She didn’t bother to struggle but released the shotgun. I pushed the lever behind the hammer and broke it open. The old 20-gauge wasn’t loaded.
“Whose is this, anyway?” I asked.
“I got it for skunks, years ago,” Carla said, still perky and on the offensive.
“Well, I’m not a skunk,” I said and stepped past her. I tossed the gun on the bed behind the first partition.
“Now what if I refuse to move this?” Carla said. “You can’t force me to drive this away.”
Undersheriff Torrez appeared in the doorway, and by the set of his shoulders I knew that his right hand was on the butt of his service automatic.
“Everything all right?” he asked.
“Fine, Robert, fine,” I said. “You might as well call the wrecker and have them come hook up.” I turned to Carla. “And if you force us to do that, the tow charge is going to be a hundred bucks or so. Guess who’s going to pay that.”
She took a deep breath and made a petulant face. “Oh, all right.” She made sweeping motions with both hands. “Just both of you get out and leave me alone. I’ll be on my way.”
“We’ll help you maneuver out of the judge’s driveway,” I said. “It’s kind of narrow. We don’t want any plants damaged.”
“I’m perfectly capable.”
“I’m sure you are, Miss Champlin.”
She shook an admonishing finger at me. “And remember what you promised. This evening, at the latest.”
“Absolutely,” I said.
Torrez stepped down out of the RV, still eyeing Carla Champlin, who settled into the driver’s seat, muttering to herself.
I stepped down from the RV and felt the blast of hot air. Even with the air conditioning in the RV, I was glad the confrontation was over.
“Gayle said she had a gun,” the undersheriff said quietly when I was a pace or two away from the doorway of the massive vehicle.
“Broomstick,” I said. “She was going to attack me with a broomstick. I talked her out of it.”
Chapter Thirty-four
I spent a couple of minutes following the RV as Carla Champlin trundled it home. She drove it reasonably straight and true, signaling and stopping at all the right places. Pausing 310 at the curb in front of her house, I watched her wedge the big machine back into its place in the grape arbor. She glanced my way as she darted inside the house, and I waved a hand. She didn’t acknowledge.
But that was OK. I didn’t have time just then for tea and crumpets, or whatever she might serve, even if she had showed signs of wanting to continue her conversation with me. Maybe a little conversation was just what she needed. Maybe Carla Champlin had started her long slide downhill toward the loony bin, and this was the one day that fate had given her to teeter on the edge. She could be hauled back to the world of the reasonable or pushed on over. But I didn’t feel that I had time to stand on the edge with her just then. She was going to have to depend on her own sense of balance.
Instead, I drove directly to the Public Safety Building and discovered I was just about the last one at the party. In the few moments that I’d been following Carla Champlin, Gayle had taken up Dispatch again, and when she saw me she motioned toward the basement door.
“They’re all down there, sir,” she said.
The “they” were far too many large people for the small space outside the darkroom. On the utility table photographic enlargements were lined up in neat rows, and as I walked down the stairs Linda Real was bending over one of the prints, guiding one of those little photo gadgets used to check the focus of a print. The aroma of chemicals from the darkroom was strong enough to make my eyes burn.
At her elbow on one side was Tom Pasquale, with Bob Torrez on the other. Both were trying their best not to knock heads on the spiderweb of plumbing and electrical pipes.
Howard Bishop sat at the end of the table, his considerable bulk balanced on an absurdly small stool.
The only fan was the exhaust unit in the darkroom behind them, and with so many large individuals so long from a shower on a hot day, I was surprised Linda hadn’t keeled over from the rich locker-room effluvia.
“We’ve got a nice conference room upstairs,” I said by way of greeting. But they were too excited to bother with amenities. “What have you got?” I asked, and Linda glanced up from the lens.
“Sir, Sergeant Bishop lifted a neat set of latents from the cabin frame on the backhoe,” she said. “I had just finished processing the initial prints when we got called over to Judge Hobart’s.” She swept a hand to include the dozen or so prints. “They’re pretty clear.”
Bob Torrez braced both hands on the table and scanned the photos. The dusted fingerprints, little more than dark ghosts against the lighter steel, showed clearly enough in one of the photos that I could actually see them, with the tractor’s sunshade in the background blanking out the bright sky.
“It looks like somebody grabbed real low on the frame and hit a sharp spur on the weld joint,” he said. “And then the blood smeared on the metal, maybe when he was getting off.”
“He’s going to grab it in the same place each time?” I asked.
“If it’s a habit,” Bishop said without shifting the position of his chin on his hands. “It wouldn’t start bleedin’ fast enough to smear like that the instant he cut it gettin’ on.”
“Huh,” I said, and pondered the picture. It didn’t mean much to me. “Good enough,” I said. “But I guess I need to see it for real. Anything on the blood type yet?”
“Mears is at the hospital now,” Torrez replied.
“Then let’s ride out and take a look at this thing. Maybe whoever left this,” I tapped the photo, “got careless and dribbled somewhere else.”
“I’ve been over that machine ten times,” Bishop said, and heaved himself to his feet. “Course, we found this on about round nine, so another good look wouldn’t hurt.”
“Who’s out there now?” I asked.
“Taber’s taking the afternoon,” Torrez said, and I grimaced. Jackie Taber normally worked midnight to eight. Like everyone else, her eight-hour workday had gone extinct.
The hot, windless afternoon air was a relief after the basement. The machinery in Jim Sisson’s backyard rested silently, circled by a yellow ribbon. Deputy Taber had parked in the Sissons’ driveway, well back so that she could watch the back and front at the same time.
If Grace Sisson and her daughter objected to the surveillance, they hadn’t told us. Neither had been outside since returning home, at least that we knew of. And friends weren’t exactly standing in line to visit. Maybe the neighborhood assumed the Sissons were still at Grace’s parents’ place in Las Cruces.
I walked up to the backhoe, and Linda Real pointed at the steel frame just above the outriggers. Originally, the backhoe had sported a nifty enclosed cab. Over time, it had shed various parts, with most of the glass or Plexiglas or whatever it was going first. The remaining cage had plenty of sharp spots that an operator would avoid out of habit.
“Under there, sir,” she said, and I cranked my neck around so I could see under one of the braces. The smear was a light brown against the machine’s yellow paint.
Reaching out my hand as if to grab the bar, I said, “So he grabs hold to pull himself up. He cuts himself on the weld somehow.”
“There’s a spur there, if you look close,” Bishop said. “Linda got a good photo of it.”
“I’ll take your word,” I said. “So he grabs here, cuts himself, and then on the way down grabs again and leaves blood.” I shrugged. “Possible. If he got on this side, he’s got a cut on his left hand somewhere.” I held my hand near the bar. “If he grabbed it in the usual fashion, it would nick him right about between the first and second knuckle. If he got on the other side, he’d grab the bar with his right hand.”