Frowning, she leafed back to the photos of the tree and the offending limb. The saw would have been snarling full throttle as the young man touched the chain to the dead limb spar. The scene brought back memories of another incident to which Estelle had responded as a young deputy, when an older man had been building a stock fence south of Posadas. He’d been cutting railroad ties when the saw kicked and bit him savagely in the face, laying open cheek and jaw, shattering teeth, and coming a hair’s breadth from the major arteries in the man’s neck. He had managed to stagger into his mobile home, splashing blood over everything. That he was even able to dial 911, much less mumble a garbled message, had been remarkable.
In this case, the clear digital photo showed that the limb had been free of bark, the hard gray of seasoned piñon. The saw’s flashing teeth had touched the wood, perhaps on the very tip of the saw’s bar, and Estelle could imagine how the teeth had bitten deep and then kicked up and back. If the sawyer was standing astride the trunk, twisting with the saw to reach down awkwardly for the limb with his boots caught in the snarl of limbs on the ground, he was an easy target. It was a moment of inattention, of carelessness, late in the afternoon after a full day of labor.
Estelle tapped the photos into a neat pile and sighed. From hopes and dreams, fueled by quick cash earnings and a pleasant day in the fragrant woods, to a moment of horror and total loss…not what the young man had had in mind when he and his friend had found their way across the border.
His friend. It wasn’t hard to imagine the other woodcutter fleeing. People panicked all the time. It was one thing to imagine heroism in the comfort of a living room chair, when no real threat actually loomed. When the moment came with all its ugly reality, there was no predicting how people would react. In this case, the blood and gore hurled by the saw, the shriek of pain, the impossible wound-all of that would have been enough to test the strongest nerves. Estelle suspected that the other cutter had run, too unnerved even to take the pickup truck. He had run out to the highway, run to hitch a ride, leaving his dying friend to be found by someone else.
“And now, the question is,” Estelle said aloud, “why do we need to know about all this?”
A brief memo had been included with the photos, signed by Deputy Albert Romero, that requested a check of the telephone number found scribbled on the scrap of paper in the dead man’s coat pocket.
Estelle frowned at the number, eyebrows arching up in surprise. Her mouth formed a silent O as she stared at the number, puzzled by its familiarity. The prefix indicated Regál, the tiny village just south of the pass that shared its name, a very long way from the piñons of Catron County.
She thumbed the Rolodex and stopped at a well-worn card. The phone number matched the one scrawled on the slip of paper recovered from the dead woodcutter’s pocket.
Chapter Twelve
Coincidence made Estelle Reyes-Guzman uneasy. She had known the Contreras family for years-the elderly and crippled Emilio, who spent practically every waking moment working for the mission in Regál, Iglesia de Nuestra Señora; his wife, Betty, the energetic, bustling lady whose volunteer activism filled her days after a long career in the elementary classroom; even their three grown children, who returned infrequently to the little border village to celebrate the long string of birthdays and anniversaries.
But as Estelle drove south toward the pass, she considered the other odd pieces of this puzzle that had presented themselves. An unidentified man, odds strong that he was an illegal alien, had managed to lose control of a chain saw, which had then chewed him to death. His partner had vanished without lifting a finger to help the mortally injured man. All of this had happened 150 miles to the north, yet the sole documentation on the victim was a slip of paper with the telephone number of Emilio and Betty Contreras in Regál.
The radio and cell phone remained mercifully silent for the twenty minutes during which Estelle’s car sped south on State 56 toward the looming mountain range that formed the southern border for most of Posadas County. During those twenty minutes, she relaxed back in the seat and let her mind roam through the possibilities.
If one were to dial the Contrerases’ telephone number, odds were overwhelming that it would be Betty who answered. Her husband, 20 years older than Betty, was so lame that walking the 300 yards from home to the mission was a major penitence each day. Emilio did not belong to the twenty-first century. He and the little white mission continued on as he had for 88 years, and as it had for 219.
The mission had no electricity, no heating system other than the large potbellied stove that dominated the east wall. It certainly had no telephone. Emilio didn’t carry a cell phone draped on his worn, hand-tooled leather belt. He needed no phone to keep in close contact with his God, with whom Emilio shared most waking moments of each day. If anyone else wanted to talk with him, well…they could meet him at the church, or pass a message to him through his good wife, Betty.
If a stranger carried the Contreras phone number in his pocket, then Betty Contreras would know why. That loose end was what the deputy in Catron County wanted tidied up, and was the sort of thing one county routinely asked of another.
Just before the beginning of the guardrail as the road started its long grade up the pass, Estelle saw the tracks cutting off to the left where the EMTs had pulled the ambulance onto the mining road the night before. Later this morning, the wrecker would unceremoniously bundle the smashed vehicle back up the rugged hillside. What information the little truck might hold needed to be gained before that happened, and Estelle knew that Deputy Jackie Taber, assigned to guard the site during the night, wouldn’t waste any time. The deputy had a keen eye and would have made good use of the long hours during the night.
At one point as the highway swept through a long, graceful turn to the left, Estelle saw the wink of morning sun off vehicles parked down below on the mining road-more just an overgrown path than anything else. In another mile she passed the accident site, then using the turnout just beyond the Forest Service sign that announced the 8,012-foot elevation of the pass itself.
Pulling as far off the pavement as she could, she eased the county car in behind Jackie Taber’s white Bronco.
“I’m coming up.” The disembodied voice crackled out of Estelle’s handheld radio.
“Take your time,” Estelle replied.
“Tom and the sheriff are down below,” Jackie said, and Estelle could hear the young woman’s labored breathing.
“Not to hurry,” Estelle said. She slipped the clip of a small digital camera on her belt, and as she got out of the car, she saw Jackie Taber reach the guardrail and pull herself over.
“Interesting stuff,” the deputy said as she heaved a deep breath. “Let me show you.” She retrieved a large sketch pad from the Bronco and spread it out on the hood of the truck. Her drawing of the accident site was from a raven’s-eye view with the trees in perfect perspective from overhead. The measurements had been neatly penciled in.
“My first thought,” Jackie said, “was that a little truck like that wouldn’t be cookin’ along too fast after climbing a mile-and-a-half grade…and the south side of the pass is the steeper one. But the skid marks say maybe sixty, even a little faster. The truck’s a V-six, so that’s possible. He sees the deer at the last minute,” and the deputy traced the route with the eraser end of a pencil, “swerves, crosses the highway, recrosses the highway, and vaults over at that mound of dirt near the beginning of the guardrail.” She pointed over Estelle’s shoulder with the pencil. “Another foot or two, and he might have just bounced along the rail and never gone over at all.” She shifted the drawing.