By the time we reached the truck, Estelle had the engine going and was talking on the radio.
“Get back to me when you know for sure,” she said. She racked the mike.
“What is it?” I asked.
“They think one of the Hueys had a catastrophic mechanical failure of some kind,” she said. “Nobody hurt, but it was a hard landing. They took out a couple of trees, so the chopper is junk.”
She tapped on the steering wheel, forehead deeply furrowed. Camille struggled with the seat straps for Francis, but Estelle didn’t seem to notice.
“So what else?” I said. She was still staring off through the windshield as if she was mentally computing something that didn’t add up. “This is me, remember?” I said, and grinned.
She turned to look at me, smiling lamely as she did so. “Sorry, sir. That was Bob Torrez I was talking to on the radio. They found a blue jacket. That’s where the chopper was circling when it went down.”
“Child’s jacket?”
“Yes, sir.” She glanced toward the backseat, saw that her son was secure, and pulled the truck into gear.
Chapter 10
As the crow flies, the helicopter crash site was less than a half mile from where we had been standing on the rim of Cat Mesa. To reach it by truck, we had to snake our way northwest on the rough two-track as it followed the rim, then jog along a section fence line.
We were suddenly in the middle of a convention. If there had been two hundred searchers on the mesa, at least that many and a few dozen more had materialized, and they were still flooding out of the trees. Where they all came from was anyone’s guess, and how they got there so fast would have been a good case study for a military tactician.
The flight crew of the chopper didn’t have long to relish their privacy. As far as the helicopter was concerned, there wasn’t much to see. The Huey was olive drab junk. It looked as if the pilot had done a wonderful job of backing it down into the trees, where first the tail rotor and then the wide black main rotor had each taken a turn trying to chew pinon and juniper.
There had been no fire, but a Forest Service truck was standing by, its crew and the four Guardsmen from the chopper nervously circling the cooling, ticking machine, watching for smoke.
After the first few minutes, though, the wrecked helicopter was no longer the main attraction. No one was dead or even bleeding; nothing was going to blow up. The Huey was just another piece of debris that would be a problem to haul down off the mesa. Maybe the National Guard would strip out the usable parts and donate the rest of the bent hulk to local hunters as a base camp. It was at least as attractive as the old sofa and wash rack.
Estelle pulled the Blazer to a stop and I turned to Camille. “Will you stay here with Francis?”
“Certainly,” she said, and it sounded like she really wanted to say something else, but I didn’t give her the chance. I couldn’t keep up with Estelle, and I didn’t even try. I plodded after her as she threaded her way through the scrub, making her way toward a convocation that had surrounded a grove of small oak saplings.
I could see Sgt. Robert Torrez, almost a full head taller than anyone else. He’d already made sure that a yellow tape had been strung, and I was sure that irritated the sea of eager faces. A hand plucked at my elbow, and I damn near lost my balance as I turned to see who it was.
“Undersheriff Gastner? You’re back?” I grinned in spite of myself. Marjorie Davis looked as if she had dressed for an expedition to the north woods, rather than just a jaunt into the wilds of her own county. Under normal circumstances, I was a fan of the Posadas Register, the biweekly official newspaper of Posadas County. Marjorie had worked for the school district for a dozen years before deciding to join the wild world of newspaper reporting.
I glanced at the fancy camera that hung around her neck.
“Marjorie, how the hell are you?”
“Fine. What have we got up here? Do you know?”
“No,” I said, stepping carefully. “I don’t know.” I nodded toward the helicopter. “Bent metal over there. Page-one sort of stuff.”
“I got that. I was glad nobody was hurt.” I glanced sideways at her, but she sounded serious. “When did you get back from Wisconsin?”
“Michigan. Yesterday.” I stopped, thinking better of wading through the crowd of people whose attention was focused on the oak grove. I didn’t have any answers or theories, and I wasn’t in the mood to tell the same old story to a dozen of the familiar faces I saw ahead of me-yes, I was back; yes, I was probably still undersheriff, nominally at least; and no, I didn’t have a goddamned clue about what was going on.
Sergeant Torrez and Estelle Reyes-Guzman were in the thick of things, and I hung back, resting under a fat old pinon that knew more than I did.
Marjorie Davis wasn’t so content to loaf in neutral, and when I showed no inclination to move into the center of action, she said, “I’ll talk to you later.”
“Sure enough,” I said, and watched her blend into the crowd.
What had been discovered deep in the little grove of contorted Gambel’s oak dashed everyone’s theories. I watched the ripple effect as word spread out through the assembled people as necks craned and eyes squinted for a look.
It wasn’t much to look at-just a tiny blue coat, western-style yoke, quilted insulation, zipper up the front. The oak grove, a collection of a hundred or two saplings, none of which was more than three inches in diameter, was about the size of half a tennis court. The jacket was a third of the way in on the northwest side.
How it came to be there was certainly not evident, but I was sure the jacket would start a flood of speculation.
I heard Bob Torrez’s voice, and he did a passable imitation of a drill sergeant. “Now listen,” he bawled, and the woods got pretty quiet. “I want everyone who isn’t working law enforcement to step back, then turn and walk back on the trail to the main two-track. We’ve got too many people here, and we’re going to lose evidence. Law enforcement, I want you to just stand still until we get things sorted out.”
I could see by some of the faces that Torrez’s message wasn’t what they wanted to hear. No, by God, they all wanted to stand around and exchange stories about what they thought. I grinned.
In short order, Torrez, Estelle, and a couple of the other deputies and troopers had an orderly line of people walking back the way they’d come, back toward the field of vehicles in the clearing. They looked like a bunch of well-dressed refugees.
I stood where I was, trying to look as inconspicuous as a fat man in a black windbreaker can.
After a few moments, we were left with a grove of oaks, a small jacket, and eight police officers of various ranks and departments-and reporter Marjorie Davis, who made herself small and quiet off to one side, camera at the ready.
I shoved my hands in my pockets and walked slowly toward the yellow ribbon, head down, watching where I put my feet. Dale Kenyon, one of the Forest Service cops, stepped forward and held out a hand. “It’s about time you decided to get back to work,” he said, grinning. “We’re glad you showed up.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I just got in.”
Estelle Reyes-Guzman had picked her way through the oak grove one step at a time, eyes like radar. She knelt beside the jacket and lifted one corner of it with a pencil. “No blood that I can see,” I heard her say. She looked up at Bob Torrez. “Would you have one of the deputies go back to the undersheriff’s truck and get my camera bag?”
“In the clearing by the helicopter,” I said to Eddie Mitchell, and the deputy set off at a fast jog.
I tried to picture a three-year-old dressed in that jacket, trotting down the trail. After a bit, he got warm, and he took off the jacket, dropping it in the center of an oak grove.
A three-year-old, trotting away from camp, at night? Not likely, I thought, and about as likely as him stumbling through all those rough tree trunks to shed the jacket.