Steven Havill - Convenient Disposal

“What do you think?” Jackie said at one point. She had her broad back turned to Estelle and was examining the wall to one side of the door. Palm toward the wall, she swept her arm slowly along, covering an area nearly twenty-four inches long, as much as three inches wide, approximately five feet off the floor.

The wall was a pink-tinged white, latex paint over gypsum wallboard. Estelle stepped close, looking over Jackie’s shoulder. Soiling the otherwise clean wall was a swash of discoloration.

“It looks as if someone scrubbed something big and dirty against the wall,” Jackie said. She extended a tape measure. “Too big for a dirty hand.” She glanced down at the floor. “Too high off the ground for a kid to put his dirty feet on the wall.”

“You’d be surprised,” Estelle said. “Even the little ones put crud in the most amazing places.” She slipped a small, folding hand lens out of her pocket and handed it to the deputy. After a moment, Jackie handed the magnifier back.

“I can’t tell. Dirt, maybe.”

“Can you get that?” Estelle asked Linda, and the photographer nodded cheerfully. She started to position herself, and Estelle touched her on the arm. “After you finish the close-ups, I need some that show this entire side of the room, including that smear. I need the position relative to everything else. If you can get the corner of the bed, the table, and this, so much the better.”

Even as Linda was maneuvering to position the camera, Officer Mike Sisneros appeared in the bedroom doorway. “You got a visitor, Undersheriff,” he said. “A William Page? He’s waiting outside at the tape. You want me to let him through?”

“No, I don’t,” Estelle said quickly. “I’ll be out in a minute.” She turned to Jackie. “When you take the sample of that”-and she nodded at the wall-“don’t do a scraping. I don’t want whatever it is mixed with the base paint of the Sheetrock. Go all the way under so that you lift the plaster and paint and whatever that gunk is, all intact.”

“I think the paper layer of the Sheetrock will peel right off,” the deputy said.

“Even better.” Estelle made her way out of the house. With another roll of yellow tape, deputies had isolated Zeigler’s county truck next door, and Estelle paused to look at the area once more. Nothing beyond supposition tied the lug wrench that had been found under the little pickup with either the truck itself or the violence in the house next door-but no other assumption made sense.

Somehow, Kevin Zeigler was involved in the incident, but Estelle refused to entertain the idea that Zeigler had attacked Carmen Acosta. There was no way to predict what trouble would come Carmen’s way; she’d proved that over and over again since she’d been old enough to punch out schoolmates. But Zeigler? In trying to inventory what she knew about the man, Estelle could count only a handful of qualities, first among them that Zeigler outworked anybody in his sprawling office.

The only scenario that made sense was that Kevin had come home for lunch and walked into the middle of something. Had he come home alone? He wasn’t a smoker, but someone recently had been in his truck who was.

Across the street a small crowd of spectators had clustered, with Deputy Dennis Collins in the middle of them, pad and tape recorder in hand. True to form, few of them would be neighbors. Most would be the idle curious who had heard the scanner traffic.

A charcoal-colored Lexus was parked at the curb, nosed up close to the yellow tape. Estelle recognized the man standing impatiently on the street side of the car; at various times she had seen him with the county manager.

As she crossed the yard, Estelle glanced at her watch. If William Page had left his office in Socorro immediately after her telephone call, he had made the trip in just over two hours…a distance of 192 miles. As she neared the tape, she could hear an occasional cooling tick from the automobile’s engine.

Page’s head was shaking as he strode toward Estelle. Without breaking stride, he said something to Sisneros as he passed, ducking under the yellow tape with quick grace.

“Mr. Page?” Estelle asked.

“William Page, yes,” he said. He extended his hand, his grip firm and in no hurry to release. He lowered his head, fixing Estelle with a hard stare, his extraordinary cobalt blue eyes unblinking. “I’m guessing that you’re Sheriff Guzman.”

“Undersheriff. Yes, sir.”

His eyes flicked past her toward the Acostas’ house, and then over toward Zeigler’s. “You have to explain all this to me. I need to talk with Kevin.”

“There isn’t a lot I can tell you yet, sir,” Estelle said. She motioned for him to walk with her toward her car, parked inside the tape and farther down the street, well away from the sharp-eared neighbors. Page was wearing a yellow polo shirt, tan windbreaker, black trousers with a razor crease, and expensive running shoes. If he hadn’t taken time to change, a hard day at the office certainly didn’t show. As they walked, Page raised his arms, locking both hands behind his head as if he expected to be handcuffed at any moment.

“Have you talked with Kevin yet?”

“No, sir. We don’t know where he is.”

“Doesn’t his office-”

“No, sir.” They reached her county car and Estelle stopped, turning to stand by the back fender so she could watch both the street and the taped-off area. “How long have you known Kevin, Mr. Page?”

“William. I go by William,” he said quickly. “I guess I’ve known Kevin for three or four years.” He lowered his hands and thrust them in his back pockets. Estelle guessed him to be in his early thirties. Blond, tan, perfectly fit, William Page would have looked at home on the pages of a mail-order clothing catalog. All he needed was a perfectly groomed Irish setter sitting in the passenger seat of his Lexus.

“So you knew him before he was hired as county manager two years ago,” she said. No one had supposed that Zeigler would be able to fill the shoes of the previous manager, a twenty-eight-year veteran and Posadas legend who had dropped dead during an inspection tour of a recently completed wing of the Public Safety Building. “Where did you two meet? In Socorro?”

“Kevin used to work for the city,” Page said quickly. “I was doing a computer consulting job for them.” He shifted impatiently, glancing first at Zeigler’s house and then down the street.

“Ah.” Estelle nodded. “So when he moved down here, you’ve been able to break away and visit from time to time.” She watched Page’s face, but the only emotion she could read there was worry.

“Okay,” he said, ignoring the statement. He held out his hands a foot apart as if measuring something. “Look…you have to fill me in, Officer. I know these folks here,” and he nodded at the Acostas’ house. “They go ’round and around all the time. Always scrapping. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another. So what happened this time?”

“One of their children was assaulted, Mr. Page.” He looked back at her quickly. “Carmen,” she added. “That’s the oldest girl. She’s fourteen.”

“Of course. I know her.”

Estelle nodded. “It appears that neither parent was home at the time. Her father claims that he was gone just for a short time, over the lunch hour. When he came home, he found Carmen.”

“Oh…,” Page said, and ducked his head, closing his eyes at the same time.

“Mr. Acosta says that when he left on an errand, Kevin’s county truck was not in that driveway. He says that it was parked there on his return. If you think about that, I’m sure you can understand our concern.”

“And you’ve had no word from Kevin? Nothing at all?”