“Let me give you a tour,” Undersheriff Robert Torrez said. The five of us stood near the back of Sisson’s tractor—Torrez, Sgt. Howard Bishop, Tom Pasquale, Linda Real, and myself. The hubbub of the night before was long gone.
Two cameras hung around Linda’s neck, and a heavy camera bag with a plethora of gadgets rested on the gravel at her feet. Her right hand was poised on one of the cameras, index finger on the button as if she were covering an action sport.
“Jim is working right here, at the left rear hub. He wraps the chain from the backhoe’s bucket around the wheel, so that when he takes off the lug nuts the wheel is supported. The front loader is jacked up, with all kinds of shit under the back axle for safety.” Torrez looked at me and shook his head. “So far, so good. He’s got the wheel and tire off, suspended from the chain. He wants to swing it around to the left, so that it’s on the shop’s concrete apron, and then lay it down flat.”
He reached out and grabbed the chain that hung from the backhoe’s bucket. “When we arrived, the bucket that was doing the lifting, this one, was right where you see it now. And that’s where it was when he was working. Then the tire was hanging right here, right above the apron. He figures there’s no sense in taking it into the shop. He’s going to break the tire loose right here, using the backhoe.”
“I don’t follow,” I said.
“The tire’s flat,” Torrez continued. He thumped the rubber with his boot. “It doesn’t look flat, because it’s so stiff, but it is. In order to have it repaired, or put a new one on, he’s got to break it off the rim. Most of the small shops around here can’t do that. It’s easier just to use the backhoe and break it that way. Push down on the tire, right beside the rim, with a couple of teeth. It’ll pop it back from the rim.”
“Otherwise you end up pounding on it forever with a sledge-hammer,” Bishop said. He was a big, florid-faced man, almost as tall as the six-foot four-inch Torrez, but with a gut that threatened to pop the buttons on his shirt. He squatted down beside the tire. “And there aren’t any tooth marks along the rim, so he hadn’t gotten that far yet.”
“After we get some photos, we’re going to do just what he did. If the wheel is suspended here, it makes sense that it was touching the ground, or close to it. If it’s hanging right here, he’s getting ready to lay it down.”
“Why didn’t he, then?” I said. “Why get off the tractor?”
“Maybe he needed to spin it around,” Tom said. “If it’s hanging from the chain, it might rotate some. He gets off to manhandle it around so that when he does lay it down, it goes the way he wants it to.”
“Christ,” I muttered. “This sounds like a two-man job, at least. What the hell was he doing out here all by himself?”
“Because he was royally pissed at his wife, is one reason. He spent the whole day being pissed. I talked to Bucky Randall for a few minutes last night. That was Jim’s last job. Randall said one of the reasons this machine ended up in the shop is that Jim jammed it backward into a bunch of rebar and speared the tire. His mood wasn’t the best. But this is actually pretty simple,” Torrez said. “I mean, lifting it up is no trick, and then swing it over. Maybe the tire nudged the lip of the concrete and turned some. If it starts to swing, to pendulum, then it’s just easier to hop off and turn it by hand, then take a step and pull the lever to set it down. He wouldn’t even need to be on the tractor to do that. It’s careless, but operators do it all the time.”
“So he’s standing somehow between the suspended tire and the building. There’s enough space there to lay the tire down. But it drops off the chain and he can’t get out of the way? That doesn’t make sense to me. That tire’s not going to bounce like some crazy beach ball.”
“No, sir, it’s not,” Torrez said. “And that’s what’s been bothering me all night.”
“He’d have had to lift it up a bunch for that to happen.”
“And if the backhoe’s boom is where he last put it, that wasn’t the case. And there’d be no reason to lift it more than an inch or two…just enough to clear the concrete lip.”
“All right,” I said. “He lifts the wheel and tire. And then, he gets off the tractor.” I held up my hands to mark an imaginary spot in the air. “The tire is hanging from the chain right about here.” I turned and looked at the wall of the shop. An outline of Sisson’s body had been marked on the concrete, behind where I stood. “He’s got about six feet of space between the tire and the shop wall.” I took a step back so that my boot was about where Sisson’s had ended up. “If that tire comes off the chain, it’ll drop, what, maybe a couple inches at most?”
“At most,” Bishop said. “And it isn’t going to bounce.”
