Steven Havill - Prolonged Exposure

She didn’t say anything, but I could hear a little sigh of breath.

The footprint was tiny, no more than five or six inches long.

Estelle stood for almost a full minute, gazing down at it. I could see that her breath was coming in rapid, shallow spurts. Then she turned back toward the doorway, her eyes fastened on the tile floor. She was deathly pale, and with one hand, she reached out to me like a blind person, fumbling her way. The other hand went to the door-jamb.

“Come on outside, sweetheart,” I whispered.

She shook her head. “No. Look. There’s only one print.”

I hesitated, still holding her hand, not sure what to say.

Martin Holman cleared his throat. “The child was picked up,” he said. “If he had walked out of the bathroom, there would be other prints-at least one other footprint.”

He knelt down and pointed. “Here’s a right foot here. It’s almost four feet to the door. That would put a left foot about here,” and he reached out and touched the tile. “And the right foot again, just before the threshold. Or even on the carpet.” He looked up at me. “But there’s just the one print.”

“He was picked up and carried out,” I said.

“Right,” Holman nodded.

“Then whose blood is it?” I asked, and felt Estelle’s grip tighten.

“And which child?” she whispered.

“Any other blood anywhere else?” I asked.

Holman beckoned, and we followed him out of the room. “First of all, there’s a small smear right here, on the doorjamb,” he said. He pulled out his ballpoint pen and pointed with it. The smear was about five feet up on the jamb, as if someone had leaned there for support.

“And then he turned and went left, out the side door,” Holman said.

“Less risk being seen,” I said. “If he went back up the hall, he’d risk that intersection where other patrons come down to visit the ice machines.”

Chief Eduardo Martinez eased away from the wall as we approached. Eduardo was round and comfortable, given to good humor and easy smiles. He had an endless repertoire of jokes for any occasion. He wasn’t smiling. With him was George Bohrer. If straight, square shoulders counted, Bohrer was a winner. Unfortunately, good posture is about all Bohrer had going for him.

“Chief,” I said. That was about all I could manage, even though I liked Eduardo. He never presumed to be more than he was-the grand marshal for the Posadas Fourth of July parade. Rumor had it that eons before, he had actually spent a year with the Texas Department of Public Safety.

“Say, it’s good to have you back home,” Eduardo said, and extended a hand. His grip was warm and friendly. “This is sure a hell of a deal.”

“Yes, it is.”

“No one’s been in or out since you left, Sheriff,” Bohrer said. He had a thick Texas drawl and nodded with every syllable, as if each sound needed hatching by the physical motion of his head. I could guess what instructions Holman had left for him.

“The killer went out this way,” Holman said. “If you look here, you can see a faint smudge on the door. I’m sure it’s blood, but the lab will tell us for sure. And then,” he said, toeing the door open with the tip of one polished boot, “it appears that he fell.”

“Don’t touch the door, George,” Estelle said as she saw Bohrer reaching out to hold it open for us. He jerked his hand back as if struck.

Chief Martinez bent down and slid a pebble into the crack between door and jamb.

The man had made it down the carpeted hall successfully, then collapsed on the concrete just outside the door. Blood was puddled thick and dark, as if the man had rested there, catching his breath, taking time to wish that this day wasn’t going to be his last. A hand-print had smeared blood on the cement, as if the man had slipped while trying to push himself up.

“There’s no sign of a child’s tracks out here,” Holman said. “None at all. We don’t know what happened.”

“Did someone process this boot print?” Estelle asked. She knelt and, using the small black flashlight from her purse, bounced light off the print. Just a small curve of featureless sole had broken the margin of the bloodstain.

“We missed that,” Holman said. He knelt beside her. “Looks like just a smooth leather sole. Not enough to be sure.”

“It could be one of the officers,” I said. “There’ve been people milling around here for an hour.”

“Not milling, Bill,” Holman said, sounding a little testy. “Anyway, this is as far out from the building as the blood went. Either there was a car waiting or one drove up just then. Or maybe he was able to hold himself together and limp off somehow.”

I turned and looked back at the hallway. “This amount of blood means someone is hurt pretty badly. He’s not going to go far. You’ve got everyone who’s not sitting a roadblock or checking door-to-door working this?”

Holman managed a trace of a smile. “We don’t have anyone else, Bill. We’ve got some help coming, but it’s going to take a couple of hours.”

I grimaced. “Who’s working the blood typing for us?”

“Skip Bishop. He took about eight doubles from inside the room, and a couple from out here. One set went to the ME’s office in Cruces. Dale Kenyon ran it over for us. Skip took the other set to the hospital lab here to get something quicker. Unofficial, but quicker. He’ll stay with it until he’s got an answer.”

I nodded, thankful that Skip worked faster than his older brother, Sgt. Howard Bishop. Howard had finally agreed to attend one of the FBI seminars in Quantico. I knew the sheriff had pressured him into it, figuring that late November was a good, slow time of the year and that we’d be able to spare him for three weeks.

“So tell me about Roberto Madrid,” I said, turning back toward the doorway.

“We know nothing about him except what a car-rental paper tells us. He was thirty-four years old. He’s a Mexican national, driving a car he rented in Douglas, Arizona. He had a receipt in his suitcase that shows he paid cash for the car rental but used a Banco Central de Mexico credit card as collateral and as secondary identification.”

“He came across legally, then.”

“Absolutely.” Holman shrugged. “There’s isn’t a clue in the room why he was here. Not a clue what his business was. His wallet has been taken, as well.”

“You’re sure he had one?”

“No,” Holman said uncomfortably. “I guess I was assuming that he had one.”

“And we have a child’s footprint,” I said. We walked back to the room, and Estelle and I meticulously searched the small suitcase that lay on the stand near the busted television. From what I could see, there were a couple of changes of clothes, toiletry items, and one paperback book.

I leaned closer and looked at the cover, a hazy blue design with what might have been the figure of a child standing under a tree. The title, Cuentos del Sonador , was in black script.

“What’s sonador mean?” I asked.

“Dreamer,” Estelle said softly. “ Stories of the Dreamer .” She pushed open the book with the eraser of her pencil and scanned a page at random. “It looks like a collection of short stories for children. Bedtime stories.”

She looked up at Holman. “Was someone going to process this for prints? The shiny cover might show us something.”

“That’s next on the list,” Holman said. “As soon as Bob Torrez or Eddie Mitchell gets back here.”

She nodded absently. “He hadn’t been here long,” she said. “He hadn’t even unpacked his toothbrush.” She pushed at the vinyl toiletry case with her pencil and shook her head. “What time did Sands say Madrid checked in?”