Steven Havill - The Fourth Time is Murder

“I don’t blame you a bit, sir. If you’d move the truck on out, that’ll help.”

“You got it.”

A car approached from the south, and Estelle watched it go by, tires hissing on the pavement as wide eyes peered at them.

The tanker started with a belch of fragrant propane fumes, and the undersheriff walked to the edge of the highway out of his way. She looked down at the lights far below. Switching the radio channel to local, she keyed the handheld.

“Dennis, what do you have down there?”

For a moment, she was answered only by silence, then Deputy Collins flashed his light up the hill at her. “Estelle, I think before we move the victim, Perrone should take a look. Matty agrees.”

Matty Finnegan, the lead EMT, had voiced opinions many times before that Estelle valued.

“And you, too,” Collins added. Estelle’s curiosity was piqued, but the last thing she wanted was a discussion of the accident scene, and the accident victim, over the public airwaves, even if the local handheld signal was limited in its range.

“I’ll be down in a minute. We need some coverage up here on the highway first.”

“Connie is on her way up,” he said, referring to the highway department worker. “Matty and Cliff will stay here until you say otherwise.”

She watched the flashlight beam wobble its way up through the rocks, marveling again at the wild ride that the truck must have taken as it vaulted into space. In a few minutes, Connie Ulibarri reached the guardrail, grabbed it with both hands, and stopped, winded and red faced. She was a tiny girl, maybe twenty-five years old, her hard hat skewed back from her forehead.

“Dr. Perrone’s not going to like that climb,” she managed. She walked uphill along the narrow lane behind the rail to join Estelle. “The driver’s been dead awhile,” she said.

“Just the one occupant?”

“Yes. He wasn’t wearing the seat belt. The passenger side is retracted as well. He stayed with it for quite a ride,” Connie said. “Steering wheel is bent all to hell where he hung on. But then Dennis thinks that he went out the passenger side window.”

“This evening sometime, you think?”

“Maybe. But he’s stone cold, Estelle. That’s why Dennis was thinking that you and Perrone should take a look.”

“Okay. How’d you happen to stumble on this, Connie?”

Ulibarri took a deep breath and pulled her hard hat straight. “I saw the deer over in the ditch. She was out of the traffic lane, and I wasn’t going to stop, ’cause I could see she was too big for me to pick up alone, but then I saw that she had a Game and Fish radio collar on. I thought I should retrieve that.” She nodded toward her truck. “I got it in the unit. Then I started looking and saw the skid marks and the scuffed dirt by the rail.” She shrugged. “What a mess.”

“The propane deliveryman said he didn’t see the wreck happen, either.”

“No. He stopped after I did. I was settin’ out the flares, after I called you guys.”

Her handheld crackled again. “Estelle, when you come down, you might as well come down loaded,” Collins said. She could sense the excitement in his voice. “I think we got something going on here.”

“God, be careful,” Connie said fervently. “We don’t need you to take a header.”

“No, we don’t,” Estelle said. She left Connie to flag traffic, crossed to her car, and hefted the black field case out of her trunk.

The pickup lay on its top, nose downhill. The twisted frame and torn bed had been mangled in every direction. A single stubborn bolt had refused to sheer, and the lightweight aluminum camper shell had been flailed into what looked like a white, rumpled sheet, still attached to the truck bed by that single bolt. The cab was crushed flat to the dashboard, having taken the brunt of the first somersaults over the guardrail.

The EMTs had covered the driver’s body with a sheet of yellow plastic. Matty Finnegan and Cliff Herrera waited off to one side while Estelle surveyed the entirety of the catastrophe. The EMTs were well aware that adding their tracks to the scene only complicated matters.

“He stayed with it for a while,” Matty said. She pointed up the hill. A hundred yards above, the guardrail was a faint glint in the lights of the parked vehicles. The scars where the truck had hit the ground were clear. Had the steep slope been covered with the characteristic runty brush of this rugged country, the little Chevy might have been snagged earlier, its crashing descent slowed. But the rocks hadn’t provided anything other than a hard springboard for each amazing tumble.

Estelle nodded. The driver had stayed with the truck for most of the journey-unfortunately for him. What the crushing cab hadn’t done to him, the rocks had finished off. He lay smashed between two large slabs of limestone, and Estelle approached the body from the side away from the truck.

She bent down and pulled the yellow plastic back. The young man-if it was his truck, he was just twenty-one-lay on his back. One leg had caught and twisted sideways in the dead stump wood of a gnarled juniper. His right arm, hidden under his body, appeared to have been broken so many times that the original line formed by the elbow’s joint to upper and lower portions was lost.

“We haven’t touched anything,” Matty Finnegan said. “Just covered him up. I wouldn’t be surprised if in a little bit this mist turns to rain…or worse.”

Another vehicle stopped on the road up above, and Estelle recognized the sound of the sheriff’s elderly pickup. “Weather isn’t going to bother this young man much anymore,” Estelle said. She knelt and stretched out a hand, feeling the side of the victim’s neck. The skin was as cold as the February weather. The young man’s features were surprisingly composed, the only injury to his face a single massive laceration through his right cheek.

“Any idea how long he’s been here?” Cliff asked. “He’s not rigored anymore.”

“No telling,” Estelle replied. “Connie called Dispatch to report the accident just a minute before Ernie called you guys out. As far as I know, he could have been here for a week.”

“Well…,” Matty said.

Estelle glanced at her and shrugged. “In a manner of speaking,” she amended. She looked back at the victim’s face. He stared straight up into the night sky, face surprisingly clean of dirt or blood. The ravens and coyotes hadn’t found him yet. A puddle of blood had formed and dried beside his head, and Estelle bent down with her flashlight. The man’s left ear had been terribly lacerated, gouged out of the side of his head by a raking blow-probably a sharp corner of boulder, the same instant that his cheek had been ripped open.

“He’s local?” Matty asked.

“Don’t know yet,” Estelle said. “The truck is registered to Chris Marsh of Las Cruces, who should be twenty-one. That part fits.” She looked at the victim’s left arm, and saw that the unpredictable forces of the crash had broken it in several places above the elbow, including a catastrophic fracture of the joint of clavicle and shoulder socket.

She shifted position and realized that Deputy Dennis Collins was crouching at her right elbow, so close that she could hear his breathing and smell his aftershave. He reached out and laid his hand on her forearm. “This is what I meant,” he said. “Look at this.” He held his flashlight for her. The man’s left hand lay palm up in a small clear spot between the two rocks, fingers gently curled. Estelle bent close, puzzled at what she saw.

“What have we got here?” she said, more to herself than Collins. But the deputy assumed the question was meant for him, and he used a ballpoint pen as a pointer. “I think these are boot marks,” he said. “We got the heel right here, in this patch of dirt between the rocks. The ball of the foot rested right on his hand.” The marks were clear, outlined in muddy dirt on the pale skin of the man’s palm.