“So how’s it going to catch me?” I asked. “Break my legs, maybe, knock me down. But how’s it going to land on
top
of me?”
“It’s not,” Bob Torrez replied. “This can’t be where the backhoe’s boom was when the wheel dropped. It’s that simple.” He knelt down and pointed at a faint black rubber scuff mark on the concrete. “If you measure from this mark to the top one on the shop wall, you get a distance that’s equal to the height of the tire.”
“It hit that wall with more impact than just leaning over,” I said.
“Indeed it did. Enough to scuff rubber and dent the siding. And then it slid down on top of Jim Sisson.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, and Torrez nodded.
“I don’t think so, either. For one thing, look at this.” He stepped to the big tire. “We moved this tire up and over to the left just enough to remove Jim’s body. If you look right here, you can see the imprints of the chain where it went around the tire.”
I peered closely. The imprints were just faint, dark marks, with interruptions that corresponded to the end of each link. “Will this show up in a photo?”
“It should, sir,” Linda said. She knelt beside me. “I took a whole bunch just a few minutes ago. With this morning light coming in at a strong angle, I think it’ll work.”
“You took plenty, to be sure?”
“Yes, sir.”
I heard the clank of chain and looked up as Bob Torrez stretched out a section and laid it beside the marks. The match didn’t take any imagination.
Linda said, “I took a series like that, for comparison.”
“Good. So what else?”
Bob leaned over, moving the chain so that it crumpled into a tight
S,
just above the bright yellow rim, two feet from the first set of marks.
“The chain struck the rubber here, too,” he said. “If you look closely, you’ll see that it actually scuffed the surface of the tire.”
“Not with these eyes I can’t,” I said. “What are you telling me?”
“If I had to make a guess, I’d say that the chain was driven into the tire with a lot of force. And so was the reddish dirt.”
“Reddish dirt?”
I bent over, shifting so that I wasn’t blocking the wash of morning sunlight. The tire was clean, but even I could see the loose dirt on that section of the tire, some caught in the crevice between rim and tire, some ground into the rubber.
“I’ll be damned,” I said. “Did you get this?”
Linda nodded. “I’ve got a good close-up lens,” she replied.
“I bagged a good sample,” Torrez said. “And I’ll bet a month’s pay that it matches the dirt on the back side of that backhoe’s bucket.”
I turned and looked at the machine, its bucket poised seven feet above the concrete slab. The teeth were polished from the constant abrasion of the digging process, but soil clung here and there to the rest of it, the sort of thing I would expect after a session of digging beside someone’s leaking water line.
“You got all that?” I said to Linda.
“Yes, sir.”
“And you haven’t moved the machine any?” I asked Robert Torrez.
“No. Nothing’s been moved.”
“What are you thinking, then?”
Torrez took a deep breath. “I think that after the tire was lying down—”
“On top of Sisson?”
“Yes, sir. After it was lying down, the operator, whoever it was, curled the bucket like this,” and he curled his hand back toward the underside of his forearm, “and then set it down on the tire. The chain was still attached at the bucket, and a handful of links were caught between the bucket and the tire when he pushed down…” Torrez hesitated. “He pushed down hard enough to lift the backhoe off the ground.”
Torrez walked back to the machine and beckoned. “Look here.” The hydraulic outriggers of Sisson’s backhoe were lowered into the gravel.
“Why would he bother to put the outriggers down just for a job like this?” I asked.
“Always,” Bishop said. “The weight of that backhoe arm makes those big tires bounce like crazy. The stabilizers lock you in place. If the tractor bounces against the weight, then whatever you’re swinging starts to bounce and pendulum, too.”
“All right. So the outriggers are down, just like they’re supposed to be.”
Torrez knelt and touched the gravel with his index finger. “And you can see how they’ve dragged sideways in the gravel? I measured that gouge as almost six inches long.”
Linda anticipated my glance and nodded.
“The machine moved?”
“There’s only one way to do that,” Bishop said. “You put down force on the boom, and if the bucket can’t go down, the machine lifts itself up. Sideways force on the boom, and if the bucket can’t move sideways, the machine does.”
I squinted at Torrez. “I looked at all the photos that Linda has so far. The sideways scuffing of the tire mark?” I pointed over at the concrete apron. “That’s a hell of a photo. I wouldn’t see that scuff unless it was pointed out to me.”
Torrez nodded. “The tire moved sideways. Not a whole lot, but a bit. Several inches.”
