The Fourth Time is Murder

Chapter Thirty

The highway southwest to Regál was empty that Sunday morning. Estelle slowed as they approached Victor Sanchez’s Broken Spur Saloon. The parking lot in front was deserted, but Estelle could see Victor’s blue pickup truck parked in the back, sandwiched between the saloon and the mobile home where he, his wife, and their son lived.

Madelyn Bolles had been a silent passenger for most of the ride, and as Estelle slowed the car and pulled just off the highway on the verge of the saloon’s parking lot, she looked quizzically at the undersheriff. Estelle stopped the car. “If you look ahead toward the pass, you can see the switchback just below where the truck crashed,” she said. She leaned forward, both arms folded across the steering wheel. “One of the remaining questions.” She didn’t complete the thought but sat and gazed out at the rugged San Cristóbals.

After a moment she extended a finger and pointed toward Regál Pass. “Chris Marsh drove over the pass sometime Wednesday night. We don’t know exactly what time, but it was after dark. The highway was wet, and he swerved to avoid a deer. He lost control, and his truck flipped over the side, crashing down through the rocks.” She spread her hands, framing the mountain in front of them. “That’s what we know. There’s no spot that I can find, short of immediately at the accident site, where we could watch the highway and see headlights come over the pass.” She paused, regarding the mountain. “Not from this side. We could sit right on the pass, where the Forest Service sign is, and see the area.”

“If someone climbed down to the wreck immediately after it happened, you’re wondering where they were parked,” Madelyn said.

“Exactly. They were waiting for Chris Marsh. The pass is as far as he got. Someone was in a position to know what happened-or at least to guess what happened. We’re sure that someone climbed down to the wreck that night-almost immediately after the crash-and made sure that Marsh was dead. They took whatever documents he might have had with him, right down to the delivery service magnetic signs that were on the truck’s doors.”

“How could someone do such a thing? The beer down the gullet thing?” the writer asked, and then immediately corrected herself. “Don’t answer that,” she said. “Every corner of the planet has its share of wackos.”

“It seems to me,” Estelle said, “that this person was waiting for Chris Marsh somewhere…maybe right where we’re sitting now.”

“He couldn’t see the crash site, though,” Madelyn said.

“No. They might have been on the phone with each other. That might have been what distracted his attention so that he didn’t see the deer in time. He’s on the cell, boasting of what he did. ‘You’re there, I’m here, and I’m on my way with a fat check.’”

“After the wreck, could he have managed a call for help, then?”

“No, I don’t think so. My guess is that he could manage a gurgle. That’s the extent of it, if he was conscious at all. We never found a cell phone, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t have one. In any event, he doesn’t show up, and he doesn’t ring back. His partner is going to go looking. Sure enough, there’s a dead deer, and maybe some skid marks.” Estelle surveyed the parking lot. “Whoever it was could have been waiting here, or on down at the intersection of the county road, or at any one of the pull-outs. She was close. She had to be.”

“She?”

“Could have been,” Estelle said. “We know that Chris Marsh had a girlfriend-whether it was just casual or not, we don’t know.”

“That would be cold,” Madelyn said.

“But it fits in some ways,” Estelle said, and released the brake. “That’s what Tony Abeyta’s been digging into. Marsh lived in Las Cruces. We don’t know much about him, other than that he was a part-time student, lived in a low-rent trailer park, and had a girlfriend.” She drove out of the lot, the car lurching across the shoulder and onto the pavement.

“What about this guy?” Madelyn turned and surveyed the saloon as they pulled away. “Could he have seen anything?”

“Victor? Unlikely. He has no view of any of that area from inside-he can’t even see his own parking lot. And I don’t think he’d notice, anyway. And he wouldn’t tell us if he did.”

“Oh,” Madelyn said, her eyes growing large. “Hostile country?”

“Oh, very.”

“Even something as nasty as this, he wouldn’t talk to you?”

“Oh, he might, between grumbles and growls. But he has an image to uphold, you know.”

“What about the boy’s parents? Have they been of any help?”

“None. They’ve given up on their son. Wrote him right off. They live back east, and aren’t interested in coming out. Cremate him and ship the ashes back, if we want. Or dispose of them here. Whatever.”

“You’re kidding,” Madelyn said.

“Oh, no.”

“Does that ever get to you?”

“Well…”

“I mean some of these people that you find yourself dealing with-just amazing. Every wrong decision that could be made, they make it. I’ve met people who seem to thrive on being miserable. If I had to be around ’em for any length of time, they’d drive me either into a grand funk depression, or to homicide. You must feel that way sometimes, don’t you?”

