Aaron Elkins: Skull Duggery

He steepled his fingers at his chin and smiled in a friendly, relaxed manner, although his heart was thumping away. “I understand,” he said casually, “that the bus driver let you off here and told you you could catch a bus to Oaxaca in the morning? Is that correct?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, that’s very interesting. It’s true there is a bus from here to Oaxaca, but if I remember correctly, the bus from Santiago Matatlan also continues right up 190 to Oaxaca. Why then would he let you off here?”

“I’m just telling you what he told me. Maybe he wanted me off the bus. I don’t think he liked me.”

That part certainly held water, Sandoval thought. So much for that trap, but he had more than that to work with. “I see. But you know, now that I think of it, unless I’m mistaken, it no longer makes a stop in Teotitlan at all. So how-”

“I didn’t say it stopped in Teotitlan,” Garcia said without even a momentary pause. “He dropped me off at the junction, where the road heads into the village. I walked in from there.” Sandoval had to hand it to him. Very cool, very sure of himself.

“I see,” he said yet again, scowling. “To get the morning bus to Oaxaca, the one that leaves from the market square.”

“That’s right, unless there’s another bus stop.”

“No, it’s the only one. So then exactly what were you doing on the road up to the Hacienda Encantada?”

“I don’t know nothing about no Hacienda Encantada. I was going up in the hills, find someplace to sleep where no one would bother me.”

Sandoval was thoroughly discomposed by now. He was no good at this sort of thing; why did he even try it? He didn’t believe a word of Garcia’s story, but he didn’t see what he could do about it. The man was too experienced for him; he knew a fraud when he saw one. One thing Sandoval did know: the sooner Garcia was out of Teotitlan the better, but nothing could be done about that until morning. All he could do for now was to see that he made no trouble tonight.

“Well, my friend,” he said, “we’ll give you a nice place to sleep. And I don’t think anyone will bother you.”

“You’re putting me in jail?”

“Just for the night,” Sandoval said, first darting a glance into the outer office to make sure Pompeo was there, in case Garcia was going to make things difficult. But Garcia merely shrugged.

“Do I get a meal out of it?”

“Unless you have an objection to goat meat tacos.”

Another shrug. “Okay. And what happens in the morning?”

“We’ll see in the morning.”

He signaled through the doorway to Pompeo, who marched Garcia off to the women’s cell. (There were two cells in the municipal building, one for men and one for women, but the men’s was currently occupied by the Herrera brothers, who were sleeping off too many glasses of mezcal at their sister’s wedding, which left only the women’s cell.) Garcia went without a word, contracting the burly muscles of his shoulders; a body builder showing his stuff.

Sandoval hoped with all his heart that nothing would happen in the morning, that he’d simply send Garcia on his way and be done with it, but there were of course obligations that went with his job. For all he knew, Garcia was a dangerous fugitive. If it came about later that Sandoval had done no checking on him, it might well bring the unwelcome attentions of the attorney general’s office and the state police, the policia ministerial. Talk about trouble.

He downloaded onto his computer the photo that Pepe had taken of Garcia as a matter of routine. This he attached to an e-mail query to the policia municipal of Santiago Matatlan, asking what they could tell him about the man. He did it with a little smile of satisfaction. Garcia would no doubt have been surprised to learn that even here, in this out-of-the-way little village, the police had certain high-tech methods at their disposal. Santiago Matatlan, about twenty kilometers to the south, was a mezcal-producing village even smaller than Teotitlan; perhaps six hundred souls. The police would know everything that went on there. And they had a computer too.

He sighed and raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Just let it not require that I have any dealings with the state police,” he prayed silently. Nothing good ever came of dealing with the policia ministerial, as he had learned through hard experience.

When he’d first become chief, there were only a few village ancients who had any recollection of the last time someone had been murdered in Teotitlan, and they didn’t remember it themselves, recalling only their parents talking about it when they’d been children: a woman had bashed her straying husband’s head in with a stone mano. That had happened more than fifty years ago, before Teotitlan even had a police chief. None of Sandoval’s predecessors had ever been confronted with a homicide.

And what had happened? With only two measly weeks on the job under his belt, he had been confronted with one. It had been a terrible experience, the worst experience he’d ever had. No doubt it had taken years off his life, and it was a marvel that he hadn’t developed ulcers.

A group of Canadians who had been staying in a bed-and-breakfast in Teotitlan had been hiking in the dry hills near the village. One of them, in falling down the shaft of a long-abandoned silver mine, had discovered the body-the skeleton, really-of a young girl. He had reported it to Sandoval, who had brought in old Dr. Bustamente, the district’s medico legista (or medico forense, as he had taken to calling himself since CSI had started appearing on Mexican television), who had declared that she’d been murdered: a savage series of blows to the head, a finding that was soon confirmed by the state medico legista in Oaxaca.

So in had come the swaggering policia ministerial, thuggish and intimidating, to take charge, issuing commands, making threats and accusations, frightening old men and women, interrogating respectable people with terrible sexual questions, things people in Teotitlan never even thought of before. The worst of it was that for a whole month the policia ministerial worked on it, terrorizing the whole village, and in the end they never did solve it. And so the poor child’s bones now lay in a box in some grisly police storeroom somewhere in Oaxaca, instead of in a Christian grave in the Teotitlan cemetery, where Sandoval and the elders wanted to inter it.

And so the mere thought of the possibility of having to deal once more with those arrogant, overbearing bullies in their sinister black uniforms straight out of some old Gestapo movie (and very fitting that was) had his stomach churning now.

But, happily, it appeared that this was not to be. The reply from the police chief of Santiago Matatlan was waiting for him when he came in the next morning:

This man, Manuel Garcia, is not a resident of Santiago Matatlan. He appeared here two days ago, unable to give a satisfactory reason for his arrival. He has committed no crime of which I am aware, but his appearance and manner are not wholesome. I sent him on his way, and I suggest you do the same.

Nothing could have suited Sandoval more. At 8:10 A.M. he stood with Garcia in the parking area between the church and the covered market, having first fed him a jail breakfast of buttered tortillas, re-fried beans, and cocoa. At 8:15 the Oaxaca-bound bus rattled in its predictable fifteen minutes late. Sandoval handed Garcia a fifty-peso note he’d signed out from the treasury-the fare was ten pesos-and told him to keep the change.

“Thanks.”

He watched as Garcia mounted the steps into the bus. “Better if you don’t come back here,” he called after him, not unkindly.

Garcia turned and laughed. “Back here? Not a chance. You won’t see me again, not in this lifetime.”