“And when it did,” I said, “there was a tremendous downward force on it.”
“About as much as this machine weighs,” Bishop said. “Old Jim might have survived the tire dropping on him, but not with the weight of a backhoe on top of it. That machine weighs about five tons. Crushed him like an insect.”
Grace Sisson had wasted no time. The night her husband had been killed, she’d taken the three youngest children—twelve-year-old Todd, fourteen-year-old Melissa, and fifteen-year-old Jennifer—to her parents’ house in Las Cruces. The older children had flown the nest years before, deciding that Posadas wasn’t the answer to their every dream.
With the family gone, we had the place to ourselves. Still, I didn’t want any legal complications. While Linda Real developed the film from her earlier sessions, I woke up Judge Lester Hobart, explained what I wanted to do, and walked out of his kitchen fifteen minutes later with a court order.
We could have impounded the machines and moved them all over to one of the county barns, but that seemed like a waste of time and money. Besides, I didn’t want just an approximation of the episode that had ended with Jim Sisson’s death.
Driving back on Bustos, I saw Frank Dayan unlocking the front door of the
Register,
and I swung over to the curb. He had a breakfast burrito in one hand and a steaming cup of coffee in the other, juggling his keys like a pro. It’d been more than an hour since we’d been the Don Juan’s first customers, and the idea of a snack was appealing.
I buzzed down the window as he stepped to the curb. “If you’ve got time, drop by the Sissons’,” I said.
“You mean right now?”
“Yep. Might be interesting.”
“Well, neither Mary Ann nor Pam is here yet.” Pam Gardiner was the reporter who’d taken Linda Real’s place at the
Register,
a blubbery, much too cheerful person who apparently thought that most of the news would come to her if she sat on her butt long enough. Why Dayan put up with her lassitude I didn’t know. Maybe he was working too hard to notice. Mary Ann Weaver, the wife of county commissioner Frank Weaver, had run the front desk of the
Register
for fifteen years.
“They’ve both got keys, don’t they?” I grinned. “Come on.” I reached over and opened the door.
“What the hell,” Frank said, and got in. “You’re going to tell me what’s going on?”
“Of course not.”
He laughed and sipped the coffee, grimacing. “Want some?”
“No, thanks. I’ll take that burrito, though.”
He hesitated and then actually extended the thing toward me. “Sure. Here.”
I waved him off. “This is going to be a nasty one, Frank.”
“You mean Sisson…”
I nodded.
He took a bite of the burrito. It smelled wonderful. “You know, Pam can cover this better than I can,” he said between chews. “She’s the reporter.”
“It’s an election year,” I said. “Humor me.”
***
Howard Bishop pulled himself up into the seat of the backhoe with practiced ease. The machine cranked a couple of times and fired, belched a cloud of black smoke, and then settled into a clattering idle.
Torrez stood by one back tire, resting a forearm on it like a neighbor chatting over the fence. “I want to attach the chain over on the side, away from the original marks,” he said to Bishop. “Swing the bucket to the left some, and I’ll hook it up.”
Bishop lowered the bucket and extended the arm so that the bucket’s teeth hung over the left side of the tire, taking the heavy logging chain with it. Torrez threaded the free end of the chain through the wheel and around the tire near where it was supported by a short chunk of two-by-four, then hooked one of the links.
“You sure?” I asked, and Torrez nodded. I held out a hand. “That’s not secure,” I said. The chain hook had a scant hold on the link.
“I know, sir. That’s what I want.”
He turned to Bishop and gave him a thumbs-up, and the backhoe’s boom lifted until the slack was out of the chain. It slipped a little on the rubber, and then the tire eased off the ground as the backhoe took the weight.
“Nothing to it,” Bob said.
“How high do you want it?” Bishop shouted.
“About a foot or two off the ground,” Torrez replied. “There’d be no reason for Sisson to lift it higher than that.” I glanced across at Linda Real. The red light on the video camera’s snout was on. “And right over this spot,” Torrez added, and he picked up a shovel that had been leaning against the building and touched the spot on the concrete where the tire had first impacted, close to the shop wall.
When he was satisfied, he nodded at Bishop. “Perfect,” he said. The tire hung suspended about eighteen inches above the concrete apron. It drifted around in a lazy circle, stopping when the chain links tightened up. Then it started to drift back.
