“How could someone do such a thing? The beer down the gullet thing?” the writer asked, and then immediately corrected herself. “Don’t answer that,” she said. “Every corner of the planet has its share of wackos.”
“It seems to me,” Estelle said, “that this person was waiting for Chris Marsh somewhere…maybe right where we’re sitting now.”
“He couldn’t see the crash site, though,” Madelyn said.
“No. They might have been on the phone with each other. That might have been what distracted his attention so that he didn’t see the deer in time. He’s on the cell, boasting of what he did. ‘You’re there, I’m here, and I’m on my way with a fat check.’”
“After the wreck, could he have managed a call for help, then?”
“No, I don’t think so. My guess is that he could manage a gurgle. That’s the extent of it, if he was conscious at all. We never found a cell phone, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t have one. In any event, he doesn’t show up, and he doesn’t ring back. His partner is going to go looking. Sure enough, there’s a dead deer, and maybe some skid marks.” Estelle surveyed the parking lot. “Whoever it was could have been waiting here, or on down at the intersection of the county road, or at any one of the pull-outs. She was close. She had to be.”
“She?”
“Could have been,” Estelle said. “We know that Chris Marsh had a girlfriend-whether it was just casual or not, we don’t know.”
“That would be cold,” Madelyn said.
“But it fits in some ways,” Estelle said, and released the brake. “That’s what Tony Abeyta’s been digging into. Marsh lived in Las Cruces. We don’t know much about him, other than that he was a part-time student, lived in a low-rent trailer park, and had a girlfriend.” She drove out of the lot, the car lurching across the shoulder and onto the pavement.
“What about this guy?” Madelyn turned and surveyed the saloon as they pulled away. “Could he have seen anything?”
“Victor? Unlikely. He has no view of any of that area from inside-he can’t even see his own parking lot. And I don’t think he’d notice, anyway. And he wouldn’t tell us if he did.”
“Oh,” Madelyn said, her eyes growing large. “Hostile country?”
“Oh, very.”
“Even something as nasty as this, he wouldn’t talk to you?”
“Oh, he might, between grumbles and growls. But he has an image to uphold, you know.”
“What about the boy’s parents? Have they been of any help?”
“None. They’ve given up on their son. Wrote him right off. They live back east, and aren’t interested in coming out. Cremate him and ship the ashes back, if we want. Or dispose of them here. Whatever.”
“You’re kidding,” Madelyn said.
“Oh, no.”
“Does that ever get to you?”
“Well…”
“I mean some of these people that you find yourself dealing with-just amazing. Every wrong decision that could be made, they make it. I’ve met people who seem to thrive on being miserable. If I had to be around ’em for any length of time, they’d drive me either into a grand funk depression, or to homicide. You must feel that way sometimes, don’t you?”
“I’d have to think about that,” Estelle replied. “I don’t spend a lot of time being depressed, though. Everybody has the opportunity to make choices. What they choose to do is their business. Up to a point, anyway. Most of the time the law is pretty clear-cut.”
“But don’t you wish that sometimes you could just wave a magic wand and make all the sadness, all the viciousness, all the stupidity, just go away?”
“Then I’d be out of a job,” Estelle quipped. “It’s all part of what Bill Gastner likes to quote as ‘the great human experiment.’”
“I can do without some parts of the experiment,” Madelyn said.
“Sure enough,” Estelle agreed. “But if we live in the middle of it, we don’t get to choose.”
The highway up through the pass was dappled here and there as the morning sun warmed through the stands of runty trees, and Estelle slowed the car to 30 miles an hour, the slope steep enough that the car shifted to second gear and then stayed there as they ambled up the flank of the mountain. She lowered the window, the flow of air chilly but lush with innocent fragrance.
They reached the short, straight stretch that rose to the pass itself, and after a glance in the rearview mirror, Estelle stopped the car. “He crests the top of the pass, and almost immediately collides with the deer. He loses it, and you can see right over there,” and she pointed at the hump of dirt just uphill of the guardrail, “where his truck vaulted over.”
“How fast do you think he was going?”
“Sixty, maybe. I don’t think much faster than that. That’s enough to do it.”
Madelyn turned in her seat, looking back the way they’d come. “And the highway department found him two days later.”
“Yes. It was more a misting than a rain. The highway was wet, but there wasn’t enough rain to flush away the marks. Linda even managed to take an exposure that shows them.”
“That answers my question then. If he called and said, ‘I’m leaving now,’ she…he…whoever it was would wait a few minutes. Late evening, she’d be looking for his headlights.”
“That’s right.”
“She’d still be waiting. After a few minutes, she’d try to call him to ask where he was. No response and she’d go looking. And that’s my question. Were there enough traces of the accident left to mark the site?”
“The answer to that is ‘yes,’ Madelyn. I can imagine her driving to the top of the pass, and maybe even down into Regál. When Marsh doesn’t show up, she would retrace the route. Coming northbound, there are the tracks, the dead deer, and a short section of mangled guardrail.”
She pulled the car into gear. “Let me move out of these people’s way.” She accelerated hard and pulled off near the Forest Service sign announcing the pass. An enormous camper towing a flashy SUV rumbled by, its occupants offering a friendly wave, their vehicle leaving a wake of diesel fumes.
“I wonder if she had a pang of doubt,” Madelyn said.
“About?”
“I wonder if there was a moment when she thought that the young man-Marsh was his name? When she thought that he was running with the money.”
“That’s entirely possible.”
“Otherwise, why would she have been in the area in the first place? If she trusted him to make the delivery…He had the cashier’s check, am I right?”
“Yes.”
“So then why is she dogging his tracks? Is she afraid he’s going to split on her?”
“Interesting,” Estelle said. “We’re going to make a convert out of you yet. While you’re considering all those questions, add this one to the list, Madelyn. Why didn’t she just ride along with Marsh in the first place?”
“Couriers don’t carry passengers?”
Estelle pulled the car back out on the highway. “Good point, but who’s going to think about that?” she said. “When a delivery truck pulls up at your driveway, do you check to make sure the driver is solo?”
“Huh. She could have just ridden with him.”
“And we would have found her bashed and broken on the cliff side along with Marsh,” Estelle said.
“Could she have known the crash would happen? Some sort of vehicular sabotage?”
“Vehicular sabotage,” Estelle repeated with a grin. “What a concept.”
“Has anyone thought of that?”
“I don’t think so,” the undersheriff said. “That’s the sort of thing that works really, really well in movies, Madelyn. It’s right up there in popularity with the explosive post that makes the car inexplicably flip over on cue. In this case, the most likely scenario is that the young man collected a grillful of venison, and then lost control.”
“Which prompts the most interesting question of all, at least for me,” Madelyn said. “How do you sleep at night with all these unsolved conundrums floating around in your head? How much of this do you take home?”
“I have a houseful of wonderful distractions,” Estelle replied. “And you have to remember that this is the exception, rather than the rule. As padrino says, our job is ninety-nine percent boredom, interrupted by one percent panic and mayhem. Most of the time, we’re looking for something to do.”