“I’d have to think about that,” Estelle replied. “I don’t spend a lot of time being depressed, though. Everybody has the opportunity to make choices. What they choose to do is their business. Up to a point, anyway. Most of the time the law is pretty clear-cut.”

“But don’t you wish that sometimes you could just wave a magic wand and make all the sadness, all the viciousness, all the stupidity, just go away?”

“Then I’d be out of a job,” Estelle quipped. “It’s all part of what Bill Gastner likes to quote as ‘the great human experiment.’”

“I can do without some parts of the experiment,” Madelyn said.

“Sure enough,” Estelle agreed. “But if we live in the middle of it, we don’t get to choose.”

The highway up through the pass was dappled here and there as the morning sun warmed through the stands of runty trees, and Estelle slowed the car to 30 miles an hour, the slope steep enough that the car shifted to second gear and then stayed there as they ambled up the flank of the mountain. She lowered the window, the flow of air chilly but lush with innocent fragrance.

They reached the short, straight stretch that rose to the pass itself, and after a glance in the rearview mirror, Estelle stopped the car. “He crests the top of the pass, and almost immediately collides with the deer. He loses it, and you can see right over there,” and she pointed at the hump of dirt just uphill of the guardrail, “where his truck vaulted over.”

“How fast do you think he was going?”

“Sixty, maybe. I don’t think much faster than that. That’s enough to do it.”

Madelyn turned in her seat, looking back the way they’d come. “And the highway department found him two days later.”

“Yes. It was more a misting than a rain. The highway was wet, but there wasn’t enough rain to flush away the marks. Linda even managed to take an exposure that shows them.”

“That answers my question then. If he called and said, ‘I’m leaving now,’ she…he…whoever it was would wait a few minutes. Late evening, she’d be looking for his headlights.”

“That’s right.”

“She’d still be waiting. After a few minutes, she’d try to call him to ask where he was. No response and she’d go looking. And that’s my question. Were there enough traces of the accident left to mark the site?”

“The answer to that is ‘yes,’ Madelyn. I can imagine her driving to the top of the pass, and maybe even down into Regál. When Marsh doesn’t show up, she would retrace the route. Coming northbound, there are the tracks, the dead deer, and a short section of mangled guardrail.”

She pulled the car into gear. “Let me move out of these people’s way.” She accelerated hard and pulled off near the Forest Service sign announcing the pass. An enormous camper towing a flashy SUV rumbled by, its occupants offering a friendly wave, their vehicle leaving a wake of diesel fumes.

“I wonder if she had a pang of doubt,” Madelyn said.

“About?”

“I wonder if there was a moment when she thought that the young man-Marsh was his name? When she thought that he was running with the money.”

“That’s entirely possible.”

“Otherwise, why would she have been in the area in the first place? If she trusted him to make the delivery…He had the cashier’s check, am I right?”

“Yes.”

“So then why is she dogging his tracks? Is she afraid he’s going to split on her?”

“Interesting,” Estelle said. “We’re going to make a convert out of you yet. While you’re considering all those questions, add this one to the list, Madelyn. Why didn’t she just ride along with Marsh in the first place?”

“Couriers don’t carry passengers?”

Estelle pulled the car back out on the highway. “Good point, but who’s going to think about that?” she said. “When a delivery truck pulls up at your driveway, do you check to make sure the driver is solo?”

“Huh. She could have just ridden with him.”

“And we would have found her bashed and broken on the cliff side along with Marsh,” Estelle said.

“Could she have known the crash would happen? Some sort of vehicular sabotage?”

“Vehicular sabotage,” Estelle repeated with a grin. “What a concept.”

“Has anyone thought of that?”

“I don’t think so,” the undersheriff said. “That’s the sort of thing that works really, really well in movies, Madelyn. It’s right up there in popularity with the explosive post that makes the car inexplicably flip over on cue. In this case, the most likely scenario is that the young man collected a grillful of venison, and then lost control.”

“Which prompts the most interesting question of all, at least for me,” Madelyn said. “How do you sleep at night with all these unsolved conundrums floating around in your head? How much of this do you take home?”

“I have a houseful of wonderful distractions,” Estelle replied. “And you have to remember that this is the exception, rather than the rule. As padrino says, our job is ninety-nine percent boredom, interrupted by one percent panic and mayhem. Most of the time, we’re looking for something to do.”

“You think very highly of him, don’t you. The ‘godfather.’ That’s how padrino translates, am I right?”

“Roughly. And yes, I do think highly of him. We love him dearly.”

