Steven Havill - Dead Weight

Three seconds later, Tom Mears’s matter-of-fact voice responded, “Three oh seven is ten-eight.”

“Ten-four. PCS two five one.”

I straightened up. “You know his status now, and he knows you’re not asleep.” I grinned. “And that’s all the weird folks who spend the night listening to scanners need to know, too. That’s why you don’t spend your shift asking the deputies where they are. There’s only one of him and a big, empty county. He’s got little-enough edge as it is without someone being able to plot his course every minute.”

“That’s what Ernie Wheeler said.”

“Listen to him.” I nodded. “On a night like this, when you’ve got deputies and civilians both edgy after the mess over at the Sissons’, somebody needs to be paying attention to the little things. Don’t let yourself be distracted. Pay attention.” I grinned. “End of sermon.”

“Yes, sir,” Sutherland said, nodding his head in appreciation. I wasn’t sure if he was glad to have such monumental erudition bestowed on him by the sheriff of Posadas County or glad that I had finally shut up.

I checked my mailbox and retrieved a yellow WHILE YOU WERE OUT note. I recognized Ernie Wheeler’s angular printing-just the name Frank Dayan, time recorded as 21:05, and a check through the please-return-call box. I turned it so that Sutherland could see it. “Were you here when Dayan called?”

“No, sir.”

“Huh,” I said. Dayan had called before the Sisson tragedy, so there was the possibility he wouldn’t even remember what he had wanted. Not that a call from the publisher of the Posadas Register was unusual at any hour. He was either an insomniac like myself or a twenty-hour-a-day workaholic-I wasn’t sure which. The Register came out on Fridays, reduced from its heyday as a twice-a-week rag, and most of the time Dayan and his staff of three did a pretty fair job selling ads and sandwiching a little news in what space was left.

I folded the note into a wad and tossed it in the trash. “Huh,” I muttered again, the nagging feeling that some creep had sent Dayan the same anonymous note that had been dispatched to at least two of the county commissioners sinking to the pit of my stomach. That was all we needed.

“If Linda Real comes in, I need to talk to her,” I said over my shoulder.

“She’s downstairs with Tom Pasquale,” Sutherland replied, and I stopped in my tracks. My reaction flustered him, and he stammered, “At least I flink they are. Linda said that she wanted to finish printing the photos.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” I said. I couldn’t imagine there being enough room in the small darkroom for both Linda Real and Thomas Pasquale. Maybe that was the point of the whole exercise.

The door downstairs was beyond the drinking fountain and conference room. I opened it and then stopped, groping for the buzzer button below the light switch. The wiring was one of Bob Torrez’s brainstorms and more than once had saved a valuable piece of film from someone inadvertently opening the wrong door and letting in a blast of light.

I tapped the button twice tightly, hearing its bray down in the bowels of the basement. In a couple of seconds, the stairwell light snapped on and the doorway at the bottom unlatched with the sharp, quick snick of an electric dead bolt, activated when the folks in the darkroom knew that any unexposed film or paper was safely stowed.

I made my way down and pushed open the door at the bottom of the stairs. The darkroom shared the basement with the heating and cooling plant and the concrete fireproof evidence locker that had been built a couple years before during the renovation. A dozen steps ahead, the darkroom’s black doorway was partially obscured by the corner of the furnace. The door was open and the light on. Thomas Pasquale was bent over the counter examining a display of photos.

Linda Real, about half his size, stood beside him, and she was using Pasquale’s broad back as a leaning post, her elbow comfortable on his shoulder, her head supported by her fist.

“How do they look?” I said.

Linda jerked her arm off Tom’s back. I didn’t know who she had been expecting, but evidently it wasn’t me.

“Really good, sir,” she said, and traded places with the deputy. Pasquale made for the door and I stood to one side to let him pass.

“Are you going to be around for a while, or are you going home?” I asked him.

“I can stay as long as needed, sir.”

I waved a hand, wishing sometimes that he didn’t have to be so goddamn formal when he talked to me. “I just need to talk to you a minute. But it can wait if you have something you need to do.” To Linda I added, “Let’s see what you’ve got here.”

“Nasty, nasty,” Linda said.

I didn’t share her enthusiasm for watching crime scene photos appear under the magic of the darkroom safelight. Corpses in their natural habitat were bad enough without special effects.

A live Jim Sisson may have been photogenic, but he certainly had made a mess of himself this time. “These were taken after Sisson’s body was moved by the medical examiner,” Linda explained needlessly, indicating the set on the right. “And this is what Bob was trying to understand.” She positioned half a dozen eight-by-tens in front of me. I could smell her perfume or shampoo or whatever the source of the fragrance was-light, fresh, appealing even at that hour and in that morbid place of red lights, chemicals, and time-frozen tragedy.

“This is a tread mark on the outside wall of the shop.” She touched a photo with the tip of her pen. “The way the siding’s dented, that might be the point of first impact.”

“It would have to be,” I said. “It’s the farthest point up on the wall.”

Linda nodded. “From there to this mark on the concrete apron is fifty-four inches, give or take.”

“And that would be the height of the tire,” I said, and turned to Tom. “Did you measure it yet?”

“Yes, sir. It matches that.”

“So the tire dropped off the chain, or whatever, and crashed against the side of the building. Jim Sisson happened to be there, for what reason we don’t know. If the chain had started to slip, I would have thought he would have just lowered the thing to the ground.”

“It caught him somehow,” Linda said. “And I guess they’re pretty heavy?”

“Loaded, with weights and all, I would guess close to a ton,” I said. “Somewhere in that ballpark, anyway. More than he could manage, that’s for sure.”

I looked at the photo. “And these?”

Linda pointed. “You can see where the tread slid down the wall. In order to do that, the bottom has to kick out, too.”

“Sure. That’s not surprising. And it looks like it did.” The black marks on the concrete scrubbed away from the building as the tire slid down, with Jim Sisson pinned underneath.

I frowned and leaned close, trying to bring the marks into the right portion of my bifocals. “On that concrete, though, I would have predicted that the tire would just have leaned against the building and stayed there. Or maybe rolled off to one side. It’d have to hit it absolutely square.”

“Sir?”

“I’m surprised that it slid down in the first place. That’s all I’m saying. The concrete isn’t slick, and the rubber tire would have had a pretty good grip. It must have dropped hard, maybe with even a little bounce to it.”

“And then there’s this,” Linda said, “and you have to look close. But I made an enlargement.” She pulled another photo closer. “See the last set of black marks on the concrete? They’re the farthest out from the building, right?”

“Right.”

“The tire would have been almost horizontal by then, propped up by Jim’s body.”