Steven Havill - Prolonged Exposure

“Let me check the rest of the rooms,” I said, and backed out. The remaining two bedrooms were empty and stainless, and I allowed a sigh of relief to escape. The master bedroom’s bath was empty as well, but the three-quarter bath opposite the first bedroom still had water puddled in the sink and a blood-soaked towel flung in the bathtub.

I returned to the first bedroom. Estelle stood by the bed, frowning.

The pool of blood had saturated the mattress, covering an area nearly two feet across. Two other towels, both saturated, were flung on the other side of the bed.

“Someone was hurt, and dragged in here,” Estelle said. “His bloody hand hit the wall in the hallway.” She reached out with her pen and hooked a corner of the nearest towel, lifting it from the bed. “Someone tried to save him.”

“Or her,” I said. “And then what happened?”

She shook her head. “We need blood comparisons. If this is a match with the blood down in the motel room, then we’ve got our connection.” She bit her lip.

“What?”

“We still don’t know for sure if any of this is related to Francis, sir. We have a child’s sock print that can’t be matched. And that’s all.” She sagged against the wall. “We’re running around in circles, and we don’t know where he is.”

I put my arms around her shoulders and pulled her close. She was shaking. “We’ll find him, sweetheart. Just hang in there.”

She said something so quietly, I couldn’t catch it, and I directed her toward the hall. “You called for some help?” I asked.

“Yes, sir,” she replied, adding, “And we need to go through the camper outside,” as if she was forcing some direction and purpose on herself.

I could hear a siren in the distance, and no sooner had I uttered a curse about them running loud than the siren died. Still, in the quiet night, I could hear the big engine working overtime. The patrol car turned onto Fifth and the driver finally pulled his foot out of it, letting the car coast, almost silent, to the curb in front of 310.

I brushed past Estelle and made my way to the door, reaching the step just as Eddie Mitchell worked his way across the yard, keeping in the shadows. He held his service automatic, and I held up a hand.

“It’s all right, Eddie.” Even after he heard my voice, he didn’t drop the stealth pose, just stayed close to the side of the pickup truck, weapon at the ready.

I stepped down. “Here’s what we need you to do,” I said. “There’s evidence in here that someone was badly injured, brought here for treatment, and then taken somewhere else. We don’t have a clue where. The big RV is gone, so we need an all-points put out for that. It shouldn’t be hard to find. We need someone here, and we need someone to collect some blood samples and run them to the lab.”

“That’s all there is?” Mitchell asked. “Blood?”

“No other signs.” I hesitated as Estelle walked toward the back of the camper. “No sign of the boy yet.”

Deputy Mitchell looked at me thoughtfully. “You’re figuring that Mrs. Cole and Browers have the children?”

“That’s what we’re assuming right now. Somehow, there’s a tie-in to the homicide down at the motel. A blood type will bring us closer. But for right now, if we find Tiffany Cole, Andy Browers, or Paul Cole, we’ll have some answers.”

The door of the camper on the back of Andy Browers’s truck was closed but not latched. As soon as we swung it open, we could see the rich brown of dried blood-on the door, the floor, spread between the two small bunks on each side.

Estelle handed the shotgun to Mitchell and stepped up on the first aluminum step. She swung her flashlight around the interior. “A child’s been here,” she said. “There’re some clothes and a partial bag of chips. Even a couple games and toys.”

“Anything that belongs to Francisco?”

“No.”

“Small child? Like Cody?”

“Yes,” she said, and held up a tiny blue-and-yellow-striped T-shirt. Even in the uneven light, I could see the stain on the lower hem. “And we don’t know who’s hurt,” she added. “We need blood tests on this.” She held the small shirt in her hand.

I knew there was nothing I could say that would make much difference, but I leaned inside the camper and lowered my voice to the faintest of whispers. “Estelle, you never jumped to conclusions before. Don’t start now. Let’s go.”

“You’ve got your radio with you?” I said to Eddie.

“Yes, sir.”

“We’ll be right back.”

Every officer we had was on call was occupied in some fashion. Now we had another avalanche of evidence that deserved careful sifting.

There was no one to do the sifting.

By the time I reached 310, Estelle was on the radio.

“PCS, this is three-ten. Have three-oh-eight and three-oh-seven meet this unit at Four-oh-seven North Fifth Street. Silent approach.”

“Do you know what Torrez and Abeyta are doing right now?” I asked.

“No, sir. I don’t. But I know what they need to be doing. If we find that RV, we find the answers.”

“And you can’t hide something that big,” I said. Even as the words came out of my mouth, I knew they were untrue. With enough head start to carry them out of the initial roadblock area, the RV would blend in with the rest of the snowbird traffic that flowed from one end of the Southwest to the other.

“Why,” Estelle said, a statement rather than a question. “If we can find something that tells us why, then we’ll know which way to turn.”

“Three oh eight, three ten,” I said, and then waited, microphone in hand.

“Three oh eight.” Torrez sounded as if he’d just come off dinner break on a routine night.

“ETA?”

“I’m there.”

As he said that, his county car glided around the intersection of Bustos and Fifth. His headlights were off.

“Three ten, three oh nine is two minutes out.” By the time Torrez’s car had sidled to a stop nose-to-nose with ours, Tony Abeyta’s unmarked Caprice entered Fifth from eastbound Bustos.

“Lights,” Torrez said, and instantly Abeyta’s headlights winked out. The five of us, exactly half of the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department, assembled on the sidewalk in front of Andy Browers’s house.

“We need to establish when the RV was last here,” I said. “As nearly as we can. That gives us some kind of time frame. If we know what kind of head start they had, we know the search-area radius.”

“That vehicle could have gone through any of the roadblocks,” Mitchell said quietly. “They’re looking for someone in company with a three-year-old Mexican child. And they weren’t on the lookout for Baker Echo zero zero one, since it was sitting right here when we put out the bulletin.”

“It’s possible they drove right through,” Estelle said.

“All right, all right,” I snapped. “Let’s assume that there’s a connection with Madrid’s death. That’s too much of a coincidence not to fly. He was killed sometime shortly after six. If Cole and Browers were involved, and drove back here, maybe one of them hurt, then they could have pulled out anytime between six-thirty and ten minutes ago. That’s two hours.”

“And two hours at just sixty miles an hour is a hundred and twenty miles already,” Mitchell said calmly. “That puts them in Mexico, or Texas, or Arizona. And if they’re smart, they’ve dumped that monster for something else.”

“Browers is from Texas,” Estelle said quietly.

“But Roberto Madrid is from Mexico, by way of Arizona,” Mitchell countered.

“Christ,” I said. “All right. Let’s do it this way. Eddie, I want you to handle the blood work. Make sure things stay organized. As soon as you can, I want blood-type matches so we can start piecing this mess together. Take a sample from inside, from the puddle on the bed. Take that child’s T-shirt, the one that Estelle just bagged. We need a preliminary match with the blood from the motel bathroom. Do it anyway you can, but get back to us ASAP.”