Steven Havill - Prolonged Exposure

I bent down, hands on my knees, and squinted at the polished wood of the desktop. With the light flooding across it at an angle, the well-defined dusting marks told me that one of the deputies had done a careful, patient job.

“All right,” I murmured with satisfaction. On the desk corner nearest the wall was a clear shoe print, the fancy tread patterns clear on the dark wood, clear enough that we’d be able to match for brand, size, and wear marks. “We’ve got you, you little bastard,” I said aloud.

One of the officers had drawn a set of four-corner bracket marks around the print with a dry-erase marker. They wouldn’t have been able to lift the shoe print, but someone talented with a camera could sure as hell photograph it.

With an audible crack of joints, I stood up and looked at the wall. The Springfield.45–70 trap-door carbine was gone, as was the sword that had hung below it. To reach the carbine, I had to stand on my tiptoes, and I was five feet ten. The burglar had stepped up onto the corner of the desk to reach the weapon, leaving his shoe print behind.

I sighed. The sword was no great loss, but to a military history buff like myself, the carbine was. And it wasn’t the weapon itself so much as where it had been and what it had done. Manufactured in 1874, the.45–70 had been issued, still packed in Springfield Armory’s grease, to a young trooper named Gilbert T. LeSalle.

LeSalle hadn’t been a famous military hero or a cutthroat villain. Just one of the thousands of young men who’d spent their lives in the Southwest, moving from one fort to the next, he rode one dusty, rocky trail after another, year after year after year. His military career spanned three decades, long enough to see the aging Springfields replaced by more modern weapons.

Whether he was technically allowed to or not, Trooper LeSalle had kept his.45–70 and taken it with him when he left the service. It hung over the fireplace of his home in Deming until he’d died in 1950 at the age of ninety-six.

I had purchased the carbine in 1973 at a garage sale for twenty-five dollars. Over the course of the next two years, I tracked down both the carbine’s provenance and the military records of the trooper who had carried it.

All that paperwork, interesting only to someone fond of the little guy’s place in history, had been in the locked filing cabinet. Government paperwork was all replaceable, of course. A few items in the cabinet that I didn’t want to think about were not, and their loss made my stomach churn.

Of more interest to a thief were a couple of handguns-including the.357 Magnum Smith amp; Wesson issued to me by the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department. I grimaced, knowing damn well what kind of trouble a kid could get into with those. That wasn’t all, of course. A lifetime’s worth of financial papers, my own service records-the list went on and on. The more I thought about it, the sadder and madder I got.

I folded my arms across my chest and leaned against the desk, frowning. The faint marks of tape and print dust on every smooth surface told me that deputies had finished with their chores. Estelle hadn’t cautioned me when we’d last talked, and I knew that procrastination wasn’t part of her character. She probably had a thick file folder of glossy eight-by-ten photos of every corner of my home and its shambled contents. Camille and I could start the cleanup.

Out in the kitchen, the telephone sprang to life again, and I could hear Camille’s steps on the foyer tile. “I’ll get it,” she called, her voice sounding small and distant through the maze of adobe walls.

I straightened up and left the den, reaching the living room just as Camille leaned over the kitchen counter to holler at me, her hand covering the receiver.

“It’s Sheriff Holman, Dad.”

I grimaced. “Tell him that I’ll call him later.”

She returned to the telephone, and after a brief exchange, I heard her laugh. I stepped up into the kitchen and she extended the receiver toward me.

“He says you must be feeling better.”

“No doubt,” I muttered, and took the phone. Finding one’s home turned upside down wasn’t my idea of a practical convalescence. “Hello, Marty.”

“Hey, Bill. Welcome back, and I sure am sorry about the-”

“Thanks,” I said, cutting him off before he got too far into the eulogy over the break-in. “Hell of a homecoming. Any news on the lost kid?”

“Not a thing yet. Pasquale filled you in?”

“In part.”

“Let me tell you, the folks are getting worried sick.”

“I can imagine. Listen, don’t tie up any of the officers on my account. I’m not going to be much use to you for a while, and I sure as hell am not going to be of any use up in those rocks.” I glanced back into the living room. “I can handle a residential burglary if I move slowly.”

The least the sheriff could have done was manage agreement to that, but he didn’t. After a moment’s hesitation, Martin Holman asked, “What sorts of things are missing, besides the firearms?”

“Just personal papers. Nothing from the department.”

“Oh,” Holman said, and the relief in his voice was obvious. I could imagine Martin Holman worrying at night, as he lay in bed, that I had secret files at home, culled over the years-names, dates, indiscretions. Maybe even his name. Sheriff Martin Holman’s specialty was worrying, even when he had nothing to worry about.

“Have you been up on the mesa yet?”

“All morning,” Sheriff Holman said. “And by the way, there’s a message here that a Stanley Willit wants to talk with you as soon as you’re available.”

“Stanley who?”

“Willit. W-I–L-L–I-T. That’s the name on the note. I’ve never heard of him.”

“Nor have I. What does he want? Did he say?”

“The note just says, ‘Ref F. Apodaca.’ That mean anything to you?”

“Sure. Reference Florencio Apodaca. The old gent who’s using my back lot as his own private cemetery. I can’t imagine who Stanley Willet is, or what he has to do with that, but I’ll give him a call when I get down to the office.”

I didn’t look in Camille’s direction when I said that, since she had made it abundantly clear that she would accompany me to Posadas and help me settle in if I promised that the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department was off-limits.

“Well, shoot,” Holman said. He was one of the few people I knew who actually said things like that. “You know, we’ve been so caught up in the logistics of the search up on the mesa that I didn’t even remember the old gravedigger. Estelle told you about that, eh?”

“Yes. And all that’s the least of our problems right now.”

Holman laughed good-naturedly, assuming that I was referring to my health. “We jumped right back into all these things so fast, I haven’t had a chance to ask you how you’re doing. Did you miss us?”

“Like typhoid,” I said. “And I’m doing fine. As the doctor in Flint said, I’m a new person now.”

“That in itself will be something to see,” Holman said. He could have meant any number of things, but I didn’t pursue it.

Instead, I asked, “You said you’d been up on the mesa. Any sign of the boy at all? Any footprints, scraps of clothes, anything like that?”

Holman made a small groan of disappointment. “No, not a trace. We’ve got a good crew out there, though. We’ve got nearly two hundred people now. They brought in the dogs this morning, and the National Guard has three choppers out of Las Cruces.”

“He’s spent one night out?”

“Yes, a cold and wet one.”

“Then you don’t have much time, Marty. If he isn’t found by morning, he’s a goner.”

“I know it. But it’s tough. One of the rescue folks was telling me that a little kid like that will actually hide from the search party. He’ll get frightened and do just the opposite of what would make sense.”