“So what else is new,” I grunted. “Where would we all be without nosy neighbors? And Grace said that Jim was alone out here?”
Torrez hesitated, and I looked up at him. His response wasn’t much more than a whisper. “That’s what she said.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
Torrez reached out and lightly tapped the big tire with the toe of his boot again. “This doesn’t look like a one-man job, sir.”
I gazed at the two machines. “Stranger things have happened, Robert,” I said. “It’s jury-rigged, that’s for sure. He wanted to lift the tire, so he tried to do it with the backhoe. Something slipped, like where he had the chain hooked, and he got down to work on it. The damn thing nailed him. In fact, that’s exactly what it looks like-one man trying to do something by himself that he shouldn’t have been. And he was in a foul mood to begin with.”
“You’ll be at the office later?” The way he said it sounded like he’d dismissed my logical scenario.
I nodded. “I’m just in the way here. Let me know if you need anything.” I indicated the idling tractor. “And you might as well shut that thing down. Make it easier to hear and breathe both.”
Torrez glanced at his watch. “Dr. Perrone will be here in a minute. Then we’ll clear things up. There’s no hurry.”
Chapter Seven
Brent Sutherland sat in front of the dispatcher’s console with both elbows on the table and his head supported in his hands. His unruly red hair was about an inch longer than I would have liked, but what the hell. If that was the only concession I had to make as the millennium clicked over, I was lucky.
Whether Sutherland was reading the New Mexico Criminal and Traffic Law Manual that rested open between his elbows or sleeping was hard to tell.
If the deputy was studying, he certainly had peace and quiet. The persistent exhaling of the building’s circulation system as it moved stale air, summer dust, and range country pollen from one room to the other was all the excitement the Public Safety Building had to offer at 3:15 that morning.
In four weeks Sutherland would attend the Academy, and until then the weekday graveyard dispatcher’s shift was just the right time and place to whittle away at his inexperience. Once in a while, Bob Torrez assigned Sutherland to double up on patrol with one of the deputies. We didn’t have the manpower to do that often, though, and Sutherland had to content himself with the bottom rung on the duty ladder.
Tom Mears, a veteran who preferred the midnight-to-eight shift so that he had time to race his beloved stock cars on summer weekends, was the only deputy on the road at the moment. Undersheriff Torrez and one or two others who were supposed to be off-duty were still over at the Sissons’, probing and photographing, oblivious to whatever else might be going on elsewhere in the county.
Mears and Sutherland had the place to themselves, and I trusted that Mears could keep the rookie out of trouble.
Whether the sound of my boots on the polished tile floor woke him up or it was just coincidence, Sutherland’s right hand drifted down from his chin and picked up the pencil on the table. He jotted a note in the margin of the book, replaced the pencil, and glanced at the digital clock in front of him.
“Fascinating stuff, eh?” I said, and Sutherland started, cranking his head around so fast I thought I heard a vertebra crack. “Sorry about that.” I stepped closer and looked at the log. Since the Sisson emergency, things had drifted to tomblike peace and quiet.
Thirty-one minutes before, Deputy Mears had radioed in that the side door of the tiny Catholic church in Regal was open, not an unusual state of affairs, and that he was going to check it. Three minutes later, logged at 02:47, Mears had radioed ten-eight, the numerical mumbo-jumbo that meant he was back in service.
“No sleep-overs this time,” I said, and Sutherland looked puzzled.
“Sir?”
“Sleep-overs. The church in Regal is never locked. I don’t think there’s even a lockable chasp on the door. It’s a favorite place for Mexican nationals to spend the night.”
“That’s why the three minutes, then,” Sutherland said.
“That’s why. And that’s why you need to be on your toes, even when you’re bored to death and you’ve committed that book to memory and you’re counting the ticks on the clock. Where’s the nearest officer who can provide backup to Mears?”
Sutherland frowned and I saw his back straighten and one hand move an inch or two in the direction of the transmit bar on the radio.
“No matter who you find,” I said, “odds are that they aren’t going to be close to Regal. So Mears is on his own. If he walks into that church and there are about eight illegals snoozing on the pews and two of them happen to be armed with something more than an attitude, the night can get exciting. So when someone goes in to check a place like that, you give him three or four minutes, no more. If he isn’t on the air ten-eight by then, you remind him.”
I leaned across and pushed the bar. “Three oh seven, PCS. Ten-thirty-nine.”
Three seconds later, Tom Mears’s matter-of-fact voice responded, “Three oh seven is ten-eight.”
“Ten-four. PCS two five one.”
I straightened up. “You know his status now, and he knows you’re not asleep.” I grinned. “And that’s all the weird folks who spend the night listening to scanners need to know, too. That’s why you don’t spend your shift asking the deputies where they are. There’s only one of him and a big, empty county. He’s got little-enough edge as it is without someone being able to plot his course every minute.”
“That’s what Ernie Wheeler said.”
“Listen to him.” I nodded. “On a night like this, when you’ve got deputies and civilians both edgy after the mess over at the Sissons’, somebody needs to be paying attention to the little things. Don’t let yourself be distracted. Pay attention.” I grinned. “End of sermon.”
“Yes, sir,” Sutherland said, nodding his head in appreciation. I wasn’t sure if he was glad to have such monumental erudition bestowed on him by the sheriff of Posadas County or glad that I had finally shut up.
I checked my mailbox and retrieved a yellow WHILE YOU WERE OUT note. I recognized Ernie Wheeler’s angular printing-just the name Frank Dayan, time recorded as 21:05, and a check through the please-return-call box. I turned it so that Sutherland could see it. “Were you here when Dayan called?”
“No, sir.”
“Huh,” I said. Dayan had called before the Sisson tragedy, so there was the possibility he wouldn’t even remember what he had wanted. Not that a call from the publisher of the Posadas Register was unusual at any hour. He was either an insomniac like myself or a twenty-hour-a-day workaholic-I wasn’t sure which. The Register came out on Fridays, reduced from its heyday as a twice-a-week rag, and most of the time Dayan and his staff of three did a pretty fair job selling ads and sandwiching a little news in what space was left.
I folded the note into a wad and tossed it in the trash. “Huh,” I muttered again, the nagging feeling that some creep had sent Dayan the same anonymous note that had been dispatched to at least two of the county commissioners sinking to the pit of my stomach. That was all we needed.
“If Linda Real comes in, I need to talk to her,” I said over my shoulder.
“She’s downstairs with Tom Pasquale,” Sutherland replied, and I stopped in my tracks. My reaction flustered him, and he stammered, “At least I flink they are. Linda said that she wanted to finish printing the photos.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” I said. I couldn’t imagine there being enough room in the small darkroom for both Linda Real and Thomas Pasquale. Maybe that was the point of the whole exercise.