Steven Havill - Before She Dies

“Right now, that’s not our highest priority, sheriff.”

Holman looked confused. “I don’t follow.”

“Paul Encinos is dead. Nothing we do is going to bring him back. Much as I’d like to catch the son of a bitch who killed him, I don’t want to do anything that might jeopardize Linda Real’s life. I don’t want two dead. So we’re going to let the doctors alone to do their best. Later, if she can…”

“She’s got to know, Bill. She’s the key witness.”

“Only if she’s alive, sheriff.”

Holman nodded and turned to go. I had a stack of patrol logs and radio logs I wanted to sift through in peace and quiet, but Holman wasn’t finished.

“Will you give the eulogy?” I stopped short, and Holman added, “At the service. It’s Thursday morning at ten.”

“I’m not very good at that sort of thing, sheriff.”

“You don’t have to be good at it, Bill. And I hope that you never get enough practice that you become good at it. But it will mean more coming from you than from me. I mean, I’ll say a little something, but the official department sentiments should come from you. You’ve been in this business for a long time.”

I nodded.

“Thanks. Let me know if there’s anything else you want me to do.”

“There is,” I said, and Holman looked expectant. “Sergeant Torrez has a plaster cast of some tire prints. He’s got about eighty-five million other things to do. It’d be a hell of a deal if you’d take them and find out what kind of tire we’re dealing with.”

For a second or two, Holman looked as if he wanted to say, “How do I do that?” But he thought better of it. “Where are they?”

“The deputy has them with him. He’s over at the county maintenance yard, in the old shop building.”

He nodded. “I’ll pick them up. I’ll be in my office until five, and then I’ll be at the hospital.”

After Sheriff Martin Holman left, I retrieved a stack of patrol logs along with the radio and telephone logs for the previous week. I spread the paperwork out on my desk, closed my office door, and got to work. I had no illusions that I would find anything of importance in that mass of documentation.

The logs would show, in terse, repetitive jargon, exactly what I told every new deputy who ever joined our tiny department-and what I told the others on a regular basis. The threat of rural law enforcement lay not in the constant dangers of hoodlum patrol. Leave that to the big cities. We might go weeks, months, even years with nothing but yawns, and then be smashed in the face with fifteen seconds of panic.

After living in the doldrums, it was easy to be caught off guard.

Paul Encinos had been caught off guard and it had killed him. His handgun had been found still snapped in its holster. The electric lock on the dashboard of his patrol car that held the shotgun had not been tripped. The deputy never had time to recognize his moment of panic.

Sergeant Robert Torrez was bent over the fender of 308, his brows knit tightly together in concentration as he peeled the backing off a one-inch bright-blue circular sticker.

“Estelle’s better at this than I am,” he muttered.

I surveyed his handiwork, impressed. Centered over each mark of pellet damage was a colored sticker. He had used yellow dots for the first shot pattern, blue for the second, and red for the third. In place of the atomized driver’s side window, he had stretched a piece of clear plastic and then, by carefully extrapolating where the pellets had struck other surfaces of the car’s interior, he had dotted the probable locations of the pellets’ entry through the window.

I turned and looked at the dozen yard-square pieces of brown butcher paper that were laid on the garage floor. Each one had been blasted once with a shotgun. Each was carefully labeled.

The top six targets had been shot using one of the department’s 12 gauge riot guns, a pump action weapon with a twenty-inch barrel. The shots had been fired at distances beginning at five feet and then extending out in five-foot increments to thirty feet. The diameter of the pattern was clearly labeled.

The second set of targets had been riddled using the same type three-inch magnum number four buck ammunition, but this time fired from a shotgun with a standard length barrel.

“You can see a pretty significant difference in spread between the two guns,” I mused, kneeling down with a grunt and a loud cracking of the knees. “What was the choke on the field gun?”

“Modified,” Torrez said. “There’s a bunch of other combinations I could have tried, but this gives us a pretty clear picture.”

He picked up the last target in the riot gun series, the one fired at thirty feet, and walked to the car. “If you compare the size of the yellow pattern, the one we think was fired from the opposite shoulder of the highway, you’ll see that it’d be pretty easy to imagine a close match.”

“You sound overwhelmed with confidence,” I said. “None of the other series are that large.”

“Right,” Torrez nodded. “In order to get a spread like this with a regular field gun, you’d have to be backed off fifty or sixty feet.”

“You don’t really have very many definite pellet marks on the car to establish that pattern size, though.”

“Eight, sir. That’s why I said you could imagine a match. I’d hate to have to defend this in court.”

“Eight pellets out of a possible…”

“Forty-one. I know that isn’t a very good percentage, but it gives us a starting point. For the round fired through the window, I had only six definites to work with and another half a dozen probables.” He laid down the target and picked up another. “The round fired through the window was really tight when it hit the glass. Just under a foot in diameter.”

“And with a field gun, you’d still have to be backed away twenty or thirty feet for a pattern that big.”

“Right.”

I took a deep breath. “So we’re looking for a sawed-off twelve-gauge three-inch magnum shotgun that ejects its empties to the side.”

“Or a bottom dumper that the killer held on its side, like the Hollywood hotshots do.” Torrez mimed the stance, right elbow cocked high. I grimaced.

“In short, we don’t really know very much, do we?”

“No, sir.”

I straightened up and surveyed the perforated patrol car and paper targets. “We’re going to be able to figure out pretty much what happened from the time the trigger was pulled for the first time,” I said. “And that just about shoots our wad. We don’t know who, we don’t know why, we don’t know how many people were involved.” I looked at Torrez, hoping that he had some other answers that he’d been saving for last. He didn’t.

“Howard Bishop and Bing Burkett are coordinating highway searches, airport checks, that sort of thing,” I shrugged. “Good cooperation all around. I imagine that there’s something like a hundred deputies, troopers-even some of the critter cops working every corner of the state. No one’s turned up anything.” I thrust my hands in my pockets. “Did Sheriff Holman swing by and pick up the tire casts from you?”

“Yes, sir.” Torrez sounded a little skeptical. I grinned at the big deputy.

“The sheriff is not as stupid as we all sometimes think he is, Roberto.” Torrez had the tact to remain silent. “Did you tell the county yard foreman that we’d need this garage bay for several days?”

Torrez nodded. “He said whatever we needed. He said he’s got the only other key, so people won’t be wandering in and out until we give the word.”

The deputy carefully walked around his targets and frowned at me. “Sir, I’ve been wondering about the car, too. You know, we have a couple of coincidences here that are kinda interesting. One, Paul takes three oh eight here, instead of the car he usually drives. Two, he was out in the vicinity of the Broken Spur Saloon, which is where I had my last go-around with Victor Sanchez. And three, this all happened during the swing shift, which is when I work.”