“This is what I think, Thomas,” I said, and walked over to the window, hands thrust in my pockets. The sky to the west was dark, just enough to tantalize us into wishful thinking. “You’re down that way a lot. I think someone else knows it.” I turned and regarded him. “Seven or eight calls to Dispatch on any given evening. And each time, when you call in a license plate, you also give your location, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
I held up both hands. “Well, then. Someone with a simple dime store scanner knows your habits. What happens if someone actually investigates? Let’s say there’s a complaint made that at twenty-oh-five hours on a Tuesday you stopped a motorist on 56 and put the arm on them. The obvious thing to do is look at the dispatch log and see if you’re working that area. Sure enough, you are. You’re not dumb enough to log the vehicle that you stop for a little easy cash, but maybe the log will show that ten minutes before you stopped another vehicle…maybe just a tourist headed for Arizona.”
“But there’s no direct proof,” Pasquale said.
“No, there’s not. But the evidence shows that you’re in the area, and what happens? There’s some credence given to the rumor in people’s minds.” I shook my head. “Doesn’t matter if it can be proved or not. The idea is planted.”
“Christ,” the young deputy muttered.
“We’ve got a little ammunition,” I said. “We can guess that someone listens to our radio traffic. And it’s somebody who’s reasonably familiar with the county and the way traffic works. If the lab gets back to me with something interesting from the original letters, that’s another piece.”
Thomas Pasquale took a deep breath and held it for a long moment, finally exhaling with a loud sigh. “I hate this, sir,” he said.
“I don’t blame you. What I want you to do is start thinking and researching. I’ve looked over the logs, and I don’t see any consistency in the vehicles that you’re stopping, except out-of-staters lead the pack, with the greatest share going to Texas plates.” I shrugged. “That’s reasonable. Now I want to know who you see when you’re out and around. Don’t change your patrol habits. Stay heavy on 56 when you can, and stay on the air.”
“Do you think somebody else is hitting up on Mexican nationals and blaming it on me?”
“It’s possible, but it just doesn’t make sense to me. Why not just keep it quiet? None of the Mexicans are going to say anything…Hell, it’s a way of life for most of them when it comes to government officials. Why bother drawing attention to the scam with a bunch of dumb letters?”
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“No, it doesn’t. Just keep your eyes open. I’ll talk to Bob Torrez about it and see what he thinks. And if you happen to see me parked off in the weeds when you’re down that way, pretend I’m not there.”
Deputy Pasquale gathered his hat and stood up. He was half a head taller than me and with the worry on his face no longer looked as if he were a twenty-year-old. “I guess I should ask, then,” he said.
“Ask what?”
“Two nights ago, down on 56. You were parked up on the mesa? You’d already received one or two of those letters?”
“Yes.”
“You thought there was something to them, sir?”
“I didn’t know what to think.” I reached out and gave him a paternal pat on the arm. “And when that happens, I go out and park in the dark somewhere, roll down the windows, and let great thoughts come to me.” I didn’t know if that answer satisfied him or not, but he nodded and settled the summer-weight uniform hat firmly on his head, the broad brim two fingers above the bridge of his nose.
“Keep your eyes and ears open,” I said as he headed toward the door of my office.
“Yes, sir,” he replied, and touched the brim of his hat. He opened the door, and at the same time a muffled drumroll of summer thunder murmured off to the west.
Chapter Fifteen
The late afternoon storm, carrying the first promise of precipitation in more than a month, hung dark and broody over the western half of the county. I followed Deputy Pasquale outside, and we stood for a moment on the back steps of the Public Safety Building. The San Cristobal Mountains were obscured by long fingers of rain that curtained from ragged, torn scud clouds, while thunderheads built enormous billowing ranges whose tops anvilled out into wisps of ice.
A rich, prolonged rumble, like something from the gut of a colossal horse who’d eaten moldy hay, rolled across the prairie.
“The crazies are going to be out,” Pasquale said. He hefted his briefcase. “A change in the weather is all the excuse they need.” He grinned at me, the sort of expression that you paste on when you don’t want others to know how rotten the world makes you feel. In no mood for small talk, the deputy turned and started down the steps.
“Don’t worry about the letters,” I said as he set off across the parking lot toward the gas pumps where 303, one of the department Broncos, was parked.
“That’s going to be hard, sir,” Pasquale said over his shoulder.
“Yes, it is,” I muttered, and went back inside.
It was going to be a good evening to worry about a whole list of things. The lightning show out on the prairie might torch a grass fire. The resulting smoke could drift across the four lanes of the interstate, sending folks who didn’t understand the function of the brake pedal into a colossal domino game of twisted metal. The rain might hang up there, never touching the ground, taunting us. And that was just the weather.
As I walked back into my office, I added to the worry list. Our resident heroic protector of the public trust might crawl out from under his rock and send another cute note to someone-this time, since there hadn’t been any public reaction that I’d heard, to a blabbermouth who would get the job done.
And, most important, almost twenty-four hours had passed since a tractor tire served as a blunt instrument to crush Jim Sisson to death. We were no closer to knowing what had happened in that backyard.
I knew that the deputies were scouring MacArthur Avenue for any tidbit and that gradually Undersheriff Robert Torrez would put together a profile of what the neighborhood had looked like on Tuesday night.
My worry was that we probably knew that profile already. I had that nasty gut feeling that no one was going to jump out of the woodwork and say, Now let me tell you what I saw. I saw a 1989 yellow Mercury parked in front of the Sisson home, New Mexico license XYZ. I recognized one of the men who got out of it. He walked around behind the Sisson home, sure enough just about nine o’clock. I heard a heated argument, some machinery running, and then I saw him come running out a few minutes later and speed off.
The longer I sat behind my desk staring at the blotter, the more skeptical I became. After a moment, I pulled a piece of paper out of the top right-hand drawer, picked up a pencil, and doodled a crude map. I was a rotten artist, but the map helped me focus my worries.
To the best of our knowledge, four people had been inside the Sisson home that Tuesday evening-Mom and three teenagers-while Daddy vented his frustration on a deflated front-loader tire out back.
Yes, the family inside the house could all have been absorbed with telephone gossip, video games, or raiding the fridge-whatever passed for evening activity in the Sisson household when Mom and Dad weren’t throwing things at each other. They might have been so absorbed that they didn’t hear an argument outside. Or they might have been arguing among themselves, that continuous nitpicking that scrubbed the nerve endings raw.
Outside, the gentle pulsing idle of the diesel backhoe could have blanketed any but the most strident sounds. Someone might have come in the driveway unbeknownst to the folks inside the house. Even if they heard the crunch of tires on the driveway gravel, they might not have cared one way or the other who the visitor was. Or the killer might have parked out at the curb, or down the street, or in the Burger Heaven parking lot, or in the back alley and sauntered through the back gate.