Steven Havill - Before She Dies

At ten that morning, I sat morosely at my desk, staring across my small office at the chalkboard in the corner. I’d just left the hospital, where any extra people were just a nuisance. In an effort to clear my weary brain, I’d holed up in my office for a few minutes, trying to think of anything we’d missed.

On the chalkboard I had drawn a representation of the shooting scene. It was simple enough…a child could have drawn it. One section of empty two-lane highway and a patrol car-and two victims. That was all.

We didn’t have a single set of tracks that we could conclusively link to the crime, although Bob Torrez had made a plaster of paris cast of the tracks in the sand in front of the county car. We had another set from across the highway, imprints no more than three feet long before they’d been obliterated by one or more of the sightseers. Torrez had cast those, too.

The killer had left behind no shell casings. From hurried conversations at Posadas General Hospital, we knew that the weapon that had killed Paul Encinos and desperately wounded Linda Real was a shotgun. The odds-on favorite would be a 12 gauge, statistically the most common by a wide margin. The killer’s weapon had sprayed them with number 4 buck, lead pellets roughly.24 caliber in size and 21 to the ounce. A 12-gauge three-inch magnum would blast out 40 of the things at each jerk of the trigger.

We did not know where Paul Encinos had been standing, or even if he was, when the first shot was fired. Our guess was that Linda Real never moved from her seat during the incident…and certainly didn’t move once the killer started pumping shots into the patrol car.

Gayle Sedillos appeared in the doorway. “Sir, Lionel Martinez is on the phone.” I waved a hand in dismissal and Gayle smiled faintly. She was tired, too, but I needed her expertise for a few hours more. “He wants to know when you’re going to open the highway.”

I sighed and reached for the phone. “What’s up, Lionel?”

Martinez was a man of infinite patience. He ran his State Highway Department District with good humor and tact, even when overloaded semis beat his new, expensive pavement to rubble and tourists constantly complained that there were no shaded, plumbed, padded rest areas out in the middle of desolation.

We’d put a cork in one of his highways and left it there.

“Sheriff, I need to know when your department is going to open Fifty-six.”

I took a deep breath, trying to think of something tactful to say. “I don’t know, Lionel.”

“You can’t give me some idea?”

“Not yet.”

“We’ve got a flock of angry snowbirds who aren’t takin’ kindly to using Herb Torrance’s road to go around you folks.” I could imagine the gigantic, waddling RVs trying to negotiate the narrow, dusty, rutted county road that would take motorists around our roadblock.

“They’re going to have to stay angry, Lionel. Tell you what. Don’t take any shit from anybody. If they want to bark at someone, send ’em to see me.”

Lionel chuckled and then his voice grew serious. “Is there anything else we can do for you?”

“I wish there were.”

“No progress yet?”

“No.”

“Is the young lady going to make it?”

“I don’t know. She was in surgery all night. Last word I had is that she’s still out.”

“I never would have thought something like this would happen here, sheriff.”

“Yeah…well,” I started to say, then stopped. I let it slide.

“You know, Paul Encinos was family.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Sure. He was second cousin to my wife. You know Rosie Salazar?”

“Yes.”

“Rosie’s sister Celsa was Paul’s mother. She died here not so long ago.”

I wasn’t in the mood to pursue the complicated lineage. Paul Encinos had lived in Posadas County most of his life and I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn he was related in one way or another to half the county. It would make for a hell of a lynch mob when we caught the son of a bitch who killed him.

“I had forgotten that,” I said, and glanced up as Gayle Sedillos appeared in the doorway again and tapped her ear.

“I’ll keep in touch, Lionel,” I said, and as soon as I started to hang up Gayle said, “Estelle needs you out on Fifty-six. And she asked if you’d bring the county’s cherry picker.”

“The cherry picker?” I looked at Gayle stupidly.

She held out her right hand, palm up, and raised her arm. “You know, the cherry picker they use to fix electric lines and things like that.”

“I know what it is, Gayle. I was just trying to imagine what Estelle would want with it. There’s not much higher than cholla cactus out where she is.”

Gayle shrugged. “That’s what she said.”

“Then that’s what she’ll get.”

Twenty minutes later I was driving west on 56 with the county’s utility truck rumbling along behind me. One of our reserve officers met us at the roadblock, and five hundred yards after that I stopped, the county truck edging up behind me so that its massive front bumper was only inches from the back of 310. The driver, Nelson Petro, sat patiently with both hands locked on the steering wheel while I got out to confer with Estelle.

“I need to show you what we’ve found, sir,” she said. I caught the eagerness in her tone. I looked toward Encinos’s patrol car and saw the webbing of heavy nylon fishing line attached to the car in several places. The nylon lines stretched from the car across the highway, converging to a single spot five feet above the ground, tied to the top of a wooden pole driven into the hard soil of the highway shoulder. A camera tripod rested on the north side of the highway’s center line, and several more nylon lines ran from points inside the car to it.

Ignoring the spiderweb of lines, Estelle walked quickly to where her briefcase perched on the hood of Bob Torrez’s patrol car. Torrez leaned against the car, his arms folded. “First, we got lucky,” she said, and handed me a plastic bag. I looked at the attached evidence tag and then turned the bag so I could see the shell casing inside clearly.

“Twelve gauge,” Sergeant Torrez said quietly. “Winchester-Western, number four buck.” He straightened a little, towering over me by a head. “Recently fired.”

“Has to be it, then,” I said. “Where was it?”

Bob indicated the south side of the highway where the dense rabbitbrush and kochia choked the shoulder. “Twenty-eight inches from the pavement.” I saw the small red flag off to one side of the wooden web-stake.

“Sharp eyes,” I said.

“Luck, sir,” Estelle said. “I almost stepped on it when I was adjusting the camera tripod.”

“Sharp eyes,” Bob Torrez added. He was right, of course. Estelle rarely did anything by accident.

“Any others?”

“No, sir. Just the one,” Estelle said.

“But at least three shots were fired, maybe more.”

“That’s right, sir. But this tells us something we didn’t know. Number one, the killer probably picked up the spent shell casings that he could find. The other two may have landed on the macadam. They would be easy.”

“In the dark, it would have been a tough search to find this one,” I said, and dropped the plastic bag back in Estelle’s briefcase.

“He…or she, maybe…took the time to pick up spent shells, but missed this one, because it was kicked out to the side.”

“And that eliminates any shotgun that ejects its shells straight down, sir,” Torrez said.

“In all likelihood,” Estelle added quickly. “Let me show you.” I followed her across the macadam to the far shoulder. The red surveyor’s flag was nestled in the midst of a thick, healthy rabbitbrush. The wind was cooperating and the spiderweb of fishing lines stretched silently, reflecting the sunlight.