Prolonged Exposure (6 page)

“Get back to me when you know for sure,” she said. She racked the mike.

“What is it?” I asked.

“They think one of the Hueys had a catastrophic mechanical failure of some kind,” she said. “Nobody hurt, but it was a hard landing. They took out a couple of trees, so the chopper is junk.”

She tapped on the steering wheel, forehead deeply furrowed. Camille struggled with the seat straps for Francis, but Estelle didn’t seem to notice.

“So what else?” I said. She was still staring off through the windshield as if she was mentally computing something that didn’t add up. “This is me, remember?” I said, and grinned.

She turned to look at me, smiling lamely as she did so. “Sorry, sir. That was Bob Torrez I was talking to on the radio. They found a blue jacket. That’s where the chopper was circling when it went down.”

“Child’s jacket?”

“Yes, sir.” She glanced toward the backseat, saw that her son was secure, and pulled the truck into gear.

Chapter 10

As the crow flies, the helicopter crash site was less than a half mile from where we had been standing on the rim of Cat Mesa. To reach it by truck, we had to snake our way northwest on the rough two-track as it followed the rim, then jog along a section fence line.

We were suddenly in the middle of a convention. If there had been two hundred searchers on the mesa, at least that many and a few dozen more had materialized, and they were still flooding out of the trees. Where they all came from was anyone’s guess, and how they got there so fast would have been a good case study for a military tactician.

The flight crew of the chopper didn’t have long to relish their privacy. As far as the helicopter was concerned, there wasn’t much to see. The Huey was olive drab junk. It looked as if the pilot had done a wonderful job of backing it down into the trees, where first the tail rotor and then the wide black main rotor had each taken a turn trying to chew piñon and juniper.

There had been no fire, but a Forest Service truck was standing by, its crew and the four Guardsmen from the chopper nervously circling the cooling, ticking machine, watching for smoke.

After the first few minutes, though, the wrecked helicopter was no longer the main attraction. No one was dead or even bleeding; nothing was going to blow up. The Huey was just another piece of debris that would be a problem to haul down off the mesa. Maybe the National Guard would strip out the usable parts and donate the rest of the bent hulk to local hunters as a base camp. It was at least as attractive as the old sofa and wash rack.

Estelle pulled the Blazer to a stop and I turned to Camille. “Will you stay here with Francis?”

“Certainly,” she said, and it sounded like she really wanted to say something else, but I didn’t give her the chance. I couldn’t keep up with Estelle, and I didn’t even try. I plodded after her as she threaded her way through the scrub, making her way toward a convocation that had surrounded a grove of small oak saplings.

I could see Sgt. Robert Torrez, almost a full head taller than anyone else. He’d already made sure that a yellow tape had been strung, and I was sure that irritated the sea of eager faces. A hand plucked at my elbow, and I damn near lost my balance as I turned to see who it was.

“Undersheriff Gastner? You’re back?” I grinned in spite of myself. Marjorie Davis looked as if she had dressed for an expedition to the north woods, rather than just a jaunt into the wilds of her own county. Under normal circumstances, I was a fan of the
Posadas Register
, the biweekly official newspaper of Posadas County. Marjorie had worked for the school district for a dozen years before deciding to join the wild world of newspaper reporting.

I glanced at the fancy camera that hung around her neck.

“Marjorie, how the hell are you?”

“Fine. What have we got up here? Do you know?”

“No,” I said, stepping carefully. “I don’t know.” I nodded toward the helicopter. “Bent metal over there. Page-one sort of stuff.”

“I got that. I was glad nobody was hurt.” I glanced sideways at her, but she sounded serious. “When did you get back from Wisconsin?”

“Michigan. Yesterday.” I stopped, thinking better of wading through the crowd of people whose attention was focused on the oak grove. I didn’t have any answers or theories, and I wasn’t in the mood to tell the same old story to a dozen of the familiar faces I saw ahead of me—yes, I was back; yes, I was probably still undersheriff, nominally at least; and no, I didn’t have a goddamned clue about what was going on.

