Steven Havill - Before She Dies

“What a goddamned mess,” I said. I looked at Deputy Mears’s pale face. “Take your car on up the road about a quarter mile and block the oncoming lane. No one comes through. No one.” He nodded but didn’t move. I took him by the arm. “Tom…do it now. And find out from Gayle what the deputy’s last radio call was and get back to me.”

“Yes, sir,” he said with a start. To Estelle I said, “Let’s get an inventory and then get ’em out of here.”

She nodded. There were nine civilians present, and by the time we took IDs, statements, and inventories and marked where each vehicle had been parked, Sergeant Robert Torrez and Sheriff Martin Holman had arrived.

We needed the manpower to control that circus, and every time I caught a glimpse of Estelle’s taut face I knew just what she was thinking. Whoever had pulled the trigger on Encinos and Real had picked a perfect spot. There had been no passersby to witness the shooting, no neighbors to hear the shots.

And the nearest telephone, when a motorist finally did stumble onto the carnage, was at a crowded saloon seven miles from town. That assured that the spectators would arrive well before any law, trampling any evidence there might have been into the fine New Mexico sand.

In less than two minutes, the handheld radio on my belt squawked. The news from Deputy Tom Mears wasn’t what I wanted to hear. If Paul Encinos had stopped a vehicle, he hadn’t radioed in. The last transmission Gayle Sedillos had recorded in the log back in Posadas was at 10:53 P.M., when the deputy had radioed that he was stopping at Chavez Chevrolet-Oldsmobile to talk with a motorist. He had given no name or license then, either.

That coincided with the information on the deputy’s own patrol log. The clipboard rested on Encinos’s briefcase in the middle of the front seat. The blood-spattered top page offered only a cryptic account of the deputy’s last hours. He hadn’t documented either the stop at Chavez or any event thereafter.

I felt a hand on my elbow. “Bill…” Sheriff Holman pulled gently, ushering me to one side. “Listen. Cassie isn’t sure they are going to be able to…resuscitate him.” Cassie Gates, the best EMT in Posadas County, wasn’t usually wrong.

I nodded. “I know, sheriff.”

“Maybe if they can get him back to the hospital in time…” His voice trailed off as he watched the first ambulance’s door slam shut. After a deep sigh he shrugged his shoulders a little straighter and looked at me. “What do you want me to do?”

“Control things at the hospital, Martin.” I ticked off a list while he jotted notes in the little blue spiral. “Make sure both sets of parents are notified. Paul’s father lives in Scottsdale, I think. I’m not sure where his mother is now.”

“She’s up in Albuquerque,” Holman muttered.

“And get a hold of Paul’s ex-wife.”

“Tiffany,” Holman said.

“She lives over in the Mesaview Apartments. And Linda. I’m not sure. I think she told me once that her mother was living in Las Lunas.”

“I’ll take care of it.” He snapped the little book shut, confident now that he had somewhere to go, something to do. “Anything else? Do we know who he stopped?”

I shook my head. “No, we don’t. But right now the most important thing is what’s going on at the hospital.” As Sheriff Holman turned to go, I added, “And Martin…”

“Yes?”

“Keep the lid on over there. Frank Dayan will want to talk with Linda.”

Holman frowned and walked back to me, standing so that our faces were less than a foot apart.

“If she lives, then she’s the only witness to what happened here,” he said, grasping the obvious more quickly than usual. The back door of the second ambulance slammed shut and then that vehicle too pulled away.

“If she regains consciousness, we have to talk with her. And that means before anyone else,” I said.

Holman nodded. “I’ll be at the hospital.”

“I’ll have one of the deputies there as soon as I can. In the meantime, if anything breaks, call me. Take my recorder in case Linda is able to speak with you. If she says anything at all, tape it. The recorder is in my briefcase on the front seat of my car.”

He walked briskly back toward his car, caught in the winking of a dozen red lights. I saw the huge, dark figure of Sergeant Bob Torrez herding spectators east along the highway, well away from the scene. The routine of the drill would keep our minds occupied, at least.

The spectators would be individually interviewed and then escorted, one by one, down the macadam to where their vehicles were parked. They would be allowed to pull directly back onto the highway, their tire tracks in the sandy shoulder marked with a red surveyor’s flag.

Eventually the entire fleet would be gone, leaving only the bullet-pocked patrol car parked on the north shoulder of the road. Then we would put a half mile of state highway under a microscope if we had to.

Maybe one of the rubberneckers had seen something. Maybe one of them had overheard someone say something at the Broken Spur Saloon. Maybe.

I left Bob Torrez and Bing Burkett, one of the first state troopers to arrive, to work the witnesses. Estelle was setting up her camera gear on the pavement beside Encinos’s patrol car.

“Do you need any help?”

“You could hold the flashlight for me, sir.”

I swung the beam over the patrol car and counted seven holes in the driver’s door, doorpost, and roof.

“I’ll take close-ups of those in the morning when it’s light,” Estelle said. “I want the side of the car and the macadam beside it right away.”

By the time we finished two hours later, the list of evidence was painfully short. Paul Encinos had been driving county patrol car 308. The tire tracks showed that he had pulled his patrol car off the pavement in a normal fashion. Another set of tracks was printed clearly in the sand several feet in front of 308. The origin of the tracks was obscured by both the patrol car and dozens of bootprints. Whether the tracks belonged to the killer’s car was anyone’s guess.

The driver’s door of 308 was open, and that’s the way Francisco Pena had found it when he’d happened by sometime after eleven that night. Pena worked for rancher Herb Torrance. He traveled from his line shack the nine miles down County Road 14 to the state highway and the Broken Spur Saloon often.

It had been Pena who’d raced to the Broken Spur and called Posadas. Pena said that when he’d driven by the scene, the car door was open. The engine was idling, the four-way flashers were blinking, and Deputy Encinos was on the ground by the back tire. Another person was inside the car.

The first pool of Paul Encinos’s blood began four inches in front of the back tire and extended east for seventeen inches, part of the pool smeared by the deputy’s upper left arm.

Another larger pool of blood actually touched the tread of the back tire where the tire rested on the macadam, extending around and under the car in a crescent. What appeared to be a blood smear on the bodywork of the patrol car began just to the rear of the wheel-well opening, extending down to the chrome strip above the rock guard.

The deputy had managed to exit the patrol car, but Linda Real never moved from her seat. “The killer fired at Linda through the driver’s side window,” Estelle said.

“I don’t understand why Paul didn’t call in, Estelle. I mean we harp and harp on that.” I’m sure Estelle heard the helplessness in my voice, but there were no easy answers.

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Somebody does,” I said.

Sunday slipped into Monday morning. Roadblocks on State 56 just north of the border at Regal produced nothing. Throughout most of the morning, deputies and troopers stopped just about everything with wheels in an area whose radius grew with the day. Our best efforts produced nothing. We had no idea what we were looking for.