“No, he didn’t do that.”
“Mrs. LaCrosse, let me ask you something.” I glanced over at Paul Turner. He was leaning on the car, head down, looking studiously at the gravel at his feet. “Why did you bother to call out here before we had a chance to talk with the kid?”
“Well, I…well, I thought that if the boys knew you were going to drive all the way out there, they wouldn’t send Kenny off on some errand so you’d run the risk of missing him. After driving all that way, I mean.”
I chuckled. “Slick, ma’am. Thanks for your help.”
She’d started to say something else when I hung up. “Let’s go.”
Bob smiled pleasantly at Paul Turner. “Where’s that road go?”
The man glanced up briefly. “Oh, just on over to the other side of the block. This whole area’s gridded.”
“So if I went that way, I’d hit a road that would take me back to Deming?”
The man nodded, noncommittal. “Faster, easier just to go back the way you come. On the pavement.”
Torrez nodded. “Sure enough.” He pulled the car into gear. “Thanks.”
The man waved a couple of fingers and trudged back to the ditch and the new culvert.
Torrez turned the car around and accelerated hard, heading back north on the paved highway. After a minute, he said, “Nobody passed us coming out.”
“What’s the kid driving, do you know?”
“He’s got a red ’97 Jeep Wrangler,” Torrez said, and pointed off to the west. “I can’t tell if that one’s red or not, but I’m willing to bet.”
I squinted, trying hard, and saw a lot of blue sky, rolling white clouds building heavenward, and tan prairie. If I let my imagination play, I could pretend that I saw a thin, wispy vapor trail of dust kicked up by a speeding vehicle. “You think he cut back on one of the side roads?”
“Yes, I do. I don’t think he wants to talk to us much, and I don’t think he’s going to show up this afternoon at the office.” He turned and grinned at me. “Mama LaCrosse back in Deming must have called the instant we stepped out the door.”
“If that’s the case, turning tail isn’t the smartest stunt that kid’s ever pulled. She should know that.”
“We’ll see,” Torrez murmured. I glanced over at him and saw the intent hunter’s expression that meant Bob Torrez was having his own version of fun. “It won’t be hard to catch up with him once he’s on the interstate.”
We entered the southern outskirts of Deming and in a couple minutes saw that fun wasn’t in the cards for Kenny Carter. We turned onto the main drag and immediately saw the winking lights of a Deming patrol car up ahead a couple of blocks, snugged into the curb behind a red Jeep. Bob had plenty of time and eased over to the curb well back, out of view.
“You sure that’s him?” I asked. “There are a lot of red Jeeps in this world.”
“I’d be willing to bet,” Torrez said, and he slid the cellular phone out of its boot on the dash. “I’d be just as happy if he didn’t know we were here just yet.” It took a moment for Information to find the Deming PD’s nonemergency number, and Torrez dialed. I listened with amusement as he then said, “Jerry?…Hey, glad you’re workin’ today. This is Bob Torrez…Yeah. Hey, one of your units just stopped a red Jeep Wrangler west of the intersection with Route Eleven. Who do you show that vehicle registered to?”
He paused and listened and turned toward me, grinning. “That’s what I thought.” He shook his head. “No, just curious, is all. We’re following him on in to Posadas on another deal. We don’t want to talk to him, and he doesn’t need to know that we’re here.”
He listened again and laughed. “Hell no, don’t let him off. Give the little son of a bitch a ticket.” I could hear chatter on the other end, and Torrez looked heavenward. “Thanks, guy. You and Sadie come over one of these days. Bring Lolo with you.”
He switched off and racked the phone. “It’s him.”
“So I gathered. It’s handy, being related to half of the Southwest,” I said. “Who’s Jerry?”
“Jerry Pellitier. I knew he worked days on Dispatch, but it was just luck he was on today.”
“A cousin?”
“No relation.”
“That’s amazing in itself.”
Torrez shrugged, eyes locked on the blinking lights ahead. “His wife is Sadie, formerly Sadie Quintana.”
“Ah,” I said. “The wife’s a relative. Let me guess-a cousin.”
“Nope. Sadie is actually some distant relation to my wife, but I don’t know what. They lived in Posadas for a few months, and Gayle’s sister-Irma? — she did some day care for them when she wasn’t busy with the Guzmans. Their kid, Lolo, is about three or so.”
After a few minutes, we saw the Deming officer climb back out of the patrol car, ticket book in hand. He handed the ticket to Kenny Carter and pointed on down the road, no doubt telling the kid to keep a lid on it. Even as the cop was walking back toward the patrol car, the Jeep pulled away from the curb without signaling and accelerated away.
Torrez let him have a thousand-yard head start, then pulled out into traffic. With his head buried in paperwork, the Deming cop didn’t notice us as we slid by.
For the rest of the trip to Posadas, Kenny Carter kept the Jeep just a shade over eighty-close enough to the interstate speed limit that a trooper wasn’t apt to bother him but fast enough to say, “So there, a ticket don’t matter to me.”
We stayed far enough back that he wouldn’t recognize the vehicle in his jiggling rearview mirror, and more than once I had the uneasy feeling that we should stop playing cat and mouse and just stop Carter so that we could talk. About ten miles east of Posadas, I said as much to Torrez.
“The trouble is,” I said, “we haven’t talked to this kid yet-not since Jim Sisson’s death. In fact, not at all, before or after. We don’t know what’s on his mind. He might be innocent as the driven snow.”
Torrez shot a glance at me as if to say, “You know better than that,” but instead settled for, “That’s a fact, sir.”
“We don’t know for sure if he’s the father of Jennifer Sisson’s child.”
“No, we don’t. But he’s a place to start. He’s been seen with her, and Mike Rhodes says they’ve spent some time together.”
“He’s a place to start, sure enough. I’m just not sure deliberately spooking him like this is going to be productive.”
“I don’t think he knows we’re here, sir.”
“How could he not?”
“No, I mean he doesn’t know that we’re sitting here, a quarter of a mile behind him, watching. He thinks he’s given us the slip. As long as that’s the case, I think we’ve got something to gain by just being patient, seeing where he’s headed in such a hurry.”
“Straight home to Daddy is my guess,” I said.
“You think Sam would cover for him?”
“Of course he’d cover for him, Robert. Get a grip.”
“That’s going to make it interesting,” Torrez muttered.
“Doubly so if Taffy Hines’s intuition is correct.”
“Taffy Hines? About what?”
“Carter couldn’t keep the Pasquale letter to himself. He showed it to Taffy, at the store. She said her first thought was that Sam wrote it himself. She told him so. Needless to say, he said he hadn’t. He blames Leona Spears.”
“Leona never wrote an unsigned letter in her sorry life,” Torrez said. He let the car coast as we approached the Posadas exit. “Old Sam keeps it up, he’s going to have a full menu.”
Chapter Thirty
Kenny Carter’s Jeep left the interstate and headed up Posadas’ Grande Avenue. I half-expected to see the kid turn on MacArthur, aiming for his sweetheart’s, but apparently the love of his life-if we were right about the kids-wasn’t the first thing on his mind. The Jeep pulled up into the parking lot of the Family SuperMarket. We drove by just in time to see the Jeep swing around back, into the alley.
“You want to give them some time?” Bob Torrez asked.
“No, I don’t,” I said. “What I want is some answers.”