Final Payment Read online

  Torrez nodded. He looked at his wristwatch. “It’s three fifty-five. It’ll take an hour to get the maintenance crew out here with a bucket. In the meantime, I want Perrone to establish a TOD just as quick as he can. I don’t think these folks have been camped out here more than a couple of days, three or four at the most. Don’t smell like it.”

  Estelle knelt, looking south. “Why here?” she mused. “Why here?”

  “’Cause that’s where it was convenient,” Torrez said.

  “It’s like real estate,” Estelle said. “Location, location, location.”

  Chapter Three

  Within two hours, the area surrounding the gas company’s runway looked like a movie set, complete with a Posadas County utility truck’s cherry picker hoisted aloft into the gusty late afternoon sky. Each time she shifted position, Estelle felt the bucket’s gentle sway. Her commanding view, with the lift truck parked fifty yards from the end of the runway and the bucket hoisted thirty feet high, told her nothing new. The three bodies lay in pathetic isolation on the prairie, a few tantalizing yards from the spot where they had apparently deplaned.

  Sergeant Tom Mears worked with Deputy Tom Pasquale, and the “two Toms,” as the sheriff’s wife, Gayle Torrez, called them, had established that the pilot had stopped the aircraft just as the right tire sank into the sand, off the macadam and sixty-five feet from the end of the runway. Swinging wide to turn, the pilot had misjudged by mere inches, dropping first a main and then the nose wheel off the pavement. An odd mistake, Estelle thought, for someone who had landed a loaded aircraft on a short runway, most likely in the dead of night.

  A night landing made sense to her. The risks of trying to cross the border and then land in this isolated place would escalate in daylight—State 56 was a busy highway, and a plane parked on the airstrip would be in plain view.

  With tires precariously in the sandy gravel, it appeared that the pilot had elected to stop the aircraft, perhaps to off-load extra weight. The passengers had deplaned, their feet creating a welter of scuffed prints.

  “That’s one question answered,” Estelle said aloud. Linda Real, the Sheriff’s Department’s photographer and Deputy Pasquale’s roommate, didn’t move a muscle. She hung on gamely as the bucket rocked and dipped like a stuck carnival ride.

  “Which one?” she asked.

  “The trail of shoe prints. I can see them from here.” Estelle swept her arm to indicate the route the three victims had apparently taken, and just that small motion bounced the bucket. Linda flinched. The trail was marked with a row of small wire-stemmed surveyor’s flags.

  “We know—well, we’re close to knowing—that they came here by air. We know that in all likelihood they climbed out of the plane right there,” and she pointed to where the two Toms worked to pour plaster casts of the vague footprints and the one reasonably clear aircraft tire print. “The trouble is that when the pilot gunned the engine to pull the plane forward out of the sand, the prop wash obliterated most of the prints. That’s what I’m thinking right now. We’re not going to be able to tell much from the casts. But when he did that, he gave us a sequence of events.”

  “You mean the footprints first, then gunning the engine to obscure them.”

  “Exactly. That’s a start.”

  “Are any of the shoe prints clear enough for a comparison?” Linda asked.

  “Probably not. Even if we had some notion about what to compare them to. Maybe, maybe. That’s what we have right now. A big ‘maybe’ that they came in by plane, a big nothing beyond that.” She rested both forearms on the rim of the bucket, a posture so relaxed that Linda cringed. “So if they got off the plane right there, where was the killer? On the plane? Waiting in the bushes? Why did they do this?” Shifting position slightly, she felt the bucket sway gently under her. “Where were these people from, Linda? And where were they headed?”

  “Mexico is an obvious choice,” Linda said.

  “Sure enough. But they’re not migrants, Linda. This isn’t just a family headed to Hatch to pick green chile—not in May, anyway. His hands? The roughest thing he’s touched in years is a pencil. She hasn’t mopped her own floor in decades. I’d bet on it. Don y doña. And hijo…number-one son. That’s what I think. Where would people like that be heading after an illegal entry into the United States in the dead of night?” She looked off toward Posadas, and the slight motion of her turning rocked the bucket again. “And if not Mexico, then where? L.A.? Phoenix?” She turned to look east. “St. Louis? Chicago?”

