Steven Havill - Convenient Disposal

Torrez leaned his head toward Freddy. “We know where the damn school is, Freddy. You don’t know where they are, then?”

“Well, you know,” Freddy said helplessly. “Sometimes Tony rides his bike. Well, until it broke, he did. Not Mauro. He usually catches a ride with somebody.”

With the ambulance now safely away, the school bus had backed out of Candelaria, and Estelle could see the two Acosta girls sitting on the sidewalk, backpacks making convenient chair backs.

“Sir,” she said, “you said that you walked uptown? When you did that, you left Carmen alone in the house?”

Freddy nodded. “I shouldn’t have left her like that,” he murmured.

“That’s not the issue, sir,” Estelle said. “When you walked up the street, you didn’t see anyone in the neighborhood who you didn’t know?” He shook his head slowly. “You don’t remember seeing any vehicles?” His head had settled into a methodical rhythm. “Do you remember what time that was?” The oscillation slowed, but Freddy didn’t reply.

“Sir, whatever you can remember is going to help us.” The dispatcher had taken the father’s desperate 911 call at 2:38 PM Estelle could picture Freddy plodding home, ambling up the driveway, entering the house through the kitchen door, and taking several minutes to notice the results of the ruckus. If he had paused in the kitchen, it was conceivable that he wouldn’t notice anything amiss for some time.

“I guess,” Freddy started slowly. “I guess that I walked up to the car place, there, right around noon. I was going to see if Juanita could break away for lunch, maybe. We sometimes do that. Right there at the burger place.”

“And that’s what you did today?”

Freddy nodded and then brightened a little. “You know, I walked in and Juanita was on the telephone. I remember her looking at the clock, and then she just shook her head at me. I remember that.”

“What time was that?”

“Just like…like twelve oh one. Something like that. Right at noon.”

“And then after that, what? You walked downtown?” Torrez asked.

“I thought maybe I’d get a pizza or something. But then I just went to Tommy’s and got some chips. I talked to a few people, you know…just people I know. I had a cup of coffee. I guess…”

“When you came back home, you didn’t see anything out of the ordinary?” Torrez said, clearly irritated at the man’s wandering reminiscence. “Nobody outside, no traffic, nothing?”

Freddy shook his head. “Just like…you know? Like always, I guess.”

Like always , Estelle thought.

“And then I came inside…” His lip quivered. “The first thing I saw…the first thing was the telephone on the floor. I almost stepped on it. I looked across the living room and that’s when I saw the television set, all smashed.” He looked helplessly at Estelle. “Who would do such a thing to Carmen?”

Estelle turned and regarded the house and driveway toward the east. “Mr. Acosta, you said that the county manager’s truck was not there when you left to walk uptown?”

“It sure wasn’t. I’m sure of that. I went out that side door, you know. It wasn’t there then.”

“But it was parked there when you returned?”

He nodded and turned to look at the small white county truck. “He’s not home, though.”

“We hope not,” she almost said, but Freddy Acosta’s assumption was a natural one to make. If the peripatetic Kevin Zeigler had stopped home for a quick nap-and he would have had to be incapacitated with the flu, or worse, to do something like that-the hubbub next door would have rousted him out of bed. She shot a glance at Sheriff Robert Torrez. He was jotting something down in a tiny notebook.

“I’ll give Judge Hobart a call,” he said to Estelle, and then turned back to Freddy. “You’ll take the kids to Armand’s?”

“I guess so. They’re going to need some things from inside…”

Torrez shook his head quickly. “Nobody goes inside, Freddy. Not until we’re finished. Maybe by later this evening. We’ll keep you posted. Right now, you need to go get the kids settled and then make arrangements to meet your wife at the hospital. They might let both of you ride up to Albuquerque on the plane. If not, you’ll need the car.” Juanita Acosta had parked diagonally, the older-model Fairlane’s massive rear end blocking much of the street.

“I got my keys, I guess,” Freddy said. He glanced at the house and Estelle saw his eyes flick to the yellow crime-scene ribbon. “You’ll let me know?” he asked.

“Of course,” Estelle said. “Right now, you need to be with Juanita and your daughter. And you need to find the boys.”

He nodded and set off toward the car.

“What?” Sheriff Torrez said when he saw the expression on her face. The sudden question jerked Estelle’s head around. He tapped the side of his head and lifted his chin at her in question.

“Where’s Zeigler?” she asked.

“That’s a hell of a good question,” Torrez said.

With the Acostas’ home cleared of the hubbub of paramedics and members of the family, Estelle stood for a moment at the kitchen door, looking across the side yard toward Kevin Zeigler’s neighboring house. There might be a perfectly simple explanation for the truck’s presence. But the key ring, loaded with not only ignition keys, but a wad of other county keys as well-office, gates, who knew what all? People didn’t go far without their keys.

Estelle forced her attention back to the evidence directly in front of her: the Acostas’ kitchen door. A tear in the screen immediately beside the latch looked as if someone had punched through to flip the flimsy lock, but there were so many tears, so many dents and buckles in the door’s aluminum frame that it was impossible to tell what was recent and what was simply the result of several seasons’ worth of rambunctious children.

The inner door had been flung open so hard that the cheap brass doorstop had broken, and the doorknob had slammed into the wall. A spattering of paint and Sheetrock dust marked the floor below the strike.

“I think she was tryin’ to lock the door,” Torrez said. With the cap of his ballpoint pen, he touched the brass lock in the middle of the doorknob. It was one of those smooth, difficult-to-grasp things that projected a bare minimum from the knob. “I got one of these that’s a real pain in the ass…it hangs up all the time. I can see old Carmen struggling with it, and whoever’s on the outside just busts right through.”

He turned and pointed at the small table that sat askew, far too close to the kitchen range. “That got scooted back.”

Estelle looked from the kitchen toward the small dining room. “And then she headed for the telephone,” she said. The telephone answering-machine combination rested on one wing of an impressive oak hutch in the dining room, but the wireless receiver was in the bedroom, where Freddy had left it when he called 911.

“Lemme show you something,” Torrez said. He stepped through the doorway into the dining room. “I think she got to the phone,” he said. “Either that, or they struggled in that doorway between the dining room and living room, right about where the phone was . That’s the direction she was headed.” He knelt down and touched a gouge in the wallpaper beside the doorway that led into the living room.

While the kitchen was smooth-plastered Sheetrock painted in ubiquitous eggshell white, the dining room was mid-’40s fancy, with paneled wainscoting below a painted wood-trim strip. Above the strip, the wallpaper was dark Victorian, the dense curlicues and floral patterns stained in several places from roof leaks.