The Fourth Time is Murder

Chapter Thirty-six

Dust still hung thick in the air as Estelle slid her car to a halt. The westbound lanes of the interstate became a kaleidoscope of lights and milling people. Five semis sat motionless, blocking both lanes, their diesel engines muttering quietly. More would line up behind them by the minute, with all the rest of the arterial flow adding to the clot until it stretched for a mile or more.

The ball of junk that had once been the sleek, fashionable sports car rested in the center median. One of the truckers had climbed down from the cab of his rig and trotted over to the car, and he stood helpless, hands pumping up and down as if he were reciting an incantation. Three others were walking cautiously around the wreck, two of them with fire extinguishers in hand.

In the distance, Estelle heard the wail of sirens eastbound.…It would be Eddie Mitchell and Dennis Collins. An EMT rescue squad and ambulance would be en route close behind them.

“He just ticked the left rear of my trailer,” the first driver said when he saw Estelle. “Jesus H. Christ, he come out of nowhere.” He was an older man, pleasant enough looking, his face white as a sheet. “Musta rolled five or six times. I guess he’s still inside.”

The car lay on its top facing eastbound, three wheels askew but still attached to the car, the fourth ripped off to join the trail of parts marking the car’s path along the median. Estelle took a few seconds to walk a circle around it, making sure the area was clear of hazards. She approached the driver’s side. As she cut across through the stumpy desert scrub, Robert Torrez’s Expedition pulled off the interstate, crossing the median well behind where the first marks of the car’s trajectory marked the shoulder. He parked on the median side of the eastbound lane’s shoulder fifty yards beyond the crash site, facing traffic.

Estelle knelt beside the wreck, which now from front to back appeared to be about six feet long, its extremities crushed and torn by the impact forces. What remained of the windshield structure and the roof was slammed into the ground, crushing inward.

She swept away a small bush, mindful that the desert, even between lanes of an interstate, hosted all kinds of interesting critters who didn’t care for intrusion. Then, with her face touching the ground, she tried to see through a small triangle of side window, shattered inward by the crushed roof post. She could not see past the fabric of the deployed air bag, and she held her breath, listening. The ticking of hot metal sounded like an old, out-of-sync clock.

“CJ?” Estelle called. “Can you hear me?” There was no response. Hearing Sheriff Torrez’s heavy breathing behind her, she pushed herself away. “I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t see her. I can’t tell what position she’s in.” She crawled toward the rear of the car, and tried to see through the little rear wing window.

“We got rescue comin’,” Torrez said. “Cut away that door and we’ll be able to tell.”

With the metal twisted and mangled into a puzzle of interlocked, sharp parts, simply hauling the car upright with a cable from a wrecker was out of the question. The driver was already apt to be impaled on sharp objects. A careless movement of the car’s carcass could finish the job. Estelle circled to the passenger side, but that had taken a number of smashing hits. The car lay more on its right side than left, and the rising ground made it impossible to see inside. From the rear, the trunk lid and its supporting structure had bashed upward, and then driven into the dirt.

“Don’t let it burn!” The four words came from the core of the crushed wreckage, thin and desperate.

Estelle darted back to the driver’s side and dropped to her hands and knees. “CJ, can you hear me?”

“Don’t let it burn!” the voice repeated, and trailed off into a whimper.

“We’re going to get you out of there. Just hold on. How badly are you hurt?”

“I…I don’t know. I can’t move.”

“They’re on their way,” Estelle said.

The wait was agonizing, even though it was probably no more than a few minutes. By the time the rescue squad arrived, set up a perimeter, made a hasty game plan, and finally fired up the gasoline-powered extraction jaws, Estelle saw what had to be at least sixty-five people standing in the median or beside their vehicles.

Dennis Collins, dressed in blue jeans and a light windbreaker with sheriff’s department in huge yellow letters across the back, appeared at her side. “We can open the right westbound lane and get most of these guys out of here,” he said. “You want Allen and me to start workin’ on that?”

“No, I don’t,” she said. “Until we talk to everyone who saw this, I don’t want anything moved.” She turned and looked to the east. “That freight liner there with the double trailers?”

“Got it.”

“I want everyone who isn’t working this, or who doesn’t belong to one of the trucks of this front convoy here, back behind that spot. All the rubberneckers. We’re going to need the breathing space. Run a yellow tape across to my car, if you have to.”

“Got it.”

“After she’s out of the car, and after we take some measurements, we can open the right-hand lane.” She turned her attention back to the emergency workers. Jerry Buckman, a big, burly hulk of a man who appeared even larger in his bunker gear, worked the nose of the jaws into the door frame by the lower hinge, and it spread and popped the metal as if it were aluminum foil. He worked this way and that, worrying the metal of the door away from the frame, all the way down to what, in the upright vehicle, would be the top hinge, now forced into the dirt.