  “I’m betting on the killer being a fourth passenger—or the pilot,” Linda said. “It’s too complicated to think that he was waiting here. That doesn’t make sense to me. For one thing, there are no vehicle tracks other than the airplane’s, so we know he wasn’t just sitting there in a van, supposedly waiting to pick up a load of illegals. But why would he walk? And all the way to this end of the runway? How did he know this is where the plane would stop?”

  “The wind, maybe,” Estelle said. She lifted her head and let the soft air play against her face. “What little there is feels like it’s from the southwest. If the pilot landed into the wind right now, right this minute, this is where he’d end up. But we don’t know what the wind conditions were when this all happened.” She thumped the side of the bucket. “If there was no wind, why didn’t he land eastbound, so the passengers could get off close to the road?”

  “Or turn around and taxi back to the gate,” Linda said. “I think the killer was on the plane. For one thing, I don’t think someone intent on bumping off three people would walk across the desert for miles and miles, then hope he had the right spot. I think he was on the plane.”

  “And that leaves us wondering, doesn’t it.” Estelle looked through the wide-angle lens of her camera again and for a moment watched Sheriff Torrez, Coroner Alan Perrone, and State Police Lieutenant Mark Adams working the area around the third victim. “If the killer did his business and then got back on the plane, was he the pilot?” She turned and looked at Linda. “Were there four on the plane originally, or five? Or more?”

  The photographer shrugged carefully. “And if he didn’t get back on the plane, where is he now?”

  “It’s a big desert out there,” Estelle said, and she sighed. How large the desert must have seemed for the three victims, how incomprehensible for a few awful minutes. None of this fitted the usual pattern—no plastic bags stuffed with cheap clothing, no plastic water jugs, none of the trappings of a desperate trudge across the desert for migrants seeking American minimum wage, a fortune for them.

  “Are there any other angles you want before we go back down?”

  “Ah, no,” Linda said. “I have the whole thing six ways from Sunday.”

  Estelle nudged the control and the bucket sank to earth with a faint hydraulic sigh. Bucky Sanchez, the county worker who had driven the bucket truck out to this lonely spot, met them as they stepped off.

  “You guys done with me?” he asked hopefully.

  “We are,” Estelle said. “And thanks, Bucky.”

  “Anytime,” he said, glancing nervously to the west. He managed a weak smile. “And I don’t really mean that, either. You think you know what happened out here?”

  “No,” Estelle said. “But every little bit that we can learn is bound to help.”

  “Worst thing I ever saw,” he said. “When I drive out back to the county road, do you want me to stay over to the side of the runway, same way I came in?”

  “Perfect.” Estelle nodded. “And if someone asks you what’s going on out here, just plead ignorance.”

  “That ain’t hard,” Sanchez said. “Why somebody’d do a thing like this is beyond me. Way beyond.”

  She turned at the approach of Tom Mears. “We’re finished,” she said to the sergeant.

  “Inspiration from above?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Estelle said. “But it’ll give us some overview pictures to ponder.”

  Mears looked down a
t the trowel in his hand as if the answers might lie there. “One of us needs to run out to the airport to talk with Jim Bergin. I’m kinda curious to see if there’s a standard wheelbase measurement that’s of any use to us.” He pointed across the pavement. “We’ve got a good measurement between the main gear in any number of places. It’s right at ninety-seven inches—más o menos. It’s hard to be exact, but it’s a start. By the way, if you look right there,” and he pointed at where a small yellow plastic evidence marker rested beside the runway, “you can see where he cranked the nose wheel over when he knew he was getting hung up on the edge of the pavement. I’m guessing that’s what happened. That gives us an idea of the distance and geometry between the main gear and the nose gear. Again, nothing exact, but it helps.”

  “It’s interesting that he did that,” Estelle said. “And you’re right. Jim might have some ideas. He might have seen a plane pass through that didn’t mean anything special to him at the time.”

