Steven Havill - Privileged to Kill

“We won’t have the full blood run-up back for another forty-eight hours or so, but I think it’s interesting,” Francis said, and with a start I realized that I had drifted back into hearing range.

“Sir?” Estelle prompted.

“What’s interesting?” I asked. “Sorry. I was wandering.”

“Francis was saying that the preliminary autopsy showed Maria Ibarra had virtually nothing in her stomach other than the equivalent of about a quarter slice of pizza.”

“Really?”

She nodded, and I was aware that Francis was gazing at me, his dark eyes doing their quiet doctor-patient number.

“She was famished then,” I said. “She went after the food too fast.” I grinned. “Great dinner table conversation.”

But with some relief, I focused on Maria’s last meal as I laid my fork across my plate, most of the food untouched. With my elbows on either side of the plate and my chin resting on laced fingers, I squinted at Estelle.

“Maria Ibarra couldn’t have afforded half a slice of pizza, let alone anything else. So she was with someone who picked up the tab,” I said. “We know that much.” I pushed myself away from the table and leaned back in the chair. “If she was with kids, what are the odds that it was packaged pizza? The kind you buy in the grocery store?”

“Zero,” Estelle said. “That time of night? Kids cruising the village? They’re not going to go home and eat microwave pizza.”

“Maybe not.”

“And not pizza with fresh jalapeños,” Francis said.

I turned and grinned at him. “This is getting even better, this conversation. But it gives us a place to start. How many places in Posadas sell fresh pizza? Two?”

“Three, if you count Portillo’s Handy-Way.”

“And that’s just miked packaged stuff,” I said. “It shouldn’t be hard to track down who sold the pizza…and if we have any luck at all, the counter help will remember who came in and who didn’t. It’s not that big a town.”

“If you can get people to talk,” Francis said.

“At the moment, that doesn’t matter,” I replied. “Remember what it’s like to be a teenager? If we find a single kid who remembers seeing Maria last night, even just one, that kid will remember who Maria was with. And a teenager with an adult? That, they’ll really remember.”

I reached out and stabbed the piece of chicken that I’d been pushing around my plate while my mind was off in the blue. The chicken was tender and spicy, and when that piece was gone I went searching for another. It looked like the others had finished their dinner, so I had some catching up to do. Both Francis and Estelle seemed perfectly willing to keep me company.

While the others waited, I finished a dinner fit for a condemned man, and then spent time over coffee, hashing out a battle plan with Estelle. Francis Guzman even spent the better part of ten minutes with us before adjourning to the living room to play with his son. That ten minutes was something of a record for him.

The battle plan should have been simple enough. My brain was clear, the paths of action seemed limited to a handful. The first order of business was to find out who had kept Maria Ibarra company the evening of her death.

What I hoped, of course, was that we’d visit Jan’s Pizza Parlor on Bustos and Second, or maybe the Pizza World over on North Fifth, and find out that Maria had been seen with person X, and then we’d go arrest the son of a bitch for failure to report a death. That’s not what happened.

The Guzmans’ nanny, Irma Sedillos, she of the chililess baked chicken recipe, showed up at the house around eight that evening for the night shift. The kid seemed perfectly attuned to his parents’ bizarre life, accepting their sudden comings and goings with complete aplomb. He obviously loved Irma and accepted her as a third parent-probably because she was noisier than he was.

“I can’t watch,” Estelle muttered as she closed the door on the kitchen. Neither could Francis. The good doctor had locked himself in his study, nose deep in a stack of medical journals. Irma and the kid were about to do the dishes. I didn’t bother to ask what kind of team the two of them would make. Irma had to be capable of some magic, though, since the two of them had done dishes many times before and the Guzmans didn’t yet eat off paper plates.

After a third cup of coffee, I worked up enough gumption to move out of my chair. We decided to hit Jan’s Pizza Parlor first, for no good reason other than that it was the more popular of the two nightspots. With an out-of-town game, business would be slow. There was no reason for this game to be any different from other contests. The cavalcade of cars and trucks that traditionally followed the Posadas Jaguars’ game bus out of town would have been long and vocal. The ruckus in the local eateries would start about midnight, when everyone returned.

I drove the Blazer home to its garage with Estelle following in the patrol car. Even as I swung the heavy door down, I could hear a siren far in the distance. Estelle swung 310 into my driveway and I hustled over to the patrol car.

She started to step out. “Do you want to drive, sir?”

“Go ahead,” I said, and slid my bulk into the passenger side, simultaneously reaching for the radio’s volume knob. The damn thing was turned so low it was an unintelligible mumble and I frowned at Estelle. “Wonderful gadgets, these radios,” I said.

“It’s a pedestrian accident at the corner of Pershing and Bustos,” Estelle said. “Bob Torrez is coming in, but he’s about twelve miles west. The ambulance is already en route.”

“Where’s the P.D.?” I asked, but the radio answered my question.

“Posadas, P.D. will be ten-ninety-seven.” I could hear the excitement in Officer Thomas Pasquale’s voice, and his radio was picking up enough background noise that I could hear the wail of his patrol car’s engine as he flogged it down one of the village’s quiet streets.

“Ten-four, P.D.,” our dispatcher said, calm as ice. He didn’t ask Tom Pasquale where he was, or why he was predicting that he would arrive at the scene before he actually did. Ernie Wheeler took life as it came. Instead he added, “P.D., did you copy three-oh-eight?”

“Ten-four. I’m on North Twelfth. E.T.A. about a minute,” Pasquale said, and I wished that he would leave the damn radio alone and put both hands on the steering wheel.

I keyed the mike and told Posadas dispatch that we were responding as well. The ambulance had a block and a half to travel from the hospital to the reported accident site. If Officer Tom Pasquale was on North Twelfth, he had approximately half a mile to cover. We were three quarters of a mile south.

We flew through the same intersection where I’d run the red light earlier in the evening and immediately saw, one block west, the ambulance parked at the south curb of Bustos, near the sidewalk at the intersection of Bustos and Pershing. Two other vehicles were parked nearby, and a small crowd had gathered. Tom Pasquale’s village patrol car was nowhere in sight.

“Swing around and block eastbound,” I said needlessly. Estelle was already in the process, neatly shielding the accident scene from incoming traffic-including Officer Pasquale, if he ever showed up.

Several people were clustered around a figure lying at the base of a utility pole, but they didn’t seem to be paying much attention to the patient. Instead, they were all looking off to the west, and one of them was pointing.

We pulled to a halt and beyond the crowd, fifty feet farther east and well across the intersection of Pershing, close to the curb, was what had once been a bicycle, crushed to junk. The street was strewn with debris. The light was not good, and I wouldn’t have immediately recognized the bicycle even if it hadn’t been reduced to scrap.