Sergeant Torrez and Estelle Reyes-Guzman were in the thick of things, and I hung back, resting under a fat old piñon that knew more than I did.

Marjorie Davis wasn’t so content to loaf in neutral, and when I showed no inclination to move into the center of action, she said, “I’ll talk to you later.”

“Sure enough,” I said, and watched her blend into the crowd.

What had been discovered deep in the little grove of contorted Gambel’s oak dashed everyone’s theories. I watched the ripple effect as word spread out through the assembled people as necks craned and eyes squinted for a look.

It wasn’t much to look at—just a tiny blue coat, western-style yoke, quilted insulation, zipper up the front. The oak grove, a collection of a hundred or two saplings, none of which was more than three inches in diameter, was about the size of half a tennis court. The jacket was a third of the way in on the northwest side.

How it came to be there was certainly not evident, but I was sure the jacket would start a flood of speculation.

I heard Bob Torrez’s voice, and he did a passable imitation of a drill sergeant. “Now listen,” he bawled, and the woods got pretty quiet. “I want everyone who isn’t working law enforcement to step back, then turn and walk back on the trail to the main two-track. We’ve got too many people here, and we’re going to lose evidence. Law enforcement, I want you to just stand still until we get things sorted out.”

I could see by some of the faces that Torrez’s message wasn’t what they wanted to hear. No, by God, they all wanted to stand around and exchange stories about what
they
thought. I grinned.

In short order, Torrez, Estelle, and a couple of the other deputies and troopers had an orderly line of people walking back the way they’d come, back toward the field of vehicles in the clearing. They looked like a bunch of well-dressed refugees.

I stood where I was, trying to look as inconspicuous as a fat man in a black windbreaker can.

After a few moments, we were left with a grove of oaks, a small jacket, and eight police officers of various ranks and departments—and reporter Marjorie Davis, who made herself small and quiet off to one side, camera at the ready.

I shoved my hands in my pockets and walked slowly toward the yellow ribbon, head down, watching where I put my feet. Dale Kenyon, one of the Forest Service cops, stepped forward and held out a hand. “It’s about time you decided to get back to work,” he said, grinning. “We’re glad you showed up.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I just got in.”

Estelle Reyes-Guzman had picked her way through the oak grove one step at a time, eyes like radar. She knelt beside the jacket and lifted one corner of it with a pencil. “No blood that I can see,” I heard her say. She looked up at Bob Torrez. “Would you have one of the deputies go back to the undersheriff’s truck and get my camera bag?”

“In the clearing by the helicopter,” I said to Eddie Mitchell, and the deputy set off at a fast jog.

I tried to picture a three-year-old dressed in that jacket, trotting down the trail. After a bit, he got warm, and he took off the jacket, dropping it in the center of an oak grove.

A three-year-old, trotting
away
from camp, at night? Not likely, I thought, and about as likely as him stumbling through all those rough tree trunks to shed the jacket.

“Sir?” I realized that Estelle was looking at me, and when she had my attention, she beckoned.

“Sir,” she said quietly, “doesn’t this look like a knife slice?”

I put one hand on her shoulder and lowered myself to a kneel. She lifted the jacket with the pencil. From the top of the right shoulder, down across the back yoke for perhaps five inches was a deep slice, deep enough that the quilted insulation was seeping out. The deep slice was the second in a series of four cuts, all the others shallower and shorter.

“A little more,” I said, and she lifted the jacket. I peered down, then moved the fabric to one side with a careful finger. “It goes all the way through, but only for an inch or so.”

“And no blood,” Estelle said.

“Right. No blood. And the other cuts don’t even go through.”

She dropped the jacket and tapped her lips with the pencil, then turned and gazed at me. Her voice was so soft that I had trouble hearing, and I bent close.

“Are we supposed to think that this looks like a series of tears from a bear claw, sir?”

I looked at her in surprise, then down at the jacket. The cuts were roughly parallel. And they were clearly blade cuts, not the sort of thing inflicted by a bear claw, no matter how sharp. “Maybe the jacket was torn before. We need to talk with mama.”

