“Well, I suppose that’s good news. I don’t know. Has anyone been by to give you a break?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, then, here I am.” I patted the door. “Go get yourself some breakfast or something.” I pointed toward the pad. “What are you drawing?”
“Oh, just sketches,” she said. “It’s a habit of mine.” She picked up the pad and handed it to me.
“In this light, I’ll have to take your word for it,” I said. I turned the pad to catch what illumination there was from the streetlight and still saw a meaningless jumble of lines and shadows. I pulled the small penlight out of my shirt pocket and snapped it on. “Wow,” I murmured. Her “sketch” was a fantastically detailed, shaded rendering of what she was looking at through the windshield-the end of MacArthur Avenue and its intersection with Bustos, all drawn in careful perspective, as if the viewer were floating about twenty feet above the street.
“Amazing,” I said. Deputy Taber had caught the silence and cover of night in her artwork, complete with what might have been a furtive figure lurking beside the Sissons’ fence. “Who’s this?”
The deputy shrugged and smiled. “When I saw the pedestrian come around the corner from Bustos, she and her dog just sort of walked into the picture.” I looked closer. Sure enough, a hair-thin pencil line connected the human to the shadow of a dog.
I snapped the light off and handed the pad back to her. “Hidden talents,” I said. “I’d like to see this in decent light. How the hell can you tell what you’re drawing in the dark?”
“Actually, once your eyes adjust, there’s really quite a bit of light, sir. Enough for this, anyway.”
Oh, sure, I thought. “Do you do people, too? Faces and such, I mean?”
“Yes.”
“That’s nice to know.” I regarded Taber for a moment. She’d joined our department as a transplant from Las Cruces six months before, one of the last people that Martin Holman had hired before he’d been killed in a plane crash in April. I also imagined her as the sort of gal who would have come off a farm in Nebraska somewhere…square through the shoulders with about as much taper to the waist as a refrigerator, hair no-nonsense short, a plain, round face that could split open with a fetching grin. Whatever the urban social scene of the city had been, it hadn’t agreed with her.
Something about Posadas did, though, and she seemed to take quiet satisfaction in working the graveyard shift. As far as I knew, she hadn’t taken much ribbing from the other deputies about being the only female patrol officer on the force-partly because she did such a damn good job and partly because Estelle Reyes-Guzman had broken that particular ice for our department long ago.
She started the Bronco and I stepped away. “Who was the pedestrian, by the way? Did you recognize him?” I asked.
Deputy Taber paused with her hand on the gearshift. “It was a woman, sir. She lives right there,” she said, twisting and pointing, over her shoulder. “Number 512. Tabitha Hines. I believe that she works at the grocery store. I didn’t see her come out of the house, so I assume she walked the dog up the roadway behind the houses, then returned on the street.”
“Ah, Taffy,” I said and nodded. “She’d have to be a fellow charter member of the Insomniacs Club of America. What kind of dog was it, not that it matters?” I laughed. “This is all a test of your keen artist’s eye, Jackie.”
“It appeared to be a chow, sir. The light’s not the best, but it was either a chow or husky. Short, blocky, tail over the back. I couldn’t be sure of the color.”
“From this distance, I couldn’t have been sure it was a dog,” I chuckled, then added, “or a person, either, for that matter. What time is it now, by the way?”
“Four-oh-one, sir.”
“She’ll be heading off to work in a little bit.”
The deputy didn’t respond to that earth-shaking information, and I patted the side of the Bronco. “I’ll holler at you if I need anything. You might take a swing down 56 if nothing better crops up. I assume you know about our friendly letter writer.”
“The letters about Tom Pasquale? Yes, sir, Undersheriff Torrez told me. He said you were taking care of it, but he suggested the same thing.”
“Keep an eye out,” I said. “I don’t think there’s anything to it, but you never know.”
She nodded and pulled the Bronco into gear, then U-turned in the street, letting the truck’s quiet idle pull it away. I stood on the sidewalk for a while, listening to the neighborhood as the sound of Taber’s unit faded.
After a moment, I returned to my car and got the larger flashlight so that I’d have a fighting chance to miss stepping in the piles left by Taffy’s chow.
Chapter Twenty-three
There are folks who are built for nighttime stealth, those fortunate souls with vision like owls and balance like cats. I wasn’t one of them. I was blessed with patience, though, and had no trouble standing still long enough so that I was sure of my next footing.
Exactly what I thought I would accomplish was anyone’s guess, but my curiosity was aroused. As long as I didn’t step on a rattlesnake or trip over a skunk, it would be a pleasant night for a stroll.
I took the large flashlight and crossed MacArthur south of Taffy Hines’ residence. The houses that graced the east side of MacArthur were Posadas civilization, as far as it went. Behind Taffy’s lot and that of her neighbors was open junk-strewn bunchgrass prairie, the land cut by tracks of four-wheelers and motorcycles.
As I walked along the side of her yard, I kept the flashlight off, making my way by what light filtered through from the street behind me and the single sodium vapor light behind the McKuens’ house, two doors south. I expected the chow to burst out of a doghouse at any moment, teeth flashing. The place was silent.
Many of the yards were neatly fenced, but Taffy’s wasn’t. The grass of the backyard ended at the lane that served as a back property boundary for all the properties on that section of MacArthur.
I reached the lane without falling on my face and stopped, listening. In the distance, a trucker rode his Jake brake as he headed off the interstate for breakfast at the AMERICAN OWNED AND OPERATED POSADAS INN, home of the worst food in Posadas but conveniently located at the bottom of the exit ramp.
After a moment, I turned on the flashlight and played it back and forth on the ground. The lane was what most back alleys are in towns and cities…a welter of broken glass, paper, pet manure, and the occasional automobile muffler or oil filter. The recent thundershower had turned it all into a dark soup.
Taffy Hines had kept to the high ground along the side of the lane, but her chow hadn’t. His big feet had planted tracks that crisscrossed the lane, and he hadn’t been all that interested in missing puddles. I’m sure he was a delight to have inside the house once back home. Perhaps that explained why Taffy had elected to walk back on the clean sidewalk, giving pooch a chance to shake off some of the mud.
With an occasional night thing clicking, buzzing, or peeping out in the prairie to my right, I passed behind seven houses before the stout six-foot board fence that marked the Sissons’ property came into view.
The gate was wide and cumbersome, big enough that when Jim drove into the yard with one of his machines in tow, he could just head out the back without having to turn the Lo-Boy trailer around or back out past the house. The gate was ajar a couple of inches, and I played my light around it. Apparently a trusting soul, Jim Sisson hadn’t included any way to lock the gate when he’d hung it.
It moved easily on the large barn door hinges, and I opened it enough that I could have passed through. The chow’s prints grazed a puddle just inside the gate, headed westward into Sisson’s property. I stood for several minutes, looking down at the tracks.