Steven Havill - The Fourth Time is Murder

“Wow,” Madelyn said as she settled into the car once more. The sheriff had already left, his truck trailing blue smoke. “I was watching your face when the young woman’s face came up on the screen.”

Estelle didn’t reply. She had been calculating the time it would take Bobby Torrez to drive to the boneyard to talk with Sergeant Tom Mears, and then on to Las Cruces, an hour away even flying low. She hadn’t told Irene what photo needed to be identified, and that was good. Still, there had been enough questions asked about the accident victim, Chris Marsh, and his girlfriend, Consuela Juanita Vallejos, that Irene Salas, a member of the modern cell phone generation, might be prompted to make a quick telephone call. Even if done in compassionate innocence, it would be all the tip-off needed.

If she was home in Las Cruces, CJ Vallejos was half an hour, maybe an hour, from the border crossing at El Paso. It was conceivable that she was already waiting in line.

“Where are you now?”

The telephone connection was scratchy, and it sounded as if Deputy Tony Abeyta was down in the bottom of a large tank, his voice both faint and echoing.

“I’m at Lawson Brothers Ford,” the deputy said. “The sales manager doesn’t remember anything about a blue Mustang, but he’s checkin’ their records for me.”

“Don’t bother. The MVD says that the car came from Sonoraland Ford. I have a name for you,” Estelle said. “Consuela Juanita Vallejos.” She spelled the first name. “She goes by ‘CJ.’”

“Got it.”

Estelle gave the deputy the residence address. “I don’t have a clue where that is,” she added. “But LCPD will. What we need is a close watch for a little while until we can unsnarl some loose ends. It turns out that Ms. Vallejos is a friend-or at least a classmate acquaintance-of Serafina Roybal’s granddaughter, Irene. She says that CJ’s boyfriend at one time was Chris Marsh.”

“Bingo.”

“Well, maybe bingo. We’ll see. I’m headed to Regál so Irene can ID a driver’s license photo. That’s going to take a half hour, at least. In the meantime, Bobby’s flying your way with whatever Mears has been able to dig out of the wrecked truck. That’s going to be at least an hour, so hang tight.”

“Got it.”

“And Tony…I do not want you making contact with Vallejos. You copy that?”

“Absolutely.”

“No contact at all. If she’s home, I want to know. If not, we need to find her, and LCPD can help with that. Okay? In the meantime, alert the border crossing at Santa Teresa, just to be on the safe side. They can spread the word. The Mustang in question is a 2007 model, color blue, license Mary Yankee Paul Ocean Nora Yankee.”

“Cute. That’ll be hard to find,” Abeyta quipped.

“We hope not. I’ll be back to you. No contact, Tony. I don’t want her knowing you’re there.”

“Ten-four.”

Estelle dropped the phone in her lap and tried to relax back in the seat.

“Flight risk?” Madelyn asked.

“Oh, absolutely that,” Estelle said. “She may be already gone.”

“And then what?”

“Then all the rules change,” she replied.

“I have to ask.…”

“Okay.”

“Why doesn’t…it’s Tony? Why doesn’t the deputy just detain her right now, if he finds her at home? I mean, there’s a fair chance she has no idea you’re on her tail, isn’t there?”

“Better than fair.”

“So…”

“For one thing, other than that a certain CJ Vallejos was once Chris Marsh’s girlfriend, we have nothing on her. If Irene Salas makes a positive ID from the driver’s license photo, then we can put a face to a name. Irene says that CJ Vallejos and Chris Marsh were a couple. That’s a good connection. If Marsh’s neighbors also make an ID, then that’s good corroboration. But other than that…” Estelle shrugged. “We have nothing that directly ties Ms. Consuela Juanita Vallejos to Chris Marsh’s death. To his murder. And we don’t arrest people ‘just in case.’”

“You’re saying that this CJ person might not know a thing about Marsh’s escapades.”

“On the one hand, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Maybe they haven’t been seeing each other since last fall. Maybe, maybe, maybe. All the possibilities. That’s why we don’t just land on someone with both feet…at least before we have probable cause. As our district attorney is fond of telling Grand Juries, ‘I’d rather let ten criminals back onto the street than arrest one innocent person.’ There are a lot of things that the D.A. and I don’t see eye to eye on, but that’s not one of them.”

“So you’re trying to close some doors, as you said.”

“Yes. And that’s not always easy. For one thing, we don’t always recognize the doors when we see them.”

“Ah.” Madelyn fell silent for a few minutes, her right hand straying out to the dash at one point as Estelle drifted out to pass a pickup truck with a livestock trailer in tow. With the highway stretching empty before them for another twelve miles to the saloon, the reporter turned a bit sideways in her seat. “You said ‘on the one hand.’ What’s on the other?”

“Someone climbed down to the wreck shortly after it happened. It’s certain that Chris Marsh was still alive. He was so horribly injured that he couldn’t move. He just lay there, on his back, bashed down between some rocks, bleeding to death. Someone climbed down, ransacked the truck and his person, and finished him off by drowning him with one of his own cans of beer.”

“That’s grim.”

“Yes, it’s grim. Maybe at one point, Marsh spasmed enough that he flailed his left arm.…It was already broken in two places, mind you. The killer stepped on his hand. By accident? To keep it away from the victim’s face while the killer poured the beer down his throat, choking him to death?”

“Okay,” Madelyn said. “It’s guaranteed that I won’t sleep tonight.”

“While you’re lying there staring at the ceiling tonight, consider the killer’s mind-set, Madelyn. Anyone who would kill like that-watching Chris Marsh choke and gag and then die right before her eyes? Kill once in the most cold-blooded, cruel manner possible, you know the killer won’t hesitate a second time.” Estelle glanced across at the writer. “We don’t corner a person like that without holding every card in the deck that we can. Whether it’s to a sleepless night or not, we all want to go home when the shift is done.”

“Some shift.”

“In a manner of speaking.”

The writer ruminated on that for a few minutes, and then said, “The sheriff.”

Estelle flashed a quick look her way.

Madelyn held up a hand as if to say, I know, I know. “The sheriff impresses me as being much more on top of things than he would like us to believe.”

That prompted a laugh from Estelle. “That’s an observation, not a question.”

“Exactly. Is it an accurate one?”

“That’s a judgment you’ll have to make, Madelyn. Stick around for a while and then decide. I’d hate to bias you one way or another.”

The reporter shook her head in amusement. “Probably the figure is something like 99.99999 percent,” she said, more to herself than Estelle.

“What figure is that?”

“The percentage of people who will cheerfully talk about someone behind their back when the occasion presents itself.”

“Ah.”

“I have to try, you understand.”

“I do.”

The miles melted behind them, and before long they swept up the north side of the San Cristóbals toward the pass, and then over the top. Minutes later, they eased into Sanchez Lane. Madelyn reached over and patted the top of the computer.