Steven Havill: Dead Weight

“Now what direction are we going with this?” Jaramillo asked, and he pulled a slender fancy leather memo book from his suit coat pocket.

“Give us until midnight,” I said again.

Annoyance flashed across Jaramillo’s pudgy face. Midnight would also give me plenty of time to find Daniel Schroeder, the district attorney. His office was in Deming, and I considered it a cruel twist of fate that most of the time we had to deal with his assistant rather than him.

“None of this can be published yet,” Jaramillo said to Dayan. “This is an ongoing investigation.”

“Indeed,” I said as I let them go past me on the stairs. I started down after them, saying, “And the sheriff just gave a statement to the press. Use your own judgment, Frank.”

Tom Pasquale closed the office door, and I turned and handed him the printer pages. As Dayan and Jaramillo continued on out of earshot, I said quietly, “You might read those and see if you see any similarities.” He took the papers, and before he had a chance to read more than a couple words I added, “Both were on Carter’s computer. He could have taken the file on a disk to any printer, I suppose, but I doubt that he was smart enough to do that.” I reached out and punched Pasquale lightly on the arm. “Did you get more than two lamps and a bookcase moved?”

He grinned, more with relief at seeing the documents than at the question.

“No, sir. But we’ll get to it.”

“Other things take precedence right now, Thomas. I’m sure Carla Champlin will understand.” I pointed at the documents. “Don’t lose those. Put ’em in your briefcase. When you get a moment, start a file. I’ll write a formal deposition about where I obtained them…all that sort of thing. As soon as he gets breathing space, I’ll get Tony Abeyta to come up and make a copy of that computer’s hard drive, just to be double sure. I would think he can do that. If he can’t some computer guru can tell him how. Just in case at some later date someone wants to make an issue out of all this.”

“Yes, sir.” He folded the papers and glanced at the doorway leading to the crime scene. “It’s all too bad, though.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Any ideas about who might have done this?”

“Yes,” I said. Frank Dayan was headed out the back door, stepping carefully around Howard Bishop and Tony Abeyta, who were working prints. Don Jaramillo followed, apparently preferring the fresh air outside to the smell of spilled beer and blood.

County Commission chairman Sam Carter would have cringed at the rate at which we emptied the county’s coffers during the next several hours, but he would have swelled at the attention. Of our dozen or so Sheriff’s Department employees, ten were on duty that evening.

Deputy Taber got to shake out the kinks when she drove to Las Cruces, hand-delivering a briefcase full of evidence for processing by the state’s regional crime lab. Among other things, we had requested a DNA test that would compare the blood from the metal brace on the backhoe with a sample from Sam Carter. I didn’t bother to voice my skepticism about that sort of high-tech testing: Maybe it would produce results, maybe not. But if it could weld a direct link to Sam Carter’s presence in Jim Sisson’s back yard, that was a major step.

If that was Sam’s blood on the machine, what would still be missing is the when -the smear could have been made anytime, even out on the job site before Jim brought the beast home.

Part-timer Brent Sutherland took over the odious, deadly boring job of keeping an eye on the Sisson household from a new position a block farther down the street. I wasn’t ready to cancel the surveillance, as unproductive as it had proved so far, but I wanted a wider view-all of the neighbors included.

Sam and Grace had been hip-deep in an affair, and people had been murdered for a lot less than a hundred-thousand-dollar life insurance policy. Whether or not Grace Sisson was a coconspirator was one of our large, neon, nagging questions. I couldn’t believe that Sam’s dalliance with Grace had been so discreet that it had been witnessed only by Buddy Chavez, the nosy manager of Burger Heaven across MacArthur.

And who the hell knew what little Jennifer was capable of in her own darker, introspective moments-if, in fact, she had such.

Four deputies were down at the store with Bob Torrez, meticulously combing the crime scene and trying to reconstruct exactly what had happened. By 8:00 p.m., we knew that Sam Carter had most likely spun around after the impact of the fatal bullet through the base of his skull. His hand had spasmed and grabbed one of the polished chrome door handles of the glass cooler. The door had swung open as he fell away, allowing the ruptured beer bottles to foam and spit across the smooth tile floor.

A.38-caliber half-jacketed hollow-point bullet was recovered from the insulated wall of the cooler, stopped dead by the appliance’s outside metal casing. The slug was mushroomed and missing fragments of lead, but there was plenty of rifling visible and what must have been bits of Sam’s brain stem and skull embedded in the hollow-point tip. All of that went to Las Cruces as well.

Torrez could now establish a trajectory, lining up the hole in the door with the hole in the cooler’s cabinetry. The distance between the two was less than eighteen inches, but that was enough.

The entry wound in Sam’s skull was on the left side, and the trajectory of the bullet was consistent with his facing the back of the store, the beer coolers on his right and the killer behind him and to his left.

The complete lack of any other evidence suggested to us that Sam hadn’t been caught in a struggle. Shoe soles would scuff that polished tile floor easily, and any flailing of arms would scatter chips and canned dip off the shelves opposite the glass coolers.

The zippered bank bag produced lots of prints, and sorting those out became Tom Mear’s task.

If Jennifer Sisson hadn’t been Sam Carter’s major concern just then, the robbery scenario made sense. I could picture Sam Carter walking toward the back of the store, away from the cash registers up front, bank bag in hand, full of the afternoon’s receipts. The killer could have entered the store through the back door if it had been unlocked at the time, or he could have been waiting anywhere in the store at closing time. As Sam walked down the aisle, the killer came up behind him, and that was that. One bullet, down goes Sam, grab the bank bag, stop to remove the cash, fling down the useless paperwork, and it’s over.

A simple script, and not remotely close to what must have happened. Sam Carter was in the process of arranging some specialized medical treatment for his fifteen-year-old girlfriend. He’d taken the time to reserve a room for her, doing so the day before. He’d picked her up at Burger Heaven when she’d slipped out of the house, heading supposedly for a simple hamburger and some quiet time-out from her mother. Sam had been slick. He knew his wife was busy chasing bowling pins, and he used his son’s Jeep-a nice touch by a caring father.

After making Jennifer comfortable in the motel room, he’d headed back to the store. And that’s where the puzzle remained. Why he hadn’t used the telephone at the motel maybe only Sam knew. It could have been as simple as where he’d placed-or misplaced-the note with the proper telephone number. The puzzling half hour included Sam leaving the motel and arriving back at the store to close up-and keep his appointment with a.38-caliber slug.

Shortly before 9:00 p.m., Linda Real handed me what I wanted to see. I took the eight-by-ten glossies from her and settled back in my chair. She came around the desk to narrate over my shoulder.