  “Sure enough. We’re not talking a large plane, I’m guessing. The footprint of even a light twin-engine plane would be substantially wider than a single engine, I’d think.”

  “We have a starting point,” she said. “But you know, I’m curious why they walked where they did.” She looked off through the brush, her gaze following the trail of yellow flags that had been thrust into the desert. Why not just fly to Posadas and get off there, she wondered. Most of the time, Posadas Municipal was untended at night, even deserted. The facility was a comfortable six miles from town, far enough that a conservative landing wouldn’t even be heard except by a handful of folks who wouldn’t care about casual air traffic in the first place.

  “The possibility exists that the three were brought to this spot to be executed,” Estelle said. “That simple.”

  “Interesting,” Mears said cryptically. “That’s what Bobby thinks, too. And they were shot here, not somewhere else and dumped. Execution is the one scenario that explains a lot of what we’re seeing. There was no scuffle, no fight. Nothing that left any tracks, anyway.” The lift truck started and they watched it trundle back down the runway toward the gate and the county road beyond.

  “Tomás, we need the long tape,” Mears said, and Pasquale held up the reel. “Let’s get some numbers.”

  He hesitated and turned back to Estelle. “Apropos of nothing, are you ready for Saturday night?”

  “I haven’t been so nervous in a long, long time.” She laughed. Her son’s first recital, in which he would be performing along with nearly a dozen other music students, added another dimension to an otherwise already hectic weekend. Tom Mears’ fifteen-year-old daughter Melody would also play, but she was a veteran of half a dozen such performances.

  “This is a new experience for us,” she added.

  Sheriff Torrez made his way carefully through the vegetation, walking back to the runway. He greeted them with a heavy sigh, and Estelle didn’t know if that was because of the ugly crime, or the nagging pain in his hip irritated by all the walking. During another magic moment two years before, his rump had gotten in the way of a .223 bullet, and the recovery had been long, slow, and painful. “Hey,” Torrez said.

  Estelle held up her hands in frustration.

  “I know what you mean,” the sheriff said. “Nothin’ except three bodies. All shot one time. Pop, pop, pop. Hey, look—do we need to cancel the race?”

  “Cancel the race?” Estelle looked at the sheriff blankly. As if the young man going airborne into the rocks off the mesa rim had been from another lifetime instead of just hours before, Estelle hadn’t given the race a moment’s thought. In just a few days, 150 cyclists would be pounding down County Road 14 during the second half of the Posadas Cyclo-Cross 100. They would ride as far south on County Road 14 as Bender’s Canyon Trail, and turn east, the rough and broken two-track roughly paralleling the state highway. There would be no reason for the cyclists to ride another mile farther south to this remote place.

  “I don’t think we can do that,” she said.

  “The hell we can’t,” Torrez said.

  “No, I mean there’s no reason to. We’ll have someone posted at the intersection of the canyon trail and the county road to make sure no one strays.” She glanced across to where Deputy Tom Pasquale was recording numbers from their measurements. “Tom will be one of the cyclists, and that’ll give us another set of eyes.”

  “Bad time to be spread so thin,” Torrez said, then held up a plastic evidence bag containing three empty shell casings. “Niners,” he said. “I figured as much. It’s something, but it ain’t much.” He turned and waved at Linda Real. “Hey? Needja.” He lowered his voice. “Interesting thing is that it looks like the killer didn’t move much.”

  “How so?”

  Torrez hefted the bag. “Every empty case we’ve found was within a fifteen-foot circle. Like he stood in one spot and just pivoted with the target.” He hefted the bag thoughtfully, then reached out a hand toward Linda, touching her lightly on the shoulder as if to make sure that she was listening. “I need pictures of the brass locations,” he said. “Follow me over.”

  “Yep,” Linda said, and dropped her voice an octave, rending a fair impression of the sheriff. “Pictures.”

  “Oh,” Torrez said, stopping in his tracks. “No belts.”

  “Belts?”

  “None of ’em had belts on.”

  “Were they tied with them, maybe?”

