“I don’t believe so either, sir. But look at the angles.” She raised her arm next to mine and swept it across the sky along the path that the airplane must have flown. “Whoever it is, he sees the plane and ducks behind the building here, out of sight. Now right there”-she stopped the swing of her arm-“is about where the airplane must have been when Martin took the photo.”
“The wall hides the person from view, but his shadow extends out to the east. It’d be visible,” I said.
“That’s what I think.”
I pursed my lips and studied the photo. “Mrs. Finnegan said that the plane was flying east-west tracks.”
“That fits, sir.”
“What a photo,” I said. “But if Charlotte is correct, the aircraft was coming toward her when it reared up. If this is the shadow of a man, then either it’s of the gunman or of someone who was really close to where the gunman was standing. He would have heard the gunshot clearly…if he didn’t make it himself.”
“It would make more sense to make the shot on a return trip, when the aircraft was heading east. Maybe on the next leg, they flew slightly north of this site. Whoever it was, he could see the plane coming and set himself up.”
“Why?”
“We don’t know that yet, sir.”
“And we don’t know for certain that this tiny black speck is a shadow, either. Not for sure.”
“It’s pretty clear, sir.”
I leaned against the cool stones of the north wall and regarded the ground. “As rocky as this area is, we’re not going to find prints.”
“Are you up for a little stroll, sir?”
“Stroll? That sounds nasty. To where?”
She gestured up the slope. “I’d like to see what’s up there. It’s just enough of a rise that we’ll see…” She stopped and shrugged. “Who knows what we’ll see?” She opened the folder again and looked at the photo. “Nothing is centered in this,” she said. “It’s always possible that Martin was aiming at something else and just plain missed.”
An unkind remark came to mind, the sort of thing I would have cheerfully voiced had Martin Holman been alive. I shook my head.
“That’s easy to do,” I said. “Let’s stroll.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
As the crow flies, or even as the lizard scuttles, the distance to the top of the little mesa behind the block house was nothing at all-perhaps fifty yards. But most of it was at a significant slope, far steeper than it appeared in the aerial photograph, where the tricks of the camera flattened features and distorted distances. By the time I worked my way to the top, ever mindful of my precarious balance on the rocky footing, I was puffing like an old steam engine.
Estelle stood waiting on the rim, a study in patience. She’d had plenty of time to catch her breath-if she’d lost it in the first place.
The rise gave us enough elevation that I could see the slope-backed bulge a couple of miles to the west against which the Bonanza had pulped itself. As I gazed at that spot, a dust trail caught my attention, and if I squinted hard enough, I could imagine that I could see the small, dark dot that kicked up the plume.
“It looks like a parking lot over there,” Estelle said.
“I’ll take your word for it,” I replied.
“It’s too bad someone wasn’t standing right here when the crash happened,” she added. “They would have seen the whole thing.” She moved her hand in an arc across the sky, finally sweeping down to point over at the crash site. She then thrust her hands in her pockets and just stood quietly, looking out across the prairie.
“Suppose that the person who was standing behind that building fired the shot,” she said finally. “Suppose that’s what happened. What would be the most logical way for him to drive out of here?”
I peered back down the slope at the block house. “Right from there,” I said. “He’d drive out the same way that we came in and then hook up with County 9010. And then on out east to Forty-three. If that’s where he was headed.”
“Richard Finnegan would drive out that way to go back to his house. Johnny Boyd would have to turn west. And it’s possible that they could have driven due south, up the back of Cat Mesa.”
“Lots of choices,” I said. “Too many. It leaves us with nothing, except one big, glaring fact.”
“What’s that?”
“If he wasn’t familiar with the area, Estelle, he wouldn’t have been here in the first place. He couldn’t have known that the aircraft was coming over here. It’s that simple.”
“Assuming the shot wasn’t accidental.”
“Assuming that. And the simple logistics of it say that if the shot was fired from about here, then either the person left to the east, through Finnegan’s, or west through Boyd’s. That’s about the choice. If he took that road”-I pointed toward the north-south track-“and headed south, toward the back side of Cat Mesa, he’d have to know the roads really well to pick his way out of there once he got into the trees.”
Estelle nodded and pulled out the folder of photographs. “So far, we’ve identified two of these,” she said. “The windmill, and the block house.” She shuffled through the other pictures, frowning. “Before that truck gets here, I’d like to take a look at the fence line just north of us.”
I turned, expecting her to be looking off into the distance. Instead, she was still sorting photos.
“What truck?” I said, scanning the prairie.
This time she looked up and pointed to the south. “If you follow the road down from the back of Cat Mesa, you’ll see the dust. Right now he’s about a finger’s width below that dark belt of junipers, headed this way.”
The binoculars were in the truck, of course, where they always did the most good. But I shaded my eyes with both hands and concentrated, and sure enough, eventually a tiny portion of the distant terrain moved. I saw the dust plume first, then the speck.
“You’re right, Sharp Eyes,” I said. “And what fence?”
Estelle held up a photo. “Linda marked this as the next photo on the roll. It’s also the last photo that Martin Holman took. And I think this grove of trees”-she indicated a small blotch in the top right corner of the photo-“is right over there.” She turned and looked north. A hundred yards away, a stand of junipers was bunched near a jumble of boulders that marked the north edge of the mesa on which we were standing. “There’s a fence just over the crown of the hill.”
“Just around the next corner,” I said and grinned. “Lead on.”
I had no doubt that we’d find the fence. If I’d learned nothing else working with Estelle Reyes-Guzman over the past decade, it was that she didn’t make idle guesses. As we walked toward the junipers, she held the photo in front of her as if it were a witching rod.
“Just north of the rim,” she said. We circled around the grove of stunted, withered old junipers. They were skirted with mountain mahogany, making a dense brush barrier. But sure enough, after we picked our way through a jumble of rocks, we found our progress blocked by a livestock fence.
Estelle stopped and turned this way and that until she was satisfied that she had the orientation of the photograph correct. “We are here,” she announced, and used her pen as a pointer. “This fence goes east-west, and you can see quite a bit of it in this photo. Sheriff Holman snapped the shutter when the plane was still a bit west of here.” She turned and looked along the fence. “He was shooting ahead of the wing, and the shadows say he was looking east.”
“And if he’d swung the camera just a degree or two to his right, he’d have been able to see the top of the mesa, maybe even the back side of the block house.”
Estelle pursed her lips and gazed at the barbed-wire fence. “If we assume that Martin took a photograph of exactly what he meant to, then he was interested in this fence. Or at least in something in this area.”