Estelle nodded. “Maybe. But these aren’t tears. They’re cuts.”

I held out my hand, and she handed me the pencil. I moved the jacket just enough that I could see the front half, which was on the ground. A single long rent tore the fabric from just inside the left armpit diagonally across toward the zipper, stopping just to the left of center. A portion of that tear penetrated the coat for a distance of an inch and a half, but again, there was no blood.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Under a microscope, you can tell for sure if the fibers are cut or torn.”

“They’re cut,” Estelle said, more to herself than to me.

I pushed myself to my feet with a grunt and twisted at the waist to look at the others. I shrugged and said to Sergeant Torrez, “She’ll want photos of the jacket in place. And after that, we need a shoulder-to-shoulder line to sweep this area. First time through, put the oak grove right in the center of the sweep. See what you can pick up.”

Behind me, I heard Estelle Reyes-Guzman mutter, “They won’t find a thing.” I agreed with her, but at least the maneuver gave the troops something to do. She took photos of the jacket, and Marjorie Davis took photos of her. When it became clear that the searchers weren’t going to turn up anything else, Marjorie walked back toward the vehicles, no doubt with deadlines to meet.

Estelle completed her series of close-up photos, then backed away from the grove and took several more, finally moving so far away that the jacket would be just a tiny touch of blue in the middle of the negative. She stopped at the sound of voices, and we turned, to see Deputy Pasquale walking through the trees toward us, in company with two civilians.

“Great timing,” Estelle said.

Chapter 11

The woman walked with the exaggerated stability of the practiced drunk, her boots hitting the ground flat-footed and graceless. Small wonder, I thought as she drew closer. Her eyes were puffy and red, and despite what her clothing said, she was no more at home in the boonies than I was.

One of the state troopers materialized out of the trees to her left, and the woman startled, almost losing what little balance she had.

I had never seen her before, but I knew her escort. Andy Browers walked at her right elbow, his lean face haggard and pale. He still wore his Posadas Rural Electric Co-op work clothes, now soiled and wrinkled from his long hours on the mesa. Deputy Pasquale, looking fit and eager, rested a hand lightly on the woman’s left shoulder. He steered her over to where I was standing.

“Undersheriff,” Deputy Pasquale said, “this is Mrs. Cole.” I nodded and extended my hand.

“Ma’am,” I said. She wasn’t looking at me. Her eyes were locked on the yellow tape a few yards ahead of us.

“Andy Browers,” the lean man said, and shook my hand. Up close, the bags under his eyes could have been used to transport his belongings. I nodded.

“The deputy said that you’ve found something,” he said, his voice was deep, smooth, and pleasing, with just a hint of the Deep South. He gestured toward the yellow tape. “Is that it over there?”

“We’ll need an identification,” I said, and reached out a hand to take Tiffany Cole by the elbow. Her blond hair was dirty and her clothes smelled of wood smoke. “We think that we’ve found the boy’s jacket.”

Mrs. Cole whimpered something unintelligible, and Browers and I walked her toward the oak grove. “And ma’am, you need to understand that we don’t know what this all means,” I said, but she didn’t care. Her eyes were locked on the jacket, and when she reached it, she sank to her knees, picked it up, and hugged it as if the child were still inside.

“Jesus,” Andy Browers said. He pivoted at the waist and looked off toward the southeast. “This is a good half mile from the campsite, at least. I don’t understand what the hell…”

“We don’t either, sir,” I said. I glanced across at Estelle. She and the others seemed perfectly content to let me do all the talking. I didn’t blame them. They’d been on that damn mesa for forty hours or more and had probably fielded hundreds of useless questions. “Is that your son’s jacket?”

I suppose that was a stupid question, considering Tiffany Cole’s agony right there in front of me. In her condition, it wouldn’t have taken much to open the floodgates—any piece of child’s clothing, her son’s or not, might have done the trick.

“I don’t understand,” Browers repeated. “Why would Cody take off his jacket on a cold night?”

“I don’t know.”

“And why would he wander way in there? Jesus.”