“Now what?” Frank Dayan asked.
“Now we drop it,” Torrez said. “You guys back off some.”
I stood near the rear wheel of the backhoe, and Dayan joined me. Torrez walked over to his pickup and rummaged in the back, finally returning with a six-foot length of one-inch galvanized pipe and a three-pound hammer. “This’ll work,” he said.
He walked altogether too close to the tire, stopped, and looked over at Linda. “You all set?”
“
World’s Strangest Videos
, take one,” she said.
Torrez grinned and lifted the steel pipe as if it were a toothpick. He rested one end against the tip of the chain’s hook where it had a tenuous grip on the link. He struck the other end of the bar with the hammer, and it drove the tip of the hook out of the link with the first tap.
With a brief
rapppp
of sliding chain, the tire thumped to the concrete like a wet pillow, with just as much bounce. When he struck the bar, Bob Torrez was two paces from the tire, and even as it hit the concrete, he stepped forward and put a steadying hand on the tread. After a second or two, he took his hand away. The tire stood motionless, a fat bulge at the bottom.
“Don’t turn it off yet,” he said to Linda, and then looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “So much for it bouncing into the building.”
Resting a hand on the top of the tire, he walked around on the other side. With a gentle nudge, the tire fell over, striking the side of the building with a crash. And there it leaned, refusing to slide down.
“I’ll be damned,” I said.
Torrez walked to one side and aimed a hearty kick at the tire. It thumped and refused to move.
“There’s just no way,” he said. Then he turned to Howard Bishop and beckoned. Bishop extended the boom, curling the bucket as he did so. Torrez pointed to the spot on the tire, and Bishop lowered the bucket until its back gently touched the rubber.
“Nail it!” the undersheriff shouted, and Bishop slammed the lever full forward.
The tire skidded down the wall, its bottom simultaneously kicking out on the concrete slab. When it thumped flat, I shivered, imagining Jim Sisson’s final moments with that weight on top of him. Bishop kept the hydraulic force applied, and the backhoe lifted itself in the air, the outriggers clearing the ground by a foot.
Torrez held up a hand, and Bishop stopped, the machine frozen, bucket crushing the tire, outriggers up in the air. Bishop reduced the throttle as Torrez walked around and approached us.
“Now,” he said to Bishop, “how do you jog it sideways?”
“It’s easy to do,” the sergeant replied. “If the operator gets excited, he can do it by accident. The sideways movement of the arm is on the same lever as down thrust.” He pointed at the left of the two long central control levers.
“Do it,” Torrez said. “Just drop her down. Try and make the same kind of marks.”
“Move a little,” Bishop said, and waited while we stepped away from the backhoe. Then he jammed the lever to the left and pulled back at the same time. The bucket jerked left; the tractor bucked right and dropped like a giant yellow stone, its outriggers crashing back in the gravel.
The tire had scrubbed a couple of inches to the left.
“And that’s what I think happened,” Torrez said. The tractor idled down and then died as Bishop pulled the manual throttle lever back.
“The tire clearly didn’t drop and kill him,” he said.
“Nope,” Torrez agreed. “It had help.”
Frank Dayan shook his head in wonder. “Wow. That’s amazing.”
I reached out a hand and put it on his shoulder. “And now you know that if you just print ‘investigation is continuing’ you’ll be telling the absolute truth.”
“But what you’re saying here is that Jim Sisson was murdered,” Dayan replied. “You’re saying that someone deliberately crushed him to death. And then made it look like an accident.”
“It appears that way.”
“That means whoever it was would have had to clout him on the head or something first…overpower him in some way. He wouldn’t just lie still, waiting to be crushed.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Maybe the autopsy will show something. But if it was something as simple as a blow to the back of the head, that’s not going to show up. Not with his skull crushed the way it was.”
“Give me a photo. At least give me that much,” he pleaded. “It’s not often I get to scoop the big-city dailies.”
“On one condition,” I said. “On one condition, we’ll fix you right up.”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t use the word
homicide
yet.”
“Done deal,” Dayan said. “And my paper doesn’t come out until Friday morning, anyway. Maybe things will have changed by then.”
“Maybe,” I said.
Dayan bent down, looking at the tire marks on the concrete. “Do you suppose whoever did this figured you’d never look closely?”
“Maybe,” I said. “And we can hope that’s not the only mistake they made.”