Steven Havill - Privileged to Kill

After being unlucky enough to fall asleep, the driver had bargained with fate pretty well. The pickup was less than a year old, with all the options. The air bag in the steering wheel had deployed just right and his seatbelt and shoulder harness had been snug. From all appearances, the truck had been traveling nearly sixty miles an hour when it had struck the rock, but the driver had been pillowed enough that the collapsing cab hadn’t cut him to pieces or crushed him to pudding.

His buddy hadn’t done so well. The truck had struck the rock face just to the right of center. If he’d been awake, the passenger had had one brief moment when his head-on view was nothing but limestone. The truck didn’t have a passenger air bag, and if the passenger had been wearing his seatbelt, it hadn’t followed him out of the truck. He’d gone ballistic and after blasting through the powdered windshield had made solid contact with the limestone rock. If the truck hadn’t bounced to the left after the impact, the kid would have landed right back on the crushed hood.

I winced and turned away. Martin Holman had surrendered his place to the EMTs, and he grabbed my arm.

“It looks like just the two of them,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Are you going to call Estelle, or do you want me to?”

“I’ll do it,” I said. As I turned to walk back to 310, I wondered if Vanessa Davila had been in one of the cars that had filed by the wreckage, or if hers had been one of the faces pressed against the bus window. The thought had never occurred to me to step up into the bus and check. I stopped and turned to Holman.

“You don’t need me here,” I said. “We’re staking out a place at the trailer park for a young girl who was seen with Maria Ibarra earlier. We had information that she might have been at the game.” I nodded down the now-dark highway. “While you people are finishing up here, I’m going to see if I can corral her.”

“You’ll be back at the office later tonight?”

“Yes.”

Holman took a step closer and touched my elbow again. “No, I mean…really. You’ll be at the office?”

I looked at the sheriff for a long minute, and then nodded again. “If the kid we’re after isn’t home by now, there’s no point in sticking around the rest of the night watching. I’ll be at the office.”

“Okay, because we need to talk.”

“If I’m not there when you get back, just give me a call.”

Holman smiled and his eyes narrowed. “I’ve been doing that all day, Bill.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that. I climbed into 310 and headed back toward Posadas. Less than three miles from town, Estelle’s unmarked county car flashed by, and my radio barked a couple of times. She’d seen me and could figure out easily enough where I was headed.

I reflected that Martin Holman had handled himself with surprising competence. Of course, it was a simple enough traffic accident, but still he’d managed pretty well. And then I realized that I was brooding not so much about Holman’s performance, but about having to explain my own.

Posadas was buzzing when I drove back into town. I slowed to my usual crawl, window down and radio low. “All right, Vanessa, where the hell are you?” I said.

I idled past Jan’s Pizza Parlor, looking at cars and crowds. The place was hopping, and I didn’t recognize many of the faces. I wouldn’t have even if I had been able to see them clearly. New generations of kids were passing through the school so fast that I had long since given up trying to keep track of them all.

Posadas was a tiny place by most standards. Still, I was discovering that it was startlingly easy to grow out of touch.

All four of my own kids had graduated from Posadas High School, and back then when I saw a kid on the street, odds were ten to one that I would recognize him-and probably in eight of those cases I’d also know the parents, know what the father did or didn’t do for a living, know what the closet skeletons were.

Now I was lucky to recognize one out of ten. And that included the two victims of the truck crash that night. I’d heard Stub Moore mention the name, and it had meant nothing to me. Nor had a quick glimpse of the kid’s ashen face as he was strapped onto the stretcher. All I’d seen of the passenger was a lump under a blanket. But I was content that I’d find out in due time who they were, and I knew that they’d be just two more faces in a passing crowd.

I swung around the back of the restaurant and parked the patrol car next to the Dumpster. The service entrance was unlocked and I slipped inside.

The smell of fresh pizza and all its possible toppings hit me like a club.

Crowded though the restaurant was, the atmosphere was subdued. The patrons didn’t know whether to celebrate the winning game they’d seen or mourn for a lost classmate. But folks eat at both wakes and weddings, so what the hell. The pizza soothed either way.

“Sir?”

I turned and waved a hand in recognition at Jan’s assistant manager-whose name promptly escaped me. I handed her a photocopied yearbook picture of Vanessa Davila. “Have you noticed her in here tonight?”

The young lady, a short, stocky, well-manicured gal who looked like she could work sixteen-hour shifts back to back, squinted at the photo and shook her head. “But then, we’ve been really busy, you know? She could have been in here a dozen times and I wouldn’t have seen her.”

I nodded, stepped up closer to one of the cash registers, and scanned the faces in the restaurant. There was no Vanessa.

The same was true at the other pizza joint, and at the convenience store. I drove down to the Ranchero, but trailer number three was still dark, with Mama asleep somewhere in the back.

I was no longer feeling gracious. I parked 310 and left the door open so I’d have some light. This time, Mrs. Davila took her sweet time. I knocked, pounded, rang the bell-and finally heard muffled footsteps.

Mrs. Davila opened the door and surveyed me with complete disgust.

“Did your daughter make it home yet, ma’am?”

“What?” There it was again, the automatic bastion of the deaf or the dull.

“Is your daughter here?” I kept my voice down and worked hard at keeping the frustration out of it.

“Does it look like she’s here?”

“I don’t know, ma’am. I can’t see into your home.”

She snorted and stepped to one side. “Well, then, come on in and see for yourself. She’s not here.”

Ordinarily I wouldn’t have bothered to press the point-and I didn’t think that Mrs. Davila expected my response-but it was the middle of the night, and I had nothing better to do.

“Thanks, I will,” I said, and stepped past her. “Where do you think she’s staying? With one of her friends in town?”

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Davila said, her voice winding up and down as if the whole thing was an unfathomable mystery. “I told you that before.”

I stood in the middle of the tiny, narrow living room and surveyed the place. The ten-by-twelve room didn’t offer much space for decorating. But it was clean and neat, even heated in winter…a hell of a lot more than Maria Ibarra had been looking forward to.

“Mrs. Davila, how old is your daughter?”

“What?”

“How old is Vanessa?”

The hesitation that followed was a bit too long for a mother, even one who’d given up. “Fourteen next month.”

“Fourteen.” I turned and looked at the woman. “And at fourteen she comes and goes as she likes? When she likes?”

The woman didn’t answer my question, but instead asked, “What do you want her for? I deserve to know that.”

“We need to talk to her about one of her friends. We told you that before.”