“We don’t know,” I said. “At least it gives us something of a lead. A general direction anyway.” I motioned with my hand toward the northwest.

“I don’t see why we didn’t see this before,” Browers said. “There must have been searchers going by here before this.” I didn’t have an answer to that, and Browers added, “What’s down that way?” He stood at his girlfriend’s side, one hand resting on her shoulder. He didn’t try to help her up, didn’t try to pry the jacket loose.

“Well,” I said, and turned to find Dale Kenyon. He was walking toward us through the trees, a black plastic folder under his arm. “Let’s check a map.”

“I can’t believe we’re still looking at maps,” Browers said.

He had every reason to be snappy, and I could imagine just how frustrated he felt. “Maps keep us organized,” I said pleasantly. “If we knew exactly where a lost three-year-old would go, then the boy wouldn’t still be lost, would he?” Cole’s forehead furrowed, and I saw a flash of color that was more than exertion. “All of these folks have damn near lived up here for the past two days, same as you. I’m the newcomer on the block, and I need a map. Leave me alone up here for two minutes, and you’ll be looking for me, too.”

“Here’s a topo map of the area,” Kenyon said, and he spread the plastic-coated map out on a level spot. “Here’s where we are, right in from the rim.” His finger followed the contours where they bunched together, indicating the steep country. “You can see that in another quarter mile or so, the country opens up some.”

“What’s this?” Browers asked, and when he knelt, his knees cracked like an old man’s.

“Turkey Springs,” Kenyon said. “It’s an old water-catchment system that’s been abandoned for years. The permittee on that section drilled a well farther east.”

“That’s Boyd?” I asked, and Kenyon nodded.

“Johnny Boyd. Right.”

I cracked off an oak twig and used it as a pointer so I wouldn’t have to kneel. “His place is about three miles north and west. Right there.”

“And this is the closest road,” Browers said, tapping a faint dotted line.

“That two-track runs along the edge, then cuts down the mesa,” Kenyon explained. “It joins up with Forest Road Thirty-three at the base of the mesa, and Thirty-three winds farther on down, eventually joining up with County Road Fourteen. And by the way, we’ve had search teams sweep right along this mesa in that general direction, all the way to that two-track, and all the way to Thirty-three. So I don’t know.”

“Shit,” Andy Browers said, and stood with his hands on his hips, as if he could discipline an answer out of the piñons.

I stepped around the map and knelt by Tiffany Cole. Her eyes were closed and her face was still muffled in the jacket. I was afraid for a moment that she’d gone to sleep. “Mrs. Cole, can you answer a couple questions?”

She nodded and lifted her face out of the polyester. “That’s your son’s jacket?”

“Yes.” Her voice was small and distant. Her lip quivered, but she wouldn’t look directly at the jacket she held in her hands. Instead, her eyes—and they would have been pretty had they not been shot through with so much red—were focused somewhere off on the horizon.

I put a hand on the tiny garment, and Mrs. Cole jerked as if she feared I was going to take it away. Instead, I just gave it a pat, leaving my hand on top of hers. “Was the jacket torn? The last time you saw your son, did his jacket have these tears in it?”

Then she focused, her eyes following the four parallel rents down the back of her son’s coat. It was as if I’d pulled the plug on whatever small energy source she had left. She crumpled backward before I could catch her, her head hitting the base of one of the little oaks with a thump.

Andy Browers was at her side in an instant, as were Deputy Pasquale and Dale Kenyon. I backed off to give them room. Movement to my right attracted my attention, and I glanced up, to see Estelle Reyes-Guzman walking back through the trees, toward the spot where we’d left the truck, Camille, and little Francis.

Mrs. Cole needed a hot bath, a massive sedative, and about two days in a soft, warm bed. And none of that would make it any easier. We still didn’t have a clue about the boy’s whereabouts. And now, every time she drifted back to the real world, Tiffany Cole would think of that jacket and wonder what the hell had taken a swipe at her son—and if whatever it was had ever come back to finish the job.

I didn’t blame Estelle a bit for wanting to go hug Francisco.