“Yes, sir.” The reply was crisp and professional, but I could see that Mitchell did mind.
“Bob Torrez was going to come, but he said he had a lead he needed to chase down. Sounds like he’s going to nail the little bastard who burned down my house last summer.”
It sounded to me like Torrez had been faster on the excuse draw than Mitchell. But whatever the motivation, the protection of old Reuben’s privacy was a good move. I had to give Holman some credit.
“So what’s next?” Holman said. He took me by the elbow and started escorting me down the damn hallway toward the nurses’ station as if I were an aging, ambulatory patient heading for an enema session.
“We wait for the rest of the lab results to come back, I suppose,” I said.
“That’s it?” Holman had the grace to say it as a simple query, without any accusations.
“We’re short on physical evidence, Marty. We’re going to have to be very lucky. Whoever shot Stuart Torkelson didn’t leave many tracks. No casings. No prints. No tire tracks…none that we can separate out, anyway. Clean job.”
“What do we do, then…I mean, in a case like this?”
“We keep sifting. We hope something breaks.”
Holman looked down at the polished tile floor for a minute and when he looked up, his mouth was pursed and his brow furrowed. He raised his right hand and slowly folded down his fingers until just the index was pointing heavenward. “Do we have a single, solitary bit of evidence that says the killer wasn’t Reuben Fuentes?”
I wished that he hadn’t asked me that. I took a long moment to frame my reply. “Just that common sense tells us Reuben isn’t capable of that kind of violent, high-activity crime.”
“I hope you’re right,” Holman said.
Estelle Reyes-Guzman touched my arm. “Sir, I’d like to visit with a couple people while I’m here. Maybe we could slip away now for a few minutes while Uncle Reuben’s resting. If he needs anything, Francis is here. We could come back this afternoon.”
I couldn’t read in the dark depths of Estelle’s eyes what she had in mind, but it wasn’t visiting old friends. Holman let us escape any more questions from either him or the press, and when we were out in the parking lot, I grinned at Estelle.
“Visiting?” We climbed into my Blazer and I waited while she performed the ceremony of lashing in the papoose.
“Well, sort of,” Estelle said. She glanced back toward the hospital. “I don’t think we have a lot of time.”
“No.”
“Would you ask Bob Torrez to meet us back out at Uncle Reuben’s?”
“Sure. What are you thinking?”
“Just something nagging.” She turned around and looked in the back of the Blazer, then nodded.
“Estelle-”
“Sir?”
“You can talk to me. What’s on your mind? What do you want to talk with Bob about?”
“I don’t need to talk with him, sir. I need his expertise with a shovel.”
20
Whatever it was that she was after, Estelle Reyes-Guzman didn’t want to make it a production. She wanted just the three of us-four if I counted Francis Carlos. His forensic training was starting early, but he seemed plainly bored with the whole process.
She couldn’t resist glancing at the newspaper article as we drove out to Reuben’s. “Do you want to know what it says?” Estelle asked, and before I could answer she read the first paragraphs under Linda Rael’s by-line.
During the investigation into the death of an elderly Posadas County resident Friday night, Sheriff’s Department personnel demonstrated that theirs is a job that goes far beyond the lifting of fingerprints, sifting of clues, or filing volumes of paperwork.
“The victim has the right to privacy,” says Under-sheriff William G. Gastner. And his staff’s protection of Mrs. Anna Hocking’s property-and privacy-were evident that night.
Estelle looked over at me and grinned. “I thought your middle initial was K,” she said.
“It is.” She read the rest, the sort of thin stuff that small town papers like to print as their nod to public service. What it amounted to was a dozen column inches that explained why we hadn’t allowed Miss Rael inside the Hocking house. No wonder Holman was pleased.
“You’ll want to keep this for your scrapbook,” she said when she finished.
“I don’t have a scrapbook,” I said. “And I can’t wait for the second installment. I wonder how she’s going to sanitize three dead dogs exhumed in the middle of the night after a prominent citizen and newspaper advertiser gets himself murdered. That ought to be a real challenge.”
Deputy Robert Torrez was waiting for us when we reached Reuben’s driveway. He took the shovel I handed him from the back of the Blazer.
“What are we looking for?” he asked. The shovel handle looked like a match stick in his big hands.
“I don’t know,” I said. We slipped through the fence. “What time did Holman call in Tom Mears?” The deputy’s car was no longer parked in Reuben’s lane.
“I heard him on the radio,” Torrez said. “I think it was about two o’clock.”
“The sheriff is confident,” I said. We followed Estelle and Francis Carlos across the field.
“She takes him everywhere?” Torrez asked with the naive puzzlement of a true bachelor. Estelle pretended not to hear.
“Everywhere,” I said.
The hole where the dogs had been buried was undisturbed. It was roughly three feet on a side, slightly rhomboid-shaped because of an outcropping of limestone that intruded a sharp corner into the grave.
“So, oh inscrutable one,” I said, standing at the edge of the hole. “What are we looking for?”
Estelle got down on her knees and leaned as far down as she could without the papoose sliding over her head. She was looking closely at the dirt.
She pointed along the smooth vertical cut of one side. “I was looking at this earlier,” she said. “You can see that the first six inches or so is really black on this side. Rich humus from recent accumulation of leaves. And then, as we go down,” and she bent further and pointed, “the soil color changes considerably until by about fourteen inches down, it’s much lighter brown…almost a dark golden color.”
“Doesn’t soil always do that?” I asked. “Get lighter and more leached out as you go down?”
“I would guess so. If we dug much deeper, we’d see other zones, maybe, and start getting into more rock. Maybe even pockets of sand.”
“And so-”
“And so that’s what I’d like to do.” She knelt back on her haunches and brushed off her hands. She twisted, looking for something. She stretched to her right and grabbed a dead piece of juniper limb wood and used it like a chalkboard pointer.
“You see the dirt in the bottom of the grave, sir.”
“Yes.” I saw the dirt all right, but wasn’t following her logic.
“It’s very dark…like surface soil.”
I frowned and stared into the shallow pit. The soil on the bottom was indeed the same dark, rich humus as the first several inches.
“So maybe that was the first dirt thrown back in the hole after the dogs were buried,” I said. Robert Torrez said nothing. He leaned on the shovel, one black boot on the tool’s shoulder. Over the years, he’d heard Estelle and me supposing many times before. He was patient.
“No, for two reasons. First, if you dig a hole, the first dirt out is the last dirt back in, unless you make a conscious effort to line the dirt up so you can reach the-”
I interrupted her by holding up a hand. “All right. All right. I see that.”
“And second, even if the person did that, the bodies of the dogs would separate the fill-in layer from the undisturbed soil underneath-the lighter colored soil.”
“Estelle,” I said. “Get a grip. When most people dig a hole, they toss dirt first one way and then another. One arm gets sore, they switch to the other. The dirt goes every which way, too.”