“If I had to make a guess, I’d say that the chain was driven into the tire with a lot of force. And so was the reddish dirt.”
“Reddish dirt?”
I bent over, shifting so that I wasn’t blocking the wash of morning sunlight. The tire was clean, but even I could see the loose dirt on that section of the tire, some caught in the crevice between rim and tire, some ground into the rubber.
“I’ll be damned,” I said. “Did you get this?”
Linda nodded. “I’ve got a good close-up lens,” she replied.
“I bagged a good sample,” Torrez said. “And I’ll bet a month’s pay that it matches the dirt on the back side of that backhoe’s bucket.”
I turned and looked at the machine, its bucket poised seven feet above the concrete slab. The teeth were polished from the constant abrasion of the digging process, but soil clung here and there to the rest of it, the sort of thing I would expect after a session of digging beside someone’s leaking water line.
“You got all that?” I said to Linda.
“Yes, sir.”
“And you haven’t moved the machine any?” I asked Robert Torrez.
“No. Nothing’s been moved.”
“What are you thinking, then?”
Torrez took a deep breath. “I think that after the tire was lying down-”
“On top of Sisson?”
“Yes, sir. After it was lying down, the operator, whoever it was, curled the bucket like this,” and he curled his hand back toward the underside of his forearm, “and then set it down on the tire. The chain was still attached at the bucket, and a handful of links were caught between the bucket and the tire when he pushed down…” Torrez hesitated. “He pushed down hard enough to lift the backhoe off the ground.”
Torrez walked back to the machine and beckoned. “Look here.” The hydraulic outriggers of Sisson’s backhoe were lowered into the gravel.
“Why would he bother to put the outriggers down just for a job like this?” I asked.
“Always,” Bishop said. “The weight of that backhoe arm makes those big tires bounce like crazy. The stabilizers lock you in place. If the tractor bounces against the weight, then whatever you’re swinging starts to bounce and pendulum, too.”
“All right. So the outriggers are down, just like they’re supposed to be.”
Torrez knelt and touched the gravel with his index finger. “And you can see how they’ve dragged sideways in the gravel? I measured that gouge as almost six inches long.”
Linda anticipated my glance and nodded.
“The machine moved?”
“There’s only one way to do that,” Bishop said. “You put down force on the boom, and if the bucket can’t go down, the machine lifts itself up. Sideways force on the boom, and if the bucket can’t move sideways, the machine does.”
I squinted at Torrez. “I looked at all the photos that Linda has so far. The sideways scuffing of the tire mark?” I pointed over at the concrete apron. “That’s a hell of a photo. I wouldn’t see that scuff unless it was pointed out to me.”
Torrez nodded. “The tire moved sideways. Not a whole lot, but a bit. Several inches.”
“And when it did,” I said, “there was a tremendous downward force on it.”
“About as much as this machine weighs,” Bishop said. “Old Jim might have survived the tire dropping on him, but not with the weight of a backhoe on top of it. That machine weighs about five tons. Crushed him like an insect.”
Chapter Eleven
Grace Sisson had wasted no time. The night her husband had been killed, she’d taken the three youngest children-twelve-year-old Todd, fourteen-year-old Melissa, and fifteen-year-old Jennifer-to her parents’ house in Las Cruces. The older children had flown the nest years before, deciding that Posadas wasn’t the answer to their every dream.
With the family gone, we had the place to ourselves. Still, I didn’t want any legal complications. While Linda Real developed the film from her earlier sessions, I woke up Judge Lester Hobart, explained what I wanted to do, and walked out of his kitchen fifteen minutes later with a court order.
We could have impounded the machines and moved them all over to one of the county barns, but that seemed like a waste of time and money. Besides, I didn’t want just an approximation of the episode that had ended with Jim Sisson’s death.
Driving back on Bustos, I saw Frank Dayan unlocking the front door of the Register, and I swung over to the curb. He had a breakfast burrito in one hand and a steaming cup of coffee in the other, juggling his keys like a pro. It’d been more than an hour since we’d been the Don Juan’s first customers, and the idea of a snack was appealing.
I buzzed down the window as he stepped to the curb. “If you’ve got time, drop by the Sissons’,” I said.
“You mean right now?”
“Yep. Might be interesting.”
“Well, neither Mary Ann nor Pam is here yet.” Pam Gardiner was the reporter who’d taken Linda Real’s place at the Register, a blubbery, much too cheerful person who apparently thought that most of the news would come to her if she sat on her butt long enough. Why Dayan put up with her lassitude I didn’t know. Maybe he was working too hard to notice. Mary Ann Weaver, the wife of county commissioner Frank Weaver, had run the front desk of the Register for fifteen years.
“They’ve both got keys, don’t they?” I grinned. “Come on.” I reached over and opened the door.
“What the hell,” Frank said, and got in. “You’re going to tell me what’s going on?”
“Of course not.”
He laughed and sipped the coffee, grimacing. “Want some?”
“No, thanks. I’ll take that burrito, though.”
He hesitated and then actually extended the thing toward me. “Sure. Here.”
I waved him off. “This is going to be a nasty one, Frank.”
“You mean Sisson…”
I nodded.
He took a bite of the burrito. It smelled wonderful. “You know, Pam can cover this better than I can,” he said between chews. “She’s the reporter.”
“It’s an election year,” I said. “Humor me.”
***
Howard Bishop pulled himself up into the seat of the backhoe with practiced ease. The machine cranked a couple of times and fired, belched a cloud of black smoke, and then settled into a clattering idle.
Torrez stood by one back tire, resting a forearm on it like a neighbor chatting over the fence. “I want to attach the chain over on the side, away from the original marks,” he said to Bishop. “Swing the bucket to the left some, and I’ll hook it up.”
Bishop lowered the bucket and extended the arm so that the bucket’s teeth hung over the left side of the tire, taking the heavy logging chain with it. Torrez threaded the free end of the chain through the wheel and around the tire near where it was supported by a short chunk of two-by-four, then hooked one of the links.
“You sure?” I asked, and Torrez nodded. I held out a hand. “That’s not secure,” I said. The chain hook had a scant hold on the link.
“I know, sir. That’s what I want.”
He turned to Bishop and gave him a thumbs-up, and the backhoe’s boom lifted until the slack was out of the chain. It slipped a little on the rubber, and then the tire eased off the ground as the backhoe took the weight.
“Nothing to it,” Bob said.
“How high do you want it?” Bishop shouted.
“About a foot or two off the ground,” Torrez replied. “There’d be no reason for Sisson to lift it higher than that.” I glanced across at Linda Real. The red light on the video camera’s snout was on. “And right over this spot,” Torrez added, and he picked up a shovel that had been leaning against the building and touched the spot on the concrete where the tire had first impacted, close to the shop wall.
When he was satisfied, he nodded at Bishop. “Perfect,” he said. The tire hung suspended about eighteen inches above the concrete apron. It drifted around in a lazy circle, stopping when the chain links tightened up. Then it started to drift back.