“You’ve known him since the ice ages?”

“About that long. I first met Bill Gastner when I was twelve. He and my great-uncle Reuben visited Tres Santos. That’s about forty miles straight ahead south from here.”

“You guys don’t have jurisdiction over the border, though.…”

“No, not in any formal sense. In this case, someone stole several pallets of bricks from a construction site near Posadas. The bricks ended up in Tres Santos. Bill and Reuben went down to negotiate their return without involving the judiciales.”

“Your uncle stole them? Is that what you’re saying?”

“‘Informal time payment’ might be more accurate,” Estelle said. “Anyway, that’s when I met Bill Gastner for the first time. Twenty-seven years ago. Sometimes it seems a lifetime away, sometimes like yesterday.”

“Memory lanes are like that,” Madelyn said. Below them, the village of Regál was still in deep shadow, the buttress of mountains hiding them from the sun until late morning. Despite the promise of a mild February day, with the sky clear of clouds, a few wisps of piñon smoke perfumed the village. “You’d think a place like this would be so far out of the way that nothing would touch them,” the writer said.

“These folks argue about immigration and abortion rights and taxes and Iraq like everyone else,” Estelle said. “And water rights, and the cost of gasoline, and who’s sleeping with whom.”

“When’s the first mass?” They could see that the iglesia’s parking lot was still empty.

“Eleven o’clock,” Estelle replied. “First and only. Father Anselmo has mass in María at eight, then comes over here.” As they drew closer, Estelle could see a trace of smoke from the church’s single stovepipe. Emilio Contreras would be at the iglesia, chasing the chill, dabbing the last bit of dust from the furnishings. In the old days, he might have had to rouse a few illegals from their snoozing on the pews.

“Do you ever go?” The question surprised Estelle, and she looked across at Madelyn. “Or does your job make that sort of thing difficult?” When the undersheriff didn’t respond immediately, Madelyn added, “Or is that question too personal?”

“No,” Estelle said. “And no, I don’t go.” The response sounded more abrupt than she intended, but the writer accepted the explanation with a nod.

“It would be hard, I guess,” she said. “You spend a career working with the most base of human ulterior motives, and it would be a challenge to sit in a group of people, hearing all the hypocrisy.”

“I hadn’t thought of it like that,” Estelle said. “I just don’t think about it. It’s not something that I consider.”

“Even last year, when you were hurt?”

“Especially not then.”

At the bottom of the hill, Estelle slowed and turned into the dirt lane that first passed by the Contreras home, then meandered through the village.

“What will happen to the young man you apprehended yesterday?” Madelyn asked as they passed by the driveway to Joe and Lucinda Baca’s adobe.

“Immigration will return him to Mexican authorities,” Estelle said. “From that point it’s completely unpredictable.”

“That’s what I’ve heard. He’ll try again, no doubt.”

“No doubt. And that’s part of the dilemma with Joe and Lucinda. They make a tempting target. All that money makes an easy target.”

“It’s not like they keep it in bundles under the bed,” Madelyn said. “At least I hope they don’t.”

“No matter where it’s kept,” Estelle said. As she drove around another apple orchard, its irrigation pipe discharging a meager stream into the freshly hoed ditch, she slowed the car to a walk, then eased into Serafina Roybal’s narrow driveway. The retired schoolteacher’s Jeep Wagoneer had been backed out of the small shed and parked near the rose trellis on the southwest side of the adobe. The entire truck was evenly covered with fine dust and sparrow droppings. The left rear tire was just a couple of pounds above dead flat.

A small station wagon was parked close to the kitchen door, and Estelle pulled in directly behind it.

She keyed the mike. “PCS, three-ten.”

“Three-ten, PCS.”

“Ten-twenty-eight New Mexico niner-eight-niner Charlie Bravo Nora.”

“Ten-four.”

She waited, mike in hand.

“This doesn’t work?” Madelyn said, tapping the flat computer monitor.

Estelle shook her head. “I don’t know what happened. It’s scheduled for replacement next week. I’m getting a new car with a whole raft of new gadgets coming on board.”

“Three-ten, niner-eight-niner Charlie Bravo Nora should appear on a 2003 Subaru Outback, color green over silver, registered to Irene Merriam Salas, 301 College Lane Circle, Las Cruces. Negative wants or warrants.”

“Ten-four. Thanks, Brent.” She slid the mike back into the rack. “It appears that the granddaughter is visiting,” she said, switching off the car. “Serafina said yesterday that she was going to. I think it’s best if you stay here.”