill and, unable to stop the momentum of his descent, plant a foot on the victim’s limp hand? Stranger things had happened.

She peered again at the mark. With a proper photo, they might be able to ascertain direction, but here in this variable light, it would only be a guess. Collins thought a deep imprint in the gravelly soil was a heel. He might be right, and that meant the boot that stomped the hand was pointing uphill. The owner of the boot would have been standing close to where she now stood.

Keeping to the hard surface of the surrounding rocks, Estelle made her way to a point uphill of the body, near the right side of his head. A large amount of blood had foamed up and out of the victim’s gaping mouth, and she could imagine the young man struggling for his last breath as his flailed ribs moved in all the wrong ways. “Huh,” she said, and tried to find a way to support herself on elbows and knees, ignoring the dull, naggy ache in her own bones, exacerbated by the climbing and bending. Past injuries had a way of reminding their owners, she thought.

The victim’s head was turned slightly to the right, and she bent down close enough to smell the path of his last breath. The distinctive odor of beer clung to the body, and she imagined that she could see dried residue on his right cheek, as if the beverage had trickled out of his mouth during his final moments. Maybe it had.

Was Chris Marsh tipping a can of brew just as the doe bolted into the truck’s path? Smashed and battered down through the rocks, crushed by his own somersaulting truck, he had come to rest here flat on his shattered back, staring at the foggy heavens, choking on a last mouthful of beer.

Were you dead when your friend stepped on your hand? she thought, and then aloud, she said, “And where did he go?”

“Who?” Matty said. The EMT sat quietly on a nearby rock, watching.

“That’s what we need to find out,” Estelle said. She pushed herself upright and turned back to the truck. Again picking her way using the rocks as her only path, she took her time, finally kneeling at the crushed door on the driver’s side. Because the truck was upside down and twisted, the opening would have allowed a child to wriggle through, but not Christopher Marsh. The inside of the cab was a jumble, with all the trash that had been on the floor now tossed about the crumpled space in senseless disarray. A white plastic cooler was jammed between the crushed roof, the remains of the steering wheel, and the gear lever, jammed so hard that it had cracked open and molded itself around the bent lever.

The smell of beer was moderate, and she could see where some had leaked from the cooler and puddle on the head liner. In the far corner, about where the corner of the windshield had originally met the dashboard, lay a bent but still-sealed beer can, sprung loose from the cooler, no doubt.

“Okay,” Estelle murmured to herself. She had seen hundreds of accidents similar in most respects to this one-crumpled and torn steel, crumpled and smashed drivers and passengers, all tainted with that familiar, depressing aroma potpourri of beer and blown bladders and colons.

She got up and brushed off the knees of her trousers. The accidents were all too familiar, and so was the notion that someone-some Good Samaritan-had stopped and gone to all the trouble of climbing down that forbidding cliff side. But then, instead of phoning 911 from that spot with the ubiquitous cell phone, at that moment he or she had left the scene.

And then what? Estelle thought. Who would stop, climb down, and then leave, panicked by the gurgling death rattles of Chris Marsh?

“Three-ten, PCS.”

Dispatcher Ernie Wheeler’s disembodied voice startled her out of her thoughts.

“Three-ten. Go ahead.”

“Three-ten, be advised that both Dr. Perrone and Dr. Guzman have been called into surgery. The hospital tells me that it’s going to be a little while before either one of them can answer a call.”

“Ten-four. Keep me posted. The weather might force us to transport here in a little bit. I’m going to hold off as long as we can, though. As soon as one or both are out of surgery, get back to me.”

“Ten-four.”

She could feel the mist on her face like a cold, clingy veil, and she bent to pull the yellow plastic so that it covered the boot-marked left hand of the victim.