  “No evidence of that. They just weren’t wearin’ ’em. Maybe they were, at one time. You can see the upset in the loops on their pants. But no belts now. The boy not wearin’ a belt don’t surprise me. Maybe even dad. But mama’s got a little belly…. She’s gonna need something. Think on that.” He shrugged. “Where you headed now?”

  “Sarge is going to swing by the airport to talk with Jim Bergin. Maybe there’s a profile of the aircraft we can conjure. I’m going to put together a pack of faces.” She gazed across at the bodies. “Someone knows these people, Bobby. They’re somebody. You can’t just pluck them out of the world and not have somebody notice.”

  “They ain’t wetbacks,” the sheriff said. “That’s for sure.”

  “Someone knows them. And that’s an advantage for us. The faster I can get a set of faces online, the better.”

  “See what Naranjo thinks. My money is on Mexico.”

  “Exactly.” Capitán Tomás Naranjo of the Mexican Judiciales could probe far more dark corners south of the border than the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department. Location, Estelle thought. Did the pilot see the landing strip far below, deserted and inviting? Not at night, he didn’t. Did he know beforehand that it was there? If he could read an aeronautical chart, yes.

  “I need the faces ASAP, Linda,” Estelle called, and the young photographer lifted a hand in acknowledgment. Someone, somewhere, would know who these three people were, and how their lives had tangled to bring them to this empty, lonesome place.

  Chapter Four

  Cabo primero Emilio Rojas of the district Judiciales, speaking in the clipped, certain tones of command, informed the undersheriff from across the border that Capitán Tomás Naranjo was not available. The capitán was busy, doing what only the capitán knew, the corporal said.

  The border between the United States and Mexico was far more than barbed wire and empty desert, Estelle knew. A great bureaucratic gulf existed, a fundamental difference in approach—to life, to language, and certainly to law enforcement.

  She lowered her voice another notch and slipped into the Spanish of her childhood in Tres Santos, speaking differentially, and still making it clear that she was imparting a confidence intended for Rojas’ ears only. “Agente,” she said, “I’m sending a series of photographs via e-mail. It is important that el capitán sees them as soon as possible.” She almost added, “within the hour,” but knew that Agente Rojas wouldn’t accept any form of ultimatum from a female. An hour was impossible anyway, if Naranjo was out in the hinterlands riding one of his favorite horses�
�his preferred prescription for blowing out the cobwebs of the bureaucracy in which he worked.

  “Ah,” Rojas said in English. “Photographs of what, Sheriff Guzman?”

  Before Estelle could elaborate, the phone clicked sharply, and the corporal’s stonewall was removed, replaced by a voice so soft and genteel that Estelle had to press the phone tightly to her ear, covering the other with her hand, in order to hear.

  “Estelle, how are you?” Captain Tomás Naranjo asked, speaking in faultless English. “I apologize for interrupting, but mention of your name always demands my complete attention.”

  “Good morning, mi capitán,” Estelle said with polite deference. “I hope my call finds you well. And Bianca as well.”

  “To be sure. What a pleasure to hear from you. It has been too long, you know.”

  “Yes, it has. I’m calling to ask for your agency’s assistance.”

  “Name it, señora.” His seductive avoidance of title wasn’t lost on Estelle. She had learned over the years to treat Tomás Naranjo with professional distance, being careful not to open unintended doors.

  “I’m sending you an attachment…a series of photographs. We have had an incident that is most puzzling, and I need your help.”

  “I see.” He sounded almost disappointed.

  She turned to watch her computer screen. “The first three are morgue photos. The victims came into the country by air—we think. In all likelihood, the plane landed at a private airstrip west of Posadas, and the victims were shot there, apparently by someone else also riding on the airplane. No signs of confrontation or struggle.”

  “You’re referring to the gas company’s modest runway west of your town?” Naranjo said, once again demonstrating his complete command of the geography on both sides of the border.

  “Exactly,” Estelle replied. “Off the west end, half a mile from the county road. There was no identification of any kind found on any of the bodies. The clothing is of quality, but there isn’t any labeling that tells us much.”