Shifting his stance deftly, he attacked the rear of the door, working down through the door lock itself. Finally, with the jaws between the lower edge of the door and the rocker panel, he eased the door gently away from the frame, always alert that his actions didn’t move the car. Throughout the process, the occupant, crushed into this impossibly small space, kept up a stream of whimpers, cries, and wails, most of them drowned out by the power equipment.

Finally Buckman stopped and shut down the noisy saw. “We can get us a chain right through here,” he said to Cliff Herrera. Buckman touched the lower edge of the rocker panel, now drawn four or five inches out. “Run it right down and out through the window.” That opening, where the driver’s elbow might rest with the window open, was crushed to within a couple inches of the ground.

Within seconds, the rescue workers threaded the chain down through the narrow opening and dragged it back out, securing it to a hefty come-along attached to the big rescue truck’s rear bumper.

With both sides and the bottom can-openered away, the door shifted easily, its crushed top and window frame digging a trough in the dirt. Cliff Herrera, about half Buckman’s size, bellied down on the ground and squirmed up close to peer inside. Even with the door peeled aside, the opening was desperately small. Knowing that Buckman would never allow her to approach in the first place, Estelle forced herself to stand well back as the rescue team worked. “You ain’t dressed for the dance, young lady,” he once had told her years before.

“Can you hear me?” Herrera asked, his voice loud and carefully enunciated. His head and one shoulder were inside the car, and Estelle could see him trying to shift position.

“Yes. Oh, please.”

“Okay, just hold still,” he said. “We’re going to get you out of here.”

Estelle moved close enough that she could hear Cliff’s insistent voice with a nonstop conversation, none of it making much of an impression on the car’s occupant.

“Listen,” he said at one point, then repeated himself as if the young woman were not listening. “Can you move this hand?” Estelle saw Herrera’s body shift as he stretched as far into the wreckage as he could. “Well, sure it hurts. Just try to stay calm. We’re with you.”

“Don’t go. It’s going to burn.”

“I’m not going away, and it’s not going to burn, young lady. I’ll be right back to get you out of here. Just hang in there with me.”

Cliff squirmed backward with alacrity. He lowered his voice, and Buckman and EMT Matty Finnegan drew close.

“The center console is crushing her against the roof,” he said. “Her head and shoulders are on the passenger side, and at least one foot is caught down by the pedals. I can’t feel around her neck, but everything is twisted up. Her breathing’s ragged.” He took a deep breath to calm himself. “Look, if we lift this thing up any, there’s a good chance it’ll crush her. I think what we need to do is take the seats apart. The roof is actually pretty flat. That’s going to help us.”

“Let’s do it,” Buckman said. “We’re burnin’ daylight.”

The words were no sooner out of his mouth than a brief symphony of horns and screeching tires erupted from the eastbound lanes, followed by a single loud crash. Knowing exactly what had happened, Estelle turned slowly in place. Two compact cars immediately behind a tractor trailer and in front of a commercial bus had melded into one as the driver in the rear had diverted his attention from traffic to gawk at the crash. The bus had managed to stop well short of the metal and plastic sandwich.

“Oh, cute,” Buckman snapped. One of the state troopers who had been directing traffic on that section of highway was standing frozen in place, hands on his hips in a momentary display of indignation at such stupidity.

Captain Eddie Mitchell strode across the median and intercepted Bob Torrez, who looked as if he were intent on killing someone. “Shut it down,” the sheriff snapped. “Goddamn morons.” Leaving Mitchell and the State Police to sort out the traffic snarl, Torrez beckoned to Estelle.

“What’s the deal?” he asked.

“They’re going to have to dismantle the car to get her out,” the undersheriff replied. “She’s responsive.…They can’t tell more than that yet.”

“Okay. I was just talkin’ to Abeyta. I sent him back to Cruces to work with the cops there,” Torrez said. “They got the one in custody, and are securing the house. They’ve got a warrant comin’. Then we’ll see what we can find.”

He looked past Estelle’s shoulder, and she could see the crow’s-feet deepen around his eyes. “Your passenger’s gettin’ more than she bargained for,” he said.

Estelle turned and saw Madelyn Bolles standing beside the patrol car, camera in hand, and realized that she had forgotten all about the writer.

“When all the dust clears, it’ll be interesting to hear her view on all of this,” Estelle remarked.

“Oh, I can’t wait,” Torrez remarked. He turned to watch the rescue crew. “They say how long it was going to take?”

“No.” CJ Vallejos’ “golden hour,” that time immediately following an accident when the badly injured victim’s life hung on a slender thread, was ticking away, each moment that medical care was delayed lessening her chances of survival. The girl was still conscious, still frightened that she was going to end up burning to death. The sixteen minutes that had passed since her car had ticked the back of one of the semis and gone ballistic must have seemed hours to her.

More than anything else, Estelle wanted to talk with her, to learn the answers to a host of still-puzzling questions. But the crash had changed all the rules. Now the center median of the interstate was full of people who had become skillful, compassionate Samaritans, advocates working relentlessly on behalf of Consuela Juanita Vallejos…advocates who for the moment didn’t care what she had done or to whom she had done it.